Philippine Hardpunch (15 page)

Almost instantly a massive brawl had spread through the entire club—fists, bottles and occasional human bodies flying through
the air to the sounds of cracking fists, smashing bottles, and breaking furniture.

Before Murphy could get the third guy off Caine—the guy who had his ham-sized hands wrapped around the Briton’s throat, repeatedly
rapping his head against the barroom floor—Caine kicked this guy in the balls so hard he actually flipped over and landed
in a brawling bunch over by another one of the cigarette machines.

Caine sprung to his feet, looking around for Rufe Murphy in the melee.

Rufe had his hands full with three guys trying to bring him down to rap a chair leg over his head.

Caine flung himself in that direction, deeper into this madhouse raging out of control everywhere around them.

Hawkeye decided to give chase after Cody down the hallway. Caine and Murphy had their hands full, but they didn’t need his
help. Cody was a man alone when Hawkeye had last spotted him.

He darted in through the archway, the .44 Magnum in his fist.

The hallway took a bend after a couple hundred feet, and there was some light from farther down this end of the hallway because
a door to the alley was open and through that poured a stark shaft of brutal midday sunlight from outside.

Hawkins zoomed around the bend in the hallway right on Cody’s heels, this whole crazy thing going down so fast it was amazing.

Cody had drawn up.

Hawkeye put on the brakes and stood his ground at Cody’s side, glimpsing the scene back here in a flash.

Down the hall, the Filipino hood who had taken off with Ann had pushed the teenage girl in the direction of an older, well-preserved
woman.

If you liked them on the slightly buxom side, Hawkeye decided.

“Mara Zobel,” Cody grunted.

“Bingo.” Hawkins nodded.

Both men stood there with their pistols drawn but not firing because the action had already shifted down at the end of that
hall by the open door.

Mara Zobel held a pistol; it looked from here to Hawkins like a small Walther PPK, which she pressed against the back of Ann
Jeffers’ head, using it to prod the girl out through the door.

Cody felt a spasm of dread shiver through him.

He remembered a hostage crisis like this at the Rome airport not long ago when he and his men had been unable to prevent the
murder of a twelve-year-old child who had been held under the gun in a situation exactly like this.

God, don’t let it happen again
, Cody’s mind raged.

Mara Zobel used the palm of her hand to push Ann along, out of sight, into the sunlight, and the Zobel woman followed her
out, leaving the Filipino hood behind.

The hood whirled on Cody and Hawkins with a pistol coming up to fire on them, the punk screaming something they couldn’t hear
because each of them triggered two rounds from their .45s that reverberated in the confines of the hallway.

The punk caught the slugs, one-two-three-four, each impact shuddering his body into another jerky weave until the opened alley
door stopped him, wrapped him around it, then his cored corpse sinking into a sitting position with his legs outside the building,
his torso inside, his head twisted around with unseeing eyes staring upside down along the floor at the men who had killed
him.

Cody and Hawkins stormed down the length of that hall to the door.

Cody heard the gunning of an engine from outside the doorway.

A squeal of tires.

Rage in his gut fired a snarl.

“No, dammit,
no!
”

He piled through the doorway into the blinding glare of the sun-splashed alley, Hawkins right on his heels, in time to see
an outdated Renault swing into a two-wheeled turn at one end of the alley, the tortured rubber skidding across the pavement,
shrieking between the canyon walls of the alley.

The car turned, onto busy Pilar Street.

The Renault, which could only be driven by Mara Zobel, with Ann Jeffers aboard as her passenger, made the turn and vanished
from sight.

C
ody and Hawkins pelted up the alley, onto Pilar Street.

The flow of noisy traffic of every type and description continued unabated, in apparent raucous ignorance of the brawl exploding
inside the Gilded Peacock.

The car Cody had driven here, a Lancia supplied by General Simmons, waited where they had parked it.

Three Filipino street-gang kids, punks with giant tattoos on their arms and backs, stood lounging against the car.

Cody had tipped the boys to keep an eye on the car, a common practice along Pilar Street; a sort of five-and-dime protection
racket; but he had seen no sense in bringing attention to themselves at that point by bucking the street system.

The teenage street gangs are a powerful force along scenes of Manila’s underbelly like this sin strip, much as they are in
New York or Chicago; not in the big money games, but a definite presence to be reckoned with among the street people.

Hawkeye and Cody hoofed over to the car.

Murphy and Caine beat it down the short flight of steps in front of the club.

Behind them, a whiskey bottle came pitching through one of the plate glass windows, followed seconds later by the airborne
body of a Filipino male who landed, stood, and gave his head a couple of shakes to clear it before storming back into the
fray.

Cody and his men met up in front of the club, at the car.

The street toughs were beginning to take an interest in the brawl now obviously blaring from inside the club.

Cody said to the leader of the street hoods, “A Renault just came out of that alley over there and drove past this way. Which
way did they go from here?”

The Flip punk barely acknowledged Cody’s presence, starting to move with his pals in the direction of the big fight.

“Didn’t see nothing.”

Cody’s men were already piling into the Lancia.

Cody grabbed the punk by two fistfuls of his shirtfront and lifted the guy off his feet.

“Which way, slimeball?”

He now had the punk’s full attention.

The kid pointed shakily down a side street that connected with Pilar one building over. He had not expected anything like
this.

“Th—they went that way!” he gasped.

Cody pushed the kid away, in the direction of the brawl raging inside the Gilded Peacock.

“Have fun.”

He turned and leaped behind the wheel of the Lancia, twisting the key in the ignition and tromping the gas pedal to get them
moving away from there. He leaned his fist on the horn and that did a pretty good job of getting folks to make way.

He steered onto the less traveled side street.

“Let’s hope that punk back there wasn’t lyin’ to you, Sarge, out of spite,” grumbled Murphy from where he sat in the backseat
he shared with Hawkins.

“Is that what we’re looking for?” Caine asked, pointing.

Cody had already seen the Renault one-and-a-half blocks down this very narrow street of shops.

It was mostly pedestrian traffic along here but up ahead the Renault sped along, putting additional distance between itself
and the Lancia even as Cody straightened out the Lancia’s steering wheel, righting the vehicle out of the turn.

People along the block were recovering from having jumped aside to allow the Renault to pass. When they saw the Lancia coming
along, burning up pavement after the Renault, many of them remained hugging the storefronts, or dodging back inside the shops
or recesses in the store fronts, to escape being in the path of the oncoming car driven by Cody.

“There’s a map in the glovebox,” Cody told Caine. “Try to figure where it is they could be heading.”

He could feel them starting to gain on the Renault.

Then a delivery truck innocently lumbered its way into the intersection ahead, the driver slowing down, easing into a wide
turn.

Cody kept pumping the Lancia’s horn, braking only slightly; then he rode the Lancia up onto the sidewalk to navigate around
that delivery truck, the driver of which now realizing he had gotten into the middle of something but was too late to do anything
about it.

People on the sidewalk scrambled every which way, with enough agility to somehow avoid being hit.

Cody steered the Lancia back onto the street only to find that the Renault had gained another half block on them.

Caine considered the map he held open in his lap, encountering some difficulty in reading it as the Lancia bounced along over
the potholes one finds infesting practically every street and thoroughfare in the nation’s capital, road repairs having fallen
very low on the priority list since the beginnings of serious civil unrest.

Caine ran his index finger along the map, tracing street lines, then he looked up with a smile. “I believe I’ve got it. She’s
heading for a half-completed freeway that runs south of here through Makati.

Makati is Manila’s futuristic central business district.

“Any shortcuts we can take to head her off?” Cody asked.

Caine studied the map a bit more as they bumped along.

Cody figured Mara Zobel’s action as one of two ways.

She had spotted some value in Ann and she was hightailing it either to accomplish no more than putting distance and breathing
time between herself and Cody’s team—or she had a definite destination in mind.

Either way, he saw no other options open to him in the matter but to attempt to head her off and rescue Ann as soon as possible.

“If she’s taking us to Valera, we’re losing a chance at that guy if we corral her before she gets to him,” Hawkeye broke in
on Cody’s thoughts from the backseat.

“We lose Valera and we’ll have to start from scratch,” Murphy grunted.

“If Javier does have something big wired to go down, the whole damn thing’ll be clamped tight when word of this gets out.”

“That’s a chance we take,” Cody growled, steering around a peddler who couldn’t get his cart out of the way fast enough. “That
kid is our top priority.”

Murphy said, “You’re right, Sarge, we’ve got to save her little butt and that’s a fact.”

Hawkeye glanced at the Brit in the front passenger seat.

Caine continued to closely ponder the map on his knee.

“How’s it look, teabag?”

Caine looked up from the map.

“If the witch is heading with the child toward that expressway, it looks as if we could buzz over one block from here. That
appears to be a one-way thoroughfare, and there are often fewer stop signs and signals on those than on two-way streets such
as this one, aren’t there? We could get ahead of them on that one-way, then get back to this street and—”

They were approaching an alley.

“Let’s try it,” Cody growled.

He whipped the steering wheel around, easing the Lancia into that alley with as much speed as he could use, what with the
sidewalk filled as it was with pedestrians, beggars, and so many bicyclists.

Priority Number One was Ann Jeffers, yes, but Cody hated bringing this battleground to this civilian sector.

The civilians clogging these streets, innocently going about their errands or jobs, minding their own business, were the people
Cody’s Army fought
for
, and he had no wish to endanger their lives in a willy-nilly firefight that could make victims out of bystanders.

His last glimpse of the Renault was its skrinking chassis continuing on through the busy crowds two blocks away.

“We’re taking one hell of a gamble,” Hawkeye pointed out. “That Zobel bum takes some different turn, or stops somewhere between
here and that freeway, and we lose ’em.”

The alleyway Cody turned into had little pedestrian traffic to slow them. It led them over toward the one-way boulevard.

“She’s on her way to Valera with that girl,” Cody decided. “ He wouldn’t run his operation out of the Pilar Street district.
Valera’s respectable. She’s heading to Makati, or out of town. She’s in a hurry. She’ll take the freeway.”

He leaned on the horn again.

The Lancia shot toward the mouth of this alley, pedestrians along this sidewalk seeing the Lancia barreling down on them and
giving them enough time to leap aside.

Cody caught the two-lane flow of one-way traffic in a skidding turn that left other vehicles’ brakes squealing behind him,
as cars and other vehicles fought not to collide with Lancia, and the squealing of angry motorists too, was left in the Lancia’s
wake.

Caine had called it right.

This street, running parallel to the one the Renault traveled along, had fewer shops and, therefore, fewer people clogging
its sidewalks or the potholed street itself, which accommodated mostly steadily moving traffic.

“I wonder if that Zobel woman even knows we’re trailing her; we were pretty far behind them,” Murphy wondered aloud.

“Let’s hope she doesn’t, but figure she does,” Cody grunted.

He cut in between a pair of vehicles noodling along side by side, startling both of those drivers.

The Lancia zipped on through.

The other drivers sounded their horns and angry shouts after the Lancia but by that time Cody had found an extended stretch
of pavement for more than a block with no vehicles ahead.

He gave the Lancia everything she had. The car fired down the street, through an intersection, ignoring a stop sign.

The day grew darker overhead, the last patches of clear sky yielding to the threatening rain clouds that made the sky into
a low, gray ceiling of foreboding.

Thunder rumbled.

A storm was building.

About to cut loose.

The shrill engine sounds filling her head, Mara Zobel twisted the steering wheel, but not in time to avoid hitting the blind
beggar who had wandered into the street from nowhere, it seemed into the direct path of the Renault.

Ann Jeffers, seated next to Mara, wearing a seat belt, lifted her hands to her eyes and screamed at the precise moment of
impact.

Her sharp scream covered the terrible splat that must have sounded when the front left fender of the Renault slammed into
the beggar’s chest.