Mindoro, Philippines—Then

 

“Lieutenant, let me tell you something.” Marine Gunner Shake Davis popped a lemon-lime Charms candy into his mouth and chased it with a swig from his canteen. “I’m more than a little disappointed. This patrol leader of yours couldn’t find his ass with a ten-man working party.”

“We didn’t get what was promised.” Lt. Ignacio Felodon paused in rolling one of the homemade cigarettes he smoked with cull tobacco wrapped in a bit of cornhusk. “We asked for the best men and the unit commanders sent us their problems.” Shake’s Philippine Marine counterpart on the Mobile Training Team had more to say but the discourse was interrupted by a raging torrent of Tagalog from deep in the bush to the right of their position.

“Sounds like Sergeant Mariano is ripping off another piece of the corporal’s ass.” Shake pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and checked his training schedule. The deep reconnaissance team they were trying to form was three events behind for the day. “Maybe it’ll do some good. We’re way behind the power curve.”

“He’ll be lucky if the sergeant doesn’t cut his balls off.” Felodon heaved himself up off the ground and massaged the knots in his thighs. Following a lost patrol up and down steep, jungle-covered hills was tough on everyone’s legs but the students needed to learn in a hurry. The constabulary command wanted a deep reconnaissance unit ready for active service in less than two weeks. “Do we still transition to night operations? Or do you want to hold off for another day or two?”

“We better go ahead and get into the night stuff, Ignacio.” Shake re-checked his sweat-stained schedule. “If the P-L doesn’t cut it, we’ll just have to send him home and hope we get a better replacement.”

Felodon nodded and started into the bush to retrieve the patrol but Shake caught him with an additional thought. “Ask Sergeant Mariano to come see me—after he’s done removing the patrol leader’s balls.” Felodon chuckled and disappeared into the green.

Shake was in the process of re-jiggering their Mindoro training schedule when he caught the squelch break on his radio. One of the two veteran U.S. Marine infantry NCOs he’d sent to conduct area reconnaissance for the night phase of their training program was calling from somewhere below the hill. He stretched for the handset and jammed it up against a sweaty ear.

“Tango Six. Send your traffic.”

“Tango Four Charlie, Six.” Staff Sergeant Steve Wyatt was calling, which meant he and Gunnery Sergeant Dick Liccardi had likely completed their area recon. “We’ve got two solid positions plotted. Alpha is a beach recon about one point five clicks from the harbor site. Bravo is a night ambush along that trail we spotted about two point five clicks out. Gunny and me are all set to play bad guys tonight with Sergeant Mariano. Which one you want to do, Boss?”

“Four Charlie, Six, we better go with Alpha. We send this patrol out any further and they’ll wind up in downtown Manila sucking balut.”

“Is it that bad up there, Boss?”

“Nah, we’ll get it done one way or another.” Shake looked around to be sure none of their Filipino cadre or students were within hearing. “But our little brown brothers are a couple of grid squares away from making a solid deep recon unit.”

“Copy all, Boss. We go with Alpha tonight. We’ll use the IBS and see if we can land without getting caught.”

Shake turned to replace the radio handset and found himself looking up at Sgt. Jubal Mariano of the Philippine Constabulary Special Action Force. The veteran commando was smiling down on him from no more than a foot away with his razor-sharp bolo bush-knife dangling from his right wrist. The guy moved like a snake in the bush. Shake pointed at the bolo and nodded.

“No blood on your blade. I guess our patrol leader has still got his balls?”

“Not for long if he doesn’t improve.” Mariano squatted on his heels and accepted the cigarette Shake offered him. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

Shake could hear the hapless five-man recon patrol returning with Lt. Felodon loudly alternating between lecturing and hectoring. “You’re a really good man, Sergeant Mariano. I’ve never seen anyone as good in the bush. I mean that.” Mariano bowed his head slightly to acknowledgement the compliment and waited silently for the other shoe to drop.

“Lieutenant Felodon is not gonna like losing you from the training team, but I’m going to recommend that you become patrol leader when this unit goes active. Is that gonna be a problem?”

“I go where I am needed, sir.” Mariano shrugged and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the returning patrol. “It’s probably for the best if this new unit is to be of any use against the Moros in the south islands.”

“OK, Jubal.” Shake smiled and remembered what he’d told his two NCOs after they got a good look at Sgt. Jubal Mariano working in the bush. If the Constabulary SAF had a couple dozen Sgt. Mariano clones, there wouldn’t be a guerilla problem in the south islands. “Keep this between us for right now. I’ll let Lt. Felodon know when the time is right.”

When the patrol broke into the clearing, Shake noticed that the patrol leader looked like a man who had been shot with a powerful shit pistol. Much more failure coupled with the impressive ass-chewing Felodon and Mariano delivered and the poor corporal would be suicidal. He turned to Felodon and nodded. “Lieutenant, please have Sergeant Mariano take the point. We’ll run a compass march back to the harbor site.” Shake broke out his lensatic compass and map. “Base course will be two-eight-zero magnetic. Tactical formation and flank security all the way.”

Felodon nodded at Mariano who preset his compass bezel to the designated azimuth and motioned for one of the patrol members to move out as marker. The disheartened patrol leader moved to fall in at the rear but Shake caught his elbow. “Let’s you and me work a parallel course, Corporal Velasquez. I’ll give you a hand and see if we can beat them back to the base.” The Filipino NCO smiled for the first time since he’d been working with the mobile training team.

Halfway down the mountain after some gentle coaching, Shake was gratified to note the SAF corporal seemed to be getting the hang of walking on a compass heading, circling around obstacles in their path and then returning to the base course. Sometimes it was just a matter of teaching them to keep the compass needle aligned and forget about the theory behind it all. The corporal seemed to be the kind of guy who could master the technique if he wasn’t bothered about why it worked.

Confident that they’d eventually find themselves emerging close to the objective, Shake just followed the man’s lead and let his mind wander back to the time when he’d been ordered to report to the commanding officer of the 31^st Marine Expeditionary Unit on Okinawa.

A mission that looked like a political turd in a military punchbowl had just landed on the colonel’s desk. Someone high up in the Philippine government wanted a special unit trained quickly, competently and very, very quietly. The objective was a unit of the Philippine Constabulary’s Special Action Force able to work deep and dark tracking Moro insurgents who were causing the Manila government more than a little international heartburn.

“You know the ropes down there, Gunner.” The colonel had been a student when Shake was a resident instructor at the prestigious Philippine Jungle Warfare School. “Pick yourself a couple of good staff NCOs, get down to the PI and get it done. And keep it off the radar.”

When the selected team stopped by the G-3 Operations shop on Okinawa for a detailed briefing, they discovered the reason for that final caution. There were elements in recently elected Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s government still smarting from the economic impact of the U.S. pullout of the Philippines in 1991. It was a self-inflicted wound primarily caused by economic blackmail and exorbitant rents on U.S. bases in the country but that didn’t keep the politicians from blaming everyone but themselves for the nation’s crumbling economy. And these days, Arroyo’s not-so-loyal opposition was even claiming the recent upsurge in Muslim separatist atrocities was proof that the arrogant Americans had left their loyal Filipino allies in a dangerous lurch.

What made it all worse was a rash of kidnappings that had recently spread from Mindanao as far north as the main island of Luzon. The Philippine military had been searching for a trio of American Christian missionaries taken by the Moro National Liberation Front at Baguio for weeks with no luck and no leads. International pressure—especially from Washington—was building and President Arroyo wasted no words in accusing her generals of everything from insubordination to incompetence. Frustrated with finger-pointing and backbiting in her regular military establishment, she decided to create a dedicated unit of national police trackers and reconnaissance specialists to feed her unfiltered information that she could act on quickly and directly. President Arroyo wanted an outfit that could out-guerilla the guerillas and she didn’t care how that unit got trained and fielded.

Her generals thought they were going to be publically humiliated as a bunch of incompetent, Third World stumble-bums who couldn’t defend the population. Calling on the Americans to save their collective bacon didn’t do much for their national pride and made it look like the whole business of tossing the Yanks out of the Philippines was a monumental blunder. They had to go along with the President’s program, but the generals and the admirals in Manila would be just as happy if the whole idea swirled down the crapper and took the Arroyo government with it. Enter Gunner Davis and his mobile training team, which spirited selected men over to the sparsely-populated island of Mindoro where they could work away from prying eyes.

Shake was so distracted chewing on that knotty political situation that he nearly ran over Cpl. Velasquez, who was kneeling at the edge of a clearing and grinning like he’d just gotten a meritorious promotion. The man snapped his compass shut with a decisive click and nodded for Shake to take a look through the tangle of brush at their front. No need for that. Shake could hear Gunny Liccardi’s shortwave radio droning away on the other side of the clearing. They were within spitting distance of the training team’s harbor site.

“Very good, Corporal!” Shake wrapped an arm around the delighted SAF trooper and decided he’d give the guy another shot at leading tonight. “You did an outstanding job…but you must be able to do it every time and all the time. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir, it’s not so hard if you trust this,” Velazquez looked at his lensatic compass as if it was the Rosetta Stone and then tapped his temple. “And this.”

“That’s right.” Shake poked him in the stomach. “Like the aviators always say, trust your instruments and ignore your gut.”

At dusk a much more confident Cpl. Velasquez led his patrol on a compass heading toward an isolated stretch of Mindoro beach. Assuming that they reached the designated spot, the recon unit would set up in three linear positions to observe the beach and watch for aggressor activity. Sometime in the early hours before dawn Gunny Liccardi, SSgt. Wyatt and Sgt. Mariano would paddle ashore in a rubber boat and try to slide by the observers onto the beach. Assuming the Velasquez patrol managed to spot the aggressors, they were to track them covertly to an objective inland where Shake and Lt. Felodon would be waiting to spring a blank-fire ambush. The two officers had spent a good part of the afternoon rigging a deadfall, a Malay gate and a bamboo whip as nefarious surprises for the patrol to either discover or trigger along the route.

It was inky black in the jungle by the time Shake and Felodon reached their planned ambush site. A quick, coded burst transmission on the Filipino net told them the patrol was in position where they thought they should be near the beach. Shake was snuggling into his poncho liner for a nap when his radio demanded attention. He checked the luminous dial of his watch. It was too early for the Gunny and his team to be calling.

“Tango Seven, Six. Send it.”

“Gunner, we’re about a mile offshore. There’s what looks like a fishing boat out here and the guys on it are rowing for the beach, right toward our landing area.”

“Copy all, Seven. Let ’em come. We’ll see what kind of spot-rep we get from our guys.”

“Might not be a good idea, Gunner. I think these guys are packing serious heat. They passed right by our pos and we saw a bunch of AKs and other gear.”

Shake’s pulse began to pound and he whispered for Felodon to dial up the American tactical frequency on his radio so he could monitor the conversation. “Interrogative, Seven. Did they spot you?”

“That’s negative, Gunner. Too dark out here and we were laying low in the water. Mariano got a good look and counted eight people and maybe five weapons. He says he thinks these dudes are bad guys for real. How copy?”

“Copy all. Wait out.” Shake turned to Felodon now sitting just a few feet away from him in the pitch dark. “What do you think?”

“I think maybe our training exercise has just become a combat operation, sir.” Felodon snapped on a red-lens flashlight and examined the frequency dials on his radio. “I also think we should call up the PC unit here on Mindoro and report the landing. I’m trying to remember the frequency…”

“Where’s the nearest PC station on this island?”

Felodon took a moment to think. In the glow of the flashlight, Shake could see by the set of the man’s features that he’d shifted into combat mode. “Calapan City…maybe fifty kilometers northwest.”

“Can you reach them on the radio?”

“Maybe.” Felodon used the red light to read a list of emergency frequencies he’d pulled from his map case. “I don’t think we can reach the central station from here, but they’ve got patrol vehicles with radios. Maybe I can raise someone on the guard frequency.”

“Give it a shot…” Shake was in no position to take chances with an armed band of guerillas. His guys had weapons but all their ammo was blanks. A firefight would be distinctly one-sided and lethal for them. “But before you do that, get Corporal Velasquez on the horn and tell him what’s up. Under no circumstances is he to reveal himself or his people to these guys if they land in his area. Tell him to just report what he sees and sit tight.”

“Tango Seven, Six.” Shake keyed his handset and tried to compute how long it might take a crew of what had to be MNLF guerillas to row a mile from sea to shore. He didn’t have much time to avoid trouble. “We’ve alerted our guys on the beach to sit tight and stay out of sight. Have you still got a visual on that boat?”

“Roger.” Gunny Liccardi’s voice was barely a whisper in the handset. “We’re behind them and off to their right. They’re pulling for shore and not checking Six.”

“Stay with them, Gunny. After they land and start inland, you guys police up our team and head for the harbor site. We’ll meet you there and figure out what to do about all this. Be quiet and be careful. We don’t want this thing turning into a fight.”

“Copy all, Six. We’ll push you on this freq when we’re ashore and secure.”

Shake gathered his gear and tried to work out an effective solution to their new problem while Felodon attempted to contact a PC patrol on the guard frequency. He was having no luck. Patrols normally monitored their own command frequency and only checked the alternate guard frequency occasionally. Felodon would keep trying to catch one of the few patrols on Mindoro but they needed to come up with a plan in case that failed. Contact between the training unit and the guerilla landing party was a losing proposition that would likely get some people killed. Best bet would be to let them pass unmolested, and then send some men to interdict one of the island’s few main roads where they’d be likely to run into a constabulary motor patrol. Then they could turn the problem over to people with real rounds in their weapons.

They were about halfway to the harbor site with Felodon regularly barking into his handset when the distinctive crack of AK-47 fire broke the stillness from the direction of the beach. Before he could retrieve his handset and ask for a report, Gunny Liccardi came up on the net. “Six…we’ve got problems. Either they spotted something or…” The rest of the report was lost in the roar and rattle of an M-60 machinegun. Unless the guerillas had one of their own, Velasquez’ machine gunner had fired a burst of blank ammo and it was probably going to get him killed in the next few minutes.

He heard Felodon shouting into his handset in Tagalog. Either he’d managed to contact a constabulary patrol or he’d switched to the tactical frequency and was talking to their men on the beach. As the firing dribbled off to isolated AK pops, Felodon provided an update on the situation.

“Corporal Velasquez reports one of the Moros nearly stepped on one of his men. He believes that man and one other in the same position are dead. He ordered the machinegun to fire to cover his withdrawal. Velasquez and two others are running for the harbor site. The Moros are pursuing…”

“Shit! I was afraid of that.” Shake chewed on the problem for a moment and then decided Cpl. Velasquez had made the right move. The guerillas didn’t know the patrol was firing blanks and that gave him an idea.

“Tell Velasquez to find a good hide and lay chilly. We’ll stage a diversion and pull them off his back.” As Felodon relayed the instructions, Shake grabbed his own handset and began to transmit to his team bobbing offshore in the rubber boat.

“Tango Seven, Six. Our patrol is moving out in the direction of the harbor site. They think they’ve got two KIA on the beach and the bad guys are in pursuit. We need to take the heat off of them. How far offshore are you now?”

“Six, Tango Seven is just off the surf line. You want us to pursue?” Gunny Liccardi didn’t sound anxious to set off chasing armed guerillas with nothing but blanks in their magazines.

“It’s on you guys, Gunny. Get on the beach ASAP and see if you can make ’em think they’re being chased from behind. Once you’ve got ’em stopped…” This was the hard part. Shake understood he was asking his veteran guys to engage in a firefight in which they couldn’t do any damage and could easily get killed in the effort. “Don’t take any unnecessary chances, but see if you can get them to chase you in the direction of our ambush site. Use that admin trail you found on the scout so you can move fast and get well ahead of them. I’ll have the lieutenant meet you on the trail with a chem light. Keep me advised as you can. How copy, over?”

“Copy all, Six. We’re headed for the beach now. Tango Seven out.” If it worked as Shake planned, Liccardi, Wyatt and Sgt. Mariano would distract the Moro element and set them on a tail chase away from Cpl. Velasquez and what was left of their training unit. What happened at that point Shake was still trying to work out as he led Lt. Felodon in the direction of their ambush site. The booby traps they’d prepared for Velazquez might serve to slow the bad guys down and maybe by that time they could feed this whole shit sandwich to the local Philippine constabulary. Felodon was back on the guard frequency, transmitting on the run and trying to reach a roving patrol.

They broke out of the bush and onto an open path that led in the direction of the ambush site. During the day, Shake and Felodon had rigged boobytraps along this trail hoping to teach their students an object lesson about taking the easy way in approaching an objective. It was one of Murphy’s most reliable laws of combat: The easy way is always mined or booby trapped. If Velasquez and his patrol had used the speed trail on the exercise they would have run alternately into a deadfall, a Malay gate, and a bamboo-whip, all traps that Shake had learned about the hard way in Vietnam and then taught to students in the Jungle Warfare School. Of course, the versions he and Felodon had rigged along the trail were minus the deadly barbs and other trimmings that made them lethal, but if he had enough time that might be able to remedy that tonight. It would be tight and they could use an extra set of experienced hands.

“Tango Seven, Six. Stay status, over.”

“Six, we are off the beach and heading northeasterly. We can hear the bad guys thrashing around up ahead but no more firing so far. We’re gonna find a place where we can hit them in a flank and then run like hell in your direction, over.”

“Roger all, Seven. You and Wyatt handle that. Send me Sergeant Mariano on the double. Tell him to use the speed trail.”

“Roger, Boss.” Gunny Liccardi didn’t sound happy about losing the help when he came back on the air about a minute later. “Mariano just left. He’s inbound to you somewhere along the trail. We’ll take a whack at these guys as soon as we can and then follow in trace.”

At a bend in the trail just ahead, Lt. Felodon was huddled over his radio, aiming a hooded flashlight at the Mindoro map spread on his knee. As Shake joined him, the Filipino Marine signed off and smiled. “I raised a mobile patrol. They are pulling in reinforcements now. Then they will head in our direction. They have requested we try to maintain visual contact with the Moros until they arrive.”

“How far out are they?” Shake didn’t mind doing a little real-world recon for his allies but these guys in the landing party were now on high alert and knew they’d been discovered by the military. That much would be obvious to them from the encounter on the beach.

Felodon did a quick map study using his thumb to measure road distance to the nearest possible intercept point. He didn’t look happy with the result. “Maybe two hours, maybe more, it depends on how long it takes them to get moving in our direction.”

“Tell them to move with all possible speed, Ignacio.” Shake thought it chancy at best and more than a little dangerous for his basically unarmed guys to track an armed, alert enemy to some unknown point for two hours. “We’ll do what we can once I’m sure our guys are safe.”

Felodon reached for his radio handset but Shake grabbed his elbow. “You wait here and make the call. I’ve got Sgt. Mariano headed this way on the run. Meet him and then both of you join up with me…” Shake snapped a green light stick to start the chemical reaction and then stuck the glowing cylinder in the low branches of a nearby shrub. “We’re gonna re-rig those boobytraps and see if we can do these guys some damage.”

Shake was working on the trail-sweeper deadfall, jamming sharpened bamboo spikes into a heavy ball of congealed jungle mud, turning an unpleasant object lesson into a potentially lethal surprise for the Moro guerillas, when he heard the first tinny bursts of M-16 rifle fire. Liccardi and Wyatt had found their spot and would now try to lure the guerillas into a very deadly game of bumper tag in the jungle. His ears told him they were less than a kilometer away. It would be tight but the game was on for real now.

He finished work on the deadfall and began to pull it back up into the treetops that formed a canopy over the trail. What had originally been a heavy but relatively harmless ball of mud was now something more akin to the spiked head of a medieval war club. It was rigged so that an encounter with the vine holding it aloft would send the barbed ball plunging down parallel with the trail and hopefully impale one or more people along its deadly path.

Just as he was re-tying the tripwire over the trail he heard footsteps at his rear and turned to see a greenish glow bobbing in the dark. Ten seconds later, Sgt. Jubal Mariano appeared on the trail leading Lt. Felodon toward the spot where Shake waited to keep them from running into his tripwire. Mariano had his blank-adapted weapon slung across his back and his bolo in hand. The chem-light was gripped between his teeth and cast a pale, eerie glow on his chiseled features. Both Filipinos slid to a knee, panting and listening to another burst of gunfire that rattled in the bush well off to their left. Both AK and M-16 fire this time.

“The Gunny and Staff Sergeant Wyatt will pull them onto the trail.” Shake pointed down the path and spit out a staccato burst of orders. “You two help me re-rig these boobytraps so they’ll do some damage. Ignacio, you take the Malay Gate. Get as many spikes into it as you can. Jubal, you’ve got the bamboo whip just up the trail from the gate. Same deal, spike it and rig it low. Maybe we can…”

Sgt. Mariano nodded but held up a hand to interrupt. “They have hostages, sir!”

“What?” Shake suddenly saw a bad situation getting immeasurably worse. “What kind of hostages?”

“One man…two women.” Sgt. Mariano stuck the light stick into a pocket of his uniform and took a deep breath. “All white. They are in pretty bad shape from what I could see.”

“They must be the ones from Baguio,” Felodon added. “It is no wonder we couldn’t find them on Luzon. They were moved off the island.”

“Shit! Can it get any more fucked up?” Shake was trying to decide whether or not to go on with his original plan. Civil-ians complicated matters considerably and he didn’t want to take a chance on getting them killed in some sort of high-speed, one-sided war game. “You guys got any suggestions, now’s the time to hear ’em.”

“The hostages are slowing their speed.” Sgt. Mariano stared off in the direction of another burst of gunfire from the bush to their left. “That works in our favor.”

“When they hit the traps, maybe we can cut them away from the Moros.” Felodon didn’t sound very confident. “Maybe we could hide them until the PC patrol arrives.”

“Any update on that?” Shake was running down the potential courses of action. He didn’t much like any of them.

“They are moving in our direction at high speed. One hour, maybe a little more.”

“It all sucks, gents. Let’s stick with the original plan. Jubal, find a place to intercept the Gunny and Staff Sergeant Wyatt. Be sure the Moros hit the trail and then start in this direction. Ignacio, you and I will do the re-rigs on the other traps and then try to run parallel with them as they move up the trail. If it looks like the hostages are in any kind of danger, we move in quick and see what we can do to rescue them.”

Shake waited for a nod of acknowledgement. There were no challenges to his command or his ideas. “If that happens, Jubal, you and the other two Marines come running and we all pile on. Questions?”

There were none. They all knew the long odds they were facing.

 * * *

Waiting on his belly with his heart pounding in his chest, Shake Davis heard a few rounds of AK fire crack through the darkness. His trained ears estimated the range of the trigger-pullers to be less than a hundred meters down the speed trail to his left. He was in position at the fulcrum of the deadfall’s intended swing with Sgt. Mariano just behind him with his bolo at the ready. Lt. Felodon was to his right about thirty meters up the trail near the Malay gate he’d rigged with bamboo spikes and suspended over the path. The idea was to try to corral the hostages and shuttle them off into the bush during the confusion after one or more of the boobytraps were sprung. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all they had right now.

Off to his left, Shake could just make out the dim glow of the chem-light he’d planted as a signal for Gunny Liccardi and SSgt. Wyatt to keep them from running into the traps. He could hear their pounding footsteps intermingled with short bursts of blank fire from their rifles. Suddenly, the chem-light disappeared and he heard SSgt. Wyatt’s coarse whisper.

“Last man!”

That meant his two Marines had policed up the light and turned off into the jungle. As their pursuers sent a ragged burst of ball ammo up the trail in his direction, Shake turned over his shoulder and felt for Sgt. Mariano’s bolo. “Give me the blade, Jubal. You grab for the hostages and get them gone in a hurry. You’ll do better with them in the bush.” Mariano didn’t argue or discuss the matter. He released his grip on the blade and acknowledged the order with a tap on Shake’s leg.

The Moro point man came into sight at a bend in the trail and slowed his rush, listening for sounds from the people he was pursuing. Shake could barely make out two more guerillas behind the point and suspected that the hostages would be somewhere around fourth in line with two more armed men behind them if Liccardi’s count was correct. If they got lucky and the deadfall took out the lead man, he’d have to deal with the guys walking slack and drag behind the point while Mariano did what he could to hustle the hostages off the trail. That meant the two guerillas walking tail-end Charlie in the formation would be a major problem, but there was little he could do about that now.

Firing from the hip, the lead Moro sent a burst up the trail, said something to the men behind him and then began to advance. Shake silently gathered his legs beneath him ready to spring as the guerillas approached his tripwire. This guy was no amateur, but he wasn’t expecting booby traps and his attention was riveted straight ahead. He never even looked down as his foot snagged the vine Shake had rigged to trigger the deadfall. The point man froze as he heard the rustle in the branches that formed a canopy over the trail but he was too slow to avoid the forty-pound ball of mud that smacked him directly in the chest, driving two bamboo spikes through his ribcage.

Shake sprang from the bush swinging the bolo like a meat-axe and caught the slack man in the neck with the blade. His victim fell hard dragging Shake down on top of him as the next guerilla in line triggered a burst from his AK-47. Shake heard the rounds snap past his ears as he struggled to regain his footing. He whipped the bolo around with a roundhouse swing and felt the blade bite into wooden fore-grip of the third guerilla’s rifle. With the bolo out of play, Shake made a grab for the guerilla to keep him from getting his rifle back into action. Off to his left he saw Sgt. Mariano thrashing his way into the bush with what looked like two females; one under each arm. The third hostage was lying on the trail curled into a protective ball, either hit or playing possum while the deadly action swirled around him.

Grabbing his wheezing opponent by the throat, Shake pushed him violently backward and toppled onto him as they stumbled over the prostrate body. That body moaned and squirmed, which let Shake know he still had one hostage left to rescue even if he managed to dispense with the current problem before the remaining two guerillas caught up to the ambush. He could hear their shouts as they pounded up the trail headed in his direction, but he was locked into a lethal struggle with his current opponent and it was all he could do to keep the wiry little bastard under some modicum of control. Even as he groped for a weapon to fill his free hand, Shake understood he was likely to die in the next few seconds or become a fourth MNLF hostage.

“Gunner, haul ass out of there!” Gunny Liccardi’s shout was almost lost in the deafening bark of two M-16 rifles ripping through thirty-round magazines on full-automatic. Within seconds, their blank fusillade was answered by long, crackling bursts from AK-47s firing the real deal. Liccardi and Wyatt had bought him some time by initiating a firefight with the two trailing guerillas but they couldn’t stick around and trade rounds. He had to act fast.

Shake jammed his free hand into the tight space between his body and the guerilla’s, looking for some way to retrieve the bolo or come up with some other weapon that would end the struggle decisively. His fingertips jammed painfully against the AK’s curved magazine and he wedged his hand in deeper, feeling for the magazine release while he tried to keep the desperate guerilla pinned to the ground. Finally, he found the paddle-shaped lever, tugged at it and felt the magazine pop free of the weapon. He jerked it free of their embrace and jammed the sharp edge of the magazine into the guerilla’s face.

The man thrashed violently as Shake kept jamming the magazine into his face. To escape the punishment, the guerilla turned his head. Shake spotted a target of opportunity and delivered a stout blow to the temple. He felt the man go slack, pushed away and looked around him for the third hostage. He was about halfway into the trailside bush, doing a low-crawl and yelling for Dora and Audrey in a panicky, adrenaline-choked falsetto. Shake grabbed his ankles and hauled him back onto the speed trail.

“U.S. Marines! We gotta get you out of here! Let’s go!” Shake gripped the stunned hostage at the elbow and started him up the trail. It was like hauling an uncooperative drunk out of his favorite bar. The man kept shouting that he wouldn’t leave Dora and Audrey. Above the babble, Shake could hear shouted orders from down the trail. The remaining guerillas were getting reorganized to take up the pursuit. He was about to throw the struggling man over his shoulder when Lt. Felodon suddenly appeared. He was pointing up the trail.

“Take him and go!” He made a dash for the middle of the path where the point man lay bleeding out with the deadfall still locked to his chest by the bloody bamboo spikes. “Sergeant Mariano is waiting for you with the two women where the trail meets the primary road.” Felodon grabbed the wounded man’s AK, retrieved the magazine and quickly chambered a ready round. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Shake whirled the male hostage around and tried to inject some element of calm into his voice: “There you go, see? My friends have got Dora and Audrey just up the trail here. They’re safe. Now let’s go join them.” The hostage turned docile and nodded. There were still live booby traps on the trail, so Shake pulled the man into the bush where they could run a parallel course toward the juncture. Felodon now had a weapon loaded with live ammo and he was more than capable of either killing or capturing the two remaining guerillas.

By the time he’d carefully worked the exhausted hostage past the Malay gate position, Shake heard two short bursts of AK fire; same weapon, no return. Apparently, Felodon opted for the former course of action over the latter, a good move given their circumstances. He stepped out onto the trail, sat the hostage near a tree and handed over his canteen. The man chugged greedily from it.

Shake was reaching for his radio handset to call off the dogs and reassemble his forces when a small caliber shot came from the opposite side of the trail, tore through his left hamstring and sent him spinning to the ground near the hostage. The pain was intense, but Shake knew from first-hand experience it wasn’t lethal. He shoved at the hostage trying to get the man out of the line of fire but any escape was cut off by the guerilla that emerged from the bush aiming a Makarov pistol at them. The right side of the Moro’s face was bruised and swollen. Dried blood was caked along his scalp line and his right ear was mangled. One fuck-up is all it takes, Shake thought as he watched the man he should have killed in the initial struggle walk toward him, clearly intent on not making a similar mistake.

The guerilla seemed puzzled for a moment as he stood aiming the pistol at Shake’s head. He kept cutting glances at the missionary apparently trying to decide whether it was better to kill the man who’d maimed him or recapture the hostage. Shake averted his eyes, figuring he could do without seeing the trigger squeeze and muzzle blast that ended his life. Just to his left he saw the three stones they’d piled alongside the trail to mark the location of the bamboo whip, the last of the pre-rigged booby traps they’d prepared. Just to the right of the marker he spotted the vine that kept the green bamboo branch bent back under pressure. If he was very lucky and had just a few seconds left before the guerilla made up his mind, there might be a way out of this fix.

Shake held up his hands to signal surrender and struggled painfully to stand. As he had expected, the guerilla backed away out of arm’s reach and right into the center of the trail. Shake bent low as if to help the hostage to his feet and kicked hard with his good leg to snap the tripwire. The bamboo whip whirred viciously over his head and caught the wounded guerilla right in the throat. There had been no time to re-rig the trap with spikes but the brutal impact of the bamboo was enough to knock the man off his feet. Shake stamped hard on the guerilla’s right wrist and twisted the pistol out of his hand. As the surviving guerilla lay gasping on the ground he looked up into the muzzle of his own weapon.

The encounter had been over for 45 minutes when the Philippine constabulary patrol rolled up to the road juncture in three jeeps that bristled with weapons. An officer jumped out of the lead vehicle and stood staring at the four dead guerillas Gunny Liccardi and SSgt. Wyatt had lined up neatly alongside the road. Lt. Felodon trotted over, grabbed the officer by the elbow and steered him toward the surviving guerilla who sat opposite his dead buddies, his hands and feet tightly bound. Also on that side of the road, Cpl. Velasquez and his surviving men had laid out their slain comrades covered with ponchos.

Shake sat with the other survivors—three missionaries who had been run rough-shod all over the northern Philippines by their MNLF captors for the past six weeks—and tried to explain what had happened to set them free. Given his orders to maintain a low profile, he was doing a lot of weasel-wording and trying to decide how much information to provide. He was saved by the throbbing chop of helicopter rotors. A pair of Philippine Air Force Huey’s blew low over their heads and wheeled into pedal-turns looking for a suitable landing zone. He could tell by the polish and paint that they carried VIPs. Shake had the uncomfortable feeling his low-profile mission had just emerged blatantly onto the international skyline.

It didn’t surprise him all that much when the guy who crashed through the bush from the landing zone to the road junction wearing a suit and tie introduced himself as the military attaché to the American Ambassador to the Philippines. “What we have here, Mr. Davis,” said the attaché, “is a bit of a sticky wicket.”

 * * *

 During a hushed meeting at the Presidential Palace in Manila, the hostages were debriefed prior to a press conference. They were all God-fearing, patriotic Americans so it wasn’t hard to convince them that it was in the interest of their country if they credited the entire rescue to Philippine forces. In fact, warranted the President of the Philippines and the U.S. ambassador in the name of his president, if the presence of American Marines during their dramatic rescue was kept secret for the next fifty years, the missionaries could be guaranteed official support of their worldwide mission for at least that long.

President Macapagal-Arroyo was satisfied with granting her generals and their Special Forces soldiers full credit for tracking the guerillas and rescuing the hostages. Her generals were delighted to accept the credit, quit making public noises about coups and throw their wholehearted support behind her administration. They were, after-all, clearly capable military superstars now that they’d shown their mettle in the hostage rescue. Lt. Ignacio Felodon and to a lesser extent Sgt. Jubal Mariano, became instant international heroes of the all-important counterinsurgency game. Their photos and suitably humble quotes were flashed around the world.

Gunner Shake Davis, with yet another bullet hole in his hide suffered in service to his nation, policed up GySgt. Dick Liccardi and SSgt. Steve Wyatt from isolation in Quezon City and swore them to secrecy. The next morning at zero-dark-thirty they were whisked back to Okinawa in an unmarked aircraft. Before they left Manila, the Philippine president sent an emissary with classified letters of commendation and four cases of cold San Miguel beer. She also sent her promise that someday in the future she would call them back for appropriate recognition by a grateful nation.