Philippine Hardpunch (25 page)

“But he said—”

“Right?”

“Uh, yes,” Valera conceded. “Well?”

“He’ll expect you to helicopter to his base on Mindanao, one way or another; to find a way there. And what would you do, Vincente?”

Valera, rattled beyond straight reasoning, mumbled, “I own a small processing plant just north of here. There is a private
landing field there. I own it.”

“Javier expects you to fly to him and report what happened,” Cody said. “And you will. And I’m going to be your pilot.”

“But, hell. Sarge.” Murphy grunted, “
I’m
your pilot!”

“We both know how to fly choppers,” Cody reminded him. “You’re just a little better at it than I am, that’s all.”

“But—”

“I want to be in on the finish of this one first-hand, Rufe.”

“Fat chance to take,” Hawkeye muttered.

Caine said, “My associate’s gift of understatement manifests itself more than ever.”

“You want Javier’s hit list,” Murphy said to Cody.

Cody nodded. “He’ll have it all down on paper somewhere—where each one of those units he’s consolidated or set up is, waiting
for the time to signal to Clark.”

“How many choppers are there at this private airfield of yours?” Cody shot at Valera.

“There are three,” the guy answered, stuttering on the “t”s, “but—”

Cody ignored him.

“We’ll only need two.” He looked at Caine, Murphy, and Hawkins. “You three follow us and land nearby.”

“Land nearby?” Hawkeye echoed sourly.

“We’re three guys with some M-16s and what high explosives I’ve got left,” Caine said. “If that is Javier’s main staging area
we’re talking about, he’d have close to a half-hundred men there at the very least, with full equipment.”

“We don’t need to destroy that staging area,” said Cody, “if I can take out this warlord and whoever’s bossing the NPA detachment.”

“There will be General Chung,” Valera volunteered.

“The North Koreans.” Cody nodded. “Javier will have that list on his person. He’s put the personal touch on every step of
his plan so far; he’ll play true to form now, if I can pull that off quietly enough and pull out—and you have the Filipino’s
military units ready to close in when I get out; that should be enough work for us for tonight.”

“That’s one hell of a lot of
ifs
,” Caine opined.

Hawkeye said, “And what if high pockets here decides to play along up to a point,” he roughly kicked Valera, “then blows the
whistle to this warlord about who you really are and why you’re here.”

Valera cleared his throat.

“Er, uh, perhaps it would be best if you went without me. I—”

“He’ll play along,” Cody growled, “because the one thing we all value the most is our own lives, isn’t it, Senator?”

“I… do not want to die…” Valera whined. He drew his knees up in front of himself, hugging them to him. “Do not make me go
to Javier with you, I beseech you—”

“This Javier must be quite a dude,” Hawkeye said and whistled.

“He has… the power of the beast he appears to be,” Valera muttered in a small voice.

“You know what he has in mind if you play along with him,” said Cody to Valera.

“He knows a man like you hasn’t carved himself an empire in the black market without being one tenacious son of a bitch,”
Caine offered Valera, “even if you do send other people to do your dirty work while you sit reading your leather-bound books.
He’ll have to eliminate you to take over your organization, Senator.”

“I…
will
help you to kill Javier,” Valera said with a rising inflection that took on a sort of devious purr that coiled through the
inside of the van.

“Now you’ve got it.” Cody nodded, not liking or sympathizing with this little sleazeball one damn bit. “Your only chance out
of this alive is to do exactly what I tell you to do. If you do that, you’ll give us, you and me, a shot at walking out of
there, back to your chopper, and flying right on out.”

“Sure.” Murphy shook his head sarcastically. “It’s always easy, just like that. Like hell it is, Sarge, and you know it.”

“He is right, though,” Caine said. “All fucking bloody right. We follow you to somewhere on Mindanao,” he said to Cody. “You
and Valera touch down in the middle of an encampment of some five hundred or more goons and communist guerillas. We call in
the cavalry, in this case the Filipino counterinsurgency strike units that we pray are standing by, and we sit on our arses
like we were supposed to back at the senator’s.”

“Where we pulled attention away from that downed chopper to save
your
asses,” Hawkeye pointed out to Cody.

“The only thing that matters right now is putting the screws to whatever Javier has ready to roll at 0200 hours,” Cody countered,
“and the way to do that is to get my hands on his master list. There sure as hell won’t be any copies floating around.”

“And we play it on the heartbeat, just like Nam,” Murphy grunted. “It worked back there,” he said to Caine and Hawkins. “Remember
that time at Luc Da when we—”

“Jeez, bit guy, save the war stories for later.” Hawkeye chuckled. “But yeah, play it loose. I like it like that my own self.”

“We’ll radio air cover from the Filipinos to be standing by,” Caine assured Cody. “Let’s hope they play along.”

“They’ll want what I’m going to get more than we do,” said Cody.

“Don’t… please don’t tell the authorities about me,” Valera wailed.

“Pal, your name is already taken and your ass is hung for kicking.” Hawkeye grinned. “You play straight with the sarge, at
least you’ll have an ass to run and hide with after this is over.”

Valera looked to Cody. “If this plan of yours… goes accordingly, then… you will let me, uh, escape?”

“Now there you’ve got a deal,” Cody consented.

“We’ll try some escaping together.” Murphy chuckled.

Cody realized Valera interpreted that as a grim threat. He assured the Filipino, “You help us set up Javier and we’ll let
you go free.”

Valera started regaining some of his composure, or trying to.

“You’ve got a deal,” he told Cody.

Cody started the van, flicked the headlights back on and backed out onto the street to continue on along through this slumbering
neighborhood street that began curving through narrower streets before linking with the Manila highway.

“Keep your eyes peeled, guys,” Cody advised his men, each of whom fisted a weapon. To Valera, he said, “And you give me directions
to that private landing field of yours.”

C
aptain Leiter paused in General Simmons’ open office doorway, saw that his superior was busy on the telephone, and started
to walk away when he caught Simmons notice him there and wag a finger for him to enter.

Leiter stepped inside. He moved over to stand looking out a window at the pitch-darkness beyond, giving the general some privacy
to complete the call.

There was little activity on this restricted section of Clark Air Force Base, this or any other night.

It had come down, Leiter reflected, as it always did in the end for the men left behind the desks, to do the waiting. And
worrying, if a man cared about his job.

The general was doing all of the listening over the telephone, then he said, “Very well, then, General Avelino. I’ll leave
it in your capable hands and wait to hear from you.”

Leiter turned from the window at the click of Simmons hanging up the phone.

“Avelino? The Commander of the Filipinos’ counter-insurgents?”

Simmons stared at the phone, his brow creased in deep-set furrows.

“That was the second strangest phone call of my life, Captain. The other strangest phone call of my life came through about
ten minutes before this one.”

“You got through to Lund?”

“He got through to me. Get this. We give Cody full support on
everything
, no questions asked. The guy’s a walking order from the president.”

Leiter pictured in his mind the indelibly imprinted images of the four commandos he had met briefly a few hours earlier.

“I’d say the president’s got good taste in fighting men, if nothing else.”

“It’s still a first,” Simmons grunted, “even if I do half-like it. Those four guys could be the determining force in world
affairs, ever think of that?” He chuckled. “Yeah, like I said, Captain, a strange call.”

“You said one of two, sir.”

“So I did. You know we passed word along to Avelino’s until this afternoon about what we’d learned about Javier’s plans and
Colonel Locsin’s base and the setup we, uh, that is, Cody, thought Javier had brewing.”

“And got a polite ‘thank you’ and a blank look for the effort,” Leiter guessed.

“Right; you’ve been dealing with them, too,” Simmons growled. He walked over and poured a cup of coffee from a percolator,
offered it to Leiter, who shook his head. Simmons took a sip, made a face, and threw the half-filled cup at the nearest wastebasket.

“And the general had what to say just now?” Leiter prodded.

Simmons impatiently threw himself back into the swivel chair behind his desk.

“He had about as much to say as the paper pusher I handed the poop to this afternoon. Except, oh yeah, he said they were aware
of Javier and were prepared to deal with the problem, end of quote.”

Leiter faced back to look out the window again, the drawn facial muscles reflecting back at him from the black glass; the
worry he saw in his own eyes surprised him.

“That means Cody and men are caught in a vise then, doesn’t it, sir?
if
the Flips are ready to strike at Javier tonight while Cody’s team is dealing with it.”

“It could be a bluff,” Simmons tried, with no conviction whatsoever. The furrows in his brow grew deeper in the mahogany tan
of his face. “Cal Jeffers said something a while ago about outlaws. Cody and those men of his are going to have to break every
law of odds there is tonight, because, Captain, that is the only chance in hell any of those good men have of getting through
this night alive.”

Cody piloted the chopper down to the landing area, marked off by some of Javier’s goons holding kerosene lanterns at one end
of this impromptu staging area, an area that filled several square acres of rugged jungle real estate around a naturally formed
clearing.

There was no attempt at secrecy. Cody had seen the lights from the bubble front of Valera’s company copter well before he
told Valera to get on the radio and announce their arrival.

The chopper touched down.

The staging area appeared from the air at night to be laid out roughly in a long rectangle, with two more copters near where
Cody set down. He recognized one of those choppers as the Huey gunship which had fled the firefight that morning when Javier’s
paramilitary goons had linked up with New People’s Army terrorists to try to keep Cody’s team from rescuing three innocent
American civilians, the Jeffers family, and which had cost the lives of two American airmen crewing that morning’s pickup
chopper.

Floodlights were mounted on trees everywhere and men in full battle dress loitered around fires and checked over weapons and
equipment with an air of building expectation bubbling through it all thick enough to slice a piece and mail to the folks
back home…

Cody’s “Army” had split up at Valera’s private airfield, which was right where Valera had said it was.

He and Valera had taken this chopper to fly directly toward those coordinates supplied by the original pilot’s flight plans.

Valera had ridden beside him, not saying word one throughout the flight.

Cody did not underestimate this guy, not for one second. He had seen Valera at his worst back there when hellfire had raged
through the man’s ancestral home. That was maybe understandable from a guy of some sensitivity, sure, who had nothing to do
with carrying out his own dirty work. That was left to punks like Jorges and Ramos from the Gilded Peacock. But a man like
this Vincente Valera, who commanded thugs and street-gang leaders and was tied in to a power structure of nationwide underworld
bosses, this was a man who did not lose his self-control for very long. The heart and mind of a wily savage hid inside this
oh-so-civilized surface and that mind would be clicking like the fixed gaming tables in one of Valera’s nightclubs, weighing
the percentages of going along with Cody or double-crossing Cody, and all Cody could do was gamble that Valera’s fear of Javier,
and his fear of Cody, would make him play along long enough for Cody to play out whatever scenario was handed him when he
and Valera walked into Javier’s presence.

He cut the chopper’s engines after setting down on the mucky loam. He saw unmarked transport carriers parked nearby, tailgates
open, ready to receive this force that was waiting only for a warlord’s command to roll, to attack.

Rifle-bearing men in the uniforms of Javier’s goons, recognizable to Cody from that morning’s firefight, approached the chopper.

Cody turned to Valera in the fleeting seconds they had alone in the chopper bubble before the three goons reached them.

“Remember, Senator. Play it on
my
side, and you walk away. Cross me, and you’re the first to die.”

“Do not worry,” Valera assured him in a whisper smooth as silk. “I am not a fool. I am your friend, American. You can trust
me.”

Then they stepped out of the chopper to meet the three goons who toted AK-47 assault rifles.

Hawkins, Caine, and Murphy had flown at a distance behind Cody and Valera in an identical copter to the one Cody piloted.
The two aircraft maintained a total communications blackout during the flight.

Murphy had supposedly set the other chopper down within two kilometers from Javier’s staging area, a good-sized lope through
the jungle for those three, but Cody’s men could handle that easily and it would be distance enough to prevent this crowd
from hearing that second chopper.

What his team did after they closed in on this base on foot was identical to Cody’s own plan: ride the heartbeat, ad lib the
damn thing through to life or death.