"What else?"
"That's it, I swear..."
Bolan stared at her, struck dumb. He looked at Carlos, and thought of the three monkeys.
He knew which one he was.
18
Bolan leaned against the front fender of the jeep.
Behind him, Marisa and Carlos conversed in hoarse whispers. She had asked for a chance to talk to Carlos alone, and Bolan, hopeful that she would see just how limited her options were, had agreed.
The sounds of the night began to change as the sky started to brighten. The night creatures gradually settled into their burrows or found places to sleep high in the canopy. It was too early yet for the day shift, but it wouldn't be long. The whispers lost their intensity behind him, and Bolan sensed that Marisa had come to some agreement with Carlos. What it might be, he would soon find out.
The deep blue-black velvet turned milky gray, like a charcoal wash. The stars died away one by one, and the horizon began to sharpen; a white line, tinged with red, like a taut wire stretched from peak to peak along the Sierra Madre range. It looked as if the ocean had burst into flame and a tidal wave of molten color were sweeping across the trackless Pacific.
Then, so suddenly he couldn't believe it could be so silent, the sun appeared, a brilliant red mound in the east, and the sky caught fire. Far to the east, wispy red clouds, like huge pennants fluttering in impossibly slow motion, turned pink and bleached before his eyes.
He heard Marisa's soft approach. She placed a hand on his shoulder. "Mr. Belasko," she whispered, "you're right."
He turned to her with a sober look.
"We have to hurry, Senor Belasko," Carlos said, climbing into the jeep. When Bolan and Marisa climbed in, he started the engine.
Bolan sat on the jump seat beside the M-60.
He let one arm dangle over the big machine gun as the jeep lurched into the road. Directly ahead, the sky was wall-to-wall red. Then, as if someone had changed a filter, it turned orange. By the time they had gone a hundred yards, the orange had faded to yellow.
Morning was getting started in earnest, and Bolan felt as if something had changed. The world was somehow a different place. Overnight the script had been rewritten, and he felt as if his part had been expanded. A warning tingled down his spine. Such a change could mean only one thing.
And he didn't want to think about what that might be.
The jungle came alive as they passed, and Bolan had the sense that he was being watched. On the opposite side of the jeep, he spotted a pair of wooden crates banded with galvanized metal strips. He reached around the gun, pulled the top crate off its companion and scraped it along the floor of the jeep.
Marisa turned toward the sound as though she wanted to know what he was doing. He was thankful she didn't seem to notice the belt of ammunition as he grabbed the end and tugged it free. He locked it down with a sharp click, and Marisa nodded as if she had heard the sound before. She turned back to the front without saying anything, her head tilted at that odd angle he had grown used to.
"Carlos," he shouted, "can you find the camp we visited the other day?"
Carlos nodded. "Si," he shouted. "I know where it is."
"Is there any place we can leave Mrs. Colgan?"
Carlos shook his head. "No, senor. No place..." Bolan let that sink in, watching Marisa to see what her reaction might be. She might as well have been made of stone for all the emotion she showed.
Bolan took the M-16 from a rack against the sidewall of the jeep and balanced it across his knees. The fire control lever was on full-auto, and he adjusted it to semi, then took off the safety. Four clips jutted out of a plastic canister suspended from the rack. He stuffed two of them into his shirt pocket and tucked the other pair into the back pocket of his pants.
Something told him he was going to need all the hardware he could carry before the day was out. He recognised the terrain. If memory served, they were only a mile or so from the turnoff to the NPA camp.
Bolan surveyed the tree line to the left, his eye drawn by something that had registered without really being seen. His ears perked up, and he heard the cry of frightened birds. Like a rolling wave, a cloud of parrots pulsed for a moment above the trees, then sank again. It must have been the birds he'd registered before. As he watched, it rose again, this time higher, then seemed to fracture. The birds fluttered like scraps of bright confetti, then sank down out of sight. As they disappeared, their excited cries swept across the canopy before dying away. And in the echo, he heard another, unnatural sound. Felt it, really, as the floorboard of the jeep picked up the throbbing, vibrating in sympathy.
The pulse grew stronger, and his body reacted to it. Automatically he draped an arm over the M-60. The pulse grew stronger, and he could hear it now, too. A deep throbbing, fading away then coming back even stronger, it seemed to gather more and more strength each time it ceased. And he didn't have to see its source to know what it was. A Huey, somewhere off to the left, had climbed above the trees and had started toward them.
It spelled trouble to Bolan.
The NPA camp had been almost Stone Age in its simplicity. Automatic weapons, yes. But there had been only two vehicles, both in desperate need of repair. They had little fuel to speak of. The idea that they commanded a chopper was unthinkable. Only two options suggested themselves. It was either a Philippine Army ship or it belonged to the Leyte Brigade.
The pulse fractured now, and he realized there were at least two birds. The strange inconsistency of the sound was created by the overlapping rhythm of the two engines, a rhythm that changed constantly as the ships changed speed and their respective distances from him changed along with it. One, from the sound of it, was moving away, heading south. The other seemed to be coming their way.
"Carlos," Bolan shouted, "pull off the road."
Carlos swiveled around. When he saw Bolan pointing at the sky, he nodded that he understood.
The jeep veered suddenly, jolting Marisa. She turned to Bolan. "What's happening?" she shouted. "Why are we leaving the road?"
"Helicopters," Bolan yelled in her ears. "At least two, maybe more. If they're army, they might take us for NPA, and if they're not..." He didn't have to tell Marisa what that would mean.
The chopper roared closer. It was still too far away to see, probably keeping low, just above the trees. Unlike in Vietnam, it had little to fear flying so dose to the ground here. The NPA had nothing much beyond small arms, and most of its widely scattered units were no match in firepower for a single Huey carrying the usual complement of guns and possibly rockets.
Carlos wrestled the jeep's steering wheel, struggling to get under the trees. If they were out of sight, they should be all right, since the chopper had no particular reason to be looking for them.
The bushes began to dose around the nose of the jeep just as the chopper appeared overhead, sudden as a wasp. It roared past, and Bolan thought for a moment they hadn't been seen, but the Huey slowed, banked in a tight circle and hovered over the middle of the road about four hundred yards past them.
"Get out," Bolan shouted. "They spotted us."
He pushed Marisa down to Carlos, who struggled through the dense undergrowth, hacking at it with a machete to cut a narrow swath for the two of them to slip through.
Carlos looked back and Bolan waved him on. "Keep going!"
The chopper pilot seemed to be debating what to do. The big bird hung there in the air. Its engine was a dull undercurrent under the steady whomping of the huge rotor blades. It was side-on, and Bolan spotted two men in the open door. A Browning M-3, a half-inch machine gun on a pintle, was starkly outlined against the bright sky through the open belly of the aircraft.