They came crawling from the back of the plane toward the side door in single file. Movement was difficult, as each man had his hands and feet chained together. Like a clumsy centipede, they clanked together down the ladder of the airplane, stepping into the shallow water.
To a man, they shut their narrow eyes, balking at the brightness of the noonday sun. They were relieved, however, to be out of the airplane, as the temperature had reached an unbearable 120 degrees inside the steel frame of the craft while they were waiting for Takishi in Davao City. Outside, it was only 105 degrees. Much better.
Takishi stood on the beach, envisioning himself as a futuristic MacArthur, with his gold-rimmed sunglasses and wicked smile. He pulled a revolver from his trousers and checked its payload with a quick flip of his wrist. The prisoners looked up, squinting in the bright sun, at the familiar sound of unlatching metal. With his thumb, Takishi popped the cylinder back into the New Nambu revolver. Takishi liked it because it made him feel like a cowboy. It was uniquely different from the military automatic pistols, and the curved, custom-made pearl-handled grip fit his hand rather well.
He smiled at the gang of prisoners, all Chinese, Koreans, or Indonesians who had infiltrated his homeland, byproducts of the fractional criminal element in Japan. While the black market was a nuisance to the country, these illegal immigrants were perfect fodder for his purposes.
He marched them off the beach, past the thatch huts of the fishing village, and onto a trail that led almost two kilometers into the jungle. Yes, we shall return, he thought to himself, smiling. Takishi relished this post-9-11 window of opportunity. The Americans’ fledgling effort in Afghanistan and their obvious intentions toward Iraq opened the door for geopolitical chess moves that would overwhelm and stymie the Americans. He was part strategic military planner and part pragmatic economist: a modern-day Machiavelli.
As they walked, Filipino peasants waved at Takishi. He always brought them packages of food from his country. This time was no different as he had the pilot drop three boxes next to an elderly woman. The peasants were unaware that the food was nothing more than military combat rations. It was nutritional and filled their children’s stomachs.
The Filipinos stood from cleaning fish along a straw mat and watched the entourage. Takishi looked at the children in bare feet, their legs dirty and riddled with fly bites. He smiled and waved, though it was an insincere gesture. He had no sympathy for them.
They soon entered the dense jungle and followed a worn path up the spine of a ridge to the south of a river that would lead them to a brown and green structure. There was a road that came from the north, but the shorter distance to the factory was directly through the jungle.
Once there, Takishi would introduce his friends to Mr. Abe, the manager of plant number three, who could surely use the labor. The other three Rolling Stones knew about plant number one, which manufactured small arms for the Abu Sayyaf insurgency.
But they had no clue about the other three plants, which built weaponry of a different type.
Chapter 8
Philippine Abu Sayyaf Commander Douglas Talbosa departed the airfield and rode in an old U.S. Army jeep toward the burning hulk of an airplane that had crashed about thirty kilometers north of Davao City in the east-central highland region of Mindanao.
He had three battalions of infantry soldiers, each consisting of roughly three hundred men. There were three companies per battalion. The unit had no organic support structure. Talbosa had done his best to create a new, loosely structured unit to supply ammunition, food, and other critical supplies to his troops deployed in the field. As a result of the Japanese monetary assistance, the Muslim army had been able to buy new supplies, equipment, and, most importantly, food. Talbosa had a two-man staff that coordinated all logistical efforts. Now with the apparent shooting down of two Philippine C-130s, he hoped they would be able to take some pictures and get more funding by posting them on the Internet. Al Qaeda was always looking to reinforce successful commanders by rewarding them with money that would propel further attacks against westernized countries.
Eyewitness accounts said one aircraft blew up in the sky, and the other discharged about thirty paratroopers before exploding into the side of a mountain. When he got a daylight report, then he might dispatch one of his few precious helicopters to survey the wreckage. But for the moment, he wanted his men to quickly inspect the smoldering aircraft hulks, if they could, and bring back alive any soldiers who made it to ground safely. Just days before their final offensive into Manila, it was critical that he get as much intelligence as possible.
The sun had risen, peeking above the jungle highlands to the east. An orange-gray shade tumbled over the eastern mountain range, the sun not yet high enough to illuminate the leeward slopes. The mountain’s elongated shadow still obscured the aircraft wreckage.
Talbosa did not know exactly what he was looking for, but his men rode forward in old farm trucks and jeepneys, fancy Filipino jeeps ornately decorated with several hood ornaments and colorful velvet material around the window edges. They had painted the vehicles an olive color, but some of the troops kept the red, orange, and maroon velvet curtains hanging inside.
Two of Talbosa’s battalions moved quickly to link up with the battalion that had downed the aircraft an hour earlier. Speeding along the only road in the Central Valley, they moved past what was the initial drop zone for the Ranger unit and stopped their vehicles in a rather unprofessional fashion all around the one aircraft. Black smoke billowed from the midsection, which was split in two. The wreckage gained definition as the sun burned away the dawn mist and darkness. The men who had shot down the aircraft were jubilant, and wasted no time in greeting their commander.
“Rangers?” Talbosa asked Pascual, his second-in-command, who had been in charge of the air-defense efforts.
“That’s right,” Pascual said, relishing his kills. “We got both planes. Only about twenty or so enemy jumped from the first airplane.”
“Congratulations, men,” he said to the growing throng gawking at the smoking airplane and the charred bodies strewn about the wreckage. In no time, the men were pilfering the equipment and picking through the uniforms of the dead soldiers.
“Have one battalion stay here, another to move back to their air-defense positions, and the last one to move into the jungle to the east with me. I want them here in half an hour,” Talbosa ordered. Pascual saluted and moved out, eager to please his commander once again.
Talbosa was not surprised when his men, digging around the wreckage, found the bodies of seventy Filipino Rangers. A Mindanao native, Talbosa was in his middle forties, and the drop zone was less than eight kilometers from his boyhood home. He grew up with the Abu Sayyaf and its governing ideology, not as right wing as the Taliban in Afghanistan, but not as liberal as the European Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. Their ideology was a more pragmatic one, based loosely around Islamic faith. Talbosa knew that not even Al Qaeda was altogether Koran-based. In the final analysis, he was convinced that the only way for his country to achieve any semblance of international respect was by aligning with the only growing insurgent movement in the world, Islamic extremism. Perhaps that would bring social and economic equality to his countrymen. Nothing else had.
He had been only ten years old in 1969, when a group of ragged Filipino soldiers appeared at his family’s hut. His father worked the sugarcane plantation of one of the wealthy Filipino families, the Aquinos. Their rudimentary living quarters consisted of nothing more than a thatch hut, which sat astride the massive sugarcane field. The soldiers had told his father about the new movement that some “university students” were organizing. They needed people to fight for the cause.