False Front. Don Pendleton

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.

      The Executioner saw Latham trading blows with an unusually large Filipino armed with a pair of golok swords. Used for centuries by the Moros for jungle warfare, the man who now flailed with them had been trained well. He had taken the offensive, swinging hard and fast with both blades, giving the appearance of twin airplane propellers flashing through the air. Latham blocked, then blocked again. Then again and again and again. But he was a half beat behind the man, which kept him on the defense, unable to launch a counterattack.

      Bolan knew that blocking only was the road to an early death. Latham was good. But no matter how good a man was, sooner or later, he missed a block.

      Stepping in to the side, the Executioner brought the blunt edge of the machete around in an arc against the back of the big Filipino’s neck. The Rio Hondan dropped to his knees, then fell forward onto his face, unconscious. Latham’s chest heaved in and out with exertion, but he had the strength to bring his machete up to his forehead in a smiling salute to the Executioner.

      Bolan turned back to the road and another villager stepped in to face him. For a split second the man looked as if he held a Fourth of July sparkler in each hand. Then, as the flashing steel took better shape, the Executioner again recognized a matched pair of bright stainless steel balisongs. The villager appeared even more skilled in their use than the punk in Zamboanga from whom Bolan had appropriated the Buick.

      Spreading and closing the wings of the butterfly knives, then spreading and closing them again, the Rio Hondan made the twin blades dance a graceful ballet through the air. And as they danced they also sang, clicking, clacking and whirring in the night and sending shafts of moonlight reflecting off their surfaces in a colorful prism of death. But the balisong expert made one fatal mistake. He took too much time showing off.

      The Executioner stepped in and swung the baston overhead like a tennis racket, cracking it down first on the man’s right wrist, then on his left. Both balisongs dropped to the ground. The man’s lower lip dropped open almost that far in surprise. Bolan’s third strike with the baston left the man lying on top of his fallen knives.

      In the middle of the asphalt roadway now, the soldier was halted by three men. Each carried a klewang and each held the straight, single-edge blade with the widened point up and ready. But they had seen the unconscious men in the Executioner’s wake and it had curbed some of their enthusiasm for battle. Each hesitated to be the next to hit the ground.

      Bolan took advantage of their indecisiveness to initiate his own attack. Faking an overhand strike with the baston, he waited until the man’s klewang came up to block, then cut the feint short, drawing it slightly back toward him before jabbing the blunt end into the man’s face. The Executioner heard the crack of bone as the villager’s nose broke. A half second later he brought the blunt edge of the machete straight up between the man’s legs.

      The villager had grunted with the broken nose. Now he screeched from the groin strike. As he bent in agony, the Executioner struck downward with the butt end of the stick, which extended below his fist. The short stub of wood cracked into the back of the man’s skull. A punyo—the Filipinos called the technique—worked just as well on them as for them, ending the attacker’s sounds of torment and sending him to sleep on the asphalt of the highway.

      Turning his attention to the side, Bolan noticed that Latham had stepped up even with him to engage one of the two remaining attackers. As the Executioner feinted again with his baston, he saw the Texan crack his man across the jaw with the backside of his machete. Although it didn’t break the skin, the long, thin striking area left an ugly red stripe across the top of the crumbled bone.

      The third man had watched the men on both sides of him fall to the strangers and the sight brought out a desperate panic. With a shriek of terror, he abandoned all training he might have had and began to swing his klewang wildly back and forth.

      Bolan had only to time the swings, then step in as the blade went past him. In one smooth motion he trapped the sword with his machete and, with the other hand, brought the baston down at a forty-five-degree angle against the frightened man’s temple.

      Although he could still hear townsmen running toward him in the darkness, there was no immediate threat. The Executioner took advantage of the break in the action to sprint across the asphalt to the sandy shore beneath the stilt houses. Behind him, he could hear Latham’s feet beating the sand as he followed. “I’m…with you,” the Texan panted.

      The Executioner took the steps of Subing’s house three at a time, the machete in one hand, the crudely fashioned baston in the other. Each time his foot hit the rotting wood the stairs screamed in agony, threatening to collapse beneath him. Halfway up the steps he saw a small dark figure step out of the house onto the porch.

      Mario Subing aimed the pistol in his hands down the steps at the Executioner.

      BOTH RACHAEL PARKS and her husband, John, believed strongly in prayer. Before accepting the mission assignment to the Philippines, they’d had a special time set aside each night when they prayed together. The both also did their best to offer up short individual appeals and supplications to God throughout the day. But there had been so much work to be done as soon as they’d arrived on Mindanao that too often they collapsed into bed at night and suddenly realized they hadn’t spoken a word to the Lord all day.

      “Yeah, but isn’t there a proverb that says God loves busy hands?” Rachael remembered her husband saying one night when she’d pointed out that they’d forgotten to pray.

      “Yes,” she remembered saying back. “But there’s a whole bunch of scripture that says He likes to talk to us, too.” They had both laughed. Then they’d both prayed, because neither one of them were the type who fooled themselves into thinking a rapid-fire thank-you-God-for-another-day-and-enough-to-eat-amen was a real prayer.

      Well, Rachael thought as she closed her eyes behind the hood, I’ve got plenty of time to make up for lost prayers now. The fact was that prayer, meditation and thinking was about all she or her husband had been able to do during the past several months.

      Rachel shifted her mud-encrusted, water-soaked jeans beneath her and felt the chapped skin on the back of her thighs. Yes, for perhaps the first time in her life, she had all the time she wanted to pray. And though she had taken advantage of it, offering up prayers about her church, her husband, the other hostages, her family and herself, for some reason the words she found herself silently forming with her lips, over and over again, had nothing to do with her present situation. In fact, the words she caught herself saying most often were not even original on her part—they had been spoken by Jesus more than two thousand years earlier while he hung on the cross.

      Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.

      Rachael opened her eyes beneath the hood. For weeks after their capture she had hated the terrorists who had taken them hostage. Then she had realized her hatred wasn’t hurting the men who held them captive one bit. But it was eating her alive. So she had prayed that God would remove the hatred from her soul and give her the strength to endure whatever happened. Then she had gone another step and prayed that the Lord would forgive Candido Subing and the other Tigers and that they would find salvation through Jesus Christ.

      Rachael smiled as she remembered the sequence of events after the first such prayer. She’d said, “Amen” then felt obligated to add. “P.S. Lord, help me to someday mean it when I ask you