Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

12 NIPA

Rhiannon heard a knock at the door of their hut. When she answered, three elders from the local church stood before her. They asked to talk to both her and her husband, declaring that they were quite concerned about the safety of the Jeffords in the unfolding invasion. As they explained it, they thought it was important for the Jeffords to flee to Manila or even leave the country entirely, both for their own safety and for the safety of the villagers. One elder admitted, “We are willing to hide you, but we are pretty sure the Indos will start torturing and killing us until we give you up.”

The Jeffords knew they had to leave the Philippines. All through the following year they prayed for the means to make that happen. All of the scheduled Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific flights out of Calbayog City were sold out for months in advance. And even if they made it to Manila, there were no longer any scheduled flights to the United States.

As missionaries, they had few possessions with them on the island. Anything bulky had been left in storage with relatives and friends in New Hampshire and in Florida. Other than their car and some hammocks, almost everything else they owned could fit in eight suitcases. They pared this down to five suitcases for their planned voyage. Their hammocks, extra clothes, kitchen utensils, linens, and extra luggage were given to friends at the mission school.

Meanwhile, the news kept getting worse. Moro Islamic Liberation Front (ILF) guerillas were making increasingly brazen and atrocious attacks. Catholic church buildings—the most outward symbol of Christianity in the island nation—were burned wherever the ILF went, and anyone wearing religious apparel, or carrying rosaries and crucifixes, became the targets of disfigurements or even murder, usually via machete.

A recent rumor circulated that the government would only defend Luzon Island and let all of the islands to the south fall to the ILF. Samar Island and neighboring Masbate Island were directly in the path of the Islamic guerillas. The Indonesians and their surrogates were systematically taking control of all of the southern and central Philippine islands. There were reports that ILF soldiers were hunting down Christian missionaries and torturing them before beheading them.

Just as the Jeffords had begun to feel panicked about their situation, Joseph Navarro, a teenage Jeepney barker showed up at the school. Joseph’s job as a barker was to call out the routes and drum up customers. But his job also gave him free rides almost anywhere, and the opportunity to make some money on the side. He often sold used cell phones, cell phone SIM cards, and prepaid telephone calling cards. He regularly made deliveries to the mission school, which was on one of his routes. Joseph only casually knew the Jeffords, but he approached Peter and asked, “Kuya, I hear you want to get to Luzon. My grandfather, Paul Navarro, says he will take us in his outrigger boat—a carag boat called the Tiburon—if you can help buy the diesel fuel. It’s a big fishing boat.”

“Is it big enough to carry us and all of our luggage?” Peter asked.

“Oh, yeah. Ang Malaking barko—a big boat. I’ve been helping him run her since I was twelve.”

“He’d really be agreeable?”

“I think so,” Joseph replied. “We are really tight. I’m his Tuazon, you know, his youngest grandson.”

“It sounds like you are his favorite grandson, too.”

Joseph, who was modest, nodded and looked embarrassed when he heard that.

The Jeffords met Paul Timbancaya Navarro a few hours later. They learned that everyone called him Tatang (grandfather), even people who were not related. He had a strong reputation in the community, both as a fisherman and as an instructor of the Filipino Martial Arts (FMAs). Now in his early seventies, he had reduced both occupations to just part-time endeavors.

Paul Navarro was sitting on his porch reading an Abante tabloid when Joseph and the Jeffords arrived. He gazed up from his paper and said quietly, “I heard you need to get to Luzon.”

“That’s right,” Peter answered.

The old man set aside the newspaper and said, “This very familiar to me, from a long time ago. It is just like the Huk uprising, right after the World War Two. I was a little boy then. Our family originally lived on Luzon, but my dad decided to flee to Samar, in 1948. This was during the Huk Rebellion. Rumor had it that they were going to try to recruit my father by force, or that there was a price on his head. So he got wise and fled. He thought he would be safer if he moved our family completely off of Luzon. He chose to come here to Samar, where he already had a few relatives.”

Peter nodded. “That was a smart thing to do.”

“Yes, when there is trouble like that, with hundreds of soldiers coming your way, you don’t try and stand your ground. That will just get you killed. What you do is pull up anchor and get the heck out of there. That is what my dad did, and it saved all our lives, in my family. This is wisdom.”

From his history reading, Peter Jeffords knew that the Huk Rebellion had been a communist-led uprising of peasants, primarily on Luzon. The name of the movement was a Tagalog acronym for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, which was often shortened to Hukbalahap, or simply just Huk. The acronym stood for “People’s Anti-Japanese Army,” which was how the communist rebels got their start. The Huks were eventually defeated by the army during the presidency of Ramon Magsaysay.

“Even after it was safe to return to Luzon, my father decided to stay on Samar. That worked out okay, too,” Tatang said.

After a long pause, Tatang Navarro said, “I will take you.”

Again and again, the Jeffords expressed their thanks. They wore huge smiles and felt tremendous relief in the knowledge that they would be escaping the ILF. They knew that Mr. Navarro’s generous offer had just saved them from almost certain death.

They went to see Tatang Navarro’s boat late that afternoon. Peter and Rhiannon liked the look of the boat. It was thirty-eight feet long with a five-foot wide hull, and a thirty-inch draught. For stability, it had traditional double-pole outriggers called carags. The boat had a graceful upswept triangular transom, but its well-proportioned bowstem was incongruously tipped with an old car tire that had been painted white for use as a mooring buffer. Overall, the boat had attractive lines, but it was obviously built more for utility than for style. What Tiburon lacked in chromed fittings, it made up for in solidity and native charm.

A pair of large white horizontal canvas awnings covered Tiburon in the rear and amidships. The awnings were elevated in shallow inverted Vs, suspended from short masts. They had reinforcing rods down the center and numerous guy lines to keep them taut. Unless the winds were unfavorable, the awnings could be left unfurled day and night.

Tacked up above the chart box were newspaper clippings—most of them about Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao, a national hero and distant cousin of Navarro’s late wife—and a few faded printouts of digital pictures showing some of their particularly large catches of fish that had filled the hold.

Tiburon’s engine was a Mitsubishi straight block four-cylinder, a naturally aspirated diesel with a 2,659 cc displacement. This reliable engine produced 80 horsepower. It was equipped with an auxiliary belt-drive alternator, which was used to charge a pair of 6-volt deep cycle marine batteries. The batteries were needed to operate an electric Power Block winch for hauling in the fishing nets. This was a smaller version of the big winches used on commercial purse seiners. The engine’s exhaust pipe, one of the few stainless steel fittings on the entire boat, emerged just below the center of the transom rail.

Their original plan was to motor Tiburon northward to Batangas in southern Luzon only 170 nautical miles—about a fourteen-hour trip at twelve knots. The next morning, however, word came that the ILF and Indonesians also planned to invade Luzon in their jihad campaign. Peter and Tatang began a series of meetings on the old man’s porch to discuss alternative destinations.

Unfortunately, most of the Pacific islands were not self-sufficient. If the Crunch lasted for another year, Peter anticipated that many Pacific islanders would be starving to death. Peter summed it up. “Continental land masses have resources that just aren’t available on island nations.”

They weighed the merits and drawbacks of different destinations. They even considered going as far as the United States, but the vast expanses of the central Pacific Ocean were more than they could handle. To motor their way 5,300 miles to Hawaii and then another 2,500 miles to San Diego seemed far too uncertain, and well beyond the capabilities of their coastal fishing boat. Rhiannon had also been hearing reports of a total collapse of law and order throughout the United States, with the worst of the chaos on the East and West coasts. Most of their news came from Radio Australia, which was still in operation. Most of the other international shortwave broadcasters had gone off the air. In the end, northern Australia seemed like their safest bet.

Tatang had always burned a mix of petroleum–based “dino diesel” and various plant-derived oils in Tiburon’s engine. He was proud to exclaim, “This engine, she’s an omnivore. She can burn coconut oil, palm oil, peanut oil, corn oil, you name it!”

To surreptitiously get to Australia through Indonesian-controlled waters, Peter realized that FV Tiburon was actually better suited than the larger and ostensibly more seaworthy steel boats docked in Samar’s harbors. Because Paul Navarro’s boat was constructed of wood, it was radar transparent. The only significant radar reflector was the engine block, and most of that was below the waterline and therefore less visible to radar. Even the ship’s wheel was made of wood. As was typical of locally made boats, oversize wood mooring bitts were used instead of the stainless steel ones used on nearly every boat from First World countries. And since Tiburon was built in the late 1990s, its two diesel fuel tanks—forty and forty-five gallons—were made of HDPE plastic rather than steel.

Pointing out these features, Peter added, “Just look at how the outriggers are lashed on with heavy fishing line rather than bolted on with big stainless steel fixtures like they’d be if this were an American-made boat. Even the chainwale is plywood, not steel. What you have here is a stealth boat, Tatang.”

Tatang’s expression changed to a huge gap-toothed grin. “Radar can no see her?”

“That’s right,” Peter replied. “I’d much rather be in your radar-invisible boat going eight or ten knots than I would in a big fancy steel yacht going twenty-five knots. Those ships would have big radar signatures and be obvious targets. But Tiburon will likely just slip through unnoticed if we can keep out of sight, visually.”

After a pause, Peter continued, “My dad was an engineer who worked on the periphery of the stealth aircraft programs for the U.S. Air Force. His little company only made special heating pads that were used to cure the composite materials used in the wing and fuselage sections. But I had some long conversations with him about radar and radar wave reflectivity. It all comes down to this: Composites, fiberglass, and wood are good because they don’t reflect radar waves, but metal is bad because it reflects radar like a mirror. Even though this boat is thirty-eight feet long and has four feet of hull above the waterline, it has a radar cross section—or RCS—that is probably smaller than that of an eight-foot-long aluminum skiff with just one foot of hull exposed above the waterline.”

Tatang nodded to indicate he understood and Peter continued, “This boat won’t give a sharp radar return like a modern boat. It will probably look fuzzy, like an indistinct blob. In daytime, when we are drifting or have a sea anchor out, we won’t look like much more than a piece of driftwood. At night, when we are under power, the motion against the radar screen background will make it obvious that we are a boat, but of course on radar we won’t look like anything more than a local fishing boat. The chance of someone dispatching a patrol boat or a cutter to investigate, I think, will be quite low.”

Peter walked around the boat, closely examining it, then came back to Tatang, who was sitting in the helm chair. Peter said, “The anchor and the motor winch will be an issue for radar. The anchor is on a rope, rather than a chain, which is good, but it is stowed on the foredeck. That’s almost like mounting what they call a radar corner reflector for all the world to see.”

Tatang gave a toss of his hand and said, “No biggie, Pastor Jeffords. I can trade that, easy, for a poor man’s anchor. Those are made out of concrete. They cast those flat, what-do-you-call discs, so they don’t roll off a boat. The only metal is a little loop of rebar.”

Jeffords nodded. “Perfecto.” Then another thought crossed his mind. “And what about the Power Block winch? There is a lot of metal there. Can we dismount it and stow it below?”

“Sure, but if I’m selling my nets, I might as well sell the winch, too.”