Sudden Threat (7 page)

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.

“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, marveling 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.

He closed and locked his door behind him. His room was about seven meters wide and five and a half meters deep. He had a bed, sink, shower, and toilet area; desk area with nearly thirty books; and a closet and chest-of-drawers area. It was not unlike his dorm room at the University of Tokyo. Littered about his desk were pictures of his wife and girls. His wife, Nagimi, was a beautiful woman in her late thirties. She had black hair and a huge grin that produced dimples in her cheeks. In one picture, she was kneeling, looking up at the camera and wearing an oriental robe. Sitting at his desk, he got out his notebook to make another entry in his journal.

“
April 2002. I have only three days remaining until the next team arrives to plant number three. Soon, I will joyously return home to my lovely wife and children. I can’t wait. But must. I can feel the spirit of my family in my soul.
Oddly, we have continued to increase production of tanks at a rapid pace. We are making nearly twenty a day now.
I hope and pray that these weapons bring peace and security to the Filipino people and help the fight against the terrorists. If in some small way, I have made the world a safer place through the production of these weapons, then I will have fulfilled a duty that I always wanted to pursue. If these weapons, however, only add to the fighting and suffering in the world, then I am ashamed of my time here and will, of course, be responsible for my actions. At the very least, I have fulfilled an obligation to my prime minister, and I am happy about that. A new poem:

The path is my way/a way to peace you say/the path is my guide/my temple to pray/it moves past me/as only I can see/my motives are/to make these people free/gravel beneath and green above/it is the dove/I hope/and not the fisted glove/that comes flying toward/these people so moored/to their misery.

Three days and counting.

Abe closed the book and placed it in his desk drawer. He had religiously written similar thoughts in the journal every night since his arrival. He thought he might try to publish his collection of poems. It was an escape for him, like writing the fabled poison-pen letter that never gets sent to whom it is directed—at least it makes you feel better, he thought. He walked to the sink area and washed his face. Looking in the mirror, he noticed new wrinkles in his face. He was aging quickly. Perhaps all of the stress and worry had gotten the best of him. After brushing his teeth, he urinated and climbed in bed. He set his alarm clock for 8:30 a.m.. That would give him enough time to wake up, shave, shower, dress, and report for the 9:00 a.m. shift. After all, the commute was short.

Lying in bed, as he thought of his two girls, he wept silently. He had to be strong. Even though he was only a few days away from rejoining his beloved family, the battery in the clock seemed to be weak, dragging the second hand slower and slower each day. Sometimes, it almost seemed to stop.

Soon, he would run on the jungle path. That would make him stronger.

CHAPTER 10

Special Forces Major Chuck Ramsey watched Sergeant First Class Jones set up the tactical satellite radio so that he could inform Okinawa and the U.S. embassy in the Philippines that he had control of eleven of his twelve team members and one Filipino Ranger that had survived the jump.

The news was not good, but it always got worse with age. The two men quietly huddled in a thick crop of elephant grass, toying with the satellite antenna. Overhead, monkeys spoke their primordial language, screeching at one another through the green of the mahogany leaves. The blazing sun hung in its afternoon position over the western mountain ranges, its unfiltered rays blasting them with heat.