Ambush

12

A sharp command came from behind the rebels, and they turned in stride and worked their way back down the slope and in the direction of their camp.

Lam wiped sweat from his forehead. He decided not to wake up Juan right then. He’d tell him about it at 0300.

Nothing else happened the rest of the night. The word about the patrol coming so close was enough to keep Juan alert for the next three hours. Then the pair picked up and hiked over the next hill, and two miles deeper into the untarnished wilderness. At 0700 they stopped and used the SATCOM.

Lam told about their close call the night before, and emphasized the idea that the town might be expecting some kind of an attack since they had found two strangers with automatic weapons on their doorstep.

“They might be ready, but we’ll be ready too,” Murdock said. “I had an early meeting with General Domingo this morning. Alvarez has been placed under arrest and will probably be charged with treason, misappropriation of funds and equipment, bribery, conduct unbecoming, and all sorts of nasty stuff. General Domingo says we get anything we want. He brought in three forty-sixes. Turned out there were only two here despite what Alvarez said. Now we’re ready when we track down the hostages.”

“Don’t think we’ll find them on this shot,” Lam said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open about where they might be. Juan says some of the rebels wear red tabs on their shoulders. That may be our only sign who the leaders are.”

“Roger that. It’s in our briefing. You find a better hole?”

“Right, we’re three miles from the river, and snuggled down for a long daytime nap. Next we’re going to try out those new MREs they gave us this time. Supposed to be better than what we had before. About it. We’re out.”

“We’ll check again 1900 to keep our ducks in a row. We’ll leave the receive button on here in the meantime in case you need to call. Home Plate, out.”

“New MREs,” Juan said. “Let’s try them, right now.”

They dug out the large brown plastic envelopes and tore them open. “Mine says menu number one: grilled beefsteak,” Lam said. He looked at what was inside. It contained the main meal in a plastic pouch. There was another long plastic pouch that could be used to heat up the entree. “It’s called a nonflammable ration heater,” Juan said. “You just put some water into it, insert your main meal pouch, seal it, and it heats the food piping hot in a few minutes.”

They tried it and it worked. Juan had menu number ten, chili and macaroni. Also in the large MRE pouch were packets of salt and sugar, Taster’s Choice coffee, a non-dairy creamer package, a Tootsie Roll, a Jolly Rancher bar, a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce, a plastic tray and plastic spoon, iced-tea-drink mix, a book of matches, crackers, an envelope of peanut butter, an envelope of jam, and a Hooah! Nutritious Booster Bar.

“How do we heat the water for coffee?” Juan said. They tried putting water in the heating envelope, and it worked. They ate, drank, and decided the Hooah! Bars were the hit of the meal.

“Better than most airline food,” Lam said. “You should see some of the junk they try to feed you on those airlines. Our Senior Chief, who picked these up, said that there were twenty-four different menus. He mentioned beef strips in teriyaki sauce, chicken breast strips with salsa, black bean and rice burrito, and boneless pork chop with noodles. How many more do we have?”

They each had two more, and checked what the main courses were. Two each of chicken breast strips and boneless pork chops.

“So much for our gourmet food,” said Lam. “What are we going to do today?”

“Hide out here, sleep, and sharpen our KA-BARs,” Juan said.

“Mine won’t get any sharper,” Lam said. He jolted up from where he lay on the grassy mat under the trees. He pointed to his left. Lam had heard noises; something moved through the heavy growth. Somebody in Davao had said that there were more then ten thousand kinds of flowering plants and shrubs in the Philippines. Looking at the overgrown lush tropical rain forest now, Lam believed it.

The sound came again, foliage crashing and a grunting sound.

Before Lam could lift his MP-5 a wild pig as big as a German shepherd darted out of some heavy green growth and charged straight at where he lay. An instant later a man jolted through the cover and threw a wooden spear that hit the pig in the side and lanced all the way through. The animal sprawled, then rolled, trying to get rid of the lance. The man was short, no more than four feet tall, and dark with stringy black hair. He took a knife from a belt and slashed the animal’s throat. Lam stood and the small man turned, holding the knife pointing at Lam.

“I’m a friend,” Lam said. The small man scowled, then wiped the bloody blade on the side of the dead wild pig and pulled out his spear.

“Friends from America,” Lam said.

The small black man rolled his eyes and looked at the pig, then back at Lam. Behind Lam, Juan stood and rattled off a dozen words in some strange tongue that Lam figured was Filipino.

The small man relaxed and put down the spear. He grinned.

“You GI. Me go teach GI jungle survival at old Navy base at Subic Bay.”

Juan moved up and shook hands with the small man. They squatted near the pig and talked in the other Philippine official language, English.

The small man stood and walked over to Lam. “GI call me Blackie. You come my house, we have feast.”

Lam looked at Juan, who nodded. “How better can we spend the day? The food will be good. These guys are the best hunter/gatherers in the world. They roam around the hills, drop down to the lowlands for coconuts, make out like crazy. The government has even set aside a huge reserve for several of the minorities where no logging or trespassing can be done. I’ve seen these guys work before. They are good. Spears and knives, that’s their weapons. They don’t trust guns.”

“How far?” Lam asked.

Juan translated. “Blackie says two ridges, which could be two miles or ten. My guess about three or four miles. It won’t come close to the town. They stay well away from the roads, camps, and guns.”

“Hell, why not?” Lam said, and they picked up their gear and walked. The spear had been rammed through the pig from the open mouth and out the tail. Lam carried one end of the lance and Blackie the other. Lam figured the wild pig must weigh about 120 pounds. His shoulder got sore, and he traded off with Juan. Blackie didn’t notice; he just kept hiking up the side of the slope and through the growth of evergreen trees, bamboo, and a few banana trees. Blackie stopped at one banana cluster of trees and looked at a three-foot-long stalk with twenty or thirty hands of bananas. He shook his head.

“Too fucking far walk carry,” he said. Lam laughed and they moved ahead.

They soon passed through growth of teakwood trees and a sprinkling of towering Philippine mahogany trees. Lam figured they were well over 150 feet tall. The jungle was so green, and up here on the slope it didn’t feel all that tropical wet. Lam started to sweat. The average temperature hovered around eighty degrees, Juan had told him. Up here on the slope it was cooler, but not much.

After a half hour of hiking they moved down a slope, and Lam could smell, then soon see small spirals of smoke rising through the trees. They came into a village that was so temporary it had only small lean-tos, with the tops made of nipa palm fronds. Two women and six children ran to meet Blackie as the little caravan arrived. The women grabbed the lance with the pig and hurried it to a large rock, where they began butchering it. At once slabs of the meat were cut out, taken to a small cooking fire, and dropped into two heavy cast-iron skillets.

“Out here these people, who are called Negritos, eat when and where they can,” Juan said. “No three squares a day here. It’s feast or famine, but with these people, it’s usually feast. They can harvest a dozen kinds of fruit from the jungle, including bananas and cassava, which makes tapioca, or the roots can be used to make flour like meal. Down near the coast they can find coconuts, and there are a few deer around and if they get really hungry, monkeys and crocodiles down on the rivers near the coast.”

Blackie wore only cut-off jeans. Lam had no idea where he’d gotten them. The two women wore-loose fitting dark cloth skirts and no tops. The children, all under ten, wore nothing at all. The kids and women clustered around the pig, and soon it had been cleaned and skinned and the head put in a special iron pot.

Soup later on, Lam thought and grinned. Wild pig-head soup. Not high on his eating list.

Blackie took pride in introducing his two wives to his guests. They spoke no English at all, but Juan talked with them in Filipino.

Blackie said that usually they lived much higher on the mountain and farther from the coast. His wives wanted coconuts, so he’d brought the family here. He would make nighttime trips lower where the coconuts grew, and harvest some to take back to his village.

“How many people at the village?” Lam asked.

Blackie grinned. “How many I know. I speak how many. Yes, maybe thirty. I learn count in Subic Bay but not good. No?”

They all laughed. “You count good, Blackie, good,” Lam said. He looked around, and could see almost nothing that would be moved. The lean-tos would stay; the fire pit held only the three cast-iron skillets and pot. There were no bedrolls, no bundles of clothes, no eating utensils that he could see. It was a camp ready to move at any time.

Then he saw several nets that looked as if they had been woven from some local vine. They had two- or three-inch squares, and he figured they were used for carrying things, like the coconuts that the Negritos had come to harvest. At one side he saw two dozen coconuts that had been husked out of their fibrous shell. The brown inner shell remained.

Blackie picked up one of the coconuts, pierced the eyes with a sharp-pointed stick, and drank the milk. Then he broke it on a rock and dug out the white meat.

“Take just meat when walk home,” he said.

Lam thought Blackie and the others might even dry the coconut meat before they carried it back to their main camp. They were efficient, self-sufficient, answering to nobody, beholden to no one, man or government. Now there was a lifestyle.

A curious monkey swung from trees high overhead. Blackie looked at him, judged the distance, and put down his spear.

“Eat monkey too,” he said. “Monkey taste good.”

“How old are you, Blackie?” Juan asked.

The short man built furrows in his forehead and twisted up his face. “At Subic Bay, Navy Chief Chief call me twenty-five. Not know for sure. Now, maybe fifty, fifty-five. Blackie no count good now.”

The women shouted at the children, and three of them ran into the rain forest and came back quickly with a dozen green shiny leaves as big as dinner plates. They laid them on a log that had been flattened somewhat by cutting with a knife. The pork slabs were placed on each of the leaves, and topped with a mixture of fruits that one of the women had been preparing.

“Chow,” Blackie said. He grinned. “Blackie remember chow call good from Navy.”

They sat in front of the log and ate. The pork was well done and different from anything Lam had ever tasted. It wasn’t like pork, or beef. It had been butchered and cooked before most of the blood had been drained out of the animal and while it was still warm. That made a difference in the taste. It was good, but Lam didn’t think he’d want to make it a permanent part of his diet. The fruit was marvelous. He recognized the bananas, but that was all. Whatever it was, he liked it.

Lam checked his watch. “Chogie time. We need to get back to the LZ.” Lam looked around for a minute. “Be damned if I’m certain how we got here.”

Juan chuckled. “I made a small wager with Blackie that he’d have to take us back partway and point us down to the river. He said no problem. As soon as you finish your pork. It’s not polite in a primitive society to leave any food that has been given to you.”

Lam looked down at his leaf and scooped up the last of the pork and chewed it down.

It was a little over an hour later that they settled in at their former hideout three miles from the river. The time was almost 1400. Plenty of time. Lam set up the radio, and this time he showed Juan how to do it.

“Home Plate, this is Scout.”

A response came back immediately. “Yes, Scout. We’re in our final prep here for our jump over there. A little longer flight this time, but still well within the range of the forty-six. We’re going to leave the bird on the ground this time with six Army security guards while we make our hike.”

“Good thinking, Home Plate. We’re at our safe spot and will move down to the LZ in about two hours. Any changes?”

“None right now. We’ll talk later just before we pull out. Take care and we’ll see you soon.”

Juan closed down the radio, folded the antenna, and put it in its pouch on the SATCOM.

Lam leaned back on the soft greenery and looked at Juan. “I better say it, Juan. I’ve been thinking about Colonel Alvarez. He did pick you to come on this mission, you and the sergeant.”

Juan nodded. “I know where you’re going with that. But you can rest easy. I was rammed down Alvarez’s throat. He didn’t want me to come. He had a captain from his headquarters he had picked and primed. Then somebody said it should be a man who had been in contact and combat with the rebels. My CO pushed me for the spot and I won out. I have no loyalty to the colonel. I didn’t even like him. He’s getting what he deserved. No, I won’t sabotage the fight tonight. I could have done that yesterday on my recon. If I was his man, I’d have acted before now. I’m not. I’m clean.”

“I believe you, Juan. I just had to ask, in case Murdock nails me.”

“No problem, Lam. Hey, I’ve been in the Army for eight years, I know how the military works. Cover your ass. Hell, yes. When are we heading for the river?”