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against the base of the munitions building, inserting a detonator that could be triggered by
     a radio beep from a matchbox-sized device he wore clipped to his belt.
    Several hundred meters beyond the munitions dump stood a hastily thrown together garagelike structure and beside the makeshift
     motorpool sat a ragtag collection of vehicles, a few Soviet Chor-7s, Jeep-like vehicles, one of them with an M-60 mounted
     on its back, to civilian rattletraps: rusting Volkswagens and a handful of eastern European jobs in somewhat better shape
     that must have belonged to the NPA officers stationed here.
    Their plan was to locate the Jeffers family—which Rufe and Cody were doing now—while Caine and Hawkins took care of wiring
     the munitions shed and those vehicles for when after Cody’s Army had whisked the Jefferses out of here as undetected as had
     been the penetration thus far. For that to work, maximum silence had to be maintained.
    Caine stood from having set the explosives. He and Hawkins left the building with the sentry in front never having tumbled
     to their presence. They zipped along the wall, advancing on the cluster of parked vehicles beside the garage.
    The whole thing depended on stealth and luck. Mostly the latter. Richard Caine did not kid himself about this.
    After wiring the vehicles, they would stay to the wall to circle back around to hook up with Cody and Murphy behind the h.q.
     hut, where everyone thought the hostages were being kept, then they would withdraw on foot rather than hijack vehicles, which
     would have served only to alert the camp, sending Locsin’s men after them. Far better to hoof it back the two kilometers to
     the LZ. The hostages would not be in the best of condition, but if the men could pull a good distance away, then detonate
     the explosives, enough confusion back here at the base behind them, triggered from way out there in the jungle, would knock
     Colonel Locsin’s sleepy-eyed force off balance with enough racket, hellfire, and confusion for Cody’s team to whisk the Jeffers
     folks aboard the chopper that would touch down to lift them to safety.
    They gained the first of three rows of vehicles, Hawkeye moving with Caine first to one, then another vehicle, placing wads
     of C-4 and detonators against the petrol tanks, enough to take the motor pool out of commission.
    Caine saw no reason to rig every vehicle. A glance at his watch goosed him along.
    Hawkins’ attention remained steadily on the NPA base gradually materializing through the misty quiet around them.
    Visibility was come and go, but this looked to Caine like a squalid setting waking beneath the oppressive heat, the humid
     mist quavering the blur of stark greens and browns. A new sound joined the bird-bat-and-insect cacophony accompanying the
     first light of dawn: the steady sound, removed and faint beyond the huts, of outhouse doors slamming dully as this base woozily
     came to life, waking NPA guerillas heeding nature’s call, some other forms beginning to straggle toward the tent from where
     the scent of cooking rice drifted, but there was no real activity yet and none, it seemed, near or around the motor pool or
     between it and the next hut over, the h.q. hut where they were to link up with Rufe and Cody and, God willing, the Jefferses.
    Caine nodded to Hawkins that the job was done.
    Hawkeye returned the nod. They pulled away from the vehicles, around toward the back of the garage, toward that h.q. hut.
    For a second there it seemed to Caine as if they would make it; that for once everything would fall into place right on the
     money, nothing would go wrong, they would reach Cody and Murphy and continue undetected with no noise to alert this base slowly
     stirring to life around them.
    He and Hawkins gained the backside of the garage.
    And ran practically face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball into three NPA regulars making a perimeter check along the inside of
     the wall.
    The communists spotted Caine and