Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

13 CHARTS

The next day they started looking at Navarro’s nautical charts. Tatang summarized their options. “There are two ways we can go: either down through the Moluccas or down through the Celebes Sea, which is more roundabout.”

Jeffords, always the punster, couldn’t resist quipping, “As I once informed a young Catholic priest, celibacy ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Joseph laughed, but the subtlety of the play on words escaped his grandfather.

Tracing his finger on the chart, Jeffords said, “Well, Darwin in northern Australia is our nearest safe landfall. So through the Molucca Sea, then the Banda Sea, and then Timor Sea would be the most direct route.”

Looking to Tatang, he asked, “But I suppose the more important question is, given all the variables and imponderables, which route will give us the least chance of running into any ILF or Indo warships?”

Tatang looked slightly puzzled—perhaps by Peter’s use of the word “imponderables”—so Joseph translated this question into Tagalog.

“The only bad danger is the Makassar Strait up against Malaysia. There could be ships of the Indonesian Navy there,” Tatang replied.

Peter nodded. “Okay, we’ll make sure to avoid that. So we take the Molucca route?”

Tatang nodded, but Peter asked, pointing at the chart, “What about this string of islands between the Molucca Sea and the Banda Sea? Look, it’s Pulau This, Pulau That, Pulau The Other Thing without much water in between them.”

Joseph and Tatang consulted rapidly in Tagalog.

Joseph then translated. “Grandpa says there’s not many people in the Spice Islands—no cities, just villages, so it is not too risky, especially if we time it so we slip between those islands at night.”

Jeffords nodded. “Okay, then that’s the route we’ll take, and we’ll put our trust in God to see us safely through.”

Tiburon’s engine, Tatang said, was less than two years old and had been run for only about five hundred hours. By Filipino fishing fleet standards, it was considered brand-new.

Tallying the various containers and adding it to the capacity of the boat’s two existing tanks, they came up with a grand total of 503 gallons. At 7.29 pounds per gallon, the fuel would weigh 3,667 pounds. At three quarts per hour at three-quarter throttle, that gave them 377 hours of engine run time—or thirty-one and a half days—assuming twelve hours per day with the engine running. With good weather, catching favorable winds and currents, and with Gods’ providence, they might make it the 2,800 nautical miles to Australia in twenty-eight days. If the winds were not favorable, it might take as long as thirty-eight days. According to their calculations, they would run out of fuel in thirty-one and a half days unless they found a place to refuel en route.

Their greatest challenge would be that after leaving Samar they would be entirely in hostile Islamic waters until they approached Australia. There would be no friendly ports where they could purchase fuel. East Timor was already under Indonesian control, and they expected to find warships blockading Papua New Guinea.

Jeffords pondered for a few minutes and reran the calculations. Then he asked Tatang, “How much lube oil does the engine use?”

“It’s a brand-new engine, so it burns at most maybe one quart a week. I use the what-ya-call forty weight.”

Jeffords said, “Okay, we should set aside a gallon and a half for lubrication, even though we’ll probably need less than half of that.”

Once the fuel discussion had been sorted out, they focused on Tiburon’s white-and-light-blue paint scheme, which was clearly not good for camouflage. Tatang consulted one of his neighbors, Rudolfo Saguisag, who went by the nickname Dolpo. Dolpo had served for many years as an NCO in the Hukbóng Dagat ng Pilipinas—the Philippine Navy, often just called the PN. He had retired from the navy four years before the Crunch. His last duty station had been with Naval Forces Central (NAVFORCEN), serving on rigid hull inflatable boats.

Dolpo’s experience was mainly in small boats and onboard frigates. After hearing about their camouflage concern, he advised Tatang to use the U.S. Navy’s defunct Measure 21 camouflage paint scheme. He pulled a naval camouflage reference book from his bookshelf, and after a couple of minutes of searching through the pages, he turned to the page that showed Measure 21. “Here,” he said. “Have the paint store match these colors. That is the best camo coloring for being out on the blue water. It is a little too dark for inshore, but perpekto in deep water.” He then jotted down a note that read: “Navy Blue 5-N on all the vertical surfaces and Deck Blue 20-B on all the horizontal surfaces and canvas.”

Two days later, Peter learned that Tatang had traded his nets and floats for 150 rounds of .22 Long Rifle ammo, which had practically become a currency unto itself since the Crunch. The electric motor winch was traded for 20 rounds of .30-06.

The engine, he explained, burned about three quarts of diesel or coconut oil (“mantika”) per hour. The nearby Caltex station had long since sold out of all types and grades of fuel, but with some begging and pleading, a number of neighbors were willing to sell a total of eighty-five gallons of diesel.

In addition to the dino diesel, the Jeffords were able to buy coconut oil. Most of this was “Light Centrifuged Coconut Oil” in five-gallon plastic buckets labeled with maker names like NARDIAS, MPC, and CIIF Oil Mills.

They also managed to buy ten and a half gallons of corn-based cooking oil (made by the Bagiuo, Sun Valley, and Sunar companies), eight gallons of palm oil, six gallons of soybean oil, eleven bottles and cans of olive oil, and even a few bottles each of sunflower, peanut, and camellia oil. Realizing that this still wouldn’t be enough, they asked around and found twenty gallons of used deep-fryer oil available from a fried fish stand owner in Calbayog, as well as fifteen gallons of 10W40 motor oil, much of it in one-quart plastic bottles. It cost them more than 800 Philippine Pesos (PHP), but Tatang assured them that the various types of oil could mix with the diesel fuel, though no more than fifteen percent by volume. “We put in just a little bit of this fryer oil each time we refill the main tank,” he explained.

Before it was taken aboard, the used deep-fryer oil was carefully strained through three thicknesses of T-shirts, a slow process that removed all of the blackened particulate matter.

As he started the filtering process, Joseph asked his grandfather, “Do you want it to be stored in this can, or in this big plastic bottle?”

The old man answered in Tagalog, “Pakilagay naman sa bote ang mantika” (“Please put the oil in the bottle”). He added in English, “Mr. Jeffords says he want as many plastic containers as possible since metal ones are radar reflectors. We are stealthy boys.”

Jeffords recognized the Tagalog phrase. In the two years leading up to his first missionary trip, he had seriously studied the language. Ironically, his assignment turned out to be in the central Philippines, where Visayan and Waray were spoken much more frequently. Peter’s knowledge of Tagalog came in handy only around people like Navarro, who was originally from Luzon.

They indeed tried to buy and repackage as much of the oil as possible in plastic bottles. The few steel containers were stowed below the waterline. They agreed to use up all of the fuel in these metal containers first so they could discard the containers immediately after they had been emptied into the main tank, by sinking them. Given the wide variety of oil that they planned to burn and its dubious purity, they took the precaution of buying four spare fuel filters.

With both the U.S. dollar and the Philippine peso in free fall, nearly all of the various fuel and oil purchases were barter transactions. They started by bartering the gasoline they could siphon from the Jeffords’ car and what they had in cans. They were able to negotiate two gallons of diesel in trade for each gallon of gas, since gas was already more scarce, and because it was common knowledge that coconut oil could be substituted in diesel engine cars, trucks, or boats.

Tatang’s standard practice was to start the engine with “dino diesel” before switching to draw from the tank of coconut oil. Then, just before shutting down, he would switch back to the petroleum-based diesel tank.

The most disappointing transactions occurred when Tatang traded his truck for 110 gallons of coconut oil, and the Jeffords exchanged their Mitsubishi L300 Versa Van minivan for 130 gallons of coconut oil and 40 gallons of palm oil. The car was only three years old, but in the new post-Crunch economy, cars with gasoline engines were not highly valued. If the Mitsubishi had been a diesel, they might have been able to trade it for enough coconut oil for their entire trip. The rest of the fuel was bought with Philippine pesos of rapidly diminishing value and by bartering Rhiannon’s laptop and some silver pesos that Joseph had inherited from his maternal grandmother.

Their arsenal for the voyage consisted of Tatang’s well-worn but serviceable M1 Garand semiautomatic .30-06 rifle, Joseph’s takedown .22 rimfire Ruger 10/22 rifle, and Tatang’s 26.5 mm Geco flare pistol. The latter was designed just for signaling, but Tatang had a 12 gauge flare insert sleeve for the gun. Inside of this insert, he could use a second insert—a chamber adapter for .38 Special revolver cartridges. This made the flare gun into a crude single-shot pistol. Lacking both a rifled barrel and sights, the pistol could not be fired accurately beyond a few yards, but it was better than nothing.

Peter’s main concern was their most potent weapon, the M1 Garand. “Is it zeroed?” he asked Tatang.

“Oh, yeah, on a paper target it shoots right where you are aiming it at one hundred steps.”

Peter had once fired an uncle’s M1, but he didn’t know how to field-strip it or clean it. Tatang showed him how, though he had some difficulty in relating the rifle parts nomenclature in English.

Most of Tatang’s ammunition was black-tipped armor-piercing (AP) ammunition. It was all stored in 8-round en bloc clips. Tatang had only eleven loaded clips left—seven of AP, and four of plain “ball” full metal jacket ammunition. With such a small supply, they realized they would have to make each shot count.

With just one solid battle rifle in hand, Peter did not feel comfortably well armed for the voyage. When he mentioned this to Rhiannon, she retorted, “What did you want? A 20-millimeter deck gun? We have what we have, and we’ll be vigilant. The rest is up to God.”