Philippine Hardpunch (7 page)

Cal Jeffers assisted his wife, then his daughter, into the backseat of the first Chor-7, then joined Caine in front, every
eye of the Jeffers family registering concern in the direction of the men in the other vehicle.

“Let… let us fight with you,” Jeffers implored.

His wife and daughter nodded agreement.

Cody shook his head.

“Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. Our job is to get you out of here, safe and sound, not get you killed. Find cover and
sit tight. Our chopper will be here any minute.”

The incoming choppers were almost upon them now, though still not in sight, but their oncoming racket had blotted out the
jungle screechings and everything else.

“Hit it, Hawkeye,” Cody shouted.

“I hear that,” Hawkins nodded.

He popped a clutch busting away from there.

Caine steered his vehicle in the opposite direction, down the trail for one hundred meters, then he yanked the Chor-7 sharply
into the first break in the wall of jungle he came to along the trail.

The Chor-7 and its passengers disappeared into the verdant wall.

The rotoring chopper noise sounded almost on top of them now.

“There they are!” Cody snarled.

Hawkins’ and Murphy’s eyes followed his to four Huey gunships sailing into view, coming in upon the LZ clearing so low that
a knoll of trees extending into the clearing several thousand meters across the stretch had shielded them from sight until
this very instant.

“Locsin called them in,” Hawkeye grunted. “That’s the only way they could have gotten here that fast.”

“Who the hell are they?” Rufe bellowed above the noise.

The Chor-7 engine raced, bumping them back along the trail from which they had come moments earlier.

The gunships slowed down across the clearing, obviously knowing what they were looking for. They fanned out in an even line
and started together across the clearing, coming across in a line from the opposite side.

“No government markings,” Cody noted from their position of concealment.

“Man, those turkeys don’t need markings,” Hawkeye groused, watching Murphy rotate the M-60 so it pointed in the direction
of the choppers. “These guys are gonna be trouble no matter who they are!”

He sped the Chor-7 down a rocky incline of the trail, where it angled away from the clearing on its way back toward the NPA
camp.

“We go much farther this way and we’re gonna end up back in Colonel Locsin’s lap,” Murphy noted with no show of enthusiasm.

The Hueys slowed their speed, scouring the clearing like low-flying insects looking for something to munch. The Chor-7 zipped
behind a thin wall of smaller trees and drooping vines and jungle growth separating the trail from the clearing.

Cody could see the choppers across the clearing, through the trees. He saw them drawing closer, closer; then the line of gunships
picked up speed, roaring in on them.

“They’ve spotted us.”

“And this,” Murphy growled, “is where it gets
real
hairy!”

The pilot’s voice crackled in Javier’s helmet headset at the exact moment he himself spotted the racing Chor-7 across the
clearing, behind that natural drapery of vines and fronds just inside the treeline.

“Over there!” The pilot pointed.

Javier nodded. He spoke into his direct tac net hookup.

“Birds one and two, land. Engage and capture… if possible. Bird three, remain up here with us. We will cover. They’ll have
air pickup coming in for them. We take
them
on.”

His headset rattled back with affirmatives from the pilots of the designated gunships, which broke from the formation to begin
lowering, each of the copters carrying at least a dozen top-notch paramilitaries.

Javier’s pulse raced, the tasted scent of blood becoming the scent of the
kill
. As his and the other gunship zoomed in, he saw more clearly the Chor-7 chugging along, trying to put distance between itself
and the clearing that had to have been their pickup point.

He saw three men in that vehicle, through the Huey’s Plexiglas, but even from this distance, as the gunship maintained its
treetop-level approach, he knew that these were the men, or at least some of them, who had assaulted the communists.

Javier saw that the men in that Jeep down below were heavyset, heavily armed combatants in camou who did not flinch at the
sight of oncoming gunships.

He saw no sign of any other vehicles, the treetop fronds a billowing sea of harsh green stretching below to infinity in every
direction.

Javier saw the big black man at the M-60 machine gun in the rear of that vehicle swing around toward the two copters and open
fire when they were coming right down on the Chor-7.

Another man braced himself in the front passenger seat, firing away nonstop with a CAR-15.

The Chor-7’s driver upshifted, coaxing more power out of the fast-moving vehicle.

Javier could not hear that gunfire from the vehicle below through the sounds of his copter’s racket, but a projectile speared
a hole, spiderwebbing cracks inches from his head.

“Fire!”
he yelled into his headset microphone. “Destroy them!”

To his either side, the two Hueys began their paradoxically overweight yet graceful descent, the side hatches yanking open,
rifle-toting men inside priming themselves to hit the ground and close in to block off the roaring Chor-7.

We must kill them!
Javier’s mind screamed, wholly inflamed.

The pilot of Javier’s gunship, of the one zooming in three rotor lengths to his right, opened up each with their miniguns
and the 40mm cannons blamming, twin lines of evenly spaced explosions pulverizing the jungle.

For a moment it looked like the driver of that Chor-7 would outmaneuver the impacting cannon fire, but Javier had chosen to
fly with the best of his pilots.

The man next to him justified that faith, angling Javier’s gunship just so, then triggered another boom from the 40mm that
only barely missed the racing Chor-7 but hit close enough for a geysering eruption of flame, smoke, and earth that caught
the back end of the vehicle, the force of the blast lifting it and the men aboard into a nose-crunched forward somersault.

Twin gunships buzzed by over that sight and for a moment it was gone beneath Javier’s line of vision. The last thing he saw
as the Huey sped by was the Chor-7 flipping the three men aboard it airborne, catapulted into three different directions.

Hawkins hit the ground to come out of the roll in a loose-limbed somersault he had first perfected as a smart-ass kid busting
broncs for rodeo prize money in the Panhandle, before he was drafted, before Nam.

He righted himself, unleathering the .45 automatic holstered at his side, his CAR-15 lost somewhere in what remained of the
Chor-7.

The impacting cannon fire had heaved the vehicle end over end into a tree.

The Chor-7 presently rested at a crazed, crashed angle against the tree, smoke steaming from a punctured radiator, one wheel
stuck up in the air, looping unevenly, the rear axle busted apart at the middle.

Hawkins hit a combat crouch close to the ground, unsheathing his combat knife with his other hand. He viewed the sloping stretch
of trail around him.

The two Hueys had zapped by overhead. He allowed himself to momentarily forget about those. He focused his attention around
to where the third of these unmarked choppers rested its landing skids upon the clearing ground no more than twenty yards
from the treeline where Hawkins now stood.

Before that chopper completely settled, the side doors unleashed a stream of camou fatigue-clad paramilitaries armed with
what looked to Hawkins like standard Kalishnakov AK-47s.

The force spread out in a staggered combat line with plenty of space between each man, advancing at a jog toward the treeline.

The second chopper hovering slightly back in a defensive posture now commenced settling down.

Hawkins saw men crowding at its hatchdoor as if eager to leap out. He glanced this way and that, and spotted Murphy and Cody
coming toward him from a break several meters up and across the road.

Cody had managed to hold onto his CAR-15, which he gripped in both fists. Murphy moved toward the remains of the Chor-7. They
both looked ruffled, disheveled from the crash, but Hawkins knew these guys well enough that he was sure they would appear
unless an errant piece of shrapnel from that impacting blast that sent them spinning had found a mark.

Hawkins had ridden with the blast that had tossed his vehicle, as he now saw his buddies must have done. He wiped at what
he thought was sweat near his right temple. His hand came away red with droplets of his own blood. He snarled an oath and
gently probed the area with his fingertips, too hyped up with the adrenaline rush of the moment to feel any pain, but he did
feel a paper-cut-thin slice beneath his right eye. He wiped away the remaining few droplets of blood with the back of his
gunhand.

Cody came up to him, motioning toward the sturdy trunks of towering teak trees that lined this piece of the trail.

“We make a stand here.”

Murphy leaned up from the rear of the Chor-7, where the M-60 had been mounted and was now blocked from sight by the vehicle’s
overturned chassis, emerging with the big M-60 cradled in his massive, muscle-knotted arms, a long strip of ammo belt wrapped
around his torso, brass shiny in the probing rays of sunlight.

Murphy loped back over to Cody and Hawkins, who were already spreading out along the treeline to meet the oncoming line of
paramilitaries closing in, the second chopper descending in the clearing seconds away from disgorging its human cargo.

The other two choppers that had flown the strafing run, overturning the Chor-7, banked around, beneath the muggy gray and
blue sky, maintaining just-above-the-treetops altitude, preparing for another run designed to keep Cody and his men pinned
while the foot soldiers closed in.

Then everything changed. A fully armed U.S. Air Force gunship, its rotors throwing off stabbing lances of sunlight, thrust
itself onto the scene unannounced, its approach shielded by its low altitude, the engine and rotor sounds buried beneath the
hellfire of this battle beneath the sunrise.

Cody opened fire with his CAR-15 on the line of men advancing from that first chopper, the assault rifle stuttering angrily
in his grip, the sustained back-and-forth burst rocking his body.

Murphy’s mighty frame shuddered and shimmied behind the rapid-fire wham-
blam!-
wham-
blam!
-wham-
blam!
of the M-60.

Hawkins contented himself with sheathing his combat knife to hit classic two-handed target range stance, squeezing off one
round after another from the .45 automatic.

The line of closing-in paras had expected them to hightail it in the opposite direction, not to take on such odds.

Paramilitaries started stumbling backward, down and out under the hail of fire from the treeline, while others held the line,
continuing forward a bit more slowly into the face of the fire, their AK-47s hammering flame and smoke and bullets that sprayed
the line of teak trees. The Air Force chopper opened fire on the Huey that was just about to touch down. A 40mm cannon fired
a pointing finger of white smoke and fire that zipped almost faster than the eye could see to strike bull’s-eye, exploded
that Huey full of human beings into a violently blossoming fireball, bits and fiery pieces of machinery and human body parts
hurtling crazily in every direction from thirty feet off the ground.

Javier felt his face blanch and he could not pull his eyes from the sight of the fireball plummeting to the ground.

Alongside his Huey, the other copter which had joined in the strafing run of the Chor-7 swung around to face the Air Force
gunship, loosing a burst from turreted miniguns.

The pilot of that oncoming American chopper shifted his stick into a blinding-fast evasive maneuver, and if some rounds did
hit, they did not slow that gunship down.

Javier wrenched around to the pilot beside him, who eyed him for instructions. Javier started to speak, then momentarily checked
himself. He must not appear a coward to his men in the other two choppers.

He gestured to the pilot, throwing a thumb over his shoulder in a repeated
get us out of here!
signal.

The pilot nodded understanding, tugging back on his cyclic stick.

The Air Force gunship rushed in to engage the other Huey.

Javier’s force on the ground encountered heavy fire from the commandos along the treeline.

The Huey gunship with Arturo Javier aboard stole discreetly away from the ground-and-air firefight.

*      *      *

Cody bit off a useless curse when his CAR-15 jammed. He tossed the rifle aside and pawed for the .45 holstered at his hip.

The world reeled to a kaleidoscope of frozen combat moments.

He lay flat, shielded behind a tree trunk. He steadied his aim with both elbows on the ground and started pulling off rounds
at the winking saffron dots from the enemy’s AK-47s that sent projectiles pulverizing tree fronds and the trunk.

The scene swirled behind the dark, foreboding fires of battle, the remains of the downed enemy chopper blazing out of control
in the clearing where the now ragged line of riflemen had separated and fallen flat to return fire on the treeline.

Murphy’s fire from the mighty M-60 kept those foot soldiers pinned down.

In the low sky above, beneath slate gray clouds, the Air Force chopper and the Huey continued circling, dogfighting, miniguns
firing at each other like champ fighters in a ring testing each other’s reflexes while trying to keep out of striking range.

The U.S. bird unleashed sudden cannon fire, booming through everything else except for the second blossoming fireball of the
morning. The Huey disintegrated into fire and destruction, pitching groundward not two hundred meters from where the wreckage
of the other Huey continued smearing the scene with inky black smoke.