Philippine Hardpunch (27 page)

“Of course.” Javier sneered. “There is nothing lower than a traitor, pig shit.”

“There is nothing lower than a traitor to his country,” Escaler countered. “That includes those who direct and supply you,
those who would betray the land of their ancestors for greed”—he nodded at the messy remains of Valera—”and those like yourself,
Arturo Javier, who would like to see the old ways return, but they never will, no matter what you do. The Filipino people
spoke when we threw out the gangster Marcos. Your kind are finished, Javier, even if you don’t know it yet. You may kill us,
but—”

“I will most certainly kill
you
,” Javier snarled, then he eyed Cody again. “But I will kill you first, American, I think. It matters little who you are,
only
what
you are, and that you have failed.

“Your political leaders hope to apply covert force at long last against those of us who understand and appreciate the frailties
of human condition, and the potential of violence and fear, but you are too little, too late, whoever you are.”

“You ought to have your own TV show, handsome,” Cody grunted. “You could spend the whole hour with your own fucking monologue.”

Cody had not made eye contact with Escaler. He and the Flip agent were on the same side—tighter than white rice, as Rufe would
say—but Cody kept his full attention on Javier and the pistol the warlord wagged nonchalantly from that relaxed posture in
his chair, until Cody’s wisecrack jolted him upright like a slap across the chops.

“My people in Manila warned me a covert unit was in on this. You were among those who attacked the communists and rescued
the American hostages this morning, weren’t you, American?”

“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Quasimodo,” Cody said with a smile.

The idea was to rile Javier.

That did it.

This warlord had an ego that took control of emotion and intellect when his ass wasn’t being kissed.

Javier leaped to his feet, and Cody knew the goons behind him and Escaler would be dividing their attention between Escaler
and Cody and their commandant for any signal to open fire, which anyone could see was about to burst from Javier’s fleshy
lips.

“I owe you for what you did to me, to my men, this morning,” Javier snarled.

Cody thought about those two airmen in the pickup chopper who’d lost their lives.

“I owe you, too, asshole,” he snarled.

He pivoted on his left leg in a blur-fast backswing judo kick, his left leg straightening to punch the heel of that combat
boot with enough punch to fling those rifles from the grips of the startled goons.

The instant reflex of Javier’s para aiming his AK at Escaler was to spin in the direction of the judo kick disarming the other
two, and Escaler took full advantage of that opportunity with an unexpectedness that matched Cody’s.

Escaler twisted, both hands going to the barrel of the AK held on him by the goons whose attention reflexed elsewhere.

The guy started to turn back on Escaler but the Flip undercover agent wheeled around to bring a knee-blow up into the goon’s
balls while the man tried to fight with Escaler over the AK. The guy
oooofed!
and let go of the rifle.

Escaler swung the AK around so the butt caved in the side of the man’s head.

At that instant, Cody pivoted on his right leg, following through the kick that had disarmed the two, sending their rifles
flying. He came around to brace himself on his right leg. His hands blazed around, the right slicing down at the neck of the
goon to the right. The
crack!
of the man’s neck snapping sounded like a twig broken in half. Cody completed the move by bringing a straightened right hand
to the middle of the second goon’s nose, driving splintered bone and cartilage back into this man’s brain, killing him instantly.

Javier responded to this turning of the tables by observing that while the American was killing those goons with his bare
hands, Escaler had killed his man with the para’s own rifle, which he next whirled around in Javier’s direction.

“I have not come this far to fail!” the warlord screamed.

He raised his pistol on Escaler, but the Filipino agent already had the AK-47 into full target acquisition on Javier.

With no show of emotion, Escaler triggered noisy fire-and-smoke-blamming round after round on single fire mode, five shots
evenly spaced, striking the warlord in the chest one after another, pulverizing the guy’s life right out of him, making Arturo
Javier a lurching dead man executing a sloppy back stepping exit through the command tent’s rear end flaps to disappear from
sight.

Cody liberated one of the dead goons’ AK-47 and several clips of ammunition. He looked across at Escaler.

“Undercover man, huh? Why the hell didn’t you tell your people about this show?”

Escaler lowered his rifle from having finished off Javier.

The encampment around the tent could be heard babbling with curiosity and shouting.

Escaler first reached over and snatched the master list of Javier’s positioned units from the field desk. Pocketing the folded
sheet of paper, he hurried to a box behind the desk, reached inside, and came out with a flare gun, an overgrown pistol-like
device. He started toward the rear end-flap, away from the distance separating the command tent from the rows of other tents.

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

He stepped from the tent, Cody with him. Escaler raised the flare gun and triggered it.

An extending flare fingered skyward like a Fourth of July show, and up high above the staging area, the flare burst like fireworks
that would not extinguish, throwing the mountainous jungle corner of the world into a silvery glare that seemed like sustained
lightning.

Escaler turned to Cody.

“We have two minutes to get out of here.”

“Then let’s not dally,” Cody grunted.

They hauled away from the rear of the tent when a single rifle shot fired at them.

Escaler grunted
“Ugh!
” more in anger than in pain and spun around at the lance of an extended muzzle flash that stitched his side.

A towering figure in the comou fatigues of Javier’s goons appeared, lowering an AK-47, not seeing Cody yet.

“Sante…” Escaler muttered from where he twitched upon the ground.

Sante started to smile and aim his rifle around on the downed Flip.

Cody pumped a three-round burst from his AK that lifted Sante off his feet into a backslide through his own insides across
the slippery ground.

Cody rushed over, knelt beside Escaler.

“How bad?”

The Flip was already propping himself up on one knee. Cody reached around, offering the guy support.

Several figures—Javier’s goons drawn by the gunfire, perimeter security—approached out of the blackness into the rain-dimmed
illumination back there, on the run, investigating, stopping up short when they saw Sante and Javier dead.

Cody, supporting Escaler, had nowhere to dodge or hide. Cody pulled up his AK with his right fist, propping the rifle butt
against his right hip, intending to take along as many of these mothers’ sons as he could on his way to Hell.

An engine-roaring Chor-7 powered onto the scene, Richard Caine at the wheel and Rufe Murphy, who else, behind a mounted M-60.
Hawkeye rode shotgun, steadying himself to pick off a goon here and there with his .44 Magnum in a two-handed aim, the Jeep-like
vehicle exploding onto the scene from behind the goons, its approach covered by the rabble on the ground below the flare and
the rifle fire from the command tent that drew the curious from the New People’s Army guerillas and Javier’s goon squads who
were already starting to assume command—but most of them could not see this happening back there behind the long command tent.

Caine tilted the Chor-7 into a jolting stop right behind Cody and Escaler. Rufe swiveled the M-60 to hammer a steady pounding
burst that cut down the remainder of Sante’s backup. Hawkeye helped Cody load Escaler into the back of the Chor-7.

The enemy in front of the tent started around the sides of the tent and saw the Chor-7 that had circled around the outskirts
of the camp from where Hawkeye had snuck up on a sentry, strangled him, and lifted the keys.

Projectiles whistled, singing death around the Chor-7. Cody heard one round
spang!
into the vehicle’s armor chassis.

He leaped aboard, willing this once to give Caine the wheel, nervous passenger or not. He and Hawkeye and Rufe concentrated
their fire on the enemy scattering around the tent.

The Chor-7 veered away, deeper into the jungle. Hawkeye sighted his .44 Magnum from one hand, using his other arm to steady
Escaler in place in the backseat.

The vehicle jogged along through the uncleared terrain, Caine steering them back in the direction of the trail.

Escaler wore an expression twisted with pain, his side a dark stain that looked bad to Cody even in the silvery wavering of
the light from the flare, but the Filipino did not utter a groan of agony as Caine steered the Chor-7 away from the lights
and activity and confusion of Javier’s staging area behind them.

Someone, a bunch of someones, started shooting back there, into the jungle surrounding the base, but at nothing. Cody remembered
some of our own guys giving into pressure in a hostile environment and letting off steam the same way in Nam—but that’s all
it usually accomplished, including now.

No more zinging projectiles stung near the Chor-7 that gained the rutted trail, Caine sent fishtailing onto the bumpy, mucky-mud
trail leading away from the staging area.

The vehicle swerved through mud that could stop them if its sucking hold grabbed the tires with enough suction.

“We beat this mud, we’ll get to that chopper in no time at all,” Caine called back over his shoulder.

“How is he?” Murphy asked about Escaler.

Cody looked up from the wound of the guy he helped brace against the jouncing.

“Graze, not entry. He’ll make it.”

“You’re damn right about that, yank,” Escaler gasped through clenched teeth. “The Philippines are going to make it… thanks
for the help, but… we’ve got our future in
our
hands… and we’re going to keep it that way.” He patted the list inside his pocket. “Take this, my friend… broadcast their
positions…”

Murphy asked, “Broadcast to who?”

Thunder hammered overhead. Lightning rippled the black clouds. But it was not Nature. It was artillery that boomed a steady
barrage down upon that staging area behind them.

Explosions commenced renting the night with orange fire, impacting mortars and secondary explosions eating up fuel tanks and
equipment and men and a whole staging area.

“Escaler’s with us,” Cody told his men, “or more the other way around.”

He glanced at his watch. Two minutes exactly since Escaper had fired that flare. Talk about crack precision.

Hawkeye tore his attention away from the barrage blowing Javier’s staging area to bits. He looked at the wounded Filipino
with a mixture of respect and open curiosity.

“You sure took your time about calling in the cavalry, cousin.”

Escaler did not look like a man whose side would feel aflame from the bullet graze he’d sustained. He nodded at the list Cody
took from his pocket.

Javier’s master list.

“I… could not get close enough to Javier… to get that,” he said. “Until tonight.” He looked at Cody. “You came… but then it
was too late for me.”

The bombardment behind them continued unabated, blistering the night with war. Caine steered the Chor-7 off the trail to where
the second chopper from Valera’s fleet had been stashed, waiting for them.

Murphy tumbled from the vehicle, hopping into the pilot’s seat before Caine had fully reined the Chor-7 to a full stop. Hawkeye
stood behind the M-60, watching the night for any sign of danger, but the ruckus of Javier’s base falling under Filipino government
attack showed no indication of following them.

Cody and Hawkeye carried Escaler, propping him up as gently as possible in a bucket seat in the copter’s bubble.

Rufe cranked the bird to life.

“It looks a bit as if we muddled into something you Filipino chaps already had your hands on,” Caine said as he and Cody belted
Escaler into the chopper seat.

Escaler’s stoic mask stayed right in place.

“It is… most fortunate that you intervened, my friend… for myself, for my country… for the Jeffers family. I was helpless
to assist them without showing my hand. And had you not intervened when Javier had me under the gun, I would be a dead man.
His units would be alerted…”

Cody took that hint and grabbed at the chopper’s dash radio mike to patch into the Filipinos’ tac net with information a couple
of generals named Avelino and Simmons would be waiting for back in Manila.

A dead warlord’s dreams of an overthrow would be stopped in its tracks before it even got underway.

There would be no command broadcast from that jungle staging area in Mindanao ordering a strike at the many targets at 0200
hours, and a dead warlord’s list would get every one of those waiting units across the Philippines stomped hard by competent
military of the new government.

The misting rain slanted, splashing harder against the chopper’s Plexiglas as Murphy piloted them along.

Caine administered Escaler a shot of morphine to help knock out the guy’s pain.

The storm would be a mild one, Cody could tell. The thunder was already subsiding, and those sounds of human warfare from
that base were shrinking away into seeming insignificance behind them.

Filipino artillery hard punched the heart of an overthrow that might have succeeded but was already history.

Cody read pertinent information from Javier’s list across the scrambled frequency to Filipino army units at the other end
ready to move, to pounce.

The heavier rain pounding the islands they flew over would give Murphy little trouble in getting them back to Clark Air Base.
This rain was nothing but good, a cleansing, purifying force that would wash away the blood and memories of the bad ones who
had to be stopped by force.