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  Colonel Locsin, said to be an utterly ruthless, amoral sadist wanted by the police for the murder of his wife in Legaspi four years earlier, had eluded the cops, the Marcos military and, more recently, the Aquino counterinsurgency forces that had never stopped trying to track him down, with no success. Locsin controlled nothing less than an organized criminal gang, like the other cells of the NPA across the Philippines, smokescreening their vicious activities with political rhetoric that allowed them to accept support, including weapons and intelligence, from the Soviet Union via the North Koreans, the Russians as usual loath to directly associate themselves with such brutalities as kidnapping and murder (hence the involvement of the less discriminating North Koreans). But anyone wanting to look deep enough could clearly see that the New People’s Army represented nothing more than one more link in a web of worldwide terrorism sponsored by an evil empire whose stated aim of world conquest was becoming closer and closer every day to being realized.

  The primary military objective here was to rescue the Jeffers family from the hand of Colonel Locsin, hoping like hell that the NPA commander had not already learned of Jeffers’ former identity and the value Jeffers would fetch from being passed on to the Koreans for their superiors in the KGB.

  There was the possibility of course that, if this had happened, the Jeffers family could have already been relocated from here to some other location, possibly out of the Philippines altogether.

  Lund’s communique, which had reached them on their return to the states from their last mission and had diverted them here, had explained that the Philippine government had a pipeline placed high in the NPA command of this base. The Aquino government had taken over intact much of the Marcos regime’s apparatus for dealing with the insurgents, the new government’s overtures of compromise to the New People’s Army nothwithstanding, but Lund, with all of his connections, had been unable to learn for Cody the name of the government informant placed in Colonel Locsin’s command.

  The coded orders and b.g. could only state that, according to the Filipino’s source the Jeffers family had been held at this installation since their kidnapping and had been held here up until fifteen hours ago, the government informant unable to make regular transmissions, using his limited access to the base communications setup judiciously.

  Cody’s Army had swung into immediate action upon receiving notification from Lund. They had been looking forward to some much needed R&R, but that had to be put on hold for now along with everything else.

  Pete’s information had brought them to this remote mountain region without any official notification of the Philippine government, nor had the American military or diplomats in Manila been briefed.

  That was the way this “army” of Cody’s worked; a fast strike, hit-and-git commando force operating wholly under Cody’s command once they penetrated into a crisis situation.

  The chopper that had set them down at the LZ awaited their signal in a holding pattern those two kilometers away, but the chopper would not take a part in this action. There would be red-tape hell to pay if the U.S. military was caught taking on communist insurgents in the Philippines without first consulting the Filipinos.

  Cody’s team was on its own, but the lives of three innocent Americans held hostage in a land far from their home made Cody’s Army an option that had to be exercised.

  America was coming to the Philippines to take care of its own…

  The NPA compound slumbered, or appeared to. An errant breeze carried the smell of coffee.

  Cody swung his CAR-15 around into firing position.

  “Let’s find their h.q. hut.”

  He and Rufe moved stealthily along the length of the structure before them, in the opposite direction of the front gate, deeper into the shadowy enemy compound.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  It was the type of guerilla base that can be thrown together in four or five days with the proper equipment, materials, and training—which would have been supplied by the Russians through the North Koreans.

  Cody’s group had encountered no government military presence in the region since he and his men had touched down on Mindanao less than two hours earlier.

  The Filipino government’s counterinsurgency forces knew of this base but, since the Aquino government had now assumed control, the NPA hierarchy considered their various options in view of the government’s spirit of compromise and negotiation, and no new full-scale operations against government interests or forces had been discerned through the government’s various pipelines to the leftists, such as the mystery man stationed with this group. The new, fragile government in Manila, not knowing that Lund was aware they knew where the hostages were, had chosen to sit on the fence, expecting the hostages to be released sooner or later, contenting themselves not to launch their own military action.

  The NPA picked up and moved bases like this at sporadic, unscheduled intervals, to be used as staging areas for lightning strikes at government targets in and around this province.

  There would be a motor pool, a munitions shed—that’s what Caine and Hawkins were going after—and a hut that would be the officers’ barracks and another that would be the headquarters hut where Cody expected to find the Jeffers family.

  He and Murphy almost reached the far corner of the barracks structure when two things happened at once.

  A light switched on inside the barracks, men grumbling themselves awake, coming to life in there to begin another day.

  And, outside of the barracks building, Cody heard footfalls and idle chatter of men approaching.

  He flattened himself back against the back wall of the barracks hut, beneath and to the right of one of the windows where a light had gone on, motioning Murphy back, but Rufe heard the sound on his own and the two of them became indiscernible like that to the three guys in combat fatigues who strode past, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, NPA guerillas just going on or coming off duty, jawing away as if without a care in the world, moving past the spot where Cody and Murphy froze, the guerillas heading in the direction of a tent across the way where lights were on and from where the smell of coffee originated.

  When the three were out of earshot, Cody motioned Rufe to follow him and they silently hoofed away from the barracks structure on a beeline for what Cody had determined to be Locsin’s headshed hut, where he hoped like hell they would find the Jeffers family alive and well.

  Then would come the real difficult part: getting out of here alive and in one piece…

  Calvin Jeffers at that moment honestly did not know whether or not to wish his daughter was dead, or that she would walk into this room in the full bloom of her youth, a young woman Cal Jeffers had cared everything in the world for, as if none of this had happened or was happening; as if it was all some terrible nightmare that had gone on for far too long.

  He sat with his back against the pole, his arms handcuffed behind it, as he had for the past three weeks except for those brief daily periods when he and Louise were taken out of the hut to the latrines and “allowed” by Colonel Locsin’s guards to suffer the humiliation of bathing in the primitive latrine under the constant scrutiny of the sentries.

  He told himself again that he could have endured this far better if Ann and Louise were not a part of it.

  But they were, and he sat there unable to take his eyes from the heartrending sight of his wife handcuffed to the pole next to him.

  Louise Jeffers slept fitfully, stretched out on her side upon the ground, handcuffed by one wrist to her pole, which was at least something, Jeffers told himself. At least she did not have to sleep sitting up, as he did, since both of his wrists were handcuffed together.

  His captors seemed to think of him as more of a threat than his wife, but he knew that in reality there was nothing he could have done had he not been handcuffed.

  He was an engineer and a damn good one, he told himself, but no more than that. He was hardly a soldier and certainly not a fighter, not a guerilla, and h
e had no idea where they were on Mindanao. Even if he could have escaped from here with Louise and Ann, he told himself, these barbarians of General Locsin would track them down or the jungle would kill them on its own; they would not be the first to lose their way and their lives in these seemingly endless stretches of uninhabitable jungle.

  He had early on resigned himself to the fact that he and his wife and daughter were at the mercy of these mountain bandits and thieves who preferred to think of themselves as “revolutionary guerillas.”

  He shifted his gaze from Louise to look again at the third pole rising from the dirt floor of this room.

  This hut served as Locsin’s headquarters, the thatched roof structure partitioned off inside with dividers into two offices and this room, which he figured was probably regularly used to hold hostages such as themselves, or for interrogations.

  There had been no interrogation, really, but Jeffers knew this was only because Locsin and his ruffians thought he was “Cal Jeffers.” That would change damn quick if they ever found out his real name and learned of his work for the CIA. If that were to happen, he sensed that this nightmare truly would never end and with all that had gone wrong thus far, he could only thank God that at least that secret had not gotten out to make things worse for himself, his wife, and daughter.

  He stared at that third pole rising in the center of this room, at which his daughter had been handcuffed… and he did not know whether to wish his daughter dead still.

  “I’m sorry, Mom and Dad,” she would say. “Please forgive me.”

  He blinked away the sweat beading in his eyes and told himself it wasn’t tears, that he had no tears left, since he no longer had a daughter, not really.

  That had ended when she had stood above him and her mother, wearing those ill-fitting fatigues Locsin’s men had given her.

  He had sensed trouble coming when he had first seen her listening to the Colonel’s ranting and raving during their first days of captivity; all the Marxist crap about the downtrodden seizing power through the only means available to them, and how he, her father, and those like Jeffers were guilty of crimes against the Philippine people, fattening the Marcos coffers in the name of imperialism and greed.

  Jeffers had snarled back those were lies that he was only a man doing his job. If communism was so great, why did every communist country feel compelled to have barbed wire and machine gun towers stretched across its borders to keep its citizens from escaping, he had demanded of Locsin, and he had accused his captors of disguising common crimes and their base motives behind lofty sounding political crap.

  He and Louise had not been harmed. He knew this was only because they had to be kept looking good for those pictures Locsin ordered snapped of them every few days.

  The Colonel had not beaten him for the outburst, but yes, even then Jeffers had seen his daughter listening to Locsin more than she listened to him.

  What was worse, Locsin noticed it too.

  Two days ago the NPA commander had entered this room and offered to uncuff Ann, had offered her an invitation to dine with him that night, alone in his quarters.

  To her parents’ shock, ignoring their heated, emotional protests, Ann Jeffers accepted Locsin’s invitation. Brought back much later that night, she assured her parents that she had not been harmed or molested in any way. She told them what a “gentleman” Locsin had been and how they had done nothing but talk, talk, talk, all night about Marxism and the rights of the downtrodden. Beyond that, she had been belligerent and uncommunicative.

  The following night the same thing happened, and the next night; except that third night—Ann did not return.

  They had not seen her the next day, either. Louise had become hysterical.

  Jeffers demanded to know where his daughter was, to no avail.

  That night Locsin and Ann had come in to see them.

  Together.

  That was when Jeffers knew the madness had touched his daughter.

  “I’m sorry, Mother and Father,” she told them, “but… Colonel Locsin wishes me for his woman. I wish it, too.”

  “Ann, no!” Jeffers had heard himself scream.

  “I share his struggles,” she had said calmly. “I renounce you, Mother and Father, and your imperialist ways.”

  Jeffers had shrieked and fought his chains then.

  Louise had mercifully passed out.

  And things had not changed much in the days since.

  He feared his wife was losing her mind and he was not too sure about himself. He did know that the one in total control here was Locsin, and he realized fully for the first time that he had been too busy with his work and mistaken the gap widening between himself and his daughter over the past year as due to no more than a mild case of normal teenage rebelliousness. He had not realized the extent to which his own daughter had become alienated in whatever growing-up world she lived in, and of course now it was too late for anything but the consequences.

  He had read of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and of how easy, and common, it was for susceptible minds to be co-opted, brainwashed, and manipulated by the captors in a kidnap situation, and this is what had happened to Ann, he told himself.

  Locsin had exploited a normal generation gap between parents and child, and the child’s hysteria at the awful situation she found herself in, was warping Ann Jeffers, snapping her mind.

  He thought of his daughter alone with Locsin and he wanted to puke. He wanted to kill.

  A flurry of movement from outside the hut came closer, yanking him from his thoughts and snapping Louise, with a jolt, from her nightmare-tormented sleep.

  Louise Jeffers’ glazed, not-all-there eyes snapped open. She whipped her eyes toward the third pole and, not seeing Ann, looked frantically at her husband.

  “What is it? Our baby… is she—?”

  Jeffers wished that at least he and his wife could have somehow grown closer during this ordeal, but he had let her slip away from him over the years, just as he had Ann, and he wondered now with an exquisite sadness if their little family could ever be strong and together again as they had once been so long ago.

  “Someone’s coming,” he told her.

  Her gaze followed his to the doorway.

  The scuffling grew louder, into the hut, coming near, beyond the walled partition.

  Ann’s strained voice, violently angry, snapped, “Let me go, damn you!”

  A man laughed coarsely, sneering.

  “You have very much spirit, little American. I like that, but unfortunately, other things occupy me now and you have no place in them.”

  Ann came hurling into the room, sprawling to her hands and knees between the two poles where her mother and father watched, handcuffed.

  She looked at them through tendrils of disheveled dark hair covering some of her face, her fatigues tattered, showing dirt stains where she must have been roughed up before being brought here. She wiped away the raven’s-wing black mask of hair.

  Jeffers saw the bruise across her left cheekbone.

  Louise Jeffers saw it, too.

  “Oh, my little darling!” she wailed.

  Jeffers saw his daughter’s face twisted with emotion and pain.

  “Mom… Dad… I’m so sorry!”

  Jeffers said in a soft voice he barely recognized as his own, “Ann… honey—”

  The doorway became filled, first with Colonel Locsin, who had dragged Ann here before, pitching her into the room ahead of him.

  Colonel Locsin had the standard Filipino male’s lack of physical stature, but he cut an impressive figure, nonetheless; his bulky frame was all muscle, carried with an aggressive thrust.

  Behind the NPA commander came Locsin’s assistant, Escaler, a razor-thin man with a scarred face and unreadable eyes.

  Locsin smirked at Jeffers.

  “You can have your daughter back now, Mr. Jeffers. I am finished using her. Or should I call you… Mr. Weldon?”

  Jeffers, whose name in his CIA days had been Duan
e Weldon, felt his face become fish-belly pale. He looked at his daughter.

  “My God, Ann… no…”

  She remained sprawled, watching her father with naked emotion that reminded Jeffers for some reason of that day when she had been a little girl and they had gone to the zoo and the tiger in his cage scared her and it seemed to him in that moment like only yesterday.

  “Oh, Dad, Mom”—their daughter wept—”… forgive me, please… you were right… I thought he loved me.”

  Locsin spat upon the earthen floor. “Enough of this touching reunion scene. Handcuff her.”

  Escaler stepped over to Ann. He grabbed her by both wrists, dragging her the short distance to the pole.

  “Let her go, you lowly piece of garbage!” Jeffers screamed, leaping to his feet, blindly struggling at his bonds with all his strength.

  Louise Jeffers observed this, but nothing registered in her eyes.

  Ann fought, kicking, biting.

  Escaler made quick work of avoiding her pummeling fists and kicks. He snapped the cuffs on her and stood back quickly, leaving an enraged, fiery young woman sputtering angrily, fighting vainly at her bonds, the same as her father did.

  “My parents were right,” she spat at Locsin. “ I was a fool because I was innocent and you—”

  “The freshly picked grape is always the sweetest,” Locsin snickered at the child he had seduced. “I told you, did I not, my Ann, of my appetite for the good things in life.”

  She started hurling epithets at him.

  Locsin stepped forward. His open right hand arced in a backhand slap with enough power to knock Ann off her feet.

  The teenager crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

  Louise Jeffers emitted a quiet whimper at the instant the blow connected but registered no other reaction, staring blankly ahead with shiny, empty eyes.

  Jeffers pulled his attention away from Ann’s crumpled figure, the fight gone out of him.

  “Don’t do anything more to my women. Please, Colonel. As one man to another, I beg of you. Be decent.”

  Locsin spat again.