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  “Let me try to intercept them,” the Filipino offered. “I assume you’ve read about the killings in the newspaper. The eighteenth man was murdered yesterday, by a frogman with a spear gun. His wife shot the assassin when he tried to attack the couple’s small children. The killer’s corpse was identified this morning. We learned by telephone that he probably worked for the man we know to be behind all this—Ruperto Velez, known as Happy Man. We Filipinos often have Malay–Chinese faces, Spanish names, and American nicknames. Happy Man is head of a powerful landowning family with much political power. Like some other powerful men, he has his own private army. Happy Man wants very badly to become president so he and his friends can plunder the country. If he doesn’t get office by electoral means, he will try to create a situation in which he can seize power. We want to stop him.”

  “If he does take over,” the American businessman added, “he’ll be no friend to Washington.”

  “What’s your interest in this?” Dartley asked him.

  “Mine?” He seemed a little taken aback. “Agribusiness. My company has extensive pineapple plantations in the Philippines.”

  “You based over there?”

  “No,” the businessman said. “I’ve been a few times, but my office is on Wall Street.”

  Dartley nodded. He had the picture now. He couldn’t give a flying fuck for the international investments of some Wall Street firm or for the political ambitions of these three Filipinos. He’d have thrown them out if that was all they had brought with them, and Charley would never have set up the meeting in the first place. But they knew that, and they also knew they had something that would bring him in. Happy Man Velez was killing Americans. No matter what Velez’s final intention was, he was going about it the wrong way, so far as Dartley was concerned. Dartley was all for discouraging people from messing with Americans abroad. If someone wanted to go after Germans or Russians or Norwegians, to publicize how bad things were in his own country, that was none of Dartley’s business. But he felt very strongly that the U.S. government had been sending wimp messages to people who harmed U.S. citizens and that this apparent weakness was an invitation to further attacks. He knew what the answer would be to his next question before he asked it.

  “Why doesn’t the CIA or military intelligence take out Happy Man?”

  The American answered, “The diplomats in the Philippines advise against it, and that makes the State Department nervous. They don’t want to be seen as interfering in the internal affairs of the country, especially during these times when there’s a lot of opposition to our military bases there.”

  “Couldn’t the Philippine government do it?”

  A Filipino said, “There is no evidence to link him to these crimes, so he cannot be arrested. Since he is an important political contender, the government feels that ordering his killing would prove that they also ordered Benjamino Aquino’s —you remember they said soldiers killed him as he got off his plane. The government won’t take any chances on it.”

  “How do I know you’re not setting up Velez?”

  The Filipino businessman pointed to a thick manila envelope. “There’s the evidence. Most of it is hearsay. Part of it is what we know from our own experience. None of it would stand up in court. We would also expect Mr. Dartley to make his own inquiries before taking any action.”

  “It’ll cost you a million dollars.”

  “Mr. Woodgate has already told us that. The money is in Switzerland.”

  Dartley was impressed. These fellas had no hesitation about cash and showed no desire to bargain. He said, “If the mission falls through because it turns out to be not what you say it is, it will be canceled, and nine hundred thousand will be returned. If it’s canceled through no fault of yours, you’ll get everything back.” He wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to the businessman. “Deposit the cash, in American dollars, in that number in the Zurich branch.”

  Within seconds of deposit the money would be automatically redeposited in another numbered account at the Geneva branch.

  Herbert Malleson sat at the kitchen table with Dartley and Woodgate in the latter’s Maryland farmhouse. The Englishman’s courtly manner and Oxford accent had earned him the honorary title of Viscount with Dartley and Woodgate, particularly when they were annoyed with him for his superior ways. Malleson had spent the past few days putting together a picture of the Philippines for Dartley. Although Dartley had been to the Orient many times, including Vietnam, he had never been to the Philippines.

  “There are 7,107 islands,” the Viscount announced, “but that’s counting rocks and sandbars. They are really a series of volcanic peaks on the ocean floor, and the mountaintops stick out of the water as islands. Twelve of the volcanoes are presently active. The islands were settled by those people who invented the outrigger canoe and who navigated all over the South Pacific and north to Hawaii. Even today we have not determined how they did this. Before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, the islands were thinly populated by people of basically Malaysian racial origin. Most lived in villages at the river mouths in stilt houses made of bamboo and palm thatch. They grew rice and caught fish. A few groups lived in the mountains, and they were gatherers and hunters who did some slash-and-burn planting. Chinese, Arab, Indian, and Indonesian traders visited the islands, and they bartered weapons, tools, and pottery for pearls, coral, and gold. In the early fourteenth century the southernmost islands became Moslem, which they are to this day.

  “Ferdinand Magellan arrived in 1521. He was looking for a route to India across the Pacific from Spanish-controlled Mexico. The Portuguese controlled the Cape of Good Hope and would not allow Spanish ships around the southern tip of Africa. Magellan was killed in a clash with a local Filipino chieftain. His expedition went on and eventually returned to Spain three years later. Only one ship of the original five survived, and only eighteen of the original two hundred and fifty-two Spaniards. But more Spanish forces arrived. After a while the conquistadores owned great estates on which the Filipinos worked as peons, and friars rounded up their souls for salvation.

  “The Spanish began trading with the Chinese in Manila. They bought silk, porcelain, spices, and so forth, and paid for them in Mexican silver. Each year the famous Manila galleon set sail for Acapulco, loaded down with treasures from the exotic East. On the return journey the ship carried payment in silver, which every British privateer and pirate tried to capture. My fellow countrymen, from British India, did capture Manila in 1762, but all they did was promise not to burn the city to the ground if a ransom was paid. It was, and they left after a couple of years. The English governor, Dawson Drake, packed every treasure he could lay hands on into wooden crates and shipped them back to England, marked RICE FOR DRAKE.

  “The Filipinos revolted in 1896. Then America went to war with Spain over Cuba. Commodore George Dewey sailed into Manila Bay in 1898. His seven American ships beat twelve Spanish ones. Filipino guerrillas helped the American forces fight the Spanish. At the end of the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States. The Filipinos had thought they would be independent now, but instead found they had new masters. They staged another rebellion, but the Americans put this down. The islands were promised independence for 1945, but World War II upset that.

  “The Japanese invaded on December 10, 1941. The Filipinos and Americans fought together against them but were overrun. Before he retreated, General MacArthur said, I shall return,’ and he waded ashore again on December 20, 1944, at the head of a huge invasion force. Fierce fighting against the Japanese occupation forces caused huge losses in American and Filipino lives. The islands were finally granted independence in 1946.

  “Since then there have been three more rebellions against the Manila government: the unsuccessful communist Huk rebellion of the fifties; the unsuccessful Moro rebellion of the early seventies, in which the Moslem southern islands attempted to secede; and the present-day communist New People’s Army
rebellion. It’s generally believed that the NPA is responsible for the American servicemen’s deaths, which sounds reasonable to me.”

  The Englishman’s speech was finished, and he looked at Dartley and Woodgate for comments.

  “What about Happy Man Velez?” Dartley asked.

  “I see nothing to tie him to the crimes,” Malleson responded. “The supposed proof given to you could be faked against anyone in the public eye who has enemies.”

  “I’ve been asking around Washington,” Charley Woodgate put in. “From what I’ve been able to learn, which hasn’t been much, Velez is your man. The Air Force and Navy certainly think so.”

  Malleson shrugged. “That could be. I don’t have your intelligence connections, Charley. But from the data available to me there is nothing definite to indicate that Velez is involved.”

  “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.

  CHAPTER

  4

  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 pack
ed 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.