A face appeared before me. Distraction, I shout! But who would it be but Peterson with a tale about a new girl at the Skylight, a real honest-to-God blond named Gloria who was an ex-movie star from Manila. He thought he might shack steady with her since she was the best thing eighteen years of life had found him. Or was it nineteen?
"Sure, Pete, I fucked her once. Her hair's bleached, she uses too much make-up to cover small-pox scars, and she gave a guy a blow-job in a blue movie once. Lovely girl," I shouted above the electronic whispering and the grinding of the damned malfunctioning air conditioner. Voices stopped, heads turned. Peterson, poorest son of Peter, frowned slightly and spoke to his friendly trick chief, "Geez. I thought she was a nice girl, Sarge," then quietly dissolved into a film of ashes. I swung out of my chair and up the ladder to the roof before I got soot in my eye. "Geez," he said behind me.
On the roof I slammed the trap door on the noisy square of light. Novotny turned from his post at the edge of the roof. I waved at him, and he turned around to lean on the waist-high wall which outlined the roof. The compound was as bright as a supermarket, vastly illuminated by new floodlights on poles around the fence and on the corners of the building. It seemed very sheltered in the dark square of the roof, a safe place to stroll, to watch the world without being seen; the only sounds a scattering of gravel across the tarred roof from your feet or a gentle thump as a rice bug discovered its fate against the brick wall below the beckoning lights. A pleasant and roomy crow's nest but with very little to spy upon – the spying went on below. The fences, the gate, the parked three-quarter, and fifty yards of cogon grass. Occasionally a small pig might be glimpsed racing across the thirty-yard swath cut around the fence, but where the grass wasn't cut, it waved higher than a man's hopes and anything you chose to see out there was a ghost of your own construction. A patch of darkness in a square of light in an eternity of darkness in a hole in the bottom of the sea. To the right in the distance were the lights of the Main Gate, to the left those of the Central Exchange, and behind were the dancing colored lights of the runways, dipping to the swinging baton of the endless beacon. But these were only lights, distant cold dots without the warmth of stars. The sullen night was no more pleasing than the eternal daylight below. Even the silence held a gritty whisper, and I walked around to hear the track of my boots and spoke for the sound of my voice, "Got a cigarette, Novotny?"
He shook his pack at me, scattering several across the roof. "Have some," he said. I could see the light gleaming off his cheeks and knew they were clenched in a grin.
"Thanks."
"You got a bug up your ass tonight?" he asked as we searched for the lost cigarettes. "Heard you holler all the way up here."
"Maybe I'm going Asiatic like the rest of you bastards. Who knows?"
"Told you this place wasn't home."
"You did, didn't you? Pete thinks it is."
"Huh."
"Pete's fallen in love with a new broad at the Skyview. Do you know who she is? He said she had blond hair."
"Yeah," he snorted, "she's got blond hair, but she ain't got pink nipples. She's okay in the dark, but in the daylight she's bad news." We stood up and leaned over the wall.
"He says he may steady shack with it," I said, flipping my cigarette among the pile of rice bugs on the sidewalk below. "Hope he doesn't bite off…"
An explosion and a clatter of automatic fire at the Main Gate interrupted me. We could see bouncing headlights and splashing bursts of automatic fire followed by their rattle.
"Jesus. What's happening?" Novotny asked quietly, grabbing my arm.
"I don't know, but load your weapon, anyway," I answered on my way to the trap door.
Later I learned that six jeeps of Huk bandits had hit the Main Gate with everything from a 20mm cannon stolen from a jet to a.25 caliber Nambu light machine left by the Japanese, and lots of swivel-mounted.50s and.30s. And they knew how to use them. They came through the gate without changing gears, knocked down six Air Policemen, two Filipino guards and a KP coming to work early; blew up the guard shack, a jeep and a three-quarter, and kept on moving. But we did not know any of this until later.
I hit the floor shouting, "Shut her down! Shut her down! Levenson! get on the phone to PMO and find out what's happening at the Main Gate!" I fielded seventy questions by not answering, then caught seventy more when I unlocked the weapons rack and the ammo locker. "Everybody get a weapon and ammo and get on the roof!" They stared at me with a single question furrowing every face: War? Then the same sadness touched every pair of eyes when the next thought followed, as had been promised since they were born: The Bomb? Oh, my God, the faces said, Oh my God! Nobody told us. We're not ready. There's too much left undone. We all stood very still for a long, long second, very quiet in the metallic hum and beep of our useless equipment, as if wondering why it hadn't warned us, listening again for a clue from the silent, glowing and smug tubes. I thought they would be all right. They were just stunned by the opening of the ammunition locker. None of them had ever seen the green footlocker opened. The weapons' rack was okay, even familiar, an ordinary thing of day to day inspections or alerts, but live ammunition was only for the range or standing roof guard and being very careful not to accidently fire a round because old Johnson had caught a Special Court for firing one round. But this was different. Frightening, exciting, but mainly different, and it grabbed them and held them silent and still. But like all captured moments, this one was as short as it was long, and it ended as I shoved several bandoleers of M-1 clips into Morning's stomach, and shouted, "On the roof! Move! Move! Move! Cagle, get the outside lights. Move!"
They moved.
I grabbed a rifle, some ammo and swung up the ladder, shouting once more for Levenson to call PMO. "Busy! Busy! Busy!" he screamed back, his voice as high and irritated as the signal he was getting.
On the roof madness was unleashed as everyone tried to load, look, and run around knocking each other off the roof. A line of headlights had already turned off the main highway on the side road coming toward us. I could barely keep my mind on the men: the rifle in my hands kept begging to be fired. Another jeep followed the line at a distance which I later judged to be the effective range plus one hundred of a.50 caliber at night from the back of a speeding vehicle. Two sets of headlights were coming across the grass from the runways behind us, and more along the fence next to the Exchange. It looked as if we were being attacked from all sides, and since I had forgotten about the money in the Exchange half a mile east of us, this attacking fear did more than I could with all my pushing and shouting to make the men stay in one place. Peterson still stood in the center of the roof, lost, holding an M-l in one hand, a carbine in the other, and he looked doubly helpless because it was obvious he was not about to turn loose of either rifle long enough to get both hands on one. Novotny led him to the wall, and sat him down behind it. Collins, Quinn and Morning were kneeling behind the wall and at least had their weapons pointed in the general direction of the lights stringing swiftly closer. Levenson popped through the trap door and screamed, "A holdup! A holdup! A Huk holdup!" He giggled and ran to the wall loading a carbine. One of the jeeps from the runaway patrol swept through our lights, an AP hanging out of either side, shouting and shooting, one with a.38 revolver, the other with a shotgun, at the jeeps over a thousand yards away. They were having a grand time. Once more my rifle pleaded to be fired.