False Front. Don Pendleton
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to see if the search party had heard the Texan’s snoring. Finally satisfied that they had not, he rose and pulled Latham to his feet.
“What’s wrong?” the Texan whispered. He looked around, spotted the note stuck in the ground with the machete, then reached down and tore it from the blade.
“Old news,” the Executioner whispered. “I’m back.”
“Where’d you go?” Latham asked, yawning.
“The guys on the path came back. I went out to see if I could pick up more information.”
Coming fully awake now, Latham’s forehead wrinkled. “But you don’t speak the language.”
Bolan reached into his pocket and pulled out the recorder. “No,” he said, “but you do.”
“Aha,” Latham said, throwing his head back slightly. Then he frowned and said, “But what was the problem when you woke me up? How come we had to freeze for so long? They hear you or something?”
The Executioner suppressed a grin. “Or something,” he said.
“WELL, NOBODY ELSE ever accused me of snoring,” Latham said defensively as he and Bolan cut yet another new route through the jungle toward the stilt houses along the sea.
Bolan didn’t bother to answer. Night was falling quickly as it did in the jungle and the Executioner wanted to be within sight of the houses across the road from Mario Subing’s before their surroundings turned ink-black. As to Latham’s snoring, he had found it slightly amusing that this man—an accomplished fighter by anyone’s standard and a good enough woodsman if not the best—had grown immediately sensitive when he’d been told he not only snored but did so in a way that threatened to rip leaves off their vines.
The Executioner came to the edge of the jungle and peered through the foliage. Ahead, he could see the rear of one of the inland shanties across the road from the stilt houses. He held up a hand, both to halt Latham and to signal for silence, then sat among the thick green growth to wait on darkness.
Latham dropped to a squatting position next to him.
Bolan rested his hand on his outstretched leg and felt the tiny microcassette recorder inside his front pocket. Latham had listened to the recording as they’d waited for the hot afternoon to become evening. But they had gained precious little information they hadn’t already had. The Texan had, however, said that one thing was clear: it wasn’t just the fact that they’d been seen driving into town that had alerted the villagers to potential trouble. They’d been tipped off by someone ahead of time that two men might be coming to the village and that they were trouble.
That, in itself, was worth the chance the Executioner had taken with the recorder. It also jibed with his suspicion that the men they had fought on the road the day before hadn’t been random kidnappers. Someone knew he was on Mindanao, and that someone had alerted the Tigers.
Leaning back against the trunk of a tree, Bolan closed his eyes. He had also learned another valuable bit of intel by hiding near the path as the local men had passed—how they were armed. Although they would mistakenly view the Executioner as their enemy, he wasn’t. And he had no wish to kill or even injure them. But if he had to deal with them somehow, he had been relived to see that their primary weapons appeared to be blades rather than firearms.
Latham, having dropped to the ground across from him, now crossed his legs on the ground. “You think they know who we are?” he asked Bolan in a low voice. “The locals, I mean.”
“Probably not exactly who we are,” Bolan whispered. “But if they were tipped off, then somebody knows that somebody new—from America—is looking for the hostages.” He glanced overhead, squinting through the treetops into the quickly diminishing sunlight. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “At least I’m sure they don’t know exactly who I am.” He looked over at the other man now. “Exactly how well are you known on the island?”
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,