Philippine Hardpunch (8 page)

Some poor bastard was screaming his head off inside one of those fires.

Rufe’s M-60 finally went quiet, the last of the ammo belt feeding through the humongous weapon so only the pistol fire from
Cody and Hawkins answered the continuous barrage of rifle fire from the straggling line of men bellied down in the clearing.

The instant the M-60 quieted, some of those paramilitaries showed themselves in crouched positions to get better lines of
fire on the threesome undercover behind the line of teak trees.

Some of the paras in the clearing turned and fired bursts at the Air Force gunship, which had pulled around from having downed
the Huey to start coming straight on into the rifle fire on the ground. The sun, fully risen, grew smaller and redder, the
air grew heavier, thicker, with heat, smoke, and the smell of death.

The line of men in the clearing responded to a snapped command and stormed to their feet, charging forward, their warrior
cries renting the air, their AKs firing.

Cody, Hawkins, and Murphy returned fire with their pistols as best they could, dropping an enemy here, one there, but not
hardly enough to hold back that line closing in now at a trot from no more than five hundred feet away.

M
urphy paused in firing. He scrunched himself in flatter against the lip of ground that caught and deflected much of the incoming
fire from the clearing. He yanked a full clip for the .45 and palm-slapped it into the pistol’s butt.

“Maybe Cody’s Army is history,” he grunted, and began firing again.

“Not quite,” Cody growled, reloading his own pistol.

Murphy and Hawkins saw what he saw; what the approaching line of men did not see… yet.

“Well, gawddamn, teabag.” Hawkins chuckled through the sounds of weapons fire. “If it ain’t about gawddamn fucking time!”

The other Chor-7 ejected itself from the treeline well downrange from all of this firefight. Cody saw Cal Jeffers behind the
wheel. The vehicle sped around the enemy’s far flank.

Richard Caine rode the M-60 in the Chor-7’s tail end.

Cody saw no sign of Louise and Ann Jeffers.

Caine opened fire and kept right on firing in a nonstop burst, swinging the M-60 on its mount to rake with its furious fire
across those who had been about to overrun Cody’s position, and on the men firing on the Air Force gunship whose turreted
miniguns already sang blistering songs of death, backtripping men onto the ground.

Caine swung the M-60 back on the paras who spun to confront his flanking movement, several of whom flew off their feet, their
spines blown out through their chests, messily, with their guts.

The fire slacked off on the position held by Cody, Rufe, and Hawkeye, who had left the ground to crouch behind the remains
of the teak trees for a better field of fire at those in the clearing, keeping up a steady barrage of pistol fire.

The tables turned, paras in the clearing toppled in every direction from the Air Force gunship’s miniguns, the M-60 fire from
Caine in the Chor-7 where Jeffers had parked to offer the Brit a field of fire.

Finally, a couple of the paras just said the hell with it, didn’t throw their rifles but did make a running break for farther
up the treeline before they too got the pulverization treatment from either the chopper or Caine, Cody could not be sure,
and it did not much matter now.

Any signs of movement ceased from the clearing, not even a scream or moaning from any wounded.

The kills had been one-shot and these enemy, whoever the hell they were, were
dead
.

Everyone—the chopper, Caine, the man crouched inside the treeline—held their fire.

The chopper started to settle to ground in the clearing, between the treeline and the twin funeral pyres of the downed Hueys
that made the morning dark and bitter, plumes of black smoke rising from wreckage and the awful, sweetish stench of violent
death.

The clearing was littered with fallen bodies torn apart.

It was a scene from Hell.

Cal Jeffers steered the Chor-7 in their direction and at that moment Cody saw Louise and Ann Jeffers gracefully hoofing toward
them from the direction of where Caine must have had them wait out of sight while he and Jeffers played the cavalry to the
rescue.

“We made it, we made it,
we made it!
” Louise Jeffers kept wailing over and over, unable to take her eyes from the U.S. Air Force chopper settling down.

“Let’s hope you’re right, ma’am.” Hawkeye nodded.

“We’re forgetting something,” Murphy growled.

The Chor-7 driven by Jeffers swept into a turn and braked up alongside them.

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” Cody said, his attention not on the landing chopper but on what could be seen from this point
of the winding trail leading back in the direction of the NPA base. “Colonel Locsin.”

The keening whistle of an incoming mortar caught everyone’s attention then, followed by another and another before they started
impacting randomly along the treeline too far down from them, explosions whamming up fire and earth across the clearing.

The third mortar hit too close to the landing chopper. The impact blast tilted the gunship momentarily off-balance and for
an instant Cody thought the copter would flip onto its side under the hot force of the blast, but the gunship righted and
landed.

The mortar fire ceased, but that would only be long enough for spotters to wait for the smoke to clear, to spot new targets.

Murphy’s eyes were on the chopper where it sat, its idling rotors catching and refracting sunlight.

“Something’s wrong.”

Cody caught it then, too.

No sign of life stirred from within the chopper. By now the two-man crew should have already swung the hatch open to assist
Cody and his group in a hurried boarding, but… nothing.

“I suggest, when in a bind, that you first consider the benefits of riding with Caine’s taxi service,” Caine commented dryly
from the Chor-7.

“The teabag’s got a
grand
idea.” Hawkins mimicked his buddy’s English accent on the word “grand,” but he wasted no time in ushering the Jefferses aboard
the vehicle while Caine moved to take over driving chores from Mr. Jeffers.

Murphy climbed behind the M-60, naturally.

Figures emerged into sight down along the trail, well out of range of the pistols.

“Rufe, downrange!”

Murphy cranked the mounted M-60 at the command, saw the first of Locsin’s foot soldiers starting to catch up with them.

The M-60’s ear-punching muzzle blast exploded over their heads, eliciting much activity along the backtrack: figures diving
for cover, others slammed off their feet like wheat chopped down by a razor-sharp scythe.

Cody and Hawkeye leaped to opposite sides of the Chor-7, bracing themselves again as Caine sent the vehicle zipping across
the clearing in a semicircle around the strewn corpses before angling toward that chopper.

Cody watched the skies during the short, bumpy ride but saw no sign of the fourth Huey that had so discreetly withdrawn before
the real fracas got under way.

Caine braked the Chor-7 to a jolting stop alongside the chopper.

Mortar fire blazed on them again from the treeline, the first incoming impacting well behind them, the boom of geysering earth
and explosives adding more wafting smoke and soot to this hazy, sun-splashed killground.

Another hit, downrange.

Murphy kept the heat on the M-60, peppering that treeline.

Cody and Hawkins leaped from the vehicle, their pistols useless at this range. Cody waved the Jeffers family toward the yawning
side door of the chopper.

Caine came around to assist the ladies aboard, then followed them in with Mr. Jeffers, the steady racket of Murphy’s busy
M-60 enveloping the scene.

Cody and Hawkeye climbed in and rushed toward the cockpit.

Cody knew what to expect when he saw the puddles of scarlet behind the cockpit seats rivuleting backwards into the bay because
of the slight tilt, at which the chopper rested.

The seats were armored, but that had not been protection enough for the pilot and copilot, the two-man crew of this gunship,
who had caught enough shrapnel from that glancing mortar hit, through a jagged hole in the Plexiglas, to render them into
burbling, unrecognizable masses of butchered gristle and gore.

Cody and Hawkeye threw themselves into the unpleasant task of unstrapping the two seated dead men and setting them on the
deck behind the seats.

Hawkins then strapped himself into the copilot’s seat, familiarizing himself with the warbird’s weaponry systems.

Cody dashed back past where Caine was, snowing the Jeffers family where to stand, well away from the side doors, gripping
wall straps.

Mr. and Mrs. Jeffers and Ann saw the remains of the dead men before averting their eyes, and in those eyes Cody saw the awareness
that the same thing could happen to any of them at any second.

He gained the door and shouted above the hammering and yammering of Rufe’s M-60, firing white-hot from where the big guy from
Mississippi kept the trigger depressed.

“Rufe…
Rufe!
”

Murphy heard that, ceased firing and left the Chor-7 in a leap to gain the chopper, reaching Cody’s side in two long bounds.

“Just about out of ammo anyhow.” He grinned, sweating.

Cody spotted camou-clad figures emerge from the treeline again to set up mortars. He threw a thumb in the direction of the
cockpit.

“Get us the hell out of here!”

“My pleasure all the way.”

Another three long strides took Murphy to the cockpit. He lost his grin when he saw the dead crew.

Colonel Locsin’s NPA guerillas opened fire with their mortars again.

Another overshot.

Another a little closer.

Murphy threw switches on the cockpit dash without bothering to strap himself in.

The chopper’s rotor RPMs increased, revving engine noises from the turbines mounted directly overhead. Then the Air Force
gunship lifted off.

Cody grabbed hold of the pylon grips of the M-60 mounted in the side hatchdoor. As Rufe lifted them up and out of there, he
held on and hammered a long burst at the figures leaving their mortar setups, fleeing back to the safety of the treeline when
they realized they were the ones being caught in the open, but only half of Locsin’s force made it to safety.

Cody registered faces upturned from down there, pulling away as the chopper rose, as they ran, and some of those faces and
bodies below ruptured with bloody force as the slamming rain of heavy projectiles tripped bodies forward, unloading death
and confusion down there, the chopper’s parting shots before Cody sensed they would be out of the M-60’s range.

Rufe worked the controls with all the expertise of a guy who had been making a hell of a good living as a commercial chopper
pilot before Cody’s Army had been regrouped by Pete Lund.

The chopper steadied off into a straight-ahead flight, Rufe pouring on the knots.

Cody moved away from the M-60, toward the bench just inside the hatchdoor. He sank onto the bench, opposite where Caine sat
with the Jefferses.

Parents and child at last freed from terrorist hands.

Mission accomplished, as far as Cody’s Army was concerned.

Supposedly.

Except… Cody didn’t think so.

He sat there, feeling for the first time the weariness of body and spirit that is the first stage of postcombat wind-down,
the million and one little aches and bruises and cuts from such prolonged, extreme physical exertion making themselves known
all at once, the near total exhaustion from having danced with Death.

From having taken so many lives.

From having one’s life imperiled for such a stretch.

And yet… and yet,

There was in John Cody’s gut the tug of something left undone.

The Jeffers family was safe, sure.

This “mission” had a conclusion, though hardly wholly satisfactory when the price was considered. He pulled down blankets
from a shelf and covered the corpses bleeding across the desk, allowing these brave men at least privacy in death, the ultimate
sacrifices paid for this mission.

Rufe would steer them to safety.

They were out of it, yeah.

But, damn it, the rug would not leave.

He had never liked loose ends and there were too many of them this time—and they added up to hint at something too damn ominous
when considered together.

He was determined to identify at first opportunity the pedigree of the force in those Hueys that had come to the communists’
rescue at the last minute.

Who were they?

Who was in command?

He told himself to let that stuff go for now, to ride the winddown.

Too many men had died this a.m.

Something
very
big was in the wind.

Had to be.

The jungle was a racing green blur outside and below the open hatch door, through which wind poured, ruffling Cody’s hair,
cooling his sweat, but it did not cool the sense of danger all around, of more violence ready to explode, ticking away somewhere
like a time bomb.

It reminded him of Nam, yeah.

Too goddamn much, it reminded him of Nam.

C
olonel Locsin started to run toward the front gate when he heard the Huey chopper coming in from the direction taken by the
attackers.

He and Escaler had been sitting drinking hot, bitter tea at the h.q. hut, by the radio.

Communications had blacked out during much of the operation but Locsin had heard plainly enough the fierce flaring of warfare
audible over a distance of less than two kilometers.

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.