Philippines, Zamboanga.
“I think we need to bring in more weapons, Dennis.”
“What kind of weapons are you talking about?”
“We need more than 200 sets, including drones, bulletproof vests, and tactical vests.”
“You’re giving them to Damaya?”
“Of course. We have to save the kids’ lives, don’t we? Even if it seems like nothing much, those things can save lives when it matters.”
“Haven’t you already given them quite a lot? The expenses that have gone to Damaya are no small matter.”
“I know. But we can’t send the kids to their deaths just because of money.”
“I’m only saying this because I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry. I’m doing this because it’s something I can afford to do.”
That was what I said, but supporting Damaya cost an enormous amount of money.
To be honest, it wasn’t even proper support.
It was more like helping out unfortunate neighbors.
Give them some food, some military uniforms, some weapons, some equipment—that was all.
Did I pay them salaries? Did I enroll them in social security?
I had only provided the most basic things they needed.
That was all.
But even those basics cost an incredible amount.
If money hadn’t been pouring out of Gogo Casino like crazy lately, I would have been in trouble.
What had I been thinking, spouting nonsense about buying Damaya?
I should have just sold them some guns and left it at that.
Even as I regretted it, seeing Damaya grow day by day filled me with pride.
People were strange.
They knew something wasn’t the answer in their heads, yet they ended up cheering for it anyway.
Even when they knew the right answer, they deliberately chose the wrong one.
There was nothing more foolish.
But on the other hand, another thought occurred to me.
What if this was the right answer?
What if it became the right answer?
Maybe it was possible to take Damaya along with me.
Those pointless thoughts.
.
.
.
Simon and I were sitting in the office.
Dennis was seated beside me.
We were trying to come up with a way to make the rebels—
especially the first- and second-ranked factions—fight one another.
If those two didn’t fight,
if they didn’t wound each other by fighting, there was no way the rebels would ever be unified.
Abu Sayyaf and the Bangsamoro Liberation Front (BLF) had to fight.
Only if they wore down each other’s strength would even the slightest opening appear.
“It won’t be easy. No, it probably won’t be possible. I’ve told you several times, but the two of them never fight.”
“Why?”
“They know each other too well. They can’t join forces, but neither are they reckless enough to trespass into each other’s territory.”
“Simon is right. There have been psychological operations to provoke a fight between them several times, but not one of them has ever succeeded.”
Dennis answered in his place.
This was difficult.
The rebels avoided fighting?
That wasn’t going to be easy.
At the very least, it meant psychological warfare wouldn’t work.
“Could you tell me once more about the leaders of Abu Sayyaf and the Bangsamoro Liberation Front?”
“The leader of Abu Sayyaf is named Amir. He graduated from a Philippine military academy, is well versed in military theory, and has earned the absolute loyalty of his subordinates. He believes violence is the most proper path to achieving one’s goals.”
“And the Bangsamoro Liberation Front?”
“The head of the BLF is a man named Murad, who pursues extreme pragmatism. Rather than violence, he looks for solutions through negotiation and dialogue.”
“They’re that different, and they still don’t fight?”
“Whenever Amir tried to start something, Murad would always talk him down. He would say things like, ‘There’s nothing to be gained from you and me fighting.’”
“Then in this situation, our biggest obstacle isn’t Amir of Abu Sayyaf, but Murad of the BLF, right?”
“You could say that in a limited sense, but even without Murad, Amir would have a hard time attacking the BLF.”
Complicated.
If they didn’t like each other, they should just beat the hell out of each other and fight.
These brats were being way too picky.
“Then what if Murad of the BLF were gone? What would happen if he disappeared?”
“If Murad disappeared, his successor would be Karim, the second-in-command.”
“What’s Karim like?”
“Karim is the exact opposite of Murad. He believes armed struggle is far more effective than dialogue.”
“Great. Then if we get rid of Murad, Karim will fight Abu Sayyaf, won’t he?”
“They might join forces instead. They have quite a few similarities.”
I thought otherwise.
Amir wouldn’t want to share his already-complete power with Karim,
while Karim wouldn’t hand over the power he had acquired through such difficulty to Amir.
“I don’t think so. Their dispositions are similar, but their goals aren’t the same. If their goals are the same, they can join forces even if their dispositions differ. But if their goals differ, it’s hard for them to unite no matter how similar they are.”
“Even so, I don’t think killing Murad alone would start a war between them.”
It was frustrating.
They hated each other.
And yet, perhaps because they considered each other a necessary evil, they respected each other’s territory.
I wished there were something that could shatter that arrangement.
But nothing came to mind.
“It would be nice if there were some kind of trigger, but I can’t think of one.”
“I know. Unless gold were discovered again, like before.”
I didn’t miss what Dennis muttered in response to my words.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“What?”
“You said something about gold being discovered.”
“Ah… A long time ago, a very long time ago, there was a rumor that gold had been found at the BLF’s headquarters. An exploration company came, and there was a big commotion, but when they actually surveyed the area, there was nothing. And that was the end of it. It was just a sort of happening.”
This was it.
I had a feeling.
If I arranged this properly, it looked like it could turn out beautifully.
Spread a rumor that gold had been discovered at the BLF’s headquarters.
And if it was said that the reason the BLF insisted on maintaining its autonomous region was because of that gold—
would Amir of Abu Sayyaf sit still?
Would he ignore whether the BLF lived well or not and continue down Abu Sayyaf’s path simply because he received money from headquarters?
Amir, who was that greedy?
Besides, after helping the rebels a little, I had realized that the money required was no joke.
Amir would be no different.
And the BLF’s headquarters wasn’t far away.
If he occupied their headquarters, he could take both the gold and the BLF.
For a greedy man like Amir, it would be difficult to simply let that opportunity pass.
On the other hand, the BLF had Murad, who insisted that everything should be resolved through dialogue.
If Murad remained, the operation might fall apart.
Murad had to be eliminated.
And it had to look as though Abu Sayyaf had killed him while targeting the gold.
Then Karim would fight on his own.
With fewer men than Abu Sayyaf, the BLF would also find it far more advantageous to defend rather than attack.
It was self-evident that the defending side had the advantage in war.
Huh? Wasn’t this the end of it?
Spread the rumor that there was gold and kill Murad.
Abu Sayyaf would come to attack the BLF, and Karim would stop them.
Enormous casualties would occur in the process.
All we would have to do was capture the wounded beasts after they bled each other dry.
That was it?
Had I already come up with the whole plan?
Put it into action!!
********
Fuck.
It was me again.
I was doing it again.
I was wandering along the river near Darapanan in the Philippines, the BLF’s headquarters, scattering gold dust.
I was traveling by boat, sprinkling gold into the river.
What the hell was I doing?
I had made the plan, paid for it, and was carrying it out myself.
If this was how things were going to be, I didn’t know why I was supporting Damaya or spending all that money.
Wasn’t it standard practice for the person paying the money to be left out of the work?
It was unfair,
but I had brought this on myself by volunteering to scatter the gold.
I was supposed to scatter it secretly and discreetly,
but since I had an inventory, moving around and distributing it were both easy. I couldn’t help but make that choice.
And so I was simply scattering money—or rather, gold more expensive than money—across the riverbed.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt I had planned the operation wrong.
An operation to scatter gold across a riverbed?
It had come from my own head, but it had come out wrong.
Terribly wrong.
Gold was filthy expensive.
A one-kilogram gold bar cost nearly 200 million won.
But if I ground that one kilogram down like sand and scattered it across the riverbed, would anyone even notice?
And it was placer gold. Did 24-karat gold make any sense?
The purity had to be low. It needed to contain impurities.
So I bought 14-karat gold.
It was about half the price of 24-karat gold.
I also found a gold mine and bought ten tons of rocks containing traces of gold.
The rocks from the gold mine were actually cheap.
They were literally in the state they had been mined in.
The rocks had low purity, with tiny amounts of gold embedded here and there.
Processing them cost money,
and even after processing, they wouldn’t yield much gold, so I could buy them cheaply for their weight.
Of course, I meant cheap compared to actual gold. It wasn’t sand cheap.
Why was I scattering gold into the river?
Well, I had to spread a rumor that gold had been found,
but I couldn’t just say, “They say gold has appeared,” with no basis whatsoever.
At least a few pieces of gold had to turn up.
If people saw something glittering as they passed by, wouldn’t the rumor spread even further?
So I had intended to scatter just a little gold,
but the problem was that the gold was far more expensive than I had expected.
And the river was far wider than I had expected.
Anyway, that was why I was scattering gold across the riverbed.
Right in the middle of the BLF’s headquarters.
I brought Dennis with me because I was worried people would become suspicious if an unmistakable foreigner was seen scattering something around.
Dennis drove the boat while I scattered the gold dust.
The boat had “UN Environmental Improvement Disinfection Project” written on it.
What I was scattering today should have been disinfectant, not gold.
.
.
.
Marco, a member of the BLF, recently saw a strange post on social media.
Some men had posted photos proudly boasting that they had mined gold from a river.
He could have simply shrugged it off, but the background looked strangely familiar.
It was somewhere he had seen many times before.
‘Isn’t that near Darapanan?’
No matter how he looked at it, it seemed to be Darapanan.
Darapanan.
The place where Marco lived.
He went out, just in case.
Of course, there wouldn’t be any gold.
The video had obviously been faked, too.
He wasn’t looking for gold, but he had come to take a look out of curiosity. Then he saw something glittering.
‘No way. It can’t be.’
He cautiously went down toward the river to check.
He picked up a tiny,
glittering stone, no bigger than a grain of sand, with his fingertips.
The moment he touched it, he knew.
It was heavy.
Unusually heavy.
This was definitely gold.
He looked around, and everything was glittering.
Eureka!!!!
.
.
.
The people of the BLF scooped up soil with shovels and put it into baskets.
They were extracting placer gold.
People panning for gold were everywhere.
Some had even begun surveying the area in search of a gold vein.
The people of the BLF began walking around with their eyes fixed on the ground.
A gold rush had swept through the BLF.
******
“Commander. Have you heard the rumor that a gold mine has been discovered at the BLF’s headquarters?”
“A gold mine?”
“Yes. A tremendous amount of placer gold is coming out of the river that runs through Darapanan. The BLF people are doing nothing but mining gold.”
“Really?”
At the secretary’s report about the gold, greed flashed in Amir’s eyes.
“They say everyone in that area has been mining gold from the river lately.”
“But gold just started appearing all of a sudden?”
“They seem to believe the last earthquake was the cause.”
“An earthquake…”
“They think the earth shifted because of the earthquake, causing gold to flow out of a hidden deposit. The BLF is also searching for the gold mine at the same time.”
“And they don’t know how much is buried there?”
“They probably won’t know until they find the mine, will they? But they say the placer gold they’re recovering is of remarkably high purity.”
Amir fell into thought at his secretary’s words.
He was tempted.
The BLF’s strength was nothing special, to begin with.
Compared to Abu Sayyaf, they were child’s play.
He could move in and swallow them up whenever he wanted.
He had held back because Murad had said that Muslims shouldn’t fight other Muslims,
and headquarters had also told him to protect Muslims whenever possible.
But wasn’t this a different matter?
The BLF’s headquarters wasn’t very far away.
If he swallowed the BLF, he might be able to take all of Mindanao.
There was the New People’s Army (NPA) and Damaya, but those bastards weren’t even worth a handful of soldiers.
This was a good opportunity.
An opportunity to acquire a gold mine and unify Mindanao.
And yet…
Even so, Amir endured with superhuman patience.
Let’s just let it pass this time.
No—let’s wait.
It wouldn’t be too late to move in after the gold-mine survey was finished and the size of the deposit had been confirmed.
He would let the BLF handle the troublesome work.
Once the whole table has been set, it won’t be too late to pick up the spoon and chopsticks.
It’s too early now.
We need to let it simmer.
I don’t know how much is buried in the gold mine,
but once the table is set, we can start punching the numbers into the calculator.
.
.
.
The BLF’s headquarters.
People remained busy panning for gold.
As if a new form of entertainment had appeared, they came out to collect gold as soon as they opened their eyes each morning.
Gold kept turning up from somewhere.
The people panning for gold were working while making pointless jokes.
“There really must be a vein here. Gold just keeps coming out.”
“Yeah. If we knew where it was coming from, we’d go dig there right away.”
“By the way, did you hear that story?”
“What story?”
“They say some professional organization is coming here to conduct geological surveys and things, to find the gold vein.”
“Really? Where is the gold vein?”
“How would we know? The experts will find it. Anyway, I heard a foreign company is coming in to investigate.”
“I heard that too. I also heard they’re joining forces with the provincial government here to take the excavation rights.”
“What?? This is our land, so why would the government take the excavation rights? That makes no sense.”
“I heard that’s what the law says. All underground resources belong to the government.”
“That’s bullshit. This is our land.”
“Strictly speaking, it isn’t our land either.”
“What the fuck did you say?”
“Legally, it isn’t our land.”
“It’s our land because we live here. We’ve lived here for so long. This is our territory, given to us by Allah.”
“Did you hear that story too? That Abu Sayyaf is targeting this place.”
“What?????”
“I heard they found out gold was coming out here and were planning to seize the place.”
“Those crazy bastards. Let them come. I’ll put a bullet in each of their heads.”
“With your skill? Sure you will.”
“Just wait and see. The moment those bastards show up, I’ll—”
Bang!!!!!!!
A gunshot rang out as they were talking.
Just one shot.
It sounded somewhat different from the gunfire they usually heard.
Much heavier and more powerful.
The people panning for gold quickly took cover.
“Anyone hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“Me too…”
“I’m fine as well.”
“Then who was it?”
Just then, a sharp scream rang out.
The people immediately ran toward where the sound had come from.
There, Murad lay collapsed, dead from a gunshot wound.
.
.
.
After confirming that the target had fallen, Allen quickly gathered his equipment and left.
According to what he had been taught, he should have completely erased every trace of his presence, but he didn’t.
He deliberately left behind a few traces.
Not Allen’s traces, but those of Abu Sayyaf.