Read Online Rebels of Mindanao by Tom Anthony - Free Book Online Page B

months after his untimely death, Ugly Maria used all the money she had squeezed out of him, investing it with her mother in a
sari-sari
store with a single bedroom above the retail shop. Her new general store was strategically located along the road through her village in the province of South Cotobato and advertised “Foreign Goods” on its hand-painted sign. Mariafe lived there with her even less fortunate mother, and they worked together selling canned food and dried fish. Her jealousy soon turned into a hatred for all Europeans. When the owner of the hardware store next to her offered her a hundred U.S. dollars for a month’s work driving jeepney loads of cargo into and out of Davao City, she took the opportunity, which also gave her the chance to do some wholesale buying for her own store in the metropolitan capital of the neighboring province.
    She had heard about the Spanish who occupied the Philippines for half a millennium before the American colonialists took control of the country after a lucky war won mostly back in the Caribbean Sea, and thought both must be to blame for her plight. When she first heard about the Abu Sayaf from her cousin, it sounded like a good gang to join and, in her mind, a chance to hurt the imperialists and the Christian zealots who she was sure were the cause of her woe. Of course, as a woman in a Muslim war camp she would be treated neither well nor as an equal, but she did not notice or care, and the men gradually began to think of her as one of their own.
    After she was recruited by Lateef, the squad leader of more than two dozen Abu Sayaf warriors, she began to spend weekends hangingaround his camp whenever she was not working in her store or hauling cargo. Sometimes she would travel with the squad when they went on combat missions or to Abu Sayaf headquarters for training. It was she alone who met Mahir under the bridge and led him inland.
    The two of them, an incongruous pair, remained together throughout the hot day in a lean-to shelter they made near the bridge to protect them from the sun. Shortly after dark, a four-man patrol led by the apparently underfed Abu Sayaf soldier with only one name, Lateef, picked them up. Thin, with skinny muscles rippling under his brown skin, he wore military trousers and shirt, sleeves rolled up. To signify his mujahadeen status, he had tied around his head a white headband with a red spot in the middle, which made him look like a kamikaze pilot before his last flight. Lateef led the returning patrol into the rain forest and ordered Ugly Maria to take the point, the first to push through the underbrush. From behind, Ugly Maria appeared powerful, squat and bow legged, and her muscled legs pumped her up the hills. The patrol easily followed her, focused on the faint reflection of the moon off the round, balding spot on the back of her head.
    On Mahir’s second night in Mindanao, the Abu Sayaf patrol traveled only five miles from their rendezvous to an established campsite. The place looked as though it might have been set up as a primitive camp challenge on some reality TV show, but it was the only home to more than thirty Abu Sayaf warriors, plus their women and assorted kids. Now that Mahir had joined him, Lateef’s next goal would be to steal enough dynamite for the bombing that would show everyone that the Abu Sayaf were a power to be reckoned with.
    Mahir watched two of the Abu Sayaf soldiers work on a laptop computer. He asked Lateef, who spoke English, if they were able to pick up a satellite signal and connect to the Internet directly.
    Lateef explained the level of his soldiers’ ability. “No, they’re just trying to learn how to play games. We have to go to the mall in General Santos to connect to the Internet.” Mahir felt lucky that he had a GPS device that worked.
    The camp headquarters was a native hut, a wooden platform raised on stilts the height of a man to make it easier to see snakes attempting