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fourteen-inch turrets, topside, and reinforced concrete ranging up to thirty-six feet thick around the sides. As much as fifteen of those feet, though, had been blasted away by bombardment during the early and late stages of the Second World War.
    From a distance, and if the light were poor, one might almost have thought the forward turret, Battery Marshall, still capable. The rearward one, though, Battery Wilson, gave that the lie; of its two guns, one had fallen back completely inside the turret while the other only stuck out a few feet from the glacis, and that at an angle that said, “ruin.”
    Fort Drum, the old concrete battleship with its wrecked and rusted steel turrets and casemates, passed to port doing its fairly routine three knots. That is to say, while the ruined fort never moved, never had, and never could have—at least short of a world class earthquake or asteroid strike—the flowing tide, pushing through the narrow entrance to Manila Bay, tended to give it a wake just as with any ship moving at about that speed, said wake having fooled sundry aviators into believing the thing was moving.
    The little motor launch into which an unconscious Ayala had been laid was moving, and at rather more than three knots. It was also bobbing and weaving with its forward movement, the natural waves, and the somewhat unnatural ones caused by, among other things, Fort Drum and the tide. Between the rap on the head and the motion, the old man began to throw up into the shallow bilges of the launch.
    “Pull his head out of it,” Janail ordered. There was little sense in kidnapping the old tyrant only to lose him to drowning in his own vomit.
    Dutifully, one of the team members grabbed Ayala’s thinning gray hair and held it up, forcing him into a purely face-down position to allow the puke to drain.
    “Bastard stinks,” the guard commented.
    “So might you . . . or I, in the same circumstances,” Janail countered.
    “Wha . . . ?” whispered a frail old voice.
    “Ah, he’s coming to. Very good. If he’s conscious, he’s unlikely to die on us.
    “How are you feeling, Mr. Ayala?” Janail asked, most politely.
    “What . . . what do you pirates want of me?”
    “Not pirates, old man,” Janail answered, “freedom fighters.” As in the freedom I’ll have when I have your ransom. “And what we want is money to continue the struggle.”
    “Where are you taking me?”
    “No reason for you not to know, I suppose,” Janail answered. “We’re going to rendezvous with a larger boat just west of Corregidor. To which destination”—Janail uttered something in Cebuano, which language Ayala didn’t understand—“we’re now turning.”
    The launch began a sharp turn to the right. Without being able to see anything, Ayala couldn’t hope to place the direction. Still, he saw no reason to doubt that he was heading toward Corregidor.
    “From there we’ll sail to Mindanao. You’ll be there a while, until we can finalize transportation to elsewhere.”
    “Why me?” Ayala asked. “Who put you up to this?”
    Janail laughed. Then, relenting, he said, “Why . . . why Allah put us up to this, old man.” Whatever I do—or don’t—believe, that’s for the benefit of the troops.

    Malate, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

    Under an early morning sun, Aida pulled her own automobile—a tiny red conveyance, none too new—up to the curb fronting a row of carefully trimmed hedges that almost completely concealed the stilted house set back from the street in this quiet neighborhood west of Taft Avenue. Magnificent palms grew from gaps in the sidewalks here, lining both sides of the street. The shade they provided was minimal, though the ambience was considerable.
    Before stepping out of the vehicle, she considered flipping her sun visor down to reveal the police symbol that would let any patrolling cop know that hers was not a car to be ticketed.
    “But . . . nah,” she muttered. “Better a ticket than to reveal