Rebound (31 page)

Dartley went back to the bedroom and woke Harry, who suddenly was as wide-awake as a startled rabbit when he realized what
was happening.

“I’m going to open the door!” Dartley shouted, and eased it open slowly, staying out of the rectangular view this presented
to those outside. “Who are you?”

“Army of the Philippines! How many there?”

“Two.”

“Come out slowly, one by one, hands on the backs of your necks.”

Harry motioned for Dartley to go first. The American stepped out into the blinding glare. Nobody fired. Thus reassured, Harry
followed a few seconds later. They were left standing before the lights while troops with helmets and
full combat gear ran into the cottage behind them. In a couple of minutes a sergeant emerged to say that they had “secured
this position.”

The voice that had spoken before out of the darkness now said, “Both of you go back in.”

“This is not so good,” Harry whispered. “They don’t want people to see them killing us.”

“Do what the man says,” Dartley warned him, and they went inside.

Soldiers slouched against the walls of both rooms, and the contents of the four golf bags were spread out on the two beds
and bedroom floor. The sergeant slapped both of them face-first against a wall and performed a rapid, expert search of each
of them. They carried no weapons. Two men entered while they were left facing the wall. They looked over the weapons in the
bedroom and rifled through Dartley’s and Harry’s papers.

“Sit on the couch,” the voice they’d heard before told them from right behind their backs.

They obeyed. The speaker was a tough-looking middle-aged Filipino, obviously a military man, although he wore civilian clothes.
To Dartley’s surprise the second man was an American, also middle-aged, also tough-looking. They sat themselves at the table
across the room from the couch. Each of them placed a Colt .45 automatic on the table in front of him so that there would
be no misunderstandings.

“All right, boys, you can go now,” the Filipino said. “Turn all those damn lights off.” After all the soldiers trooped out
in their combat boots and closed the door after them, the Filipinos
said to the American, “Roscoe, you talk to him.”

The American glared at Dartley and jerked his thumb toward the man next to him. “You know who he is?”

“No,” Dartley answered.

“That’s General Bonifacio.”

Harry made an audible whimper at the sound of this name, and this cracked a malevolent smile on the American’s face. He said,
“Your friend reads leftist newspapers and listens to gossip about the general. Those pinko rags are always saying he tortures
and kills people, makes them disappear, interferes with their human rights, runs prison camps, you name it. Me, I think lie’s
a nice man. Where did you find this fella?” he asked Dartley, pointing to Harry.

“He’s from Tondo,” Dartley answered quietly.

“And you?”

“I’m not Filipino,” Dartley answered, as if supplying valuable information.

“A fucking humorist,” the American complained. “I’m not even going to bother with that garbage name on your ID, Milton Morrison
or whatever. Frankly I don’t give a shit what your name is, boy, but when I tell you mine, you better listen carefully because
you’re in one heap of trouble, and you’re going to have to grasp at any straw you can catch hold of.”

He paused to let that sink in. Dartley was amazed by his sudden transformation into a Southern good ol’ boy. And he was hinting
at some kind of deal!

“My name is Roscoe James, and I’m military attaché at the American Embassy. Now,
those same newspapers that spread lies about my good friend the general also say bad things about me. They claim that I’m
the top CIA man in the Philippines. Imagine that! You got anything to say to me?”

“No,” Dartley answered.

“That’s what I expected,” Roscoe said agreeably. “You land in trouble, you’re on your own. You don’t work for anybody. You
thought it all up yourself.”

“Oh, no, I was hired, all right,” Dartley told him, “but not by Langley or the Pentagon.”

“Who hired you?”

“Four businessmen.”

“American?”

“One. Three Filipino.”

“Names?”

“Sorry, I can’t tell you that,” Dartley answered pleasantly. “Also, I don’t know if they have connections with the CIA or
anyone else.”

“What did they hire you to do?”

“Waste Happy Man.”

“You on the level about no Washington connections?” Roscoe asked.

“Absolutely.”

Roscoe exchanged a look with the general, who nodded his approval.

“What you just seen walking out the door is one of the elite squads of the Philippine army,” Roscoe went on. “In case you
don’t know, the general here doesn’t fuck around when he wants something done. You see for yourself how he found you when
he got here. It took him an hour and a half.”

Dartley smiled. “I kept worrying about that.”

“You ever bet on a cockfight?” Roscoe asked quickly.

“Once.”

“How much? On what kind of bird?”

“Five bucks on a pied cock. It came in last.”

“So we heard,” Roscoe said. “And that was you at his place in Laguna?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been unlucky so far.”

Dartley shook his head. “Happy Man has been lucky.”

“Whatever,” Roscoe said. “Main thing is, I’ve lost an assistant attaché out on San Geronimo today. We figure they mistook
him for you. General Bonifacio lost two intelligence officers.”

Harry suddenly spoke. “They mistook them for me.”

Roscoe scowled at him, and Harry subsided.

“We heard some shooting,” Dartley volunteered.

“Near where?”

“Harry was driving.”

Harry perked up again. “It was near Happy Man’s residence.”

“That’s what I thought happened,” Roscoe growled. “Happy Man claims it was the NPA guerrillas who killed them. I think that’s
bullshit because my assistant had his papers on him, and if the communists had managed to kill an embassy staff man and supposed
CIA agent—the newspapers got to him, too—they’d have made a big deal about him being a spy and so forth, to try to embarrass
the United States.”

Dartley asked, “Why didn’t Happy Man bury the body and keep quiet about it?”

“Well, number one, he’s got to figure that we know where he went—and probably more important to him, he realizes that he’s
just blown away two of Bonifacio’s men, and the general also knows where they were.” Roscoe paused. “But that ain’t all. Just
before we left Manila for here, word got to us that Happy Man is going public in the next few days in his accusation that
my assistant, Ken Hodges, was the American assassin on his trail. He can leave it to the
Washington Post
or
New York Times
to trace Ken’s CIA connections—and there you have it, the CIA has a contract out on Happy Man. It will fan anti-American
flames here and make Happy Man into a public hero. The newspapers here will link the two dead agents to General Bonifacio,
and so he will be implicated. I can already hear them calling him a tool of the CIA, a yes-man to Washington, who is capable
of scheming with foreigners to murder a prominent fellow countryman. It’ll finish the general. It’ll finish me. It may finish
the U.S. bases here. And if Happy Man gets in power, it’ll finish the Philippines.”

Roscoe slowly looked Dartley and Harry over. “So, you can see now why the general thought it might be an idea for us to sit
down and talk instead of him just putting you out against some wall and shooting you?”

Dartley nodded appreciatively in Bonifacio’s direction. “I’m sure we won’t let the general down.”

* * *

They got maybe an hour’s rest before starting out the next morning. Both Dartley and Harry were pale and tense, but they still
had the four golf bags of weapons and the yellow Toyota.

“I’m not sure I understand what we are doing,” Harry announced halfway out to the Velez plantations.

“Just get in a firefight with the NPA.”

“You say that like it was a basketball game we’re going to play,” Harry said irritably. “Why, Santa Maria, why do you and
I have to attack these dangerous guerrillas?”

“Harry, I’ve told you many times that you are not cut out for this line of work.”

“I agree. Murdering people one at a time I think I am good at. Attacking NPA guerrilla squads, not so good. I think maybe
I am not insane enough.”

“You may be right,” Dartley agreed equably.

“According to the general’s spies, the NPA has half of Happy Man’s land. We go in there and get them to attack us, which gives
the general’s elite squad an excuse to come in and finish them off. And which also gives them an excuse to rush into Happy
Man’s house and kill him. That’s madness! You think that plan will work?”

“It’s crude,” Dartley conceded, “but considering the circumstances and the short time available, it was the best plan we could
come up with. You had dozed off by then.”

“Something struck me as funny,” Harry said. “It seemed to me like getting the NPA was equally as important as Happy Man. Why
don’t we go start a fight with Happy Man’s guards?”

“Because they all believe they’ve killed the American assassin and they’ll try to be nice guys while Happy Man is looking
for publicity. No, the objective ones in this are the NPA. They’ve seen us before and now, when they see us again, it will
prove that the same American assassin is still on Happy Man’s trail and thus couldn’t have been Ken Hodges, as Happy man asserts.”

As they drove along the roads on the NPAcontrolled part of the Velez plantations, they saw that in spite of all the killings
and turmoil, work still went on at the sugar harvest. Nature did not postpone her cycles to convenience mankind. They watched
every agricultural vehicle carefully, knowing that the NPA seized these anytime they needed wheels. Dartley knew that they
were being watched, too, and that word would quickly reach Commander Cristobal that intruders were in his stronghold. Unless
Cristobal was very, very smart, he would challenge them. Dartley knew better than to expect people to be very, very smart.
He let Harry drive and kept himself in readiness to respond to sudden attack.

When a large flatbed truck, loaded high with cut cane, settled in behind them, completely filling the road from side to side
and blocking all retreat, Dartley knew it was going to be any moment now. Dartley removed the cover from one end of the glass-fiber-reinforced
plastic tube that lay across his knees. He raised the plastic sights on the tube and cocked the firing mechanism, which made
Harry nervous, since the open end of the rocket launcher was pointed at him as it lay bouncing across Dartley’s knees. The
Miniman antitank free-flight missile came
prepacked in its plastic disposable launcher. The complete missile launcher combinations came in an aluminum and polyethylene
pack with a carrying handle and weighing about fifteen pounds— almost as handy as buying beer.

The 74 mm Swedish missile was 90 cm long and had an effective range of 250 meters. It was unusual in that a propellant-filled
combination chamber was connected to the projectile by a breakable joint. This joint held the missile in position within the
launcher tube until the gases escaping from the combustion chamber built up sufficient pressure to break the joint. The aluminum-cased,
hollow-charge missile had percussion ignition and a piezoelectric detonating device. Its muzzle velocity was 160 meters per
second, and it contained 0.9 kilogram of HEAT explosive, capable of penetrating 340 mm of armor plate. Dartley was looking
forward to seeing something on the road ahead on which he could use the Miniman. Harry was just hoping that a sudden jolt
wouldn’t launch it into his ribs.

A heavy truck blocked the road ahead, and armed men stood on either side of it. They had amused looks on their faces at the
plight of the little yellow Toyota trapped by dense fields of cane on either side, the heavy, stationary truck ahead and the
loaded flatbed truck bringing up the rear. There were two men in the little car, fourteen men with M16s waiting for them on
the road. They had reason to be pleased with themselves.

“Stay over to the left,” Dartley said to Harry, and thrust his head and shoulders through
the right side window. He placed the plastic Miniman tube on top of his right shoulder, found the truck about seventy meters
away on the graduated grid of the plastic sights, and pressed the thumb-operated trigger. The missile whooshed from the launcher,
and the truck exploded into an orange ball of fire.

The blast had knocked down the men standing close to the truck. As Harry took the Toyota past the flaming wreck, squeezing
between it and the wall of sugarcane, the rolled-up windows on one side of the Toyota cracked from the heat. Harry grimaced
at the sickening thuds beneath the car as they ran over the guerrillas lying on the roadway. The tires bumped over some, but
the gruesome thing that got to Harry was the way two bodies scraped along between the car’s underside and the road, like a
cardboard carton that can’t get free. Dartley didn’t seem to mind. He tossed the disposable plastic launcher tube on the backseat,
since he didn’t believe in littering the countryside.

The column of smoke from the burning truck brought three Philippine army choppers in. They used the roadway as a landing zone,
and the troopers stormed what they expected would be a fiercely defended position. Instead, all they found was dead and injured
guerrillas. Any still able to walk had disappeared into the canefields. There was nothing for them to do except kill off the
injured men until only two remained. One was a fat man with two broken ankles. An army sergeant pulled his combat knife and
pressed the point of it slowly into the
injured man’s soft belly, which hung out over his belt. Then the sergeant flicked the blade up sharply, so that it gouged
out a nick of fat tissue and skin. The wounded man screamed with pain and watched, with terrified eyes, the blood streaming
down his belly as he sat on the road.

The sergeant again slowly pressed in the blade tip a couple of inches above this wound, the blade edge down. The broad edge
of the upturned tip tore, rather than cut through, the flesh as it whipped upward. The man screamed again and begged for mercy.