Rebound (29 page)

On the way Happy Man stopped off at Apo’s for more herbal talismans. Cristobal and those outside agitators had sent word that
they had to talk with him urgently. It was only an hour or so until dark. Normally he would never have gone, except for the
message whispered in his ear by the man they sent. “The American is here!”

In spite of the humid, sticky, late-afternoon heat, Happy Man felt suddenly cold. He moved away from the window he had been
standing near. The guerrilla, who could not have been much more than fifteen and was terrified of the guards who had searched
and handled him brutally, knew nothing more. Cristobal wanted to talk. He was in the church, which had been burned down two
years before because of its
leftist priest, the one who had later disappeared without a trace.

Happy Man stopped off for the dried herbs even though he had lost the fervent belief he had held before, that their power
had lifted the curse from him. It was not a curse—he knew that now. It had never been a curse. It was a black cloud of guilt
for the murders of those American servicemen, and now that the black cloud had once again taken demonic human form in this
mad American, who no one knew, who stalked him everywhere, who appeared in unexpected places, bringing slaughter with him.

For a moment Happy Man had the wild hope that the guerrillas had captured this American or, better still, killed him. He didn’t
want to hear any explanation of how this American had done what he did or why. He just wanted to be rid of him.

As the two jeeps and Happy Man’s car approached the ruined church, they saw a truck parked at the side of the road about three
hundred yards on the far side of it. Armed men stood next to it. Happy Man’s convoy pulled into the side of the road at more
or less an equal distance on the near side of the church. Three guards went forward to check out the place. They came back
and told Velez that six bodies were stretched on the floor of the burned-out church. The guards recognized five of them as
Cristobal guerrillas, all local men, and the sixth was the famous communist organizer from Bacolod, Froilan Quijano.

For a moment Happy Man had palpitations, thinking that the NPA was blaming him
for these deaths, since it was generally assumed— correctly—that he had ordered the burning of the church where the bodies
were now laid. But then he remembered the American. He was still on the loose. And he had come to San Geronimo not to kill
NPA guerrillas but to murder Happy Man himself. He and the NPA now had a mutual enemy and could help each other to destroy
him. This was why the guerrillas wanted to meet with him. Laying out the bodies in the church he had ordered burned was only
typical NPA dramatics—martyred freedom fighters in the holy place desecrated by the capitalist landowner.

Happy Man walked by himself along the road toward the church, and one man broke away from the opposite group and kept pace
with him. The two groups of armed men eyed each other, but none made any threatening moves, everybody being equally exposed
on the open roadway. The man approaching him he recognized as Joker Solano. He reached the blackened church walls before Solano
and saw the corpses laid on the church floor, on top of carbonized rubble from the collapsed roof. The left side of Quijano’s
face was ripped and caked in congealed blood, his mouth was stove in, but he was still recognizable. The others Velez recognized
vaguely as local youths whose fathers and brothers still worked for him. Good riddance to bad rubbish, he thought, and turned
to face Joker Solano.

“Where’s Cristobal?” Velez snapped, making it clear that a man of his stature expected to speak with the commander.

“Cristobal reports to me,” Solano said quietly. He gave Velez a factual account of the deaths of the six men as described
by the surviving witnesses. “He’ll be back if you intend to remain here.”

“I do.”

Solano appeared to give this some thought. “Very well. I may have to ask you to leave if we can’t control this American.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why can’t we control him? You and I have no shortage of armed men at our disposal. If we don’t let him
pit us against each other, he simply can’t function here.”

“So we’ll cooperate?” Solano asked.

“As much as we can. You and I are men of the world, Solano. Even if we can’t agree, we recognize that there are situations
in which we must compromise and cooperate with each other. But you cannot hope that my guards and militiamen will get on with
Cristobal and your guerrillas just because we tell them to. Family feuds and personal quarrels are more important here than
leftist beliefs. You police your side of the line and we’ll police ours. I have flare guns I can give you. Next time either
side sees this American in San Geronimo, setting off the flares will raise a general alarm.”

Solano nodded, turned on his heel, and walked back along the road.

Happy Man looked after him, thinking that if all NPA commanders were such spineless wimps, the red plague of communism could
be checked and cured easily.

* * *

Early next morning a yellow Toyota Celica was followed by a big green Ford LTD off the road from Bacolod to San Geronimo and
into a sandy area near a small lake. Two other cars were already parked there, their owners visible down by the lakeshore
with fishing rods. Dartley switched off the Toyota’s engine and threw the ignition key under the driver’s seat. Then he joined
Harry in the Ford, which pulled back onto the road. Although the place was more than three miles from the nearest boundary
of the Velez plantations, it was the closest place they could think of to leave it without attracting attention.

“Let’s hope we don’t have to use it,” Dartley said to Harry.

Harry raised his eyes to heaven and quickly returned them to the road. “Let’s hope we’re not hurt too bad to make it out this
far.”

Harry was making no secret of the fact that he considered it a serious error of judgment on Dartley’s part to resume their
car tour of the Velez estate the very next morning after their run-in with the guerrillas in the truck. Dartley did not explain
his decision—he just said they were going. He did not want to tell Harry right away that he was on the point of suspending
the mission, of returning to Manila to lie low for a few days, then slip out to Singapore or Hong Kong and fly from there
back to the States. When Happy Man had slipped back into his old ways, he would come back after him again. Like MacArthur
said, “I shall return.”

The situation in San Geronimo was too unpromising. He had no secure base of operations, only a rented cottage in a seaside
resort, a
building impossible either to secure or to defend. He had no accessibility to target; as long as Happy Man stayed put in his
great house, surrounded by guards, he was more likely to die of boredom than of gunshot wounds. His failed attempts on Velez’s
life and the other incidental deaths had spooked Happy Man. No matter how dull life was down on the farm, Happy Man’s fear
would make him stay where he was. For a few weeks, at least. By then, if nothing terrible was happening, he would start peeping
out at the world once more. Dartley had no intention of sitting on a beach until then. He’d go back to Maryland, maybe do
another assignment, and come back to strike just when Happy Man thought it was safe to go back in the water again.

He had often put much more time and effort than this into a hit. Usually the effort had gone into observation and meticulous
planning. That had not been possible in this case, and it would be difficult to term his mission so far as one of mere reconnaissance.
But he did not regard his efforts so far as a failure, only as spadework that had to be done. Nothing had been wasted, except
Benjael’s life. Dartley saw one big achievement: He had stopped a series of attacks on American servicemen. Now all he had
to do was insure that the attacks would not start up again.

But before he left, Dartley wanted to tangle with Happy Man’s guards. He had had his run-in with the communist guerrillas;
now he wanted to see what the Velez goons were made of. Harry almost certainly wouldn’t have seen
the point of this, and Dartley saw no reason to argue with him. As far as Harry knew, they were just going to take another
look around.

Harry tooled the big car around the narrow roads near Happy Man’s residence. Large ornamental gates hung open on two stone
pillars, and a gravel drive twisted off into the canefields. There was no sign of walls, fences, or security devices here,
like there had been at Laguna and Balbalasang. No doubt appearances were deceiving. Harry drove past the gateway without slowing.
From time to time they saw groups of men cutting cane in the fields but met no one on the narrow, twisting roads where the
visibility was limited on both sides by the high growth of sugarcane.

In a while they saw two men by the side of the road. One was kicking the other one along in front of him. As the car neared
them, the man doing the kicking did not look around, but the one being kicked held out his hands and shouted something. He
could not have been more than thirty, yet he looked thin and wasted. The one kicking him was in his mid-twenties, solidly
built, with a brutal, heavy face.

“Stop the car,” Dartley said as they passed them.

Dartley walked back to the men, carrying his canvas shopping bag in his left hand (at Bacolod, the previous evening, he had
gone back to the store to buy six more of these bags).

“You need help?” Dartley asked the man being driven, ignoring the other.

“Stop him, please. I sick. I cannot work. I lie down because I sick. I not lazy.”

“Leave him alone,” Dartley said to the younger, stronger man as he was about to kick him again.

“He’s lucky Mr. Velez is kind enough to give him work. He owes the big boss money. He gotta work. A poor man has no right
to be sick. That’s what the big boss says.”

“Happy Man?” Dartley inquired.

“There’s only one big boss. You here to see him?”

Dartley ignored his question and turned to the sickly man. “Get in the car. We’ll give you a lift.”

“He’s not going! He’s got to work.” He aimed a kick and missed.

“You kick him once more and I’ll kick your ass, sonny boy,” Dartley said with a snarl.

The goon kicked the weaker man so hard, he fell down. He turned to face Dartley with a supercilious grin on his face.

This one is a real dumbo, Dartley thought. The American knew he was mean-looking and big and that others rarely saw him as
someone convenient on whom to take out their hostilities. He had better be careful. This asshole might know something. Dropping
the bag lightly to the ground, he quickly moved forward, just outside arm’s reach of his opponent. Dartley feinted to the
left, then to the right. The goon stood planted evenly on his feet, his big fists closed, not moving an inch in response,
his mean little pig eyes staring dully in front of him. Dartley sized him up in an instant as a guy who figured he could take
any blow thrown at
him and then thump the shit out of the man who’d thrown it.

Dartley hopped high in the air, curling his knees to his chest as he did so, allowing his body to pivot so that his left hip
was the nearest part of him to the ground. Then he timed a fast expulsion of air from his lungs with a violent sideways double
kick. His two feet, ankle to ankle, drove forward in a single ramrod, and the soles of his shoes caught the goon in the solar
plexus. The blow, enough to collapse the rib cage of a weaker man, only winded him and knocked his parasympathetic nervous
system temporarily out of whack.

He sat on the ground, gasping for air like a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl. Dartley strolled over to him and drove
his right heel into his left eye, so he would have a shiner to remember him by. He left the goon whimpering and lying on his
side by the edge of the road.

“You want a lift?” Dartley asked the weak one, on his way to the car after picking up the canvas bag.

The man pointed in horror to his recent tormentor. “He’s still alive!”

“I know,” Dartley answered.

“But when he is all right again, he will come to kill me, saying that this was all my fault because I waved to you to stop.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Kill him,” the sickly man said without hesitation.

“Anything to oblige.” Dartley returned to the fallen goon and connected with a flying kick to the side of the man’s head.
He stomped down
on his head a few times with his right heel. “If he survives this, he’s not going to recognize his own mother, let alone remember
you.”

“Thank you,” the man said with a grateful smile.

Dartley headed for the car. “Sure you don’t want a lift?”

“Never from strangers.” He grinned, all of a sudden looking in much better health, and disappeared into the sugarcane.

Ken Hodges had arrived that morning on the first flight from Manila to Bacolod. He hired a car and took the desk clerk’s recommendation
of a good hotel. He breakfasted there and phoned his office at the embassy for any late-breaking developments. There were
none.

There wasn’t much Hodges, himself, could do down here except brief the three good field agents in the area, all Filipinos
born on Negros and much more likely to turn up valuable information than a bumbling foreigner. This would be where their little
game with Bonifacio began. Hodges did not have to look over his shoulder to know that General Bonifacio would have placed
surveillance on him so he would lead them to Filipinos functioniong as CIA agents. Hodges had to shake whatever tails they
put on him, avoid any phone traces or recordings that might be useful to them, and make contact with the three agents while
maintaining the integrity of their cover.

He enjoyed this kind of cat-and-mouse game because he was very good at it. He would make his contacts later in the day in
Bacolod. First he
would take a look for himself at the Velez plantations, which he had not seen before. This little side trip also would serve
to dull the enthusiasm of his Filipino military intelligence tails. Nothing worked like following someone around for hours
in the hot sun as they drove around, seemingly aimless. Hodges did not expect to see anything of importance, and he did not
intend to stop and question anybody. He had a highly detailed Philippine army map of the area, with the various Velez properties
and residences clearly marked on it.