Rebound (30 page)

He took the road there without bothering to check whether or not he was being followed. After being on the road awhile, he
noticed a small blue car some distance back. He did not try slowing and speeding to see if it would keep pace with him. It
could work to his advantage if they thought he hadn’t spotted them. But he wanted to be sure, so when he saw a sandy area
next to a small lake, he pulled into it and parked next to a yellow Toyota Celica. He left the engine and air conditioning
running as he smoked a cigarette and looked through the windshield at the lake water and some people fishing along its shore.
The blue car had passed and kept going. He waited, glancing in the rearview mirror, until sure enough that the blue car, this
time traveling in the opposite direction, pulled into the sandy area. It parked several cars away, and out of the corner of
his eye Hodges saw two men in it, with the windows rolled down. They had no air conditioning, which would make things just
a little hard on their patience. So as not to give them any rest, Hodges got on the
move again and, a little way down the road, saw the blue car behind him again, quite a distance back.

According to his map he could turn off the main road onto any side road in this area and he would be traversing Velez family
land. None of the little roads were signposted, and none were named on the map, either, so it would be guesswork as to his
exact position. He hung a quick right off the main road and onto a narrow road that cut a niche between tall, green sugarcane
and wondered if he had managed to lose his little blue friend following him.

The four Velez guards stood by their jeep and looked down at the body of their fellow guard where it had been left on the
side of the road. He had bad injuries on his face and head, and his eyes stared, sightless and dead. But he did not appear
to have been shot, and his .45 automatic pistol was still stuck in his belt.

“He was a bully,” one guard said. “He had it coming to him. Some of the workers jumped him and stomped him. They left his
gun in case it would be found in their possession. The NPA, if they had done this, would have taken the weapon. And the American
crazy man, why would he do this? I say we don’t raise the alarm.”

“If we start shooting flares in the sky every time anything goes wrong, it won’t mean nothing when we really need them,” another
guard said.

“This guy ain’t no loss, anyhow. He was stupid and greedy.”

“That’s just because he whipped you for cheating him at cards.”

“I wasn’t cheating!”

They all laughed at that. Just then, they heard the sound of a vehicle approaching, and they all looked that way. It was a
car. With one occupant.

“It’s him!”

“The American!”

“Let’s get him!”

They piled into the jeep, swerved to avoid running over the body on the ground, and took after the car, which had not been
traveling very fast. They overtook it not far down the road, squeezing past it along a straightaway. One man emptied his M16
magazine into the windshield as they got clear, and the car left the road, plunging through the sugarcane until it came to
a stop. The jeep screeched to a halt, and the four guards came running back to the road.

The men were all fired up for action, so when a small blue car came into the straightaway and put on speed when they waved
it down, two of the man raked the vehicle with their M16s. The car veered erratically and slid off the road, into the cane.

The single occupant of the first car and the two occupants of the second car were all dead. The guards examined their papers.

“It says he’s an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy. Happy Man was right when he said that the CIA was after
him. Now that we got the guy, we found the proof on him.”

The guard with the other men’s papers looked less happy. “They’re Philippine military intelligence. We’d better take these
papers to the big boss.”

Dartley and Harry heard the gunfire. It was not far off, although they guessed that sound would carry a good distance over
the canefields of this flat land. Harry drove the car behind a big thicket where they could watch and wait. They expected
to see vehicles rushing to or from the direction of the gunfire. Dartley recognized the sound of M16s, and when they heard
nothing more after the first long bursts, he decided that it was guards fooling around or target practice.

They had been driving around for a while. They had met agricultural trucks on the roads, but apart from the single guard who
had been kicking the worker, they saw no sign of either Velez goons or NPA guerrillas. After the long bursts of rifle fire,
silence again descended. Only insects were making noise in the heat of the day, and some birds deep in the cane. Dartley was
in no hurry to move, watching and waiting.

When they had been there almost half an hour, he said to Harry, “Time to go.”

“Where?”

“Bacolod.”

This marked Dartley’s decision to suspend the mission. He recognized that his hanging around the Velez estates today was only
an effort on his part to try to delay that decision. Dartley hated to give up on something—even if he
meant to come back later to finish it. But things were running too strongly against him. Velez was too well dug in. Dartley,
through his own efforts, could not flush him into the open long enough to have a shot at him. It was all becoming a waste
of time. More than that, it had become too dangerous in this location, with all the dice loaded, all the cards marked. He
would tell Harry when they got back to the cottage and promise to work with him, if he wanted, when he returned to finish
the job.

Yet the gunfire had made Dartley uneasy. He said, “I’ll ride in the trunk until we pick up the Toyota.”

He unlocked and climbed into the large trunk of the Ford LTD. He propped the trunk open about nine inches with the harness
of wood and wire he had made the previous evening. He struggled around, making himself comfortable, as the car moved forward
over the bumpy road.

Dartley’s first warning that anything was wrong was the car’s sudden acceleration and a scrape of metal as it went through
a roadblock formed by two jeeps, which had carelessly been placed with just enough room left for a big car to get through.
Bullets spattered off the trunk lid.

The car kept up its high speed as Harry made a run for it, making some sharp turns to throw off pursuers. But the guards knew
these roads better than he did, and Dartley soon spotted the two jeeps behind them through the nine-inch gap left by the propped-up
trunk lid. He had already fed the disintegrating link belt
7.62 mm ammo into the M60 machine gun. He poked the barrel, from which he had removed the bipod, through the crack and scrunched
down so he could line up the blade front sight with the leaf rear sight. Then he waited for a straightaway, as the two jeeps
chased them, gaining on them fast, more maneuverable than the clumsy big LTD on these twisting roads.

Dartley looked along the barrel over the square hood of the lead jeep and touched off a brief rattle of fire that shattered
the jeep’s windshield. The vehicle began to fishtail, then slowed all of a sudden. The second jeep hit it from behind, and
both vehicles left the road in a cloud of dust, smashing down the sugarcane in their paths as they spun wildly around. The
last thing Dartley saw was a flare rise from where the two jeeps had gone off the road. He peered out and saw the flare burst
vivid pink against the flawless blue noontime sky.

All went well for a few minutes. Dartley couldn’t even tell the direction in which Harry was driving anymore, but he was going
there fast, which was okay with Dartley. Then, when things seemed to be going well, he heard bullets hitting the car once
more. This time they came in a series of hard, sharp knocks as the high-velocity projectiles punctured the steel. Harry seemed
to be all right, since the Ford was keeping to the road. An instant later Dartley saw the source of their trouble—a high-sided
open truck moving into the crossroad they were passing through, with men standing in the back, leaning rifles on the truck
side and shooting at them. Although the truck was moving fairly
slowly the road was very bumpy beneath it, and the jolting was throwing off the aim of the riflemen. It occurred to Dartley
that Harry probably owed his life to this bumpy road, maybe himself too.

The truck made a turn and roared after them. Dartley checked the ammo belt and clutched the pistol grip to the M60, wedging
the shoulder piece into his chest. It was no easy matter groveling on the steel floor in the trunk of a fast-moving car on
a bumpy, twisting country road, wrestling with a twenty-five-pound machine gun. The truck did not gain on them, but the men
in the back shot forward over the cab roof at them. When their shooting grew increasingly accurate, Dartley decided to put
a stop to it. They were using M16 rifles, and his M60 machine gun had more than twice the effective range of their weapons.
At nine hundred meters the M60 was still deadly.

Just as he was about to open up on the truck, the car rattled across a plank bridge over a creek. Dartley waited for the truck
to reach it, hoping that no sudden turn or bend would obscure his view. As the front wheels of the truck rolled onto the planks,
he opened fire. He blasted away until he could feel the machine gun’s barrel grow hot.

The 7.62 mm bullets beat down on the truck front, thick as hail. The driver was killed instantly by a bullet between the eyes.
The man next to him somehow managed to escape being hit by flying lead, but a foot-long sliver of nonsafety glass from the
windshield buried itself in his throat. He clutched at the sliver with
both hands, tearing up his palms instead of grabbing the steering wheel out of the dead driver’s hands and keeping the truck
on the bridge.

With an upward wave of the M60 barrel Dartley blew away three or four of the sharpshooters firing on the Ford. As the truck
pitched nose-first off the side of the bridge, the other riflemen were tossed out, like a bronco throwing a rider.

They made it to the main road with no further incidents and, after transferring the weapons from the LTD to the yellow Toyota,
left the big Ford at the edge of the lake.

When they got back to Hacienda Luisa at La Castellana, Dartley and Harry spent an hour in the pool. Dartley told Harry of
his decision to suspend the mission over dinner at a local restaurant. After the last two days of “touring” the canefields
this came as a great relief to Harry.

“I was wondering how I was going to be able to face tomorrow,” he admitted. “The Virgin has answered my prayers.”

“Pity you didn’t pray that we hit Happy Man instead.”

Harry was mildly scandalized at the suggestion, but it didn’t stop him from celebrating the good news with numerous bottles
of San Miguel beer and a large helping of
kari-kari,
which consisted of oxtail, tripe, and greens coated with peanut sauce. Dartley ate
adobo,
the Filipino
national dish, a dark stew of pork, chicken, and pieces of liver spiked with soy sauce and vinegar.

Next morning, Dartley wanted to avoid the airport in case it was being watched. They would take the Negros Navigation ferry
for the two-hour ride across the Guimaras Strait to the island of Iloilo. They could arrange to fly from Iloilo City to Manila,
or travel on to the island of Panay and fly from there. Dartley felt it was important to get off the island of Negros as soon
as possible, but they did not have to risk drawing attention to themselves by heading directly for Manila.

Back at the cottage, they lugged all the armaments, stuffed into the golf bags, inside, unable to leave any of the weapons
behind them during the day because of the resort maids, or in the car overnight on the off chance of car thieves. Harry, a
little the worse for his celebrations, fell beneath one of the loaded golf bags and had to be released by Dartley. The cottage
had two rooms, one with two beds and the other with a couch and a table and chair, plus a small bathroom. It was a short walk
from the pool and had its own bit of patchy lawn and some trees and bushes for privacy. The nearest cottage was fifty yards
from them, and no one snooped.

All the same, Dartley was tense. He would be until he got off this island. He was beginning to feel trapped. He lay on the
bed, drifting in and out of uneasy sleep, listening to Harry snore on the other bed. At some point during the night he opened
his eyes and found the room lit by a whitish glare. The blinds were
down over the two windows, but their material was not enough to keep out this fierce light. It was as if the moon were right
outside the cottage! Dartley didn’t have to move the blind to peer out—he would see nothing except blinding pans of light.
He rushed into the other room, and then the bathroom, to see if the lights shone outside those windows too. They did. The
cottage was completely encircled by mobile flashlights on folding aluminum tripods—Dartley could have remembered the brand
name of the equipment if he only had time to think—and beyond that circle of light, invisible behind the glare, stood a circle
of trained men with automatic weapons. For the first time Dartley heard some sounds. He listened. They were evacuating other
cottages. A woman was giving them a piece of her mind, refusing to leave quietly.