Expatriates (7 page)

“I learned how much of what we think to be necessary is superfluous; I learned how few things are essential, and how essential those things really are.”

—Bernard Fergusson,
Beyond the Chindwin: An Account of Number Five Column of the Wingate Expedition into Burma 1943

R
hiannon heard a knock at the door of their hut. When she answered, three elders from the local church stood before her. They asked to talk to both her and her husband, declaring that they were quite concerned about the safety of the Jeffords in the unfolding invasion. As they explained it, they thought it was important for the Jeffords to flee to Manila or even leave the country entirely, both for their own safety and for the safety of the villagers. One elder admitted, “We are willing to hide you, but we are pretty sure the Indos will start torturing and killing us until we give you up.”

The Jeffords knew they had to leave the Philippines. All through the following year they prayed for the means to make that happen. All of the scheduled Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific flights out of Calbayog City were sold out for months in advance. And even if they made it to Manila, there were no longer any scheduled flights to the United States.

As missionaries, they had few possessions with them on the island. Anything bulky had been left in storage with relatives and friends in New Hampshire and in Florida. Other than their car and some hammocks, almost everything else they owned could fit in eight suitcases. They pared this down to five suitcases for their planned voyage. Their hammocks, extra clothes, kitchen utensils, linens, and extra luggage were given to friends at the mission school.

Meanwhile, the news kept getting worse. Moro Islamic Liberation Front (ILF) guerillas were making increasingly brazen and atrocious attacks. Catholic church buildings—the most outward symbol of Christianity in the island nation—were burned wherever the ILF went, and anyone wearing religious apparel, or carrying rosaries and crucifixes, became the targets of disfigurements or even murder, usually via machete.

A recent rumor circulated that the government would only defend Luzon Island and let all of the islands to the south fall to the ILF. Samar Island and neighboring Masbate Island were directly in the path of the Islamic guerillas. The Indonesians and their surrogates were systematically taking control of all of the southern and central Philippine islands. There were reports that ILF soldiers were hunting down Christian missionaries and torturing them before beheading them.

Just as the Jeffords had begun to feel panicked about their situation, Joseph Navarro, a teenage Jeepney barker showed up at the school. Joseph's job as a barker was to call out the routes and drum up customers. But his job also gave him free rides almost anywhere, and the opportunity to make some money on the side. He often sold used cell phones, cell phone SIM cards, and prepaid telephone calling cards. He regularly made deliveries to the mission school, which was on one of his routes. Joseph only casually knew the Jeffords, but he approached Peter and asked, “Kuya, I hear you want to get to Luzon. My grandfather, Paul Navarro, says he will take us in his outrigger boat—a carag
boat called the
Tiburon
—if you can help buy the diesel fuel. It's a big fishing boat.”

“Is it big enough to carry us and all of our luggage?” Peter asked.

“Oh, yeah.
Ang Malaking barko
—a big boat. I've been helping him run her since I was twelve.”

“He'd really be agreeable?”

“I think so,” Joseph replied. “We are really tight. I'm his
Tuazon
, you know, his youngest grandson.”

“It sounds like you are his favorite grandson, too.”

Joseph, who was modest, nodded and looked embarrassed when he heard that.

The Jeffords met Paul Timbancaya Navarro a few hours later. They learned that everyone called him Tatang (grandfather), even people who were not related. He had a strong reputation in the community, both as a fisherman and as an instructor of the Filipino Martial Arts (FMAs). Now in his early seventies, he had reduced both occupations to just part-time endeavors.

Paul Navarro was sitting on his porch reading an
Abante
tabloid when Joseph and the Jeffords arrived. He gazed up from his paper and said quietly, “I heard you need to get to Luzon.”

“That's right,” Peter answered.

The old man set aside the newspaper and said, “This very familiar to me, from a long time ago. It is just like the Huk uprising, right after the World War Two. I was a little boy then. Our family originally lived on Luzon, but my dad decided to flee to Samar, in 1948. This was during the Huk Rebellion. Rumor had it that they were going to try to recruit my father by force, or that there was a price on his head. So he got wise and fled. He thought he would be safer if he moved our family completely off of Luzon. He chose to come here to Samar, where he already had a few relatives.”

Peter nodded. “That was a smart thing to do.”

“Yes, when there is trouble like that, with hundreds of soldiers coming your way, you don't try and stand your ground. That will just get you killed. What you do is pull up anchor and get the heck out of there. That is what my dad did, and it saved all our lives, in my family. This is wisdom.”

From his history reading, Peter Jeffords knew that the Huk Rebellion had been a communist-led uprising of peasants, primarily on Luzon. The name of the movement was a Tagalog acronym for
Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon
, which was often shortened to
Hukbalahap
, or simply just
Huk
. The acronym stood for “People's Anti-Japanese Army,” which was how the communist rebels got their start. The Huks were eventually defeated by the army during the presidency of Ramon Magsaysay.

“Even after it was safe to return to Luzon, my father decided to stay on Samar. That worked out okay, too,” Tatang said.

After a long pause, Tatang Navarro said, “I will take you.”

Again and again, the Jeffords expressed their thanks. They wore huge smiles and felt tremendous relief in the knowledge that they would be escaping the ILF. They knew that Mr. Navarro's generous offer had just saved them from almost certain death.

They went to see Tatang Navarro's boat late that afternoon. Peter and Rhiannon liked the look of the boat. It was thirty-eight feet long with a five-foot wide hull, and a thirty-inch draught. For stability, it had traditional double-pole outriggers called
carags
. The boat had a graceful upswept triangular transom, but its well-proportioned bowstem was incongruously tipped with an old car tire that had been painted white for use as a mooring buffer. Overall, the boat had attractive lines, but it was obviously built more for utility than for style. What
Tiburon
lacked in chromed fittings, it made up for in solidity and native charm.

A pair of large white horizontal canvas awnings covered
Tiburon
in the rear and amidships. The awnings were elevated in shallow inverted Vs, suspended from short masts. They had reinforcing rods down the center and numerous guy lines to keep them taut. Unless the winds were unfavorable, the awnings could be left unfurled day and night.

Tacked up above the chart box were newspaper clippings—most of them about Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao, a national hero and distant cousin of Navarro's late wife—and a few faded printouts of digital pictures showing some of their particularly large catches of fish that had filled the hold.

Tiburon
's engine was a Mitsubishi straight block four-cylinder, a naturally aspirated diesel with a 2,659 cc displacement. This reliable engine produced 80 horsepower. It was equipped with an auxiliary belt-drive alternator, which was used to charge a pair of 6-volt deep cycle marine batteries. The batteries were needed to operate an electric Power Block winch for hauling in the fishing nets. This was a smaller version of the big winches used on commercial purse seiners. The engine's exhaust pipe, one of the few stainless steel fittings on the entire boat, emerged just below the center of the transom rail.

Their original plan was to motor
Tiburon
northward to Batangas in southern Luzon only 170 nautical miles—about a fourteen-hour trip at twelve knots. The next morning, however, word came that the ILF and Indonesians also planned to invade Luzon in their jihad campaign. Peter and Tatang began a series of meetings on the old man's porch to discuss alternative destinations.

Unfortunately, most of the Pacific islands were not self-sufficient. If the Crunch lasted for another year, Peter anticipated that many Pacific islanders would be starving to death. Peter summed it up. “Continental land masses have resources that just aren't available on island nations.”

They weighed the merits and drawbacks of different destinations. They even considered going as far as the United States, but the vast expanses of the central Pacific Ocean were more than they could handle. To motor their way 5,300 miles to Hawaii and then another 2,500 miles to San Diego seemed far too uncertain, and well beyond the capabilities of their coastal fishing boat. Rhiannon had also been hearing reports of a total collapse of law and order throughout the United States, with the worst of the chaos on the East and West coasts. Most of their news came from Radio Australia, which was still in operation. Most of the other international shortwave broadcasters had gone off the air. In the end, northern Australia seemed like their safest bet.

Tatang had always burned a mix of petroleum–based “dino diesel” and various plant-derived oils in
Tiburon
's engine. He was proud to exclaim, “This engine, she's an omnivore. She can burn coconut oil, palm oil, peanut oil, corn oil, you name it!”

To surreptitiously get to Australia through Indonesian-controlled waters, Peter realized that FV
Tiburon
was actually better suited than the larger and ostensibly more seaworthy steel boats docked in Samar's harbors. Because Paul Navarro's boat was constructed of wood, it was radar transparent. The only significant radar reflector was the engine block, and most of that was below the waterline and therefore less visible to radar. Even the ship's wheel was made of wood. As was typical of locally made boats, oversize wood mooring bitts were used instead of the stainless steel ones used on nearly every boat from First World countries. And since
Tiburon
was built in the late 1990s, its two diesel fuel tanks—forty and forty-five gallons—were made of HDPE plastic rather than steel.

Pointing out these features, Peter added, “Just look at how the outriggers are lashed on with heavy fishing line rather than bolted on with big stainless steel fixtures like they'd be if this were an American-made boat. Even the chainwale is plywood, not steel. What you have here is a stealth boat, Tatang.”

Tatang's expression changed to a huge gap-toothed grin. “Radar can no see her?”

“That's right,” Peter replied. “I'd much rather be in your radar-invisible boat going eight or ten knots than I would in a big fancy steel yacht going twenty-five knots. Those ships would have big radar signatures and be obvious targets. But
Tiburon
will likely just slip through unnoticed if we can keep out of sight, visually.”

After a pause, Peter continued, “My dad was an engineer who worked on the periphery of the stealth aircraft programs for the U.S. Air Force. His little company only made special heating pads that were used to cure the composite materials used in the wing and fuselage sections. But I had some long conversations with him about radar and radar wave reflectivity. It all comes down to this: Composites, fiberglass, and wood are good because they don't reflect radar waves, but metal is bad because it reflects radar like a mirror. Even though this boat is thirty-eight feet long and has four feet of hull above the waterline, it has a radar cross section—or RCS—that is probably smaller than that of an eight-foot-long aluminum skiff with just one foot of hull exposed above the waterline.”

Tatang nodded to indicate he understood and Peter continued, “This boat won't give a sharp radar return like a modern boat. It will probably look fuzzy, like an indistinct blob. In daytime, when we are drifting or have a sea anchor out, we won't look like much more than a piece of driftwood. At night, when we are under power, the motion against the radar screen background will make it obvious that we are a boat, but of course on radar we won't look like anything more than a local fishing boat. The chance of someone dispatching a patrol boat or a cutter to investigate, I think, will be quite low.”

Peter walked around the boat, closely examining it, then came back to Tatang, who was sitting in the helm chair. Peter said, “The anchor and the motor winch will be an issue for radar. The anchor is on a rope, rather than a chain, which is good, but it is stowed on the foredeck. That's almost like mounting what they call a radar corner reflector for all the world to see.”

Tatang gave a toss of his hand and said, “No biggie, Pastor Jeffords. I can trade that, easy, for a poor man's anchor. Those are made out of concrete. They cast those flat, what-do-you-call discs, so they don't roll off a boat. The only metal is a little loop of rebar.”

Jeffords nodded. “
Perfecto
.” Then another thought crossed his mind. “And what about the Power Block winch? There is a lot of metal there. Can we dismount it and stow it below?”

“Sure, but if I'm selling my nets, I might as well sell the winch, too.”

“Technology is a blessing for those who understand it and can develop and maintain it. It can be a snare for those who can only depend on getting it ‘off the shelf.' If it malfunctions they are lost. Tools, supplies, and technological equipment should play a part in anyone's survival plans, but they should not play a part that overreaches the person's ability to deal with it.”

—Karl Hess,
A Common Sense Strategy for Survivalists
, p. 37, 1981

T
he next day they started looking at Navarro's nautical charts. Tatang summarized their options. “There are two ways we can go: either down through the Moluccas or down through the Celebes Sea, which is more roundabout.”

Jeffords, always the punster, couldn't resist quipping, “As I once informed a young Catholic priest, celibacy ain't all it's cracked up to be.”

Joseph laughed, but the subtlety of the play on words escaped his grandfather.

Tracing his finger on the chart, Jeffords said, “Well, Darwin in northern Australia is our nearest safe landfall. So through the Molucca Sea, then the Banda Sea, and then Timor Sea would be the most direct route.”

Looking to Tatang, he asked, “But I suppose the more important question is, given all the variables and imponderables, which route will give us the
least
chance of running into any ILF or Indo warships?”

Tatang looked slightly puzzled—perhaps by Peter's use of the word “imponderables”—so Joseph translated this question into Tagalog.

“The only bad danger is the Makassar Strait up against Malaysia. There could be ships of the Indonesian Navy there,” Tatang replied.

Peter nodded. “Okay, we'll make sure to avoid that. So we take the Molucca route?”

Tatang nodded, but Peter asked, pointing at the chart, “What about this string of islands between the Molucca Sea and the Banda Sea? Look, it's Pulau This, Pulau That, Pulau The Other Thing without much water in between them.”

Joseph and Tatang consulted rapidly in Tagalog.

Joseph then translated. “Grandpa says there's not many people in the Spice Islands—no cities, just villages, so it is not too risky, especially if we time it so we slip between those islands at night.”

Jeffords nodded. “Okay, then that's the route we'll take, and we'll put our trust in God to see us safely through.”

Tiburon
's engine, Tatang said, was less than two years old and had been run for only about five hundred hours. By Filipino fishing fleet standards, it was considered brand-new.

Tallying the various containers and adding it to the capacity of the boat's two existing tanks, they came up with a grand total of 503 gallons. At 7.29 pounds per gallon, the fuel would weigh 3,667 pounds. At three quarts per hour at three-quarter throttle, that gave them 377 hours of engine run time—or thirty-one and a half days—assuming twelve hours per day with the engine running. With good weather, catching favorable winds and currents, and with Gods' providence, they might make it the 2,800 nautical miles to Australia in twenty-eight days. If the winds were not favorable, it might take as long as thirty-eight days. According to their calculations, they would run out of fuel in thirty-one and a half days unless they found a place to refuel en route
.

Their greatest challenge would be that after leaving Samar they would be entirely in hostile Islamic waters until they approached Australia. There would be no friendly ports where they could purchase fuel. East Timor was already under Indonesian control, and they expected to find warships blockading Papua New Guinea.

Jeffords pondered for a few minutes and reran the calculations. Then he asked Tatang, “How much lube oil does the engine use?”

“It's a brand-new engine, so it burns
at most
maybe one quart a week. I use the what-ya-call forty weight.”

Jeffords said, “Okay, we should set aside a gallon and a half for lubrication, even though we'll probably need less than half of that.”

Once the fuel discussion had been sorted out, they focused on
Tiburon
's white-and-light-blue paint scheme, which was clearly not good for camouflage. Tatang consulted one of his neighbors, Rudolfo Saguisag, who went by the nickname Dolpo. Dolpo had served for many years as an NCO in the Hukbóng Dagat ng Pilipinas—the Philippine Navy, often just called the PN. He had retired from the navy four years before the Crunch. His last duty station had been with Naval Forces Central (NAVFORCEN), serving on rigid hull inflatable boats.

Dolpo's experience was mainly in small boats and onboard frigates. After hearing about their camouflage concern, he advised Tatang to use the U.S. Navy's defunct Measure 21 camouflage paint scheme. He pulled a naval camouflage reference book from his bookshelf, and after a couple of minutes of searching through the pages, he turned to the page that showed Measure 21. “Here,” he said. “Have the paint store match these colors. That is the best camo coloring for being out on the blue water. It is a little too dark for inshore, but
perpekto
in deep water.” He then jotted down a note that read: “Navy Blue 5-N on all the vertical surfaces and Deck Blue 20-B on all the horizontal surfaces and canvas.”

—

T
wo days later, Peter learned that Tatang had traded his nets and floats for 150 rounds of .22 Long Rifle ammo, which had practically become a currency unto itself since the Crunch. The electric motor winch was traded for 20 rounds of .30-06.

The engine, he explained, burned about three quarts of diesel or coconut oil (“mantika”) per hour. The nearby Caltex station had long since sold out of all types and grades of fuel, but with some begging and pleading, a number of neighbors were willing to sell a total of eighty-five gallons of diesel.

In addition to the dino diesel, the Jeffords were able to buy coconut oil. Most of this was “Light Centrifuged Coconut Oil” in five-gallon plastic buckets labeled with maker names like NARDIAS, MPC, and CIIF Oil Mills.

They also managed to buy ten and a half gallons of corn-based cooking oil (made by the Bagiuo, Sun Valley, and Sunar companies), eight gallons of palm oil, six gallons of soybean oil, eleven bottles and cans of olive oil, and even a few bottles each of sunflower, peanut, and camellia oil. Realizing that this still wouldn't be enough, they asked around and found twenty gallons of used deep-fryer oil available from a fried fish stand owner in Calbayog, as well as fifteen gallons of 10W40 motor oil, much of it in one-quart plastic bottles. It cost them more than 800 Philippine Pesos (PHP), but Tatang assured them that the various types of oil could mix with the diesel fuel, though no more than fifteen percent by volume. “We put in just a little bit of this fryer oil each time we refill the main tank,” he explained.

Before it was taken aboard, the used deep-fryer oil was carefully strained through three thicknesses of T-shirts, a slow process that removed all of the blackened particulate matter.

As he started the filtering process, Joseph asked his grandfather, “Do you want it to be stored in this can, or in this big plastic bottle?”

The old man answered in Tagalog,
“
Pakilagay naman sa bote ang mantika
” (“Please put the oil in the bottle”). He added in English, “Mr. Jeffords says he want as many plastic containers as possible since metal ones are radar reflectors. We are stealthy boys.”

Jeffords recognized the Tagalog phrase. In the two years leading up to his first missionary trip, he had seriously studied the language. Ironically, his assignment turned out to be in the central Philippines, where Visayan and Waray were spoken much more frequently. Peter's knowledge of Tagalog came in handy only around people like Navarro, who was originally from Luzon.

They indeed tried to buy and repackage as much of the oil as possible in plastic bottles. The few steel containers were stowed below the waterline. They agreed to use up all of the fuel in these metal containers first so they could discard the containers immediately after they had been emptied into the main tank, by sinking them. Given the wide variety of oil that they planned to burn and its dubious purity, they took the precaution of buying four spare fuel filters.

With both the U.S. dollar and the Philippine peso in free fall, nearly all of the various fuel and oil purchases were barter transactions. They started by bartering the gasoline they could siphon from the Jeffords' car and what they had in cans. They were able to negotiate two gallons of diesel in trade for each gallon of gas, since gas was already more scarce, and because it was common knowledge that coconut oil could be substituted in diesel engine cars, trucks, or boats.

Tatang's standard practice was to start the engine with “dino diesel” before switching to draw from the tank of coconut oil. Then, just before shutting down, he would switch back to the petroleum-based diesel tank.

The most disappointing transactions occurred when Tatang traded his truck for 110 gallons of coconut oil, and the Jeffords exchanged their Mitsubishi L300 Versa Van minivan for 130 gallons of coconut oil and 40 gallons of palm oil. The car was only three years old, but in the new post-Crunch economy, cars with gasoline engines were not highly valued. If the Mitsubishi had been a diesel, they might have been able to trade it for enough coconut oil for their entire trip. The rest of the fuel was bought with Philippine pesos of rapidly diminishing value and by bartering Rhiannon's laptop and some silver pesos that Joseph had inherited from his maternal grandmother.

Their arsenal for the voyage consisted of Tatang's well-worn but serviceable M1 Garand semiautomatic .30-06 rifle, Joseph's takedown .22 rimfire Ruger 10/22 rifle, and Tatang's 26.5 mm Geco flare pistol. The latter was designed just for signaling, but Tatang had a 12 gauge flare insert sleeve for the gun. Inside of this insert, he could use a second insert—a chamber adapter for .38 Special revolver cartridges. This made the flare gun into a crude single-shot pistol. Lacking both a rifled barrel and sights, the pistol could not be fired accurately beyond a few yards, but it was better than nothing.

Peter's main concern was their most potent weapon, the M1 Garand. “Is it zeroed?” he asked Tatang.

“Oh, yeah, on a paper target it shoots right where you are aiming it at one hundred steps.”

Peter had once fired an uncle's M1, but he didn't know how to field-strip it or clean it. Tatang showed him how, though he had some difficulty in relating the rifle parts nomenclature in English.

Most of Tatang's ammunition was black-tipped armor-piercing (AP) ammunition. It was all stored in 8-round en bloc
clips. Tatang had only eleven loaded clips left—seven of AP, and four of plain “ball” full metal jacket ammunition. With such a small supply, they realized they would have to make each shot count.

With just one solid battle rifle in hand, Peter did not feel comfortably well armed for the voyage. When he mentioned this to Rhiannon, she retorted, “What did you want? A 20-millimeter deck gun? We have what we have, and we'll be vigilant. The rest is up to God.”