Loki's Fire

1

Miguel Vega

Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Manila, Philippines

They call it the Philippines Protectorate, short for the Chinese People’s Philippines Protectorate, and I’m in line to clear customs. While I’m in line, I’ll bring you up to speed. My story doesn’t begin here in line, and I don’t want to go back too far. Just far enough for things to make sense and to put everything in context for you. My father, Rear Admiral Adam Turner, had been Director, National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO) when he retired. As things went to hell in a hand-basket politically in the country, he punched out of the US Navy and his oldest son, which would be me, ceased to exist in the same week. There had been a car accident, body burned beyond recognition, dental records confirmed the death of Timothy Adam Turner, as Miguel Vega, rose like a phoenix from the ashes at the tender age of twenty-two, and where better to have that happen than Phoenix, Arizona? It’s a long way from Annandale.

Miguel (Mike) Vega, an orphan, raised in Arizona by a foster family now deceased, holding a bachelor’s degree in English (backstopped), from Arizona State University, applied for a commission in the US Marine Corps. It took the better part of a year for me to wade through the paperwork, chew through Officer’s Candidate Course, and receive my reserve commission as a second lieutenant, with a slot in The Basic School (TBS). Six months of TBS, fifteen-hour days, endless lectures, and the back-stabbing peer evaluation climate. I did better than they thought I’d do since nothing in my background reflected military references. There were whispers among the cadre. Maybe I was some sort of military savant? My scores allowed me to pick my Military Occupational School and my career track: Flight School, Intelligence, or the Tech Trades like cannon cocker. I chose a rifle platoon. Maybe I wasn’t a savant? Who would decide to be a mud marine when he had other options? Still, I excelled at navigating the conventions, bureaucracy, micromanagement, showing flashes of brilliance when they were required. Kipling said that one should not, ‘look too good or talk too wise’. Rules, manuals, traditions, and enduring strategic misdirection from the top had become my life and making weak superiors look good had become my only reason for living.

If none of that sounds anything like Timothy Turner, it wasn’t, but I wasn’t there to continue my life as I had known it. I joined the Corps for another reason. My father and others remained distant but influential shadows as I ran three places behind the leader on the grinder. I stood tall as the third man in the fourth row as they directed, and I became somebody new. The national agency check that had been conducted when I joined the Marine Corps had been expanded slightly. Rifle platoon second lieutenants don’t need anything above secret, and they handed out my updated secret clearance, pro-forma. If I’d have been flying an F-35B, or the new F-40 tactical hoverjet, they’d have taken a lot harder look and it had the potential of becoming problematic.

Without anything else in my life to distract me, I didn’t find the high tempo and pre-deployment frenzy to be bothersome. I found myself a platoon commander in Lima Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division, a subset of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. The Fifth Marines, nicknamed the Dark Horse Regiment, was an inspiration when I went head-over-heels in debt and bought a black Ford Mustang (a dark horse) in honor of the regiment. Marine officers weren’t technically supposed to go into debt for a car, but if you didn’t, people wondered what was wrong with you. I loved the car and kept up expectations by living slightly beyond my means. I polished the car on the weekends, I dated the daughters of senior officers, and I remained unentangled. Two years and two deployments later, I was automatically promoted to first lieutenant. The Marine Corps officer promotion system is based on a hierarchal structure of laws, instructions, and orders. In a military framework, the laws can be associated with strategic guidance, the instructions with operational guidance, and the orders with tactical guidance. None of that applies to the promotion from second to first lieutenant. It’s automatic.

I surfed the gentle waves at San Onofre, upgraded to Del Mar for more challenging surf conditions and then took military hops with other officers who surfed, to Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii to better hone our skills. I had half a dozen good boards in my quiver. My bottom turns were better than average, and I occasionally managed surprisingly decent cutbacks in total chunder, but didn’t have the surfcraft to join the surfing circuit or keep up with the best Marines. All the same, I held my own on the Pipeline, at Hale’iwa and Sunset Beach. It wasn’t all work and no play.

Promotion led to reassignment as platoon commander, weapons platoon. If it seems like I’m getting in the weeds with you while I’m standing in line to clear customs, maybe I am. The point is that I progressed as a model marine through company executive officer to promotion to captain two years later. I moved to Alpha Company, Fourth Marines, on the same base. Major Nathan Spears was a typical battalion commander. He had a secure job that sounded glamorous but was actually routine and it wasn’t taking him anywhere in the Corps. Two marriages behind him, the courts took most of his income and he felt bitter at the rulings. He partied hard, drank too much, and took his misery out on me personally and publicly, which worked out better than I could have hoped. Six months after that I broke up with my girlfriend, daughter of the Deputy Base Commander, and separated from the United States Marine Corps.

I had lived on base so that made me jobless and homeless, but I still had the car and the payment.

Priscilla Braddock, Chief Executive Officer of Southwest Positronics hired me to work with the firm, based in San Diego, California. They managed private and government engineering programs. Of course, Priscilla’s husband, Andy, had known me since I had been in junior high school. I learned to sail under his watchful eye, as we went before the wind along the Virginia Capes. He knew me as Tim, not Mike. By that time, Dad worked for Southwest Positronics, too. More about the Braddocks and my father, the retired admiral, later.

I handed my passport to the Chinese Customs Officer at the Philippines port of entry and they scanned it along with my retina and took an electronic image of my fingerprints. Miguel Vega, a real person with no connection to Timothy Turner had been allowed to pass. You see, Miguel Vega separated from the Marine Corps based on a racial grievance issue and I knew that the Chinese quietly flagged the matter. Who knows what value a former Marine officer might have as a cat’s paw for the Worker’s Paradise and their octopus-like agenda?

Ruy Lopez de Villalobos claimed the islands of Leyte and Samar for King Phillip II of Spain in 1542 and Las Islas Filipinas were ruled by Spain for 300 years. The British occupied Manila from 1762 through 1764. The islands were ceded to the United States as a result of their victory in the Spanish American War. The Japanese invaded during the Second World War. After the war, in 1946, the United States recognized that the Philippines were an independent nation. Four years ago the People’s Republic of China arranged a military coup wherein the new leader of the Philippines asked for China’s help. China responded with 300,000 troops, to aid the new government in the establishment of order. A new election had been immediately undertaken wherein people voted overwhelmingly to accept the Chinese People’s Philippines Protectorate as the legitimate government. Meet the new boss.

The Bangsamoro Region (Mindanao) being mostly Muslim, had been targeted for deportation to work camps in Western China, where they could join others of their faith. They immediately resisted, and with donated Saudi money, were buying anything that would shoot. Wherever there were buyers, sellers inevitably appeared. It wasn’t the Marine Corps but it was my new job. You can call it cover for status if you’d like, but you’ve always been a cynic.

I arrived in Manila just before monsoon struck. Not my first time in town. The clouds rolled in off the ocean, black, and angry and the humidity must have been close to one hundred percent. By night time on a moonless night, you couldn't see the clouds, but you could feel them moving overhead as the thunder rattled and roared.

Dinner in the Makati City District didn't begin until ten at night. Every dinner in Makati seemed to be a power dinner with somebody wanting something from somebody else. I arrived at the Brass Monkey early. A fat, dirty police officer carrying a pump action riot gun moved aside when I walked up.

Senior Vega, he said with a nod of his head.

Sergeant Sanchez, I replied with a nod of mine. Having a reputation with the police in Manila was a prerequisite for success at any venture. My mojo remained intact. I wore a baro, long enough to cover my .45 Colt, but it didn't disguise the bulge. It wasn't meant to. A Colt 1911A1 was and remains a fashion statement in the P.I. even with the Communist Chinese Party in control.

Sanchez slung his shotgun and opened the door.

Most of the usual suspects were there, some important enough to 'hold court'. The manager checked my name on his list and led me to a booth. I ordered an Aussie beer in a can. A pretty waitress arrived with the can and a church key. I wiped the key, and the top of the can with a white pocket handkerchief, and popped the can open. You can't be too careful in a joint like the Brass Monkey.

Two Chinese secret policemen sat at their table wearing cheap suits and drinking on the house, and were deeply into their cups when I arrived. You could have set a bomb off and they wouldn’t have noticed

Bucktooth Eddie sat in another booth near the front of the Brass Monkey, endlessly flicking his balisong knife. Zen spin, a maneuver around the thumb, Patpong snap, and on and on. If he wasn't opening it and spinning it, he sharpened it, head down, long black hair in his eyes. The fact that a man could screw around with a butterfly knife as much as Eddie did, and not have cut up hands, provided adequate testament to his skill with that tool. Reliable sources confirmed that Eddie spent time with his knife because he'd been gelded almost a decade before. He'd been tortured and the gelding may not have been the most painful part of it, but it led to his obsession with that damned blade. Knife work for Eddie, it was speculated by those who knew him, provided a substitute for masturbation. I can only imagine that he had been hell on wheels if he jerked off back when he had balls, as intensely as he fiddled with that knife.

I'd been through the huge mahogany door of the Brass Monkey before, but since I'm not a member of the club, I had to have a sponsor then just as I did on that night. It's not like the Manila Press Club, where anyone can simply show up at the bar and be served. Money does not change hands at the Brass Monkey, members sign a chit and it is added to their bill and settled later. Or not, if you’re a Party member. It’s said that they skip on paying their chits. The other patrons did the heavy lifting required by the Party.

It's a civilized bar and restaurant in an increasingly uncivilized world. It's also politically incorrect, which is to say that only the right sort of people are invited. This might strike you as strange because Bucktooth Eddie is a voted-in member. You're prejudiced, I know. You infer that a Filipino eunuch from Pinoy can't have the means to afford the membership to an old school tie style club. And, you'd be right on all counts. Eddie has a place there because his patron, every bit as much a thug as Eddie is, pays his freight, knife and all. Cardinal Santos backed Eddie's play.

I mused how a Chinese-Filipino priest named Santos (not an adjective, a proper noun) could be elevated through the rank of bishop to serve as a prince of the Church of Rome. The cardinal made the Borgia Pope look like a saint. Well, that’s what I thought as I sat in my booth and watched Bucktooth Eddie twirl endlessly with his knife. I had the waitress send him a tall drink and he chugged it with one hand, while he multi-tasked with that balisong knife with his other, never missing a beat. He winked at me in acknowledgement. We did some business before and enjoyed as much mutual professional respect as either Eddie or I could muster for each other.

The suits all looked at the little bucktooth Pinoy gunman out of the corner of their eyes while they talked business. It wouldn't have happened at Twenty-One in New York, Tontaria in London or at the Old Ebbitt Grill, across the street from the White House, but Eddie was sitting in the Brass Monkey in Manila wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt three sizes too big. And let me assure you that money is the universal solvent. Nobody in the Philippines had more money than Cardinal Santos. Not even the Chinese thugs who ran the country as proxies for Beijing.

Eddie served as the Cardinal's calling card. He sat there as a reminder that the Cardinal got a piece of all the action in Makati. Paying off the Chinese Commissar was not paying the Santos tax. You could call it a donation to the Holy Church if it made you feel better, but his cut exceeded a tithe. Tax could be paid in any currency, including white powder, whores or trafficked women or lady boys, stolen cargo, guns, precious gems or gold, but Santos got his piece. If he didn't, Eddie or somebody like Eddie would slit you groin to sternum and drop you into a pig pen to eliminate the evidence. The point being you were alive when the pigs began to feed on your entrails. I avoided pork in the P. I. as assiduously as did the Mohammedans or Jews. It's not unlike how I feel about tilapia fish these days. The Mexican cartels feed their kills to the tilapia, then the fish are killed, fileted, frozen and sold as restaurant quality in the developed world.

Entertainment was predictable at the Brass Monkey. The early act had come and gone where a girl with a cello played melancholy tunes. The late act, yet to appear, was always the same. A tall, homely, paunchy, Malay lady boy wearing the same suit every night, crusted with dirt, two sizes too small, sang sad songs of lost love. He always opened with a raspy, nasal rendition of La Vie en Rose in a high alto that you thought only Edith Piaf, the lady herself, could belt out. It may pass for culture to the right sort, but it usually annoyed me. At least they didn't have an Um Kulthum impersonator like the Egyptian bar, one block to the East.

My contact arrived, half an hour late, as expected. Think of her as a dwarfishly small Chinese woman with protruding cock-eyes, fleshy lips and a wig on her head that looked as if birds nested there. Hello June, I greeted her by bending and going for a peck on her fleshy cheek. She smelled of mayonnaise, which I'd smelled on her before. She considered it a recipe for youthful features after her age gene kicked in, inevitably ravaging for Chinese women. Still wiping that Best Foods mayo on, I see.

Hello Farang. Standard Thai insult. The fact that we were in the P. I. and not Thailand must not have registered with June, her chosen Anglicized moniker. She traced her money and her stroke with the Party back to Chairman Mao, a fourth cousin or something along that order. In her case, Mao got the good looks, and you can make of that what you will. They shipped her off to the Islands to keep her from embarrassing the family. She learned English from an expat lover from the Bronx. Her accent was comical enough and I struggled to keep a straight face. I could have switched into broken Mandarin, but I didn't want to spook her before our business concluded.

A Bombay Sapphire Gin, straight up, appeared in front of her like magic. She knocked half of it back and burped. So how you love life, Vega? She finished her drink with a second gulp and motioned for a refill.

Fraught with adversity and diversity. Same as always. Thanks for steering that dragon lady spy my way. She'd been well schooled and worked very hard to make me like her.

A cloud crossed June's face, and just as quickly, vanished. Normally I wouldn't have let on that I knew, but this meeting had a special quality to it and I threw her the tip.

The lady boy began his second set, starting with L'Hymne à l'amour. June expected small talk, so I commented on Edith Piaf's life. Edith still had a legendary reputation among the cultured in the Philippines as well as the former French colonies that formed French Indochina, all in Chinese hands now. I lifted that Aussie beer I still nursed toward the lady boy. Edith had a rough life full of disappointment, heartache, booze and drugs. But will always be the 'Little Sparrow' and France's most cherished asset.

You too damned sentimental, Vega. It be your end. Shrimp dumplings arrived and June worked two of them into her mouth, one right after the other, her yellowed partial plate twisting in her mouth to get a bite going. The dumplings at the Brass Monkey enjoyed a solid reputation. She gulped them down and worked another one with her chopsticks. Are all Mexicans dumb like you?

I dodged the intended insult. That dragon lady we were talking about, Da-Xie, your step-daughter. I can't believe you pimped her to me. You must have had a big score in mind. Her chopsticks stopped, the dumpling wedged between them, as she tried to focus her eyes on me. My disclosure that I knew Da-Xie was her step-daughter stalled her.

June's eyes bugged out even larger than usual and she seemed to have a problem speaking, but she stuffed that last shrimp dumpling into her mouth and chewed, with a portion of the dumpling falling out of her mouth and into her silk blouse. There were no breasts of any size to hold it and gravity led the partially chewed dumpling through her blouse to splat onto the floor.

She tried to get something out of her purse but slipped down the chair and out onto the floor. 

I bent low, looking up, pronounced, heart attack, I think. Give us room. Somebody call a doctor! I palmed the cheaply made Chinese handgun from her purse and slipped it into my pocket.

June was right. I am sentimental. I felt that I owed her an explanation on her way out. Tetrodotoxin. The bacteria that live in the intestinal tract of the puffer fish create it. You can't breathe, so you can't speak. But this isn't about me, or any government. It's about the Cardinal. You lied to him. You fabricated and made him look bad when he passed it off as the truth. Frankly, I'm fine with feeding Da-Xie bullshit for the Chinese Communist Party’s consumption. She screws like a horny rabbit and doesn't seem to mind it when I tie her up. But the Cardinal? You can't mess with a saint.

Her pupils dilated and she gave a brief death rattle. 

A Catholic priest, Irish, of course, wearing a full black cassock, funny hat, pushed through the crowd, knelt next to me and checked her pulse. He went through the motions of last rights in a thick brogue. Then he went to the bar and ordered a shot of Tullamore Dew. I stood next to him and ordered another unopened can of beer telling the bartender to put it on June's tab. He gave me a hard look, glanced at June’s carcass lying on the floor with her teeth out next to her head as a good Samaritan tried to resurrect her with CPR, thought twice, and brought the frosty can and a key.

The priest handed me a Bible. There's a bindle of very nice clear stones glued under the cover in the book's spine, Captain. They're an old style cut, of the sort women used to wear in their engagement rings. Best not to inquire too closely when it comes to the wages of sin and Santos. 

I'll remember that, Padre.

After finishing business with June on behalf of the Prince of the Church, I left the club behind. The headlines, playing on the televisions on the BBC World Broadcast, announced that the United States had just given up Guam and Saipan to the People’s Republic of China out of a sense of comradeship and mutual cooperation. Why the hell not?

I’m not as slick as Andy Braddock is. At least that’s what he keeps telling me. He’s twenty years older than I am, old enough to be my father, and this craft that I undertook to learn is one that you need to learn by experience. You need to touch