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  “Yes, sir. They already are.”

  “They can all be trusted?”

  “Implicitly. I know every one of these men personally that I’ve brought along, my general. They are from families loyal to what was. They themselves were loyal to our former president. They are now treated like outcasts, scorned, barely tolerated by their fellow servicemen and the public. They are ready to serve to the death for what can be ours.”

  “What will be ours,” Maceda barked. “See to it then, Lieutenant, then return here to join us.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Again the saluting. Durano left.

  Valera was again alone with Maceda, and with his thoughts.

  “Your lieutenant,” he said to the man behind his desk, “did not even deign to acknowledge my presence. My dear general, I must insist upon some respect in my own home. I have fulfilled my part in our bargain, have I not? My forces are aligned throughout the islands, my associates in higher places are prepared to move as well, and yet I somehow get the feeling that I am a prisoner in my own home; that we are not associates, that you are here to keep an eye on me.”

  Maceda finished his carved glass of sherry with a careful sip, set the glass down on the desk and remained standing, eyeing him across the room with that icy, impersonal glare that always made Valera want to look away.

  “Months of planning, and this is the night it happens, or begins,” Maceda intoned. “Troops moved into place, alliances formed, Operation Thunderstrike about to become a reality… and a fool named Valera risks it all.”

  “If you mean that phone call about what happened at the club—”

  “Of course I mean that, imbecile.” Some emotion crept into the general’s clipped diction, something like loathing; disdain. “We are lucky the Americans have managed to contain what happened on Mindanao this morning from the media for as long as they have, not to mention our government. When Durano returns, I shall have him double security in case we have been traced here through your bungling.”

  “But that at the club awhile ago, that was not my doing,” Valera protested. He decided to pat his pockets as if looking for one of his cigars, giving himself a second or two, a reason to lower his eyes free from that glare of Maceda’s that reminded him of an executioner’s eyes just before the axe fell. Why am I thinking these things? he wondered. I have never liked nor trusted this man! A growing sense of panic rippled deep in his psyche and his flesh felt clammy. “Mara Zobel is dead,” he reminded Maceda, not finding a cigar in any of his pockets. “They will learn nothing from the dead.”

  “What happens to you means little to me,” Maceda stated. He gazed around, his hands on his hips in an attitude of rude, expansive arrogance. “I have grown to like it here during my infrequent visits. Without you around, Vincente, this could be a very pleasant place.” He glared back at Valera. “I have my contacts in the Manila Police Department and the military, of course, but curious things are happening. I’ve told Javier, but he discounts it. When I find out how much they’ve learned about us, I will pass it on to Javier on Mindanao. That will decide your fate.”

  “They’ve learned nothing, I tell you.” Valera started to rise to make himself a drink.

  The stabbing peel of the ringing telephone on the desk halted him. He sank back into the chair.

  Maceda grabbed the receiver and as he did so, he finger tipped a button to activate a monitor box located on one corner of the desk that allowed the incoming voice to be amplified while a microphone in the unit picked up anything spoken in the library, channeling it out across the wire to the other end of the telephone connection.

  Before Maceda could speak, a voice Valera recognized instantly to be Javier’s spat from the little amplifier box speaker and polluted the last vestiges of civilized ambience of this library he loved so much.

  Javier’s voice snarled from the box, “You know who this is. Is my man there?”

  “I am,” said Maceda.

  “The other?”

  “Also,” Maceda replied.

  It was as with the lieutenant, Durano, Valera thought. As if he were invisible. He knew now it had been a terrible miscalculation to ever have joined forces with these serpents.

  “All is in readiness?” Javier demanded.

  As if I am invisible, Valera thought again.

  Or already dead…

  “Everything,” Maceda acknowledged. “The time?”

  “It begins at 0200 hours,” said Javier. “Acknowledge.”

  “0200 hours,” said Maceda.

  “This will be our last communication,” the amplifier box clipped. “All other staging points have been so advised. Have you anything final to convey?”

  “A problem,” Maceda said, his eye on Valera.

  “Report.”

  “The daughter. You understand?”

  “I do.”

  “She fell into, uh, the hands of the senator.”

  Valera sensed a frost reaching across the connection from the other end, extending invisibly out of that desktop amplifier to caress him like the skeletal fingers of death.

  “I… I only wish to say that I only tried to assist,” he told the box on the desk. “I had an assistant send men to Clark Air Base. They… got the girl. They were trailed back to one of my business concerns, it’s true, but none of this is my fault! Have I not amply demonstrated my sympathies to our cause?”

  “Silence.” Javier’s command snapped like a whip. “You will come here promptly to me now, as planned.”

  “And I?” Maceda asked.

  “I think we shall change our plans,” Javier said. “You will stay there and… command the situation.” The warlord’s voice took on a tone of sly intimacy meant for Maceda, not Valera. “And sec that our associate does not miss his flight.”

  “I shall indeed.”

  “Good luck then,” Javier’s voice crisped.

  The monitor box clicked. The drone of a steady dial tone buzzed.

  Maceda flicked another button to cut off the monitor.

  Valera decided to stand. He felt himself doing so stiffly, somehow unnaturally, and he knew his fear showed through the aloof, polished demeanor he always strived to maintain to match the tailored cut of his Savile Row wardrobe; but he felt his facade of impeccability slipping and he saw in Maceda’s sneer that this viper he had taken in was not fooled, no.

  Thunder rumbled outside. Lightning crackled, strobelike in its intensity, a storm approaching.

  Well, Senator,” Maceda put a mocking accent on the title, “you’re expected at Javier’s new base camp on Mindanao.”

  “I… should remain here. What reason is there for me to—”

  “You heard Mr. Javier.”

  “That list of men I gave you the last time you were here,” Valera said. “My contacts throughout the islands, who will move and strike tonight when I am to give them the signal—”

  “I will give them their signal to strike at 0200 hours.” Maceda’s oily smile got greasier, a self-satisfied smirk. “Now, shall I see you aboard the helicopter outside peaceably or would you prefer an armed escort? Time has run out for all of us.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Two of the sentries passing beneath the northwest corner of the wall did not see Cody and Murphy in that sustained moment of strobe-lightning that rendered the rainy, gloomy scene a surreal, metallic sort of daylight.

  The middle man who had stared up at the heavens with a curse on his lips against the elements, the one who saw the commando figures flattened up there atop the wall but not flat enough, opened his mouth to yelp a warning to his comrades who trudged along beside him absorbed in some conversation of their own, probably concerning their shitty luck at pulling guard duty on a night like tonight.

  Cody and Murphy triggered the Ingrams they held, the MAC noise and flash suppressors keeping the weapons down to a discreet chug that stitched the three men into reverse gallops, the backstepping dead stopped by the base of the wall already mur
aled with their sprayed guts, the only sounds to this triple kill the violent flapping about of the bodies that bonked off the wall to pile face downward atop each other, these noises muffled from atop the wall by the sibilant hissing of mist kissing the grounds and buildings, aided by the gloom of night steadily devouring the dreamy half-light remnants of this day.

  An inky clutch of shrubbery grew to nearly six feet high between this point where the killings took place and nearest of those lighted guest houses.

  No indications of reaction came from that vicinity, but something started happening at the front of the house, where the armored personnel carrier appeared almost comically out of place beneath the porte cochere. troops in government uniform standing around where they had debarked from the confines of the armored vehicle to stand in casual attitudes, some leaning against the vehicle, undercover of the porte cochere from the rain, smoking, looking around as men getting the feel of a new place for the first time.

  An officer in his midthirties strutted out of the main front entrance of Valera’s home and snapped a command at the soldiers, who doused their smokes and climbed back into the personnel carrier.

  The officer, a Flip looey, rode in front, next to the driver.

  The vehicle hummed to life over there and moved farther around the driveway to stop in front of one of the guest houses, where another Philippine uniformed officer emerged from the front door of that house to greet them. The newly arrived soldiers—each man, Cody saw, armed with an assault rifle—ascended from the personnel carrier and filed into the house without wasting any time out of doors. “And that’s a break we can use,” Cody grunted.

  “I hear that,” Murphy rumbled assent.

  They sprang off the top of that wall together in loose drops that landed them into somersaulting rolls, each coming up onto his feet safely a short distance inside and down the slight sloping of the landscaped terrace inside the wall.

  “Let’s stash this bunch first,” Cody said.

  They hurried over to the tangle of unmoving arms and legs that were the remains of the sentries. They grabbed at those arms and legs, tugging the corpses and their dropped weapons in to the opaque gloom of the shrubs growing at the bottom of the wall. “I never was a litter bug,” Murphy grunted as they made quick work of the job, “but with this garbage I could make an exception.”

  “Uh oh,” said Cody.

  Rufe turned from surveying the results of having stuffed the dead men from sight of anyone who might pass by, and he saw what Cody saw.

  “Someone’s going somewhere,” he grunted.

  A guy in pilot gear had waltzed out the back door of the main house to strut over to and board the chopper.

  Then followed the cranking up of the Huey, the whistling of the turbines awakening, the clunk of that first rotor turn; then the rotor rumble vibrated the eerie half-darkness with husky insistence.

  “My guess is Valera, and possibly whoever’s in charge here,” Cody said. “Let’s see how lucky we are, big guy.”

  “Man, I feel luckier than a stud turned loose in a woman’s prison.” Rufe chuckled.

  They trotted off together from the clump of shrubs that blended so with the tastefully landscaped acreage separating their corner of the wall from the northwest corner of the main house.

  The helicopter pilot did not spot them, being far too occupied with his controls in preparing the chopper for obvious imminent takeoff.

  The Huey waited there, its rotor blades whishhhing in the pelting mist.

  The last of the troopers from the personnel carrier disappeared into the “guest house” downrange, and from inside there, and the other two structures, could be heard upraised male voices, and, from across the rainy distance to where Cody and Murphy gained the corner of the main house, Cody could sense the vibrations—he could think of no other word—of something about to happen.

  The night storm riding the cooling wind of coming night was only a prelude for a human drama about to unleash itself right down here on Earth.

  The door to that middle house slammed shut after the last soldier, and the vehicle rolled around the driveway again to pull into a garage south of the house and the chopper landing pad.

  Cody and Murphy squatted beneath a darkened window at the corner of the house, out of the pelting, needling mist, around the corner from the chopper, blocked from sight of the lighted windows of those guest houses by the staggered lines of shrubs dotting the acreage.

  The row of ground-floor windows along this side of Valera’s main house were darkened except… except for—not a window but a door, a screen door, from which came a rectangle of indirect, warm light that refracted the falling mist, the screen door off a patio bordered by what looked to Cody like well-tended flower beds.

  Angry voices exchanging heatedly in the local dialect sniped at each other, almost audible enough to be understood.

  “You make out that pig latin?” Rufe grunted.

  Cody did, and he recalled Cal Jeffers’ description of the peculiarities of speech by which Jeffers had been able to identify Valera during Valera’s visit to Locsin’s NPA base in the jungle, and those same peculiarities—deep-voiced, resonant for a Filipino, with a slight stutter over the “t”s—allowed Cody to tag the Communist Party ex-senator without eyeballing Valera, too. He motioned Rufe ahead with him and soundlessly tread through Vincente Valera’s carefully tended flower beds, hugging the wall of the house, he and Rufe each with their Ingrams held close in but aimed out, ready to unleash more silent death if it came to that.

  He paused with his back pasted to the rain-slimed brick of the side of the house, two feet from that screen door.

  The lightless shroud of night had completed its smothering of dusk during the time he and Rufe had taken to climb the wall, deal with those three wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time sentries, and make it this far, the descending gloom offering them the additional benefit of further camouflaging their approach through and between those shrubs to the house.

  He eased along the wall a couple careful inches at a time, knowing Murph was eyeing their backtrack and around them, especially the direction of that line of guest houses (read: barracks), thus allowing Cody to concentrate with his ear close to that screen door from a point where the end of this argumentative exchange from inside could be more clearly eavesdropped.

  The one he tagged as Valera was saying, “—I am a power too, General Maceda. The force of gunmen and youth gangs I have organized to carry out their attacks upon specified targets, these street vermin, owe their allegiance to me. I run the rackets in Manila, do you not understand that?”

  “That may be true,” the other man, Maceda, countered, in a voice of unmoving coarseness, “but these units of, er, urban guerillas you were kind enough to organize, as you say, for us—”

  “Urban guerillas? You mean burglars and murderers and rapists, don’t you? The scum of the streets.”

  “A moment ago you were boasting of your command over such men.” Maceda snickered.

  Cody knew this guy by the sound of his voice, too, though they had never met. It was the voice of a brutish savage used to enforcing his will, used to having others obey for fear of their lives.

  Valera seemed no exception.

  “I… do believe you, General,” the communist said in a conciliatory voice, a sigh of acceptance. “You have paid them more, is that it? Promised them more than Javier instructed me to offer them, so as to usurp what is mine. You wanted me out of the picture from the very beginning, I see now so clearly. And the New People’s Army?”

  “I won’t say it again, Senator.” Maceda’s growl dropped to not-so-subtle a threat. “Walk out of that door, board that helicopter I have waiting for you, and carry out your part. You should already be on your way to Mindanao.”

  “We were to take that helicopter together to meet with Javier. I see what you have in mind. It will be as was before. You people will have the country, we will be hunted and killed as we were before.”

  “We,
Senator? You were born to rule. Too bad you picked the wrong side.”

  “And this time,” Valera went on in a thinking-aloud voice as the pieces fully fell together for him for the first time, “you will control my organization, too. You will be the government and you will be the black market. I think, General, that I would rather you killed me right here, in the home of my ancestors, if you have the courage to do your own dirty work.”

  Maceda said, “Nothing I would like better, my pompous, hypocritical senator, but, unfortunately, it’s not according to plan. Mr. Javier has requested we reserve the privilege of dealing with you for him. But if you insist, I can tell him that you put up a struggle. That you—”

  Cody left his piece of the wall and turned to plant himself squarely in the rectangle of light that fell upon the ground at his feet in the cold rain. He brought up the Ingram in target acquisition on the man in Filipino Army uniform who had been in the process of strutting around the far end of an ornate oak desk planted in the center of a library that reeked class and breeding—except for the men arguing in it.

  Maceda had a Russian Tokarev pistol half-drawn from a flapped hip holster, the general closing in aggressively on the sixtyish fellow who cringed before a wingchair on the far side of the airy room.

  Valera’s patrician features had grown jowly from age and amorality.

  Maceda did not directly note the appearance of Cody and the Ingram searching for and finding a moving target, but the general did see the surprise in Valera’s eyes at something more than Maceda’s threat of harm.

  Maceda forgot about Valera and completing his draw, and flung himself sideways from what he sensed more than actually saw. He did see the extended shadow of the Ingram plainly enough from the vaguely discerned combat figure out there in the rain beyond the screen door.

  Cody squeezed the Ingram’s trigger.

  Nothing.

  Jammed!

  A rare but ever-present possibility and the worst thing that could happen in combat unless you were the guy, like Maceda, who found himself cheating the fickle finger of fate.

  Across the room, one side of a closed double oak door opened inward from the wall opposite the screen door. The Flip officer who had arrived with the crew in the personnel carrier minutes earlier walked in without knocking, obviously expected.