Philippine Hardpunch (23 page)

Maceda had a Russian Tokarev pistol half-drawn from a flapped hip holster, the general closing in aggressively on the sixtyish
fellow who cringed before a wingchair on the far side of the airy room.

Valera’s patrician features had grown jowly from age and amorality.

Maceda did not directly note the appearance of Cody and the Ingram searching for and finding a moving target, but the general
did see the surprise in Valera’s eyes at something more than Maceda’s threat of harm.

Maceda forgot about Valera and completing his draw, and flung himself sideways from what he sensed more than actually saw.
He
did
see the extended shadow of the Ingram plainly enough from the vaguely discerned combat figure out there in the rain beyond
the screen door.

Cody squeezed the Ingram’s trigger.

Nothing.

Jammed!

A rare but ever-present possibility and the worst thing that could happen in combat unless you were the guy, like Maceda,
who found himself cheating the fickle finger of fate.

Across the room, one side of a closed double oak door opened inward from the wall opposite the screen door. The Flip officer
who had arrived with the crew in the personnel carrier minutes earlier walked in without knocking, obviously expected.

Two wild cards in one heartbeat!

The Filipino lieutenant picked up on the action here with admirably fast reflexes, seeing Maceda throw himself behind the
massive desk that would have stopped slugs from an M-60, much less a jammed Ingram.

Cody threw away the useless piece-of-crap Ingram, unlimbering his .45 from its shoulder leather, unsnapping a grenade from
the combat webbing he wore strapped to his chest.

Valera sprinted somewhere out of his line of vision.

He pulled back a boot and sent the screen door plowing off its hinges with one kick, knowing from experience that Murphy would
be fanning out around behind him for a line of fire in through the doorway.

The Flip looey got caught flatfooted in the opposite doorway, saw the screen door kicking in, started to holler to someone
down the hallway in the house and paw for his sidearm at the same instant.

Rufe caressed a twenty-round burst from his Ingram that was like some invisible high velocity cannonball that pumped the whole
middle out of this Flip looey’s chest, belching awful and red out of his back, his innards preceding him, only for the eye
blink it took the force of the Ingram’s burst to hurl him through that doorway.

Rufe fell back when he saw Cody do the same.

A pistol shot cracked from inside the library, from the direction of behind that massive oak desk, sent an angry hornet stinging
its way through the doorway where they had both stood an instant before.

“And there goes goddamn
soft
,” Rufe muttered at the noise of the gunshot.

Cody called in English in through the doorway.

“Get behind something, Senator.”

Then he lifted the grenade in his left fist and unplugged the detonator with his teeth while at the same time snapping off
two fast rounds into the library at the oak desk monstrosity that stopped the .45-caliber projectiles but would also keep
this General Maceda in place a few seconds more.

Cody underhanded the grenade into the library and fell back, plastering himself against the outside wall to one side of the
doorway.

Rufe, seeing what he was up to, grabbed the other wall at the opposite side.

The grenade pitched beyond sight, in the opposite direction in which Valera had scrambled for cover.

Shouted responses to Maccda’s pistol shot enlivened the rainy darkness from in and outside the main house, from the direction
of the main gate, and from the line of “guest houses.”

A
BLAMMMM!
rocked the grounds and the darkening misty hissing air, and the house, and Cody thought he heard one terrified scream cut
off that could have been Maceda in the second before the blast, but he could not be sure and did not much give a damn anyway.

The grenade detonation which would hardly have sounded so much more impressive had it gone off outdoors, punched glass out
of windows, and sizable splinters of the big oak desk razored the air every which way, millions of tattered pages of books
blowing and settling like snow.

Before the smoke cleared, Cody and Murphy burst into what remained of what had seconds earlier been a graceful room of class
and beauty but now looked like a slaughterhouse.

Valera rose from where he had hidden behind an overstuffed wingchair near a window.

The wall-and-ceiling mess of blood and tattered bits of clothing and gooey body parts belonged to one man: what had been a
traitor named Maceda.

Valera’s trembling aristocratic features wore the pallor of a fish belly that’s rotted in the sun too long. He eyed the apparition
in commando black that emerged from the clearing smoke swirling through the room. He saw the second man, the hulking black
giant, crouched in what remained of the doorway to the rainy night outside.

“My beautiful books…lost. Wh-who are you?” he croaked in English, in a weak voice.

“We’re here to save your ass,” Cody snarled. “You can come with us—”

Two men in Philippine Army uniforms arrived in a hurry in the hallway door.

Murphy triggered a medium-length burst from the Ingram, sending a hail of .45-caliber flesh eaters buzzing across the library
from the outside door, rendering these two deader than their lieutenant.

“—or you can stay here with them,” Cody finished with a nod to the dropping corpses.

Valera stumbled forward, his expensive suit and once carefully coifed white thatch of hair a shambles, a pampered fat cat
more used to planning out things like death and terror to make power work but not having to confront what any of it was really
about—until right
now
.

“How… how will we get out?”

Cody had already started toward the back door to the outside, where he paused to eye the night. He motioned Valera to join
him.

The senator looked dazed, so Rufe grabbed him above the elbow to hurry the old fart along, also keeping Valera away from the
line of possible fire from outside that doorway.

Less than forty-five seconds had elapsed since Maceda’s gunshot and the grenade explosion.

They would be closing in from all sides within seconds, but Cody intended to
use
those seconds.

“All clear, let’s go.”

He fisted Valera’s free arm and dragged the guy with him out through that door.

Murphy turned to fire a long parting burst into the library just to give anyone back there second thoughts, then he hurled
himself alongside Cody and Valera, back to the northwest corner of the house.

The racket of motorized conveyances, not real vehicles, more like golf carts, could be heard departing from the main gate
and from the string of houses where men surged through open doorways into the night.

The golf-cart-type deals would be security staff deploying into defensive reflex, some of Valera’s “private security guards”
racing toward points along the wall, another two carts zipping across the ground toward the garage south of the house, all
to beef up security around this force’s transportation.

Valera’s security staff and Maceda’s military units naturally approached the main house in force, too, most of these heading
toward the main entrance beneath the porte cochere on the east side of the family mansion.

Cody, Valera in tow, and Murphy gained the northeast corner of the house.

One of the golf cart jobs came two-wheeling it on the slick grass around the corner before they had a chance to dive for cover
in the rainy blackness now total except for this security cart’s single headlight stabbing ahead like a luminous knife, pinning
Cody and the other two when the driver straightened the cart out of the wild, full-speed turn.

Two men in the cart.

Murphy took them out without hesitation before either could react, zipping a tight pattern of slugs that chucked both men
back out of the cart that sailed on driverless for a few seconds, far enough to swerve into the side of the house just behind
them.

Murphy loped over and switched off the cart’s headlight.

Cody looked around the corner of the wall at the revving chopper and the pilot who sat inside waiting.

The turbine engine rumbled over the pilot’s head, loud enough so the guy had not heard General Maceda’s single pistol shot;
and, contrary to popular belief, the detonation of a hand grenade is not all that noisy. Noisy enough to have stirred up the
rest of the force on the grounds, sure, but not noisy enough to penetrate through the chopper’s engine sounds to the pilot—unless
word had gotten to him across his helmet radio; but it had been less than a minute since the action in the library, and much
confusion reigned inside and outside the main house.

Two figures silhouetted themselves at the northeast corner of the longish building; behind them were men with rifles visible
in the refracted light from the front of the house, the first of the enemy to be drawn by the crash of the security cart into
the side of the house.

Cody lunged away from the comer of the house, releasing his grip on Valera, motioning Valera to stay where he was.

Valera obeyed, in a state of shuddering semiawareness, overwhelmed by the world he had known since childhood destroying itself
in hellfire and death around him. He watched Murphy hit a combat crouch, one of the big American’s arms reaching to shield
Valera against the wall from any possible incoming fire from those two down at the opposite corner behind them who were joined
by three more just in time to catch Murph’s sustained burst from the Ingram, a burst that kicked three of them down there
through the pearly gates with their chests stitched with .45-caliber holes, sending the lucky survivors diving for cover post
haste back around the corner of the front of the house.

Murphy palmed a fresh magazine into the smoking Ingram. He took Valera’s right arm by the wrist and charged after Cody, who
had already reached the helicopter.

The pilot, glancing over a map and flight plans on his lap, jerked his face up just in time to realize he had been taken by
a half-seen apparition that pulled him from the bubble of the chopper to deliver a killing judo chop that caved in the back
of the pilot’s skull behind the left ear, collapsing the guy into a clump on the wet grass with two trickles of crimson snaking
from his nostrils and dead eyes rolled back so only the whites showed.

Murphy and Valera joined Cody. Cody untugged the pilot’s helmet and gave it a toss to Murphy, who released Valera, shoving
the disheveled aristocrat from him with disdain. He grabbed the tossed helmet with his oversized left fist, tossing the Ingram
from his left fist to Cody. Rufe donned the flight helmet and heaved himself aboard the chopper with the ease borne of long
familiarity and experience, throwing himself into the pilot seat.

Cody climbed aboard.

“Let’s go. Senator,” he called down to Valera.

Valera could not tear his eyes from the unmoving clump of dead meat that had been the pilot, as if each new killing he witnessed
nudged the guy deeper into a near catatonic trance, but Rufe caught the senator’s attention by revving the chopper’s turbines.

The metal bird started vibrating, the rotors chopping around at higher RPMs, whipping the mist out from the chopper’s backwash
like a small hurricane.

“Wait!” Valera’s scream came high-pitched enough to lance through the copter noises. “Don’t leave me!”

He dashed forward and leaped when the chopper treads had already lifted three feet off the slippery turf.

Cody did not help the clown aboard, but chose to concentrate on bracing himself in a kneeling position inside the chopper’s
bubble to trigger Murphy’s Ingram to stop a bunch of men who tore ass from around the northwest corner of the house, falling
away below the rising chopper.

Rufe held the chopper low at no more than fifteen feet; just enough to safely clear that wall.

Cody swung the Ingram on the soldiers below, behind the house, feeding a fresh magazine into the weapon.

The shots from down there started spanking the chopper.

“Better take some of those boys out quick, Sarge,” Murphy grunted over his shoulder as he worked the chopper’s controls. “One
lucky round will—”

The back door of the house spewed out more soldiers, these raising their M-16s at the copter banking away from the turf toward
the northeast wall of the estate.

Cody didn’t hear the rest, swinging the Ingram on those below, pulling the trigger.

And nothing happened.

The Ingram jammed in his fist!

“This I do not fucking believe,” he snarled.

The main house drew back below and behind in the rainy dark backdrop. The chopper gained the north wall.

But those saffron winking pinpoint flashes of M-16s below did not stop.

Cody could not hear the reports, but he felt the sudden lurch of the chopper when the lucky round Murphy had mentioned hit.

Valera shrieked.

The chopper started to tilt crazily.

“Got us!” Cody heard Rufe snarl like a curse.

Then the engine noises stopped altogether, and only the airy
whirrrr
of the rotors could be heard as the chopper plummeted downward…

C
ody was certain he was a heartbeat away from his own death.

Then the copter impacted, but the jolt had a sort of
spring
to it, not the hard impact of slamming into ground he had expected.

Rufe had landed the wounded chopper in the fronds of a treetop upon the incline outside of the wall.

Beneath the approximate point where he and Murphy had parted company from Caine and Hawkins less than five minutes earlier…

He trusted his sense of direction and he trusted his nose when it pinched at the tart bite of fuel fumes.

“Jump for it!” Murphy snarled, already unlatching his side of the bubble front.