Philippine Hardpunch (19 page)

A
rturo Javier looked up irritably from the maps he had been studying when the sounds of a man screaming at the top of his lungs
from somewhere nearby outside his tent shattered the humid afternoon air.

The rains had passed, making the heat worse than before, the jungle around this makeshift staging area nothing but a steambath;
mist rising from the ground, the dripping sounds of water falling from everything.

The low, black cloud cover made the natural stench of vegetative decay around them ten times worse, the ground nothing but
sucking mud even in his private tent.

He had been pondering this necessary shift in the wake of what had happened at Locsin’s camp and had been thinking about the
coming confrontation with General Chung of the North Korean UNG II.

Chung was due at any moment.

One of Javier’s troopers appeared at one opened end-flap of the tent and stood sharply at attention.

The male screeching climbed in decibels till it became like a woman being cruelly tortured. The thought intrigued Javier.

“What is it?”

“A government informer,” the trooper reported. “They’ve tied him to a tree. I was sent to tell you, sir.”

Javier grabbed his military cap.

“Let us have a look.”

He strode from the tent through the muck of the staging area.

The screaming tapered off to whimpers, then ceased altogether.

This should be interesting, Javier told himself. And diverting.

The sun was beginning its arching descent into the west.

Tonight.

Tonight Operation Thunderstrike
would
strike.

His thoughts had been occupied with nothing else, naturally, especially not since the fiasco involving Locsin and that kidnapped
American family and the firefight with that commando strike force, whoever those swine had been.

Upon his return to his base after executing Locsin, he had ordered the peasant girl he’d left tied to his bed in his trailer
to be taken out, destroyed, and buried so that nothing about her disappearance would lead to him.

There was no more time for pleasures of the flesh.

The intervening hours since then had been spent in relocating both the New People’s Army force, now commanded by Escaler,
and in simultaneously relocating Javier’s group.

The two forces, this most unlikely alliance of communist insurgents and ex-Marcos cronies, had established this new staging
area some fifteen kilometers south of their previous camps.

Hardly an ideal situation, Javier knew. They did not have a walled or fenced perimeter, though he’d ordered men of both forces
to be heavily positioned in a perimeter and others sent to heavily patrol the surrounding jungle, a jungle remote and all
but uninhabitable, the principal reason Javier had chosen this as an alternative contingency site when he had decided on the
previous two areas for his force and the NPA to set up several weeks ago.

Though security here was not all he would have wished, he felt safer having these unwashed Marxists close at hand, where he
could keep an eye on them. He had vowed to himself that there would be no more slipups like the one that had cost that idiot,
Locsin, his worthless existence.

He and the trooper, who kept a respectful several paces behind, tramped through the mud, past armored vehicles and lines of
tents pitched by his men and the New People’s Army.

At least, he reminded himself, they would be here for only another handful of hours. Valera and General Maceda were also due
shortly, and, soon after that, his orders would be given to the units already in place throughout the islands, units made
up of every stripe of this crazy -coalition, and they would
strike
!

The man who’d heard screaming was tied, sitting, to the base of a tree. He wore the uniform of Javier’s troops, but the tunic
had been torn open. Knife slashes, deep ones, dripped red pearls across his upper chest.

A cluster of Javier’s troops stood bordering the tableau, and one of these men held a knife that was tinted crimson at its
tip, the men regarding the para tied to the tree with contempt. As Javier and the trooper approached, some of the men started
kicking the guy bound to the tree, brutal boot-smacks to the man’s chest and head.

The man’s head sagged forward and Javier saw blood oozing from his nose and mouth, too.

“How was he uncovered as an informant?” he demanded of the man with the knife. “Is there any doubt?”

The others stepped back respectfully.

This staging area had been hurriedly set up with lines of tents pitched by Javier’s men in even rows to the north, the communist
insurgents setting down a more ragtag line of their tents in the rain to the south of an invisible point.

This tree where the man was tied was approximately at one end of that invisible line, and men who had been huddling around
small fires and in tents from both sides were drawn to this commotion.

Javier saw, from the comer of his eye, Escaler approaching at a run from the direction of the NPA’s h.q. tent.

“There’s no doubt, sir,” the man with the knife muttered in as respectful a voice as he could muster. This one’s name was
Sante, Javier recalled. A hit man for the Burmese faction of the Golden Triangle until an international drug news crackdown
had brought him to new climes, and into Javier’s employ.

“He had a shortwave radio stashed just beyond the perimeter. We don’t know how he managed it but he was sending a signal to
someone. We caught the pigfucker in the act. We can give you the details now or later of what we heard him say.”

“Hand me the knife.”

Sante handed the knife, handle first.

Javier turned toward the man tied to the tree, who appeared to have passed out. He extended his left hand to grasp a handful
of the informer’s dirty, unkept hair. He tugged at the hair with force enough to thwack the back of the man’s head against
the tree trunk.

The man gasped in pain, his eyes flying open.

Javier chuckled. He did not recognize this one. He had ordered his ranks increased for Operation Thunderstrike. He wielded
the knife so the blade wavered in slight, light-as-air circles near the informer’s jugular vein.

“I thought you might be play-acting,” he snickered. “The time has come to talk, my unfortunate friend. What branch of government
are you with?”

Escaler reached them.

“Stop!” he called. The newly promoted NPA commander stopped just short of grabbing at Javier’s hand holding the knife.

Javier did not release the man’s hair or move the knife from inches away from the man’s pulsating jugular vein.

The only sound in that moment seemed to be the frightened gaspings of the man tied to the tree.

Javier said in a low, brittle voice to Escaler, “You speak with a tone of command. As if you have already forgotten who commands
here.”

Escaler worked at catching his breath.

“I do not mean to appear disrespectful. I only… wish to be apprised of what—”

“We have found a spy for the Manila government planted among my troops. I am dealing with him.” He looked at something happening
behind Escaler. “And I have run out of time. Other matters need attending to, I see.”

Escaler looked around.

A Chor-7 bounced up the trail that led to the staging area, the trail down which the machinery of war would roll within a
few hours. He recognized the vehicle, and the passenger in it.

“General Chung.”

“Precisely.” Javier nodded. He returned his attention to the bound man he held against the tree. “And, now that I think of
it, it hardly matters what government unit you are with, my informing friend, nor does it much matter how you were planted
here among us, or how much you have tried to pass along to your superiors. I’ve made sure that the big picture has not reached
your level of rank and file. And in another few hours, none of what you could hve passed on will matter. Too bad you can’t
pass
that
along, isn’t it? You might have earned yourself a promotion.”

“Don’t kill me,
please
!!” the man wailed, forgetting about the wounds of his torture.

Javier wondered in that flicker of time why he liked it so much when they begged for their lives, knowing they were seconds
away from death.

“Filth,” he hissed.

He flicked the knife in a short, sharp slash, then stepped back, as did his men, as rich red blood spurted in a solid geyser.

He snickered at the sickness he saw in Escaler’s eyes.

“Perhaps you do not have the stomach for duty in the field, eh,
Commander
.”

He emphasized that last word to make sure Escaler would understand.

Escaler drew his back erect. The look disappeared from his eyes, which stared down at the ghastly sight of the man bleeding
to death, the geyser reduced to a coursing series of bright rivulets that pumped from the neck wound to course across the
man’s body and dissolve into the water-soaked loam.

The sitting corpse shuddered for several seconds against the tree in death spasms, the outstretched legs fluttering upon the
ground.

“I only thought it prudent to find out what he knew before we… finished him,” Escaler said. “Security for this operation affects
my men too.”

“Your men.” Javier snickered. “That could change. / put you in command. I can take that command away from you.”

Escaler turned to observe, with Javier, the stout, stubby form in an ill-fitting black suit emerge from the Chor-7 and briskly
stride toward them.

“With all due respect,” Escaler said, “perhaps we should hear what General Chung has to say about it. He does, after all,
represent a power greater than either of ours, does he not?”

“We shall see,” Javier mumbled to himself. He handed the knife back to Sante and indicated the dead man with a slight nod
of his head. “See that this garbage is removed.”

“At once.” Sante nodded.

He began seeing to it, ordering some of the troopers to the untidy task of untying the corpse, which now stunk of released
bowels.

Javier moved off to meet Chung as if nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred.

“General Chung, welcome to Mindanao.’

Chung brushed away droplets of moisture and specks of vegetation picked up on the rough drive in the Chor-7 through the jungle.

“This is a miserable anus of a place. I have no wish to indulge in pleasantries. I am here to oversee this New People’s Army
detachment’s involvement in what you have chosen to call Operation Thunderstrike. The other principals are here?”

Javier kept his true feelings from showing.

“Senator Valera and General Maceda will be arriving shortly.”

“The Americans are involved, did you know that?”

Javier snarled, “How did
you
know that?”

“We know everything,” Chung said impassively. He glanced at Sante’s troopers carrying away the dead informer. “Very messy.”

“I believe in making examples,” Javier snarled. “And you are hardly here to oversee
me
, General Chung.”

“You, and those you represent, have painted a most interesting picture of how things will be after tonight,” Chung said. “But,
it has not happened
yet
.”

“It will,” Javier growled. He told himself to relax, not to push. this. “I need to speak with you in my tent, General.” He
pointedly eyed Escaler. “Alone, if you please.”

Escaler started to say, “But I—”

“I want to know what happened to Colonel Locsin,” Chung stated, his impassivity intact. “There is a top secret unit operating
out of Clark Air Base that is involved; it is all we know. They rescued the American family from you,” he snarled at Escaler,
with a hint of emotion rippling the granite face.

Escaler took a step back, Javier noting that the new NPA unit commander had quickly lost his pique at not having been invited
to accompany them.

“That was not my doing, General Chung. I have done nothing but loyally serve our cause since—”

Javier chuckled to Chung. “As a matter of strict fact, General, Escaler here is telling the truth, and that ties in with your
Colonel Locsin.”

He started back toward his tent. Chung accompanied him.

“I have been instructed not to interfere with your overall strategy or operations,” the North Korean told him as they walked
back past the troopers already losing interest in the scene around the tree, returning to their own tents and small sputtering
fires. “I must, however, insist on your honoring your promises to the New People’s Army when this operation is finished.”

They reached Javier’s tent. Javier held back the flap and nodded Chung inside.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing, General,” he said as he followed the Korean into the tent. He closed the tent flaps
after them. “You’re not going to be around, no matter what happens.”

“What is that you say?”

Chung started to tum, his impassivity giving in to rising alarm.

Javier came up on the shorter man with a stealth belying his apelike build. His left arm curved around under the Koreans throat.
He raised a knee, pulling the UNG II agent back against it for balance, his left arm choking back the gurgle of alarm Chung
did manage and which did not carry outside the tent. Javier brought in from behind in his right fist the stiletto he had hidden
beneath the front of his fatigues. He buried that long, thin blade into the base of Chung’s skull, behind the right ear, sliding
the blade in to the hilt, rapidly wiggling the stiletto as much as he could to scramble the man’s brain.

With an abrupt jerk that almost tore Chung loose from his grip, the Korean’s frantic struggles expired. He uttered a bubbly
sigh that sounded almost like a contented baby falling asleep. His body sagged in Javier’s grasp.

Javier pulled out the stiletto and let collapse the second man he had slain in less than five minutes.

No death spasms or jerkings from this one, he noted. He knelt down to wipe the blade clean by sliding it back and forth across
the dead man’s clothing, then he secreted it beneath his shirt. Each man died differently, it seemed to him, and he had seen
and caused many a man to die. I should set my thoughts down when this is over, he thought. But of course he would not mention
such things as the pleasure inflicting death and pain brought him, for such matters were hardly to be linked to a man who
would rule a great nation, if not tomorrow, then soon, very soon.