One to Count Cadence by James Crumley Read Free Book Online

Force Base lies on the central Luzon plain in the province of Pampanga near the city of Angeles. It is bordered on the west by the Bambam river which skirts a heavily jungled range of hills and on the east by the Manila-Baguio highway. Clark is one of the largest bases in the Far East. It provides runways and support facilities for countless jet fighters and bombers which guard Southeast Asia against China, or for American business interests, or against the Eskimos, depending on your politics and memory. The base, in its turn, is also guarded. A strong hurricane-wire fence encloses the entire base. The fence, as any other important facility of the base, is also closely guarded by the Air Police, Filipino constabulary and Negrito pygmies. The APs patrol the perimeter in jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks, armed with Browning automatic shotguns, submachine guns, carbines, rifles, pistols, and angry German Shepherd police dogs. The APs shoot on sight, usually forgetting the warning shots, and quite often kill, not only thieves and infiltrators, but expensive dogs and each other on occasion. When an AP kills a Filipino intruder, he is quickly court-martialed, found guilty, fined one dollar, given a carton of his favorite smokes by an apologetic major, then flown back to the states on the next flight. The Filipino constabulary, being indigenous, suffer no such inconvenience. They are merely required to reimburse the government for each round of ammunition expended that does not find a human target. They seldom miss; ammunition is expensive. The Negritoes, true pygmies, live mainly in the hills except for a small group which resides in cardboard, tin and board shacks near the back fence. They are famed for their unreasoning love of Americans, their righteous hatred of Filipinos and Japanese, and their action against the Imperial Army of Japan during World War II. Their favorite trick, since they are able to stalk and hunt quite well, was to quietly remove every other man’s head in a Jap barracks or bivouac at night, placing it on his chest so that his comrades might find it the next morning. This usually disabled the whole unit: those who weren’t sleeping forever never slept again. In spite of these gruesome tricks, the Negritoes are jolly little folk in their gray uniforms and silver badges, bare, dusty feet and bush hair only half hidden by helmet liners, and faces split by smiles twice too large for men only four-feet-six. They perform their work in the highest of spirits and with the greatest of efficiency.
    However, the base loses approximately $140,000 in theft and pilferage each month. In a single night eighteen hundred iron crosses were lifted from the military cemetery for scrap iron. On another, five two-and-a-half-ton trucks and six jeeps were stolen from a motor pool and driven on boards over that high, well-patrolled fence. Still another time an imaginative thief stole a fireman’s uniform, then a fire truck to go with it. He drove the truck out of the station with siren and flashing lights going full blast, raced the five miles to the Main Gate as seven Air Policemen stopped traffic for him.
    Tetrick pointed out all these events should have been expected once the Army allowed their personal Air Corps to become something he called the “Air Farce” — unfairly, I’m sure. “Three old ladies with blowed-up rubbers could take this place,” he grunted.
    If the base, as we agreed, existed only because intelligent thieves were leaving something for next time, the base didn’t seem excited about the danger. Conditions were calm, situations normal at the seven swimming pools, the PX shopping center, the Officer’s and NCO’s and Airman’s clubs, the veterinarian’s office and the golf course (where every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon Tetrick baked his bald head and managed to get drunk before the sixteenth tee). The residential sections were as cool and unruffled as if they were in Indianapolis and Vietnam on