PALAWAN

Lisa sat at the dressing table in her quarters at the Christian mission.  The sheen on her skin was part perspiration and part mosquito repellant.  She listened to the night call of the geckos and reflected on the previous week as she combed her shoulder length hair before turning in for the night.  Her body clock was still playing catch up after having traveled half way around the world.  Her home was in the high desert country of the American Southwest and she wondered if she would ever get used to the humidity.  It was the rainy season on Palawan.

The geckos went silent and the door to her room suddenly flew open.  The image of a man appeared in the dressing table mirror.  She jumped out of her chair, knocking it over, and spun around.  Standing in the doorway was a young Filipino man with a wispy mustache.  He was short, maybe 5 feet 4 inches tall.  He was slightly built with a mop of blue black hair over a pair of wild, dark brown eyes.  The intruder was wearing a sleeveless white tee shirt over loose baggy trousers and had rubber sandals on his feet.  Hanging at his waist was a large bolo knife in a wooden scabbard, the AK47 assault rifle in his hands was pointed directly at her chest.

Lisa gasped, then stammered, “What do you want?”

He spoke in heavily accented English, “No talk, no sound, you make sound, you die”.

The worst nightmare of Lisa’s young life had just begun.

The island of Palawan protrudes like a dagger thrust out from the rest of the Philippine Archipelago deep into the South China Sea.  The small islands in the Balabac Straights fall like drops of blood from the tip of the dagger onto the island of Borneo.  The East side of Palawan forms the western boundary of the Sulu Sea.  The island has a spine of mountains running its entire length and some of the thickest triple canopy rainforests this side of the Amazon Basin.

Southwest Palawan is one of the last wild places on the planet.  Of the more than seven thousand islands that make up the Republic of the Philippines, many could be said to be remote, but Palawan is the place that Filipinos refer to as the last frontier.  It is the home to many rare species of flora and fauna that do not exist anywhere else, not even in other parts of the Philippines.  It is also home to a number of indigenous peoples, some of whom are jungle dwellers with no written language who are just a couple steps out of the Stone Age.  The list of things on Palawan Island that could kill you was already long.  Now, Abu Sayyaf terrorists could be added to that list.