Philippine Hardpunch Read online

  The Renault piled a grazing blow into a cement abutment topping one of the girders supporting the freeway, hitting the abutment with enough force to fill the air with an explosion of smashing glass, slamming, and crunching car-metal sounds.

  A violent pitching around of the Renault sent that car with Mara Zobel and Ann Jeffers aboard hurtling across the freeway pavement—into a full-force, end-over-end series of shattering flips that no one could survive.

  General Maceda leaned forward and spoke to his driver when the BMW limousine reached the crest of the hill just north of Pasay.

  “Slow here for a moment. I want to look.”

  “Yes, sir.” The chauffeur nodded curtly.

  The powerful car slowed to coasting speed down the hill and into the valley where Vincente Valera had his estate.

  It was one of the old plantations that had never gotten back on its feet economically after World War II but, rather, had become a residence for the very wealthy.

  The small town of Pasay behind him, the general now saw the valley of estates below this crest of the hill fanned out in a patchwork pattern for some considerable distance in every direction.

  Maceda focused his attention on a thorough study of what he could see of Valera’s estate, which was his destination.

  He wore pressed military khaki-—even though he had been suspended of active duties until further notice, his being one of the cases the new government’s civil rights review panel was still considering regarding the charges against him, but he did not know when he would next get a chance to slow down enough to change clothes.

  When the big moment arrived, as it would very, very soon now, he wanted to be ready.

  What appeared from this distance to be ten-foot-high stone walls surrounded the fifteen-acre parcel of real estate that belonged to Valera.

  The ex-senator had done rather well, his Marxist rhetoric not withstanding. Maceda imagined that Valera’s tax returns listed his nightclub holdings and other investments as the principal source of his income.

  The main house was a three-level affair, and there were a few outbuildings and one extended garage. Tapered lawns and well-maintained shrubbery and a small forest of trees lent the place a tranquil, pastoral elegance.

  The perfect point from which to unleash a lightning strategic strike, once the signal was given.

  Fifty of Maceda’s men were billeted in Valera’s house, and the garage held three armored urban assault vehicles and two canvas-topped trucks which would serve as troop carriers. A helicopter sat on a landing pad behind the house.

  The main entrance to the grounds was a heavy metal gate bolted into the wall.

  Maceda leaned forward again and said to the driver, “I’ve seen enough. Continue on.”

  “Yes, my general.”

  The sleek car picked up speed with no more sound than the purring of a contented kitten.

  The driver, like the men waiting for them down there on Valera’s estate, were soldiers attached to the unit Maceda had commanded before his ouster. They were all supposedly “off duty,” something the General’s connections had managed to aid in, but were in fact, at this moment, very much on duty, in the service of another, greater cause.

  Maceda still had some trouble believing he was allowing his men to be put up—and was sharing command of this aspect of the operation—with an avowed (albeit decidedly insincere) communist.

  As a loyal soldier to President Marcos, the communists—be they political party or mountain guerillas—were the sworn enemy of the Philippine Army.

  There had never been any doubt about where Maceda’s loyalties rested after the new government came to power, which was certain, he knew, the principal reason for his suspension, but he made sure the spies and surveillance teams the government had tried to wire him with knew nothing of his involvement in this plot that had been set in motion almost before the Marcos jet had even lifted off from Clark Air Force Base.

  There were too many highly placed, influential people who owed too much to the former president (and had too much to lose under the new government) for there not to have been a concerted effort to overthrow sooner or later. It happened sooner because the ex-president already had his forces quietly consolidating almost before crazy Imelda had begun unpacking her shoes in Honolulu.

  Not that it mattered by this time whether Marcos was alive or dead. The balance of power was shortly due to shift in more ways than one, to General Maceda’s way of thinking…

  The BMW gained the bottom of the hill, continued on the short distance to the front gate of Valera’s estate, where the driver braked for inspection by the posted sentries who wore the uniforms of standard rental security personnel.

  One of the sentries strode over to the car.

  Maceda nodded approvingly to himself. The sentries surely recognized the car and the license plates by now, but the side windows of the BMW were smoked glass, and so this sentry was coming forward just to make sure while his partner covered the car from inside the gate with a rifle. Maceda fingered the mechanism for lowering the window.

  The sentry stared in briefly, as one of the gate guards always had on the few occasions he had visited Valera; then the guard straightened in a hurry and nodded to the man inside the gate.

  The iron gate yawned open.

  The BMW purred on through.

  Maceda closed the window and relaxed back against the plush interior as the driver gained speed along the slight incline toward the house, where Maceda saw—through the slight drizzle which started as the BMW pulled onto the ground—Valera standing and waiting for him beneath the porte cochere.

  The senator appeared aloof, almost absentminded, but Maceda knew a shrewd man functioned behind those deceiving features; almost as shrewd as the man, Arturo Javier, who had managed to put this entire incredible thing together.

  Operation Thunderstrike, yes.

  A carefully orchestrated, national overthrow of the present government, accomplished through selective strikes at key government targets: assassinations, attacks on police and military strongpoints, assaults on the administrative centers of the new government.

  Javier had been the one selected by the exiled Marcos hierarchy to organize the thing, but Maceda felt no jealousy over that.

  Maceda was a career army man who prided himself in thinking that he never missed an opportunity for monetary gain—and the privileges of rank and power of his years under the Marcos government had offered enough such opportunities to make him a very wealthy man.

  Still, one could always use more money, more power.

  Which was why he had gone along with this alignment of such diverse forces as Valera and the NPA and Javier.

  There was no way Operation Thunderstrike could not be a resounding success, or so he told himself. Only a few short hours to go, and the country, and the glory would again be theirs.

  The BMW coasted to a stop beneath the porte cochere. Valera watched as the chauffeur climbed out from behind the wheel and hurried back to open the rear door for the General.

  Maceda stepped out, a lithe, fiftyish man of stern military bearing who gave the impression of being hard as nails, his eyes, as always, concealed behind the reflecting sunglasses he wore even on this rainy day.

  Those sunglasses always had an unsettling effect on Valera, which he tried now to ignore.

  “Welcome once again to my home, General. It is good to see you. I trust you had a pleasant drive out from Man—”

  “We will dispense with the amenities, Senator,” Maceda snapped. “The moment of truth is at hand.”

  Valera did not need to be reminded of that. He would have been unable to sleep the last several nights had it not been for the massive doses of sedatives prescribed by his physician, and even through the day-after grogginess he could feel the quivering in his stomach lining that would not stop.

  He realized anew that his talent lay in deception, the subtleties of politics and secrecy. He was not a fighter. He had been far more confident
than this during the planning stages of Operation Thunderstrike.

  He had been suspicious at first, of course, very suspicious, upon being asked to cooperate not only with old enemies like Arturo Javier, but with men like Maceda, whom Valera considered a walking threat.

  But orders were orders and those orders had come directly from no other than General Chung of the North Korean UNG II, those orders as such constituting no less than tacit KGB approval for Valera to cooperate with Javier’s proposals regarding Valera’s underworld connections—as well as having Valera function as initial liaison in bringing Javier together with the New People’s Army.

  Maceda turned from the car and led the way into the house as if he owned the place.

  Valera found himself hurrying to keep up.

  “I, uh, trust this rain will not… interfere with Operation Thunderstrike, General.”

  “It will work to our advantage,” Maceda snarled. He headed down the first-floor hallway toward the library, which he had taken over as his private office—another thing Valera hated him for.

  Maceda’s men, in uniform, were walking and talking everywhere in the house. An air of preparation and anticipation prevailed. He had made his daily routine check-in call ten minutes ago, to speak briefly with Mara about how the club was doing and so forth. Except today. A gruff voice he had not recognized had answered the phone and would give out no information, nor would it patch him through to Mara.

  He had decided he was talking to a policeman and had hung up before they could trace the call.

  He decided it might be best if he said nothing about this to Maceda for the time being.

  They were halfway to the library doorway when one of Valera’s servants appeared. “A call for you, Mr. Valera. It’s Edmundo, from the club.”

  Maceda eyed Valera coldly and started toward the phone before Valera could.

  “I’ll take that.”

  Valera’s heart sank.

  Something was very wrong, he sensed.

  As Maceda had said, the moment of truth was at hand.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Cal Jeffers left the room where his wife slept soundly on a hospital cot. His eyes were open and his feet shuffled him along, but he was barely aware of where he was and where he was going, though long years of training in the American espionage service had taught him how to keep under control at times like this.

  He bumped into someone walking down the hallway and mumbled an “excuse me,” reprimanding himself for letting the strain show. He pulled himself erect, left the wing of the building, and crossed the rainy courtyard to the building next door on this classified corner of Clark Air Force Base.

  The misting precip cooled and revived him and he was feeling better when he gained the second building and started down the corridor in the direction of General Simmons’ office.

  Simmons had allowed him to stay on-deck through to the finish of this, one way or the other. The object of concern was his daughter, after all.

  He had felt compelled to check in on Louise and had excused himself, and now felt glad that he had looked in on her. He felt relief knowing that she was asleep, unconscious, not hurting with the excruciating agony of not knowing what he felt.

  He reached a point several paces from Simmons’ office, the doorway of which was partially opened, and slowed his step when he overheard voices from inside the office, there being a minimum of foot traffic along this corridor as so few people knew anything about the mission in the first place.

  “Word just came in, sir,” a voice, not Simmons’, was reporting. “I picked it up monitoring the police band out of Manila, as you requested. Big doings at the Gilded Peacock.

  “Let’s have it, Captain.”

  “A brawl, a couple of deaths. Gunshot wounds.”

  “The cops have anything on Cody and his boys?”

  “Not yet they don’t. Last seen, Cody and his team were hauling ass away from there.”

  “I’ll bet they were.”

  “Supposedly chasing a Renault that belonged to one of the dead men.”

  “Any sign of someone named Mara Zobel?”

  “No names at all so far. I just picked it up seconds ago. It’s still happening. The report I picked up said the club had been cleared out except for one or two drunks, one or two employees and the dead men. Everyone stopped fighting and split as soon as the shooting started.”

  Jeffers could listen to no more. He stepped into the office.

  “And my daughter?” he asked the captain. “Was there any word about her?”

  The captain looked at Jeffers blankly, then back at Simmons.

  “Sir, I’m afraid, er, that is, I don’t think I—”

  Simmons cut him off with, “That will be all, Captain. Thank you. Keep us posted.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain nodded to Jeffers on his way out, closing the door behind him.

  Jeffers said, “I’m sorry, General, but I really would like to know what any of this has to do with my daughter.”

  “Mr. Jeffers, you’ve a personal stake in this, that is why I agreed to let you stay on, but I can’t have you interfering with our other business around here.”

  Jeffers considered that a moment.

  “I’m sorry, General. I know you’re right and I guess I did make a fool out of myself just now. It’s just that… I’m so damned worried about Ann.”

  “She’ll turn up, Cal.”

  “Will she? We don’t have the slightest idea where Ann could have gone to.” Jeffers sank into a chair. “It had all worked out so fine, Cody and his gang coming in like some movie commandos to pull us out of Locsin’s camp. Maybe it wasn’t a movie, but it damn sure almost had a happy ending.”

  He smashed a fist into an open palm. “Damn that kid of mine! Damn her, damn her, damn her for what she’s done… no, wait, no, goddamn it, I don’t mean that… shit, I don’t know what I mean.”

  Simmons strode over and placed a hand on Jeffers’ shoulder.

  “Slow down, Cal. There are overlapping priorities here. I had that captain keeping the town wired for something on Vincente Valera, but the captain doesn’t know why. And I don’t know what Cody and those loonies of his are up to. I’m not even all that goddamn sure Cody himself knows.”

  “But Ann… they went looking for her, didn’t they, and now you say Cody and his men are involved in this shooting and so on. Could Ann be involved in that? By God, I should have gone with Cody. My own flesh and blood out there in enemy hands, and I’m sitting here on my ass.”

  “Er, Cal, I believe the team is monitoring the situation,” Simmons kidded, trying to break through some of the tension. “Believe me, Cal, I do have Manila wired. We’ll know within minutes what happened at that club—and whether or not your daughter was involved.”

  The phone on Simmons’ desk rang, causing both men to start slightly.

  General Eugene Simmons was not used to feeling on edge, and his was a high-pressure business all around, but what made it worse this time was that Cody’s Army, and by extension himself and this small unit of his, were totally out of bounds regarding Philippine law or diplomacy. He did not expect this to stay under wraps for very much longer.

  He grabbed the phone up to his ear.

  “Simmons.”

  He could feel Jeffers’ anxiously eyes on him.

  “Simmons, this is O’Donnell. What the hell have you got going on down there this time?”

  O’Donnell, a four star, was Simmons’ commanding officer but, without Need To Know, Simmons knew it was a rhetorical question. He also knew Clem O’Donnell well enough to know his CO. was steamed, the heat in his voice eating up the wire.

  “You know I can’t tell you that, sir,” Simmons said.

  “Goddamn it, Gene, you’re going to be telling someone about it damn soon and it might just be a board of inquiry—-if not the Flips, then us.”

  “I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”

  “List
en, you,” O’Donnell, who was a friend, bristled, “I’ve just had my butt chewed out from one end of this goddamn office to the other. Generals do get their asses chewed from time to time.”

  “I, uh, think I’m finding that out, but you know the position I’m in, Clem. I can’t tell you what we’ve been up to over here, and why should you want to know? Who’s been chewing your ass?”

  “The goddamn Flips, who d’ya think,” O’Donnell snarled. “Cops and military.”

  “They want to know what?”

  “They want to know what a Lancia, with plates registered to your unit, is doing involved in some sort of shoot-out at a place called the Gilded Peacock.”

  “And the military?”

  “They got on line soon as the cops got off. There was some blowout down on Mindanao this morning and now the Jefferses are said to be back home. Since they were being held by the New People’s Army, the military wants to know why they weren’t advised of this, why they weren’t brought in on it, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “I take it, sir, that you told them to fold it up and shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I mean, they had how many weeks to do something to find those people, and what did we get? Diddley-squat! So we brought in the best we have and we got the job done and if they don’t like it, goddamn it, sir, that should be tough shit. Those Americans were being held prisoner, a child being raped and abused, and a team of four men sent in did something about that, brought them home. We’re a world power, f’chrissake. Maybe it’s time we start acting like it when the situation calls for it. Sir.”

  A long pause came from the other end.

  Then O’Donnell said, in a tired voice, “You’re right, Gene, damn your hide. I’ll take care of the Flips. But remember, I can only stall them for so long, and I’m talking about no more than a couple of hours. They can go over my head too, you know.”

  “The people who came in to handle this for us,” Simmons said, “I’ve got a feeling a couple of hours is all they’ll need.”