Sudden Threat Page 5

  The plane skidded as it always did, spraying fine mist in either direction. Another skid, and the water’s friction against the pontoons grabbed the craft, causing its passengers to lurch slightly forward for a typical landing. The pilot steered the plane to the beach, where it found purchase with a gentle nudge into the sand.

  Takishi turned and spoke in his harsh Japanese tongue to his eighteen passengers, telling them to stand and exit the airplane.

  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 mas
sive 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.

  “We want a better future for your son, Mister Talbosa,” a wild-eyed student armed with an AK-47 had said.

  The elder Talbosa had looked at his son, standing by his leg, then beyond the soldiers at the cane fields and knew that if his children were to have a better life than working eighteen hours a day in those rat-infested fields, he had to let him go. Douglas was eager to venture out, as most young boys are wont to do.

  He was not the youngest “soldier,” but he had showed great bravery padding along the hardened trails of the jungle, running messages, and providing warning of attacking Filipino or communist soldiers. He had soon graduated to a sparrow unit and participated in the executions of hundreds of his countrymen who did not support the cause. He had risen through the ranks the hard way, having several brushes with the grim reaper. He knew about death, and he knew about poverty. He preferred to die fighting for a better life for his countrymen than to live in a shack where the children ran scared from rats the size of soccer balls.

  After his sparrow-unit experience, he had been given command of the Mindanao cell, which consisted of about two thousand loosely aligned soldiers. Now, with Takishi as wind behind his sails, he had declared himself the leader of the Abu Sayyaf movement throughout the country. One day, he believed, his army could anchor the eastern boundary of the Islamic Caliphate.

  Considering his past for a brief moment, Talbosa spit into the ground, pulled the brown Australian bush hat tight onto his head, and scanned the eastern mountains for the wreckage of the second plane. Clearly, it was not visible on the western range, as the sun provided great visibility, but the eastern range was still dark. They would find it in time. It was his notion, too, that whatever Rangers had made it safely out of the aircraft would probably move to the nearest cover, and that appeared to be the eastern range. Even though the Rangers normally moved south toward Davao City to conduct raids, he figured the unit had taken too many casualties for them to pursue that option.

  He radioed the battalion commander and told him to hurry. They were going Ranger hunting.

  And they needed to hurry because, Talbosa knew, Matt Garrett was near the wreckage.

  CHAPTER 9

  Japanese Weapons Production Plant #3

  Cateel, Mindanao, Philippines

  “Unit number seven needs more hydraulic fluid in its lower lathe,” Kanishi Abe said to the production supervisor.

  “Mr. Abe,” he said, pronouncing it “Ahbey,” “we are operating well beyond the capacity of these machines. Less than two years old, and we have exceeded the quality-control time lines on all replaceable parts,” Mr. Kuriwu said in his native language.

  “I understand. We have almost met our production goals, and a new team will come in a few days to replace us. Then it will be their problem,” Abe said. His comments were out of character. He considered it unprofessional to pass along unresolved problems, but this was different.

  “Please patch the tubing and replace the fluid before we lose hydraulic power in number seven and exceed the parameters for safe assembly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Abe walked along the assembly line, watching his robots perform assembly of minor parts of a tank chassis. Wearing a white smock, he looked like the automobile engineer that he used to be. Graduating with honors from the University of Tokyo, Abe had immediately gone to work for Mitsubishi, designing most of their current line of automobiles. Recently, he had participated in developing, hell, he developed, the Mitsubishi AH-X helicopter with the new twenty-nine-hundred-horsepower turbo shaft engine.

  He spoke briefly with a technician and moved along the production facility, which was brightly lit. Robots moved in short, hydraulic spurts, placing a widget here or a gadget there, and at the end of the line came a tank or a helicopter. The sound of men speaking Japanese was evident above the constant clanking of the assembly line.

  How the Japanese engineers had ever constructed this plant was a mystery to Abe. Carved into the side of a mountain, it seemed more like a huge white cave to him. He was amazed and at the same time not surprised by the abilities of his countrymen. It was his understanding that there were three other similar facilities spread over the remote island. His particular plant was built into an old mining quarry. In essence, the Japanese had simply laid down a floor on the bottom and a big roof on the top. But the guts were state-of-the art robotics, pushing tanks and attack helicopters along two separate assembly lines.

  He was curious how the Philippine government could afford such a massive increase in their armed forces. He surmised that the Americans were paying for all of it, and construction of the facilities was another “peaceful” way for Japan to contribute to security in the region and contribute to the Global War on Terror. It made sense, and Mr. Taiku Takishi had told him that the United Nations was exploiting the strengths of member countries to create a stronger world that could fight terrorism at its roots.

  “Manufacturing is our strength,” Takishi had said. Abe did not personally know Takishi other than the fact that he appeared roughly every couple of weeks with 18 new workers for him, mostly foreigners, Chinese, Korean, and a few Japanese mafia. He knew that Takishi landed his float plane in Cateel Bay, walking the prisoners up the spine of the ridge to his plant location.

  But still Abe wondered, why the secrecy? What happened to the other teams that had already rotated back?

  The facility was located in the eastern mountain province of Mindanao just northwest of the small coastal town of Cateel and astride a river that provided waste runoff from the plant into Cateel Bay. He and his production team had rotated to Mindanao from Japan six months ago, replacing a team that had already been working six months. In three days, another team was to replace them, and he could go back to his family.

  He paused at a water cooler and drained two cupfuls. He pulled a picture of his wife and two girls from the breast pocket of his smock and stared at it. He missed them. He wondered if his two children, ages five and three, would remember him. He had not been allowed any phone or email contact with his family and was only permitted outside of the biosphere environment to exercise for thirty minutes daily.

  Abe exercised during that time, the only real stress relief he could find. He wore a bright orange Nike jogging suit when he ran. That way, no Filipino hunters would mistake him for a wild pig running through the jungle. The Japanese construction team, two years earlier, had built an exercise path through the jungle above the old quarry. It was perversely anachronistic—a modern arms-production facility with an executive jogging path in the Mindanao hinterlands, through which indigenous tribesmen occasionally wandered. The dense tropical rain forest made it seem like the facility and path both were out of place, not that the area had failed to modernize.

  The top of the plant was covered with dirt, and tropical growth renewed over the past two years. The running route was a dark tunnel of trees through the thick jungle, consisting of a circular kilometer and exercise stations every couple of hundred meters where the five or six high-level technicians could do push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, stretching, and balancing exercises. At each station was a sawdust pit off to the side of the gravel track, with signs that described how to use the appropriate equipment. For Abe, the exercise had become the only thing he looked forward to since his plant had gone to round-the-clock production. He couldn’t remember being so tired since Mitsubishi increased production in the mid 1990s in order to flood the American market.

  It was nearly five in the morning and time for Abe to get four hours of sleep before checking the nine o’clock shift. During his next shift, he would sneak out and relax his mind and body, he told himself. He summoned his vice president for operations and told him to take charge while he rested. The man dutifully obeyed. Abe walked past the constantly moving assembly line, looking at the many tank chassis, marveli
ng at the technology they were employing on these modern weapons.

  He knew very little about the military. He was a pacifist, having been raised in Japan’s post–World War II era. He advocated Article Nine of the Japanese Peace Constitution. He saw no need for Japan to be strong militarily when they could effectively compete in the world through economics. But he understood the need for other nations to have strong militaries, particularly countries such as the Philippines, where insurgency impeded all government headway.

  He opened the door to his cubicle of a room. As the plant manager, his accommodations were less spartan than the others’, but not luxurious by any stretch. Still, he had no television or radio. He was completely isolated from the outside world. The walls of the facility were as white as Abe’s smock. It was a sterile environment. Music from Japanese tapes poured through speakers in the work area.

  Before he entered his room, he paused and looked down the pristine white hall toward the glass door and guard station that separated the living quarters from the production area. Beyond his door in the other direction was the heavily guarded entrance. Abe felt secure with the guards there. Mr. Takishi had warned him about the rising tide of Islamic insurgency and how they would try to steal everything they had. It was good, he thought, that there were Japanese soldiers protecting his plant. He agreed that trucking the tanks at night to the port city of Davao was best, also, because it was then that they would be most secure from the wandering Abu Sayyaf bands.