Philippine Hardpunch (14 page)

Mara stepped behind the girl. She shoved Ann toward the hallway door.

“Just keep your mouth shut.”

She nodded to Edmundo, who took his turn at grabbing Ann’s arm. Edmundo manhandled the teenage girl through that doorway.

Mara cut around in front of them. She started down the stairs.

Ramos and Jorges brought up the rear.

“I’ll get the car started,” she told them. “Get her out there to me, then get back in here and stop whoever this Cody is.
You know where we’ll be.”

She reached the alley door at the foot of the stairs where the hallway stretched down to connect with the bar. She opened
the doorway an inch, looked out, saw no one near the parked Renault. She turned to wave an okay for Edmundo and the girl to
follow her.

The club bouncer and the teenager reached the bottom of the stairs, Ramos and Jorges remaining close behind them.

It would fit together, Mara told herself.

Her Vincente.

His Operation Thunderstrike, whatever that was.

And this girl, this Ann Jeffers.

It would all add up to her passport out of her dead-end life of managing whores and crooked gamblers.

Nothing must go wrong, she told herself.

At the instant she registered that thought, she turned in time to see Ann Jeffers twist slightly, to face Edmundo, who gripped
her bruised arm as the two of them reached the bottom of the stairs.

Ann then brought her knee up and around in a lightning kick at Edmundo’s groin.

The club bouncer had not expected this, but he was an expert at this sort of thing. He almost managed to jerk a thigh around
to block the kick.

The girl’s knee caught his privates a glancing blow.

Edmundo gasped. His complexion turned purple. He bent in at the middle, wheezing like a busted accordion.

Ann tugged herself out of his grip with a ferocious lunge. She angled herself around behind Edmundo. She gave him a shove
that sent the bouncer bouncing into Mara.

Mara and Edmundo collapsed into a corner next to the alley door, a tangle of writhing limbs and much cursing.

Ann turned first toward that door to the alley—but that would take her too close past the man and woman she’d just tumbled.

The other two behind her, taken by surprise, started to dart for her, reaching out with grabbing arms, both of them.

She took off running down the hall in the direction of the club noises.

Mara forced herself free of the groaning Edmundo, who climbed to his feet also, but with none of his usual agility.

“After her!”
Mara screamed, pointing frantically with her pistol toward the fleeing teen. “Get her! And don’t let
anything
stop you.”

Ramos and Jorges tore off down the hallway leading toward the club. They were already gaining on the girl.

Edmundo did his best to keep up with them, gaining strength by the moment after the girl’s glancing knee-blow to his manhood.

Mara Zobel chambered a round, kept the Walther PPK in front of her, and followed it into what she knew would become, in these
next few heartbeats, one
hell
of a confrontation between her, and her men, and whoever this
Cody
was.

Cody had driven the winding thirty-minute trek into Manila from Clark Air Force Base, through Angeles, south through San Fernando.

He always preferred being behind the steering wheel of whatever vehicle he happened to be aboard, having resigned himself
long ago to the unalterable fact that he was a classic “nervous passenger.”

General Simmons’ idea of “appropriate civilian attire” for Cody and his men, sent over from the main Post Exchange, had been
decidedly casual, constricting jeans, T-shirts, open-necked shirts, running shoes and boots; but that had worked just fine
in allowing the team to blend into the muddled street scenes once they reached downtown Manila and the area of Pilar Street
where no one, it seemed, wore a suit and tie beneath the humid, crushing heat.

The sun had drifted behind some of the increasing cloud cover, clouds gray-bottomed with the threat of rain.

Cody had spent enough time in this part of the world to know that the rain does not cool things off.

Nothing cools things off in that part of the world.

The rains would make the air even muggier, more humid. The mosquitoes would get worse, and so would the creeping jungle rot
that could eat out a new pair of combat boots within weeks.

It is a climate made for violence.

If that came their way, the men of Cody’s Army were prepared.

Cody wore the Colt .45. He liked the old-fashioned solid feel of the weapon at the small of his back in a special holster
designed to conceal the weapon, clipped to the back inside of his jeans.

Murphy also opted for Mr. Colt’s equalizer.

Caine similarly wore a Beretta 93-R.

Hawkeye had wanted to carry along a brand new .375 Magnum they’d had at the armory on the base but that was too much hardware
to wear concealed, no matter what kind of leather he tried.

“You look like you’re wearing a cucumber up your ass,” was how Murphy had phrased it.

The Texan had settled for a short-barreled .44 Magnum.

Each man wore spare clips tucked inside the belt line of their slacks.

They pushed off the street, into the inviting coolness of the Gilded Peacock.

The lights were low and it took a moment or two for Cody’s eyes to readjust to this half-crowded smoky scene underscored by
the throbbing beat of a jukebox somewhere.

The first thing he centered on when his eyes could see enough was the rotating closed-circuit TV camera mounted above the
bar. The camera slowly panned the scene, catching Cody and his team as they stood sizing up the place.

About a half-dozen very young Filipino women, wearing tiny white bikinis, approached them through the crowd.

Kids the same age or younger than Ann Jeffers, Cody thought. He got a sour taste in his mouth.

One girl-woman went boldly up to each man and there was much attempted caressing and several purring invitations that had
to be brushed away from these little professionals.

Cody noted that no one in the place seemed to be paying this scene any undue attention.

Dozens of animated conversations in local dialect peppered the unending rhythmic rumble of the unseen jukebox somewhere.

There were men at tables with B-girls cadging drinks and, offering propositions concerning the private rooms upstairs. There
were a few couples, and some tables of just men sitting around drinking beers and shooting the breeze; a collection of all
types, but none of them showing the least bit of interest in this little scene.

The girls clustering around these new arrivals got the idea after a few seconds and drifted off with upturned noses, seeking
more promising prospects.

Murphy watched the bikini-clad tails jiggling off to disappear into the club scene.

“There goes a real waste of talent,” he sighed.

“A time and a place, old chap,” Caine reminded him.

Hawkeye was looking around the joint, warming to the feel of it. “Quite a honky-tonk, yeah.” He grinned. “We’ll have to come
back here sometime, Murph.”

Cody grunted, “If there’s anything left after we get done with it.” He spotted a darkened archway on the far side of the bar
and started toward it. “Let’s find Vincente Valera.”

The other three trailed along with him. They wended their way, following a circuitous route between the wall tables and the
more close-quarters press of customers nearer to the bar.

Cody had a hunch about that archway.

If General Simmons was right about the size of the operation Valera had going here, there would be private rooms and a gambling
setup somewhere on these premises.

Cody had already spotted signs for the men’s and women’s rooms on the opposite side of the main entrance when they first came
in.

His hunch was that the archway they were heading toward would lead them to the rest of this layout; would lead them to Mara
Zobel, who would be with, or would lead them to, Valera.

He had noted that this was a three-level building. There would be plenty of snooping around to be done, but he felt confident
that they would be able to pull that off as long as they made it to and through that archway without drawing attention to
themselves.

In here, in this barroom, there were too many unknown factors.

He noticed the bartender down at this end of the bar starting to eye, with more than passing interest, their progress around
the outer edges of the crowd.

They reached a point about forty feet from that archway.

Cody could still see nothing through the darkness in there except that a hallway beyond led deeper into the building.

He slowed his pace, and so did his men.

“Doesn’t look all that inviting,” Caine commented.

“This is where it gets hard,” Murphy rumbled.

Hawkeye chuckled. “That happened to me back with them little chickies back yonder.”

The distance between them and the archway was beyond the tables, a little corner with cigarette machines and a pay phone,
none of which were in use at the moment.

Wishing he and his men had more firepower, Cody started forward with a tad more caution but no slackening in their steady
approach.

Then things happened.

Ann Jeffers came sprinting out from that archway, skidding to a stop once she found herself inside the bar.

She had been cleaned up some and outfitted with new clothes since Cody had seen her last, when they’d parted ways after the
chopper landed back there at Clark, but she now also wore an overwrought, bedraggled appearance. A brand-new bluish welt puffed
shut one of her eyes.

She saw them.

“Cody!”
she cried.

She started toward them.

Two figures, Filipino males, materialized from the archway behind the girl before she could take another step and they both
set upon her, wrapping their arms around her, dragging her back toward that hallway, the teenage girl fighting and struggling
and screaming like hell let loose.

Cody and his team bolted forward, Cody and Murphy dashing forward side by side, Caine and Hawkins fanning out behind them.

The guys with the Jeffers girl realized this. One of them disappeared into the darkness back there behind them with his one
arm around Ann’s waist, the* other looping up around her throat in a mugger’s grip, dragging her along with him.

His pal spun around to meet the threat of Cody and company advancing. He sprung a folded knife from his pocket and snicked
the nine-inch blade open with a practiced flip of his wrist. The blade glinted wickedly in the neon light from behind the
bar.

Another guy appeared from the hallway to join mack the knife. This guy, who limped slightly, did a strange thing.

Some of the bar customers seated close to the flaring confrontation had become aware that something was up: conversations
tapering away, heads turning; but most of the customers were still caught up in their own little worlds.

The man who appeared saw Cody and his men coming forward. He turned, picked up a chair, raised it over his head and brought
it down with muscular force atop the head of a burly guy sitting with three similar-looking gents around a table, drinking
beer, wholly unaware of this scene.

At the same time, Cody took on the Filipino with the knife.

The Flip danced back and forth in the archway, ready to go to work on whomever came close enough first.

Cody reached around, came out with his .45 automatic and blew the guy’s guts out a hole in his back, kicking him to the floor
somewhere beyond the archway.

This, simultaneous with the chair smashing over the other man’s head, snagged the attention of everyone in the place, and
in a hurry.

Conversations stopped. Men leaped to their feet for a better look. B-girls shrieked and dived for cover.

The guy who got the chair busted over his head pitched forward, overturning the table and the beers in front of him.

His pals hurtled to their feet.

Edmundo turned from smashing the chair. He picked up a bottle from another table and threw it at the back bar mirror, sending
the mirror shattering into a million noisy pieces. That really tore things loose.

The guy who’d caught the chair picked himself up, shaking his head, looked around and decided it was this bunch who’d fired
the pistol and raised this ruckus who were to blame for his injury. He sailed into Caine before the Englishman could grunt
a single syllable.

Caine and the guy and two of the guy’s buddies tumbled to the barroom floor, a tornado of flying fists and kicks.

Edmundo, satisfied that he had started enough of a diversion to delay this Cody and his men, turned to race after Jorges and
the teenager.

Hawkeye propelled himself into a flying tumble that caught Edmundo at the knees and took the club bouncer down. Hawkeye came
up for air first. His right arm blurred around in a twist draw to unleather his .44, with which he popped Edmundo sharply
on the jaw.

The Filipino’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he leaned against a cigarette machine in the corner and commenced snoring.

Hawkeye straightened back from the guy, making sure not to slip in the blood slick spreading beneath the punk Cody had plugged.

“At least you got off better than your pard,” Hawkins grunted to the guy he’d just rendered unconscious.

Then he spun to observe the full-scale brawl that had flared up inside the Gilded Peacock.

Murphy had rushed to Caine’s assistance, Big Rufe pulling off one by one the guys piling onto Caine, with considerable help
from the Englishman himself.

Murphy picked off one guy and flung him over his shoulder, not watching or caring where the guy landed, but hearing him smash
into a wall over near the bar.

The second man he pulled off he flung at some guys a couple tables away who had already been mistakenly shoved by someone
in the melee, and that table full of guys started swinging fists.