Philippine Hardpunch Read online

  “One of my men flew us back,” Cody reported. “Both of the crews bought it.”

  The paramedics were leading away Mrs. Jeffers and Ann toward the closest building fronting this landing pad.

  Louise Jeffers looked back at her husband with a look that said she did not want them to be apart again, ever.

  Cody read the look that way, at any rate, and something told him that this ordeal would probably serve to strengthen things between this married man and woman and not destroy them as it had the potential of doing.

  Ann Jeffers was another matter.

  Cal Jeffers lifted his hand in a reassuring way and mother and daughter continued on with the paramedics hurrying them along.

  Ann did not look back, not at her father nor at Cody nor at anyone else. She walked like a zombie.

  “You go join your family, Mr. Jeffers,” General Simmons urged. “You’ll want to get cooled down from what you’ve been through. We’ll have a debriefing in—” He deferred to Cody, who had been given charge of this operation by White House order.

  “Not debriefing,” Cody said.” Briefing. One hour, please, Mr. Jeffers.”

  Jeffers nodded and started to speak.

  Simmons echoed, “One hour? These people have been through hell, Cody—”

  “It’s not over, General. These folks are back and I’m glad for that, but it’s not over. There’s more to this than this family held hostage, and there is no time to lose.”

  “What have you found out?”

  Jeffers broke in.

  “I know what he’s talking about, General. I haven’t been able to put it all together yet, myself, but… it could add up to something, sure. I’ll be ready in an hour, Cody. Or less.”

  “Please join your family for that checkup, then,” the general suggested. “They need you at a time like this, Mr. Jeffers. One hour, then.”

  Jeffers turned to Cody with the look of an out-of-shape fighter returning from retirement for one last hurrah. He’d done okay, but the effort showed.

  “Hey, mister, thanks again, from the bottom, okay?”

  “Okay.” Cody nodded. “And have someone qualified take a look at your daughter, Cal. She looks in bad shape.”

  “I will.” Jeffers shot a tired grin at Simmons.”You’ve got one hell of a man here, General.”

  He left them, pausing to speak with Hawkins, Caine, and Murphy where those worn-out guys lounged around the opposite side of the chopper.

  Simmons regarded Cody.

  “My thanks too, soldier. And pass that on to your men. Looks like you guys could use some freshening up, too. You’re gamier than a goat in a shithole, son.”

  “I’ll see to it, sir.”

  Cody crossed over to join his men as Jeffers walked away, across the baking tarmac toward the doorway through which the paramedics had rushed his wife and daughter moments earlier.

  “Shower up,” Cody told his men. “Rearm. Briefing in one hour.”

  “One hour!” Hawkins groused. “What asshole came up with this double-time shit?”

  “You’re looking at him. You can file a written protest with Pete Lund when we get home.”

  “He’ll have to learn how to write, first.” Caine chuckled.

  “It’s that outfit that took us on after we busted those folks away from the commies,” Murphy grunted. “That’s what you’ve got in your craw,” he said to Cody.

  “That’s it.” Cody nodded. “And Jeffers says he’s got more. There could be more to this than anyone thinks.”

  Caine thought about that. “And the Jefferses got caught in the middle?”

  “Something like that.”

  Hawkins grunted, “If we’re gonna try tracking down anybody, we’d better not try it smelling this bad.”

  “Not terribly eloquent, but profound in essence,” Caine nodded dryly. “Let’s find those showers.”

  The briefing room was air-conditioned cool and sunlight bright, thanks to one wall of windows. The bare walls went with the spartan furnishings: gray metal conference table, gray metal armchairs.

  Cody, as head man of this operation, sat at one end of the long table. General Simmons and Cal Jeffers sat to his right, the men of his team to his left. Everyone looked showered down and scrubbed up, even the general, Simmons.

  Jeffers wore a fresh-looking leisure suit which had been provided him, Cody and his crew wore fresh camou fatigues and fully reloaded .45s on their hips.

  Mrs. Jeffers and Ann were being cared for at the infirmary.

  M-16 toting sentries stood guard in the hallway outside the briefing room.

  A pitcher of ice water and glasses remained untouched, the full attention of Cody and his men, and Simmons, centered on Jeffers, who was winding up his first run-through of his family’s ordeal.

  “That’s about it, then, gentlemen.” Jeffers raised his water glass to his lips for the first time and polished off half of it in a couple of gulps. “Guess old habits die hard. I kept my ears and eyes open. It helped being kept in that headquarters hut.”

  “They must have been planning to kill you,” Simmons said, “and your family, or you wouldn’t have overheard anything. They kept you alive to take those pictures they needed to get the payoff. They never considered you’d be rescued.”

  “Except for those visits from Javier’s people, and that one other time, they did keep the lid on pretty tight.” Jeffers dabbed at his forehead, shiny despite the crisp cool of the air conditioning. “Man, I’ll have nightmares about this for the rest of my life.”

  “What about your daughter?” asked Cody.

  Jeffers drew back, in his eyes, and only Cody saw it.

  “Uh, what about her?”

  Hawkeye Hawkins put in, “Your daughter looked in pretty bad shape, Mr. Jeffers.”

  “Real bad.” Murphy nodded.

  Simmons snapped angrily, “Of course the kid looks bad! Consider what the child’s been through.”

  Jeffers bristled. “If you’re implying what I think your are—”

  “You kept a hell of a cool head when the chips were down, Mr. J.,” Cody said evenly, “and you came through for us back at the LZ. We just want to make sure we’re working with the whole picture. None of this is very pleasant.”

  Jeffers accepted that, relaxing back into his chair. He looked embarrassed.

  “Very well.” General Simmons moved right along. “I say we concentrate on Javier. You think those were goons, Mr. Jeffers?”

  Cody knew Simmons was not slipping into dated slang.

  Goons was in common usage in the hinterlands and remote islands that were often virtually controlled and governed by province warlords. The goons were the paramilitary militias that enforced the warlords’ will, even upon cowed local government leaders.

  These warlords had been closely aligned with the Marcos government, but political changes in Manila had little, if any, immediate effect on the remote provinces where most of these warlords held power.

  Arturo Javier—a millionaire who counted among his holdings a sugar mill, a warehouse, and a cement plant in Butuan Province on Mindanao—was such a warlord.

  Cody decided to let slide his hunch that he was not getting the whole story about Ann Jeffers’ part in the kidnap drama of the past three weeks.

  “All I know is that men, uniformed exactly like the ones who tried to stop us, visited Colonel Locsin on two occasions while we were there. The conversations I overheard were vague, but I got the impression that it was a sort of final confirmation of plans between their forces. I didn’t know at the time, of course, that they were aligned with Javier. Who would think such a thing.”

  “Guys like this warlord, Javier, are everything the commie insurgents are fighting against,” Rufe Murphy pointed out.

  “Javier is the only way it breaks down,” Cody concluded. “The only ones with firepower like four Hueys are this warlord and the government, and we know the government wasn’t involved. Right, General?”

  “Affirmative,” Sim
mons assured them.

  “Then that force we met, those responsible for the deaths of that chopper crew, has to belong to Arturo Javier.”

  “Sworn enemies of the New People’s Army,” Caine reflected. “It doesn’t add up.”

  “It adds up,” Cody said. “We just don’t know how, yet. But we will.”

  “So this Javier punk and the commies are sworn enemies,” Hawkins said. “But Javier comes to the rescue when we come for the Jefferses.”

  Simmons eyed Cody.

  “Are you sure they were with Locsin’s force?”

  “I’m sure.” Cody nodded. “They lost three choppers full of men trying to keep us from getting out of there. That tells me something big is in the wind.”

  “The odds would have to be high.” Caine nodded. “A warlord and the communists holding hands and sacrificing all those lives to keep the lid on it.”

  “What is it they’re so uptight about us finding out?” Cody asked. “That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

  “There was a man who came with those goons of Javier’s the second time, but not the first time. In fact, I think the purpose of the second visit was to introduce the man.”

  “Did you catch this man’s name?” Cody asked.

  “I did, but I had already recognized the voice,” Jeffers said with a grin. “His name is Vincente Valera. I heard him speak one time at a businessmen’s convention. A very deep voice for a Filipino, resonant, and with a slight stutter only at times, on the ‘t’s. An unusual voice, that’s why I remembered it.”

  “Ranking bigshot in the Opposition Party,” Simmons considered aloud. “If he’s tied into it, we are talking very strange bedfellows.”

  “What could they have been cooking together?” Caine asked.

  “At this point, it doesn’t matter,” said Cody. “Whatever it is, it’s big. Mass assassinations; complete takeover, a try for all the marbles.” He looked to Simmons. “Is that possible?”

  “With the new government presently so unstable,” Simmons said, “anything is possible.”

  “What we concentrate on now is finding a handle,” Cody told them.

  Hawkins chuckled. “Then grab it and pull like hell, eh, Sarge?”

  “You’ve got it.” Cody nodded. “What’s the story on this Valera, General? Is he a handle?”

  “He just could be,” said Simmons. “He owns controlling interest in a club in Manila. The government’s had it under surveillance but not much more.”

  “Are we sure about that?”

  “They haven’t got anything on him they can use or I’d have heard about his place being slammed shut.”

  “Get me a complete BG on Valera,” Cody instructed the general. “We’ll—”

  He was interrupted by a commotion from outside the closed doors.

  The double doors flew inward a moment later and Louise Jeffers burst into the room, wearing a more terrified expression than she had during those final moments on the ground two hours earlier at that hot LZ near Colonel Locsin’s camp.

  “Cal… Cal, oh, my God, Cal,” Mrs. Jeffers shrieked, “She’s gone! Ann’s gone!”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  This sector of Clark Air Force Base was one of the tightest security perimeters in the Philippines. The only trouble was that security was on the lookout for all manner of things suspicious.

  They had not been prepared for an innocent nineteen-year-old kid bopping along, whom they of course knew was the Jeffers kid, just brought in… but she had said she was going, and through some mix-up she slipped away.

  “You know how she was behaving on the helicopter, and after we landed,” said Mrs. Jeffers, later. “Well, when she realized I wanted someone, a psychiatrist or someone, to look at her, the way you suggested, Mr. Cody, well, she started acting just as natural as you please, warming up and everything, like everything was all right. Then I turned around… and she was gone.”

  Jeffers looked around from face to face of the men at that table.

  “I’m… sorry, gentlemen. My child… Ann is an impulsive young woman.”

  “What happened during those three weeks of your captivity, Mr. Jeffers?” Cody asked.

  “Imagine the worst thing, short of death, and that happened,” said Jeffers. “Locsin turned Ann against her mother and me. She told Locsin about my CIA identity.”

  Ann Jeffers had not shown up.

  A confused, abused, rebellious young woman had somehow disappeared off the base, off the face of the Philippines, the instant she set foot off that military installation.

  Mrs. Jeffers needed a strong sedative from the paramedics to calm her once it was established beyond a doubt that her daughter’s present whereabouts were unknown, and Cal Jeffers had not been in much better shape when he accompanied his wife, leaving Cody’s Army alone again in the briefing room with General Simmons.

  Cody respected Mr. and Mrs. Jeffers for having fought the good fight, but he was a damn sight pissed off at Ann Jeffers for flaking out the way she had on two occasions, and he was pissed at himself for not having read the signals more clearly in the chopper. He should have insisted, and supervised, the turning over of the kid to proper medical hands.

  “Well, Cody,” said General Simmons, “where do you think your men should take it from here? We were supposed to ensure that kid’s safety, and we haven’t. She’s gone.”

  Hawkeye Hawkins snarled, “Who gives a rat’s ass? Lamebrain brat gets what she deserves, screwing up like that, falling for that Locsin’s bullshit, and now this.”

  Caine eyed the Texan sternly.

  “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? Locsin took advantage of, and essentially raped, a confused young person. Ann is a victim.”

  Murphy growled, “Whatever she is, she’s gone, but without a damn thing to go on, what can we do?”

  Cody said, “We keep on Javier. We keep our ear to the ground. The first time we pick up anything regarding the Jeffers kid, we move on that. It’s all tied in.”

  “We’re covered on one angle, at least,” Simmons said. “I got word from our Filipino government connection.

  “Their man with that group you tangled with this morning sent them some interesting news. ‘Colonel Locsin is dead,’ was all the contact could pass on.”

  “The Filipino government’s playing it too damn close to the vest,” the general grumbled. “They don’t know who to trust. They don’t even think we know as much as we do.”

  Cody said, “Locsin was hooked in with Javier and Valera, but he was working the Jeffers thing on his own. When that blew up in his face and brought down the heat, Javier decided Locsin was a liability and canceled him out of the picture.”

  “A liability regarding what?” Caine asked the group rhetorically.

  “We have to put the heat on,” said Cody. “General Simmons, what were you able to get on Lopez?”

  The general set a briefcase on the table before him, unsnapped it open, and withdrew a thick file folder, which he slid across the table in Cody’s direction.

  “I’ll save you some reading time. The Party thinks Valera is too radical, too noisy for these delicate times. He’s been practically shunted out of the picture. Whatever he was doing at Locsin’s camp, it was not in any official capacity.”

  “What’s he do besides own a nightclub?”

  “He’s said to be a power in the black market,” Simmons said, “but he’s been too slick there to get tabbed for anything, either.”

  “That’s the tie-in with Javier,” said Cody. “Javier has his own force lined up behind him, his goons, and he’s got the hinterlands in his pocket if the NPA is sleeping with him. Valera holds the reins of the Manila underworld, and if he’s in this with Javier, too, yeah, we are talking a real big picture.”

  “Sounds like this Valera bird is the handle we’re looking for,” Caine said. “The most readily available, at any rate.”

  Cody looked at General Simmons.

  “Where’s this club he
owns?”

  “A joint called the Gilded Peacock, on Pilar Street,” said Simmons. “Valera owns controlling interest in it. A woman named Mara Zobel runs it for him and she’s almost as bad news as Valera. They’re two of a kind.

  “There’s gambling, and a floor with private rooms. Open at full tilt, around the clock. Has a reputation as a rough place.”

  Hawkeye grinned. “Sounds like this boy’s kind of place.”

  Simmons cleared his throat, then snapped shut his briefcase and stood.

  “As instructed, gentlemen, I will have at your disposal whatever vehicles and armament you may need for the remainder of your mission. You’re going after Valera, then, I take it?”

  “We are.” Cody nodded. “And I don’t think camou fatigues are going to cut it at the Gilded Peacock.”

  “We’ll get you appropriate civilian attire, Simmons assured him. “I’ll see to it immediately. But I, uh, just let me make sure I’ve got one thing straight in my mind.”

  “What’s that, General?”

  “My orders, and your orders, state that you are here, and I am to provide full backup, specifically in the matter of rescuing the Jeffers family.”

  “You read the orders right.”

  “Then, uh, what the hell are you doing chasing after Vincente Valera and Arturo Javier and half the goddamn New People’s Army? I still don’t see how that is going to affect the return of Ann Jeffers, whose safety is our concern.”

  “Sounds like the general here don’t like being told what to do, Sarge,” Murphy tsk-tsked from where he sat. “And I thought brass was supposed to shine.”

  Caine put in hastily, “Uh, perhaps it should be pointed out to the general that these diverse factions you mention may be our only lead to the girl.”

  “Ann Jeffers broke under the pressure.” Cody cut through the shortening tempers around the table. “After what happened, maybe she just needs some time to herself to get her head back together.

  “Or maybe she’ll try to do something to redeem herself for the betrayal of her parents, for telling about her dad’s time with the CIA. Ann doesn’t know that the word on that probably went to the grave with Locsin. Whoever else was in on it will keep their traps shut or they’ll get the same thing Javier gave the colonel.