Rebound (27 page)

“I agree,” Bonifacio said thoughtfully.

“Hodges, here, has been up in Balbalasang,” Roscoe said, changing the subject. “Why don’t you tell the general what you was
doing up there, Ken?”

“Yes, sir. Responding to Mr. Velez’s complaints, the embassy cooperated with the police in running a check on all Americans
in the vicinity of Balbalasang on the day of the attack. Some missionaries, agricultural experts, and hikers, all U.S. citizens,
were nearby but almost certainly did not enter the town limits. We could find no records of any American tourists for that
day, which is not unusual, since American visitors are warned that the Balbalasang area is not safe. That left the Navy servicemen
on the bus. I visited the Subic Bay base on my way up north, to collect photos from the files of all the Navy men involved.
The Navy was very cooperative, and I got a chance to talk with all the men assembled in a mess hall, except for eleven who
had put out to sea. One man—I’ll make this short since you will receive my detailed written report—spoke up and said it wasn’t
a Navy man I was looking for but an Air Force man. This got a big cheer, and naturally I dismissed it as a joke. I’m sure
you have a certain amount of interservice rivalry in the Philippine armed services just like we do, sir.”

“Continue,” the general said dryly.

“Yes, sir. Before I left the mess hall, this man approached me, saying he had not been joking. He described the man and said
he had helped him place a five-dollar bet at the cockfights. The bookie there would remember him.
It did not immediately strike me, I admit, that this man’s description closely matched the description we had earlier. In
Balbalasang I located some people in the crowd who had actually witnessed the attempt on Mr. Velez’s life. None identified
the attacker from the Navy photos. In fact, several were positive that it was none of these men. Since there were no American
tourists or anyone else, I was left with this Air Force mystery man. I went to see the bookmaker, who turned out to be an
extraordinary individual. He said he clearly remembered the two Americans and boasted of his powers of memory. He inisted
that I give him a test. I happened to have a Philippine Airlines schedule with me, and he no more than glanced at it and handed
it back to me. Then he recited from memory for me every flight number, departure time, and estimated time of arrival listed
there. I happened to have a column of dollar-and-cent costs for more than forty items. He ran one finger down the column and
gave me a total in a few seconds. I checked with my calculator later and found that he was correct to the last cent. I’ve
never—”

“I’ve been to the
tupada,
Hodges,” the general gently reminded him. “You’re talking about the
kristo.”

“Yes, sir.” Hodges turned to James. “They call him that because he holds his hands out like Christ on the cross, which sounds
a bit sacrilegious to me, but apparently they mean no harm.”

“No,
we
don’t,” Bonifacio said, again reminding Hodges that he was talking to a Filipino. “What did the
kristo
say?”

“That the Navy man, whom he picked correctly from the photographs, helped this other American, who was not among the photographs,
place a five-dollar bet on
a bulik,
which is some kind of pied cock. The
bulik
lost to a
talisayin,
which I understand has yellowish-white feathers, and this American paid his bet. The
kristo
did not see who fired the weapon at Mr. Velez. His description of the so-called Air Force man matched the other descriptions
received. At this point I recognized the significance of this and sent an urgent message to Mr. James. At his suggestion,
on my way south I stopped off at Clark Air Base. They are at present running their computers to give us all Air Force personnel
over twenty-five years old who were on leave, AWOL, or who possibly could have visited Balbalasang while on duty that Sunday.
I will check these photos with the Navy man at Subic Bay and with the
kristo
in Balbalasang. They will be ready tomorrow. However, I would remind you, sir, that it’s only on the Navy man’s say so that
he is a member of the Air Force. He is possibly a Navy man or even a member of neither the Navy nor the Air Force.”

“Hodges was an Air Force man,” Roscoe observed laconically.

“I just don’t want anyone to be optimistic that Air Force records will lead us anywhere,” Hodges insisted.

Bonifacio looked interested. “It seems that the phantom is putting on human flesh. Roscoe, I finally believe we are after
someone who is real.”

“Which presents us with a thorny problem,
General. What if this strikingly ‘American’ assassin is not only not one of ours but also not even genuinely American. What
if he is a Russian? Or an American or Canadian operative in Soviet pay? We suspect that the Soviet Embassy and Filipino communists
are up to something on Negros. Happy Man owns large tracts of land there, or at least his family does, and he is the family
head. The previous family head, his brother, was murdered at Laguna de Bay. Now they are after Happy Man. What’s going on
down at the Velez estates?”

Bonifacio’s eyes narrowed. He picked up the phone and asked, “Is that report on Montova verified?” He replaced the receiver
and told them about Ruben Montova’s murder on a Velez plantation. He explained Montova’s importance as an anticommunist activist
who financed the campaigns of like-minded politicians and who had become Happy Man’s right-hand man.

Roscoe and Hodges knew all this, but they listened politely.

“Montova couldn’t control Happy Man, but he was a restraining influence on him,” Bonifacio concluded. “Montova was a ruthless
bastard, and he went along with the killings of your servicemen, though I’m sure it wasn’t his idea. Velez will have nothing
to slow him now, and I know for a fact that the man’s a lunatic. But I disagree with you on one thing, Roscoe. I don’t think
the Soviets are trying to kill him. Chase him up and down and make him even crazier than he normally is, maybe. We’ve been
getting nothing of value from our intelligence agents down there. In towns and cities everybody talks.
But out in the sugarcane fields there’s a very suspicious silence.”

“With your permission,” Roscoe suggested, “I thought we might send Hodges down that way.”

From the expression on Hodges’ face it was clear that his boss had just dropped another bombshell on him. It was equally clear
that Hodges was not overjoyed.

“I have no objection,” General Bonifacio said.

“Hodges won’t be getting into any hard-nosed stuff,” Roscoe said in his best down-home manner. “It’ll be just like sniffin’
around to see if some old boy has a whiskey still hid somewhere in the canebrake.”

Herbert Malleson’s data about Negros Island was pithy and useful, as far as hard facts went. Dartley read that Negros was
one of the Viscayan islands, the smaller islands between the two large Philippine islands—Luzon to the north and Mindanao
to the south. Negros was divided into two provinces, Occidental and Oriental, and was the prime sugar-producing region. When
world sugar prices collapsed a few years previously, the government took over wholesaling the finished product, adding corruption
to economic problems. Now the government monopoly had been broken, but low prices and chaos remained. After the current harvesting
and milling season ended, about the middle of May, about 300,000 sugar workers would face unemployment and perhaps near starvation.

Dartley was already aware of the great gap
between the rich and the poor on the island of Luzon. According to Malleson, this gap was nowhere greater than on the island
of Negros, where wealthy
hacenderos
most of them tracing their ancestry back to the early Spanish settlers, led an idle and profligate life on their huge estates.
The tenant farmers and workers lived like medieval vassals under the dominance of the great landowning families. All had been
old-fashioned, peaceful, and slow-moving until the world sugar prices collapsed and hunger woke people to injustice. In 1982,
it was estimated that the New People’s Army had thirty to fifty armed guerrillas in Negros Occidental. Today there were at
least a thousand full-time armed fighters, plus thousands more active supporters who saw violent left-wing revolution as the
only way to right society’s wrongs.

In 1985, the sons of some of the biggest
hacenderos
got a land-reform program under way in which they gave workers the use of some plantation lands to grow food and crops for
cash. On half the land shared with him the peasant could grow what he wished, and on the other half he could plant mung beans,
sweet potatoes, rice, and vegetables between the rows of sugarcane. Skeptics said that this land-sharing effort was too little
too late. In March of that year New People’s Army guerrillas raided the Viscayan Maritime Academy armory in Bacolod and escaped
with more than four hundred submachine-guns, rifles, and handguns, the biggest and boldest raid ever by the rebels on a government
armory. And on September 20, a crowd of tenant farmers, who had gathered in the town
square of Escalente to protest the collapse of the sugar industry, were raked by machine-gun fire from a watchtower; twenty-one
died, and local police and militiamen were held responsible but never prosecuted. There were various other accounts of peasants
being hog-tied and buried alive while landowners watched, and also savage reprisals by guerrillas against helpless and perhaps
innocent people.

Dartley had no illusions that he could, as an individual, make any changes in a society that had taken centuries to evolve
into what it was today. He was coming to whack out one man—Ruperto Velez. Anyone who got in his way, regardless of whether
he was a
hacendero,
peasant, guerrilla, or militiaman, Dartley would step on. He knew why he wanted to nail Happy Man. That was enough. If he
could keep all the other stuff at arm’s length, all the better. He was all for letting Filipinos sort out their own problems
without interference. Velez had made himself an exception to that when he had started murdering Americans. That was his quarrel
with Velez—not seeking justice for plantation workers. Dartley was simple and clear about how he wanted things to be. He knew
damn well that things were not going to work out that way.

The Cessna circled around to land at the airport at Bacolod, the capital of Negros Occidental. From the air it all looked
fairly new and spread out. But Dartley was not here for the quaint and picturesque.

“You sure you don’t want me to take you to some smaller airfield?” the Aussie pilot asked.

“This will do fine,” Dartley answered shortly.

He and Harry dragged the four golf bags into the terminal while Purcell refueled the aircraft for his return flight. Dartley
hired a car with fake ID in the name of Milton Morrison. He had destroyed all his papers in the name of Warren Tompkins, knowing
that an alias used too often or too long can be as dangerous as using one’s real name. He also had dumped all his clothes
and other nonessential possessions, since it was handier in this equatorial climate to wear a light shirt, pants, and sandals
and buy replacements as needed. After stowing the golf bags in the trunk of the hired car, he drove to a modern shopping center
and they purchased extra clothes, razors, soap, a tent, sleeping bags, and canned food. Harry was having a good time and asked
no questions. They even bought swimming trunks and suntan lotion. Harry picked up some tourist brochures that said they should
not leave Bacalod without trying chicken
inasal
from a sidewalk stall. This was barbecued chicken with lemon grass, and they agreed that the tourist brochure for once did
not exaggerate.

The pace of life was languid, and everything was hot and humid. They drove an hour inland into the broad lowland plains. The
sugarcane haciendas stretched away on all sides.

“We can’t stay out here,” Dartley concluded. He pulled into a quiet country road and parked between two cane fields. They
slapped at mosquitoes and mopped their brows as they studied maps and looked at brochures. Dartley smiled to himself at his
lack of concern. Normally he never undertook a project unless he could
plan every small detail of the operation. But he could see that here in the tropics he had to lie in the shade and let his
prey come to him.

“We have two choices,” he told Harry. “We can go back to Bacolod and down the coast to one of these resorts. We can hire a
cottage there and be tourists. The only drawback will be the hour or more it will take us to drive to the San Geronimo district,
where the Velez haciendas are. Again it might be good to have an hour between us and Velez if things don’t go well.”

“It will be cool by the sea,” Harry said, killing two mosquitoes in a single slap on his sweat-beaded forearm.

“The other choice is to camp out on the northern slopes of Kanlaon volcano. We’d be much closer to the Velez plantations there,
but the place is probably a big guerrilla hideout, and camping out and cooking your own food is a lot of work, which would
take up a lot of our time.”

Harry was consulting a brochure. “It says here that one of the volcano’s two craters is active, and you can climb to the summit
and look down into the hundred-meter-wide active crater which is shaped like a cylinder and is two hundred and fifty meters
deep. It doesn’t say what you would see. Just smoke, I suppose. Maybe some glowing stuff very far down, like looking at the
embers of a fire. I’m thinking that after we finish this job I should take my wife and children on a vacation. We have never
been on one. It would be nice to climb that volcano and look in the crater.”

“Harry, with what I’m paying you in U.S. dollars, you’ll be able to
buy
yourself a volcano.”

They decided on a resort called Hacienda Luisa, at La Castellano, along the coast to the southeast, which boasted of a good
view of the volcano, a pool, and a cactus garden.

“Sounds like our kind of place,” Dartley said.