Whipsaw te-144

by Don Pendleton

  "Where's the NPA fit in?"

  "Good question. I've been getting reports that they're suffering heavy losses in the mountains. But there hasn't been any significant army action up there in months. Aquino has too much else to worry about. They go on punitive expeditions if there's been a serious assault by the NPA, but there hasn't been one that amounted to anything since last year."

  "You think Harding's behind it?"

  "Who else? The NPA might be amateurs, but they don't shoot one another. Not that often, anyhow." Henson lapsed into silence, as if the conversation had drained him. He drove like a robot, his eyes staring straight ahead through the bug-splattered glass.

  They were on the edge of the city, and the broad avenues gradually spilled into narrow, tree-lined streets. Tropical lushness was everywhere. Most of the houses were all but hidden behind masses of bougainvillea and something that looked like rhododendron. Few lights broke the darkness, and many of them did little more than dart in and out among the leaves as the evening breeze whipped the overhanging branches around.

  Henson started to whistle between his teeth, and Bolan watched him curiously. He seemed on edge, as if there were something he wanted to say, but didn't quite know how to phrase.

  "Anything wrong?" Bolan asked, trying to prompt him.

  Henson sucked his teeth for a few seconds.

  "I don't know. I'm arguing with myself. I don't... ah, what the hell..." He slapped the wheel with the heel of his right hand. "I've been working on a pipeline for a few months. I was just thinking, maybe, if I could hook you up, maybe it would get us somewhere. I just don't know."

  "What kind of pipeline?"

  "An odd duck, a guy named Colgan. If Harding is a mad bomber, and there's no doubt in my mind he is, then this guy's the mad hatter. He's a doctor he runs these clinics. He thinks he's the third way, or something like that. It's all mystical gobbledygook, but he believes it and he's got people who believe it right along with him. I'll tell you about it when we get to my place. Another five minutes. Let me chew on it..."

  Bolan stared out the window, watching the trees go by. The homes were few and far between now.

  He wondered why Henson had chosen to live so far out of the city. It seemed odd, almost as if Henson were trying to isolate himself from the people he was supposed to understand.

  Henson turned the wheel sharply, and the high-riding Rover leaned uncomfortably as they turned into a narrow side street.

  "It's at the end of the block," Henson said. "My little hermitage of sorts. Sometimes I think I've been at this business too long. I'm under diplomatic cover, and the ambassador keeps leaning on me to move into Manila, but I can't stand the thought of it. This place can break your heart, Bolan. It's so beautiful you can hardly believe it, but then when you see how the people live, it looks like hell on earth. I've seen enough of that, Laos in particular, in the late sixties. I just can't take it anymore. I got another year, and then I'm out of it."

  Bolan opened his mouth to respond when the Rover bounced over a pothole. His teeth clacked together. Henson began to swerve back and forth, slaloming the blocky hover down a pitted lane. A small house materialized in the deadlights a hundred yards ahead.

  "There it is," Henson said, "home, sweet home."

  He gunned the Rover, then let it coast the rest of the way, raking just as it rolled past the steps to a small side porch. Henson jumped out almost eagerly, as though the place really were some sort of refuge.

  "Wait here," he said. "I'll go in the front door and let out in right here." He sprinted back toward the front of the house.

  Bolan heard a door slam, then watched as a succession of lights appeared in the windows as Henson made his way toward he rear. A moment later the door opened in front of him, and Henson stepped back with a bow.

  "Welcome," he said.

  Bolan climbed the two steps and found himself in a small kitchen. Henson immediately turned and disappeared through another door.

  "Come on in and sit down," he shouted over his shoulder.

  Bolan followed. The first room was a small library, its shelves bulging with the pale blue and green paper bindings of government reports as well as a healthy sampling of more usual volumes in cloth and paper. The next room was twice as large. Bolan immediately noticed the walls.

  Henson caught his eye, and said, "Rubbings, my wife, ex-wife actually, taught me how to do them. She was an art student when I met her. We used to practice on old gravestones in Philadelphia. These are mine, though, from every place I've been. Temples from Laos and Burma, mostly, but one or two from every stop I've made on my somewhat circuitous transit through the typical State Department itinerary." He grabbed a stack of magazines from a chair and pointed. "Have a seat. I'll get us something cold." Bolan sank into the chair gratefully. It was nice to sit on something that wasn't moving. He glanced at one of the rubbings as Henson called, "Beer okay? It's Japanese, but it's cold."

  "Fine," Bolan shouted back.

  The refrigerator door banged back with a rattle of bat ties in its shelves. The next thing he heard sounded like Armageddon. The blast momentarily deafened him. Smoke, boiled through the doorway as he jumped to his feet.

  "Henson," he called. "Frank, what..." He covered his mouth with a forearm and charged into the library. It was full of smoke and plaster dust so thick hi couldn't see. He ducked down to try to get under the worst of it, but did no better.

  The doorway to the kitchen was blocked with debris.

  He grabbed a piece of timber with both hands and tugged but couldn't dislodge anything. The dust was choking him as he backed away a step, then sprinted for the front door.

  He leapt from the front porch and careered around the corner, where he stopped in disbelief. The whole rear half of the side wall lay splattered across the lawn. Several beams jutted up at an angle where they had smashed into the roof of the Rover.

  Bolan climbed up onto the rear bumper and hauled himself into the wreckage. There wasn't a chance in hell Frank Henson had survived the blast, but he had to be sure. The ruined wall shifted under his weight. The whole room still boiled with swirling clouds of dust.

  Bolan realized the bomb must have been in the refrigerator, primed to detonate when the door was opened. He could just make out the ruined hulk, shaped like a bulging barrel, its top split and twisted into modern art.

  "Henson," he shouted. "Henson?" There was no answer. And as the dust began to settle, he knew there wouldn't be. Frank Henson had been splattered all over the kitchen.

  The settling dust began to crust on the bloodstains, hiding the bright smears with an orangy film.

  But he could still see where they were.

  6

  Bolan closed the door quickly. His eyes scanned the interior, and nothing looked out of place. But that didn't mean a thing. He knew that if they had gotten to Henson, they could get to him.

  Breathing in slowly, holding it until his lungs were close to bursting, he checked the room carefully, his Desert Eagle at the ready. He peered in every conceivable place, from under the bed for a pressure switch to the medicine cabinet for a spring release.

  When he had looked everywhere, he relaxed. He needed to free his mind so he could consider the situation at hand.

  Cautiously he sat on the bed and examined the envelope. His name had been scrawled across it in black Magic Marker. The plain white envelope had been sealed with cellophane tape. It contained four sheets of paper. One was a grainy picture, apparently a Xerox of an old newspaper photograph, of Charles Harding. The second was a story, headline and all, about the incident at the airport. He scanned the story quickly, stopping at the underlined words, "an unknown American." Backing up, he read the entire paragraph and realised the phrase applied to him. There was no other mark on the page, just that short, thin line under the three words.

  The third sheet was a map, roughly drawn in blue pencil, of Ongpin, Manila's Chinatown.

  The map was highlighted by a single red dot at the inter
section of Rizal and Santa Margarita. The last paper was a sheet of cheap typing paper. In the same hand as that on the envelope, the words "If you have to ask, you'll never know" had been scrawled with the same Magic Marker. Underneath the inscription wert the typewritten words, "twelve midnight." Bolan was mystified. Apparently someone wanted to meet him, someone who knew he had been at the airport that afternoon, and who also knew of his interest in Charles Harding. But who?

  His head hurt and he couldn't think straight. He needed some rest, but there was no time. He glanced at the clock radio next to the bed. It read 11:17 in sickly green digits. He had less than an hour. He debated whether or not to keep the appointment, but it was no contest. Not really. There was no way in hell he could afford to pass up the invitation, and he knew it.

  Cursing Walt Wilson for getting him into such a mess, he splashed cold water on his face and strapped on a second harness, this one for the Beretta. Stuffing a couple of extra clips into his coat pocket, one for each weapon, he stared at himself in the huge round mirror over the dresser. He looked exhausted, but was used to that.

  He also looked confused, and that was cause for concern.

  He was not accustomed to standing on such shifting sand. As if it hadn't been bad enough to travel halfway around the world on the tail of a man about whom he knew next to nothing, he was unsalted to meet someone unknown, who apparently knew a great deal about him.

  He kept thinking back to Walt Wilson.

  Henson had hinted that there was more to the picture than Wilson had given him. His own suspicions were simmering beneath the surface, but he had nothing to cool them or to bring them to a boil, either. Something wasn't right, and he couldn't avoid the suspicion that he'd been sent into a minefield wearing cast-iron shoes and a blindfold.

  Slipping into his jacket again, tugging it down to fit comfortably over the artillery, he headed for the door. As he reached for the doorknob, it turned.

  The motion had been slight, no more than a fraction of an inch or so, but genuine. He reached under his coat for the Desert Eagle and flattened himself against the wall.

  He stared at the knob for a long minute, but it didn't move again. Straining his ears, Bolan listened for the slightest sound out in the carpeted hall.

  He thought he heard footsteps, but the sound vanished almost as soon as it registered. He griped the latch with one palm and turned the lock. Jerking the door wide open, he checked one end of the hall, the Desert Eagle held against his right ear.

  Switching sides, dropping the gun to belt level, he checked the other end of the hall. It, too, was empty. Cautiously he stuck his head out to make sure, but the hall was absolutely quiet. He took a tentative step into the corridor.

  He heard a snick behind him and spun around just as the fire door at the end of the hall closed.

  Sprinting on the thick carpet, he raced to the fire door and pressed an ear against it. He heard footsteps on the stairs and ripped the door open. The steps continued on down, and Bolan plunged into the stairwell just as another door, several floors below, banged shut.

  Bolan took the stairs two at a time, knowing even as he raced down the second flight that he was too late. It wasn't possible to guess which door had slammed. Rather than waste time in a pointless search, he continued on down to the ground floor.

  Slipping the Desert Eagle under his jacket, he stepped into the lobby. It, too, was empty, except for a clerk behind the bell desk, absorbed in a newspaper.

  Outside, the traffic was still fairly heavy, considering the hour, and Bolan checked his watch as he headed for the door. Out in the muggy night, he spotted a cab at once and jumped in, giving the driver his destination even before closing the door. The cabby jerked the lever on his meter and swung away from the curb as Bolan slammed the door.

  Without warning, the driver made a U-turn, to the amusement of a traffic cop who was sitting sidesaddle on a Honda scooter. The cabby waved, and the cop waved back. "My brother-in-law," the cabby explained.

  Weaving expertly through the tangled traffic, the cabdriver threaded needle after needle. Gradually, as they moved away from the heart of downtown Manila, the only part of the city Western tourists cared to see after dark, the traffic thinned and its character changed. Instead of taxi cabs and fancy limousines, rolling collections of dents and rusted fenders began to predominate. Battered cars, vans and assorted commercial delivery trucks flowed steadily past, like the brown waters of a river slipping by the gunwales of a launch headed upstream.

  "Got to make deliveries at night. Too much traffic in the daytime," the driver said without taking his eyes off the road.

  Bolan was not in the mood for idle chatter, so he said nothing. The driver seemed to sense his mood, and set his jaw. At the appropriate corner, he pulled over to the edge of the walkway and announced the fare. Bolan paid him and slipped out on the street side.

  He had thought it best to cover the last couple of blocks on foot. He'd been set up too often in the past to get careless and make it easy for the other side. The street was lined with shops on both sides, all bearing signs in Chinese ideograms and some also in English. Every window was dark. As he walked past, Bolan's eye caught the whole panoply of Far Eastern trade. Silks and ivory carvings, firecrackers and Japanese cameras, imported foods and homegrown crafts were piled helter-skelter in bins behind every pane of glass.

  Twice he hesitated before crossing the mouth of a dark alley. The street was surprisingly clean.

  He could just imagine the jungle the street would become in five or six hours, and marveled that not a single scrap of paper stirred in the slight, sticky breeze. Crossing a narrow side street, Bolan glanced in both directions, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. A striped cat darting in among the silent vans was the only living thing he saw.

  Entering the last block, he wondered where he was supposed to go. All four corners were dark. He slowed his pace a little more, listening intently for the slightest sound. There was only the grinding of sand on the asphalt underfoot. Halfway down the block, he stopped and ducked into a doorway. His watch read 11:53. He scanned the two corner buildings on the opposite side of the street, but both were dark and closed up tight. Not even a window open to catch a little of the breeze broke the seamless face of either building.

  Puzzled, he crossed the street and ducked into another doorway. He had the Desert Eagle in his hand now. He didn't like the quiet. He didn't like the darkness, either. The quiet seemed almost palpable, too perfect and too absolute. It reminded him of countless western streets Dodge City, Abilene, Tombstone in too many western movies. It was the calm before the final shootout, when every window was closed, and somebody peered into the silent street from behind every curtain.

  He had the urge to shake things up. His eyes bored into the second pair of corner buildings, each as dark and silent as the other two.

  He was getting close to that antsy frustration that assaulted him whenever things were totally out of control.

  It was as if someone had handed him a perfectly smooth globe of polished obsidian and said, "Here, open it." In the unnatural quiet Bolan could hear his heart, its rhythm throbbing in his ears. He stared at the shop on the near corner. The English portion of its sign read "Fabrick," but he didn't smile at the misspelling. Like every thing else, it just seemed one more proof that things were out of whack.

  He started to look away when something caught his eye. He riveted his gaze on the spot where it had been, but there was nothing there. It had been, or at least he thought it had been, a brief flicker, as if a candle had passed by or a match been struck and extinguished. Then again. It flashed, and he was certain this time.

  He waited, aware that he was holding his breath, as if to exhale would kill the delicate glimmer behind the dusty glass. It had become steady, electric light rather than a flame, but it did nothing. Losing his patience, Bolan began to fidget in the doorway. When the light disappeared again, he sprinted across the street at an angle. Pressing his face to the glass
, he tried to see inside, past the cascading silks. They tumbled over a rack in thick, almost seamless folds.

  He tapped on the window with his knuckles, and the glass rattled in its peeling wooden frame. A chunk of putty fell from the bottom of the pane and hit his foot. He backed away from the glass to look down. He started to lean back in when he saw something behind him, reflected in the glass. He began to turn as the grey blur dissolved. He was halfway around when the window, now almost behind him, cracked.

  Instinctively he fell to the ground. He looked for cover, but there was node to be had. He started to move, crabwalking under the window ledge to the corner, when something slammed into the wooden wall just above his head.

  At the corner he scurried across the rounded concrete step and ducked in behind the far wall.

  Desperately he scanned the silent row of shops across the street. The grey blurbs had seen was gone. In all probability, it had been the gunman. Cautiously he got to his knees, straining to see through the dark glass across the street.

  The next shot tore a chunk of wood from the window frame just above his shoulder. Sharp splinters stabbed his left cheek, and he dropped to the ground again. He still didn't know where the shots had come from. The gun was silenced, and there hadn't been a flash, either.

  Then he saw the gunman, just a block of dark grey in the mouth of an alley four shops from the corner. Inching forward, Bolan rested the muzzle of the Desert Eagle on the six-inch step. The shooter was being careful. He didn't leave much exposed. Bolan was about to squeeze the trigger when a second shadow moved, then a third.

  Shifting his aim, he drew a bead on the nearest shadow, just a blob of darkness on the roof, blotting out a few stars. As he squeezed, the shadow opened up. Unfolding like a leaf, it stood erect and let loose with a burst of suppressed fire. The slugs chewed at the corner of the building, sparking where they hit the concrete, and Bolan cringed against the wall. When the firing stopped, he ducked back out and squeezed off two quick shots. The shadow on the roof folded back into itself, then toppled over the edge and landed with a dull thud on the pavement.