Philippine Hardpunch (3 page)

His captors seemed to think of him as more of a threat than his wife, but he knew that in reality there was nothing he could
have done had he not been handcuffed.

He was an engineer and a damn good one, he told himself, but no more than that. He was hardly a soldier and certainly not
a fighter, not a guerilla, and he had no idea where they were on Mindanao. Even if he could have escaped from here with Louise
and Ann, he told himself, these barbarians of General Locsin would track them down or the jungle would kill them on its own;
they would not be the first to lose their way and their lives in these seemingly endless stretches of uninhabitable jungle.

He had early on resigned himself to the fact that he and his wife and daughter were at the mercy of these mountain bandits
and thieves who preferred to think of themselves as “revolutionary guerillas.”

He shifted his gaze from Louise to look again at the third pole rising from the dirt floor of this room.

This hut served as Locsin’s headquarters, the thatched roof structure partitioned off inside with dividers into two offices
and this room, which he figured was probably regularly used to hold hostages such as themselves, or for interrogations.

There had been no interrogation, really, but Jeffers knew this was only because Locsin and his ruffians thought he was “Cal
Jeffers.” That would change damn quick if they ever found out his real name and learned of his work for the CIA. If that were
to happen, he sensed that this nightmare truly would never end and with all that had gone wrong thus far, he could only thank
God that at least that secret had not gotten out to make things worse for himself, his wife, and daughter.

He stared at that third pole rising in the center of this room, at which his daughter had been handcuffed… and he did not
know whether to wish his daughter dead still.

“I’m sorry, Mom and Dad,”
she would say.
“Please forgive me.”

He blinked away the sweat beading in his eyes and told himself it wasn’t tears, that he had no tears left, since he no longer
had a daughter, not really.

That had ended when she had stood above him and her mother, wearing those ill-fitting fatigues Locsin’s men had given her.

He had sensed trouble coming when he had first seen her listening to the Colonel’s ranting and raving during their first days
of captivity; all the Marxist crap about the downtrodden seizing power through the only means available to them, and how he,
her father, and those like Jeffers were guilty of crimes against the Philippine people, fattening the Marcos coffers in the
name of imperialism and greed.

Jeffers had snarled back those were lies that he was only a man doing his job. If communism was so great, why did every communist
country feel compelled to have barbed wire and machine gun towers stretched across its borders to keep its citizens from escaping,
he had demanded of Locsin, and he had accused his captors of disguising common crimes and their base motives behind lofty
sounding political crap.

He and Louise had not been harmed. He knew this was only because they had to be kept looking good for those pictures Locsin
ordered snapped of them every few days.

The Colonel had not beaten him for the outburst, but yes, even then Jeffers had seen his daughter listening to Locsin more
than she listened to him.

What was worse, Locsin noticed it too.

Two days ago the NPA commander had entered this room and offered to uncuff Ann, had offered her an invitation to dine with
him that night, alone in his quarters.

To her parents’ shock, ignoring their heated, emotional protests, Ann Jeffers accepted Locsin’s invitation. Brought back much
later that night, she assured her parents that she had not been harmed or molested in any way. She told them what a “gentleman”
Locsin had been and how they had done nothing but talk, talk, talk, all night about Marxism and the rights of the downtrodden.
Beyond that, she had been belligerent and uncommunicative.

The following night the same thing happened, and the next night; except that third night—Ann did not return.

They had not seen her the next day, either. Louise had become hysterical.

Jeffers demanded to know where his daughter was, to no avail.

That night Locsin and Ann had come in to see them.

Together.

That was when Jeffers knew the madness had touched his daughter.

“I’m sorry, Mother and Father,” she told them, “but… Colonel Locsin wishes me for his woman. I wish it, too.”

“Ann,
no!
” Jeffers had heard himself scream.

“I share his struggles,” she had said calmly. “I renounce you, Mother and Father, and your imperialist ways.”

Jeffers had shrieked and fought his chains then.

Louise had mercifully passed out.

And things had not changed much in the days since.

He feared his wife was losing her mind and he was not too sure about himself. He did know that the one in total control here
was Locsin, and he realized fully for the first time that he had been too busy with his work and mistaken the gap widening
between himself and his daughter over the past year as due to no more than a mild case of normal teenage rebelliousness. He
had not realized the extent to which his own daughter had become alienated in whatever growing-up world she lived in, and
of course now it was too late for anything but the consequences.

He had read of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and of how easy, and common, it was for susceptible minds to be co-opted, brainwashed,
and manipulated by the captors in a kidnap situation, and this is what had happened to Ann, he told himself.

Locsin had exploited a normal generation gap between parents and child, and the child’s hysteria at the awful situation she
found herself in, was warping Ann Jeffers, snapping her mind.

He thought of his daughter alone with Locsin and he wanted to puke. He wanted to kill.

A flurry of movement from outside the hut came closer, yanking him from his thoughts and snapping Louise, with a jolt, from
her nightmare-tormented sleep.

Louise Jeffers’ glazed, not-all-there eyes snapped open. She whipped her eyes toward the third pole and, not seeing Ann, looked
frantically at her husband.

“What is it? Our baby… is she—?”

Jeffers wished that at least he and his wife could have somehow grown closer during this ordeal, but he had let her slip away
from him over the years, just as he had Ann, and he wondered now with an exquisite sadness if their little family could ever
be strong and together again as they had once been so long ago.

“Someone’s coming,” he told her.

Her gaze followed his to the doorway.

The scuffling grew louder, into the hut, coming near, beyond the walled partition.

Ann’s strained voice, violently angry, snapped, “Let me go, damn you!”

A man laughed coarsely, sneering.

“You have very much spirit, little American. I like that, but unfortunately, other things occupy me now and you have no place
in them.”

Ann came hurling into the room, sprawling to her hands and knees between the two poles where her mother and father watched,
handcuffed.

She looked at them through tendrils of disheveled dark hair covering some of her face, her fatigues tattered, showing dirt
stains where she must have been roughed up before being brought here. She wiped away the raven’s-wing black mask of hair.

Jeffers saw the bruise across her left cheekbone.

Louise Jeffers saw it, too.

“Oh, my little darling!” she wailed.

Jeffers saw his daughter’s face twisted with emotion and pain.

“Mom… Dad… I’m
so
sorry!”

Jeffers said in a soft voice he barely recognized as his own, “Ann… honey—”

The doorway became filled, first with Colonel Locsin, who had dragged Ann here before, pitching her into the room ahead of
him.

Colonel Locsin had the standard Filipino male’s lack of physical stature, but he cut an impressive figure, nonetheless; his
bulky frame was all muscle, carried with an aggressive thrust.

Behind the NPA commander came Locsin’s assistant, Escaler, a razor-thin man with a scarred face and unreadable eyes.

Locsin smirked at Jeffers.

“You can have your daughter back now, Mr. Jeffers. I am finished using her. Or should I call you… Mr. Weldon?”

Jeffers, whose name in his CIA days had been Duane Weldon, felt his face become fish-belly pale. He looked at his daughter.

“My God, Ann… no…”

She remained sprawled, watching her father with naked emotion that reminded Jeffers for some reason of that day when she had
been a little girl and they had gone to the zoo and the tiger in his cage scared her and it seemed to him in that moment like
only yesterday.

“Oh, Dad, Mom”—their daughter wept—”… forgive me, please… you were right… I thought he loved me.”

Locsin spat upon the earthen floor. “Enough of this touching reunion scene. Handcuff her.”

Escaler stepped over to Ann. He grabbed her by both wrists, dragging her the short distance to the pole.

“Let her go, you lowly piece of garbage!” Jeffers screamed, leaping to his feet, blindly struggling at his bonds with all
his strength.

Louise Jeffers observed this, but nothing registered in her eyes.

Ann fought, kicking, biting.

Escaler made quick work of avoiding her pummeling fists and kicks. He snapped the cuffs on her and stood back quickly, leaving
an enraged, fiery young woman sputtering angrily, fighting vainly at her bonds, the same as her father did.

“My parents were right,” she spat at Locsin. “ I was a fool because I was innocent and you—”

“The freshly picked grape is always the sweetest,” Locsin snickered at the child he had seduced. “I told you, did I not, my
Ann, of my appetite for the good things in life.”

She started hurling epithets at him.

Locsin stepped forward. His open right hand arced in a backhand slap with enough power to knock Ann off her feet.

The teenager crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

Louise Jeffers emitted a quiet whimper at the instant the blow connected but registered no other reaction, staring blankly
ahead with shiny, empty eyes.

Jeffers pulled his attention away from Ann’s crumpled figure, the fight gone out of him.

“Don’t do anything more to my women. Please, Colonel. As one man to another, I beg of you. Be decent.”

Locsin spat again.

“I enjoy hurting people,” he said casually. “But I will not hurt you no more, nor these women, if you will agree to further
cooperate with me.”

“Of course you won’t hurt us,” Jeffers snarled. “Now that you know who I am, you’ll keep us real well cared for, won’t you,
so we’ll fetch a good price from the KGB.”

“You catch on quickly, American. Behave, and you will not be harmed.”

The NPA commander nodded for Escaler to follow. They departed without another word, leaving Cal Jeffers alone with his thoughts,
his fears, his wife, his daughter.

He sank back down to a sitting position against the pole, working to catch his breath, every inch of his grimy clothing plastered
to his body with sweat. The shrieking, chirping, and cricking of the jungle beyond the hut drilled into his brain and for
a moment he felt as if he would explode.

Things could not get any worse.

Louise stared dumbly ahead with the vacuous expression of shock.

Ann lay unconscious, her ragged breathing filling his ears.

He wanted to run to his wife, take her in his arms as he should have done so much more often than he had during those years
when things had been so easy, when there had been no crisis like this to test them; then maybe they would have been strong
enough instead of facing what was happening to them here.

Their family had fallen apart under this pressure, disintegrating like the illusion it was.

He could do nothing for Louise.

He wanted to rush to Ann, take his daughter in his arms.

She had betrayed them all, yes, yes, and yet… and yet… she was his daughter, and her real crime was her innocence in a world
inhabited by walking slime like Colonel Locsin, who preyed on and raped innocence such has hers.

He could not help his daughter. He could do nothing for her.

He could not even help himself.

They knew who he was. It was all over for the Jeffers family.

Nothing could save them now.

C
aine and Hawkins entered the compound through the wall, from their side of the compound, using the same method as Cody and
Murphy, at a point behind a longish hut structure, barracks for the troops or living quarters for Colonel Locsin and his staff.

The structure and some others like it, along with a tent for the mess hall, formed a square at the center of the base.

There had been no sounds or activity from across the base, from the direction where Cody and Murphy were to be coming.

Hawkins approved of the absence of sound in the darkness with a nod.

He drawled in a whisper, “No news is good news, hey, teabag?”

Caine turned from setting a bamboo log back into a reasonable approximation of where it belonged.

“Indeed, we just walk away from this one with our asses intact.” The Brit nodded.

They advanced to one corner of the barracks structure, which shielded them from the center of the base. From this corner,
the next hut structure over could be seen, this one slightly different from the others because an AK-47-toting sentry stood
posted at the front entrance.

“Reckon we’ve found either where Locsin stores his ammo, or where his hostages are kept,” Hawkins growled.

“He doesn’t have a guard posted on the hostages,” Caine reminded him. “We’ve found what we’re looking for. Cover me.”

The British mere started to move out, but Hawkeye grabbed his arm to make him stop.

“Hold it!”

Caine saw it then, too.

A pair of NPA uniforms stalking out of a hut at the far end of the compound, well opposite the front gate.