Rebound (28 page)

Realizing that the Tondo slum dweller had never been in a swimming pool before, Dartley gave him an hour while he put some
weapons together in the cottage and made other preparations. He wanted to make a reconnaissance run into Velez territory that
afternoon, to get their bearings. He had good maps, but a place never looks the same as it does on a map. And maps don’t show
people and country stores or gas stations. Nor do they show likely guerrilla ambush sites or the best places for a visiting
hit man to assassinate the local
hacendero.
They were going to be on Happy Man’s turf in this place and would have to look carefully where they were putting their feet
before they tried moving around.

Dartley had given some thought to the weapon he would carry on Negros. He knew that Velez’s guards and the NPA used American
weapons almost exclusively. From what he had seen, they favored the M16 rifle and Colt’ .45 automatic pistol. He had been
able to run around with a M16 in the mountains at Balbalasang, but he could hardly carry one slung over his shoulder around
the cane fields and villages here. A pistol was easy to conceal but was no match
for someone with an M16. He decided that what he needed was a submachinegun—not the much publicized Israeli Uzi but the more
accurate, smaller American-made MAC10.

The Ingram MAC10 used the same wraparound bolt system as the Uzi, to save space, and it, too, combined the pistol grip and
magazine housing. It had selective fire, and the change lever was separate from the safety catch. As an additional safety
measure, the bolt could be locked by twisting the cocking handle through a right angle. Since the cocking handle was mounted
on top of the receiver with a U-notch cut in it to leave a clear sight path, the user could readily see whether the bolt was
locked or unlocked by whether or not the handle had been turned. He had bought four MAC10s, all without retractable stocks.

Dartley put one gun and six spare magazines in a canvas shopping bag he had purchased in Bacolod. He walked up and down in
front of a mirror, carrying the bag and trying to make out the shape of the weapon inside it. The canvas was thick enough
to hide it. He did not concern himself about whether he and Harry would look odd, each carrying a canvas bag wherever they
went. In the eyes of locals outsiders were always odd. Then he tried retrieving the weapon fast, plunging his hand for more
magazines, and generally becoming accustomed to the arrangement.

He was fairly pleased with how things felt. He had an automatic weapon that could deliver thirty-two 9 mm parabellum bullets
against the M16’s twenty- or thirty-round box of 5.56 mm.
True, the M16 had an effective range of four hundred meters or more, and the MAC10’s was only seventy to a hundred. He would
just have to move close in for a firefight. The MAC10 was less subject to malfunction from dust or glitches in this humid
climate. But, most important, he could walk around with this deadly baby stowed out of sight in a canvas bag, which he couldn’t
do with an M16.

He had bought sound suppressors that screwed onto the external threading on the muzzle, but he didn’t fit them for daytime
work in open country. This silencer differed from most others in that it did not slow the existing bullet below sonic speed.
Instead of the bullet, it slowed the gas. This left the
crack
of the bullet but suppressed the more easily locatable
thump
of the gun.

When Harry came back, he gave him his canvas bag. Dartley drove, and as he did so, he instructed Harry on how to handle his
MAC10, making him practice loading and unloading countless times and working the safety catch, selective fire lever, and cocking
handle.

After they reached the San Geronimo area they wandered side roads in the car between fields of tall sugarcane. Here and there
men cut the cane with long blades and stacked it on wagons to be hauled away. They met farm vehicles on the narrow roads and
occasionally passed workers walking along. There were no proper villages, only collections of miserable-looking shacks with
sickly children playing outside them and maybe a cowering dog or a foraging pig. And in a huge sea of green leaves extending
in
all directions over the flat land, the sugarcane grew tall and rippled in an occasional breath of wind.

One man walking along a deserted stretch of road by himself got Dartley’s attention. He stopped the car, got out, and took
a cheap Kodak from his canvas bag.

“Can I take your photo?”

“One peso,” the man said.

Dartley gave him five and clicked the camera once. Then he asked, “Are you Happy Man?”

“Me?” The ragged, sun-bronzed worker laughed incredulously. “No, I am not Happy Man.”

“I want to take his photo. Where does he live? Through those big gates we saw back there?”

“No. That is a Velez family house. They own seven big houses here. But Happy Man does not live in that one.”

Dartley looked very interested and serious. “You seem to know this place well.”

“I should. I was born and growed up here. Never been anyplace else.”

“We’re lost. We don’t know what to see. Would you guide us around for an hour or so? We can pay.”

“How much?” The look of hope mingled with greed that crossed the man’s face would have been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.

“Fifty pesos.” This was about three dollars. Dartley would have given him ten times this if he thought he could do so without
arousing the man’s suspicions.

“Give it to me now!”

“Half now, half after you’ve shown us what we want to see.”

Harry drove with the farm worker beside him. They had to speak English between them, too, Harry not understanding the worker’s
Ilongo, and the worker not understanding Harry’s Tagalog. Dartley sat in the backseat, following their route by map and carefully
adding points of interest in ballpoint pen while Harry kept the worker distracted. They did not press him about the Velez
family and, as a result, saw churches, cemeteries, ruined mills, ancient battle sites, and various other geographical and
historical items of interest as well as the essential information they needed on Happy Man, his militias, and the NPA. Dartley
slid down out of sight in the backseat when he thought he might be noticed as an American inside the car. He thought the worker
was not noticing this until the man insisted that Dartley get down and stay down while they were in one area.

“You know what would happen to me if the guerrillas saw me with an American?”

“Why here?” Dartley asked from the floor behind him. “A few fields back, it didn’t seem to worry you so much.”

“This is the guerrilla half of the farm. I hear it only today. The soldiers and guards don’t come over here to this side anymore,
and the guerrillas don’t go to the other side. I don’t know why. They say the big boss maybe make a deal.”

“Who is the big boss? Happy Man?”

“Sure.”

“A lot of people been killed here in the last
few days. I hope you got nothing to do with that.”

“Killed!” Dartley said in horror. “You mean people are being killed and you bring us around here?”

“I bring you out fast to the main road for a hundred pesos!”

“All right! Do it now! Right away!”

The worker left, happy at having taken the nervous tourists for so much money.

“You think he’ll say anything?” Harry asked.

“To his wife. And she’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut. He’ll get around to thinking about it himself, that maybe he was
the one who was took. And he won’t want it to get back to the guerrillas that he showed an American around, even a scared
tourist.”

“He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Harry agreed.

“I want to go back to see that NPA area,” Dartley said. “I think he skimmed over that because he was afraid.”

“He had good reason,” Harry observed dryly.

“We need to see the layout of the roads,” Dartley said, and Harry obeyed.

Froilan Quijano’s face twisted into a rage at the news. “He breaks the agreement on the very first day! You say this strange
car has been patrolling our area? That it is not Happy Man or any of the Velez family or management? Maybe they are friends
or businessmen come to see him. No. If they were lost, they would ask the way. You say ‘patrol.’ What do you mean by that?”

“I didn’t see the car, Ka Froilan, but I think
they mean that it passed by places more than once. Our men are experienced. They know how to tell tourists or lost people
from someone driving around in order to get the lay of the land.”

“What do you think, Ka Joker?” Quijano asked.

“I think we’d better do something about it,” Joker Solano said, making no move to do anything about it himself.

“Ka Eduardo won’t be back for hours,” Quijano grumbled to himself. “I had better go with you.” The old organizer was developing
a taste for action—he had done so well in fingering Montova for the marksman. It had been exciting and easy.

Joker made no comment, made no move.

Quijano emerged from the dugout in a stony section of ground unsuitable for cultivation among thick growths of cane. He persuaded
himself that he was going along because he did not want everything ruined by the senseless murder of some innocent motorists,
which would bring in special government troops if they were important people. Happy Man had a lot of influential friends,
and Froilan felt he had to make sure that none of the trigger-happy clowns in Cristobal’s outfit blew them away. It was irresponsible
for Cristobal to leave for hours on end without designating someone to command in his absence, but he did not seem to have
enough confidence in himself as commander to risk elevating someone to second in command. Solano was an intellectual who made
no pretense of being a fighter. He was not even ashamed
for having cracked so easily for the army torturers. Froilan, himself, had been around in the bad old days and had seen a
lot of comrades suffer and die for the cause. It was high time that he tasted a little blood in exchange for everything he
had seen and his years in hiding….

They tore off the sugarcane stalks that concealed the open farm truck they had used to get Montova outside Apo’s shack. As
he had then, Quijano climbed into the back with seven or eight men toting M16s. A guerrilla with a hand-held radio got in
the cab beside the driver. He held the radio outside the cab window, waiting to receive the latest location on the car, while
the truck engine idled. The last word they heard, the car was headed for the main road. Then a voice crackled over the receiver.
The car had come back again and was once more patrolling the NPA half of the Velez property. They got a fix on its position
in the network of little roads and lanes through the vast sea of canefields, and the driver shifted the truck into gear.

The guerrillas had all been born and bred in the area, and they knew every creek and clump of ferns from long days of working
in the fields before they went underground. It was only a matter of minutes before the driver pulled the truck broadside across
the road and the guerrillas in the back lined along one side with their M16 stocks resting on its top.

A minute later the car came around a bend at medium speed. There was no way the driver could have seen the truck in time to
back away to safety. The car braked to a smooth halt about ten yards from the truck, its driver, alone on the
front seat, looking up through the windshield at the row of rifle barrels pointing down at him. The driver blew the horn at
them to move. Froilan’s blood boiled in rage at the imperialistic cheekiness of this capitalist, who thought he could push
the forces of proletarian revolution to one side with a few blasts from his car horn.

Then the back door of the car swung open….Several rifle barrels raised to cover whoever would emerge. Then an American got
out. He smiled at them and waved. He held up a cloth shopping bag in his left hand and gestured that he was going to put his
right hand into it to show them something, which he did, slowly.

Froilan saw blotches of fabric scatter like feathers from one side of the bag. The MAC10 bullets tore in a line across the
faces of three riflemen in less than a second. The others ducked as the deadly hail of lead cleaved the side of the truck
at the eye level of most of the men. The guerrillas were young, and their reflexes were fast. Quijano was past his prime,
and the MAC10 beat him to it. One bullet sheared off his nose and ran along the side of his skull, beneath his left eye orbital,
searing a furrow through his cheek muscles. Another bullet smacked his upper teeth and buried itself deep in his brain. His
pain had ended before his body hit the truck floor.

Dartley fired a burst in the wide window of the cab and took out both the radioman and driver with multiple 9 mm parabellum
projectiles to the head and neck. He exhausted the thirty-two-round magazine in another run across
the wooden side of the truck, this time ripping splinters off its top, in case any of the riflemen were tempted to raise their
heads.

Harry handed him his own fully loaded MAC10 out the car window, and Dartley eased back into the car, closed the door, and
hung out the side window as Harry backed it around the bend and out of sight of the truck. Dartley saw them peeping but did
not fire.

As Harry reversed direction he said, “I’m heading for Bacolod to turn this car in.”

Dartley laughed. “You think we should get a different make in another color?”