Philippine Hardpunch Page 7

  His run slowed to a more dignified strut once he reached the gate, where he stood to watch the single chopper descend and land.

  Escaler joined him.

  “The other three—”

  Escaler let the sentence die.

  Locsin knew what he meant. He too had fully expected to see the four Hueys Javier’s camp had radioed were sent out, with the Jefferses in tow as well as those responsible for all of this, alive or dead, but all he could see was Arturo Javier’s angry features inside the Huey as the chopper touched down.

  The NPA camp still smoldered and smoked with telling evidence of the damage delivered here. The fires had been put out, the bodies and wounded cleared away, but smoke drifted everywhere and the heat from piles of rubble that had been various structures added to the already unbearable heat of the day beneath increasingly heavy, stationary clouds.

  The Huey’s pilot cut his engine and the rotors whooshed slowly to a stop.

  Locsin and Escaler started from the gate, past their men who eyed the surrounding jungle with far more interest and wariness than they did the chopper. Locsin’s attention fell on no other after Arturo Javier appeared at the side hatchdoor, backed by a dozen or more of his own troops who leaped after him to the ground to fan out, shoulder to shoulder behind their leader with their AK-47s in firing position, clearly establishing dominance of this scene.

  Locsin wanted to turn and run but he knew he could not do that. He kept walking toward Javier.

  His own men did nothing to take any sort of defense posture.

  “What shall we tell them?” Escaler asked, in a voice low enough for no other to hear, when they were halfway from the gate to the men waiting at the chopper. Locsin tried to quell the rising panic coursing through him, to slow his jumbled thought processes.

  “L—let me handle this,” he instructed, damning the quaver in his voice. “There were no hostages, do you understand that? There were no hostages.”

  Escaler nodded.

  They reached where Javier stood, combat boots planted squarely, pressed and starched camou fatigues, and those of his men, a sharp contrast to the bedraggled appearances of Locsin and his personnel. Javier’s apelike features glistened in the muggy sunlight.

  Locsin experienced again the curious combination of repulsion and fear he always felt in this man’s presence. He extended a hand.

  “Arturo, it is good of you to come to my, to our, assistance.”

  The greeting sounded hollow even to Locsin. He cursed the patina of sweat he felt on his face.

  Javier, cool and arrogant, ignored the proffered hand, his eyes cold pinpoints of steel which Locsin could feel boring holes into him as if Javier could see through him. He sensed Escaler easing slightly back, away from him. He felt isolated and suddenly very afraid.

  “What has happened here?”

  Javier’s demand matched the steel in his eyes.

  “An attack, my… good friend.”

  “I can see that, imbecile. Who attacked you?”

  “Ah, of that, we are not yet quite sure,” Locsin replied. “A commando force. You… intercepted them?”

  “They escaped us.” Javier reported that fact with no show of emotion. “They killed many of my men. I lost much equipment. This can be contained from the press, but only with extreme difficulty and a possible show of our hand at a most crucial time.”

  “I… wish I knew who they were—” Locsin began.

  Javier sprang forward before Locsin had time to dodge. He grabbed two handfuls of Locsin’s soiled tunic and yanked him forward, nearly off his feet, so that Locsin’s face was but inches from Javier’s, the bigger man holding him half-dangling on his tiptoes.

  “Who were they?”

  “I… I swear, I do not know!” Locsin gasped. “It is God’s truth!”

  “Why were they here, then? Why did they attack your base?”

  “Government troops, perhaps—”

  Javier’s left hand lashed out an open-palmed slap across Locsin’s face, hard enough to nearly wrench Locsin from his one-handed grip.

  “Those men we fought were not mere soldiers. Why were they here?”

  “P-perhaps the government has learned of our plans for… tomorrow! A new tactic!”

  Javier flung Locsin to the ground.

  Locsin landed in a sprawl and started to get up, then realized Javier towered over him.

  Javier unholstered a Tokarev pistol.

  “Aligning myself with the New People’s Army went against my better judgment from the very beginning, did you know that?”

  Locsin began to understand then what was about to happen to him. He had difficulty finding his voice.

  “I… I am a man of considerable power—” he tried to bluster.

  Javier laughed.

  “You forget who truly controls this province. I do. Those whom you serve will not concern themselves with your miserable death, not after what I hand them after tomorrow’s work is done.”

  “Javier, no, wait! I’ll tell—”

  “It does not matter what insignificant personal intrigue of yours brought this down upon us,” Javier snarled, nodding to the smoldering destruction and disorder of the base. “I can replace the men I’ve lost tenfold. The important thing is that I have learned that I cannot trust you.”

  “You can, oh, you can! Locsin screamed. “I can explain—”

  “It is too late for that,” Javier said quietly.

  He raised the Tokarev pistol, placing the muzzle against the center of Locsin’s forehead. He pulled the trigger, stepping back to escape the blood spray, as the dead man flipped over backward, legs and arms wrenching beneath him.

  Javier took his time about raising the Tokarev, making a show of holding the pistol up, ready to be fired again. He studied the man he knew to be Escaler.

  The other NPA guerillas behind Escaler had their attention arrested by the sight of their commander’s fallen body. The jungle around the NPA base grew very quiet except for the droning of the flies already drawn to feast on the blood splattered across the dead man’s face. None of the guerilla force made any move to raise a rifle or show any indication of resistance.

  Javier holstered his Tokarev. He strode over to Escaler.

  The two men stood toe-toe-toe, situated between Javier’s force and the NPA guerillas.

  “You are in command here now?” Javier asked.

  “I… suppose so,” Escaler conceded with little show of enthusiasm.

  “Do you know who those men were who attacked you here?”

  “No.”

  “I saw civilians with them. You were holding hostages here.”

  Escaler paused a moment, wording his reply carefully.

  “Colonel Locsin held those hostages.”

  “It would be the American family then, the Jefferses.”

  Escaler nodded.

  “Colonel Locsin commanded our obedience. We were told it was in the interests of our socialist revolution. If I had thought—”

  “Enough. You know of what is to happen. You know what I have organized, what is already under way.”

  “I do. It is only—”

  “Yes?”

  “My superiors… they may wish another to command—”

  “I will tend to that. How many men have you lost?”

  Escaler told him.

  Javier told him, “I shall see you have replacements before we move. This changes nothing. Is that not correct… Colonel Escaler?”

  Escaler straightened his posture when he heard himself addressed by the new rank.

  “We are ready,” he assured Javier. “There will be no more… mistakes. I apologize for our part in what happened here.”

  Javier accepted that with a curt wave of the hand and a nod toward Locsin’s remains.

  “It was his fault and he has paid for his mistake. I put this thing together, Escaler, what is about to happen. We will make history within the next twenty-four hours. We shall change forever the course of our coun
try. Nothing stands in the way of that, do you understand?”

  “I do, Mr. Javier.”

  “Good. It is settled, then.”

  Javier directed a stream of spit upon the corpse.

  “Feed this garbage to the vultures and see that readiness is maintained here. You will be moving, of course. We will relocate as well.”

  He turned to stride back to the helicopter.

  Escaler waited until Javier climbed aboard to call out.

  “What of… those who staged this attack?”

  “They will not return,” Javier snarled. “They got what they came for. And if they return, it will be too late for them to do anything to stop that which has already been set in motion. The country is ours, Colonel Escaler. All that remains is for us to now regroup and wait a short time longer, and then the moment of our, and our country’s, destiny will be at hand.”

  Most Filipinos belong to a race called Filipino-Malaysian, whose seafaring ancestors reached and began settling the islands from Indonesia as early as 200 B.C.

  By the thirteenth century, a thriving civilization was conducting active cultural and commercial trade with the Chinese and the Japanese as well as carrying on similar activities with India, Siam, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and Siam.

  Nonetheless, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, was said to have “discovered” the Philippines in 1521, and twenty-one years later a Spanish exploration party named the islands in honor of Prince Philip, later Philip II of Spain. By 1564 the Spaniards had completely taken over the area, retaining possession for the next three hundred fifty years.

  A full-scale rebellion was under way when Admiral Dewey defeated Spanish forces in the battle of Manila Bay. In 1898 Spain ceded the land to the United States. America granted the Philippines partial independence.

  The Philippines were invaded by Japanese troops on December 8, 1941, and suffered heavily during an occupation of nearly four years. U.S. forces led by General Douglas Mac Arthur regained the Philippines in 1944, and recaptured the country for good after the liberation of Manila in February 1945.

  The Philippines were granted their full independence by the U.S. on July 4, 1946, but American military presence has remained. The Philippines forms a vital strategic toehold for American interests in the region, its reason for backing the anti-insurgency efforts of a corrupt Filipino government for seventeen years.

  The history of the Philippines is written in blood and conflict, from the beginning to the present, defining the chances of any of that changing when considered in the light of the monumental obstacles facing the new government.

  More than 42 million people presently reside in the Philippines. In addition to Malayans, there are Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, American, and British, most of them Christian, more than 80 percent of them Roman Catholic, the remainder comprised of Buddhists, Moslems, and Taoists.

  The long-standing conflict between insurgents and the government, which in many areas has long since reached civil war proportions, has its roots in justifiable social grievances: unemployment in the Philippines runs at 40 percent; 70 percent of the population lives in poverty, and Manila spends half its export earnings to service foreign debt.

  Prior to the ouster of Marcos, critics had rightly labeled that gangster as the rebels’ best recruiter, particularly after he established martial law in 1972, cutting off all avenues for legitimate public dissent, thereby forcing activists to make a choice between giving up their cause in the face of stern government repression or working with the communist party.

  Many of them have gone with the communists, and the ranks of the New People’s Army are populated by a diverse cross-section of well-meaning people, including students, clergy, even disgruntled local politicians. The Manila government’s estimates hold NPA strength at well over seventeen thousand. The NPA controls or influences close to eight thousand barangay (villages) in the rural hinterlands, such villages being linked to the outside world by no more than a patchwork of trails across heavily forested, rugged islands.

  The New People’s Army is neither run nor controlled by the right-minded intellectuals and idealistic young swelling its ranks, of course.

  No, that distinction belongs to crud like “Colonel” Locsin and the North Koreans, and, ultimately, the Soviet KGB. The NPA’s true function, once the political rhetoric used to draft and motivate its mass is seen through, is actually to serve as muscle and shield to protect Soviet expansion in the region.

  The Soviets pull the strings, the way they always try to.

  World War III has already begun, waged by two superpowers, fought around the world by Third World surrogates.

  It is happening as you read these words.

  Now you understand the situation as John Cody does.

  It matters to Cody, to us, what happens in the Philippines, so far from home, because if it falls we are all that much closer to putting the surrogates behind us, and no one will survive that.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Murphy piloted the chopper on a northwesterly course, jabbering into the tac net while he worked the controls, cutting in on standard frequencies to get the coded word through to the brass waiting at Clark that they were on their way home.

  A somber feeling of exhaustion permeated the insides of the chopper.

  Caine and Hawkins rode out the ride with the same hangdog look of exhaustion Cody felt to the core of his own being.

  Cal Jeffers and his wife sat across from them, farther down the same bench from where Cody leaned back, his head against the hull.

  He let the humming vibrations of the chopper in flight massage his aching body and psyche.

  Jeffers and his wife held hands. They looked washed out, but damn glad to be alive.

  Ann was seated between Cody and Louise Jeffers. She sat there with her eyes closed, fatigued.

  Cody had diagnosed it as that pushed-too-far tension that had to be diffused before it imploded.

  She sat there with her arms crossed tightly before her, as tightly as her knees were pressed together. She sat there next to him, her spine straight like a lifelike statue.

  Cody willed himself to rouse himself from his weariness. He touched her gently on one arm. This got her attention.

  Her eyes snapped open, but she did not look at him. She stared straight ahead, her mouth remaining a taut line.

  He leaned close enough for her to hear him through the din of the chopper noise.

  “It will be all right, Ann. You’ve been through a lot. We’ll be landing soon. It’s all over. There are people waiting to help when we land.”

  “It’s not all right.”

  She spoke in a dull monotone he had to lean forward to hear.

  “Ann—”

  “I’ve ruined everything. I’ve destroyed everything. I am total shit.”

  Mrs. Jeffers, on Ann’s other side, could not hear those words because of the noise, but she caught her eye, and she read the look Cody sent her behind Ann’s back. She put an arm around her daughter. She spoke in Ann’s other ear. Cody could not hear what she said.

  Ann closed her eyes again and continued sitting there with no emotion whatsoever on her face and with the body language of a rubber band stretched too taut, about to snap.

  Cody saw nothing he could do to help. He cared, but he was a soldier, not a therapist, and he knew absolutely nothing about nineteen-year-old children, or what Ann Jeffers had gone through back there at Colonel Locsin’s NPA base in the jungle.

  The ocean beneath sparkled as if some mythical giant had spread diamonds across opaque blue glass, the stretches of sea interspersed with green-and-black splotches of islands.

  Cody rested his head back against the hull and decided maybe the kid had the right idea. He closed his eyes, but soon he was dreaming.

  Dreaming of hammering machine guns and the stench of napalm and jungles and humanity eaten by apocalyptic fires.

  He awoke with a lurch and a sta
rtled gasp that filled his own ears.

  The chopper was settling down.

  He blinked away a moment’s disorientation, knowing he had been dreaming yet feeling vulnerable somehow. He submerged that, grabbed the wall strap and tugged himself to his feet.

  Rufe settled the warbird in a Top Secret square of tarmac in an obscure corner of the expansive base.

  This was not the first such highly sensitive operation to be launched from Clark Air Force Base.

  The rotor sounds whooshed down to nothing.

  White-coated paramedics rushed across the sun-splashed tarmac toward the chopper pushing gurneys and life-saving equipment.

  Behind them came General Simmons, the one man on Clark who knew the whole story.

  Cody debarked onto the tarmac first.

  Brassy sunlight pressed down from the clear white sky between black, rain-heavy clouds.

  It is said there are two seasons in the Philippines: the wet and the very wet.

  Every inch of Cody’s clothing was plastered to his body by grime and sweat.

  Simmons looked rumpled, as if he’d had a bad night of it. He had appeared crisp and efficient when Cody’s team had set off from here several hours ago. Now the guy, a trim man in his midfifties with iron-gray hair and demeanor, looked as if he’d grown a whole new set of wrinkles during the long wait for this moment.

  Cody and the general helped Mrs. Jeffers down from the chopper, then Ann. Both of the ladies waved off the gurneys. Hawkins and Caine stepped down from the other side of the chopper, where Murphy joined them after shutting down the engines and unstrapping himself from the pilot’s seat.

  Simmons knew the names of these men but nothing else about them. Everyone involved in this functioned strictly on a Need to Know, including this Two Star.

  Cal Jeffers came out next. Simmons extended a hand to him.

  “Welcome home, Mr. Jeffers. Thank God you and your family are back with us.”

  “Thank Cody, you mean. And thank you, General… and the men you lost for us.”

  “Lost?” Simmons turned to Cody.