Philippine Hardpunch (26 page)

He ripped off his flight helmet and tossed it onto the seat behind him. He quite naturally joined Valera and the goons who
placed themselves to surround the new arrivals—to “accompany” Valera and his “pilot” past the ends of some rows of tents,
to one tent larger than the others, set apart from the others.

Valera walked with a more dignified gait than he had theretofore exhibited.

Cody looked enough like a pilot in the jacket he’d swiped from the original pilot he killed at Valera’s. The fit was one size
too small but no one would notice. He wore his.45 tucked into his waistband and a half-dozen spare clips in a holster at the
base of his spine beneath his jeans. Anything heavier in the way of firepower would have aroused suspicion.

Everything, every little sound, the squishing of bootfalls through sucking muck, the cough of a man here or there, the mutter
of conversation among camou-clad paras they passed, it all registered to Cody with a crystal clarity that he knew was the
self-awareness that, from this point on, he walked the razor’s edge.

He had considered but rejected the notion en route that Javier would recognize him when this “pilot” accompanied his “boss”
into the command tent to meet with Javier.

The warlord would then insist that the “pilot” leave, whereupon Cody would
play
that heartbeat, that leap into time and space.

Javier had been in the Huey that “disappeared” when the fighting flared up that morning—Cody was more sure of it now than
before—and that had put Javier at too high an altitude to distinguish any man’s individual features down among Cody’s force
on the ground.

A gamble, yeah.

Thunder rumbled the night and the mist started again, not with the cooling of the two earlier rains outside Manila because
there was no breeze here. The night thickened with a mist that would not stop until it soaked everything.

They reached the tent.

Two of the paras stood one to either side and drew aside the end flaps for the new arrivals to enter. Cody and Valera stepped
into the tent. The paras stepped in after them, closing the commander’s tent flaps behind them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder
slightly behind Cody and Valera, who stood side-by-side, facing a man behind a field desk and a man who stood at his side.

By the presence inside the tent of the three goons, Cody could see he had lost the first part of this gamble. He had counted
on this warlord insisting on conducting his business in private. The tent, he had noted, was set far enough away from the
other points of this area that it had a privacy all its own, and this stretch of perimeter out there in the rainy jungle night
would be particularly well patrolled.

Cody’s right palm itched to grab at the butt of the .45, but he kept his emotions inside.

The man seated behind the desk looked like an ape stuffed into pressed camou fatigues. A huge scar had the effect of extending
his smirk across one-half of his face as he took a moment to make a production of appraising Valera from top to bottom, ignoring
the “pilot.”

“The great senator. We meet at last.”

Javier’s unblinking, penetrating scowl pinned Valera.

“T—the pleasure is all mine.” Valera stuttered over the “t,” but otherwise it was a good try at sounding coolly cordial. “I
regret to report that, uh, General Maceda’s force—”

“Was attacked, yes, we know about that,” Javier said. And Cody knew at that moment that he had lost this gamble, all the way.
“It was your fault, what happened there, you blundering idiot.” Javier directed this statement at Valera as an impersonal
fact, with no emotion. “You sent those hoodlums from your nightclub to Clark Air Base, where they were stupid enough to kidnap
the American girl for a second time on no one’s orders, and that led the authorities to that club of yours and the Zobel woman,
and so to you and General Maceda.”

“This is Escaler, acting commander of this unit of the New People’s Army.” Javier nodded at the man standing to the side,
also facing the field desk.

“Where is General Chung?” Valera asked.

Javier replied with a small nod, not to Valera or Escaler, but to the three para goons who swung their AK-47s around from
shoulder-strapped to aiming, one each at Escaler, Valera, and John Cody.

Escaler reacted the most stunned.

“What is the meaning of this!”

Javier rose from behind the desk with the grace of an athlete, making his hunchback-of-Notre-Dame appearance all the more
bizarre. He snatched away the holstered pistol Escaler wore at his hip. Javier stepped back quickly so as to cover the three
men standing in front of his desk.

“As for you, my dear Escaler, I discovered only earlier today that you are a highly placed informant for the government’s
antiinsurgency force. They think they know much about what I have planned tonight, thanks to you, don’t they? But they know
only what the rest of you were led to believe.”

The coarse features and coarser manner and voice of this warlord did not fool Cody. Here was a savage of shrewd animal cunning,
an unerring judge of character and the exploitation of human beings.

Escaler stayed cool.

“I suppose you have something resembling proof of these ridiculous allegations.”

“A government informant was discovered in my rank only this afternoon,” Javier sneered. “Sante overheard him make a report.
He knew about you. He thought he might live, you see. Sante saw to it. Then we killed him.”

Outrage Dickered in Escaler’s eyes.

“Sante.” The Filipino undercover agent said the name. “Your professional torturer. And is that what happened to General Chung?
He did not leave, as you led us to think. You will order my men. While I… join Chung, is that it?”

“And what of me?” Valera sputtered, taking a step forward.

Cody tensed for anything.

The patter of rain tapping the tent made the moment brittle. A night bird peeled mournfully somewhere in the rainy jungle
night.

“You, my foolish friend,” Javier said to Valera, “have only one fate.”

He stepped over to square off facing Valera, a couple of steps in front of him, ignoring Escaler to his left and Cody to the
right because of the rifles pointed at their backs by the goons blocking their way out.

Valera stuttered, “Y-you could never—”

“Yes, I could, and I will.” Javier savored the moment. “You pompous fool. Those I serve chose to exploit you; could you not
see it long ago? You gave us the New People’s Army. The street gangs. The black market.”

“And… I can give you more!” Valera cried.

Here it comes, thought Cody. He wondered where the hell three guys named Caine, Hawkins, and Murphy were at this moment.

Thunder rumbled.

“And what, pray, can you give me?” asked the ape in the uniform in the voice of a sicko enjoying every once of fear that made
the man before him quake.

Valera could not pull his eyes from that mesmerizing scowl, but he raised a shaky arm, pointing a quivering finger at Cody.

“He… is not my pilot! He’s the one who led the attack on my home, on Maceda! He forced me to bring him here!”

Javier’s scowl left Valera to center on Cody.

“I would have guessed as much,” he said with a small smile.

Then, not appearing to even look in Valera’s direction, Javier raised his right hand, the one that gripped the pistol he had
taken from Escaler, and he aimed that pistol at Valera’s forehead from a distance of about three feet.

Valera, caught completely by surprise, had enough time only to open his mouth, try to shriek, but nothing came out.

The pistol blasted in Javier’s grip and a bullet sped into Valera’s mouth to core out the back of his skull, lots of nasty
red gunk splattering along with it across the tent fabric behind him an instant before his body slammed into that fabric that
held against him and made his corpse slide into a sitting position, eyes still ovals of surprise, mouth wrenched wide open,
nothing appearing really wrong except for the goo of blood and brains and skull fragments stuck to the tent fabric behind
him.

The warlord lowered the pistol. He strutted to his field chair behind the desk, as if the murder of a man was but a routine
matter like the shuffling of papers. He sat and looked from Escaler to Cody, where each of them stood to one side of Valera’s
remains, to opposite sides of the tent, each under cover of the goons who stood aiming their AK-47s at them.

Javier seemed to find the thing kind of amusing. A flicker of humor flashed in beady eyes in that ugly face. He looked first
at Escaler.

“You thought you must have turned a pretty trick when I removed that pest, Locsin, and made the mistake of promoting you,
but it was fortuitous that I had you close underhand when I learned what I did. You have alerted your unit of my plans, or
what you know about them, have you not?”

Escaler eyeballed Javier unflinchingly straight in the eye.

“I have.”

“But they do not know the precise positioning of the strike forces awaiting my command to strike.” Javier chuckled. “I have
every important government person and place wired to be attacked. Police stations. Arsenals. But you don’t know where my men
are, do you, Escaler? Where I have placed your own NPA units, and Valera’s gangs—”

“Ain’t you the windy son of a bitch,” Cody grunted. “You won’t kill us yet, warlord, because you don’t know what we know,
so let’s cut through to the stuff that matters, okay?”

Javier liked that. He showed it in the way he regarded Cody with the top-to-bottom treatment he had given Valera, before killing
him.

Cody thought some more about pulling for his .45. He thought some more about how he’d look in Valera’s condition. He decided
to wait his time and hope that gamble paid off at least.

Javier felt damn smug and he had good reason to, with three goons holding rifles on Escaler and Cody in the middle of a camp
of five hundred or more enemy troops.

“You do not know this list of where the units are, either, do you, American? Else why would you return here? You knew I would
have it with me, and I do.” He tapped a folded sheaf of papers before him to his right on the desk with the barrel of the
pistol, his index finger curled around the pistol’s trigger. “I have the only copy of that list here, right here, my friends,
but what is even more important as far as you’re concerned is that”—he lifted the pistol to wave the barrel idly back and
forth between Escaler and Cody—”I have the two of you. And there is no way out for either of you. Now. Which of you prefers
the honor of being the first to die?”

Hawkins, Caine, and Murphy hacked their way away from the trail, deeper into the jungle, their machetes carving a way through
the vines and tree limbs that drooped from the rains.

They had found a trail that looked recently matted down, indicating that it was the route Javier’s main force would take when
they evacuated the staging area farther on along the trail.

It became slow going, slogging through the rain and the muck. After a while they saw some lights from the staging area reflected
in the low blackness of night clouds and eventually reached a point where more lights could be seen ahead of them through
the trees.

The three commandos paused as if one consciousness guided their collective thoughts and actions.

“We’ll be running into perimeter sentries anytime now,” Caine whispered through the whisper of the rain.

Each man toted an M-16 assault rifle in addition to side arms and combat webbing.

That’s when the single pistol shot from somewhere in the direction of the staging area spanked the night.

Nothing terribly loud or alarming under normal circumstances. Guns went off all the time in the jungle, and there were several
hundred men in that temporary base, armed to the teeth.

That single pistol report cracked like a whip through the collective combat consciousness of these three.

“That there’s the start of this rodeo,” Hawkeye opined.

“Let’s get to it!”

Big Rufe Murphy sheathed his machete, grabbed his M-16 in both oversized fists, and charged forward through the soaking darkness,
toward a staging area sparking itself alive with ripples of activity in response to the pistol shot.

Hawkeye and Caine fell into combat position as they loped along in tandem with Murphy.

“Uh, if I’m not being overly obtuse,” the Englishman muttered as he plunged along, “let’s get to
what?
”

“If it moves, shoot it,” Hawkeye snarled. “Unless it’s the sarge, of course.”

“Of course,” Caine muttered wearily.

They trudged on through the mugginess of the dripping jungle, toward those lights through the trees.

T
o Javier’s question, “Which of you prefers the honor of being the first to die?” all the “warlord” behind the desk got in
response was an even-eyed stare from each man, and this too made Javier chuckle.

“Who indeed would volunteer for such an honor, who indeed?” The ape-in-pressed-camou-fatigues than got real serious again.
The Javier scowl focused on Cody. “What is your name?”

Cody said nothing.

Javier lost some of his good humor. The three goons standing behind Cody and Escaler had not shared in their commandant’s
merriment, the two AK-47’s pointed directly at the center of Cody’s back and the third of those rifles aimed at Escaler from
several feet behind them.

“Your name, I suppose, hardly matters,” warlord Javier shrugged. “You are here, and you have failed. Your men are out there
somewhere in the night but there is nothing they can do. I have six hundred men of these combined forces with me, gentlemen.
Six hundred. Your puny unit, American, will do nothing.”

Escaler said, “They did all right this morning, did they not?”

Javier leaned back, focusing on the Flip undercover man.

“I’m curious, Escaler, as to why you do not report to your superiors the fact that Locsin was holding captive that American
family.”

“I was Locsin’s second-in-command,” Escaler said. “He would have entrusted their execution to no one but myself. The Jeffers
family was safe enough, and my communications had to, of course, be severely limited.”