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  Leiter faced back to look out the window again, the drawn facial muscles reflecting back at him from the black glass; the worry he saw in his own eyes surprised him.

  “That means Cody and men are caught in a vise then, doesn’t it, sir? if the Flips are ready to strike at Javier tonight while Cody’s team is dealing with it.”

  “It could be a bluff,” Simmons tried, with no conviction whatsoever. The furrows in his brow grew deeper in the mahogany tan of his face. “Cal Jeffers said something a while ago about outlaws. Cody and those men of his are going to have to break every law of odds there is tonight, because, Captain, that is the only chance in hell any of those good men have of getting through this night alive.”

  Cody piloted the chopper down to the landing area, marked off by some of Javier’s goons holding kerosene lanterns at one end of this impromptu staging area, an area that filled several square acres of rugged jungle real estate around a naturally formed clearing.

  There was no attempt at secrecy. Cody had seen the lights from the bubble front of Valera’s company copter well before he told Valera to get on the radio and announce their arrival.

  The chopper touched down.

  The staging area appeared from the air at night to be laid out roughly in a long rectangle, with two more copters near where Cody set down. He recognized one of those choppers as the Huey gunship which had fled the firefight that morning when Javier’s paramilitary goons had linked up with New People’s Army terrorists to try to keep Cody’s team from rescuing three innocent American civilians, the Jeffers family, and which had cost the lives of two American airmen crewing that morning’s pickup chopper.

  Floodlights were mounted on trees everywhere and men in full battle dress loitered around fires and checked over weapons and equipment with an air of building expectation bubbling through it all thick enough to slice a piece and mail to the folks back home…

  Cody’s “Army” had split up at Valera’s private airfield, which was right where Valera had said it was.

  He and Valera had taken this chopper to fly directly toward those coordinates supplied by the original pilot’s flight plans.

  Valera had ridden beside him, not saying word one throughout the flight.

  Cody did not underestimate this guy, not for one second. He had seen Valera at his worst back there when hellfire had raged through the man’s ancestral home. That was maybe understandable from a guy of some sensitivity, sure, who had nothing to do with carrying out his own dirty work. That was left to punks like Jorges and Ramos from the Gilded Peacock. But a man like this Vincente Valera, who commanded thugs and street-gang leaders and was tied in to a power structure of nationwide underworld bosses, this was a man who did not lose his self-control for very long. The heart and mind of a wily savage hid inside this oh-so-civilized surface and that mind would be clicking like the fixed gaming tables in one of Valera’s nightclubs, weighing the percentages of going along with Cody or double-crossing Cody, and all Cody could do was gamble that Valera’s fear of Javier, and his fear of Cody, would make him play along long enough for Cody to play out whatever scenario was handed him when he and Valera walked into Javier’s presence.

  He cut the chopper’s engines after setting down on the mucky loam. He saw unmarked transport carriers parked nearby, tailgates open, ready to receive this force that was waiting only for a warlord’s command to roll, to attack.

  Rifle-bearing men in the uniforms of Javier’s goons, recognizable to Cody from that morning’s firefight, approached the chopper.

  Cody turned to Valera in the fleeting seconds they had alone in the chopper bubble before the three goons reached them.

  “Remember, Senator. Play it on my side, and you walk away. Cross me, and you’re the first to die.”

  “Do not worry,” Valera assured him in a whisper smooth as silk. “I am not a fool. I am your friend, American. You can trust me.”

  Then they stepped out of the chopper to meet the three goons who toted AK-47 assault rifles.

  Hawkins, Caine, and Murphy had flown at a distance behind Cody and Valera in an identical copter to the one Cody piloted. The two aircraft maintained a total communications blackout during the flight.

  Murphy had supposedly set the other chopper down within two kilometers from Javier’s staging area, a good-sized lope through the jungle for those three, but Cody’s men could handle that easily and it would be distance enough to prevent this crowd from hearing that second chopper.

  What his team did after they closed in on this base on foot was identical to Cody’s own plan: ride the heartbeat, ad lib the damn thing through to life or death.

  He ripped off his flight helmet and tossed it onto the seat behind him. He quite naturally joined Valera and the goons who placed themselves to surround the new arrivals—to “accompany” Valera and his “pilot” past the ends of some rows of tents, to one tent larger than the others, set apart from the others.

  Valera walked with a more dignified gait than he had theretofore exhibited.

  Cody looked enough like a pilot in the jacket he’d swiped from the original pilot he killed at Valera’s. The fit was one size too small but no one would notice. He wore his.45 tucked into his waistband and a half-dozen spare clips in a holster at the base of his spine beneath his jeans. Anything heavier in the way of firepower would have aroused suspicion.

  Everything, every little sound, the squishing of bootfalls through sucking muck, the cough of a man here or there, the mutter of conversation among camou-clad paras they passed, it all registered to Cody with a crystal clarity that he knew was the self-awareness that, from this point on, he walked the razor’s edge.

  He had considered but rejected the notion en route that Javier would recognize him when this “pilot” accompanied his “boss” into the command tent to meet with Javier.

  The warlord would then insist that the “pilot” leave, whereupon Cody would play that heartbeat, that leap into time and space.

  Javier had been in the Huey that “disappeared” when the fighting flared up that morning—Cody was more sure of it now than before—and that had put Javier at too high an altitude to distinguish any man’s individual features down among Cody’s force on the ground.

  A gamble, yeah.

  Thunder rumbled the night and the mist started again, not with the cooling of the two earlier rains outside Manila because there was no breeze here. The night thickened with a mist that would not stop until it soaked everything.

  They reached the tent.

  Two of the paras stood one to either side and drew aside the end flaps for the new arrivals to enter. Cody and Valera stepped into the tent. The paras stepped in after them, closing the commander’s tent flaps behind them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder slightly behind Cody and Valera, who stood side-by-side, facing a man behind a field desk and a man who stood at his side.

  By the presence inside the tent of the three goons, Cody could see he had lost the first part of this gamble. He had counted on this warlord insisting on conducting his business in private. The tent, he had noted, was set far enough away from the other points of this area that it had a privacy all its own, and this stretch of perimeter out there in the rainy jungle night would be particularly well patrolled.

  Cody’s right palm itched to grab at the butt of the .45, but he kept his emotions inside.

  The man seated behind the desk looked like an ape stuffed into pressed camou fatigues. A huge scar had the effect of extending his smirk across one-half of his face as he took a moment to make a production of appraising Valera from top to bottom, ignoring the “pilot.”

  “The great senator. We meet at last.”

  Javier’s unblinking, penetrating scowl pinned Valera.

  “T—the pleasure is all mine.” Valera stuttered over the “t,” but otherwise it was a good try at sounding coolly cordial. “I regret to report that, uh, General Maceda’s force—”

  “Was attacked, yes, we know about that,” Javier said. And Cody knew a
t that moment that he had lost this gamble, all the way. “It was your fault, what happened there, you blundering idiot.” Javier directed this statement at Valera as an impersonal fact, with no emotion. “You sent those hoodlums from your nightclub to Clark Air Base, where they were stupid enough to kidnap the American girl for a second time on no one’s orders, and that led the authorities to that club of yours and the Zobel woman, and so to you and General Maceda.”

  “This is Escaler, acting commander of this unit of the New People’s Army.” Javier nodded at the man standing to the side, also facing the field desk.

  “Where is General Chung?” Valera asked.

  Javier replied with a small nod, not to Valera or Escaler, but to the three para goons who swung their AK-47s around from shoulder-strapped to aiming, one each at Escaler, Valera, and John Cody.

  Escaler reacted the most stunned.

  “What is the meaning of this!”

  Javier rose from behind the desk with the grace of an athlete, making his hunchback-of-Notre-Dame appearance all the more bizarre. He snatched away the holstered pistol Escaler wore at his hip. Javier stepped back quickly so as to cover the three men standing in front of his desk.

  “As for you, my dear Escaler, I discovered only earlier today that you are a highly placed informant for the government’s antiinsurgency force. They think they know much about what I have planned tonight, thanks to you, don’t they? But they know only what the rest of you were led to believe.”

  The coarse features and coarser manner and voice of this warlord did not fool Cody. Here was a savage of shrewd animal cunning, an unerring judge of character and the exploitation of human beings.

  Escaler stayed cool.

  “I suppose you have something resembling proof of these ridiculous allegations.”

  “A government informant was discovered in my rank only this afternoon,” Javier sneered. “Sante overheard him make a report. He knew about you. He thought he might live, you see. Sante saw to it. Then we killed him.”

  Outrage Dickered in Escaler’s eyes.

  “Sante.” The Filipino undercover agent said the name. “Your professional torturer. And is that what happened to General Chung? He did not leave, as you led us to think. You will order my men. While I… join Chung, is that it?”

  “And what of me?” Valera sputtered, taking a step forward.

  Cody tensed for anything.

  The patter of rain tapping the tent made the moment brittle. A night bird peeled mournfully somewhere in the rainy jungle night.

  “You, my foolish friend,” Javier said to Valera, “have only one fate.”

  He stepped over to square off facing Valera, a couple of steps in front of him, ignoring Escaler to his left and Cody to the right because of the rifles pointed at their backs by the goons blocking their way out.

  Valera stuttered, “Y-you could never—”

  “Yes, I could, and I will.” Javier savored the moment. “You pompous fool. Those I serve chose to exploit you; could you not see it long ago? You gave us the New People’s Army. The street gangs. The black market.”

  “And… I can give you more!” Valera cried.

  Here it comes, thought Cody. He wondered where the hell three guys named Caine, Hawkins, and Murphy were at this moment.

  Thunder rumbled.

  “And what, pray, can you give me?” asked the ape in the uniform in the voice of a sicko enjoying every once of fear that made the man before him quake.

  Valera could not pull his eyes from that mesmerizing scowl, but he raised a shaky arm, pointing a quivering finger at Cody.

  “He… is not my pilot! He’s the one who led the attack on my home, on Maceda! He forced me to bring him here!”

  Javier’s scowl left Valera to center on Cody.

  “I would have guessed as much,” he said with a small smile.

  Then, not appearing to even look in Valera’s direction, Javier raised his right hand, the one that gripped the pistol he had taken from Escaler, and he aimed that pistol at Valera’s forehead from a distance of about three feet.

  Valera, caught completely by surprise, had enough time only to open his mouth, try to shriek, but nothing came out.

  The pistol blasted in Javier’s grip and a bullet sped into Valera’s mouth to core out the back of his skull, lots of nasty red gunk splattering along with it across the tent fabric behind him an instant before his body slammed into that fabric that held against him and made his corpse slide into a sitting position, eyes still ovals of surprise, mouth wrenched wide open, nothing appearing really wrong except for the goo of blood and brains and skull fragments stuck to the tent fabric behind him.

  The warlord lowered the pistol. He strutted to his field chair behind the desk, as if the murder of a man was but a routine matter like the shuffling of papers. He sat and looked from Escaler to Cody, where each of them stood to one side of Valera’s remains, to opposite sides of the tent, each under cover of the goons who stood aiming their AK-47s at them.

  Javier seemed to find the thing kind of amusing. A flicker of humor flashed in beady eyes in that ugly face. He looked first at Escaler.

  “You thought you must have turned a pretty trick when I removed that pest, Locsin, and made the mistake of promoting you, but it was fortuitous that I had you close underhand when I learned what I did. You have alerted your unit of my plans, or what you know about them, have you not?”

  Escaler eyeballed Javier unflinchingly straight in the eye.

  “I have.”

  “But they do not know the precise positioning of the strike forces awaiting my command to strike.” Javier chuckled. “I have every important government person and place wired to be attacked. Police stations. Arsenals. But you don’t know where my men are, do you, Escaler? Where I have placed your own NPA units, and Valera’s gangs—”

  “Ain’t you the windy son of a bitch,” Cody grunted. “You won’t kill us yet, warlord, because you don’t know what we know, so let’s cut through to the stuff that matters, okay?”

  Javier liked that. He showed it in the way he regarded Cody with the top-to-bottom treatment he had given Valera, before killing him.

  Cody thought some more about pulling for his .45. He thought some more about how he’d look in Valera’s condition. He decided to wait his time and hope that gamble paid off at least.

  Javier felt damn smug and he had good reason to, with three goons holding rifles on Escaler and Cody in the middle of a camp of five hundred or more enemy troops.

  “You do not know this list of where the units are, either, do you, American? Else why would you return here? You knew I would have it with me, and I do.” He tapped a folded sheaf of papers before him to his right on the desk with the barrel of the pistol, his index finger curled around the pistol’s trigger. “I have the only copy of that list here, right here, my friends, but what is even more important as far as you’re concerned is that”—he lifted the pistol to wave the barrel idly back and forth between Escaler and Cody—”I have the two of you. And there is no way out for either of you. Now. Which of you prefers the honor of being the first to die?”

  Hawkins, Caine, and Murphy hacked their way away from the trail, deeper into the jungle, their machetes carving a way through the vines and tree limbs that drooped from the rains.

  They had found a trail that looked recently matted down, indicating that it was the route Javier’s main force would take when they evacuated the staging area farther on along the trail.

  It became slow going, slogging through the rain and the muck. After a while they saw some lights from the staging area reflected in the low blackness of night clouds and eventually reached a point where more lights could be seen ahead of them through the trees.

  The three commandos paused as if one consciousness guided their collective thoughts and actions.

  “We’ll be running into perimeter sentries anytime now,” Caine whispered through the whisper of the rain.

  Each man toted an M-16 assault rif
le in addition to side arms and combat webbing.

  That’s when the single pistol shot from somewhere in the direction of the staging area spanked the night.

  Nothing terribly loud or alarming under normal circumstances. Guns went off all the time in the jungle, and there were several hundred men in that temporary base, armed to the teeth.

  That single pistol report cracked like a whip through the collective combat consciousness of these three.

  “That there’s the start of this rodeo,” Hawkeye opined.

  “Let’s get to it!”

  Big Rufe Murphy sheathed his machete, grabbed his M-16 in both oversized fists, and charged forward through the soaking darkness, toward a staging area sparking itself alive with ripples of activity in response to the pistol shot.

  Hawkeye and Caine fell into combat position as they loped along in tandem with Murphy.

  “Uh, if I’m not being overly obtuse,” the Englishman muttered as he plunged along, “let’s get to what?”

  “If it moves, shoot it,” Hawkeye snarled. “Unless it’s the sarge, of course.”

  “Of course,” Caine muttered wearily.

  They trudged on through the mugginess of the dripping jungle, toward those lights through the trees.

  CHAPTER

  NINTEEN

  To Javier’s question, “Which of you prefers the honor of being the first to die?” all the “warlord” behind the desk got in response was an even-eyed stare from each man, and this too made Javier chuckle.

  “Who indeed would volunteer for such an honor, who indeed?” The ape-in-pressed-camou-fatigues than got real serious again. The Javier scowl focused on Cody. “What is your name?”

  Cody said nothing.

  Javier lost some of his good humor. The three goons standing behind Cody and Escaler had not shared in their commandant’s merriment, the two AK-47’s pointed directly at the center of Cody’s back and the third of those rifles aimed at Escaler from several feet behind them.