Philippine Hardpunch (2 page)

They gained the base of the wall, continuing with well-practiced precision.

Murphy hit a combat crouch, his broad back to the wall, his CAR-15 and narrowed eyes watching in every direction.

Cody slipped his rifle over his shoulder by its strap, unsheathed his combat knife, and turned to the wall. He went to work
on the banded twine bonding the bamboo poles together along the wall at ankle height and a bit above eye level. He bent to
slash apart the bottom band with one swipe, then reached the blade toward the twine connection at the top of two poles.

Calvin Jeffers was an engineer, employed and living with his family in Butuan. The Jeffers, all three of them—Cal, 48; Louise,
42; and Ann, 19—had been spirited away at gunpoint from a company picnic three weeks ago by masked gunmen.

Demands were not long in coming, the New People’s Army taking credit for the kidnapping and demanding a ransom of 50,000 American
dollars for the Jefferses’ return. A photograph accompanied the first demand, a snapshot of the Jeffers father holding a newspaper
dating the picture. Further communications had arrived with similar pictures during the weeks since the kidnapping.

The family had not been harmed, or so it appeared, but there was far more to it than that.

Cody paused in the act of slipping the knife blade across the looped twine at the top of the bamboo wall. He sensed Rufe swinging
to their left.

“Trouble, Sarge.”

Cody whirled in time to see two NPA sentries striding around the corner of the wall from the rear of the compound, silhouettes
in the tricky moonlight who reacted to this mutual sighting, both fatigue-clad sentries falling away from each other, shouldering
AK-47s.

Murphy’s right arm blurred and his combat knife flew from his fingers, whistling downrange to embed itself with quivering
accuracy into the heart area of the sentry nearest the wall.

The man emitted a gurgling death rattle and pitched backward off his feet in a spread-armed back-fall to land across the ground
with a thud of finality.

The second soldier paid this no heed, concentrating on unlimbering his AK in the flicker of time he thought he gained by his
buddy’s death, swinging his assault rifle into a hurried target acquisition on Murphy.

Cody stepped out from behind Murphy and flung his knife.

Sentry Number Two caught the blade to the hilt through the throat, knocking him back off his feet, every bit as dead as the
first one.

Cody and Murphy hoofed down the length of this side wall to where the bodies sprawled, tugged their knives from the corpses,
wiping the knife blades clean of blood on the tunics of their victims.

“That was too close,” Rufe grumbled. “I wonder how Caine and Hawkins are doing.”

The Brit and the Texan were supposed to be penetrating the compound from the opposite direction in an identical manner.

They hurried back to the spot where Cody had been interrupted.

Noisy jungle birds and insects continued their prattle undisturbed in the jungle surrounding the clearing.

Termination of the two sentries had been accomplished with no more than the quiet thump of falling bodies.

Murphy returned to eyeing the gloom with his CAR-15.

Cody snicked apart the wrapped twine around the tops of the two bamboo poles. He sheathed his combat knife and removed the
poles from their place in the wall, revealing a space large enough to wedge through. He wished he could somehow slow time
enough to hold back the approaching dawn long enough for them to penetrate the compound and do what they had to do.

It would not be long before the bodies of those sentries would be found—they could already be missed by those who would come
looking for them—but nothing but time mattered now, and he and Murphy could not risk carrying the two dead men over to beyond
the treeline where they would not be found. It was a risk they had to take, gambling that the bodies outside the wall would
not be discovered before it was too late. That could mean only minutes from now. Cody and his men did not intend to spend
more than fleeting minutes inside these walls and this, coupled with the fact that just before dawn was the ideal time to
strike since security then is universally almost always at its weakest, meant the chances were good such a risk could pay
off.

Cody stepped through the break in the wall. He nodded for Murphy to follow.

Rufe gave the narrow opening an uncertain look but he managed with some effort and muted grunting to squeeze his hulk through.

Inside, Murphy fanned the interior of the heavily shadowed compound while Cody realigned the bamboo poles roughly where they
had been.

This point of entry would not pass any sort of close inspection, but this section of the wall faced the back of an elongated,
hutlike structure, blocking this point from the rest of the compound.

Corporations in the Philippines had been long paying off the communist mountain forces regularly to leave them alone, a not
so subtle variation on the old-time American street gang protection racket, and from what Cody could tell, the employers of
Calvin Jeffers were no exception, but they had been double-crossed by the NPA not once but twice; the first time when the
Jeffers family had been kidnapped, the second time when the only result to the paid ransom had been further demand from the
communists for an additional $15,000 before they would release the Jefferses.

It was not so much this insult added to injury that brought Cody’s Army to this remote jungle province, nor the fact that
the Jefferses were American citizens, the fact of the matter being that Americans were being kidnapped almost daily at points
all around the globe.

What made this a situation worthy of Cody and his men was the fact that Jeffers, before he had taken work in the private sector,
had been, under another identity, one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s top field operatives throughout the sixties and
early seventies, before his retirement from government service.

The kicker here was that the NPA commandant holding the Jefferses hostage in this simple extortion shakedown did not realize
who he had.

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.

I
t 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.