Philippine Hardpunch (24 page)

He had maintained the treetop altitude after passing over the wall of Valera’s ancestral digs.

The drop, when that round took out the rotor mechanism, had dropped them just enough to rupture a fuel line.

Valera sat petrified in his seat, so Cody reached around him, palming open the latch of the side door, giving Valera the old
heave-ho.

Valera whooped into frightened life as he fell out from treetop level.

Cody heard him land with a thud at the base of the tree, then he released his own grip from the chopper and dropped. At the
same instant, he saw Murphy release his shadowy bulk from the opposite side door of the bubble front.

They hit the ground together. The rattling rifle fire ceased from inside the walls, and the rain stopped misting, as if shut
off by some giant switch somewhere, rendering the world an abruptly more quiet place, a place where men’s voices calling to
each other and commotion from inside the estate carried clearly to Cody, Murphy, and Valera, hurrying from the tree holding
the chopper up there in its wide leafy fronds. They took off toward the place the Briton and the Texan were supposed to be
waiting.

Cody and Murphy managed to keep a sure footing but Valera kept slipping, stumbling, getting his expensive suit stained and
muddy, still managing to keep up with them.

They gained the break in the trees where the van sat waiting, its side hatchdoor open, just as they’d left it. Cody and Murphy
paused, each man to either side of Valera. They fanned the night with their pistols.

No sign of Hawkins or Caine.

Behind and well below them, muffled by rows of trees, the treed copter disintegrated into an enlarging sunburst of white hot,
orange-silver heat and a
ka-booom!!
louder than Nature’s thunder.

Then the light-pounding blowout of the chopper’s fuel tank’s blowing seemed to find twin echoes, but the echoes were a one-two
high explosives hardpunch that raped the darkness into further smithereens, one real big boom from the direction of the estate’s
southeast corner that merged with a third light-and-thunder explosion that dwarfed the first two, and, in the flame and fire
reflected by the low cloud ceiling, Cody saw chunks of wall and mortar disintegrating in the direction of the southwest corner
of the wall, the precise opposite direction from this point where he and the other two stood beside the van.

“And that is Richard at work,” Murphy said with a grin in the dark.

“Inside,” Cody said. “Let’s get ready to roll!”

Automatic rifle fire from the northeast wall, farther along this trail between their position and the main road, someone firing
from up along this ridge, down into the compound.

“What’s happening?” Valera squealed. “Why aren’t we getting away from here!”

Cody grinned at the direction of the rifle fire from up ahead. “Hawkeye,” he grunted.

Tex would be using one of the M-16s they had packed along in the van for this excursion. He would be firing to harass those
inside the walls.

Murphy eyeballed the darkness around them with uncharacteristic growing anxiety. “Come on, Richard!”

He grabbed another of the M-16s, checking its load.

From this higher ground, one could hear and partially see the unbridled confusion unfurling down below across the width and
breadth of the estate grounds. The security force of Vincente Valera and the Filipino soldiers-gone-bad of General Maceda
flitted around here and there down below in the immediate wake of those explosions, taken by complete surprise, having a tough
time believing they were under attack out here in the middle of wealthy estate country.

Caine materialized with no prior detection whatsoever by either Cody or Murphy, and this made Cody grin.

He popped the van’s clutch and sent their vehicle bounding forward, keeping only the amber parking lights on to follow the
contours of the winding trail. He steered along back toward the road to Pasay, bringing the van closer to the spot where that
automatic rifle fire had peppered from seconds earlier.

Maceda’s men, and Valera’s for that matter, may have been well-trained but they were no match for this team, Cody was damn
gratified to know.

This was how the day had begun, striking hard at an enemy, trading fire, putting it all on the line, and it was ending this
way, the night of death already begun, this day past a microcosm of the kind of life he’d taken on for himself: a battle,
a war, that would never end for him until his life ended.

Caine flung himself into the back of the van with Valera as they bounced along.

Rufe, seated beside Cody, said, “Nice work, mister demolitions man.”

“Real nice.” Cody nodded. “This is one time I’m glad you don’t know how to follow orders!”

“Orders?” Caine grinned as the van bumped along through the dark. He still gripped his Ingram, into which he eased a fresh
clip. “I thought me and the shit-kicker sitting on our arses, watching the fireworks from the sideline, was just a suggestion,
mate, and not a very good one at that.”

Cody tapped the van’s brakes, slowing. His peripheral vision picked up the slightest shifting of shadows at the base of a
tree along the trail.

As the van passed by that spot, Hawkeye materialized and jumped into the van much as Caine had, as if spat back by a night
that had not liked the taste of him. He rolled unceremoniously backward into Valera.

Cody goosed full speed out of the engine, upshifting along the trail away from there, away from the troops of the late General
Maceda, who would be investigating in this direction before too long…
if
there was a viable chain of command down there.

Otherwise, the thing here might fall apart on the spot, which is what he hoped for this one staging area of what was shaping
up to be one hell of a takeover plot from a modern-day warlord named Javier.

Hawkeye slammed the van’s side door shut after him. He realized he was in close physical contact with someone of breeding
and class and shirked away from Valera.

Valera was looking more discombobulated by the second.

Caine groused at Cody’s back as Cody steered them along.

“Damn, guy, you said if I blew up enough of that place I wouldn’t have to suffer this cowboy’s excuse for the King’s English.”

“It’s called an accent, limey,” Hawkeye grunted. He righted himself against one side of the van and unscrewed a tin of Skoal.
He pinched a taste and commenced chewing it.

“Ugh,” Caine shuddered.

Cody wheeled them onto the two-lane blacktop that crested the hill here before it slipped out of view to the east, the chaotic
scene inside Valera’s ancestral home disappearing behind them. He flicked on the headlights, depressed the accelerator to
the floorboard, getting them in the direction of Pasay.

They had not gone more than half a kilometer when the first emergency vehicle, its rooftop light flashing, siren wailing,
whistled past them, heading in the opposite direction toward the battleground that had erupted out of nowhere, it seemed,
in the heart of this quiet countryside.

More sirens could be heard, filling the night, like animal howls coming this way from every direction.

“What now?” Murphy grunted.

Cody eyed the huddled form of Valera visible in the rearview mirror, in the passing lights of vehicles and some street lights.
They came closer into Pasay’s shopping district.

The shiny black streets were deserted at this time of an unpleasant evening.

A warning calmness now said that a big storm was near, yes, very near.

Cody pulled the van off from a street when they reached a block lined with closed one-story shops along either side. He stopped
the van in an alley between two such buildings.

There was no traffic on the streets at either end of this alley.

The only sound in the confines of the van was Vincente Valera’s ragged, shallow breathing.

Hawkeye spat a chaw of chewing tobacco at a corner of the van’s interior and something in the spit itself carried derision.

“I’d say it’s the commie’s turn to return the favor of us saving his tight red butthole.”

Valera kept breathing raggedly, heaving for lost breath. Murphy snorted at him, “Listen, asshole, if you have a heart attack
after all the shit we went through to get you out of there—”

Valera caught some of his breath.

“You… do not have to worry about me. I will cooperate with you, gentlemen.”

“Thought you would,” Cody conceded. “You were way off-base to think snakes like Javier and Maceda and their pals would throw
in with you people. I’m surprised the payoff didn’t come sooner.”

“My th—thanks to you for getting me away from there. Who are you people? Were you the ones at my club, with the American girl…
and Mara?”

Cody detected a flicker in the question when he asked about the Zobel woman.

They meant something to each other.

Had…

“Must have been someone else,” Cody said.

He needed to use Vincente Valera and he could hardly expect cooperation if the old guy knew his team had been responsible,
after a manner of speaking, for what happened to Mara Zobel.

That crummy lady had put herself in that situation, to be impaled by that steering column that had ended her life.

But Valera would not see it that way if he knew the facts.

There was something reverent in the way he said the dead woman’s name.

Valera asked, after a moment’s silence, “How much did you hear outside that screen door, before you… appeared?”

“Enough to know you’re supposed to be on your way to meet Javier,” Cody said. “And from the way Maceda was pushing, it sounds
like the cards are on the table.”

“They are.” Valera nodded. “Javier… they… intend to kill me when I get to their base on Mindanao. Now… will I be… free to
go?”

“That’ll be the day.” Cody chuckled with no humor. “You’re going to tell us where that chopper pilot was supposed to take
you.”

Murphy rustled some papers in removing them from a pocket of his fatigues.

“No need to waste time on that, Sarge. I nicked these from the pilot and brought ’em along when they put us down. Coordinates
and everything. Doesn’t look too far from what went down this morning, when we pulled those folks out of that base.”

Caine nodded. “It does all tie together, like you thought it did,” he said to Cody.

“And Javier pulled double cross on this bored, rich piece of shit.” Hawkeye spat another chaw.

Valera’s frightened eyes flitted from one commando to the other in the shadows of the van before settling on Cody.

“You… will turn me over to the authorities?”

“In your dreams.” Murphy snickered, and he made a show of checking the action of the .45 automatic he held for Valera to see.

“What do you know about what’s planned for tonight?” Cody demanded. “Don’t bullshit us. We know Javier’s got you, the NPA,
and guys like Maceda and their men—your political connections; it’s set up throughout the country and it strikes tonight.”

“Javier spoke from Mindanao just before you arrived,” Valera sputtered. “General Maceda was to stay. I was instructed to join
Javier. He said… 0200 hours.
Now
. Will you let me go? I am already ruined, can you not see that? Don’t kill me?”

“If you’re a good boy,” Cody snapped, “we won’t kill you.”

“What do you want?”

“You’re taking me into Javier’s base camp.”

That got the attention of Cody’s team, too.

“You mean
us
, don’t you, Sarge?” Murphy growled.

“Since we’re so sure it’s tonight,” Caine put in, “mightn’t it be a good time to alert the Filipino authorities about all
this so they can properly respond? I mean, it
is
their problem, if there’s time.”

“They already know about it,” said Cody.

“They
what?
” Hawkeye grunted. He almost choked on a gob of his own chewing tobacco.

“That’s why they haven’t pushed harder on this.” Cody voiced the thoughts as they fell together at this moment inside his
head. “They must be prepared to counterattack. They just don’t know how deeply we’re into it and they don’t know Javier’s
exact timetable or they’d have responded already. They don’t know where Valera and Maceda and the rest have their staging
areas located, right, Vincente?”

Valera gulped, “If they do, it’s a better-kept secret than Operation Thunderstrike.”

“Don’t sell the Flips short,” Hawkeye muttered. “They’re tougher than hell, right, Sarge?”

“They proved that in World War II.” Cody nodded. “And they managed to get rid of Marcos; that was no small feat.” He turned
around to face Valera. The Filipino counter-insurgency doesn’t know where Javier’s main staging area is, the one on Mindanao,
the heart of this thing.”

“Why wouldn’t they know about that?” Caine asked. “I thought they had a man inside.”

“A lot of those guys bought it this morning—when you combine casualties with Locsin’s and Javier’s,” Cody said. “One of those
dead could have been that informer or maybe he just slipped up and they caught him.”

“So why do you go alone?” Murphy wanted to know. “And how do you intend to do it?”

Cody asked Valera, “If you were a good little boy for Javier, what would he expect you to do right now?”

“He would… he would expect me to flee.” Valera nodded, affirming his reply, “Yes, that’s it, he would tell me to leave the
country.”

There came a
whack!
from the dark of the interior of the van and a grunt of surprise and pain from Valera, who had not expected Caine to rap
him along the side of his jaw with the butt of his pistol.

“Playtime is over, comrade, or haven’t your picked up on that yet? Better answer the man’s questions.”

“Who are you?” Valera half-shrieked. “My life… it’s all fallen apart… what is happening to me!”

“Can that shit,” Cody snapped.

“Javier’ll get word soon enough of what happened at your place. He won’t know who or what, and you’re not supposed to be so
scared that you run, right? You only
think
he plans to off you.”