Colonel Parsons said that had already been agreed upon. “You don’t have to take just my word for it, Mr. Evans,” he said. “The guarantee comes right from the top.”

  (The top? I wondered. Where was the top? Who was the top?)

  The meeting lasted little more than an hour. I never saw McCausland, Evans or Silverhorn again. Colonel Parsons, who had more than enough to drink, “persuaded” me to accompany him to the hotel bar, where he continued to drink.

  “I’m glad you came in with us,” he told me after a while, “because I like you and know you’re a good man. You got in on the ground floor and there will come a time when you’ll come to me and say, ‘I owe it all to you, Noel my friend.’ I tell you, we can’t miss. The Filipinos may put up a bit of a squawk, but all that’s been worked out. A few people may get clobbered, but that can’t be helped. You can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. We’ll be in the driver’s seat before the little brown bastards know what’s happening.”

  I had to take Colonel Parsons home in a taxi.

  Sanders’ next entry was made on September 22, 1941. It read:

  This morning I took my findings to Douglas MacArthur and he listened in his usual impassive manner, then said quite simply, “I don’t want to hear any more about it. That is all.”

  For once, I attempted to argue with him, to make him see the truth of my accusations; all he did was repeat, “That is all, you are dismissed.”

  I read that entry again, trying to visualize the scene between the two men, one imperial and aloof, the other trying to keep his temper and barely making it. It “played,” as actors say, because MacArthur was the kind of man who could never admit that a conspiracy was taking shape right under his nose. What he didn’t know didn’t exist, or if it did, it wasn’t of much importance.

  If the diary could be believed, and I was beginning to believe it, Sanders was bitterly disappointed by MacArthur’s frosty reaction; he was an angry man, but he wasn’t mad at the guy with the crushed cap and the corncob pipe. In the entries that followed his brief meeting with MacArthur, he raged against the conspirators, trying to make up his mind about what he should do. These entries were interesting only because of the picture they gave of Sanders himself. He wondered if he should go to army intelligence and decided that would be disloyal to Big Mac.

  “Besides,” he wrote, “they might not believe me, might even consider me deranged, and that would be the end of my career. My strongest inclination is to resign from the army, but how can I do that when Douglas MacArthur needs me? There are bad days ahead and so I must remain in the service of my country.”

  For all his bitterness and anger, or because of it, Sanders continued his association with the men he called “those swinish traitors, those Benedict Arnolds in high places,” and additional names were named, including a brigadier general, a powerful Filipino senator high up in the Nacionalista Party; a U.S. Navy submarine commander; and a former and unofficial advisor to President Roosevelt. This went on all through November of 1941, and at one point, late in the month, Sanders wrote: “For all their careful planning, for all their wealth, connections and power, they are worried as war grows ever closer in spite of their best efforts to prevent it. Their dream of empire is so close they can’t believe that it may slip from their sweaty hands. I know it’s sinful to pray for war, but that’s what I do. War, in a way, would put an end to all this.”

  It did.

  On December 7, 1941, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

  The rest of the bulky diary dealt with Sanders’ war experiences, his promotion to brigadier general, his service in Korea, his decision to resign after MacArthur was fired. I read the last page and closed the leatherbound book. I knew it wasn’t a fake. Mrs. Sanders had been lying. I looked across the fire at Mohammed Nabi and he was smiling, but nothing was said just then. I sat there, wanting time to think. It didn’t matter what the diary was; I still had the problem of how to stay alive. Finally Mohammed Nabi said, “You didn’t eat much, do you want more food?”

  I said yes and the guard gave it to me. I ate stringy chicken, chewing every bite like you’re supposed to, wondering what the hell I was going to do. I could try to make a run for it and hope they’d kill me, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. They would run me down and tie me hand and foot. Sure as hell, I wasn’t going to sign anything. Then would come the torture. Maybe Mohammed Nabi would leave that till morning.

  I was going over other unpleasant ideas when Mohammed Nabi stood up and said, “Well, Yankee, you’ve read the general’s diary from cover to cover. What do you think of it?”

  “It’s a phony,” I said.

  Chapter Five

  MOHAMMED NABI HAD learned English in China, and was fluent in a stiff sort of way, but it didn’t include slang words like “phony.” Failing to understand, he became dangerous in an instant.

  “What did you say, Yankee?”

  “I said the diary is a fake, a fraud. There isn’t a word of truth in it. I already told you the old man made it up to get revenge on his enemies.” Mohammed Nabi came around the fire, followed by the two AK-47-toting guards. They grinned at me, hoping to see some pain inflicted. They were all set to work me over, but Mohammed Nabi stopped them with a snap of his finger. His eyes regarded me with infinite contempt.

  “You are a lying fool,” he said. “Everything in the diary is true. I could see it in your eyes as you read it. You tried to conceal it, but there were moments when it showed through. I can tell, I have been trained to tell truth from lies. And you, Yankee, are lying.”

  The son of a bitch wanted the diary to be the real thing, was so convinced of its authenticity that he was ready to do anything to prove his point. Having his opinion questioned made his black eyes glitter with cruelty.

  “The diary is a fake,” I repeated.

  He forced himself to be calm. “Is there any way you can prove what you are saying?”

  “Not without Mrs. Sanders to back me up. She told me it was a fake and I believe her. Why should an old woman lie about the contents of her dead husband’s diary?”

  “Because she has been threatened by some of the men named in the diary. They have threatened to kill her if the book isn’t recovered and destroyed. That is the reason she lied to you. You were not supposed to believe what was in it.”

  “If these men who threatened her know about the book, then why didn’t they send their own agents to get it?”

  Mohammed Nabi slapped my face, but it was a love tap compared to what I had been through earlier. Yeah, he’s going to torture me, I thought, and he wants me fully awake when he does it.

  He thought for a moment, trying to get his Marxist logic together. Then he said, “Perhaps you are one of their agents?”

  “You keep changing your mind,” I said. “First you said I was CIA, now I’m a hired thug in the pay of traitors.”

  He thought he had me there. He was intelligent, but his mental processes weren’t too well oiled. “Then you know they are traitors?”

  “You said that, not me.” That should have earned me another slap. It didn’t.

  He tried another tack; this time it was bribery. I guess the Chinese had convinced him that all Americans were dumb as well as evil. “Rainey,” he said, “there is no need for any of this. When we first captured you, you told me you were a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. Well, I cannot approve of such a profession, but after all what you do is not my concern. We are fighting the government of Ferdinand Marcos, and the Americans are only indirectly involved. I repeat, our fight is against the Filipinos, not the Americans. Do you follow my reasoning?”

  I nodded.

  “Very well then,” he went on, the lunatic bastard. “It took twenty thousand dollars that was to have gone for the purchase, the ransoming, of the diary. Now I am prepared to return the money—we have all the money we need—and to set you free, to give you back your life, provided you admit that the diary is authentic.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your word?” I wanted to know.

  “Because there is nothing to be gained by killing you. All you have to do is nod and we will take you to the coast. You will be richer by twenty thousand dollars and no one will ever know about it.”

  I took a deep breath. “The diary is a fake,” I said, knowing that I wasn’t going to get any more offers.

  Marxist or not, I think he was glad the question and answer session was at an end. He wanted the glory of having recovered an invaluable piece of anti-American information. Just the same, he was a Moro and cruelty was second nature to him. He spoke to the guards and they took hold of me, but there were no more slaps, not even a hard shove. They stripped off my clothes and tied me to a tree. One of them tied my penis with a piece of string, so tight that red spots of pain danced in front of my eyes.

  “Now we will fill you full of water,” Mohammed Nabi said calmly. “We will keep pouring water into you until your bladder bursts. That will take some time and the agony can’t even be imagined. To stop it, all you have to do is to tell the truth.”

  Talk, you stupid son of a bitch, I told myself. What the fuck does it matter? Talk and you’ll get a quick bullet through the head. I was still fighting with myself when someone came running and there was a babble of words. The only one I understood was “radio.”

  Suddenly I found myself unbound, my penis untied. The pain was so great that I would have fallen to the ground if the guards hadn’t caught me in time. The water that was to have been forced down my throat was now being poured over my throbbing dick. Then the sons of bitches carried me to the fire and covered me with a blanket. A bottle was held to my mouth and I drank from it. Whatever it was, it was good and strong and I gagged before I got used to it and drank as much as I could. By the time they took the bottle away I was feeling no pain in more than one respect. I lay back gasping.

  It doesn’t take long to get drunk if you drink about half a pint of liquor in one go. Mohammed Nabi’s face was bent over me and I tried to kick it as hard as I could. He pulled back, but didn’t go away. I think he looked worried.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” I yelled up at him. “You fucking sadist, what do you think you’re doing? Answer up, you donkey driver, before I cut your fucking throat!”

  I don’t know what else I called him, but it must have been plenty. “Calm yourself, Rainey,” he said soothingly. “Sleep and we will talk later. There will be no more pain.”

  Drunk as I was, I heard the anger behind his soft words. Something had happened to change things, but what it was, I had no way of knowing. I tried to think and found it impossible. I went to sleep.

  When I woke up it was still dark and I was still under the blanket. Mohammed Nabi squatted beside me, the bottle in his hand, wanting to know if I needed another drink. Overhead the Asian sky was full of stars.

  “Water,” I said.

  Mohammed Nabi put the bottle aside and held a canteen to my mouth. The water in it was fresh and cold and tasted better than anything I could remember. Sober now, I could only wonder that I was still alive when all the odds said I should be dead. The stars were bright, but I could tell it was getting on toward morning.

  “What happened to the water torture?” I said, thinking I’d never be right if I didn’t kill this man.

  “There will be no more of that,” he answered. “My orders are to bring you to regional command. What happened was a mistake, but I had no orders to the contrary.”

  I remembered the single word “radio” I was able to understand through the babble and the pain. “You got your new orders by radio?”

  “Yes,” he said, apparently too worried to ask how I knew. “Regional command said you were to be taken there for questioning.”

  “I didn’t know I was that important.”

  “You must be very important, or regional command would not have ordered me to bring you there. My orders are that you are not to be harmed in any way. Will you tell them that I mistreated you?”

  I was beginning to think he really was crazy when I realized he was nothing but a peasant with a quickly applied Marxist veneer that kept coming unglued. Like they say: you can take the boy out of Mindanao, but you can’t take Mindanao out of the boy. He longed so hard for the approval of his Communist masters; now he was afraid and ashamed because he thought he had let them down.

  “All they have to do is look at me to see I was mistreated,” I said. “Why did you do it?”

  “I had no orders to the contrary,” he said. “When they radioed that you had been sent to Mindanao to recover the diary, all I was ordered to do was to find the diary before you did. I did find it. I had no orders about you. You were not important at that time. Then when I was called to the radio, they told me how important you were without explaining why they thought so. All they said on the radio was that the old woman who sent you had been killed and you must be captured and brought to regional command and not to be harmed on the way.”

  It was hard to keep the surprise out of my voice. “Mrs. Sanders has been murdered?”

  “That is what regional command told me. My friend the radio operator told me. We are both from the same village.”

  Well, there it was: the old lady had been knocked off and I was on my way to what Mohammed Nabi called “regional command.” Somebody had killed the lying old broad, but one guess was as good as another. Who had done her in? President Marcos’ secret police? A hired killer working for one of the “traitors” named in the diary? Maybe, I thought, it was just a burglar.

  I asked Mohammed Nabi and he said regional command hadn’t given him that information.

  “How did regional command know about the diary?” I asked.

  “They didn’t tell me,” he repeated like a fucking parrot.

  The housekeeper? I asked myself. Who else could it be? No one else knew I was coming to Manila, or why. No one else had the opportunity to eavesdrop while I was talking to Mrs. Sanders. I voted for the housekeeper because she was the only candidate on the ticket. Her betrayal might not be intentional; someone in her family, if she had a family, might be a member of the Philippine Communist Party or one of its militant arms, the People’s Liberation Army, the National Liberation Front. A whispered confidence in the wrong ear, this or that, who could tell? Or, to keep it simple, she might have sold the information to the Communists for a few dollars. Few things happen by accident: there’s usually a motive.

  “It will not be good for you when we reach regional command,” Mohammed Nabi said, as if talking to himself.

  Tough shit, I thought; things would be even worse for him if I could get to him first. “How can they blame you for what happened?” I said. “You had no orders to the contrary.”

  “True,” he agreed. “But regional command will not care about that. We are taught to anticipate trouble and to avoid it. But I am glad you weren’t dead when I was called to the radio. That is something in my favor.”

  “Mine too,” I said, thinking that of all the weird characters I’d met in my time, this one was probably the weirdest. “I suppose I can expect to be treated well from here on in?”

  Mohammed Nabi nodded solemnly. “You will be treated very well. There is nothing to worry about.”

  Like hell there wasn’t. Just the same, I was alive and anything could happen on the way. Always look on the bright side, I always say.

  “We will start as soon as you dress in your new clothes,” Mohammed Nabi said. “I took your measurements while you slept. We have supplies and extra clothing here. At least your clothes will not look as if they have been mistreated. That, too, will be in my favor.”

  He handed me Cuban Army fatigues, shirt, boots, socks, belt, Fidel Castro cap, and I got dressed. By the time I finished, the sun was coming up and the men were cooking breakfast. I got some kind of Moro pancakes smeared with honey and more of that sweet tea. As I ate, the Moros looked at me with an interest that hadn’t been there before. Last night all I’d been was a miserable American foreigner to be kicked and spat on; now I was being taken to give a regional command performance. Still eating, I turned to look at the tree where I had been tied and found it hard to suppress a shudder. In a few minutes it was time to move out.

  The hills began to turn into mountains. Sixty percent of the Philippines is mountainous, with hills and very few flat places in between. The mountain we were climbing was thick with tropical growth; once there had been rice terraces here, but now they had been abandoned, their peasant proprietors scared off by the war. The country, especially in the south, is hot and wet, and it rained before we had been on the march for half an hour. Then the rain stopped and the green mountain steamed in the morning sun. It went on like that for several hours: sudden downpours followed by sun and steam. You sweated like a pig, then you got a bath, then you sweated again.

  We crossed the top of the mountain, went down into a narrow, swampy valley that once had contained rice paddies, then started to climb an even higher mountain on the far side. Climbing up through the rain forest that clung to the side of this mountain, I saw snakes, a lot of striped snakes slithering in the wet brush. The Moros paid no attention to them, and neither did I, though I watched where I put my feet. Mohammed Nabi saw what I was doing, so I asked him if the snakes were poisonous.

  “Very deadly, but few snakes are aggressive,” he told me. “You are safe, Rainey: the men ahead of you scare them off. You will not die of snakebite before you reach regional command.”

  Now it was “Rainey” all the way; no more “Yankee,” or “capitalist running dog,” or “fascist pig,” or any of the other names he had called me in the early stages of our friendship. I half expected him to ask me to put in a good word for him at regional command; that would have been too much, even for him. But the vicious, confused son of a bitch couldn’t have been nicer; he was scared shitless of what regional command might do to him for his mistreatment of an important prisoner who had some of the important answers they wanted. A more experienced guerrilla would have known better; this one had been given a command and sent into the wilds where the only people he had to deal with were frightened farmers. In a “civilized” Communist country his bosses might yell at him, but they’d hardly shoot him. But this was the Philippines, so maybe he had good reason to be shaking in his shoes.

 

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