The horses rear wildly/dashing up the rocky steepness/canyons, buttes, and piñon trees/scattered to the west/they scamper and buck/chased by the hatted hunter/whose greedy ropes/have no luck/the mustang gives chase/searching and seeking/the ropeman disappears/having been beaten.
Donning his bright orange jumpsuit, he informed the vice president for operations that he was going for a quick jog. He walked out of the electronic doors, passing the guard, who had fallen asleep leaning against the building. They pulled hard shifts, and he decided not to wake the young member of the Japanese Defense Force.
He stretched briefly, then hopped onto the railroad-tie stairway that led out of the old quarry and onto the jogging path. Over his shoulder, he could make out the beautiful blue waters of Cateel Bay. The beach had a pinkish hue as the sun lowered behind the mountains. With a joyous smile, he broke into a gallop.
Today, I am the Mustang.
The walk had been brutal, taking them nearly half a day to move and then reconnoiter the running path. Ramsey, Benson, and the Filipino, simply known as Eddie, had sliced their way through the jungle using dead reckoning where Benson laid an azimuth on the compass, and they all followed. Benson had not found any trails leading to the curious path this time around. The jungle was mysterious that way. What was there only minutes before was gone the next time someone looked for it. They felt confident, though, that their machetes had blazed a suitable trail for the return trip.
They found the chain-link fence and the gravel path and backed off about twenty meters to set up an observation post. Ramsey determined that they should spend some time conducting reconnaissance of the surrounding area, so they took pictures with digital cameras, radioed back to the patrol base what they were doing, pulled back into an objective rally point, and planned to breach the fence near dusk.
As the sun began to dip behind the mountain range over which they had traveled, Ramsey low-crawled to the fence, snipped a hole with wire cutters, then continued to the sawdust pit with the sign and saw that it was exactly as Benson had described it. Only this sign had a stick body horizontal to the ground, a disconnected circular head, and a perpendicular arm, like it was doing a push-up. He crawled back to the observation point, holding his hush-puppy pistol in his hand and using his elbows to propel him through the thorny vines.
Benson provided cover with the MP5. As the daylight faded into darkened hues of green and brown, they knew it would soon be time to don the night-vision goggles.
“You go now. See if you can read the writing,” Ramsey said to Eddie. He had smooth brown skin. His face was soft and round, despite the long scar coursing across the right cheek. His brown eyes were wide with anticipation, glowing white around the edges in hopes of providing useful information to his benefactors. They had taken him into their protective custody and he felt with grim certainty that he was the only Filipino Ranger left alive on the island.
Eddie moved with precision and skill to the sign and knelt. After a brief moment, he looked at the Americans hiding in the brush, smiling and giving them a thumbs-up. He had studied the Japanese language for two years in school, before dropping out to become a soldier.
As he was about to move, Eddie heard a steady crunching in the gravel. He froze on one knee with his head turned over his shoulder like a spotlighted deer. From their support position, Benson immediately sighted the moving figure. The bright orange outfit made the person an easy target. He was nearly fifty meters away, about to make the turn onto the push-up pit. Eddie slowly lowered his body, slid under the sign, and eased himself into the first layer of scrub. He lay motionless as what looked like a well-groomed Japanese man in an orange jumpsuit came panting into the pit. He was running so fast that Eddie thought the man was going to land on him when he stopped, the man’s hands spraying sawdust into the Filipino’s eyes.
Benson looked quickly to Ramsey for direction, who held up his hand, motioning him to maintain status quo. The orange-clad jogger began doing push-ups, and his good form perversely, though momentarily, struck Ramsey. Head raised, not looking between his legs like so many troops have a tendency to do. He was pumping like a hydraulic machine, his head fixed on the scrub to his front. His push-ups began to slow dramatically, and it struck Ramsey as odd that he would taper off so soon. Then he stopped and froze.
Ramsey immediately knew that the man had spotted Eddie, who, no more than two meters away from the jogger, remained motionless in the bush.
Surprisingly, the man went to his knees, then slowly stood, moving closer to the boy. He pulled away a twig, revealing Eddie’s face. The man held out his hand to Eddie, believing him to be hurt.
Abe had had little contact with the Filipino people during his stay in Mindanao. He had read much about them and their history and truly felt sorry for his country’s past treatment of their people. In part, he felt good about producing weapons for the Filipinos so they would no longer have to rely on other powers for their own security. He believed the time had come for them to forge their own history instead of always being the pawn of some higher power’s struggle.
So, as he reached out his hand, he was reaching in compassion to a people for whom he held great pity. He wanted to talk with them and experience at least some of their culture. He wanted to be able to tell his family about the Filipino people and how they were struggling in a world that recognized only raw power. True to his liberal beliefs, Abe reached his hand toward the young boy, obviously hurt, lying there like a wounded deer maimed by a hunter’s bullet. His next poem would be about him, he was sure.
Chapter 11
Matt Garrett peered through the scope of his SIG SAUER and tried to assess everything he was watching.
He saw a Japanese man running on a gravel path as if he was doing exercise, which was strange enough. Then he saw the man drop and do some push-ups. Matt watched as a young Filipino soldier approached the Japanese man.
Adjusting his sight ever so slightly, Matt was able to pick out the faces of two well-camouflaged American soldiers.
They must be part of Peterson’s team that jumped in last night.
Matt was on ground higher than any of the other participants in this uncoordinated drama, and he could plainly see that the situation was headed for tragedy. The Japanese could be a martial-arts expert. The Filipino could be Abu Sayyaf. The Special Forces soldiers might be wanting to kill anything because of their loss last night. There were multiple combinations and algorithms that could play out, yet none was what he would consider to be positive.
Just when he thought the strange situation could not deteriorate any further, he saw three Asian soldiers running up the path from the east. They were brandishing weapons that looked like small machine guns.
Quickly assessing the situation, he shot the three Japanese guards, who were sprinting toward the man in the orange jumpsuit. His silenced SIG SAUER made no noise at all, and the three men dropped to the ground, dead, though as he swung his weapon’s sight back to the American soldiers, he saw them scanning with their own weapons. They had heard or seen something and were spooked.
Matt did what he always believed was best to do in that type of situation; he remained perfectly still. If they saw him, they might shoot him. He presumed he had just saved someone’s life … by taking three. He didn’t want to think of the other possibilities, perhaps that the three men he had killed were simply doing rifle physical training and joining their commander on a jog.