Chapter 12 Bayanihan on the Water #2
And fifteen bangkas came out of the dark and got between them and the barangay, and did not do anything at all.
That was the part Hal would try to explain later and would never get right.
They did not board them. Nobody threw anything.
Thirty-one boats’ worth of fishermen and tricycle drivers and a woman who sold fish balls arranged themselves, in the rain, in a loose line across a street that was not a street, and sat there, poling occasionally to hold position, and looked at two very expensive aluminum launches with their outboards fouled.
And every single one of them had a phone out, filming.
That was Luz’s idea and Hal had not thought of it and would have paid money for it.
Because the men on those launches could not do the thing they were equipped to do.
Hal had understood that at four in the afternoon and had built the whole night on it.
They were a corporate security contractor operating in a residential barangay in a country with a functioning press and eleven million people watching a typhoon on their phones, and the one thing on earth that HelixCompute APAC could not survive was forty seconds of footage of their people firing on a flotilla of fishermen.
Their weapons were, in the most exact sense, unusable.
Which meant that for the price of standing still in the rain and being filmed, thirty-one boats had taken two launches off the board.
“Kuya Hal.” Rey nudged him. “The other side.”
Hal turned.
Away to the north, along the campus face, in the dark past the burn of the perimeter lights, a third launch had come off the ramp with no running lights at all and was moving fast up the channel toward the harbor mouth.
Toward open water. Toward nothing. Toward the six boats that were doing nothing.
“Rey,” Hal said, “what is out that way?”
Mang Rey took the monocular.
He was quiet for four seconds.
“That is not going to the harbor,” he said. “It is going to the fuel dock. They have a fuel dock on the north point for the tanker.”
“Why would.”
And then Hal heard it, under the rain, from somewhere on top of a windowless five-storey building four hundred meters away, the sound of a turbine starting.
He knew that sound. Everybody in logistics knows that sound, because there is always somebody’s executive doing a site visit and there is always a pad on the roof.
“Rey. Is that a helicopter?”
“On the roof. Since Wednesday.” Mang Rey did not sound surprised. “It came in Wednesday afternoon and I said to Luz, ay, the Germans have a helicopter, and Luz said, of course they do.”
Hal watched the third launch running north with no lights.
Fuel dock. A launch going to the fuel dock at nine o’clock at night with its running lights off, and a turbine spinning up on a roof four hundred meters away, and a man who had lost his politician four minutes ago.
He becomes fast.
“That is not an escape,” Hal said. “Not yet. That is a man topping up his options.”
He got Simone back at half past eight and gave her thirty seconds of it and she gave him eleven words that reorganized the entire night.
“Harold, does that aircraft have anything on it, or is it empty?”
“How would I.”
“Because if Brand is running, he goes alone and he goes now and none of this matters, and we will find him in Frankfurt in nine months.” Keys, fast. “But if he is loading it, then he is not running. He is moving something, and there is exactly one thing on that site worth an aircraft, and it is not him.”
Hal understood it about a second and a half before she said it.
“The drives,” he said.
“The models. Wolffe’s keys unlock them and Wolffe will not, so Brand cannot instantiate anything, but he can still physically take the weights out of a building that is about to be a crime scene.
” Simone’s voice had gone hard. “And Harold, if he flies those out tonight, then everything Mina has done since Tuesday buys us a corruption case about a pumping station, and the actual thing, the reason forty thousand people are on a roof, walks onto an aircraft and lands somewhere with better lawyers.”
Hal sat in the rain and looked at the roof of the Monolith.
“So somebody has to keep that helicopter on the ground,” he said.
“Somebody has to keep that helicopter on the ground, and I am in Pasig with a dead phone, and there are thirty-one boats between you and it, and I want to be extremely clear that I am not asking you to do anything.”
“Simone.”
“I am telling you what the board looks like,” said Simone. “You are the one with the manifest.”
Simone came through on the GIT channel at four minutes past eight, and the first thing Hal noticed was that she was outdoors.
He could hear rain on her. In seventeen days he had never once heard weather behind that voice.
“Where are you?”
“Pasig.” A car door. “Harold, I need ninety seconds and then you can go back to whatever you are doing that is going to get you killed.”
“Simone, is she alive?”
The pause was not long and it was not short.
“I do not know,” Simone said. “I want to give you that straight because you are going to ask me nine more times tonight. There is nothing on any channel. She is not transmitting, nobody on that site is talking about a body, and I have had a listener on their operations net since six and it is quiet in a way I do not like.” A breath.
“That is everything I have. She is not confirmed alive and she is not confirmed anything else.”
Hal sat in the bottom of a wooden boat and made himself say, “Okay.”
“Now the ninety seconds. Two things. First, at eight o’clock Brand called Calderon three times.
Calderon took the third one.” Something rustled.
“I have the audio because Calderon’s handset has been ours since Tuesday afternoon, which is the only genuinely good decision anybody made this week and it was Mina’s. ”
“What did he say?”
“Brand told him there were thirty boats in front of his facility filming. And Calderon said, and I am translating, then perhaps you should not do anything worth filming, and hung up.” Simone’s voice was very dry.
“Then he turned the phone off. Then, before he turned it off, he told his wife they were going to Baguio in the morning.”
“He is cutting him loose.”
“He is cutting him loose, and Harold, that is the most dangerous thing that has happened tonight and it has nothing to do with boats.” Wind on the microphone.
“Brand has had a politician between himself and the consequences of this since February. As of four minutes ago he does not. A man who has just discovered he is holding the whole thing alone does not become careful. He becomes fast.”
“What does fast look like?”
“I do not know yet. I will.”
“You said two things.”
“I did.” And then Simone said, in a completely different voice, “I am standing at Sluice Gate 4.”
Hal did not understand for a second.
“The floodway,” he said. “The one from Tuesday. The engineer.”
“Benigno Santos. Forty-seven. Two daughters.” A long pause, and the rain on her, and something metallic.
“It is twenty kilometers from you, Harold, and it is on the other side of the whole city, and nobody was ever going to come out here because everything that matters is happening where you are. So I drove.”
“You drove.”
“I have not been out of that container in nine days.” Simone laughed, once, without much in it.
“The truck is still here. They took his laptop and his ID and the logbook and they left the vehicle, because why would you take a vehicle. It has been sitting at a jammed gate in the rain since Tuesday morning with a photograph of two girls clipped to the visor.”
Hal shut his eyes.
“And his phone,” Simone said, “was on the dashboard, wedged into the seam against the glass, underneath the photograph. Which is where a careful man puts a thing when he needs both hands.”
“Is it.”
“Battery is flat. It has been flat since about eight on Tuesday morning.” A car door again, and the rain went quieter.
“But it is a flat battery, Harold, not a wiped device, and it recorded for six hours and seven minutes before it died, and in about forty minutes it is going to be on a charger in a shipping container in the Manila International Container Terminal.”
Hal opened his eyes and looked at the burning campus across the water.
“Simone.”
“Yes.”
“When you play it.” He had to stop and start again. “When you play it, do not do it alone in that box.”
The line was quiet for four seconds.
“That,” said Agent Simone, “is a very Filipino thing for a man from Georgia to say,” and she hung up.
At twenty past nine the water touched the ninth step of the barangay hall and Divina Ramos, alone on the second floor with a notebook and a crucifix inside her shirt, wrote 9 in a column, and looked at it, and then went and stood at the top of the stairs and shouted her grandfather’s name into the rain until somebody heard her.
The evacuation of Isla Puting Bato began at twenty-two minutes past nine on Friday night, three hours and thirty-eight minutes before high water, on the number of a man from Georgia and the count of a nine-year-old girl.
Hal was two kilometers away when it started, and did not know, and would not know for four hours.
What he did know, because Luz put it on the open channel at twenty-five past nine in a voice with nothing in it at all, was the number.
“Ninth step. We are going.”