Whipsaw te-144

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan heard the chatter of automatic weapons.

  The gunfire was drowned almost immediately in a sea of screams. All around him, people were falling to the floor, covering their heads with folded arms. Bolan turned to his right to see where the gunmen were. A huge plate-glass window collapsed in shards. The sharp crack of autofire somewhere behind him had blown out the window. Colored paper and a landslide of toys gushed out through the broken glass.

  Bolan hit the deck, his Desert Eagle in hand. He spotted one man in combat fatigues, the mottled brown and olive so out of place in the bustling terminal. He drew a bead as the man struggled to ram a new clip into an AK.

  Bolan fired once, catching him in the shoulder, and again as he pitched forward. A second Kalashnikov opened up from behind a marble pillar to the dead man's left.

  The pounding of feet came from somewhere behind, and Bolan glanced back to see a handful of airport police charging toward him. The AK opened up again, and the policemen fell to the hard marble floor like bowling pins in the wake of a solid hit.

  The cop to his left lay still, a trickle of blood oozing from his slack jaw. Bolan grabbed the M-16 half-hidden by the man's prostrate body and tugged it free. Scrambling to his feet, Bolan charged the pillar, daring the hidden gunman to step clear. He could see the gunman's crouching back reflected in another plate-glass pane beyond the pillar.

  Angling to the left, he cut in a broad circle until enough of his target was showing. Dropping to one knee, Bolan brought the M-16 up just as the shooter spotted him. Bolan tugged the fire control onto full-auto and cut loose. Chunks of marble flew off the pillar, and the ricochets ripped out the glass behind it. The gunman pitched forward, and Bolan swung his muzzle downward, slashing at the extended form with a short burst. The body twitched for a moment, then lay still.

  It was suddenly very quiet, except for a couple of shards of glass that tinkled to the floor one by one, but that was all. The screaming had stopped as if at a director's command. It seemed almost like it had been that quiet forever. Then the wounded began to moan, as if they now felt safe to do so. Panting, Bolan got to his feet, the M-16 dangling from one hand. He let it drop, and it hit the marble with a dull thud.

  Several of the wounded policemen were sitting up.

  Others, unharmed themselves, tended to their comrades. Sirens howled in the distance. Outside, a squeal of brakes announced the belated arrival of reinforcements. There was no chance of finding Harding now, Bolan thought. Slowly he walked back to his small suitcase, standing on end where he had dropped it. As he bent to pick it up, two policemen rushed toward him. They were shouting, but Bolan ignored them. Something else had captured his attention, something a lot more important.

  Fifty feet away he saw Charles Harding, as neat as ever, vanish through a doorway. Bolan dropped his suitcase and started to run. He didn't feel the first hand to grab his arms.

  Or the second.

  4

  Bolan sat in the chair quietly. So far he hadn't been asked to say anything. Roman Collazo, who was, as he stopped frequently to point out, a captain of the Military Police, had been content to do all the talking. Once, during an exceptionally long pause, Bolan leaned forward, but Collazo stopped him with a raised hand.

  "Not yet, Mr..." he glanced at the papers in front of him for a second, "...Belasko. I'll tell you when."

  Bolan leaned back in the chair without a word.

  If Collazo wanted to challenge Castro for the hot-air record, that was all right with him.

  "So, you see," Collazo continued, raising his voice for emphasis, "it is important that you tell us everything you know. I realize that you are here as a representative of your government, and that accordingly you are protected by diplomatic immunity. But I don't think I need to remind you that privilege brings obligation, as well. In this case, the obligation to be as forthcoming as you can. It is essential that we learn what happened, if for no other reason than to ensure that such a thing cannot happen again in Manila." Collazo paused to look at Bolan over his half lenses. "Am I making myself clear?" At Bolan's wordless nod, the captain continued. "Good. So, now, Mr. Belasko, if you will," he said, sinking into the tall leather chair behind his desk, "tell me everything you can about what happened at the airport."

  "I came out of the debarking tunnel. I was working my way through the crowd when all hell broke loose."

  "You mean the shooting?"

  "Yeah, the shooting."

  He looked at Collazo to make certain the man had actually asked such an inane question. There was nothing on the older man's face to suggest he hadn't.

  Bolan continued. "At first I couldn't tell where the shooting was coming from. People were falling to the ground, and there was a lot of screaming. It all happened so fast that I wasn't sure whether the people on the floor were seeking cover or had been hit."

  "I gather, though, from your prompt reaction, that you are not unfamiliar with gunfire."

  "No, I'm not unfamiliar with it." Bolan closed his jaw with a nearly audible snap.

  "I see." Collazo leaned back in the chair. "Go on, please..."

  "I threw myself on the floor and drew my weapon."

  "You are authorised to carry it in your work?"

  Bolan nodded. Before Collazo could question him about his work, he pushed on. "I spotted one of the gunmen off to my right. I knew it was a terrorist, not a policeman..."

  "Because of the fatigues..."

  "Yeah, that, and because he was firing into the crowd. I heard return fire from behind me. I turned and saw it was the police, but I didn't pause to weigh the situation I just relied on my instincts. So I fired."

  "You didn't think the police were capable of doing their job?"

  "It wasn't like that. I reacted and fired. In the back of my mind was the thought that if I didn't, he might get away or he might kill more innocent people. It's a big terminal. The police were still some distance away at that point."

  "I don't want you to feel that you have done anything wrong, Mr. Belasko. But..." Collazo spread his hands, palms down, and patted the desktop, "I'm sure you understand."

  Bolan gestured vaguely with his hands. Cops were cops, and he wasn't surprised. Hell, he thought, it would be the same hot-air and bullshit in Chicago or New York. Why should Manila be any different?

  Then Collazo smiled. Bolan didn't like the look. It seemed out of place. And then the captain threw a curveball. "You were traveling alone, Mr. Belasko?"

  "Yes." Something told him to be careful, and he tensed. "I was traveling alone."

  "I understand that you were running through the terminal even before the shooting started."

  "Yeah, I was."

  "Do you mind telling me why?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Ah," Collazo said, leaning back in the chair and rocking. "I see..." He studied Bolan for a long moment. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he asked, "Even though you were traveling alone, did you know anyone else on the plane?"

  "Not as far as I know. I didn't see everyone."

  "Of course. But of those you did see, was anyone familiar to you?"

  Bolan shook his head. What the hell was Collazo after, he wondered. "Look," he said, "if you tell me what you're after, maybe I can help, but this merry-go-round is getting us nowhere."

  Collazo was about to respond when the phone on his desk buzzed with the sound of a small, angry wasp.

  He picked it up impatiently, swiveling the chair until his back was to Bolan. Then, without having said a word, he swiveled back and replaced the phone in its cradle.

  "Where are you staying, Mr. Belasko?"

  "At the MacArthur. Why?"

  Collazo didn't answer him. Instead he remarked, "That's all for today. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop by in a couple of days."

  Bolan shook his head. "Whatever you say, Captain."

  The big man got to his feet and bent to retrieve his small bag. He studied Collazo for a moment, but the captain was already immersed in paperwork
on his desk. If he felt Bolan's eyes on him, he didn't show it.

  Bolan opened the door and let it close gently behind him as he stepped into the busy outer office.

  He'd give his eyeteeth to know who had been on the phone and what had been said. Zigzagging through the crowded corridor and across the large, square booking area, he slipped into a tall revolving door and hissed out into the heat.

  The sound of Manila immediately attacked him. The frame seemed endless and immobile. Judging by the din, a permanent blaring of the horn was a Filipino license requirement. He bounced down the steps two at a time and joined a queue at the nearest cabstand.

  Three people were ahead of him, and he waited patiently, turning back to look at the tall, vacant face of the police station. For a moment he had the suspicion that someone inside was watching him, but he shrugged it off. He was exhausted and he needed time to think.

  It seemed almost too perfectly coincidental that Charles Harding would be present in the airport during a terrorist attack. The odds argued strongly that it had not been a freak occurrence. If Harding had been the target, who had done the shooting?

  And why there? But Bolan couldn't come up with a single reason why anyone should go to such trouble to try to kill one man when he could just as easily be taken out some other way, someplace safer for the shooters.

  Unless, Bolan thought... unless it had to look like a fluke to hide the purpose, and possibly the people, behind it. Collazo had told him virtually nothing about the attack. He didn't even know whether anyone had been killed. But even if there had been fatalities, Bolan knew enough about the world to understand that incidental death raised no eyebrows in the pursuit of political goals.

  Not anymore.

  A cab finally arrived, and all three people in front of him piled into it. Bolan didn't have long to wait for the next one. He gave the driver his destination, then settled back in the seat. He hadn't been to the Philippines in so long, and yet it seemed the same. The people were a little happier with Marcos gone, but it seemed like a happiness that was only skin-deep. Everyplace he looked, he saw a guardedness, like trespassers walking through a graveyard at midnight. The peace was fragile, they seemed to say, as fragile as the eggs they all walked on.

  And, like most Third World countries, it was a place where Americans were barely tolerated, at least by a highly vocal minority. Nobody likes a cop, Bolan thought, and when you're the world's cop, nobody on earth really likes you. They want you to be there when they need help, but they don't want to feel grateful for it.

  Bolan watched the traffic slide by as the driver twirled the steering wheel, maneuvering the cab as if it were as thin as a knife blade. He darted through narrow openings without braking, sometimes gunning the engine for an extra burst of speed.

  The streets teemed with pedestrians, and in some respects it looked no different from any other major capital. Westernized to a fault, the residents looked as if they would have been equally at home in downtown New York or the streets of Singapore.

  But there was another Manila, another Philippines. Most Westerners rarely saw it, if at all. It was the Manila of rusting corrugated metal shacks and strings of shanties made of packing crates and tarpaper. This was the Manila that Marcos had made a career of ignoring, and Aquino had built a career making promises to. If any of those promises had been kept, it was a closely held secret.

  Not that Aquino was entirely to blame. You don't hold one person responsible for centuries of misery. But the forgotten people were still there, packed into their slums like gunpowder, just waiting for the spark. He wondered if the attack at the airport was the overture of a new rebellion, one to make the New People's Army look like Boy Scouts and the Huks like pacific idealists. The potential was there that was a certainty.

  In the back of Bolan's mind was the faint glimmer, dim as a penlight at the bottom of a mine shaft, that Charles Harding had come with the same notion, maybe to set that spark or maybe to piss on it and put it out. But Harding's background, sketchy as it was, suggested that he was not a disinterested observer in the Filipino political process.

  It was here, after all, that Lansdale had cut his eyeteeth, honing those theories that had gone so badly astray in Vietnam.

  The cab suddenly swerved to the left and rocked to a halt. Bolan looked out at the ultramodern glass-and-brass facade of the MacArthur Hilton. He paid the hack, then eased out of the cab. The clean pavement, flecked with glittering flakes of mica catching the sun, looked as if it had just been laid. He pushed through the revolving door as the cab lurched away, leaving the scent of burnt rubber hanging in the humid air.

  Bolan checked in quickly, and was surprised when the clerk said that someone had been asking for him. Bolan waited, watching the clerk curiously. He expected one of those ubiquitous pink papers with a phone message scribbled on it, but was instead surprised to hear the clerk page Frank Henson.

  He turned to see a man in a rumpled suit making a beeline for the desk. It had to be Henson.

  "Now what?" Bolan muttered.

  5

  Frank Henson slipped behind the wheel of his Land Rover and leaned across to open Bolan's door. The big guy climbed in and dropped his bag over the seat into the back.

  "They give you a hard time today?" Henson asked.

  "I've had worse."

  "They say anything about Harding?"

  "Collazo referred to him obliquely, but didn't really give much away. I don't know what he knows, but I don't think it's much. It was more like he was trying to pump me than anything else."

  Henson laughed easily. "Son of a bitch! I'd love to know where the holes are. We're leaking like a sieve. And everybody in Manila seems to know what we know before we know it. Guy I bought this rattletrap from, some damn assistant something or other at the British embassy, told me about Harding two days before I heard his name from anybody else."

  "You think it's on your end or back in D.C.?" Bolan watched Henson carefully while the older man composed his answer. It would be easy to blame it on the other guy. That was the way in any bureaucracy.

  "I wish to Christ I knew," Henson said, laughing again. "I'd like to blame it on Washington. Those bastards are always looking for something to talk about at their cocktail parties. But I just don't know."

  Bolan made a mental note to be circumspect in his dealing with Henson. It wasn't that he didn't trust the man, but if there was a leak in Manila, it could get him killed. In the back of his mind was the not so sneaking suspicion that the airport scene had not been a coincidence. He also had to consider the possibility that he himself had been the target.

  Henson negotiated the traffic with a casual hand, flowing with it rather than trying to outrun it. Like most Far Eastern capitals, it combined the slowest of traditional commerce with the frenzy of blaring horns.

  "I think we can talk more freely at my place," Henson said. "I have it swept a couple of times a week. Had it done this afternoon, as a matter of fact."

  "I'm beginning to think this thing is a lot more complicated than Walt Wilson told me."

  "That's Rosebud for you. Walt's a crackerjack, but he's never liked to tell a guy more than he has to. In this case, I think, probably even less."

  "Tell me what you know about Charles Harding."

  "First off, Harding's just the tip of the iceberg. I don't know where the hell he gets his money, but he's got backing, big backing."

  "But what does he do here?"

  "What I know, or what I think?"

  "Both."

  "I know he fronts some sort of political action organization out in the boondocks. They're on some sort of paramilitary trip. They got more guns than the NPA, more money than you can shake a stick at, and they are plugged into the Philippine Army six ways to Sunday. There's a dozen laws, at least, against what he's doing, but he's never even gotten a parking ticket, so far as I know."

  "What sort of politics?"

  "I know what you're asking and, no, no way he's a Communist front. If
you know anything at all about the guy, you know he's out there on the fringe, somewhere between Tricky Dick and Attila. No, that's the puzzle, really. I mean, most of these right-wing diehards sit home running beer companies and shit. They send money, but they don't put their asses on the line. Harding's different. He's out there with the grunts. Except nobody really knows where there is." Henson rapped on the horn to nudge a particularly slow-moving truck along. "And that, my friend, brings us to the end of what I know."

  "What about what you think?"

  "Ah... what I think... that's something altogether different. That is very scary stuff indeed."

  Bolan waited patiently while Henson thought about how to begin. Finally Henson cleared his throat.

  "Okay, here's what I think. I think Mr. Harding is a madman. I think he wants to see Cory take a pratfall and lay there in the mud with her skirt up around her hips. I think he is working for that very thing, and I think he will stop at nothing, including provoking a civil wart to get it done."

  "What's the percentage?"

  "Hey, am I a madman? How the fuck should I know? He's one of these guys looks under his bed every night, and not just to see if the maid did the floor. You know what I mean?"

  "Still, why here?"

  "Why here? That's an easy one. Charlie-boy did his time in Southeast Asia. He's a domino player from the old school. You look at a map of the Pacific, and what do you see? Who controls it? From Hawaii on to India, the Philippines is basically what we got. You lose Subic, you're stuck with Australia and New Zealand, and neither one of them wants nukes in port on three day leave. That creates a power vacuum in the Pacific basin. And not just for Mr. Charles Harding, either."

  "So you think he wants to install a government that will let us keep Clark and Subic? Is that it?"

  "That's part of it. Part of it's some weird megalomania, though. I think he thrives on chaos. There's been a gradually escalating terror campaign in the big cities, especially Manila. I'm convinced he's behind it, but I can't prove it. And I'll tell you something else. If anybody's running him, he's got his hands full. There is no way in hell to control this guy. He's too flaky. I'd rather play football with a bottle of nitroglycerin than try to ride herd on Harding."