Philippine Hardpunch (22 page)

“They’ve learned nothing, I tell you.” Valera started to rise to make himself a drink.

The stabbing peel of the ringing telephone on the desk halted him. He sank back into the chair.

Maceda grabbed the receiver and as he did so, he finger tipped a button to activate a monitor box located on one corner of
the desk that allowed the incoming voice to be amplified while a microphone in the unit picked up anything spoken in the library,
channeling it out across the wire to the other end of the telephone connection.

Before Maceda could speak, a voice Valera recognized instantly to be Javier’s spat from the little amplifier box speaker and
polluted the last vestiges of civilized ambience of this library he loved so much.

Javier’s voice snarled from the box, “You know who this is. Is my man there?”

“I am,” said Maceda.

“The other?”

“Also,” Maceda replied.

It was as with the lieutenant, Durano, Valera thought. As if he were invisible. He knew now it had been a terrible miscalculation
to ever have joined forces with these serpents.

“All is in readiness?” Javier demanded.

As if I am invisible, Valera thought again.

Or already dead…

“Everything,” Maceda acknowledged. “The time?”

“It begins at 0200 hours,” said Javier. “Acknowledge.”

“0200 hours,” said Maceda.

“This will be our last communication,” the amplifier box clipped. “All other staging points have been so advised. Have you
anything final to convey?”

“A problem,” Maceda said, his eye on Valera.

“Report.”

“The daughter. You understand?”

“I do.”

“She fell into, uh, the hands of the senator.”

Valera sensed a frost reaching across the connection from the other end, extending invisibly out of that desktop amplifier
to caress him like the skeletal fingers of death.

“I… I only wish to say that I only tried to assist,” he told the box on the desk. “I had an assistant send men to Clark Air
Base. They… got the girl. They were trailed back to one of my business concerns, it’s true, but none of this is my fault!
Have I not amply demonstrated my sympathies to our cause?”

“Silence.” Javier’s command snapped like a whip. “You will come here promptly to me now, as planned.”

“And I?” Maceda asked.

“I think we shall change our plans,” Javier said. “You will stay there and… command the situation.” The warlord’s voice took
on a tone of sly intimacy meant for Maceda, not Valera. “And sec that our associate does not miss his flight.”

“I shall indeed.”

“Good luck then,” Javier’s voice crisped.

The monitor box clicked. The drone of a steady dial tone buzzed.

Maceda flicked another button to cut off the monitor.

Valera decided to stand. He felt himself doing so stiffly, somehow unnaturally, and he knew his fear showed through the aloof,
polished demeanor he always strived to maintain to match the tailored cut of his Savile Row wardrobe; but he felt his facade
of impeccability slipping and he saw in Maceda’s sneer that this viper he had taken in was not fooled, no.

Thunder rumbled outside. Lightning crackled, strobelike in its intensity, a storm approaching.

Well,
Senator
,” Maceda put a mocking accent on the title, “you’re expected at Javier’s new base camp on Mindanao.”

“I… should remain here. What reason is there for me to—”

“You heard Mr. Javier.”

“That list of men I gave you the last time you were here,” Valera said. “My contacts throughout the islands, who will move
and strike tonight when I am to give them the signal—”

“
I
will give them their signal to strike at 0200 hours.” Maceda’s oily smile got greasier, a self-satisfied smirk. “Now, shall
I see you aboard the helicopter outside peaceably or would you prefer an armed escort? Time has run out for all of us.”

T
wo of the sentries passing beneath the northwest corner of the wall did not see Cody and Murphy in that sustained moment of
strobe-lightning that rendered the rainy, gloomy scene a surreal, metallic sort of daylight.

The middle man who had stared up at the heavens with a curse on his lips against the elements, the one who saw the commando
figures flattened up there atop the wall but not flat enough, opened his mouth to yelp a warning to his comrades who trudged
along beside him absorbed in some conversation of their own, probably concerning their shitty luck at pulling guard duty on
a night like tonight.

Cody and Murphy triggered the Ingrams they held, the MAC noise and flash suppressors keeping the weapons down to a discreet
chug that stitched the three men into reverse gallops, the backstepping dead stopped by the base of the wall already muraled
with their sprayed guts, the only sounds to this triple kill the violent flapping about of the bodies that bonked off the
wall to pile face downward atop each other, these noises muffled from atop the wall by the sibilant hissing of mist kissing
the grounds and buildings, aided by the gloom of night steadily devouring the dreamy half-light remnants of this day.

An inky clutch of shrubbery grew to nearly six feet high between this point where the killings took place and nearest of those
lighted guest houses.

No indications of reaction came from that vicinity, but something started happening at the front of the house, where the armored
personnel carrier appeared almost comically out of place beneath the porte cochere. troops in government uniform standing
around where they had debarked from the confines of the armored vehicle to stand in casual attitudes, some leaning against
the vehicle, undercover of the porte cochere from the rain, smoking, looking around as men getting the feel of a new place
for the first time.

An officer in his midthirties strutted out of the main front entrance of Valera’s home and snapped a command at the soldiers,
who doused their smokes and climbed back into the personnel carrier.

The officer, a Flip looey, rode in front, next to the driver.

The vehicle hummed to life over there and moved farther around the driveway to stop in front of one of the guest houses, where
another Philippine uniformed officer emerged from the front door of that house to greet them. The newly arrived soldiers—each
man, Cody saw, armed with an assault rifle—ascended from the personnel carrier and filed into the house without wasting any
time out of doors. “And that’s a break we can use,” Cody grunted.

“I hear that,” Murphy rumbled assent.

They sprang off the top of that wall together in loose drops that landed them into somersaulting rolls, each coming up onto
his feet safely a short distance inside and down the slight sloping of the landscaped terrace inside the wall.

“Let’s stash this bunch first,” Cody said.

They hurried over to the tangle of unmoving arms and legs that were the remains of the sentries. They grabbed at those arms
and legs, tugging the corpses and their dropped weapons in to the opaque gloom of the shrubs growing at the bottom of the
wall. “I never was a litter bug,” Murphy grunted as they made quick work of the job, “but with this garbage I could make an
exception.”

“Uh oh,” said Cody.

Rufe turned from surveying the results of having stuffed the dead men from sight of anyone who might pass by, and he saw what
Cody saw.

“Someone’s going somewhere,” he grunted.

A guy in pilot gear had waltzed out the back door of the main house to strut over to and board the chopper.

Then followed the cranking up of the Huey, the whistling of the turbines awakening, the clunk of that first rotor turn; then
the rotor rumble vibrated the eerie half-darkness with husky insistence.

“My guess is Valera, and possibly whoever’s in charge here,” Cody said. “Let’s see how lucky we are, big guy.”

“Man, I feel luckier than a stud turned loose in a woman’s prison.” Rufe chuckled.

They trotted off together from the clump of shrubs that blended so with the tastefully landscaped acreage separating their
corner of the wall from the northwest corner of the main house.

The helicopter pilot did not spot them, being far too occupied with his controls in preparing the chopper for obvious imminent
takeoff.

The Huey waited there, its rotor blades
whishhhing
in the pelting mist.

The last of the troopers from the personnel carrier disappeared into the “guest house” downrange, and from inside there, and
the other two structures, could be heard upraised male voices, and, from across the rainy distance to where Cody and Murphy
gained the corner of the main house, Cody could sense the vibrations—he could think of no other word—of something about to
happen.

The night storm riding the cooling wind of coming night was only a prelude for a human drama about to unleash itself right
down here on Earth.

The door to that middle house slammed shut after the last soldier, and the vehicle rolled around the driveway again to pull
into a garage south of the house and the chopper landing pad.

Cody and Murphy squatted beneath a darkened window at the corner of the house, out of the pelting, needling mist, around the
corner from the chopper, blocked from sight of the lighted windows of those guest houses by the staggered lines of shrubs
dotting the acreage.

The row of ground-floor windows along this side of Valera’s main house were darkened except… except for—not a window but a
door, a screen door, from which came a rectangle of indirect, warm light that refracted the falling mist, the screen door
off a patio bordered by what looked to Cody like well-tended flower beds.

Angry voices exchanging heatedly in the local dialect sniped at each other, almost audible enough to be understood.

“You make out that pig latin?” Rufe grunted.

Cody did, and he recalled Cal Jeffers’ description of the peculiarities of speech by which Jeffers had been able to identify
Valera during Valera’s visit to Locsin’s NPA base in the jungle, and those same peculiarities—deep-voiced, resonant for a
Filipino, with a slight stutter over the “t”s—allowed Cody to tag the Communist Party ex-senator without eyeballing Valera,
too. He motioned Rufe ahead with him and soundlessly tread through Vincente Valera’s carefully tended flower beds, hugging
the wall of the house, he and Rufe each with their Ingrams held close in but aimed out, ready to unleash more silent death
if it came to that.

He paused with his back pasted to the rain-slimed brick of the side of the house, two feet from that screen door.

The lightless shroud of night had completed its smothering of dusk during the time he and Rufe had taken to climb the wall,
deal with those three wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time sentries, and make it this far, the descending gloom offering them the
additional benefit of further camouflaging their approach through and between those shrubs to the house.

He eased along the wall a couple careful inches at a time, knowing Murph was eyeing their backtrack and around them, especially
the direction of that line of guest houses (read: barracks), thus allowing Cody to concentrate with his ear close to that
screen door from a point where the end of this argumentative exchange from inside could be more clearly eavesdropped.

The one he tagged as Valera was saying, “—I am a power too, General Maceda. The force of gunmen and youth gangs I have organized
to carry out their attacks upon specified targets, these street vermin, owe their allegiance to me.
I
run the rackets in Manila, do you not understand that?”

“That may be true,” the other man, Maceda, countered, in a voice of unmoving coarseness, “but these units of, er, urban guerillas
you were kind enough to organize, as you say, for us—”

“Urban guerillas? You mean burglars and murderers and rapists, don’t you? The scum of the streets.”

“A moment ago you were boasting of your command over such men.” Maceda snickered.

Cody knew this guy by the sound of his voice, too, though they had never met. It was the voice of a brutish savage used to
enforcing his will, used to having others obey for fear of their lives.

Valera seemed no exception.

“I… do believe you, General,” the communist said in a conciliatory voice, a sigh of acceptance. “You have paid them more,
is that it? Promised them more than Javier instructed me to offer them, so as to usurp what is mine. You wanted me out of
the picture from the very beginning, I see now so clearly. And the New People’s Army?”

“I won’t say it again, Senator.” Maceda’s growl dropped to not-so-subtle a threat. “Walk out of that door, board that helicopter
I have waiting for you, and carry out your part. You should already be on your way to Mindanao.”

“We were to take that helicopter together to meet with Javier. I see what you have in mind. It will be as
was
before.
You
people will have the country,
we
will be hunted and killed as we were before.”

“
We
, Senator? You were born to rule. Too bad you picked the wrong side.”

“And this time,” Valera went on in a thinking-aloud voice as the pieces fully fell together for him for the first time, “you
will control my organization, too. You will be the government
and
you will be the black market. I think, General, that I would rather you killed me right here, in the home of my ancestors,
if you have the courage to do your own dirty work.”

Maceda said, “Nothing I would like better, my pompous, hypocritical senator, but, unfortunately, it’s not according to plan.
Mr. Javier has requested we reserve the privilege of dealing with you for him. But if you insist, I can tell him that you
put up a struggle. That you—”

Cody left his piece of the wall and turned to plant himself squarely in the rectangle of light that fell upon the ground at
his feet in the cold rain. He brought up the Ingram in target acquisition on the man in Filipino Army uniform who had been
in the process of strutting around the far end of an ornate oak desk planted in the center of a library that reeked class
and breeding—except for the men arguing in it.