Free Gray Resurrection by Alan McDermott

us
were on the sunset cruise when they struck.”
    “How many others were there?” Grant
asked.
    “There were seven of us in all: Rob and
I plus five Filipinos.  They transferred us onto their boat and brought us
here.”
    “Are the others here?”
    He could see the pain in her eyes when
he asked the question, and suddenly wished he hadn’t.
    “There were two couples and one of them
had a daughter, Carmen.  She was only three...” Her voice tailed off as
the tears came, and Grant guessed this wasn’t the first time she had cried
since being here.
    “They threw Carmen overboard on the
second day,” Moore explained, putting an arm around Vick’s shoulder and
cradling her head against his chest.  “She had been crying, probably
because she was so hungry, and when her mother couldn’t settle her down one of
them just grabbed her and tossed her over the side like she was a bag of
rubbish.”
    “Christ!” Grant said, astonished that
anyone could be so deliberately brutal towards a child.
    “The mother dived straight in after
her,” Moore continued.  “Before they could stop him, the father jumped,
too.  We were about halfway through our journey at the time, which meant
they were about a hundred and fifty miles from land.”
    He didn’t need to elaborate for Grant to
understand what he was trying to say: there was no way they could have
survived.
    “The other two made it here with us, but
after ten days the husband was taken for a walk and never came back.  When
the wife couldn’t arrange her ransom she was taken for a walk, too.”
    “What about Eddie?” Grant asked, nodding
in the direction of the squatting figure ten yards away.
    “He’s just a tourist, and a
pain-in-the-arse one at that,” Moore said.  “We all know the future doesn’t
look rosy but he bitches about it all day long.  You’ll learn to tune him
out after a few weeks.”
    “I hope it isn’t going to take that
long,” Grant said.  “Do they honour the ransoms that are paid?”
    “Yes, so far.  There was a German
guy here last month and he managed to arrange his ransom within a few
days.  He even sent a food package for us a week later, but all we got
from it was a note.  Bong had the rest.”
    “Bong’s English is good,” Grant noted.
    “He was educated at De La Salle, the
best university in Manila.” Vick said, having regained her composure. 
“Comes from a well-off family who kicked him out of the house when they heard
he was hanging out with Muslim friends, and he came down here to teach them a
lesson.  His friends introduced him to Jonjon and he signed up there and
then.”
    “Did he tell you this?”
    “God no, it was Dindo,” she said,
lowering her voice and gesturing towards one of the younger captors.  “He
drops by every night and slips me some food when the others are asleep.  I
think he has a crush on me.”
    Grant wasn’t surprised, given her
looks.  “Bong doesn’t seem very friendly.  Are they all like that?”
    “To be honest, most of them treat us as
well as can be expected.  Bong is the exception, though.  I think there’s
a little power struggle going on there.”
    “How so?”
    “He’s told us on more than one occasion
that we are being treated too well, and that when he takes command things will
become a lot tougher for us.  I think the conflict stems from their
goals:  While Bong is fighting for an independent Muslim state, Dindo
thinks Jonjon and Abel are in it for the money, pure and simple.”
    Grant glanced upstream where the senior
Abu Sayyaf members were gathered and the power struggle became a little more
even as a plume of red erupted from Jonjon’s chest, spraying blood all over
Guzman’s head and neck.  The report from the bullet followed a millisecond
later.
    “Sundalos!”
    As the shout went up, their captors
grabbed their weapons and began returning fire, spraying bullets into the
undergrowth in the general direction of the initial round on the far bank