Philippine Hardpunch Read online

  “BETTER TAKE SOME

  OF THOSE BOYS

  OUT QUICK, SARGE!”

  Murphy grunted over his shoulder as he worked the chopper’s controls. “One lucky round will—”

  Cody didn’t hear the rest, for even as he swung the Ingram on those below, more soldiers spewed out of the house, their M-16s raised. Cody took aim, pulled the trigger…and nothing happened.

  The Ingram jammed in his fist!

  “This I do not believe,” he snarled.

  The main house drew back below and behind in the rainy dark backdrop. The chopper gained the north wall.

  But those saffron winking pinpoint flashes of M-16s below did not stop.

  Cody could not hear the reports, but he felt the sudden lurch of the chopper when the lucky round Murphy had mentioned hit.

  The chopper started to tilt crazily.

  “Got us!” Cody heard Rufe snarl like a curse.

  Then the engine noises stopped altogether, and only the airy whirrrr of the rotors could be heard as the chopper plummeted downward…

  Also by Jim Case

  CODY’S ARMY

  CODY’S ARMY: ASSAULT INTO LIBYA

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1987 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56629-2

  Contents

  “BETTER TAKE SOME OF THOSE BOYS OUT QUICK, SARGE!”

  ALSO BY JIM CASE

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINTEEN

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  It reminded John Cody of Nam.

  He led his team stealthily along the narrow trail that climbed and dipped across rugged, mountainous jungle.

  A tall man, sturdy, heavily muscled, his eyes steadily probed the muggy gloom for danger as the unit moved swiftly along.

  Each man toted a CAR-15, the fully automatic rifle similar to the army’s M-16, only shorter and lighter.

  Like his men, Cody wore camou fatigues and, in addition to the CAR-15s, a U.S. Army issue Colt 45 automatic, holstered at his hip, and military webbing strapped across his chest with an assortment of grenades, wire garrotes, pouches with spare ammunition, and a combat knife sheathed at midchest for fast crossdraw.

  The four men hustled soundlessly along the trail, their bootfalls muffled by the loam and the incessant chatter of birds and insects that made the dark a living thing, tangled vines merging with the inky closeness overhead where the fronds of thick-trunked balsa trees joined. The jungle sweltered, claustrophobic.

  Behind Cody, Rufe Murphy, Richard Caine, and Hawkeye Hawkins maintained an evenly spaced distance from each other, avoiding grouping in case of ambush, each man hustling through that gloom with his CAR-15 held up and ready in firing position, sweeping from side to side as the unit jogged along.

  A half-moon shimmered vaguely behind low, scudding clouds, bathing the jungle in a misty half-light.

  Cody made out a barely discernible widening of the trail just ahead. He slowed his pace and held up a hand.

  The men trotting behind him saw it and spread out, falling away from each other, cutting from the trail into the bush, leaving only the whisper of separating vines and branches to mark their passage.

  Cody reached a spot where the trail fed onto a clearing. He crouched at the treeline, concealing himself behind the gnarled trunk of a mango tree that towered into the stygian gloom above. He parted tangled vines with his left arm and with the barrel of his CAR-15, stifling the impulse to gag at the nearly total lack of oxygen this close to the jungle floor and the overpowering stench of decay, rotting vegetation, and animal life.

  Across a distance of no more than eight hundred feet, the bamboo wall of the perimeter of a military compound slept exactly where he expected to find it.

  The intel he had on the place said the ten-foot-high wall surrounded several hut structures, constituting the headquarters of the regional New People’s Army, the communist insurgency guerilla force which more or less claimed control of this isolated province.

  He sensed movement at his either side and seconds later the hulking form of Murphy crouched down to his right and to his left, Hawkins and Caine materialized.

  “Looks like Pete’s intel is on the money once again,” Caine noted, his precise British accent pitched to a low whisper that would not carry beyond the four of them.

  Murphy, a hulking black man of linebacker proportions, grunted, “The question now is, do we strike it rich and find Jeffers and his family in there?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Cody growled.

  A gate was set midway in the wall facing them across the moon-washed distance. A guardhouse stood past the wood-frame gate draped with concertina wire.

  Cody counted four sentries down there and figured there could be a couple more he could not see.

  The red pinpoints of cigarettes indicated not so nearly a tight security as did the shadowy shapes of the sentries leaning in nonchalant attitudes against the wall of the guardhouse, the slightest murmur of idle conversation between them carrying across the clearing.

  Hawkins nudged Caine with his elbow.

  “You have heard the sarge, teabag,” the Texan drawled with a grin. “Let’s do it.”

  He and the Englishman eased further off from Cody and Murphy to quickly disappear from sight into the gloom along the treeline, heading out inside cover of jungle, moving parallel to the walled perimeter across the clearing.

  Beyond the clearing and the compound, the craggy, mist-shrouded terrain began taking on the first warm pink tint of approaching sunrise.

  “Another ten minutes and that base starts waking up,” Murphy opined.

  “Let’s hand them a wake-up they won’t forget,” Cody grunted.

  He and Murphy pulled back slightly deeper into the treeline. Cody had been paying close attention to the jungle around them as well as to the walled perimeter.

  A U.S. Army helicopter gunship had set down the team two kilometers south from here on a mountainous plateau.

  The chopper had set them down at such a relative distance for several reasons, the primary one being the element of surprise, but also because the primary reason for this hard hit on this NPA base camp was to rescue the three American hostages being held inside by the communist insurgents.

  The possibility existed, of course, that the hostages Cody and his men had traveled halfway around the world to rescue had, for one reason or another, been already whisked away from this site by their captors.

  The first order of business here was a soft probe of that perimeter, a quiet penetration of the compound before the fireworks commenced, to first locate the Americans being held here and then pull them out safely. A full thrust assault, Cody and his men ferried in by gunships strafing the compound as the commandos struck, could well have meant the immediate execution of the hostages and so it had bee
n done this way.

  The NPA personnel at this compound must have heard the chopper that set Cody and his men down in the distance, but they would not have been alarmed, chopper noises nothing new in this remote corner of the Philippines, the helicopter a common means of island-hopping within this archipelago of more than seven thousand islands.

  And if the intel Pete Lund had channeled to Cody was, in this instance, outdated, if Jeffers and his wife and daughter had been moved by the insurgents to another location, then Cody knew there was still a chance that he and his team could learn of the Jefferses’ present whereabouts before they pulled out from here.

  But first and foremost came the welfare of the three American hostages they had come all this distance to rescue.

  Cody and Murphy jogged along, just short of the treeline, pushing their way through dense foliage, not using their combat knives as machetes because such sounds would carry to these sentries standing guard at the gate. This slowed their progress some, but not much, and they made their way parallel to the wall of the compound across the clearing, heading in the opposite direction taken by Richard Caine and Hawkeye Hawkins.

  The trek to here from where the chopper set them down had been uneventful, but Cody understood that this did not mean that the NPA commander, Colonel Locsin, would not have roving patrols moving across the region as a security precaution, and such patrols would be every bit as stealthy and skillful at jungle warfare as his own team. At this point, he preferred to engage them, alerting those within the compound, if such a patrol would appear on the scene in the next few minutes. They had been lucky so far but he knew from hard-earned experience that luck rarely held on a mission for very long…

  He and Murphy paused when they reached a point on the treeline a couple hundred feet beyond one corner of the bamboo wall of the compound. They paused for a quick visual sweep of the clearing around the walled perimeter.

  Everything appeared as it had since the two minutes or so since their approach.

  The sentries at the front gate were no longer in sight from this angle, the clearing surrounding the base bathed in gloom as yet untouched by the soft gray creeping up from the eastern horizon of craggy jungle-carpeted ridges.

  It reminded Cody of Vietnam, where he and the men of this team had first served together on missions such as this one, often behind enemy lines, often without mention in official files, a “dirty job” unit, individually and as a unit responsible for an impressive record of enemy kills and a 100% success quota on every mission the brass had seen fit to throw their way; a unit recently reorganized to counter world terrorism in decidedly off-the-record capacity for the U.S. government, which had become increasingly frustrated by its inability to effectively thwart the worldwide terrorist activity against Americans and American interests abroad, activity which threatened to move closer to home if allowed to continue unchecked.

  Computer searches of government files, including all sectors of American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, had registered one man’s name at the top of every list too often for the president and Pete Lund to ignore. Fed into their computers had been their most stringent requirements for a leader for a small, hardpunch strike force designed to deploy anywhere around the world at the first indication of a terrorist action, a force which could only effectively be met by such a team that would function with full covert support from any and all arms of the government, including military, with full authorization directly from the man in the Oval Office itself.

  Pete Lund functioned as liaison, and it was his directive that had sent Cody and his team into this latest mission for the unit that had been dubbed “Cody’s Army” by the select few even aware of its existence.

  Cody and Murphy broke from the treeline together, on a run across the clearing toward the wall, advancing in fast zigzags around the comer of the wall and out of the line of vision of the sentries at the front gate.

  Like Nam, Cody thought again. Not just the jungle and the sweat, but that tight ball of anger tempered with combat cool in the pit of your gut in these last heartbeats before a strike.

  They gained the base of the wall, continuing with well-practiced precision.

  Murphy hit a combat crouch, his broad back to the wall, his CAR-15 and narrowed eyes watching in every direction.

  Cody slipped his rifle over his shoulder by its strap, unsheathed his combat knife, and turned to the wall. He went to work on the banded twine bonding the bamboo poles together along the wall at ankle height and a bit above eye level. He bent to slash apart the bottom band with one swipe, then reached the blade toward the twine connection at the top of two poles.

  Calvin Jeffers was an engineer, employed and living with his family in Butuan. The Jeffers, all three of them—Cal, 48; Louise, 42; and Ann, 19—had been spirited away at gunpoint from a company picnic three weeks ago by masked gunmen.

  Demands were not long in coming, the New People’s Army taking credit for the kidnapping and demanding a ransom of 50,000 American dollars for the Jefferses’ return. A photograph accompanied the first demand, a snapshot of the Jeffers father holding a newspaper dating the picture. Further communications had arrived with similar pictures during the weeks since the kidnapping.

  The family had not been harmed, or so it appeared, but there was far more to it than that.

  Cody paused in the act of slipping the knife blade across the looped twine at the top of the bamboo wall. He sensed Rufe swinging to their left.

  “Trouble, Sarge.”

  Cody whirled in time to see two NPA sentries striding around the corner of the wall from the rear of the compound, silhouettes in the tricky moonlight who reacted to this mutual sighting, both fatigue-clad sentries falling away from each other, shouldering AK-47s.

  Murphy’s right arm blurred and his combat knife flew from his fingers, whistling downrange to embed itself with quivering accuracy into the heart area of the sentry nearest the wall.

  The man emitted a gurgling death rattle and pitched backward off his feet in a spread-armed back-fall to land across the ground with a thud of finality.

  The second soldier paid this no heed, concentrating on unlimbering his AK in the flicker of time he thought he gained by his buddy’s death, swinging his assault rifle into a hurried target acquisition on Murphy.

  Cody stepped out from behind Murphy and flung his knife.

  Sentry Number Two caught the blade to the hilt through the throat, knocking him back off his feet, every bit as dead as the first one.

  Cody and Murphy hoofed down the length of this side wall to where the bodies sprawled, tugged their knives from the corpses, wiping the knife blades clean of blood on the tunics of their victims.

  “That was too close,” Rufe grumbled. “I wonder how Caine and Hawkins are doing.”

  The Brit and the Texan were supposed to be penetrating the compound from the opposite direction in an identical manner.

  They hurried back to the spot where Cody had been interrupted.

  Noisy jungle birds and insects continued their prattle undisturbed in the jungle surrounding the clearing.

  Termination of the two sentries had been accomplished with no more than the quiet thump of falling bodies.

  Murphy returned to eyeing the gloom with his CAR-15.

  Cody snicked apart the wrapped twine around the tops of the two bamboo poles. He sheathed his combat knife and removed the poles from their place in the wall, revealing a space large enough to wedge through. He wished he could somehow slow time enough to hold back the approaching dawn long enough for them to penetrate the compound and do what they had to do.

  It would not be long before the bodies of those sentries would be found—they could already be missed by those who would come looking for them—but nothing but time mattered now, and he and Murphy could not risk carrying the two dead men over to beyond the treeline where they would not be found. It was a risk they had to take, gambling that the bodies outside the wall would not be discovered before it was to
o late. That could mean only minutes from now. Cody and his men did not intend to spend more than fleeting minutes inside these walls and this, coupled with the fact that just before dawn was the ideal time to strike since security then is universally almost always at its weakest, meant the chances were good such a risk could pay off.

  Cody stepped through the break in the wall. He nodded for Murphy to follow.

  Rufe gave the narrow opening an uncertain look but he managed with some effort and muted grunting to squeeze his hulk through.

  Inside, Murphy fanned the interior of the heavily shadowed compound while Cody realigned the bamboo poles roughly where they had been.

  This point of entry would not pass any sort of close inspection, but this section of the wall faced the back of an elongated, hutlike structure, blocking this point from the rest of the compound.

  Corporations in the Philippines had been long paying off the communist mountain forces regularly to leave them alone, a not so subtle variation on the old-time American street gang protection racket, and from what Cody could tell, the employers of Calvin Jeffers were no exception, but they had been double-crossed by the NPA not once but twice; the first time when the Jeffers family had been kidnapped, the second time when the only result to the paid ransom had been further demand from the communists for an additional $15,000 before they would release the Jefferses.

  It was not so much this insult added to injury that brought Cody’s Army to this remote jungle province, nor the fact that the Jefferses were American citizens, the fact of the matter being that Americans were being kidnapped almost daily at points all around the globe.

  What made this a situation worthy of Cody and his men was the fact that Jeffers, before he had taken work in the private sector, had been, under another identity, one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s top field operatives throughout the sixties and early seventies, before his retirement from government service.

  The kicker here was that the NPA commandant holding the Jefferses hostage in this simple extortion shakedown did not realize who he had.