Philippine Hardpunch Page 18

  Two wild cards in one heartbeat!

  The Filipino lieutenant picked up on the action here with admirably fast reflexes, seeing Maceda throw himself behind the massive desk that would have stopped slugs from an M-60, much less a jammed Ingram.

  Cody threw away the useless piece-of-crap Ingram, unlimbering his .45 from its shoulder leather, unsnapping a grenade from the combat webbing he wore strapped to his chest.

  Valera sprinted somewhere out of his line of vision.

  He pulled back a boot and sent the screen door plowing off its hinges with one kick, knowing from experience that Murphy would be fanning out around behind him for a line of fire in through the doorway.

  The Flip looey got caught flatfooted in the opposite doorway, saw the screen door kicking in, started to holler to someone down the hallway in the house and paw for his sidearm at the same instant.

  Rufe caressed a twenty-round burst from his Ingram that was like some invisible high velocity cannonball that pumped the whole middle out of this Flip looey’s chest, belching awful and red out of his back, his innards preceding him, only for the eye blink it took the force of the Ingram’s burst to hurl him through that doorway.

  Rufe fell back when he saw Cody do the same.

  A pistol shot cracked from inside the library, from the direction of behind that massive oak desk, sent an angry hornet stinging its way through the doorway where they had both stood an instant before.

  “And there goes goddamn soft,” Rufe muttered at the noise of the gunshot.

  Cody called in English in through the doorway.

  “Get behind something, Senator.”

  Then he lifted the grenade in his left fist and unplugged the detonator with his teeth while at the same time snapping off two fast rounds into the library at the oak desk monstrosity that stopped the .45-caliber projectiles but would also keep this General Maceda in place a few seconds more.

  Cody underhanded the grenade into the library and fell back, plastering himself against the outside wall to one side of the doorway.

  Rufe, seeing what he was up to, grabbed the other wall at the opposite side.

  The grenade pitched beyond sight, in the opposite direction in which Valera had scrambled for cover.

  Shouted responses to Maccda’s pistol shot enlivened the rainy darkness from in and outside the main house, from the direction of the main gate, and from the line of “guest houses.”

  A BLAMMMM! rocked the grounds and the darkening misty hissing air, and the house, and Cody thought he heard one terrified scream cut off that could have been Maceda in the second before the blast, but he could not be sure and did not much give a damn anyway.

  The grenade detonation which would hardly have sounded so much more impressive had it gone off outdoors, punched glass out of windows, and sizable splinters of the big oak desk razored the air every which way, millions of tattered pages of books blowing and settling like snow.

  Before the smoke cleared, Cody and Murphy burst into what remained of what had seconds earlier been a graceful room of class and beauty but now looked like a slaughterhouse.

  Valera rose from where he had hidden behind an overstuffed wingchair near a window.

  The wall-and-ceiling mess of blood and tattered bits of clothing and gooey body parts belonged to one man: what had been a traitor named Maceda.

  Valera’s trembling aristocratic features wore the pallor of a fish belly that’s rotted in the sun too long. He eyed the apparition in commando black that emerged from the clearing smoke swirling through the room. He saw the second man, the hulking black giant, crouched in what remained of the doorway to the rainy night outside.

  “My beautiful books…lost. Wh-who are you?” he croaked in English, in a weak voice.

  “We’re here to save your ass,” Cody snarled. “You can come with us—”

  Two men in Philippine Army uniforms arrived in a hurry in the hallway door.

  Murphy triggered a medium-length burst from the Ingram, sending a hail of .45-caliber flesh eaters buzzing across the library from the outside door, rendering these two deader than their lieutenant.

  “—or you can stay here with them,” Cody finished with a nod to the dropping corpses.

  Valera stumbled forward, his expensive suit and once carefully coifed white thatch of hair a shambles, a pampered fat cat more used to planning out things like death and terror to make power work but not having to confront what any of it was really about—until right now.

  “How… how will we get out?”

  Cody had already started toward the back door to the outside, where he paused to eye the night. He motioned Valera to join him.

  The senator looked dazed, so Rufe grabbed him above the elbow to hurry the old fart along, also keeping Valera away from the line of possible fire from outside that doorway.

  Less than forty-five seconds had elapsed since Maceda’s gunshot and the grenade explosion.

  They would be closing in from all sides within seconds, but Cody intended to use those seconds.

  “All clear, let’s go.”

  He fisted Valera’s free arm and dragged the guy with him out through that door.

  Murphy turned to fire a long parting burst into the library just to give anyone back there second thoughts, then he hurled himself alongside Cody and Valera, back to the northwest corner of the house.

  The racket of motorized conveyances, not real vehicles, more like golf carts, could be heard departing from the main gate and from the string of houses where men surged through open doorways into the night.

  The golf-cart-type deals would be security staff deploying into defensive reflex, some of Valera’s “private security guards” racing toward points along the wall, another two carts zipping across the ground toward the garage south of the house, all to beef up security around this force’s transportation.

  Valera’s security staff and Maceda’s military units naturally approached the main house in force, too, most of these heading toward the main entrance beneath the porte cochere on the east side of the family mansion.

  Cody, Valera in tow, and Murphy gained the northeast corner of the house.

  One of the golf cart jobs came two-wheeling it on the slick grass around the corner before they had a chance to dive for cover in the rainy blackness now total except for this security cart’s single headlight stabbing ahead like a luminous knife, pinning Cody and the other two when the driver straightened the cart out of the wild, full-speed turn.

  Two men in the cart.

  Murphy took them out without hesitation before either could react, zipping a tight pattern of slugs that chucked both men back out of the cart that sailed on driverless for a few seconds, far enough to swerve into the side of the house just behind them.

  Murphy loped over and switched off the cart’s headlight.

  Cody looked around the corner of the wall at the revving chopper and the pilot who sat inside waiting.

  The turbine engine rumbled over the pilot’s head, loud enough so the guy had not heard General Maceda’s single pistol shot; and, contrary to popular belief, the detonation of a hand grenade is not all that noisy. Noisy enough to have stirred up the rest of the force on the grounds, sure, but not noisy enough to penetrate through the chopper’s engine sounds to the pilot—unless word had gotten to him across his helmet radio; but it had been less than a minute since the action in the library, and much confusion reigned inside and outside the main house.

  Two figures silhouetted themselves at the northeast corner of the longish building; behind them were men with rifles visible in the refracted light from the front of the house, the first of the enemy to be drawn by the crash of the security cart into the side of the house.

  Cody lunged away from the comer of the house, releasing his grip on Valera, motioning Valera to stay where he was.

  Valera obeyed, in a state of shuddering semiawareness, overwhelmed by the world he had known since childhood destroying itself in hellfire and death around him. He watched
Murphy hit a combat crouch, one of the big American’s arms reaching to shield Valera against the wall from any possible incoming fire from those two down at the opposite corner behind them who were joined by three more just in time to catch Murph’s sustained burst from the Ingram, a burst that kicked three of them down there through the pearly gates with their chests stitched with .45-caliber holes, sending the lucky survivors diving for cover post haste back around the corner of the front of the house.

  Murphy palmed a fresh magazine into the smoking Ingram. He took Valera’s right arm by the wrist and charged after Cody, who had already reached the helicopter.

  The pilot, glancing over a map and flight plans on his lap, jerked his face up just in time to realize he had been taken by a half-seen apparition that pulled him from the bubble of the chopper to deliver a killing judo chop that caved in the back of the pilot’s skull behind the left ear, collapsing the guy into a clump on the wet grass with two trickles of crimson snaking from his nostrils and dead eyes rolled back so only the whites showed.

  Murphy and Valera joined Cody. Cody untugged the pilot’s helmet and gave it a toss to Murphy, who released Valera, shoving the disheveled aristocrat from him with disdain. He grabbed the tossed helmet with his oversized left fist, tossing the Ingram from his left fist to Cody. Rufe donned the flight helmet and heaved himself aboard the chopper with the ease borne of long familiarity and experience, throwing himself into the pilot seat.

  Cody climbed aboard.

  “Let’s go. Senator,” he called down to Valera.

  Valera could not tear his eyes from the unmoving clump of dead meat that had been the pilot, as if each new killing he witnessed nudged the guy deeper into a near catatonic trance, but Rufe caught the senator’s attention by revving the chopper’s turbines.

  The metal bird started vibrating, the rotors chopping around at higher RPMs, whipping the mist out from the chopper’s backwash like a small hurricane.

  “Wait!” Valera’s scream came high-pitched enough to lance through the copter noises. “Don’t leave me!”

  He dashed forward and leaped when the chopper treads had already lifted three feet off the slippery turf.

  Cody did not help the clown aboard, but chose to concentrate on bracing himself in a kneeling position inside the chopper’s bubble to trigger Murphy’s Ingram to stop a bunch of men who tore ass from around the northwest corner of the house, falling away below the rising chopper.

  Rufe held the chopper low at no more than fifteen feet; just enough to safely clear that wall.

  Cody swung the Ingram on the soldiers below, behind the house, feeding a fresh magazine into the weapon.

  The shots from down there started spanking the chopper.

  “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—”

  The back door of the house spewed out more soldiers, these raising their M-16s at the copter banking away from the turf toward the northeast wall of the estate.

  Cody didn’t hear the rest, swinging the Ingram on those below, pulling the trigger.

  And nothing happened.

  The Ingram jammed in his fist!

  “This I do not fucking 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.

  Valera shrieked.

  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…

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Cody was certain he was a heartbeat away from his own death.

  Then the copter impacted, but the jolt had a sort of spring to it, not the hard impact of slamming into ground he had expected.

  Rufe had landed the wounded chopper in the fronds of a treetop upon the incline outside of the wall.

  Beneath the approximate point where he and Murphy had parted company from Caine and Hawkins less than five minutes earlier…

  He trusted his sense of direction and he trusted his nose when it pinched at the tart bite of fuel fumes.

  “Jump for it!” Murphy snarled, already unlatching his side of the bubble front.

  He had maintained the treetop altitude after passing over the wall of Valera’s ancestral digs.

  The drop, when that round took out the rotor mechanism, had dropped them just enough to rupture a fuel line.

  Valera sat petrified in his seat, so Cody reached around him, palming open the latch of the side door, giving Valera the old heave-ho.

  Valera whooped into frightened life as he fell out from treetop level.

  Cody heard him land with a thud at the base of the tree, then he released his own grip from the chopper and dropped. At the same instant, he saw Murphy release his shadowy bulk from the opposite side door of the bubble front.

  They hit the ground together. The rattling rifle fire ceased from inside the walls, and the rain stopped misting, as if shut off by some giant switch somewhere, rendering the world an abruptly more quiet place, a place where men’s voices calling to each other and commotion from inside the estate carried clearly to Cody, Murphy, and Valera, hurrying from the tree holding the chopper up there in its wide leafy fronds. They took off toward the place the Briton and the Texan were supposed to be waiting.

  Cody and Murphy managed to keep a sure footing but Valera kept slipping, stumbling, getting his expensive suit stained and muddy, still managing to keep up with them.

  They gained the break in the trees where the van sat waiting, its side hatchdoor open, just as they’d left it. Cody and Murphy paused, each man to either side of Valera. They fanned the night with their pistols.

  No sign of Hawkins or Caine.

  Behind and well below them, muffled by rows of trees, the treed copter disintegrated into an enlarging sunburst of white hot, orange-silver heat and a ka-booom!! louder than Nature’s thunder.

  Then the light-pounding blowout of the chopper’s fuel tank’s blowing seemed to find twin echoes, but the echoes were a one-two high explosives hardpunch that raped the darkness into further smithereens, one real big boom from the direction of the estate’s southeast corner that merged with a third light-and-thunder explosion that dwarfed the first two, and, in the flame and fire reflected by the low cloud ceiling, Cody saw chunks of wall and mortar disintegrating in the direction of the southwest corner of the wall, the precise opposite direction from this point where he and the other two stood beside the van.

  “And that is Richard at work,” Murphy said with a grin in the dark.

  “Inside,” Cody said. “Let’s get ready to roll!”

  Automatic rifle fire from the northeast wall, farther along this trail between their position and the main road, someone firing from up along this ridge, down into the compound.

  “What’s happening?” Valera squealed. “Why aren’t we getting away from here!”

  Cody grinned at the direction of the rifle fire from up ahead. “Hawkeye,” he grunted.

  Tex would be using one of the M-16s they had packed along in the van for this excursion. He would be firing to harass those inside the walls.

  Murphy eyeballed the darkness around them with uncharacteristic growing anxiety. “Come on, Richard!”

  He grabbed another of the M-16s, checking its load.

  From this higher ground, one could hear and partially see the unbridled confusion unfurling down below across the width and breadth of the estate grounds. The security force of Vincente Valera and the Filipino soldiers-gone-bad of General Maceda flitted around here and there down below in the immediate wake of those explosions, t
aken by complete surprise, having a tough time believing they were under attack out here in the middle of wealthy estate country.

  Caine materialized with no prior detection whatsoever by either Cody or Murphy, and this made Cody grin.

  He popped the van’s clutch and sent their vehicle bounding forward, keeping only the amber parking lights on to follow the contours of the winding trail. He steered along back toward the road to Pasay, bringing the van closer to the spot where that automatic rifle fire had peppered from seconds earlier.

  Maceda’s men, and Valera’s for that matter, may have been well-trained but they were no match for this team, Cody was damn gratified to know.

  This was how the day had begun, striking hard at an enemy, trading fire, putting it all on the line, and it was ending this way, the night of death already begun, this day past a microcosm of the kind of life he’d taken on for himself: a battle, a war, that would never end for him until his life ended.

  Caine flung himself into the back of the van with Valera as they bounced along.

  Rufe, seated beside Cody, said, “Nice work, mister demolitions man.”

  “Real nice.” Cody nodded. “This is one time I’m glad you don’t know how to follow orders!”

  “Orders?” Caine grinned as the van bumped along through the dark. He still gripped his Ingram, into which he eased a fresh clip. “I thought me and the shit-kicker sitting on our arses, watching the fireworks from the sideline, was just a suggestion, mate, and not a very good one at that.”

  Cody tapped the van’s brakes, slowing. His peripheral vision picked up the slightest shifting of shadows at the base of a tree along the trail.

  As the van passed by that spot, Hawkeye materialized and jumped into the van much as Caine had, as if spat back by a night that had not liked the taste of him. He rolled unceremoniously backward into Valera.

  Cody goosed full speed out of the engine, upshifting along the trail away from there, away from the troops of the late General Maceda, who would be investigating in this direction before too long… if there was a viable chain of command down there.