Philippine Hardpunch by Jim Case Read Free Book Online Page A

elite commando unit, American or of any other nationality, striking against the unprecedented unification
     poised to overthrow the present government.
    It could not fail.
    It must not fail, Locsin told himself.
    Everything had been taken into account at this vital point in time, yes.
    Everything, that is, save a wholly unexpected disaster such as
this
.
    He tugged himself from his reverie and stalked off across the body-and-rubble-strewn compound to check on Escaler’s radio
     alert to Javier. He would summon transportation to come and pick them up.
    Javier’s force would stop those commandos, whomever they were, and return the Jefferses, and Locsin wanted very much to be
     in on the kill.
    Whoever is responsible for this, he told himself, will die very soon.
    It could be no other way.
    Javier had just started doing things to the naked, unconscious woman tied to the bed when a strong pounding at the door interrupted
     him.
    He grunted, set down the pliers and turned from the spread-eagled figure of the young woman. He was already in an ill temper.
     He did not like it when they passed out too soon, as this one had, from fright, before he could begin.
    He swung open the door, glaring at the camou fatigue-clad man who stood there at crisp attention.
    “I left strict orders not to be disturbed.”
    The man in the doorway kept his eyes diligently averted from the unconscious figure on the bed, visible inside the base commandant’s
     private quarters.
    “Uh, trouble, sir, Colonel Locsin—”
    “You are finished, fool, for interrupting me like this.”
    “The colonel’s base was attacked!”
    The subordinate hurried to spew it out.
    That caught Javier’s attention, cooling the crazy fires inside him.
    “Attacked?”
    “A commando force. A radio message just came in. They’re heading on our direction! They withdrew from Locsin’s base only minutes
     ago. The colonel believes they intend to rendezvous with air pickup somewhere between his base and ours.”
    “Order up four helicopters,” Javier snapped without lapsing a beat. “I want each gunship loaded with as many men as it will
     carry. I will accompany, to command.”
    The man in the doorway executed a curt salute.
    “I will see to it.”
    The “soldier” withdrew, double-timing away.
    Javier slammed the door. He crossed to the shelf near the bed. He pulled down and strapped on a holstered Tokarev machine-gun
     pistol.
    He ignored the unconscious peasant girl, whose hands and wrists were tied to opposite ends of the bed with leather thongs.
     There would be time enough for pleasure later.
    His heart had not been in it tonight anyway, he realized, just as he had realized such “pleasures” had become more and more
     of a compulsion of late.
    But he had hoped this one, here, would take his mind off, even for a little while, what had consumed him for so long.
    The moment of truth was almost at hand; all he had worked and sacrificed and risked for.
    In losing himself in passions of the flesh he had hoped to find some respite from the tension that had made his gut a tight
     knot for too long. It had almost worked.
    And now, this.
    He reached the door on his way out, opened the door, paused there with one hand on the knob, and turned to see the peasant
     girl’s eyes flicker open, returning foggily to consciousness.
    It had become more and more difficult of late for him to find women for even normal sex, despite his position of power.
    He
controlled the province, yes.
    Not the NPA. Not even the troops sent here by Manila.
He
, Arturo Javier, controlled this part of Mindanao with the same brutality of an Al Capone or an Adolf Hitler.
    Yet this meant nothing in the eyes of women when they beheld his profound ugliness. He detested every line on his own visage:
     the sloping forehead, the blubbery lips, the tiny black pinpoint eyes low behind greasy, overfleshed cheekbones, and especially
     the shiny, jagged, long-healed knife scar that traveled from above his right