Pulling the ratty Dodgers baseball cap down over his forehead, Matt shook off a bit of his clinging anger and discreetly strode next to a shack, watching the activities — nothing out of the ordinary. He had been cycling between Zhoushan Naval Base, China, and Davao City for over two months. Tonight, he had been given instructions in the form of a text message from his handler to meet a dockworker who would provide him information.
A few short months after being mysteriously yanked from Pakistan while in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda senior leadership, Matt was now trying to locate a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) called Predators. They were just being put to good use in the War on Terror, and it appeared that someone had traded this technology to the Chinese for financial motivations. Either that, or the Los Alamos debacle had contributed to the satellite imagery that indicated the Predators were being built and tested near Zhoushan. He had developed a lead in China when he suddenly received a message from his handler that there was a significant find in Davao City; and so here he was. Every time I’m close, I’m moved, Matt thought to himself.
Matt was large, a college shortstop, and looked comfortable in his cargo pants and khaki shirt. He tugged at the Dodgers baseball hat again and hid his eyes behind Oakley sunglasses.
“Muggy,” the dockworker said to him in Tagalog.
“Always in the evening,” Matt said in Mandarin.
A hazy mist rolled off the bay, distorting the presence of hundreds of fishing vessels. A gull stood guard atop a pylon and flapped its wings once, as if to shiver, though the temperature was in the nineties.
“Got any cigarettes?” the man asked, this time in Mandarin also. That was the key, he had been told.
He turned and looked at the slight Filipino. Matt, standing over six feet, towered above the diminutive man, who was shorter than five and a half feet. The contact had black hair and brown eyes, the norm in that part of the country.
“Sure. Here.” This time in English. Matt grabbed his rumpled pack of Camels and held it out to the source, who took two, glancing at him for approval. Matt nodded.
“Running out of time,” Matt said. He watched the man put a cigarette between yellow teeth and strike a match. Once he had lit the cigarette, the man shook the match and tossed it on the pier. He looked in both directions, then nodded at a ship across the harbor.
“See that tanker?”
Matt looked past the rows of red and gray fishing ships in the direction the man had nodded. He saw several tuna rigs, then could make out a large black-and-red merchant vessel. It looked more like a container ship or an automobile carrier. He guessed the contact had mistaken it for an oil tanker.
“What about it?”
“Japanese. Leaves tonight. Didn’t off-load anything, but Abu Sayyaf put something on it.”
Matt continued staring at the ship and read the name on the side: Shimpu. That name registered with him, but at the moment he couldn’t remember why.
“What was it?” Matt asked, still staring at the ship.
With his peripheral vision, Matt saw the guard remove the cigarette from his mouth and begin to speak. What followed happened quickly: The orange tip of the cigarette fell from the man’s hand and dropped at Matt’s shoes as his contact’s body shuddered. Instinctively, Matt pulled his Glock 26 from beneath his untucked shirt and jumped onto a floating dock running perpendicular to the pier on which they had been standing.
As he leapt, he saw that the contact was prone on the pier and bleeding from a head wound. He also felt the hot wash of a bullet pass uncomfortably close as he ducked behind a junked generator, which he presumed was used as an auxiliary power unit for some of the ships. The generator pinged twice from gunshots. And Matt eyed a large Bangka boat with a roof, a ferry of some type, going somewhere.
The helmsman was removing a weathered bowline from a rusty cleat about thirty meters away. There were a few passengers that he could see; mostly fishermen, probably making their way home to Babak on the eastern side of the gulf. He waited until the captain gave the boat a slight shove. As he watched the boat separate from the pier, he sprinted as if he were stealing third base against a catcher with a rifle arm, then did his best long-jump imitation, feet cycling through the air.
He landed with a thud on the roof of the boat, which promptly gave way and dumped him on the floor, which held.
The helmsman had put the engine into forward, and the ferry was moving slowly away from the pier.
No more shots followed him, but he thought that the ship captain might decide to take over where his other attackers had left off. The wizened man was screaming and baring his teeth, throwing his arms up in the air. Matt understood most of what he was saying and stood, brushed himself off, and pulled five hundred dollars from his wallet.
“Sorry about the roof. Buy a new boat,” he said in Tagalog.
“My boat. Had for twenty-five years. New roof.”
Clearly the man was bargaining with him, so Matt pulled two hundred dollars more from his pocket and handed it to the man but didn’t release it. The helmsman tugged on the money with a weathered hand.
“Drop me off at the next pier up near the airport, and we’re even,” Matt said.
The man yanked the remaining two hundred dollars from his hand and nodded.
Much later, true to his word and the seven-hundred-dollar payment, the captain of the ship pulled into the pier normally used for fruit transshipment. Night had fallen, and Matt effortlessly leapt from the bow of the Bangka ferryboat onto the concrete pier.
He reassured himself by patting his Glock, which had stayed firmly in his hand through the fall, and which he had quickly placed in its holster while still on the floor of the boat. He walked a kilometer to the apartment he had rented, grabbed his gear, then discreetly moved another kilometer and a half toward the airport and checked in at the nondescript Uncle Doug’s Motel.
Matt presumed that “Uncle Doug” was Douglas MacArthur, patron saint of all things Philippine.
He tossed his duffel on the floor, locked the door, and pulled out his satellite Blackberry.
Check out Shimpu. Contact KIA. New location. Standing by.
Matt sent the dispassionate note as if having contacts killed and being shot at were akin to signing an office memo or sitting in a meeting to discuss the next meeting. He removed the Baby Glock from its holster, ran his finger along the extractor, and felt the reassuring bump indicating he still had a round chambered.
Almost immediately he received a text message from his handler.
Airport. Midnight. More to follow. Feet and knees together.
Matt looked at his watch. It was 0200. Like I’m on a wild-goose chase, he thought, and shook his head.
Matt forwarded the text to his personal secure e-mail account; his way of keeping a journal.
“Feet and knees together” was paratrooper code for the way to survive a parachute landing. Matt understood that if you kept your feet and knees pressed firmly together, you stood a chance of not breaking an ankle or leg. If you reached for the ground with one foot, then all of your weight would come barreling onto one spot of one bone at the speed of gravity, usually resulting in a fracture.
He simply typed back: Roger.
Sitting on his twin bed with no box springs, he stared at his pistol, cycling the events of the last few hours through his mind. He snapped his head upward and whispered, “Shimpu.” Remembering the meaning of the obscure Japanese word sent a chill up his spine.
“Divine wind,” he said to himself.
It’s what the kamikaze pilots called themselves.