Blood Tide Page 12

  “That’s cloves, kid. And I don’t have a toothache. But keep up the good work.”

  He tousled the boy’s hair and walked on. Then he heard a click—switchblade?—but it was just an old priest taking his picture. The kid straggled along after him, at a distance. Curt waited at the crosswalk while a caravan of Philippine Army deuce-and-a-halfs rolled past, the soldiers leaning bored on their M16s on the plank seats in the beds. Then he crossed over to the Zamboanga Plaza Hotel.

  Plenty of time in hand for the appointment. The barter market on the hotel grounds was open, and he strolled slowly through its clamor. Wheeler-dealers gabbled in every tongue known to East Asia. Smuggling had always been a way of life on the Sulu Sea, the glue that bound Mindanao and the southern Philippines to nearby Borneo, Sabah, and Sarawak more tightly even than Islam. For a long time the Manila government fought against the smuggling, then realized it was hopeless and recently had legitimized the barter markets. There was another one, even bigger, down by the Hotel Lantanka, near the docks where Curt’s boat was moored. You could trade anything there, from pigs and poultry and rare Gloria Maris seashells through antique Moro brasswork and Chinese porcelain to Volvo Penta engine parts, Mitsubishi air conditioners, and Thai opium. Provided you greased the right palms.

  Curt bought a bowl of the spicy noodles called sotanghon from a vendor, then sat on a bench in the shade and washed them down with cold beer. He flirted briefly with a pretty Moro girl, until her father, or maybe it was her husband, gave him a dirty look and shifted his bolo higher on his hip. A church bell pealed from a distant tower. Four o’clock.

  “Captain Hughes?” A short, wide-shouldered Filipino in white duck trousers and a long, loose barong tagalog shirt smiled as he rose from a couch in the lobby and stuck out a hand. “I’m Billy Torres. It’s crowded in here. Shall we go out to the pelota court? Or would you prefer the casino? It’s quite a good one—air-conditioned and strictly legitimate.”

  Curt glanced around the lobby. There were perhaps half a dozen people in what looked like a parquet-floored acre, listlessly reading the Zambo Times and sipping beer or coffee.

  “I’m no gambler,” he said.

  “Then we’ll just watch the jai alai,” Torres said, and they headed out the door. Torres had a long red scar across his cheek and a piece of his ear missing. The stitches still showed. His eyes were flat and green, odd in a Filipino.

  Two of the men in the lobby got up and followed at a distance. Big Filipinos, all muscle and a yard wide.

  “Yours?” he asked Torres, nodding back at the followers.

  “I’m no gambler either, Captain,” Torres said. He smiled up at Curt and took his arm at the elbow, as if they were on a date.

  The bellow of the jai-alai crowd, louder even than the traffic or the barter market, hit them as they entered. Great fistfuls of pesos changed hand with every smack of the ball on the backboard. The bodyguards pushed ahead and cleared space at the top of the stands. Billy Torres sat on Curt’s right, a bodyguard on his left. The other one stood spraddle-legged behind them, watching the crowd.

  “Major Chalmers tells me you’re fluent in Spanish,” Torres said. “It’s better we talk English here. Most Zamboangans speak Chabakano, a kind of bastardized Castilian without the grammar and mixed up with maybe half a dozen other dialects, but they can follow Spanish without any trouble.”

  “Your English is very good.”

  “I was born and educated in Manila,” Torres said. “And I served for many years in the U.S. Navy.” He shook a cigarette from a pack and offered it to Curt.

  “What is that, cloves or something?”

  “Kretek cigarettes, from Djakarta,” Torres said, laughing apologetically. “Yes, cloves. You get quite fond of them.”

  “Some kid in the park just tried to sell me some as marijuana. Five bucks apiece.”

  “The ripoff is the great folk art of these islands, perhaps of all Asia. ‘Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.’”

  Curt laughed politely.

  “You didn’t bring your dog with you today, did you?” Torres sounded almost playful.

  “Chalmers tell you about that?”

  “Please.” Torres turned sideways on the bench and looked straight into Curt’s eyes. That was the most disconcerting thing about Filipinos. Curt had noticed it everywhere. They watched you so closely while you were talking, sometimes even moving their lips as if they were ventriloquists speaking your lines for you. You could feel them inside your mind, poking around in there. Comfortably. Without a condom. It was a kind of supreme other-directedness, the exact opposite of Western individualism, and it sucked at the soul so that you could not tell them a convincing lie. Malays call this quality lata, and all of them possessed it to one degree or another. Torres had plenty of it.

  “Back on the boat,” Curt said at last. “He doesn’t travel well on the beach. I can’t take him anywhere.”

  Torres laughed and broke eye contact.

  “That was a nice little business you had going off Palawan. Why did you give it up?”

  “It was getting a bit old. You can’t work the same scam too often in the same place, and besides, I only did it to get a few bucks ahead. Enough to get me up to Manila and see Phil Chalmers.”

  “And why did you come here in the first place—to the Philippines?”

  “Well, I was heading farther west, actually. I have some friends in Bangkok”—a bald-faced lie, but Torres wasn’t watching—“and I’d missed out on the great cut-rate cultural tours of Southeast Asia our government offered its young folks back in the sixties and early seventies. Wanted to mesh gears with my peers, you might say.”

  Torres chuckled, then bit it off. “You know that your little scam as you call it was conducted in another firm’s sphere of influence? You seem like a bright young fellow. Didn’t it occur to you that by drawing attention to the area through the newspapers, you might force the government to send its navy in after you—start it poking around in the South Sulu? Screw things up for others who might have bigger fish to fry?”

  “Well, actually . . .”

  “I’m a partner in that firm, Captain Hughes. Frankly, we were very cross with you. We sent out boats to look for you. There are fortunes at stake here that go beyond petty piracy. If we’d found you, you wouldn’t have been eating sotanghon and chatting with baby-faced dope peddlers in the park today. Fortunately for us, your friend Major Chalmers happened to call.” He said something sharp and guttural to the bodyguard at the top of the stands.

  Curt felt his scrotum shrink.

  “It’s about forty feet from the top of this grandstand to the pavement below,” Torres said. “Be a damn shame if you slipped and fell.”

  “Look, I didn’t know,” Curt said. “How could I know there was something else going on down there? I never been here before.”

  “Well, then, you’re dumber than you seem,” Torres replied. “But fortunately for you, you have other talents. Chalmers said you’re a good man in a fast boat. I checked on that. You’re well known to certain parties back in the States. You seem to have compiled an impressive offshore racing record, in Cigarettes and Apaches and suchlike, on the Bimini-to-Florida run. A lot of our firm’s business requires swift movement of men and materials from port to port. We deal in perishables.”

  “You’re offering me a job?”

  “On a probationary basis.”

  “Pay?”

  “One percent of the cargo value on every successful run. Your room and board will be taken care of.”

  “Benefits?”

  Torres laughed, slapped Curt on the knee. “An excellent health plan for a man in your enfeebled condition. No physical required. And the best life insurance you could ask for in the Sulu Sea.”

  “Okay,” Curt said. “When do I start?”

  “You could sell your boat—we’ll handle that for you—and start today.”

  “I’d rather hold on to the boat. In case the economy turns down, an
d anyway, it’s got sentimental value.”

  “Up to you. Do you know San Lázaro? It’s on the charts—about two or three days’ sail southwest of Jolo, call it five days from here. I’ll provide you with a crew—Tausuqs, good sailors, nominally Moros but faithful employees of our firm. They’ll keep you clear of the minor-league mundo along the way. You’ll need an advance to top off your fuel and replenish sea stores.” He thumbed an inch of hundred-peso notes off a stack handed him by one of the bodyguards and passed them to Curt. “You ought to realize, of course, that if our board chairman, Commodore Millikan, doesn’t approve of you, the deal’s off. But he usually trusts me on these things. See you next week.”

  The three of them pushed down through the milling crowds, with the bodyguards running interference. Curt slipped the money uncounted into his pocket.

  San Lázaro bound . . .

  SEVENTEEN

  From Miranda’s log:

  Put into Majuro today—a gunkhole in the true sense of the word—just long enough to top off fuel and water. While Culdee and I did that, Freddie found a phone and tried to raise Padre Cotinho in Zamboanga. Took him half an hour to get through; Padre not there. Had moved on shadowing Curt to some small island group in the SW Sulu Sea—Efemerales, he said, major island, San Lázaro. (Will look for it on the chart tomorrow.) Freddie gave Zambo contact our ETA Philippines. Someone will meet us in Surigao Strait or beyond with latest word on Curt’s track.

  Refueled and watered alongside public dock in Majuro’s Old Port—a graveyard of unemployed tankers. Depressing, all those dead ships, all those sailors on the beach. Culdee seemed delighted. “Those bastards will run you down at night,” he said. “They don’t bother to post a lookout, or if they do, he’s probably stoned and freaking to the rock beat on his headset. They’re not ships, they’re oil spills packed in giant sardine cans just waiting to happen. I hope they turn all of ’em into razor blades.” What about the sailors? “They’re not sailors, they’re union members. The only sailors are in small boats like this, or the navy. And there’s not many left in the navy, either.” Some old song. So much for pity.

  Cast off last line at 1642, motored out of harbor into stiff onshore winds. Hate to burn fuel but glad to be clear. Venganza smells foul—there’s an oily bathtub ring around her waterline—opened all hatches and aired her out as soon as we made sail. Food prices in the supermarket outrageous, but we bought some fresh fruit from a bum-boat—bananas (red and yellow), guavas, papaya, lemons, grapefruit the size of cannonballs. Also a big slab of turtle steak, so fresh it was still twitching.

  Wind almost due E tonight. We’re angling back up to 10°N lat., dodging atolls along the way. Among them Bikini—bomb tests, partial freedom for the female mammae—Eniwetok and Kwajalein, where Culdee says you’d better not even get onto their radar scopes or the navy will blow you out of the water. Still some top-secret shit going down out there. Once we get to 10°N, it’ll be latitude sailing the rest of the way to Surigao Strait.

  Freddie seems very relaxed and happy tonight—loose-jointed, almost slack at the hips, grinning a lot. Probably got laid in Majuro. There’s teenage hookers all over the place, some of them in cribs that look like chicken coops, others balling their johns in the rubbish-filled ditch behind the shopping center parking lot. All clapped up as hell, no doubt. Hope Freddie didn’t get the drips. Ah, youth, said the old whore with the heart of gold.

  Relieved Freddie at the helm shortly before midnight, and he swaggered below, humming some sugary ditty in Filipino. When my eyes adjusted to the night, I saw Culdee hunkered in his blanket up on the main hatch cover. He was throwing knots and staring steadily southward. “What do you see down there?” He didn’t bother to look around. “That’s where the Fat Lady died,” he said at last. The Fat Lady? Probably one of his old girl friends.

  The Fat Lady was a bimbo all right, but a tough one. Wake Island’s ghosts were fading as the Venganza moved west, their signals breaking up, garbling, growing dimmer and dimmer with each noon sun line. Now Culdee heard other ghosts calling, from far to the southwest. He knew their voices from of old. They were the dead men of the U.S.S. Neosho, an ugly, ungainly fleet oiler whose nickname in the prewar Pacific Fleet was the Fat Lady.

  Culdee’s great mentor in his younger days had been a warrant boatswain named Will Boyne. They’d served together in three ships, from Korea on up until Boyne’s retirement just before the Vietnam buildup. They’d pulled countless wild liberties together over the years, and even more midwatches. Boyne had been in the old Neosho. (In Culdee’s time there was a new Neosho, but she had no legend; when a sailor mentions the old Whatever-She-Was, you can be sure a sea story’s in the offing.) Boyne was in her from Pearl Harbor to the Coral Sea. It was there that the Fat Lady died.

  “We’d been lucky at Pearl,” Boyne told him one night. “We’d just finished pumping avgas and tied up starboard side to, heading seaward, at the head of Battleship Row, when the first Jap wave came in. Kates and Vals—torpedoes and bombs. We were out of there before they could hit us. That was the end of our luck. Early the next May we were down in the Coral Sea, south of the Solomons and east of the Aussie coast as part of Fletcher’s Task Force 17. Once again we’d just finished fueling, and Fletcher detached us to keep us out of harm’s way. The Japs were hunting his carriers but hadn’t found them yet. They found us instead.

  “That was the next day, the seventh of May. We had a single can for escort, the Sims. A Jap scout plane spotted us just after morning chow. At first they sent over high-level bombers—three waves of them. But their bombs fell wide. Then came the Vals—a whole skyful of dive-bombers. That was about noon. They clobbered the Sims on the first pass, three direct hits with five-hundred-pounders. Broke her back. She started going down stern first, and when the water hit the top of her stack, she just went kaboom. Jumped ten, twenty feet out of the water. There were parts of guys all over the place. Only fifteen survivors.

  “Meanwhile about twenty Vals hit us. I saw in the action report later that they scored seven direct hits and eight near-misses, but nobody I knew was counting. One of the Vals—maybe a suicider, even that early in the war—plowed right into the number four gun mount on the port side, killed all the guys there and hosed burning gas down the deck where they were treating the wounded. The CO passed the word, ‘Make all preparations to abandon ship.’ Some people thought he just said ‘Abandon.’ They started dumping life rafts over the side, even lowered two whaleboats from the davits before they were stopped. But plenty of men had already gone over the side. After what they’d seen happen to the Sims, they didn’t want to be on the Fat Lady when she blew. They climbed into the rafts and watched.

  “We’d pumped out the day before, fueling the task force, and we wouldn’t sink—we couldn’t sink. A lot of us wished we could. The Japs kept coming in, again and again, and when their bombs were gone, they strafed us—dead in the water. That was terror. A talker on the bridge got so petrified he kept the button pressed on his sound-powered phones, and we could hear him babbling up there, praying, telling how the XO was burning to death right there on the bridge, a Jap tracer had set fire to the kapok in his life jacket, and he was burning up there. I was the talker on the five-inch mount. There was a big-bellied, tough old first-class in the gun crew who’d been telling us all along what chicken-shits we were and how brave he was. After about the third or fourth strafing run he broke and dived under the gun mount. But because of his big gut, he was crammed in there pretty tight. When we trained the mount around to track the next target, the gun-platform ground him to bellyburger.

  “Most of our people took it pretty well, though. During a lull in the bomber passes, some gunner up on another mount started a carnival spiel. ‘Oh, come, come, come in and see the Fat Lady! See her quiv-v-v-er as she laughs. See her boobies bobble like washtubs. Count her double chins! Come one, come all! Come in and see the Fat Lady! Bring the missus.’ Some guys were actually laughing. It gets that way.

 
“Then the Japs went home. We drifted for four days, patching up the wounded, burying the dead. The men and the life rafts that had gone over the side early in the fight disappeared during the first night. There were sixty-eight of them. Only three lived through it. Finally, on the fourth day, about noon again, another plane came over. That was the ultimate moment of woe. We knew it had to be another Jap. But it was a PBY—one of ours. A Catalina. That afternoon another can—the Henley—came over the horizon and found us. We scuttled the Fat Lady right there, in the middle of the Coral Sea, and watched her go down. There were a hundred and twenty-three of us left.”

  “Tough duty,” Culdee said finally, wondering where he would have hidden when the Vals came down.

  “Tough duty,” Boyne agreed. He grinned at Culdee in the tropical mid-Pacific dark, out there on the wing of the bridge. Out there on the hatch cover, forty years later . . . “That’s why I quiver when I laugh.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Commodore Millikan was the fourth of that line in these troubled waters. The first, and certainly the best (since it was he who gave the name its magical resonance), was a vengeful, tightly wound young ensign fresh out of Annapolis whose PT boat was sunk off San Lázaro during the Japanese takeover of the Philippines at the outset of World War II. His real name was Edgar L. Downes, but in the Sulu Sea the locals called him Milikan, as they did all Americans. The extra l slipped in there thanks to a yeoman’s typing error at the Office of Naval Intelligence. No harm done. It sounded more American spelled that way. It made for better cover.

  The original Millikan organized a ragtag fleet—hence the title commodore—of local small craft—the slim, fast outriggers called pump boats, heavier trading vessels known as kumpits, and long-hulled, brightly clad sailing canoes called vintas. He armed them with weapons stolen from Japanese bases at Jolo and Tawitawi in the Sulu archipelago and wrought great havoc among the enemy. His sailors for the most part were Tausuq Moslems, a warlike, freedom-loving, seagoing people who had dominated the Sulu for generations—pirates, slavers, smugglers, afraid of nothing.