Rebels of Mindanao (14 page)

At this point the big guy at the other end of the bar seemed to come alive as Jade and Jasmine began to dance again. He tipped them to do a number for him on the raised platform. The music got louder, and the group of expats and Elaiza at the bar were forced to speak in less hushed voices when they resumed their conversation.

From his perch on the end stool, Starke watched his twins, whom he took more than a paternal interest in protecting and preserving.

Elaiza watched them too, with mild curiosity. She asked Thornton, “What does all this have to do with me and my iPod, even ‘upgraded' as it is?”

“Listen to this for a while, see what you think.” Thornton was still intrigued with his idea of a code. He might actually need it sometime, it was more than just an exercise in semantics. “When I was in the army in Germany, I lived near the small town of Kitzingen near the smaller town of Iphofen, famous for its dry Franken wine—you know, it comes in a
Bocksbeutel
, those bottles famous for being shaped like goat's gonads? Well, I won lots of bets, with Americans and Germans both, that I could tell from one taste which side of the mountain behind Iphofen the wine came from, north, south, east, or west. They took my bets, because all the wine looked exactly the same, in the same little green bottles, just with different vintner labels, and they all came from about a five-mile radius. I almost always, I would say always, won.”

“How did you do that, a foreigner, an American?” Moser had not heard this tale before from Thornton.

The twins had come over and loitered around Starke after their dance, oozing their natural sexuality, warm skin just a little bit moist and evaporating hints of perfume. But Elaiza's cold stare discouraged them from any snuggling, so they retreated to a front table to sit and flirt with the guy who had tipped them.

Thornton went on. “It was easy. There were four wines from very different grapes, the
Mueller-Thurgau, Riesling, Kalb
and
Sylvaner
. They grew on different sides of the mountain. The east and south got lots of sun; the north not so much, and it got cold much earlier in the autumn on the northern slope. On opposite sides on the mountain the soils were very different, loam, clay, sand, and limestone. The wines were as different as a red from France and a white from Italy. I won the bets.”

“The point is?” Starke asked.

“We create a simple code using strange German words. Elaiza, you'll need to make notes of key words,
Thurgau
will mean north,
Sylvaner
, south;
Kalb
, east; and
Riesling
, west.” Thornton was thinking as he
spoke. “Use difficult and long words like
Neuschwanstein
, crazy Prince Ludwig's castle near Fuessen.”

“OK, but what good is a code?” Elaiza was getting curious.

“Moser could easily, and in secret, give us directions on the air; since no one would be specifically looking for secret communications, it would be simple.” Thornton turned to Moser. “Wolf, you could announce something like, ‘Three callers tonight have requested Mozart's
‘Eine Kleine Kalb Sylvaner Kalb
,' slurring the words a bit into your mike. I would interpret that as, ‘Move three kilometers east southeast.' Nothing to it.”

“But anyone who knows music or German, would figure out something was strange.” Moser was understandably skeptical.

“Yes, eventually, but it would work for a week, and that would be long enough. You know all the people in Mindanao who both understand German and know something about music, and they are not the ones we care about deciphering a code. Worst case scenario with those who could be suspicious, laugh it off as a contest you were running to see if anyone noticed. Or put them all to sleep with some Mahler.”

“OK, but where would I get the information to help you?”

“From Major Hayes; he's assigned here in Mindanao during our mission and is hooked up with the U.S. Embassy tech guys in their lab by cell phone, or even land line. He could be in the station with you, giving you the messages we need.” Thornton pulled it all together in a way that made Moser comfortable.

They then devised a code with these key elements:
neunzig grad—
ninety degrees; “I have had three requests for”—three kilometers;
Bach rechts—the
. stream to the right;
Fluechtling, Gefaehr hinter Dir
'—fugitive, danger, rear, and so on. The cardinal directions would come from the Iphofen wines. Wolf could announce a musical piece as old Austrian Schlommel music, and “cough” a few words in Viennese dialect that would hardly be noticed even by someone fluent in German, let alone Visayan.

“OK, so we have a code, and Moser can give you, or whoever has the iPod, messages. What good is it?” Starke asked.

“The embassy, and therefore our armed forces, will know Elaiza's exact location. And I mean exactly. If and when she moves in a specific
way, she signals back to the embassy by the steps she has taken. Each step will be recorded digitally on a map overlay. The iPod is a radio and a GPS device rolled into one. I'd like to leave it at that.”

“Pretty slick.” Moser was impressed. “I always thought you were a CIA professional, or something like that.”

“Moser, I'm just a businessman, but working with Elaiza, and also with Starke here, I hope I can pay back some people I owe for when I was, shall we say, more involved. I still have some personal confidences to keep. And it's just better that that's all you know. Don't get more involved. I'll tell you the whole story some day.”

“OK, I wasn't that curious anyway. But I would like to know what you think you three can do by yourselves that the entire Philippine Army can't?” Moser thought he had hit the nail on the head.

“That's one of the things I'll tell you some other time. Let's let it rest there for today.” Thornton raised his glass in another toast, signaling that he did not want to talk any more about that subject.

Starke was feeling the alcohol only slightly, but the twins' near presence, his buddies around him, and the interesting conversation put him more at ease and fascinated at the same time. Without asking any more questions, he went into one of the videoke rooms with the twins and a bottle of brandy.

When Starke was gone, Elaiza declined a beer from Thornton, and ordered a sparkling grape juice, then said, “I got it. We can use the code to direct our team around, but no one will know what we're doing.”

Thornton confirmed her conclusion, “Yes. We get close to Mahir Hakki, you turn your uncles loose, and we make him and the cash disappear. It should be easy.”

S
ergeant Henry Starke arrived in Toril in time for breakfast leftovers with Thornton and Elaiza, plopped himself down and completely filled one end of the table, all decked out in tactical black, except for the design on his tee shirt featuring an off-white bald eagle, wings stretched by his girth. He belched in satisfaction, as was the local custom he had adopted as his demonstration of being simpatico with the natives, then tapped his fingers showing his eagerness to get on with the business at hand.

It was still cool, the morning salt breeze mixing the essence of yesterday's jasmine with the faintest hint of today's durian crop on its way to a nearby open market. Starke passed around a newspaper he had bought on his way there, with the report of the bombings at the airport and Sasa wharf, showing photos of shattered windows and a searing picture of a dead girl in a pure white dress splattered with blood, still clutching her small doll. It put steel into Elaiza's heart.

“If they can kill that child, they could kill my child someday,” was her low growl.

The woman who worked for Thornton came and cleared the dirty dishes away. Thornton took out a map and spread it on the table. He explained, “OK, here's the situation. Some idiots in the Defense Department wanted to send U.S. troops into Davao City proper, ‘for training' of course, but General Hargens was able to get that mission cancelled. Hargens asked me to help him, just for a short time on a very focused assignment. And I am to keep it all quiet. Only a few will know about our mission and the details.”

“How we gonna do it, Thornton?” Starke asked; the experienced trooper got right to the point.

Thornton told him, “We need to find the Turk with the money and finish him, without letting the world know the U.S. is involved in internal affairs in the Philippines. The Filipinos have to get the credit for winning their own war. Elaiza here works for our embassy and will keep in direct touch with a U.S. Army officer who is our only official contact, her boss at the embassy, Major Hayes. He works for Hargens. Our job is to get that Al Qaeda cash before the Philippine Army does.”

“What's our security, Kapitan Tomas,” asked Elaiza, “how do we keep our plans secret and cover ourselves? I don't want to see any more photos of dead little girls or boys.”

“Me either. Our primary means of contact, of course, is by cell phone in areas where there is reception. It's low tech, but relatively secure. I doubt the Abu Sayaf has the technology here in the field to intercept any communications, and if they did, and understood our English, they would not be able to react fast enough to have it matter. So Major Hayes and I talk directly on my cell phone.”

“But we also will have a back-up,” Thornton continued. “Elaiza is not only our liaison with the native troopers, but also our communications expert. The geeks in the embassy will know where this device is, when Elaiza is wearing it, down to an accuracy of a few feet, much better than any normal GPS and so accurate we can use it to call in an artillery or air strike.”

Starke was atypically quiet and a bit confused. He asked Thornton, “What do you know about the whereabouts of that money carrier?”

Thornton let him in on the latest he had from Hayes. “We assume the Turk is with the Abu Sayaf in the southwestern, mostly Muslim half of Mindanao, the ARMM, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. They will want to hook up with the NPA in northeastern Mindanao, the Moros in the West, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with their breakaway renegades, the Moro National Front as well, here in the south. The NPA has armed troops on the ground in the north and east. If they all get together, they will start to think they can achieve their objective, an independent Islamic state of Mindanao. A civil war could not only break up the Philippines, but also move the world in the opposite direction from what the U.S. President and the President and Congress of the Philippines want.”

“But the Abu Sayaf say they are not responsible for the blowing up of that little girl, I heard that announcement came from Eid Kabalu himself. If the Abu Sayaf was making trouble, he would want you to know it was him doing it.” Starke was up to date from reading newspapers in the Lady Love.

“I believe him, but I doubt that my own countrymen will
want
to believe him.” Elaiza got into it. “I think your CIA wants to connect terrorist acts here to the Bali bombings by the Al Qaeda, whether it's true or not. The CIA likes to take out the easy targets even more than they like to get the
correct
target. They want to connect the Al Qaeda terrorists to the deaths of those Australians in Bali, keeping the Aussies on your side. Nobody really cares about my people.”

“Neither the U.S. nor the Filipinos want to commit significant combat troops in Mindanao, I agree with that much,” Thornton told them all, “but we may have to. The U.S. already has 500 Special Forces rangers on the island helping your countrymen. The Philippine Army is not well trained, has poorly functioning equipment, and their rifles are so old that the rifling is worn out and they don't shoot straight. A percentage of the soldiers are paid to do nothing, or have sympathies and families with the other side. It's discouraging. Filipino soldiers can't find their way back to their own camps or just don't want to and wind up wandering around in the jungle. It's more profitable for them to work with their enemy. Consider if they had to find, fix, and destroy the Abu Sayaf elements now in South Cotobato along with the irregulars out there in
the boonies. How good would they be? We don't know which ones are with us and which ones are against us. Or they work their ‘pay to raid' programs.”

Starke got into it. “With all due respect, if the U.S. Special Forces troops running around on the island can do nothing, what makes anyone think just two unusual guys and one girl can?”

“Want to try me sometime in hand-to-hand,
boy
?” Elaiza bristled at the “girl” comment.

Starke groused, “Sure, meet me at the gym sometime.”

Thornton had to chuckle at his friends' teasing, but moved the discussion along. “A large combat force would be easily noticed and would not work. The Abu Sayaf will just hide; they want to keep their guns, their power. But a paramilitary unit like STAGCOM has a better chance of success because they won't know we're following them.”

“Why do you think so?” Starke was not convinced.

“Consider how the rebels view their political situation. Consider the difference between to disarm and to be disarmed,” Thornton told the sergeant. “If the Philippine Army, or worse yet, American troops assisting the Philippine Army, move into the provinces in force and physically take their guns away, the MNLF fighters and the others will resist. The Muslims in Mindanao will join the communists, put on their Che Guevara tee shirts, and say they are the Army of Liberation, or some new acronym for the same old theme, of simple desperation and the desire to be free of Manila, whatever that means to them.”

Elaiza didn't like Thornton's apparently condescending attitude, but realized he overemphasized to make his point, “But if they disarm
themselves?”
she asked.

“Yes, that's the big difference.” Thornton looked at her while she spoke, then turned to Starke. “That's exactly my point.”