Rebound (6 page)

“Well, thanks for your work,” Dartley told him. “I’ll take along the background material you prepared for me. It will come
in useful. As for Happy Man Velez, I guess I’ll just have to find out for myself what he is up to.”

The two pilots got into Clark from Guam late, because some of the equipment they were ferrying could not be found at the loading
bay. By the time the equipment was located and put aboard the B-52, they were four hours behind schedule. When they completed
the fifteen-hundred-nautical-mile flight to the Philippines, they got orders to stay overnight and fly a group of senior officers
back to Guam the next day. They were assigned two rooms at the Maharajah Hotel, just outside the gates of the air base, and
were dropped there by a driver who told them he would be back for them at six sharp. It was already past midnight. They were
not going to have a night on the town.

As they made their way to their rooms, along the hundred-room, one-story hotel, all was quiet. Lights still burned in only
a few rooms. But the key wouldn’t turn one door lock.

The pilot looked at the key under a light and saw that it was slightly bent. “Shit, this is all I need. Nothing has worked
all day.”

“Gonna be no better tomorrow with all the
brass on board,” the other pilot said with a grin, as he went into his room and closed the door behind him.

The night clerk apologized and, after some minutes, found the pilot another key. Then he walked back toward his room, near
the other end of the hotel. He smelled gasoline. In a moment he saw why. Two men were sloshing the gas out of five-gallon
cans against the doors and along the walls along nearly the entire length of the building. They had not seen the pilot walking
quietly at the edge of the illuminated area. He charged the nearest one, hitting him with a flying tackle, which brought him
down and knocked the can from his hand. The gasoline began to spill from the can in a wide pool.

The pilot jumped up faster than the man he had knocked down and kicked him on the side of the head. He went out like a light,
flopping on his back into the gas.

The second man dropped his can when he saw the pilot tackle the first man. He was coming to his aid when the American booted
his friend on the head. This changed his mind, and he took off into the darkness before the pilot could get to him. The five-gallon
can he had dropped lay on its side, and the gas gurgled out and spread over the concrete.

“Gas spill! Everybody out!” the pilot yelled after he had righted the two cans. He walked along outside the doors, banging
on them. “Danger of fire! Everyone out!”

A voice inside one room shouted back irritably, “Shut up, you damn drunk!”

Another called, “Let us sleep!”

“Gasoline! Fire! Fire! Get out! While you can!” The pilot banged on the doors, and the room lights came on in twos and threes.

A door opened. Then another. Then still others. They smelled the gas and moved away to safety quickly, adding their voices
to the alarm warnings. The majority were Americans. Then it happened. One disagreeable-looking guy opened his door and flipped
his cigarette butt outside.

The side of the hotel flashed into a line of flames. They were only a foot or so wide, and people evacuating the rooms easily
ran through them, coming away with some minor burns. The arsonist the pilot kicked lay in the middle of a pool of flames six
feet high. No one could get to him. The pain of the fire grilling his flesh brought him back to consciousness. He, rose ghostlike
to his feet, a flaming figure surrounded by tongues of fire. And he screamed in agony through the parched mouth in his half-cooked
face.

Then he came running out of the inferno and performed a horrible dance of pain as blue and red flames flickered all over his
body. When they finally caught him and rolled him in blankets, his features had burned away and his eyeballs had burst from
the heat.

Richard Dartley changed planes at Los Angeles and took a Philippine Airlines 747 to Manila International Airport. His passport
and driver’s license were in the name of Warren Tompkins, good counterfeits by Malleson. He hired a car, consulted a map,
and took Roxas Boulevard south toward the city center. Palms lined the waterside boulevard as it rounded the crescent of the
bay, and cool breezes came in from the sea. Big hotels appeared as he neared Ermita, the tourist section of the city. He took
a room at the Las Palmas Hotel on A. Mabini Street, which was not too pretentious. Nothing about it would draw attention to
him.

He was tired yet could not sleep in broad daylight. He had to begin sometime, and it might as well be now. After some studying
of maps and trying to separate Old Manila from
New Manila from Manila Proper from Metro Manila, he decided to stay put for the moment and operate from the Ermita section,
where a foreigner would be least out of place. The two American bases—Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Base—were each less than
two hours’ drive north. He saw no reason to go to either of them yet, since the conspiracy against the servicemen was almost
certainly being organized elsewhere, very possibly in Manila itself. Happy Man Velez was esconced in Balbalasang, in one of
the northern mountain provinces where it was dangerous for outsiders to venture. That, too, could wait.

Herbert Malleson had supplied him with reams of material on Velez and on everything else imaginable, from non-Moslem hill
tribes in Mindanao to recent fluctuations in the black market rate for the U.S. dollar. But on Dartley’s instructions neither
he nor Charley Woodgate tried any American contacts here for information. If the CIA and military intelligence didn’t want
to know about him, he would have to respect their wishes—if he knew what was good for him. Anyone knowledgeable enough to
provide valuable information presumably would report back that inquiries had been made, and Dartley would be advertising his
own presence and intentions. They had no Filipino contacts independent of American authorities. Dartley would have to make
his own.

Being a solo operator was always Dartley’s goal. He was by nature a loner and was content only when every element was under
his direct control. In the everyday world this happened
less often than he planned. He could see that it would be futile to try to find his way around the intricacies of situations
here without the guidance of a knowledgeable insider. So he went to find one.

Peddlers, all of them male, hustled tourists on the sidewalks. When a tour bus arrived, the peddlers gathered like vultures,
dragging their loads of stuffed anteaters and turtles, dried flower garlands, carabao horns, shells, coral, and necklaces.
They switched back and forth between English and Japanese, the two main languages of the tourists. Dartley bargained with
several, lost interest, and moved on. Farther down the street he haggled for some time with a man over two copper ashtrays.
Dartley ended the man’s sales pitch by handing him an American hundred-dollar bill.

“You can keep the ashtrays.”

The man looked dumbfounded at the bill and at Dartley. He quickly pocketed it and asked, “What do you want?”

“You seem smarter than the others. I need someone to find me things in Manila.”

“You looking for kinky sex?”

Dartley grinned. “Nothing as easy to find as that. Stay here, I’ll pick you up in my car in ten minutes.”

When Dartley showed, the peddler got in with his goods packed in a bag. “You surprised to see me still here?”

“No,” Dartley said.

“How come? I could have just disappeared with your hundred dollars.”

“Then you wouldn’t have been the person I took you to be.”

“I look honest to you?” the peddler asked with some surprise.

“No. Greedy. If you can get a hundred that easy, there must be a lot more. I knew you would wait for me to see if you can
get more. You can.”

The peddler said nothing and glanced at him warily as they drove around in the heavy traffic. He was a small man but had powerful
shoulders. His movements were fast, he smiled often, yet his eyes were calm and watchful. After a while he said, “This is
the second time we passed this part of Royal Park.”

“The traffic always this bad?” Dartley inquired politely.

“At this time of day.”

A policeman in a helmet and jackboots stood on a wooden box with yellow and black stripes in the middle of an intersection,
gesticulating with bright red gloves. Dartley had no idea what he meant and moved with the flow. Drivers hooted their horns
and cursed or laughed at each other as the traffic knotted and unknotted itself in high-speed maneuvering. Passengers hung
by rails on speeding buses, jumping on and off seemingly at random. Jeepneys, elongated surplus jeeps carrying ten passengers
in a highly decorated cabin, wove in and out of the traffic through split-second gaps. Taxis, trucks, and private cars avoided
jaywalkers and kids selling cigarettes. Vendors with bulky carts and beggars almost blocked some streets.

“So I am greedy,” the peddler said cautiously. “What else do I have to be?”

“Smart. Have a good command of English.”

“Are you in the drug business?”

“No,” Dartley said. “I want to buy information.”

“Ah, a spy.”

Dartley waited to see how the peddler would take that.

“First thing a spy needs,” said the Filipino, resuming, “is a gun. I know where you can buy a good one.”

Dartley smiled. This peddler had the right attitude for what he had in mind. By now they wandered into Old Manila, what was
left of the ancient, Spanish walled city, now mostly rundown buildings occupied by squatters who nailed plywood and sheets
of tin over gaping holes. Trucking and warehouse companies occupied other buildings, while still others showed signs of gentrification.
Some areas were leveled, and bleak, low-income concrete apartment complexes stood nearby, suggesting what the whole area would
ultimately look like. They took Jones Bridge north across the river Pasig to Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown. Here the buildings
were run-down also, but they had a faded elegance with wrought-iron balconies, huge wooden doors, and tiled roofs with tufts
of grass growing in them. Here modern buildings also were being raised everywhere. The car treaded slowly through the winding
narrow streets. Horse-drawn passenger carts, right out of the nineteenth century, bumped over the cobbles,

They came to Recto Avenue and passed
into the Tondo district. There was nothing quaint, charming, or picturesque here. Tondo was a teeming slum by the city piers,
and the people on the streets here—men, women, and children—looked leaner and meaner than elsewhere. The peddler waited for
Dartley to pull into a wide street lined on both sides by tenements and told him to stop halfway down the street. When Dartley
did, children of all ages gathered around the car and stared in at them.

“I will be back in a few minutes,” the peddler said, opening his door. “If anyone asks why you are waiting here, say you’ve
come to see Benjael Sumiran.”

The peddler’s few minutes turned into half an hour. Finally he came, bringing with him a tough, squat man with long arms who
carried a small suitcase. The children, who had been pestering Dartley on and off all this time, drew back respectfully as
they neared the car. The peddler had no name to give Dartley, and it seemed to embarrass him that he was not able to introduce
the two men. The man Dartley assumed to be Benjael Sumiran wore a singlet, a dirty pair of baggy pants, and sandals. Tattoos
of scaly Chinese dragons and bleeding Christian saints covered his light brown skin. As he got in the car next to Dartley
he filled the enclosed space with the odor of stale sweat. He placed the small case between them and opened its lid. The peddler
stood outside, looking in through the open window. The kids still kept their distance.

Inside the case were four Colt .45 semiautomatic pistols, all new and obviously stolen
from the American bases. A 9 mm Smith & Wesson Model 39 and three small .22 automatics probably came from burglaries of U.S.
officers’ homes. Dartley did not want anything that could be associated with the U.S. military, since he did not want them
blamed for any killing he had to do. He had his own weapons supplier, arranged by Herbert Malleson, but he saw this deal as
a way of establishing himself with some locals. Sumiran had a few revolvers and other semiautomatic pistols, but they were
so beat up that Dartley did not bother with them. The only other gun in good condition—not new but well cared for—was a 9
mm pistol Dartley did not recognize. It bore the engravings “Fabrik Sendjata Ringan” and “Pindad P1A9 mm.”

“What’s this?” he asked.

“That is a Pindad. Very good gun. It is made in Indonesia and used by the army there.”

That explained its source, Dartley thought. It was almost an exact copy of the Browning HP 35, he realized, maybe even a licensed
version of it. It took thirteen rounds and had an effective range of sixty to seventy yards. The fact that it came from the
neighboring islands of Indonesia, instead of the United States, was a big plus, in case it got left behind at the scene of
some violence.