Philippine Hardpunch Read online

  “I enjoy hurting people,” he said casually. “But I will not hurt you no more, nor these women, if you will agree to further cooperate with me.”

  “Of course you won’t hurt us,” Jeffers snarled. “Now that you know who I am, you’ll keep us real well cared for, won’t you, so we’ll fetch a good price from the KGB.”

  “You catch on quickly, American. Behave, and you will not be harmed.”

  The NPA commander nodded for Escaler to follow. They departed without another word, leaving Cal Jeffers alone with his thoughts, his fears, his wife, his daughter.

  He sank back down to a sitting position against the pole, working to catch his breath, every inch of his grimy clothing plastered to his body with sweat. The shrieking, chirping, and cricking of the jungle beyond the hut drilled into his brain and for a moment he felt as if he would explode.

  Things could not get any worse.

  Louise stared dumbly ahead with the vacuous expression of shock.

  Ann lay unconscious, her ragged breathing filling his ears.

  He wanted to run to his wife, take her in his arms as he should have done so much more often than he had during those years when things had been so easy, when there had been no crisis like this to test them; then maybe they would have been strong enough instead of facing what was happening to them here.

  Their family had fallen apart under this pressure, disintegrating like the illusion it was.

  He could do nothing for Louise.

  He wanted to rush to Ann, take his daughter in his arms.

  She had betrayed them all, yes, yes, and yet… and yet… she was his daughter, and her real crime was her innocence in a world inhabited by walking slime like Colonel Locsin, who preyed on and raped innocence such has hers.

  He could not help his daughter. He could do nothing for her.

  He could not even help himself.

  They knew who he was. It was all over for the Jeffers family.

  Nothing could save them now.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Caine and Hawkins entered the compound through the wall, from their side of the compound, using the same method as Cody and Murphy, at a point behind a longish hut structure, barracks for the troops or living quarters for Colonel Locsin and his staff.

  The structure and some others like it, along with a tent for the mess hall, formed a square at the center of the base.

  There had been no sounds or activity from across the base, from the direction where Cody and Murphy were to be coming.

  Hawkins approved of the absence of sound in the darkness with a nod.

  He drawled in a whisper, “No news is good news, hey, teabag?”

  Caine turned from setting a bamboo log back into a reasonable approximation of where it belonged.

  “Indeed, we just walk away from this one with our asses intact.” The Brit nodded.

  They advanced to one corner of the barracks structure, which shielded them from the center of the base. From this corner, the next hut structure over could be seen, this one slightly different from the others because an AK-47-toting sentry stood posted at the front entrance.

  “Reckon we’ve found either where Locsin stores his ammo, or where his hostages are kept,” Hawkins growled.

  “He doesn’t have a guard posted on the hostages,” Caine reminded him. “We’ve found what we’re looking for. Cover me.”

  The British mere started to move out, but Hawkeye grabbed his arm to make him stop.

  “Hold it!”

  Caine saw it then, too.

  A pair of NPA uniforms stalking out of a hut at the far end of the compound, well opposite the front gate.

  A flagpole in front of the hut designated it as the base headquarters hut, which was where their intel said the Jeffers family would be found.

  “Bleeding officers,” Caine hissed under his breath.

  The two officers strode across the base toward the structure behind which Caine and Hawkins crouched.

  “I wish they were bleeding,” Hawkins growled, his trigger finger curled and ready.

  Caine lifted a hand.

  “Not yet, cowboy.”

  Hawkins lowered his CAR-15, but his finger stayed curled around the trigger.

  The two officers proceeded into the hut behind which Caine and Hawkins crouched under cover of shadows.

  A sort of half-light crept across the land before the graying horizon to the east, vaguely misty, imbuing the scene of this sleepy base with a dreamlike, surreal quality in the contrast of man-made structures against the violent green backdrop of primordial jungle slowly emerging through the morning mist.

  The instant they heard the officers’ voices emanating from inside the hut, they broke from the corner to across the distance to the back of the structure, before which the sentry stood.

  Gaining the back of the munitions structure, they paused, crouching there. Hawkins kept watch, fanning the semigloom with his CAR-15. Caine knelt at the base of this hut and unsnapped a wrapped square of C-4 plastic explosive.

  Caine and Hawkins had worked together in the southern United States as a bounty hunter team before Cody’s unit had been reactivated by Peter Lund. Before that, after Nam, Caine had been a demolitions expert with the elite British Secret Air Service antiterrorist force.

  The Englishman wedged the HE against the base of the munitions building, inserting a detonator that could be triggered by a radio beep from a matchbox-sized device he wore clipped to his belt.

  Several hundred meters beyond the munitions dump stood a hastily thrown together garagelike structure and beside the makeshift motorpool sat a ragtag collection of vehicles, a few Soviet Chor-7s, Jeep-like vehicles, one of them with an M-60 mounted on its back, to civilian rattletraps: rusting Volkswagens and a handful of eastern European jobs in somewhat better shape that must have belonged to the NPA officers stationed here.

  Their plan was to locate the Jeffers family—which Rufe and Cody were doing now—while Caine and Hawkins took care of wiring the munitions shed and those vehicles for when after Cody’s Army had whisked the Jefferses out of here as undetected as had been the penetration thus far. For that to work, maximum silence had to be maintained.

  Caine stood from having set the explosives. He and Hawkins left the building with the sentry in front never having tumbled to their presence. They zipped along the wall, advancing on the cluster of parked vehicles beside the garage.

  The whole thing depended on stealth and luck. Mostly the latter. Richard Caine did not kid himself about this.

  After wiring the vehicles, they would stay to the wall to circle back around to hook up with Cody and Murphy behind the h.q. hut, where everyone thought the hostages were being kept, then they would withdraw on foot rather than hijack vehicles, which would have served only to alert the camp, sending Locsin’s men after them. Far better to hoof it back the two kilometers to the LZ. The hostages would not be in the best of condition, but if the men could pull a good distance away, then detonate the explosives, enough confusion back here at the base behind them, triggered from way out there in the jungle, would knock Colonel Locsin’s sleepy-eyed force off balance with enough racket, hellfire, and confusion for Cody’s team to whisk the Jeffers folks aboard the chopper that would touch down to lift them to safety.

  They gained the first of three rows of vehicles, Hawkeye moving with Caine first to one, then another vehicle, placing wads of C-4 and detonators against the petrol tanks, enough to take the motor pool out of commission.

  Caine saw no reason to rig every vehicle. A glance at his watch goosed him along.

  Hawkins’ attention remained steadily on the NPA base gradually materializing through the misty quiet around them.

  Visibility was come and go, but this looked to Caine like a squalid setting waking beneath the oppressive heat, the humid mist quavering the blur of stark greens and browns. A new sound joined the bird-bat-and-insect cacophony accompanying the first light of dawn: the steady sound, removed and faint
beyond the huts, of outhouse doors slamming dully as this base woozily came to life, waking NPA guerillas heeding nature’s call, some other forms beginning to straggle toward the tent from where the scent of cooking rice drifted, but there was no real activity yet and none, it seemed, near or around the motor pool or between it and the next hut over, the h.q. hut where they were to link up with Rufe and Cody and, God willing, the Jefferses.

  Caine nodded to Hawkins that the job was done.

  Hawkeye returned the nod. They pulled away from the vehicles, around toward the back of the garage, toward that h.q. hut.

  For a second there it seemed to Caine as if they would make it; that for once everything would fall into place right on the money, nothing would go wrong, they would reach Cody and Murphy and continue undetected with no noise to alert this base slowly stirring to life around them.

  He and Hawkins gained the backside of the garage.

  And ran practically face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball into three NPA regulars making a perimeter check along the inside of the wall.

  The communists spotted Caine and Hawkins and reacted as one, falling away from each other at where they first materialized from the wispy mist, swinging AK-47s around even as Caine and the Texan tracked their own CAR-15s in the communists’ direction.

  In that microsecond before all hell broke loose, Richard Caine knew there was no way this could be dealt with quietly.

  No way could they not blow the mission sky-high if he and Hawkeye wanted to survive this confrontation.

  In that instant, before rifles from both sides opened fire, he heard and fully concurred with Hawkeye’s snarled assessment.

  “Aw, mule piss,” the Texan grunted.

  Cody and Murphy had heard shouting inside the h.q. hut as they had approached it along the walk.

  Cody expected their presence here to be discovered at any moment, or to hear something go wrong from the direction from which Caine and Hawkins were closing in.

  Locsin would have the occasional foot patrol checking along the inside of the wall and with night turning to almost day, the team was becoming easier to spot by the second.

  They gained the rear of the hut.

  The shouting from inside quieted down.

  He had peered around one side of the structure, Murphy around the other, and had seen the two NPA officers striding from this hut, watching them stride in the direction of the officers’ private quarters.

  As the officers drew out of earshot, Murphy had whispered to Cody, “I tag the one on the left as Locsin, Sarge. Looks like Lund’s intel is on the mark. That yelling we heard was in English.”

  Cody nodded, glanced at his wristwatch, then across the compound in the direction of the motor pool area beyond the mess tent.

  “Richard and Hawkeye are late.”

  “They’ll make it. What about the folks inside this hut?”

  “Locsin left an orderly behind,” Cody growled. “I’ll take him. Cover me.”

  “You got it,” Rufe grunted.

  Murphy was used to covering Cody’s ass. He had been the chopper pilot assigned to Cody’s unit in Vietnam and had pulled Cody and the unit out of more hot spots than any team of dog soldiers had a right to survive.

  Cody sprinted around the side of the hut and on into it, Rufe moving right behind him as far as the doorway, where he spun and held a position just inside out-of-sight of anyone outside, with a clear field of fire.

  An NPA guerilla sat at a shortwave radio setup, not realizing he was in trouble until Cody was on him, death came that fast.

  The young man started to rise, going into a turn, then Cody looped the garrote around the guy’s throat from behind and pulled the orderly back, with his knee into the small of the man’s back. He killed him like that, ruthlessly, efficiently, before the radio man had time to do more than reach both hands up in a grab for the strangling garrote that bit off his wind and killed him.

  Cody stepped back, away, turning from the dead man before the body sank to the earthen floor.

  He tracked up his CAR-15, moving quickly to peer through the inside doorway in one of the paneled partitions dividing the hut. He stood in that doorway, fanning the room with his weapon, then he lowered the rifle without firing.

  He saw no danger in here.

  He saw only what he and his men had come all this way to find.

  Three too-close-to-the-edge basket cases.

  Mrs. Jeffers, who stared straight ahead, not comprehending his appearance on the scene or anything else.

  Ann Jeffers lay handcuffed to one of three poles, rising from the floor, like her mother and father. She did not move, but her ragged breathing assured Cody he had not come too late for her.

  Cal Jeffers leaped to his feet when Cody stepped forward. Jeffers looked drained in body and spirit, but the spark of fight crackled in his eyes.

  “Thank God!” Jeffers rasped, his voice quavering, “Thank God!”

  “No time,” Cody growled. He went to Jeffers and used a pair of wire cutters from his belt to snap open Jeffers’ handcuffs.

  Jeffers burst his arms free from behind the pole, raising both hands clenched into fists like a man discovering his own strength for the first time.

  Cody hurtled over to undo the cuffs of Mrs. Jeffers.

  The sharp little metallic snip! sound was like someone snapping his fingers to awaken a hypnotist’s subject, the cutting loose of Mrs. Jeffers’ bonds somehow unfettering her physical shackles and the mental chains of shock that had almost closed her mind off altogether. Almost. Mrs. Jeffers blinked once, twice, and gasped when she comprehended the apparition before her of a big man in combat camou wielding a CAR-15. Her eyes then instinctively sought her husband, behind Cody. She ran to him, throwing her arms around him.

  “Cal… Cal! Am I dreaming? Oh, my God…”

  Jeffers hugged his wife to him.

  “No dream, honey—it’s happening!”

  He released her. They both turned to where Cody snipped apart Ann’s handcuffs.

  “W-who are you, mister?” Louise Jeffers asked in the voice of a person regaining strength by the second.

  Mother and father rushed to their daughter.

  “Call me a friend. Name’s Cody. We’re here to take you home.”

  Auto rifle fire pounded from not far beyond the walls of this hut, more than one weapon yammering angry bursts at each other.

  Cody reached down to scoop up Ann Jeffers with his left arm, hoisting her little, slim, tightly curved body over that shoulder, holding the unconscious lady in place, his arm looped tightly around her, bracing her to him, his hand fisting the CAR-15 which he held levered against his right hip.

  The rifle fire from outside died down, echoing away amid the jungle denseness.

  Cody motioned the Jefferses toward the door leading out of the hut, where Rufe Murphy crouched, eyeballing the scene out there.

  The Jefferses went to the door to stand just behind Murphy’s bulk.

  Cody crossed the hut’s interior after them, halfway to the door when the ground beneath their feet shivered to an awesome thunderclap that gobbled up the shouting men reacting to the gunfire, everything. Cody practically ignored the big boom.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jeffers reared back from the doorway and saw for the first time the lifeless, purple-faced body of the orderly strangled by Cody on his way in.

  Murphy eased out of the hut. Cody joined him.

  Across the way, a flaming, smoky pile of rubble was all that remained of where the munitions shed had stood one second earlier, when the commandos had entered the hut.

  Rebels dashed in that direction. Confusion reigned, none of it directed toward the h.q. hut in these milliseconds after the explosion. Pieces of debris pitched to the ground, clouds of smoke roiling across the base to merge with the mist, lessening visibility ever more, adding to the confusion.

  “Uh, looks like Hawkeye and the ‘bag got themselves in a bind,” Murphy noted dryly, eyeing Cody for some indication of how to play th
is unraveling scenario.

  “Looks like our guys are getting themselves out of it, too,” Cody growled.

  Murphy looked around, followed Cody’s line of vision.

  Two vehicles burst out from the smoke and mist.

  Two Chor-7s, one zipping behind the other, both with M-60 machine guns mounted on their tail ends sped toward the h.q. hut from the direction of the motor pool, now hidden behind a wall of billowing smoke from the hut next to the munitions shed, which caught fire.

  Some of Locsin’s men reached the destroyed, flaming munitions shed, then charges within that rubble began detonating, sending men scurrying for cover, adding to the melee and the cloudiness smearing across the scene, again temporarily shrouding it from view.

  Richard Caine, in the lead, steered his Chor-7 into a skidding, dirt-flinging halt in front of the h.q. hut.

  Hawkeye careened his vehicle to a stop right behind Caine.

  “Someone hereabouts call for a taxi?” Hawkeye drawled from behind his steering wheel.

  “What about the rest of those vehicles?” Murphy growled with a nod in the direction of the motor pool. “We better hoof it on out of here while they’re looking someplace else if you didn’t have time to wire the rest of these wheels.”

  “We had time,” Caine assured them.

  He depressed buttons on the device clipped onto his belt.

  A rapid-fire three eruptions of sound and fury pounded the earth and their eardrums, kicking the disorder upon the NPA base into high gear.

  Secondary explosions of fuel tanks by the motor pool ate up where the first explosions left off, increasing the enveloping cacophony tenfold.

  Cody sprinted to Caine’s vehicle, Ann Jeffers still slung across his shoulder not slowing him a bit.

  Murphy looked back into the hut and motioned Mr. and Mrs. Jeffers to follow.

  “Last train, folks, climb aboard.”

  Cody set the teenager down in the back of Caine’s vehicle.

  Mrs. Jeffers climbed aboard that Chor-7 into the backseat, where she took over the care of her child from Cody. The woman’s arms went around her daughter, Ann, seated with her unconscious head resting on her mother’s shoulder. From the caring look of deep maternal concern etched across Louise Jeffers’ face, and the emerging strength shining there, Cody knew Louise Jeffers would be all right.