Philippine Hardpunch Page 11

  The club bouncer and the teenager reached the bottom of the stairs, Ramos and Jorges remaining close behind them.

  It would fit together, Mara told herself.

  Her Vincente.

  His Operation Thunderstrike, whatever that was.

  And this girl, this Ann Jeffers.

  It would all add up to her passport out of her dead-end life of managing whores and crooked gamblers.

  Nothing must go wrong, she told herself.

  At the instant she registered that thought, she turned in time to see Ann Jeffers twist slightly, to face Edmundo, who gripped her bruised arm as the two of them reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Ann then brought her knee up and around in a lightning kick at Edmundo’s groin.

  The club bouncer had not expected this, but he was an expert at this sort of thing. He almost managed to jerk a thigh around to block the kick.

  The girl’s knee caught his privates a glancing blow.

  Edmundo gasped. His complexion turned purple. He bent in at the middle, wheezing like a busted accordion.

  Ann tugged herself out of his grip with a ferocious lunge. She angled herself around behind Edmundo. She gave him a shove that sent the bouncer bouncing into Mara.

  Mara and Edmundo collapsed into a corner next to the alley door, a tangle of writhing limbs and much cursing.

  Ann turned first toward that door to the alley—but that would take her too close past the man and woman she’d just tumbled.

  The other two behind her, taken by surprise, started to dart for her, reaching out with grabbing arms, both of them.

  She took off running down the hall in the direction of the club noises.

  Mara forced herself free of the groaning Edmundo, who climbed to his feet also, but with none of his usual agility.

  “After her!” Mara screamed, pointing frantically with her pistol toward the fleeing teen. “Get her! And don’t let anything stop you.”

  Ramos and Jorges tore off down the hallway leading toward the club. They were already gaining on the girl.

  Edmundo did his best to keep up with them, gaining strength by the moment after the girl’s glancing knee-blow to his manhood.

  Mara Zobel chambered a round, kept the Walther PPK in front of her, and followed it into what she knew would become, in these next few heartbeats, one hell of a confrontation between her, and her men, and whoever this Cody was.

  Cody had driven the winding thirty-minute trek into Manila from Clark Air Force Base, through Angeles, south through San Fernando.

  He always preferred being behind the steering wheel of whatever vehicle he happened to be aboard, having resigned himself long ago to the unalterable fact that he was a classic “nervous passenger.”

  General Simmons’ idea of “appropriate civilian attire” for Cody and his men, sent over from the main Post Exchange, had been decidedly casual, constricting jeans, T-shirts, open-necked shirts, running shoes and boots; but that had worked just fine in allowing the team to blend into the muddled street scenes once they reached downtown Manila and the area of Pilar Street where no one, it seemed, wore a suit and tie beneath the humid, crushing heat.

  The sun had drifted behind some of the increasing cloud cover, clouds gray-bottomed with the threat of rain.

  Cody had spent enough time in this part of the world to know that the rain does not cool things off.

  Nothing cools things off in that part of the world.

  The rains would make the air even muggier, more humid. The mosquitoes would get worse, and so would the creeping jungle rot that could eat out a new pair of combat boots within weeks.

  It is a climate made for violence.

  If that came their way, the men of Cody’s Army were prepared.

  Cody wore the Colt .45. He liked the old-fashioned solid feel of the weapon at the small of his back in a special holster designed to conceal the weapon, clipped to the back inside of his jeans.

  Murphy also opted for Mr. Colt’s equalizer.

  Caine similarly wore a Beretta 93-R.

  Hawkeye had wanted to carry along a brand new .375 Magnum they’d had at the armory on the base but that was too much hardware to wear concealed, no matter what kind of leather he tried.

  “You look like you’re wearing a cucumber up your ass,” was how Murphy had phrased it.

  The Texan had settled for a short-barreled .44 Magnum.

  Each man wore spare clips tucked inside the belt line of their slacks.

  They pushed off the street, into the inviting coolness of the Gilded Peacock.

  The lights were low and it took a moment or two for Cody’s eyes to readjust to this half-crowded smoky scene underscored by the throbbing beat of a jukebox somewhere.

  The first thing he centered on when his eyes could see enough was the rotating closed-circuit TV camera mounted above the bar. The camera slowly panned the scene, catching Cody and his team as they stood sizing up the place.

  About a half-dozen very young Filipino women, wearing tiny white bikinis, approached them through the crowd.

  Kids the same age or younger than Ann Jeffers, Cody thought. He got a sour taste in his mouth.

  One girl-woman went boldly up to each man and there was much attempted caressing and several purring invitations that had to be brushed away from these little professionals.

  Cody noted that no one in the place seemed to be paying this scene any undue attention.

  Dozens of animated conversations in local dialect peppered the unending rhythmic rumble of the unseen jukebox somewhere.

  There were men at tables with B-girls cadging drinks and, offering propositions concerning the private rooms upstairs. There were a few couples, and some tables of just men sitting around drinking beers and shooting the breeze; a collection of all types, but none of them showing the least bit of interest in this little scene.

  The girls clustering around these new arrivals got the idea after a few seconds and drifted off with upturned noses, seeking more promising prospects.

  Murphy watched the bikini-clad tails jiggling off to disappear into the club scene.

  “There goes a real waste of talent,” he sighed.

  “A time and a place, old chap,” Caine reminded him.

  Hawkeye was looking around the joint, warming to the feel of it. “Quite a honky-tonk, yeah.” He grinned. “We’ll have to come back here sometime, Murph.”

  Cody grunted, “If there’s anything left after we get done with it.” He spotted a darkened archway on the far side of the bar and started toward it. “Let’s find Vincente Valera.”

  The other three trailed along with him. They wended their way, following a circuitous route between the wall tables and the more close-quarters press of customers nearer to the bar.

  Cody had a hunch about that archway.

  If General Simmons was right about the size of the operation Valera had going here, there would be private rooms and a gambling setup somewhere on these premises.

  Cody had already spotted signs for the men’s and women’s rooms on the opposite side of the main entrance when they first came in.

  His hunch was that the archway they were heading toward would lead them to the rest of this layout; would lead them to Mara Zobel, who would be with, or would lead them to, Valera.

  He had noted that this was a three-level building. There would be plenty of snooping around to be done, but he felt confident that they would be able to pull that off as long as they made it to and through that archway without drawing attention to themselves.

  In here, in this barroom, there were too many unknown factors.

  He noticed the bartender down at this end of the bar starting to eye, with more than passing interest, their progress around the outer edges of the crowd.

  They reached a point about forty feet from that archway.

  Cody could still see nothing through the darkness in there except that a hallway beyond led deeper into the building.

  He slowed his pace, and so did his men.<
br />
  “Doesn’t look all that inviting,” Caine commented.

  “This is where it gets hard,” Murphy rumbled.

  Hawkeye chuckled. “That happened to me back with them little chickies back yonder.”

  The distance between them and the archway was beyond the tables, a little corner with cigarette machines and a pay phone, none of which were in use at the moment.

  Wishing he and his men had more firepower, Cody started forward with a tad more caution but no slackening in their steady approach.

  Then things happened.

  Ann Jeffers came sprinting out from that archway, skidding to a stop once she found herself inside the bar.

  She had been cleaned up some and outfitted with new clothes since Cody had seen her last, when they’d parted ways after the chopper landed back there at Clark, but she now also wore an overwrought, bedraggled appearance. A brand-new bluish welt puffed shut one of her eyes.

  She saw them.

  “Cody!” she cried.

  She started toward them.

  Two figures, Filipino males, materialized from the archway behind the girl before she could take another step and they both set upon her, wrapping their arms around her, dragging her back toward that hallway, the teenage girl fighting and struggling and screaming like hell let loose.

  Cody and his team bolted forward, Cody and Murphy dashing forward side by side, Caine and Hawkins fanning out behind them.

  The guys with the Jeffers girl realized this. One of them disappeared into the darkness back there behind them with his one arm around Ann’s waist, the* other looping up around her throat in a mugger’s grip, dragging her along with him.

  His pal spun around to meet the threat of Cody and company advancing. He sprung a folded knife from his pocket and snicked the nine-inch blade open with a practiced flip of his wrist. The blade glinted wickedly in the neon light from behind the bar.

  Another guy appeared from the hallway to join mack the knife. This guy, who limped slightly, did a strange thing.

  Some of the bar customers seated close to the flaring confrontation had become aware that something was up: conversations tapering away, heads turning; but most of the customers were still caught up in their own little worlds.

  The man who appeared saw Cody and his men coming forward. He turned, picked up a chair, raised it over his head and brought it down with muscular force atop the head of a burly guy sitting with three similar-looking gents around a table, drinking beer, wholly unaware of this scene.

  At the same time, Cody took on the Filipino with the knife.

  The Flip danced back and forth in the archway, ready to go to work on whomever came close enough first.

  Cody reached around, came out with his .45 automatic and blew the guy’s guts out a hole in his back, kicking him to the floor somewhere beyond the archway.

  This, simultaneous with the chair smashing over the other man’s head, snagged the attention of everyone in the place, and in a hurry.

  Conversations stopped. Men leaped to their feet for a better look. B-girls shrieked and dived for cover.

  The guy who got the chair busted over his head pitched forward, overturning the table and the beers in front of him.

  His pals hurtled to their feet.

  Edmundo turned from smashing the chair. He picked up a bottle from another table and threw it at the back bar mirror, sending the mirror shattering into a million noisy pieces. That really tore things loose.

  The guy who’d caught the chair picked himself up, shaking his head, looked around and decided it was this bunch who’d fired the pistol and raised this ruckus who were to blame for his injury. He sailed into Caine before the Englishman could grunt a single syllable.

  Caine and the guy and two of the guy’s buddies tumbled to the barroom floor, a tornado of flying fists and kicks.

  Edmundo, satisfied that he had started enough of a diversion to delay this Cody and his men, turned to race after Jorges and the teenager.

  Hawkeye propelled himself into a flying tumble that caught Edmundo at the knees and took the club bouncer down. Hawkeye came up for air first. His right arm blurred around in a twist draw to unleather his .44, with which he popped Edmundo sharply on the jaw.

  The Filipino’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he leaned against a cigarette machine in the corner and commenced snoring.

  Hawkeye straightened back from the guy, making sure not to slip in the blood slick spreading beneath the punk Cody had plugged.

  “At least you got off better than your pard,” Hawkins grunted to the guy he’d just rendered unconscious.

  Then he spun to observe the full-scale brawl that had flared up inside the Gilded Peacock.

  Murphy had rushed to Caine’s assistance, Big Rufe pulling off one by one the guys piling onto Caine, with considerable help from the Englishman himself.

  Murphy picked off one guy and flung him over his shoulder, not watching or caring where the guy landed, but hearing him smash into a wall over near the bar.

  The second man he pulled off he flung at some guys a couple tables away who had already been mistakenly shoved by someone in the melee, and that table full of guys started swinging fists.

  Almost instantly a massive brawl had spread through the entire club—fists, bottles and occasional human bodies flying through the air to the sounds of cracking fists, smashing bottles, and breaking furniture.

  Before Murphy could get the third guy off Caine—the guy who had his ham-sized hands wrapped around the Briton’s throat, repeatedly rapping his head against the barroom floor—Caine kicked this guy in the balls so hard he actually flipped over and landed in a brawling bunch over by another one of the cigarette machines.

  Caine sprung to his feet, looking around for Rufe Murphy in the melee.

  Rufe had his hands full with three guys trying to bring him down to rap a chair leg over his head.

  Caine flung himself in that direction, deeper into this madhouse raging out of control everywhere around them.

  Hawkeye decided to give chase after Cody down the hallway. Caine and Murphy had their hands full, but they didn’t need his help. Cody was a man alone when Hawkeye had last spotted him.

  He darted in through the archway, the .44 Magnum in his fist.

  The hallway took a bend after a couple hundred feet, and there was some light from farther down this end of the hallway because a door to the alley was open and through that poured a stark shaft of brutal midday sunlight from outside.

  Hawkins zoomed around the bend in the hallway right on Cody’s heels, this whole crazy thing going down so fast it was amazing.

  Cody had drawn up.

  Hawkeye put on the brakes and stood his ground at Cody’s side, glimpsing the scene back here in a flash.

  Down the hall, the Filipino hood who had taken off with Ann had pushed the teenage girl in the direction of an older, well-preserved woman.

  If you liked them on the slightly buxom side, Hawkeye decided.

  “Mara Zobel,” Cody grunted.

  “Bingo.” Hawkins nodded.

  Both men stood there with their pistols drawn but not firing because the action had already shifted down at the end of that hall by the open door.

  Mara Zobel held a pistol; it looked from here to Hawkins like a small Walther PPK, which she pressed against the back of Ann Jeffers’ head, using it to prod the girl out through the door.

  Cody felt a spasm of dread shiver through him.

  He remembered a hostage crisis like this at the Rome airport not long ago when he and his men had been unable to prevent the murder of a twelve-year-old child who had been held under the gun in a situation exactly like this.

  God, don’t let it happen again, Cody’s mind raged.

  Mara Zobel used the palm of her hand to push Ann along, out of sight, into the sunlight, and the Zobel woman followed her out, leaving the Filipino hood behind.

  The hood whirled on Cody and Hawkins with a pistol coming up to fire on them, the punk screa
ming something they couldn’t hear because each of them triggered two rounds from their .45s that reverberated in the confines of the hallway.

  The punk caught the slugs, one-two-three-four, each impact shuddering his body into another jerky weave until the opened alley door stopped him, wrapped him around it, then his cored corpse sinking into a sitting position with his legs outside the building, his torso inside, his head twisted around with unseeing eyes staring upside down along the floor at the men who had killed him.

  Cody and Hawkins stormed down the length of that hall to the door.

  Cody heard the gunning of an engine from outside the doorway.

  A squeal of tires.

  Rage in his gut fired a snarl.

  “No, dammit, no!”

  He piled through the doorway into the blinding glare of the sun-splashed alley, Hawkins right on his heels, in time to see an outdated Renault swing into a two-wheeled turn at one end of the alley, the tortured rubber skidding across the pavement, shrieking between the canyon walls of the alley.

  The car turned, onto busy Pilar Street.

  The Renault, which could only be driven by Mara Zobel, with Ann Jeffers aboard as her passenger, made the turn and vanished from sight.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  Cody and Hawkins pelted up the alley, onto Pilar Street.

  The flow of noisy traffic of every type and description continued unabated, in apparent raucous ignorance of the brawl exploding inside the Gilded Peacock.

  The car Cody had driven here, a Lancia supplied by General Simmons, waited where they had parked it.

  Three Filipino street-gang kids, punks with giant tattoos on their arms and backs, stood lounging against the car.

  Cody had tipped the boys to keep an eye on the car, a common practice along Pilar Street; a sort of five-and-dime protection racket; but he had seen no sense in bringing attention to themselves at that point by bucking the street system.

  The teenage street gangs are a powerful force along scenes of Manila’s underbelly like this sin strip, much as they are in New York or Chicago; not in the big money games, but a definite presence to be reckoned with among the street people.