Whipsaw (3 page)

Bolan sat in the chair quietly. So far he hadn't been asked to say anything. Roman Collazo, who was, as he stopped frequently to point out, a captain of the Military Police, had been content to do all the talking. Once, during an exceptionally long pause, Bolan leaned forward, but Collazo stopped him with a raised hand.

"Not yet, Mr..." he glanced at the papers in front of him for a second, "...Belasko. I'll tell you when."

Bolan leaned back in the chair without a word.

If Collazo wanted to challenge Castro for the hot-air record, that was all right with him.

"So, you see," Collazo continued, raising his voice for emphasis, "it is important that you tell us everything you know. I realize that you are here as a representative of your government, and that accordingly you are protected by diplomatic immunity. But I don't think I need to remind you that privilege brings obligation, as well. In this case, the obligation to be as forthcoming as you can. It is essential that we learn what happened, if for no other reason than to ensure that such a thing cannot happen again in Manila." Collazo paused to look at Bolan over his half lenses. "Am I making myself clear?" At Bolan's wordless nod, the captain continued. "Good. So, now, Mr. Belasko, if you will," he said, sinking into the tall leather chair behind his desk, "tell me everything you can about what happened at the airport."

"I came out of the debarking tunnel. I was working my way through the crowd when all hell broke loose."

"You mean the shooting?"

"Yeah, the shooting."

He looked at Collazo to make certain the man had actually asked such an inane question. There was nothing on the older man's face to suggest he hadn't.

Bolan continued. "At first I couldn't tell where the shooting was coming from. People were falling to the ground, and there was a lot of screaming. It all happened so fast that I wasn't sure whether the people on the floor were seeking cover or had been hit."

"I gather, though, from your prompt reaction, that you are not unfamiliar with gunfire."

"No, I'm not unfamiliar with it." Bolan closed his jaw with a nearly audible snap.

"I see." Collazo leaned back in the chair. "Go on, please..."

"I threw myself on the floor and drew my weapon."

"You are authorised to carry it in your work?"

Bolan nodded. Before Collazo could question him about his work, he pushed on. "I spotted one of the gunmen off to my right. I knew it was a terrorist, not a policeman..."

"Because of the fatigues..."

"Yeah, that, and because he was firing into the crowd. I heard return fire from behind me. I turned and saw it was the police, but I didn't pause to weigh the situation I just relied on my instincts. So I fired."

"You didn't think the police were capable of doing their job?"

"It wasn't like that. I reacted and fired. In the back of my mind was the thought that if I didn't, he might get away or he might kill more innocent people. It's a big terminal. The police were still some distance away at that point."

"I don't want you to feel that you have done anything wrong, Mr. Belasko. But..." Collazo spread his hands, palms down, and patted the desktop, "I'm sure you understand."

Bolan gestured vaguely with his hands. Cops were cops, and he wasn't surprised. Hell, he thought, it would be the same hot-air and bullshit in Chicago or New York. Why should Manila be any different?

Then Collazo smiled. Bolan didn't like the look. It seemed out of place. And then the captain threw a curveball. "You were traveling alone, Mr. Belasko?"

"Yes." Something told him to be careful, and he tensed. "I was traveling alone."

"I understand that you were running through the terminal even before the shooting started."

"Yeah, I was."

"Do you mind telling me why?"

"Yes, I do."

"Ah," Collazo said, leaning back in the chair and rocking. "I see..." He studied Bolan for a long moment. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he asked, "Even though you were traveling alone, did you know anyone else on the plane?"

"Not as far as I know. I didn't see everyone."

"Of course. But of those you did see, was anyone familiar to you?"

Bolan shook his head. What the hell was Collazo after, he wondered. "Look," he said, "if you tell me what you're after, maybe I can help, but this merry-go-round is getting us nowhere."

Collazo was about to respond when the phone on his desk buzzed with the sound of a small, angry wasp.

He picked it up impatiently, swiveling the chair until his back was to Bolan. Then, without having said a word, he swiveled back and replaced the phone in its cradle.

"Where are you staying, Mr. Belasko?"

"At the MacArthur. Why?"

Collazo didn't answer him. Instead he remarked, "That's all for today. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop by in a couple of days."

Bolan shook his head. "Whatever you say, Captain."

The big man got to his feet and bent to retrieve his small bag. He studied Collazo for a moment, but the captain was already immersed in paperwork on his desk. If he felt Bolan's eyes on him, he didn't show it.

Bolan opened the door and let it close gently behind him as he stepped into the busy outer office.

He'd give his eyeteeth to know who had been on the phone and what had been said. Zigzagging through the crowded corridor and across the large, square booking area, he slipped into a tall revolving door and hissed out into the heat.

The sound of Manila immediately attacked him. The frame seemed endless and immobile. Judging by the din, a permanent blaring of the horn was a Filipino license requirement. He bounced down the steps two at a time and joined a queue at the nearest cabstand.

Three people were ahead of him, and he waited patiently, turning back to look at the tall, vacant face of the police station. For a moment he had the suspicion that someone inside was watching him, but he shrugged it off. He was exhausted and he needed time to think.

It seemed almost too perfectly coincidental that Charles Harding would be present in the airport during a terrorist attack. The odds argued strongly that it had not been a freak occurrence. If Harding had been the target, who had done the shooting?

And why there? But Bolan couldn't come up with a single reason why anyone should go to such trouble to try to kill one man when he could just as easily be taken out some other way, someplace safer for the shooters.

Unless, Bolan thought... unless it had to look like a fluke to hide the purpose, and possibly the people, behind it. Collazo had told him virtually nothing about the attack. He didn't even know whether anyone had been killed. But even if there had been fatalities, Bolan knew enough about the world to understand that incidental death raised no eyebrows in the pursuit of political goals.

Not anymore.

A cab finally arrived, and all three people in front of him piled into it. Bolan didn't have long to wait for the next one. He gave the driver his destination, then settled back in the seat. He hadn't been to the Philippines in so long, and yet it seemed the same. The people were a little happier with Marcos gone, but it seemed like a happiness that was only skin-deep. Everyplace he looked, he saw a guardedness, like trespassers walking through a graveyard at midnight. The peace was fragile, they seemed to say, as fragile as the eggs they all walked on.

And, like most Third World countries, it was a place where Americans were barely tolerated, at least by a highly vocal minority. Nobody likes a cop, Bolan thought, and when you're the world's cop, nobody on earth really likes you. They want you to be there when they need help, but they don't want to feel grateful for it.

Bolan watched the traffic slide by as the driver twirled the steering wheel, maneuvering the cab as if it were as thin as a knife blade. He darted through narrow openings without braking, sometimes gunning the engine for an extra burst of speed.

The streets teemed with pedestrians, and in some respects it looked no different from any other major capital. Westernized to a fault, the residents looked as if they would have been equally at home in downtown New York or the streets of Singapore.

But there was another Manila, another Philippines. Most Westerners rarely saw it, if at all. It was the Manila of rusting corrugated metal shacks and strings of shanties made of packing crates and tarpaper. This was the Manila that Marcos had made a career of ignoring, and Aquino had built a career making promises to. If any of those promises had been kept, it was a closely held secret.

Not that Aquino was entirely to blame. You don't hold one person responsible for centuries of misery. But the forgotten people were still there, packed into their slums like gunpowder, just waiting for the spark. He wondered if the attack at the airport was the overture of a new rebellion, one to make the New People's Army look like Boy Scouts and the Huks like pacific idealists. The potential was there that was a certainty.

In the back of Bolan's mind was the faint glimmer, dim as a penlight at the bottom of a mine shaft, that Charles Harding had come with the same notion, maybe to set that spark or maybe to piss on it and put it out. But Harding's background, sketchy as it was, suggested that he was not a disinterested observer in the Filipino political process.

It was here, after all, that Lansdale had cut his eyeteeth, honing those theories that had gone so badly astray in Vietnam.

The cab suddenly swerved to the left and rocked to a halt. Bolan looked out at the ultramodern glass-and-brass facade of the MacArthur Hilton. He paid the hack, then eased out of the cab. The clean pavement, flecked with glittering flakes of mica catching the sun, looked as if it had just been laid. He pushed through the revolving door as the cab lurched away, leaving the scent of burnt rubber hanging in the humid air.

Bolan checked in quickly, and was surprised when the clerk said that someone had been asking for him. Bolan waited, watching the clerk curiously. He expected one of those ubiquitous pink papers with a phone message scribbled on it, but was instead surprised to hear the clerk page Frank Henson.

He turned to see a man in a rumpled suit making a beeline for the desk. It had to be Henson.

"Now what?" Bolan muttered.

Frank Henson slipped behind the wheel of his Land Rover and leaned across to open Bolan's door. The big guy climbed in and dropped his bag over the seat into the back.

"They give you a hard time today?" Henson asked.

"I've had worse."

"They say anything about Harding?"

"Collazo referred to him obliquely, but didn't really give much away. I don't know what he knows, but I don't think it's much. It was more like he was trying to pump me than anything else."

Henson laughed easily. "Son of a bitch! I'd love to know where the holes are. We're leaking like a sieve. And everybody in Manila seems to know what we know before we know it. Guy I bought this rattletrap from, some damn assistant something or other at the British embassy, told me about Harding two days before I heard his name from anybody else."

"You think it's on your end or back in D.C.?" Bolan watched Henson carefully while the older man composed his answer. It would be easy to blame it on the other guy. That was the way in any bureaucracy.

"I wish to Christ I knew," Henson said, laughing again. "I'd like to blame it on Washington. Those bastards are always looking for something to talk about at their cocktail parties. But I just don't know."

Bolan made a mental note to be circumspect in his dealing with Henson. It wasn't that he didn't trust the man, but if there was a leak in Manila, it could get him killed. In the back of his mind was the not so sneaking suspicion that the airport scene had not been a coincidence. He also had to consider the possibility that he himself had been the target.

Henson negotiated the traffic with a casual hand, flowing with it rather than trying to outrun it. Like most Far Eastern capitals, it combined the slowest of traditional commerce with the frenzy of blaring horns.

"I think we can talk more freely at my place," Henson said. "I have it swept a couple of times a week. Had it done this afternoon, as a matter of fact."

"I'm beginning to think this thing is a lot more complicated than Walt Wilson told me."

"That's Rosebud for you. Walt's a crackerjack, but he's never liked to tell a guy more than he has to. In this case, I think, probably even less."

"Tell me what you know about Charles Harding."

"First off, Harding's just the tip of the iceberg. I don't know where the hell he gets his money, but he's got backing, big backing."

"But what does he do here?"

"What I know, or what I think?"

"Both."

"I know he fronts some sort of political action organization out in the boondocks. They're on some sort of paramilitary trip. They got more guns than the NPA, more money than you can shake a stick at, and they are plugged into the Philippine Army six ways to Sunday. There's a dozen laws, at least, against what he's doing, but he's never even gotten a parking ticket, so far as I know."

"What sort of politics?"

"I know what you're asking and, no, no way he's a Communist front. If you know anything at all about the guy, you know he's out there on the fringe, somewhere between Tricky Dick and Attila. No, that's the puzzle, really. I mean, most of these right-wing diehards sit home running beer companies and shit. They send money, but they don't put their asses on the line. Harding's different. He's out there with the grunts. Except nobody really knows where there is." Henson rapped on the horn to nudge a particularly slow-moving truck along. "And that, my friend, brings us to the end of what I know."

"What about what you think?"

"Ah... what I think... that's something altogether different. That is very scary stuff indeed."

Bolan waited patiently while Henson thought about how to begin. Finally Henson cleared his throat.

"Okay, here's what I think. I think Mr. Harding is a madman. I think he wants to see Cory take a pratfall and lay there in the mud with her skirt up around her hips. I think he is working for that very thing, and I think he will stop at nothing, including provoking a civil wart to get it done."

"What's the percentage?"

"Hey, am I a madman? How the fuck should I know? He's one of these guys looks under his bed every night, and not just to see if the maid did the floor. You know what I mean?"

"Still, why here?"

"Why here? That's an easy one. Charlie-boy did his time in Southeast Asia. He's a domino player from the old school. You look at a map of the Pacific, and what do you see? Who controls it? From Hawaii on to India, the Philippines is basically what we got. You lose Subic, you're stuck with Australia and New Zealand, and neither one of them wants nukes in port on three day leave. That creates a power vacuum in the Pacific basin. And not just for Mr. Charles Harding, either."

"So you think he wants to install a government that will let us keep Clark and Subic? Is that it?"

"That's part of it. Part of it's some weird megalomania, though. I think he thrives on chaos. There's been a gradually escalating terror campaign in the big cities, especially Manila. I'm convinced he's behind it, but I can't prove it. And I'll tell you something else. If anybody's running him, he's got his hands full. There is no way in hell to control this guy. He's too flaky. I'd rather play football with a bottle of nitroglycerin than try to ride herd on Harding."

"Where's the NPA fit in?"

"Good question. I've been getting reports that they're suffering heavy losses in the mountains. But there hasn't been any significant army action up there in months. Aquino has too much else to worry about. They go on punitive expeditions if there's been a serious assault by the NPA, but there hasn't been one that amounted to anything since last year."

"You think Harding's behind it?"

"Who else? The NPA might be amateurs, but they don't shoot one another. Not that often, anyhow." Henson lapsed into silence, as if the conversation had drained him. He drove like a robot, his eyes staring straight ahead through the bug-splattered glass.

They were on the edge of the city, and the broad avenues gradually spilled into narrow, tree-lined streets. Tropical lushness was everywhere. Most of the houses were all but hidden behind masses of bougainvillea and something that looked like rhododendron. Few lights broke the darkness, and many of them did little more than dart in and out among the leaves as the evening breeze whipped the overhanging branches around.

Henson started to whistle between his teeth, and Bolan watched him curiously. He seemed on edge, as if there were something he wanted to say, but didn't quite know how to phrase.

"Anything wrong?" Bolan asked, trying to prompt him.

Henson sucked his teeth for a few seconds.

"I don't know. I'm arguing with myself. I don't... ah, what the hell..." He slapped the wheel with the heel of his right hand. "I've been working on a pipeline for a few months. I was just thinking, maybe, if I could hook you up, maybe it would get us somewhere. I just don't know."

"What kind of pipeline?"

"An odd duck, a guy named Colgan. If Harding is a mad bomber, and there's no doubt in my mind he is, then this guy's the mad hatter. He's a doctor he runs these clinics. He thinks he's the third way, or something like that. It's all mystical gobbledygook, but he believes it and he's got people who believe it right along with him. I'll tell you about it when we get to my place. Another five minutes. Let me chew on it..."

Bolan stared out the window, watching the trees go by. The homes were few and far between now.

He wondered why Henson had chosen to live so far out of the city. It seemed odd, almost as if Henson were trying to isolate himself from the people he was supposed to understand.

Henson turned the wheel sharply, and the high-riding Rover leaned uncomfortably as they turned into a narrow side street.

"It's at the end of the block," Henson said. "My little hermitage of sorts. Sometimes I think I've been at this business too long. I'm under diplomatic cover, and the ambassador keeps leaning on me to move into Manila, but I can't stand the thought of it. This place can break your heart, Bolan. It's so beautiful you can hardly believe it, but then when you see how the people live, it looks like hell on earth. I've seen enough of that, Laos in particular, in the late sixties. I just can't take it anymore. I got another year, and then I'm out of it."

Bolan opened his mouth to respond when the Rover bounced over a pothole. His teeth clacked together. Henson began to swerve back and forth, slaloming the blocky hover down a pitted lane. A small house materialized in the deadlights a hundred yards ahead.

"There it is," Henson said, "home, sweet home."

He gunned the Rover, then let it coast the rest of the way, raking just as it rolled past the steps to a small side porch. Henson jumped out almost eagerly, as though the place really were some sort of refuge.

"Wait here," he said. "I'll go in the front door and let out in right here." He sprinted back toward the front of the house.

Bolan heard a door slam, then watched as a succession of lights appeared in the windows as Henson made his way toward he rear. A moment later the door opened in front of him, and Henson stepped back with a bow.

"Welcome," he said.

Bolan climbed the two steps and found himself in a small kitchen. Henson immediately turned and disappeared through another door.

"Come on in and sit down," he shouted over his shoulder.

Bolan followed. The first room was a small library, its shelves bulging with the pale blue and green paper bindings of government reports as well as a healthy sampling of more usual volumes in cloth and paper. The next room was twice as large. Bolan immediately noticed the walls.

Henson caught his eye, and said, "Rubbings, my wife, ex-wife actually, taught me how to do them. She was an art student when I met her. We used to practice on old gravestones in Philadelphia. These are mine, though, from every place I've been. Temples from Laos and Burma, mostly, but one or two from every stop I've made on my somewhat circuitous transit through the typical State Department itinerary." He grabbed a stack of magazines from a chair and pointed. "Have a seat. I'll get us something cold." Bolan sank into the chair gratefully. It was nice to sit on something that wasn't moving. He glanced at one of the rubbings as Henson called, "Beer okay? It's Japanese, but it's cold."

"Fine," Bolan shouted back.

The refrigerator door banged back with a rattle of bat ties in its shelves. The next thing he heard sounded like Armageddon. The blast momentarily deafened him. Smoke, boiled through the doorway as he jumped to his feet.

"Henson," he called. "Frank, what..." He covered his mouth with a forearm and charged into the library. It was full of smoke and plaster dust so thick hi couldn't see. He ducked down to try to get under the worst of it, but did no better.

The doorway to the kitchen was blocked with debris.

He grabbed a piece of timber with both hands and tugged but couldn't dislodge anything. The dust was choking him as he backed away a step, then sprinted for the front door.

He leapt from the front porch and careered around the corner, where he stopped in disbelief. The whole rear half of the side wall lay splattered across the lawn. Several beams jutted up at an angle where they had smashed into the roof of the Rover.

Bolan climbed up onto the rear bumper and hauled himself into the wreckage. There wasn't a chance in hell Frank Henson had survived the blast, but he had to be sure. The ruined wall shifted under his weight. The whole room still boiled with swirling clouds of dust.

Bolan realized the bomb must have been in the refrigerator, primed to detonate when the door was opened. He could just make out the ruined hulk, shaped like a bulging barrel, its top split and twisted into modern art.

"Henson," he shouted. "Henson?" There was no answer. And as the dust began to settle, he knew there wouldn't be. Frank Henson had been splattered all over the kitchen.

The settling dust began to crust on the bloodstains, hiding the bright smears with an orangy film.

But he could still see where they were.