Philippine Hardpunch Page 16

  “It will take time, I know, Mom and Dad,” Ann said contritely, “but with love, anything can be made better, can’t it?”

  “Oh, it can, honey.”

  Louise Jeffers looked like a different woman from the destabilized victim Cody had first encountered this a.m. at Colonel Locsin’s base. A rest, and seeing her child again, had washed years from her and you could see the woman a gutsy guy like Cal Jeffers had fallen in love with when their lives were young.

  Jeffers looked almost as good.

  “The general tells me the thing is already in motion to fade us from sight and put us underground again after the initial hoopla dies down,” he told the four men in black who stood in a semicircle around the end of Ann’s hospital bed. “They’ll give me another identity. Stateside this time.” He chuckled. “I insisted. Tell you guys the truth, corporate life in the Philippines was getting kind of old. This isn’t the way I’d have chosen to terminate it, but running a shrimp boat off the Gulf Coast sounds mighty fine right about now.”

  Hawkeye gunned, “Ain’t too many commie guerillas down that neck of the woods, that’s for sure.”

  Mrs. Jeffers looked into her daughter’s eyes and said, “It’s made us a real family again. Maybe that had to happen the way it did. We have each other again.”

  Cody said, “We have to leave now. We just wanted to check in.”

  “You’ve been through a lot, folks,” Caine said, “but I believe the worst is over. You’ve made it.”

  “We believe that, too,” Cal Jeffers said. “And wherever the hell you guys are heading to next… good luck.”

  “Yes,” Ann echoed in a young woman’s voice that was steady and right again. “Good luck, you four incredible men.”

  Cody gave the family the thumbs-up sign. “The same back at you.” He grinned, then he got serious with his men. “Okay, sixty seconds are up. Let’s get on it.”

  Cody was not into good-byes.

  Nor were his men.

  The four of them turned and let themselves out of that room without looking back. It was the only way to say good-bye in their world.

  They strode down the hospital hallway and out into the. darkening world.

  A wind had come up off the ocean, cooling things, but with the chill of worse to come. Thunder rumbled like an extended drum solo.

  They headed directly toward the waiting civilian van with the smoked-glass windows. Cody took the wheel, Murphy rode shotgun in the front bucket passenger seat next to him. Caine and Hawkeye clambered in the side hatchdoor with their death-laden knapsacks, ramming the door shut after them.

  Cody gunned the engine alive and aimed them out of there with a squeal of tires in the direction of the main gate.

  Murphy looked out and up at the threatening sky.

  “Looks like she’s gonna blow tonight.”

  “In more ways than one.” Cody nodded.

  The authorization he flashed at the MP at the main gate whisked them through and out into the real world.

  He pointed the van south in the direction of Manila, and Pasay beyond, an expensive little gold coast strip separating Manila Bay to the west from Laguna de Bay to the east.

  No conversation passed among the four men as they drove along.

  It was that time just before the dogs of war are turned loose, before the hellfire flares, when it’s all been said and all a soldier can do is look inside his own feelings about the kill or being killed that is to come.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  The light mist had resumed just after they passed the phony-quaint stretch of shops that made up Pasay.

  The countryside beyond the town might have appeared pastoral and exclusive in the sunshine, but on this rainy, darkening evening, a darkness in the elements matched what Cody felt inside.

  He parked the van several meters off the blacktopped road that twisted down from a rise to travel across the extended shelf of land and rectangled off into private, walled estates like the one several hundred meters below where he, Hawkins, Caine. and Murphy now crouched at a point above the northwest corner of the high stone wall around Valera’s property.

  They wore jackets against the driving mist. Beneath the jackets, each man wore his sidearm in a shoulder holster, and military webbing of grenades, ammo, and penetration gear for another hit like the assault that morning on Colonel Locsin’s NPA base on Mindanao.

  The difference being, in Cody’s estimation, that the predawn hit had been in a remote jungle province while this was in the lap of the remaining Filipino uppercrust who had thus far managed to hold onto their fortunes and reputations after the previous regime’s ouster.

  There had been little traffic along the blacktop after Cody had pulled off. He had followed a bumpy trail up into these woods, where he parked the van so he and his men could creep over to a craggy outlook that afforded them a clear peer down onto much of Valera’s estate and the public road that continued to run on past.

  Head weapon for each man on this hit was a silenced Ingram MAC Model 10 machine gun, a short, compact SMG chambered for .45 ACP rounds in 30-round magazines, capable of unleashing an incredible 1,145 rounds per minute. The lightweight, diminutive MAC-10 is accurate enough for short-range outdoor firing and is a vicious “room-boom” for close-in indoor action.

  A fresh-smelling breeze nipped in off the ocean and gave the mist a bite.

  From their high-ground concealment, they studied, with binoculars, what they could see of the inside of Vincente Valera’s estate.

  “No doubt about it, something unusual down there,” Caine said after a short while.

  “You branded that one right, teabag,” Hawkins grunted. He worked up a load of chewn tobacco and let fly, barely missing the Brit, who stepped aside just in time with an agility borne of long association with this Texan.

  “No one would suspect an ex-senator, even a commie, of harboring a paramilitary force,” Murphy growled. “Wonder how many setups like this one Javier’s got are stashed and ready to roll all over the islands.”

  “The way it’s stacking up,” said Cody, “a hundred or more would not surprise me.”

  “No matter how low a profile those lads are keeping down there,” said Caine, “they would hardly be risking massing like they seem to have done if something wasn’t about to happen very soon.”

  “Like tonight,” said Cody. “And look closer. Those aren’t Javier’s paras down there.”

  “Hot damn, right as usual, Sarge,” Murphy grunted. “Goddamn, those are government uniforms!”

  “That makes even less sense than Javier’s working with the communists,” Caine muttered.

  “It makes the same kind of sense, old limey dude,” Hawkeye chided. “If this warlord’s taken the damn commies in on this big thing of his, he’d damn sure call in his old-time cronies from the Marcos military.”

  “Part of that low security profile those dudes are maintaining,” Murphy pointed out, still scanning through his binoculars, “will work in our favor.”

  “Company,” said Cody.

  The others swung their binoculars around to hone in on his line of vision.

  An armored personnel carrier, an urban assault-type vehicle, chugged down the rise behind them in the rain, descending the blacktop road past their position, the vehicle’s diesel fumes polluting the clean ocean air.

  It was getting dark enough this gloomy night for the driver of the vehicle to have his headlights on, but there remained dusky, dirty light enough for Cody to make out the side markings on the vehicle: the insignia and ID numbering of the Filipino Army.

  “Looks like the senator’s throwing a real shindig.” Murphy grinned.

  Hawkins grinned, too, with some anticipation.

  “Shoot, this cowboy ain’t been to a party with a real live senator since, hell, I can’t rightly remember when.”

  “Uh, I hate to appear overly practical,” Caine interjected, “but I find myself wondering what size manpower they may have amassed down t
here waiting for us.”

  “My reckoning is a dozen or so more, if that baby’s full,” Hawkeye said with a nod at the armored vehicle.

  The personnel carrier passed the point where the highway curved well past and below their position, continued on another half kilometer, then braked at Valera’s front gate, where the sentries in rent-a-cop security uniforms appeared to be expecting it.

  A sentry down there ambled over to the truck and examined some papers the driver showed him; then the iron gate opened.

  The personnel carrier rolled in and to a point out of sight for the high-ground position taken by Cody—not high enough to see every part of the property inside Valera’s stone walls, but the best vantage point they could find on short notice.

  “It doesn’t matter what their manpower is,” Cody said, matter-of-factly. “We’re going in. We’re going in soft, just two of us. You and me, Rufe.”‘

  “Aw, Sarge,” Hawkeye griped.

  “That is an awful lot to ask,” Caine agreed with Hawkins. “Me and Hawkeye sitting out here while you two—”

  “Who the hell is asking,” Cody snarled. “It’s me and Rufe. We’re not here to engage this bunch. We’re going for the head. For Javier. Mr. Warlord. Valera is the only lead we’ve got. I want to get him out of here alive so he can take us to Javier.”

  “Alive?” Rufe repeated. “That could be kind of a tall order, Sarge, even for you and me if that place in there is blanketed with troops.”

  “It won’t be blanketed,” said Cody. We can see half the property from up here and we’ve only seen enough uniforms to let us know that something smells. One or two would be unusual. We’ve counted what, ten, moving about here and there.”

  “Valera is playing host to a pack of bad apple army guys,” Hawkins summed up, “but they’ve got to stay inside. Someone strolling up here, a helicopter flying by overhead, somebody could innocently spot any kind of obvious troop buildup and report it.”

  Murphy shrugged and affectionately patted the Ingram strapped over a shoulder and held to his side.

  “We get inside, we’ll stand a chance at handling any close-quarters trouble.”

  “We’ll try to avoid even that,” said Cody. “Hawkeye, Richard, you wait here. Be ready to give us cover fire if we need it.”

  “And you damn well will, is my guess,” Caine grunted sourly. “I hardly care for sitting this one out.”

  Hawkins said, “Me and the teabag could—”

  Cody expected these men to question his decisions from time to time. Each and every one of them as an outcast in his own way—from both civilian life and military discipline. This, combined with their combat capabilities, was what made them the best at what they did.

  This was no ordinary unit, and Cody was damn proud of that. He welcomed the input of these men, whose combat savvy matched his own. They might question his strategy, but never his leadership. That too had been inbred in the bonding between them forged in the fires of battle that made this team what it was, and he knew the reasoning for Murphy’s and Caine’s dissatisfaction. They hated seeing half the team running the full risk.

  Cody would have felt the same way.

  He lowered his binoculars, unstrapped them from around his neck and set them inside the opened hatchdoor of the van parked behind them. He cut in on Murphy’s offer to assist them.

  “Sorry, Hawkeye, Richard, but we can hope for a soft probe by me and Rufe. We’re going to try to get our hands on Valera. That will be easier with two of us than it will with four. It’s going to take a feather touch if it stands a chance at all.”

  “Sarge is right,” Rufe decided. “We won’t have time to go to work on Valera, if we do get him, to make him tell what Javier’s got and where.”

  “Yeah, you’re figuring it right,” Hawkins conceded. “If we bring Valera with us, he’ll take us to Javier to stay alive.”

  “Hawkeye and I will be here when you get back, with all the firepower you’re likely to need,” Caine assured Cody and Rufe. “Sitting on our bums until then is going to be another matter entirely.”

  “Let’s move out,” said Cody.

  He and Murphy broke from the rocky crag and started a fast slip-slide descent down the incline through balsa trees crowding the grassy incline, an incline that continued to within less than one hundred feet of stone wall that towered up toward the leaden unholy sky like some primordial monolith.

  A careful scan of what could be seen of the estate inside those walls had revealed that this corner spot of the wall they approached was kitty-corner from one corner of the main building, approximately a hundred yards from the wall. They sped along without a sound across the damp ground.

  Shadows had lengthened to elongated shadings against the gray ness, a world taking on the end of day. Those rumbling clouds that kept threatening more than a needle spray were saving their big blow for sometime later.

  Cody and Rufe gained the base of the wall, each man unfastening the climbing rope from his combat webbing.

  The rain would work for them. As Hawkeye had pointed out, security here had to be low profile, of necessity; Valera and his traitorous army pals could not afford to show their hand yet, and it was always easier to penetrate a defensive setup like this when the elements were at their worst, when the sentry’s inclination is to walk with his head bent down against the uncomfortable cold that has already chilled him to the bone.

  Rufe and Cody stood side by side several feet out from the wall and lassoed the climbing ropes over their heads to fling at the top of the wall.

  Rufe’s metal-pronged rope end caught on the one-foot-wide brick up there, but Cody’s rope fell back down. He caught it, tossed it again and the prongs latched on up there with a second try; then the two of them started up that wall, pulling themselves while they “walked” up the side of the wall, hand over hand.

  Cody had counted three sentries at the gate house in the east wall and one walking three-man patrol, the only outward signs visible from this distance of the force that was most likely mobilizing here for tonight.

  And it was chow time.

  There would be one or more buildings closer in toward the north wall, Cody figured, guest houses that, if he read this thing right, would have been taken over by these about-to-mutiny soldiers as temporary barracks and right now could well be packed with troops. You always had to count on the worst happening. It was a good way to avoid being surprised. But coming over at this point of the wall, if that’s what he and Murphy would find just inside, it would also be a realistic guess that the commanding officer of those troopers would be allowing them to hog down as much nourishment as they could if a major offensive against the government was coming up. There was no way of knowing in something like this when your men would have a chance to slow down again for anything more than field rations.

  Cody did not kid himself.

  It sounded like it might work, this plan of his to kidnap Javier, but it was a real long shot.

  But he saw no other way.

  He and Rufe hoisted themselves atop the wall together, flattening out up there, each man hastily rewinding the climbing rope to reattach on his webbing.

  Lights were already on in the massive, three-story house.

  A line of three modern guest houses lined along inside the wall, the closest two hundred meters east from the corner at which Cody and his partner paused.

  What Cody had not expected was to find the three-man sentry patrol passing by directly beneath them: three guys in private security service uniforms, except that their weaponry—American M-16s—and their shoulder-to-shoulder slogging through the rain in at least a semblance of military bearing stamped them as infantrymen on guard duty.

  The roiling, pregnant heavens chose that instant to sear the black-cloud ceiling with a giant strobe-light show that lasted long enough to turn the gloom to brighter than sunlight, a barrage of thunder humping the atmosphere, causing one of the sentries to idly glance up.

  In that lightning, h
e saw the two commandos perched atop the wall in the rain.

  * * *

  Maceda helped himself to another glass of his host’s sherry without bothering to offer Valera a taste of his own private stock.

  Valera sat in a wingchair near the opened screen door leading out to the patio behind his private library, three walls of the room lined floor to ceiling with leather-bound volumes, about one-third of which he had managed to read since having been born into all of this, a sole child, his parents long since deceased.

  The library was usually dominated by the immense oak desk, now cluttered with maps and dispatches, but at this moment, Valera thought, the arrogant, strutting Maceda’s brutish presence dominated this room.

  They had heard another of the military vehicles pull up in front of the house, as had been going on sporadically all of the previous night and seemed to be now resuming.

  A brisk knock at the library door.

  Valera started to bid “enter.”

  Maceda, standing behind the desk, snapped, “Enter.”

  An officer of the Philippine Army, a man in his midthirties whose stitched name tag across one of the breast pockets of his uniform read Durano, stomped in, assumed attention and rendered Maceda a salute.

  The general returned the salute with equal smartness.

  “Welcome, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You were not followed?”

  “No, sir.” The lieutenant smiled ever so slightly. “On maneuvers, sir. Overnight bivouac.”

  Maceda’s smile was an oily thing.

  “Have your men unload into the middle guest house along the north wall. They’ll find food. Have them wait with the others. They must remain inside, you understand, out of sight even after dark.”

  “In this weather, that should be an order they’ll appreciate.”

  “The weather will work for us this night, Lieutenant. Have them ready to move out at a moment’s notice.”