False Front

Latham shrugged. “Around the gyms and martial-arts training halls folks know me as the ‘big American.’ I guess I kind of stand out.”

“You didn’t tell anybody about me coming, did you?”

“Of course not,” Latham said. He rubbed the beard stubble on his face again. “I’m still wondering what happened to the CIA guy, too. If word’s out on us, it may be on him, too. You suppose he’s dead?”

Bolan shrugged. There was no way to know.

Latham pulled out his tobacco can. “They’ll have men watching old Mario’s house tonight,” he said. “You can bet on it. We’re going to have to be even more careful than we were last night.”

“Or less careful.”

Latham had been about to open the tobacco can but now he stopped and looked up at the Executioner. “Huh?”

Bolan didn’t answer. For the past half hour, as they’d made their way back through the jungle toward the stilt houses, an idea had been forming in his head. It hadn’t quite yet crystallized, but already it was beginning to look as though it had a better chance of succeeding than simply setting up on Mario Subing’s house again.

With all the heat on them at the moment, Latham was right. The men of Rio Hondo would indeed be watching for them to make an appearance at the stilt houses. And while there had been no guarantee that Candido Subing would show up on any given night, there was practically a guarantee that he would not visit his uncle on this particular evening. The word was obviously out.

The Executioner finally looked at the Texan. “Let’s just see how things go.”

Latham still looked confused, but nodded as he packed his lower lip with the finely ground tobacco from the can.

The Executioner’s eyes skirted the heavily wooded area around them. Ten feet back into the jungle, he saw what he was looking for—a long branch, low to the ground, jutting out from the trunk of a tree. Rising slowly, he walked to the tree, raised his machete over his head and sliced the green limb away with one cut. With the branch on the ground now, he chopped both ends until he had a sturdy, relatively straight, three-foot stick roughly two inches in diameter.

Latham had watched silently, but as the Executioner turned he saw a light bulb flash on in the Texan’s head. Latham smiled as he, too, rose to his feet, found a suitable limb and made his own short club. Both men sat.

Thirty minutes later the sun had finally gone down and Bolan and Latham found themselves in a darkness known only in the jungle.

The Executioner laid out his new plan.

“EVEN IF WE GET to the house without getting killed, you really think the old man is going to talk?” Latham whispered through the darkness to the man sitting across from him on the jungle floor.

The big shadowy form shrugged. “All I know is that everyone on Mindanao seems to know we’re here. That means Candido Subing knows it, too, so he’s not going to show up at Uncle Mario’s again until we’re out of the picture.” He waited a second, then said, “If you think you have a better idea, I’m willing to listen to it.”

Latham shook his head, then realized the movement might not be seen in the darkness. “Nope,” he whispered. “Nothing better.” He stared at the shadowy silhouette across from him. Latham knew the darkness would hide his eyes as he scrutinized Cooper with a mixture of respect and wonder. Slowly he shook his head. As a Delta Force soldier he had seen his share of action, but he had never worked with anyone even close to being like Cooper. His old friend T. J. Hawkins had told him this guy was the best, but that might well prove to be the understatement of Latham’s lifetime.

The Texan pulled the straw hat from his head, then removed the bandanna he’d tied beneath it. The tobacco in his mouth had lost its flavor and he let it drop from his lip. Slowly and silently, he grasped the bandanna in both hands and wrung out the sweat. It was still damp when he retied it around his forehead and covered it once more with his hat.

Staring into the blackness, Latham knew they would be going soon, and he knew just as well that they would be attacked by armed villagers. Again, he looked at the man across from him, knowing Cooper couldn’t see his stare. But this time he wondered if Cooper might not still know he was being scrutinized; might not simply feel it with whatever it was that made him so different. The guy did seem to have “powers far beyond those of mortal man” to quote the intros to the old “Superman” reruns he and Hawk had watched on TV when they were kids.

Latham chuckled silently. No, this guy wasn’t Superman. He was flesh and blood, but he was something more, too. As a Texas schoolboy Latham had studied state history, and he was reminded now of a quotation that had stuck in his mind since those days. The words had been uttered enthusiastically by the English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle speaking of James Bowie: “‘By Hercules! The man was greater than Caesar or Cromwell—well—nay, nearly equal to Odin or Thor. The Texans ought to build him an altar!’”

Latham’s gaze fell to the ground, but he continued to watch Cooper in his peripheral vision. Many altars in the form of statues and other memorials had been built for James Bowie in Texas, but Latham suspected that regardless of how deserving this man calling himself “Cooper” might be, he would never receive such honors. The wars the man fought were in the shadows. Clandestine. And Charlie Latham knew the man would never get credit for all he did for the world. At the same time he realized that, the Texan also realized that Cooper wouldn’t care. He had probably never even given personal glory a passing thought.

“You ready?” he heard his companion whisper.

In the darkness he could see the improvised baston—a Filipino fighting stick—dangling from the end of the man’s arm. Cooper’s machete hung from the other hand and, though he couldn’t see it in the darkness, Latham knew that it was held backward so that the blunt edge would be the striking side.

“I’m ready,” Latham said. With his own stick in his left hand, he flipped his machete around, too. But a last moment of doubt made him say, “You still serious about this no guns thing?”

Bolan nodded. “Keep the firepower ready, just in case. But it’s a last resort. Remember, these men think we’re here to hurt them and their families. They aren’t doing anything you or I wouldn’t do.”

“You realize we’d get better odds playing blackjack at the crookedest casino in Vegas, don’t you?” Latham asked.

The tall silhouette nodded again, but said nothing.

Which, to Charlie Latham, said it all. Yes, they’d probably die trying to do what they were about to try to do. But it was the right thing to do, so they’d do it.

Bolan stepped past Latham into the open area behind the inland houses, leading the Texan to the back of a crudely constructed storage building behind one of the houses. Both men dropped to a knee to reevaluate the situation. They knew the villagers were out there somewhere. Watching. Waiting. Knowing they would come. Who knew what lies they had been told about what the Americans wanted to do to them and their families? But it didn’t matter; the end result was the same. They erroneously viewed them as enemies and they would do their best to kill them both.

Scurrying out from behind the storage shed, the two Americans halted against the windowless back wall of the dilapidated dwelling directly across the roadway from Mario Subing’s home. Bolan peered around the corner, looked back and nodded.

Latham took a deep breath then let it out. Cooper hoped to cross the street and mount the steps of the stilt house, unseen if possible, then interrogate Subing’s uncle. With everyone looking for them already, Latham figured the chances of pulling that off were about a thousand to one. The fact was, had it been anyone else working with him, the Texan would have just flat refused to even try it.

Latham sighed. Of course the big man had a backup plan—for what it was worth. If they were spotted, they would do their best to snatch the old man and whisk him away somewhere before talking to him. To Latham, that, too, sounded like a terrific strategy for getting oneself killed and, again, he knew that if anyone whom he respected even half an ounce less than he did Matt Cooper had come up with the plan, he’d have told the idiot to go screw himself.

But Cooper had already proved he could pull off the “crazy” things in life. The worse the odds were against them, the better he seemed to perform. And now, Latham realized as they started around the side of the house, the big man would get a chance to prove himself again.

For they weren’t even halfway to the front of the house when three of the village men stepped out with swords.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bolan saw the glint of steel in the moonlight as the man rounded the corner from the front of the house. As the blade rose over the Rio Hondan’s head, he recognized the forked pommel and “crocodile” guard that characterized the Filipino sword known as the “kampilan.”

Forty-four inches of razor-edged death came flashing toward the Executioner’s head. He swung the machete across his body and steel met steel with a screech that sounded like a car wreck in the still night. The kampilan slid down the flat side of the machete and away from Bolan’s body. Using the tree-limb baston he had fashioned earlier, he smashed the attacker in the side of the head.

The villager slid to the ground, unconscious.

Two more Rio Hondans stood immediately behind the first and Bolan stepped to the side to allow Latham room to fight. The larger of the two attackers stood to the left and Bolan took him, noting that the man had dressed in traditional Filipino fighting gear for the night’s assault. A strip of red cloth—reminiscent of the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II—was tied around his forehead. Small but wiry arms extended from the vest he wore over his otherwise bare chest and in the man’s hands were a pair of matching, leaf-shaped barongs.

The two-handed swordsman was skilled with his weapons and now he came at the Executioner with a double attack. Both short swords snapped over his head, then descended at forty-five-degree angles from opposite directions toward the sides of Bolan’s neck.

The Executioner brought his machete up on one side, the baston on the other. The ping of steel against steel and the thud of steel against wood sounded simultaneously as he blocked both barongs. Taking a half step into the man in the vest, Bolan jammed the end of his stick between the eyes. By the time the villager hit the ground, his eyes had fluttered closed.

Glancing to his side, the Executioner saw that Latham had engaged his man and now blocked the wavy blade of a kris. Perhaps the most common of all the edged weapons of the Philippines, the twisting, snakelike double-edged blade could produce devastating wounds either cutting or thrusting. It was the latter tactic the villager chose now, and as Bolan moved on toward the front of the house he watched the Rio Hondan shove the serpentine weapon straight forward from his shoulder.

Latham stepped to the side and deftly guided the thrust past his body with his machete. His homemade baston came around in an arc to strike the villager on the temple.

The Executioner had just reached the front of the house when a Rio Hondan wearing what had originally been a white T-shirt stepped into his path from hiding. Countless washings in the brown waters of Mindanao streams had turned the shirt a dingy beige and the neck had been stretched out so far one side fell over his shoulder. The man carried a bolo knife in his right hand and he now brought it around in a sidearm assault.

Bolan blocked with the baston, stepped in and slapped the flat side of the machete against the man’s cheek. A loud pop broke the night but did little more than stun the villager. The soldier knew that the force of the blow had been distributed over too large an area to do serious injury and had hoped the pain would provide compliance. Unfortunately it seemed only to infuriate the man further and he brought the bolo back to strike again.

The Executioner brought his baston down and around, arcing it upward into his adversary’s ribs. He pulled the machete back again, altered his grip slightly, then struck again with the thinner backside of the blade.

The blow caught the man on the side of the neck, shocking the artery running up to his brain and cutting off the oxygen. The villager fell like a steer under a slaughterhouse hammer.

For a split second the front yard, the roadway and the area around the stilt houses seemed deserted. Then what might have been the hordes of Genghis Khan seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Bolan sprinted across the yard toward the road, downing another man wearing a headband with his baston, one more with the blunt edge of the machete. A huge panabas—a cross between a sword and ax—flashed through the air toward his head. The weapon was too heavy to block with either baston or machete, so the Executioner brought them both up together. An almost paralyzing electric shock ran from his weapons down his forearms as the panabas made contact. It stopped in midair, the attacker feeling the shock even more than the Executioner. He showed his surprise with the whites of his widened eyes.

Bolan recovered first. Lifting his stick up over his head, he brought it down hard onto the man’s collarbone. A sickening snap met his ears as wood splintered bone. The panabas, and the man who had wielded it, tumbled forward to the ground.