Philippine Hardpunch (6 page)

Most of those who served with him were disposessed farmers as well as many from the country’s shrinking middle class who had
joined the lower class because they had done something to cross the ruling class; people with legitimate gripes, being used
by forces outside the Philippines who knew they could not command such a force unless they had men like Locsin, who were cynical
and smart enough not to do it unless they were paid well.

Locsin commanded with the understanding that, when the day came, he would share in the new power.

As a military man who retained everything the government’s military training schools could teach him, he was, yes, most impressed
with whatever small force had struck and left such awful, near total ruin as that which smoldered and screamed around him
at this moment.

He would forever be forced to bear the humiliation of what had happened here this day. It would forever taint his reputation,
his name.

He
owed
something to the men who had done this and it was a debt he would repay if he ever got the chance—in kind.

In blood.

But what mattered more than that, more than anything, was that the strike at the heart of the fragile new government was less
than twenty-four hours away!

This was no time for an elite commando unit, American or of any other nationality, striking against the unprecedented unification
poised to overthrow the present government.

It could not fail.

It must not fail, Locsin told himself.

Everything had been taken into account at this vital point in time, yes.

Everything, that is, save a wholly unexpected disaster such as
this
.

He tugged himself from his reverie and stalked off across the body-and-rubble-strewn compound to check on Escaler’s radio
alert to Javier. He would summon transportation to come and pick them up.

Javier’s force would stop those commandos, whomever they were, and return the Jefferses, and Locsin wanted very much to be
in on the kill.

Whoever is responsible for this, he told himself, will die very soon.

It could be no other way.

Javier had just started doing things to the naked, unconscious woman tied to the bed when a strong pounding at the door interrupted
him.

He grunted, set down the pliers and turned from the spread-eagled figure of the young woman. He was already in an ill temper.
He did not like it when they passed out too soon, as this one had, from fright, before he could begin.

He swung open the door, glaring at the camou fatigue-clad man who stood there at crisp attention.

“I left strict orders not to be disturbed.”

The man in the doorway kept his eyes diligently averted from the unconscious figure on the bed, visible inside the base commandant’s
private quarters.

“Uh, trouble, sir, Colonel Locsin—”

“You are finished, fool, for interrupting me like this.”

“The colonel’s base was attacked!”

The subordinate hurried to spew it out.

That caught Javier’s attention, cooling the crazy fires inside him.

“Attacked?”

“A commando force. A radio message just came in. They’re heading on our direction! They withdrew from Locsin’s base only minutes
ago. The colonel believes they intend to rendezvous with air pickup somewhere between his base and ours.”

“Order up four helicopters,” Javier snapped without lapsing a beat. “I want each gunship loaded with as many men as it will
carry. I will accompany, to command.”

The man in the doorway executed a curt salute.

“I will see to it.”

The “soldier” withdrew, double-timing away.

Javier slammed the door. He crossed to the shelf near the bed. He pulled down and strapped on a holstered Tokarev machine-gun
pistol.

He ignored the unconscious peasant girl, whose hands and wrists were tied to opposite ends of the bed with leather thongs.
There would be time enough for pleasure later.

His heart had not been in it tonight anyway, he realized, just as he had realized such “pleasures” had become more and more
of a compulsion of late.

But he had hoped this one, here, would take his mind off, even for a little while, what had consumed him for so long.

The moment of truth was almost at hand; all he had worked and sacrificed and risked for.

In losing himself in passions of the flesh he had hoped to find some respite from the tension that had made his gut a tight
knot for too long. It had almost worked.

And now, this.

He reached the door on his way out, opened the door, paused there with one hand on the knob, and turned to see the peasant
girl’s eyes flicker open, returning foggily to consciousness.

It had become more and more difficult of late for him to find women for even normal sex, despite his position of power.

He
controlled the province, yes.

Not the NPA. Not even the troops sent here by Manila.
He
, Arturo Javier, controlled this part of Mindanao with the same brutality of an Al Capone or an Adolf Hitler.

Yet this meant nothing in the eyes of women when they beheld his profound ugliness. He detested every line on his own visage:
the sloping forehead, the blubbery lips, the tiny black pinpoint eyes low behind greasy, overfleshed cheekbones, and especially
the shiny, jagged, long-healed knife scar that traveled from above his right temple and down across the right eye, across
his nose from side to side, to curl his mouth up into a permanent, leering sneer.

He had taken to ordering trusted lieutenants to have their men secure women for him—girls like this one, and he never much
cared how they came to be here—and if anyone suspected who was behind the disappearances, they lacked the courage to come
forward and make accusations.

He heard the choppers outside revving up and the commotion of men grouping as his orders were carried out, his force mobilized.

He stood there in the doorway for an extra moment, to watch the girl.

Her eyes flickered wide open. She looked around, dazed, her unintelligent peasant face relaxed in the first handful of seconds
during which she did not comprehend where she was.

Then she remembered.

Her senses came back enough in the next second for her to realize that she was tied to the bed.

She saw the leering eyes of the man watching her.

“Don’t go anywhere, my dear.” Javier smiled at her. “I will be back before you know it. Then we shall resume our little, er,
game. You will enjoy that, won’t you, my pet?”

His victim clamped her eyes shut and began screaming, struggling frantically. Helpless.

“I thought you would.” He snickered.

He stepped out of the plushly appointed mobile home which had been transported here at great effort and expense; his home-away-from-home
for the period of unrest he expected to grip the width and breadth of the Philippines once he gave the final command to his
aligned forces to put Operation Thunderstrike into action.

He locked the door and strode off toward the floodlit landing area of his temporary base in the mountains.

The four gunships rattled the dawn with their revving.

The barbed-wire-perimetered base crackled with orderly activity, his well-trained, well-armed soldiers double-timing in formation
from their Quonset hut barracks to the copters, where they proceeded to disperse, boarding the gunships to capacity.

Javier reached the closest of the gunships.

It was indeed a great source of pride to him that the power he wielded was a deadly, fearsome thing, backed up by men such
as those he had brought here with him.

A far cry from the dogs of disarray commanded by that peasant scum, Locsin, who dared to bestow upon himself a military rank.

Thinking of the NPA leader and his men, he paused before boarding the helicopter to spit upon the ground the foul taste he
got in his mouth when he thought of Locsin and his peasant filth.

He wondered what could have gone wrong for a commando unit to strike Locsin’s base. He vowed to show scant tolerance if this
attack proved to be the result of some private deal of Locsin’s own that had nothing to do with what Javier had planned.

He looked forward to the day, and he did not think it would be far off, when he would rid himself permanently of “Colonel”
Locsin and his entire ill-trained “army.”

He boarded the helicopter, a fully armed Huey that would have been more than a little familiar to anyone who had served in
Vietnam during America’s involvement there.

This chopper, like the other three, wore a full complement of 40mm cannons and turret-mounted miniguns.

Javier moved to the cockpit, his men making way for him, where he settled into the vacated copilot’s armored seat. He strapped
himself in, reached for a helmet, and nodded curtly to the pilot.

The gunships lifted as one, maintaining several rotor-widths distance from each other. They lifted like giant bloated insects
from the flattened parcel of jungle, banking into a combat formation with Javier’s chopper in the lead.

As the base faded away behind and below, Javier experienced an increase in his pulse beat and he knew it was because he and
his men were flying into action at last.

For too long there had been waiting, waiting, organizing, and more waiting for the Big Moment; he had tried to submerge the
tension with the girl back there in his trailer.

That had not worked, but
this
was what he, and his men. had needed all along.

The smell of blood.

This would prime them for the big action within the next twenty-four hours.

Then… the country would be theirs.

The power would be
his
.

The choppers zoomed along low at a little above tree level, the pilots pouring on speed toward the approximate coordinates
where the message from Locsin’s camp had estimated the attackers would be heading.

Who were they? Javier wondered, these daring ones he and his troops were on their way to intercept, to kill. Why had such
a unit struck at
this
moment in his grand scheme of things?

It did not matter.

The choppers would be upon that force within a minute or less, and no matter how good they were, they would not stand a chance
against four armed gunships and fifty or more of his best men.

The rumbling thunder of the copter in flight filled Arturo Javier’s ears, matching the pounding of his heart in his chest.

The smell of
blood
, yes.

Let the killing begin.

C
raine braked the Chor-7 along the treeline of the clearing which was the LZ.

The second vehicle, filled with Cody, Hawkins, and Murphy, jounced up to stop side-by-side.

Full daylight washed the scene, the clearing long overgrown with vegetation. The upper fifth of the rising sun was a blazing,
eye-searing crescent muffled behind a gauze of mist haloing the jungle hills to the east.

Caine and Hawkins cut their engines and everyone debarked.

Cody experienced a surge of relief when he saw Ann Jeffers alight of her own volition from where she had ridden next to her
mother.

Mrs. Jeffers moved beside her daughter, an arm around the teenager, but it was more a show of emotion than to steady her.

Ann looked glassy-eyed and shaken up, not hysterical or panicky.

Hawkeye and Richard automatically faded away from the Chor-7s in separate directions, their weapons up in firing position,
establishing a security perimeter as best they could, while Cody and Rufe stepped forward to meet the Jefferses. Murphy kept
his back to the scene and his own rifle pointed outward, ready for trouble from any direction.

The only sounds around them for the moment were the unending screechings of jungle wildlife in the trees and on the ground.

Cody read the question in Cal Jeffers’ eyes.

“I radioed in our chopper,” he told them. “It’ll be along any minute.”

“Locsin’s men will be after us—” Jeffers began.

“On foot, maybe,” Murphy grunted, overhearing.

“They could loose mortars on us from back there if they are after us,” Cody acknowledged, seeing no reason to soft-peddle
the situation to Jeffers, who had to be a realist after all his years with the Company. “When that chopper of ours touches
down, everyone run straight for it no matter what.”

As if on cue,
whompa!-whompa!-whompa!
sounds discerned themselves, approaching.

The tell-tale throaty engine racket of choppers.

Louise Jeffers’ eyes lifted skyward along with everyone else’s, her expression taking on renewed animation, like a believer
searching the heavens for a sign from God.

It’s them… they’re
coming
! We’re going to make it!”

Cody felt a grimace tauten his features.

“There should only be one.”

He held there another heartbeat, his ears reading those sounds of war coming their way. Like Nam, yeah.

“If our dudes had backup, we’d’ve heard about it,” Murphy worried. “And they’re coming in from the wrong goddamn direction.”

Caine and Hawkins emerged then from the density of humid green surrounding them.

The chopper sounds grew louder, closing in at full throttle, less than two kilometers—maybe seconds—away.

“Mount up,” he instructed, indicating the Chor-7s. He looked at Caine. “We’ll pull their fire away from you. Try to raise
our bird on the radio. Tell him what we’ve got.”

Everyone scrambled aboard the vehicles.

Caine wore an expression that said he would much prefer to stay with the rest of the team for the fight roaring their way.
He gunned his vehicle to life in unison with Hawkeye doing the same as Cody and Murphy climbed on the other Chor-7.

Murphy set up a fresh ammo belt on the M-60.

Cody palmed a brand new clip into his CAR-15.

Jungle wildlife around the clearing started screeching and yeeping more frantically than before, sensing, heralding, the coming
human confrontation.