Rebound (9 page)

He had taken them aboard the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, the U.S.S.
Blue Ridge,
and the guided-missile cruiser
Sterett
and the frigate
Francis Hammond.
They saw for themselves how busy the base was, and he repeated several times for them that an average of 9,000 sailors came
ashore each day. Yes, it was true that the lease agreements, signed in 1983, were due to expire in 1991. For the use of both
Subic and Clark, the United States had agreed to pay the Philippine government $900 million over five years, half in military
aid and half in economic assistance. The Subic base covered 450 square miles of land and ocean on one of the finest natural
harbors in the world and was the biggest base of its kind outside the U.S.

Then the two members of the senator’s staff
got down to what they really wanted to know about. What improvements had been made since a delegation from a U.S. Senate subcommittee
had been shocked to learn that a guerrilla unit had walked right through the Subic Base’s perimeter and camped within mortar
range of the main ammunition dump?

Lamont had been waiting for this. He was going to give it to them straight from the shoulder. First of all, the perimeter
of the Subic Base was twenty miles, and impossible to make impenetrable. Second, Subic had miles of hilly jungle and flat
land used for training maneuvers and gunnery practice, and this undeveloped land could provide good cover for small hostile
units. And third, it was the duty of the Philippine army, not the U.S. Navy, to guard the base’s perimeter, which made any
criticism or attempt at improvement on the Navy’s part a possible diplomatic incident insofar as Navy men were often called
“insensitive to local conditions” or worse. If they had any recommendations to make after their tour, he would be pleased
to pass them on to his supervisors. They didn’t.

No, Lieutenant Commander Lamont did not think the guerrilla incursion some months ago had anything to do with the current
series of attacks on U.S. servicemen. In the first place the guerrillas were mostly too poorly trained to engage in such precision
attacks—they were peasants who had gotten their hands on automatic weapons. Second, the attacks were mostly outside the immediate
areas of the two bases and outside the city of Manila. He couldn’t speak for the Air Force, but Navy men were
constantly warned to be on the alert for anything suspicious, and he thought this accounted for the relatively small number
of incidents close to Olongapo and the Subic Bay Base.

The two staff members weren’t as much of a pain in the ass as they might have been. All three men ended kidding around over
a late lunch in Olongapo. They got in their car and headed back to Manila, intending to visit Clark Air Base the next day.
The lieutenant commander headed back to Subic. One the way he saw a pretty Filipino girl stranded on the side of the road,
the hood of her car raised. She waved a set of jumper cables at him and he braked.

“I think my battery is dead,” she told him, batting her eyes and thrusting a hip against the material of her sheath dress.

“Your battery looks all right to me,” Harris Lamont said with a grin.

“Be nice. I was talking about my car.”

He released the hood catch on his car and revved his engine before getting out.

She handed him the cables. “I’ve already attached them to my battery,” she said.

He clipped the cable ends onto his battery terminals and signaled to her to get behind the wheel and start her car. The ignition
rattled weakly, but the engine did not kick.

“You’re not getting juice,” he said, puzzled. He checked his terminals again and then walked over to check hers. He smiled.
Trust a woman, he thought, as he saw that she had clipped the terminals onto the radiator instead of the battery.

“Hold on for a moment,” he called to her. He squeezed one alligator clip and released its
jaws onto one lead terminal. Then he gripped the other terminal with the second cable clip, completing the electrical circuit.

The charge of plastic explosives concealed in the drained battery blew Lamont’s head from his shoulders as he bent over it.
His decapitated body slumped over the car engine.

The raised hood shielded the woman inside the car from the blast, although the windshield was cracked. She ran across to Lamont’s
car, disconnected the cables, slammed down the hood, and drove away.

Earlier in the day Richard Dartley had knocked on Enrique Corwelio’s door in the run-down apartment building in the Tondo
slum quarter of Manila. The peddler opened the door a crack and peered out.

“Morning, Harry,” Dartley said, and inserted a hundred-dollar bill through the narrow opening.

Harry took it, passed it to his wife, and left with the American. When they were in the car, pulling away from the sidewalk,
he asked Dartley, “Any idea of what you want me to show you?”

“Yes, I have,” Dartley said matter-of-factly. “Show me what you’ve learned since I left you yesterday. Or maybe you’ve just
been resting your brain.”

Harry gave him a sly look. “Your name is Warren Tompkins, you’re staying at the Las Palmas Hotel, and you rented this car
from Hertz in the name of Warren Tompkins, which makes me think that maybe it’s not your real name.”

Dartley took a hand off the steering wheel,
reached in his pocket, and handed Harry a hundred-dollar bill. “Go on.” he said.

Harry hesitated.

“You heard me,” Dartley said with an edge in his voice. “Go on.”

“Well, I’m just putting one and one together now, and the answer is coming out two.” He placed a small .22 pistol on the bench
seat between them. “I thought you might need this, since I believe you had to throw that Pindad away.”

“What makes you so sure?”

The tone of Dartley’s voice scared Harry. But it was too late now for him to worry if he had gone too far. “You wanted to
know if I had been using my brain. This is my answer. I’m not sure you did it, but when I saw about that American being killed
yesterday and then about two of Velez’s guards, I began to think. It was on the radio this morning that 9 mm bullets had been
taken from the two bodies. That’s when I decided that maybe I could sell you this gun. For three hundred dollars, like you
paid Sumiran.”

“He threw in three hundred rounds,” Dartley said, bargaining.

Harry sighed in relief that the American was going along with him. “I only have a hundred rounds, but the way you had to replace
the Pindad after only a few shots, that should be no problem. I want three hundred dollars.”

Dartley grinned, pulled out three bills, and handed them to him. “You think Sumiran has been making the same guesses as you?”

“Not yet. But he will.”

“When he does, where will he go?”

Harry thought about that for a moment. “You’ve shown him you are a generous man. He’d be a fool to think he could do better
with Velez. And Benjael Sumiran is not a fool.”

“He might be tempted to come to both Happy Man and me, so he could collect double.”

Harry shook his head. “Men who collect double do not survive long in Manila. Both Benjael and I have lived long enough to
have learned that.”

“I want you to keep an eye on him.”

“I can’t do that!” The little peddler was clearly upset at being asked to check on the brawny, tattooed gun dealer.

Dartley let that go. Then he spoke in an icy drawl that gave Harry goose pimples. “Of course, you and I know, Harry, that
you have too much to lose if ever you were tempted to go behind my back.”

Harry tried to say something, but no sound came out. He vowed that as soon as he got home, he would move his wife and children
to his parents’ home on the other side of Tondo. This American would never find them there.

They drove in silence for a while, moving aimlessly into the heavy traffic south of the river.

Dartley broke the silence. “So now I know that you’ve been thinking, Harry. But I still don’t know where you are taking me
today. I need to get to some of Happy Man’s operations.”

“I know he owns a lot of businesses here in Manila. I will find out some of them for you.”

“I already know which ones, Harry.” Dartley had been looking over the data supplied him by
Herbert Malleson. “You know people in the real estate business?”

Harry laughed. “Yesterday I was selling ashtrays on the street. Would I be doing that if I knew people in the real estate
business? I am a poor man. Poor men don’t know anybody except other poor men.”

Dartley found that reasonable. He stopped at some stores and had Harry buy himself a white shirt, gray pants, and black socks
and shoes to replace the burnt-orange shirt, marine-blue baggy pants, and thong sandals he was wearing. Harry had never heard
of a company called Luzon Star Development, which Malleson’s papers listed as a major real estate company with Velez as sole
owner, but he knew where Ayala Avenue was. It was often called the Philippines’ Wall Street and was the main artery of Makati,
Metro Manila’s financial district. Harry directed Dartley there and listened to instructions on what he was to do. He showed
Dartley Makati Avenue, down Ayala Avenue past the Hotel Intercontinental, and they arranged to meet at one of the restaurants
there. Dartley dropped him off outside the high-rise office building on Ayala Avenue in which Luzon Star Developments had
offices, and he drove around the prosperous area for a while, looking at the fancy stores and wealthy residential “villages.”

Harry showed up in the restaurant, tense in such unaccustomed elegant surroundings. He was secretly elated by how well he
had done, demanded a bottle of champagne, and ordered the most expensive item on the menu.

“I did what you told me to. I said to the
first person I saw that I represented an American licensed to import agricultural machinery. She picked up on this immediately
and asked why a license was needed. I said it was for very special agricultural machinery. She said I had to see Mr. Santiago.
When I got in to see him, I said you were looking for a warehouse to store the machinery unless, of course, you could wholesale
the entire shipment and wouldn’t need storage space. He wanted to know exactly what machines were being imported. I said I
didn’t know but that the American himself was now in Manila to discuss these details. I suggested that he and you meet. He
said you should talk to Mr. Cabalan. Then he wanted to know when this agricultural machinery was going to arrive—he was talking
about guns, I could see that. Again I told him how this American tells me nothing, sends me here and there, do this, do that,
but tells me very little. ‘Maybe you’re better off that way,’ he said to me, looking at me closely to see how much I really
know. He decided I’m of no account. Then Santiago said that Mr. Cabalan will see you anytime this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”

“You didn’t make an appointment at an exact time?”

“This is not America. Here in the Philippines today or tomorrow morning
is
an exact time.”

Dartley laughed. “It might surprise you, Harry, but I got a feeling that the people around Makati believe time is money, just
like they do in New York.”

They were on their way back to the car
when Harry heard a Tagalog newscast on a blaring street radio. He translated it for Dartley: A U.S. Navy man had been killed
by a car bomb near Subic Bay. Dartley stood stock-still on the pavement, and the crowds had to move around him. He stared
straight ahead, fighting to control the rage sweeping over him. When he looked at Harry again, Dartley’s eyes were so cold
that they might have been made of glass.

Harry offered in a faint voice, “I can take a jeepney home.”

“Be careful,” was all Dartley said to him before walking away.

Harry got the message that the one he had to be careful about was Dartley.

“Mr. Kelly to see Mr. Cabalan.”

The pretty receptionist crossed her legs and showed him a shapely knee as she telephoned inside. She smiled at him and replaced
the receiver. “Mr. Cabalan is expecting you. Someone will be right out.”

Another pretty girl appeared almost immediately, and Dartley followed her sashaying ass down a corridor past open office doors.
She paused outside a closed door at the end of the corridor and knocked. Then she showed Dartley in and closed the door after
him.

Dartley found himself in a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows along two walls looking out from the twenty-second
floor over the urban sprawl. A short, fat man with smooth, light skin in a pin-striped suit came from behind the desk to shake
his hand. Dartley refused an
offer of a drink and a seat. He stood by the half-open window looking out.

“Makati can’t compete with Manhattan or Chicago,” Mr. Cabalan gushed, “but we do our best. As recently as the fifties, this
was all swampland. It was part of the Ayala family estates and considered worthless. But they developed it into what you see
today. From swamp to swank, we like to say here in Makati.”

Dartley gave him a watery smile and went back to looking out the window.

“The staff criticizes me for opening my window,” Mr. Cabalan went on, “because they think it interferes with the air conditioning.
But I’m a country boy at heart, and I like to breathe God’s fresh air.”

Dartley could not help smiling genuinely at what they both knew was bullshit—no one on the staff would dare criticize this
man no matter what he did, and the kind of countryside he was talking about had lawns and Olympic-size pools.

“Being a country boy, Mr. Cabalan, will make you an expert on farm machinery.”

The Filipino smiled. This was what he liked about Americans: They came to the point so quickly. “Yes, indeed. We have needs
in that area. Who gave you my name, Mr. Kelly?”

“No one. The only name I have is the one behind Luzon Star Developments.”

“That will be enough,” Cabalan said. “This equipment is American?”

“No. Swedish, Belgian, and Swiss.”

Now the short, fat man with smooth skin was interested. His eyes gleamed as he waddled over to Dartley.