Rules of The Hunt

24

Tokyo, Japan

July 12

The entire perimeter was sealed off as they approached a side entrance of the military base at Atsugi.

Security floodlights pierced the darkness.

Located just outside Tokyo, Atsugi was the headquarters of the elite Airborne Brigade of the Japanese Defense Forces, and it was there they were to board the airship.

With a pang, Fitzduane thought of Adachi, who had trained and operated from there. It was appropriate, he mused, that retribution against the policeman's killer should originate from that location as well. He felt a great sadness when he thought of Adachi, and there was that familiar twinge of guilt which so often seemed to accompany the death of a comrade: why him and not me? He pushed such thoughts to the back of his mind. Right now, there were more urgent issues to consider. What they were about to do was intricate and dangerous and would require all his concentration.

The black Tokyo MPD limousine containing the police driver, the Spider, Yoshokawa, and Fitzduane was stopped at a striped pole barrier and they were asked to leave the car while each man's credentials were checked thoroughly.

Beyond the token barrier of the striped pole, Fitzduane saw retractable spiked metal anti-ram barricades and two well-camouflaged interlaced machine-gun posts.

The airborne troopers were taking security seriously. Other troops with blackened faces and in full battle order patrolled the perimeter and all key installations. Apart from being a military installation, Atsugi was also the training area for the kidotai, the antiterrorist riot police, and, as such, was a prime terrorist target.

The white-helmeted gate guards waved them through and held salutes as they drove past. Five minutes later, they could see the black silhouette of the airship in the distance. It looked impossibly large in the darkness and brought to Fitzduane's mind the image of some vast, menacing space monster.

"It's awesome," breathed Yoshokawa, as they emerged from the limousine. "And beautiful in a rather sinister way. But what a creation!"

"It's quite small by traditional airship standards," said the Spider modestly. Actually, he was proud of the Tokyo MPD airship. "It's about seventy feet high, fifty feet in diameter, and two hundred feet long. That is big enough to hold just under a quarter of a million feet of gas."

It's going to be like flying in a mobile city block, contemplated Fitzduane. He was used to smaller things buzzing around in the skies. On the other hand, he tried to have a reasonably open mind.

Yoshokawa was lost in thought. The engineer and inventor in him was fascinated. "When I think of airships," he mused, "I always think of zeppelins and then the horrible crash of the Hindenburg. I saw it on an old newsreel when I was a boy. A truly dread-inspiring sight to see that large balloon burst into flames and incinerate all those people."

"It did not do a lot for airship sales," said Fitzduane dryly. "And I would add, with respect, Yoshokawa-san, that such stories don't do a lot for me. In case you had forgotten, I'm going up in this particular one tonight."

"Oh," said Yoshokawa. "Oh, dear!" He was quite disconcerted. Then he recovered somewhat and went into damage limitation. "But I was talking about the past, Fitzduane-san. Airships are much safer now."

"Well, I should hope so, Yoshokawa-san," said Fitzduane with a straight face. "I have no desire to descend lightly toasted or maybe even resembling a well-done steak. I think you should know that."

There was a strange noise from the Spider. Yoshokawa looked at Fitzduane, then at the Spider. Finally, the Spider could not contain himself any longer and a belly laugh emerged.

It was only the second time Fitzduane had heard the Spider laugh. The first time had been back in Ireland in his castle. It had been merely a matter of weeks, but it seemed a different age.

* * * * *

"Stop the car," said Schwanberg suddenly.

They were through the Atsugi base perimeter, but there was still half a mile to go before the airship. "We're not there yet, Paul," said Palmer, who was driving.

"STOP THE FUCKING CAR NOW, YOU ASSHOLE!" shouted Schwanberg.

Startled, Palmer jammed his foot on the brakes and the medium-sized embassy Ford fishtailed to a halt. He waited in silence. Schwanberg had no manners at the best of times, but when he was in one of these moods all you could do was keep your head down.

"Cut the fucking lights, Chuck," said Schwanberg deliberately. "All of them."

Palmer switched off the lights.

The two men sat in darkness and stared out through the windshield of the car. The airship was ahead of them, silhouetted against the night sky. The airfield lights showed the ground crew moving about their business. They were dwarfed by the immense mass of the gas-filled envelope.

Schwanberg removed his Browning, checked the clip by touch and feel, and slammed it home again with the palm of his hand. Humans were devious shitheads, but there were some things in life you could rely on. Put a couple of 9mm hollow-points in a target's kill-zone, and he, or she, ceased to present a problem. God knows, he'd proved it often enough. The back of the neck was best. The victim dropped as if poleaxed.

"It's a hell of a plan, Paul," said Palmer quietly.

Schwanberg turned toward him, his face suffused with rage. "That's the problem, you stupid fuck," he snarled. "It's a terrific plan, and that goddamned Irishman thought it up. So what else did he think up?"

Palmer had seen Schwanberg have these feelings before. It was as if the man had an additional sense dedicated solely to his survival. They would embark on an operation and then for no reason that Palmer could ever figure out, Schwanberg would suddenly pause and think. Sometimes he would proceed as if nothing had happened. Other times, he would arbitrarily cancel the project. Again and again, he had been proved right. It was no small reason why he had been able to succeed as a player in this dangerous game for so long.

"I don't think he has thought up the ending on this one," said Palmer reassuringly. The words just came to him. He was not particularly articulate, but he felt good about this mission and he had complete faith in Schwanberg's ability to pull something out of the hat if anything went wrong. And he wanted to fly in the airship. He had never been in one before.

Schwanberg's mood suddenly switched. He had been worried, but now he felt confident again. Chuck was right. They were in control.

"Let's go," he said. Palmer restarted the engine. Schwanberg was now laughing. "‘Hasn't thought up the ending on this one,’" he repeated. "Too goddamn right."

Palmer joined in the laughter as he drove the short remaining distance to the airship.

* * * * *

Two hours later, after a host of checklists — most relating to the mission — the airship was released from its tethering mast and the mission team were airborne.

Below, the Spider and Yoshokawa waved and then were quickly lost in the darkness as the airship climbed to 1,500 feet.

Fitzduane stared out one of the windows at the panorama below and ran through the operation plan one more time, trying to consolidate his overall mental model of what had to be done. Checklists were necessary and all very well, but the endless items covered tended to buzz around distractingly in your mind and then weigh you down with detail. Fitzduane now sought a clear overview. He was keenly aware that, prepare as you might, the operation was highly unlikely to go according to plan. His opponents were clever and devious people who would have their own agendas. He had to try to prepare for the unexpected.

He smiled to himself. Another way of looking at it was to anticipate the unknown, and that was a decided contradiction in terms. Well, all you could do was give it your best shot and then make sure that you acted with reasonable grace under pressure. And the last element was luck.

Summarized — and there were a few interesting moves to add to the scenario — the basic plan was simple. Fumio Namaka had been enticed out of his normal heavy security to meet Fitzduane in the seclusion of the walled gardens surrounding Hodama's villa. The villa would be searched by two representatives of both parties to ensure there were no hidden surprises, and then the two principals and one driver each would be allowed in. Then the conference would commence. It would be held in the open garden under floodlights, so that everyone could see everyone else and to minimize the chance of eavesdropping. If it rained, there was the adequate protection of the open-sided summer house.

Fitzduane had been far from sure that Fumio would agree to an open-air meeting, but logic was on his side. It did make sense to have all involved in plain sight, and Fumio Namaka was known to be paranoid about being bugged. As an additional concession, Fitzduane had agreed that Fumio could enter the villa grounds first, immediately after the initial search, so that there would be no opportunity for any ambush to be set up.

The first twist in the plan was that it would not be Fitzduane in the second limo. But from then on, it was up to the players on the ground, with just a little help from on high.

The requirement of having a tactical edge, if at all possible, had been drummed into Fitzduane when serving under Kilmara in the Congo. There he had found he had a natural talent for thinking this way, and its application had been accelerated by being repeatedly shot at. In modern high-technology combat, so much of death was random, but it still made a difference to have an edge.

Fitzduane had been taken aback by the Tokyo MPD airship when he had first seen it floating past his bedroom window at the Fairmont, but he had very quickly taken it for granted. And it was this fact that all Tokyo residents seemed to regard the craft in the same way that had given him the idea of using it.

Vast though it was, it was such a regular feature of the Tokyoskyline, it was, for all practical purposes, invisible.

A further curious but helpful fact about the airship was that it was very hard to judge its proximity. Most people knew the approximate size of a helicopter or aircraft and cold make a rough guess at range, but the airship was seldom seen by people on the ground, so range estimation in its case was problematic in the extreme. If you do not know the size of something, it is virtually impossible to estimate distance unless there is a familiar object at the same distance.

What this boiled down to was that you could use the airship as a monitoring platform for activities on the ground below without attracting any undue attention. An extension of that premise was that you could shoot from it, too. Of course, the other side could shoot back, but at least there was the consoling fact that a modern airship could not do a Hindenburg. Early aircraft got their lift from ultravolatile hydrogen, which was a fair definition of an accident waiting to happen. Today's birds had switched to the much more expensive but more stable helium. You could fire an incendiary round into helium and no reaction would occur.

The stability of helium was the good news. The bad news, if hostiles started shooting at you, was that an airship of the Tokyo model was an easy target to acquire and a hard target to miss. Then, having found the overall target, a hostile would not have to be a rocket scientist to work out that the vulnerable humans were likely to be in the gondola below. And better yet, flying slowly.

Maximum speed was only just over seventy-five miles an hour. In reality, if shooting did start, their initial projection through speed would be considerably less. They would be optimized for monitoring, which would mean hovering or traveling at a purely nominal rate, and the airship's acceleration left a great deal to be desired. The thing was supposed to float serenely. It was not designed to hot-rod.

Fitzduane played out various scenes in his mind.

Some of the possibilities were distinctly unpalatable.

The thought of an air-to-ground running gunfight over densely populated central Tokyo made him shudder. It was for that reason that he had agreed with the Spider that only aimed rifle fire would be used within the urban confines and even then be confined to targets within the grounds of Hodama's house. It had been a reasonable request, but it would have been nice to know that the opposition was going to follow the same restrictive rules. Frankly, he did not think they would, so invisibility and surprise were his best weapons. Of course, if the action switched to over the sea, then the Spider's rules would not apply. Then they could play hardball.

Al Lonsdale had been gazing out of one of the large observation windows that lined both sides of the gondola and now turned and came over and sat by Fitzduane. When they had converted the airship for the operation, they had left a walkway around the periphery of the gondola and a row of seats in the center.

They would be airborne for four hours before the 2:00 A.M. time of the meeting. The airship could not suddenly appear. It was unlikely that anyone would look u past the glare of the floodlights when reconnoitering the meeting, but on the off chance that they did, the ship had to be established as part of the scenery. The delay was a nuisance, because waiting was the hardest part of any action, but it was unavoidable. The endurance of the airship itself was not a problem. At slow speeds it used minimal fuel and could stay up for up to forty hours if necessary.

"Hell of a craft, isn't she, Colonel?" said Lonsdale, looking around the gondola with a proprietorial air. "Frankly, I'm surprised they're not more popular. I mean, what a way to see the country. Smooth as silk."

Fitzduane was amused. Since Al had trained in the borrowed Airship Industries Skyship 600 — a model similar to the one they were flying in now — the Delta marksman had become something of an instant airship expert and advocate.

"Smooth as silk if the weather holds," said Fitzduane. "Now, some serious wind could make you reach for a long, paper bag — or so I hear."

Lonsdale grinned. The Achilles' heel of an airship was its behavior in high wind. With all that surface area, an airship's gas-holding envelope acted like a giant sail, and could pitch and roll just like a boat. On his first training flight, Lonsdale had been airsick.

"Someone's been talking," said Lonsdale cheerfully. "Anyway, that was a particularly shitty day and my pilot wasn't as expert as these boys. I don't think we're going to have any trouble tonight." He saw Fitzduane's eyebrows rise, and hastily added, "Well, not from the weather, anyway."

Fitzduane laughed. Lonsdale was right. Fortunately, weather conditions were ideal, and flying at night, unless you were flying directly over a factory or similar heat source, eliminated interference from thermals. The airship was powered by two Porsche air-cooled gasoline engines driving twin-ducted variable-pitch propellers located on either side of the rear of the gondola. It seemed to float across the sky.

It was a remarkably pleasant way to travel.

* * * * *

Schwanberg's good humor as he had boarded had faded and had been replaced with a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach as the airship took off.

At first, he had put it down to a touch of airsickness. Now, standing up in the front of the gondola looking out one of the port observation windows, Schwanberg felt distinctly uneasy again, and it was not physical. He did not know what it was, but something just did not feel right. And, over the years, if there was one thing that he had learned to rely on, it was his instinct for self-preservation. There was no question about it, something was not kosher; but what?

He fingered the grip of his 9mm Browning automatic as it sat reassuringly in his shoulder holster. What the hell had set him off? Everything seemed normal.

He had initially been thrown when he had arrived at Atsugi. He and Chuck Palmer had expected to board with everyone else after a final briefing session. That would be normal procedure. Instead, Fitzduane and his people were already installed on the airship and there had been little discussion before the airship cast off and they rose near-vertically into the sky. Fuck, it was almost as if this was entirely Fitzduane's operation, which was not the way it was supposed to be.

The second disconcerting element was the presence of Al Lonsdale and that Japanese bitch on board.

He had expected only Fitzduane and the pilots, and under those circumstances an accident for the Irishman would have been easy to arrange. The pilots were shielded from the main cabin and would see nothing. Fitzduane would just have disappeared. An accidental fall out of the door. Something simple like that.

But instead, there were two unexpected and unwanted witnesses, and both were loaded for bear. The Delta man had a .50-caliber Barrett with some high-tech telescopic sight, and the bitch had some custom self-loading piece chambered, it looked like, for the .300 WinchesterMagnum.

* * * * *

For no reason that he could identify, Fitzduane was thinking about Schwanberg. He looked across at the man. He seemed as relaxed and unperturbed as anyone could be under the very special pressures of an operation which was going to result in the imminent death of a number of fellow human beings, but Fitzduane could just feel the tension. There was nothing to see, but to Fitzduane the signs were as evident as if Schwanberg were radiating blue sparks.

Fitzduane's mind went back to the CIA chief's boarding of the airship. Had there been any sign of suspicion then? He thought not. On the contrary, both Schwanberg and his henchman, Palmer, had seemed in exceptionally good form. They had been laughing at some private joke. There had not been the slightest hint of suspicion. Or had there?

He replayed the scene in his mind. There was something — an excess of joviality? — something. He was missing some element.

He thought of Bergin. Could Schwanberg and Palmer possibly know? Surely not. There was not even a hint that they suspected their nemesis was at hand.

And yet...

* * * * *

What the fuck is going on? thought Schwanberg.

He turned toward Chuck Palmer. Palmer was looking contentedly out a window at the Tokyo lights below and seemed quite unaware that anything was amiss. Of course, Chuck would be content, since he was flying in a real airship for the first time and knew pretty much for certain that he was going to be able to kill a few people in the near future. Chuck was easy to please.

Schwanberg tried to work out a few possibilities as to what might be going down, and then, as the options clicked into place, started to sweat. It suddenly dawned on him that what he had planned to do to Fitzduane, that fucking Irishman was intending to do to him. Suspicion became certainty.

He leaned across and spoke into Chuck Palmer's ear. Palmer's back stiffened as Schwanberg spoke. If the boss had a funny feeling, there was no point in debating it. The man had a nose for trouble.

Schwanberg felt easier now that Chuck was alerted. The next question was what to do about it. Frankly, backing up Katsuda was all very well, but the prime directive was personal survival.

He looked at his watch. Shit! It was 01:38 A.M., only twenty-two minutes before the meet. They were going to have to act soon if they wanted to resolve this thing before the main action went down. After it, he had a feeling it would be too late. He had a disconcerting feeling he was being set up to die in the line of duty. He and Chuck would probably get Distinguished Intelligence Medals — posthumously — and maybe get bronze stars and their names on the memorial wall in Langley.

Some motherfucking consolation when you were a heap of ashes sitting in someone filing cabinet because they had forgotten to sprinkle you in the Garden of Remembrance. Well, it would be how Schwanberg would arrange things if roles were reversed. Death in the line of duty was a nice touch. No trial. No scandal. The Agency really did not like scandal.

The more Schwanberg thought about it, the more he was convinced he was on the button. Fuck logic! It felt right. Which raised two questions: why had they not acted already? And who was going to do the hit?

The delay in making their move was easy to work out. They did not know what was going to go down at the meet and wanted all the firepower they could get. A reasonable decision, but a fatal one for them.

* * * * *

Fitzduane tensed for a preemptive move against Schwanberg — and then relaxed. His instincts screamed danger, but his head argued with cold logic that the scenario should be played out. The first priority was what was taking place down below.

Schwanberg would have to wait — and he was covered by an ace in the hole. A very experienced ace who knew exactly what he was doing.

An ace who was not as young as he had been, whose reflexes were perhaps a little slow?

Fitzduane suppressed his doubts. The situation was complex enough already without his taking any precipitative action.

He would wait. He glanced across at Schwanberg and Palmer again. Nothing untoward.

* * * * *

AS to who was going to make the hit, Schwanberg started to give some serious thought to Bergin. He had dismissed the threat from that source before, but now it looked as if he had been wrong. This was the kind of thing the Agency liked to handle internally. Allowing outsiders to liquidate your personnel was not a good precedent. So maybe someone here worked for the Agency or... maybe he was anticipating a threat from the wrong quarter.

Schwanberg took a fresh look at his surroundings. He had read a briefing document on the airship before deciding it was worth using, and now he tried to recall what he could from it. What he saw was now illuminated only by dim red light. They were on night-vision status. Shortly, the light would be extinguished altogether, as the focus of attention switched to the meeting below. If they were going to make a move, it would have to be very soon or they would not be able to see what they were doing.

The gondola was, in effect, a long thin room that was suspended under the main balloon. At the front end were the two pilots, separated from the main cabin by only a three-quarter-height partition. Strictly speaking, he recalled, the airship did not need two pilots, but there was some safety regulation which made belt and suspenders mandatory.

In the middle was the main cabin. In passenger mode, it could seat up to twenty-four, but now there was only a short double-row of seats down the middle. Fitzduane was speaking into a microphone, and sitting beside him was the Delta sniper, busy checking his weapon. Farther back on the left, the Japanese bitch stood half leaning against the rear bulkhead. She appeared to be dozing. At any rate, her eyes seemed closed. Most probably she was into some meditation shit.

Beyond the bulkhead, at the rear of the gondola, was a major thickness of soundproofing and the engines. Schwanberg again tried to recall the layout of the airship. Wait! He had forgotten the head on the left and a small galley space on the right.

He had used the head, so there was nothing untoward there. He looked toward the galley space and it was not there — there was just a door — and suddenly their who fucking game plan became clear.

"CHUCK!" he screamed, and drew his Browning and pumped seven rounds through the galley door.

The door crashed open and Bergin stumbled out, blood spewing from a wound in his neck.

There was a silenced automatic held high in his right hand, and Schwanberg watched as the barrel swung toward him and the black circle jumped twice, as two rounds were fired. They missed him, as he knew they would.

Schwanberg felt a rush. Once more he had beaten them to it. The VC could not get him, nor could anyone else. He was whip-smart and fucking well invulnerable.

He shot again three times and watched Bergin's skull come apart and his body slam back toward the galley door.

Chifune dropped to the ground just as Chuck Palmer fired his pistol, and the round smashed through the gondola wall just above her. She was now hidden behind the center row of seats, and Palmer fired a burst of shots trying to guess her position.

She had moved forward as he was shooting, and now raised herself on one knee and put two shots into Palmer's stomach.

He folded in two, and she shot him again in the crown of his head. The bullets exited at the back of his neck.

Schwanberg could not understand the terrible pain.

He knew he had not been shot, but his vision was dimming and there was not strength in his limbs.

He looked down, and the haft of a throwing knife was protruding from his chest.

He saw Fitzduane's face, and then the pain was overwhelming as the blade was removed from his torso and plunged in once again under his rib cage and up into his heart.

Fitzduane removed his knife from Schwanberg's body and saw with horror a double hole in the low screen immediately behind the pilot's chair.

He leaped forward and ripped the screen aside.

The copilot's face, frozen with shock and fear, looked up at him in desperation. The side of the screen in front of the pilot was black with blood.

The digital chronometer on the instrument panel read 01:47 A.M.

There were thirteen minutes to go before the meet.

Fitzduane looked down at the police copilot. "We will proceed as planned, Inspector-san," he said grimly.

He began to wipe the blood and brain matter from the windshield while the copilot went into a slow circuit around the Hodama residence far below.

The parameters of the residence were defined by infrared strobe lights that were invisible at ground level and even from the air, unless seen through the appropriate goggles.

The object was to keep the Hodama garden below at a constant diagonal from the airship. A predictable range made for more accurate shooting.

Behind Fitzduane in the main cabin, Lonsdale and Chifune clipped up observation windows and readied their weapons.

As he went through the necessary actions, every fiber of Fitzduane's being screamed in pain and sadness at his friend's death and then focused totally on what had to be done. Grieving would wait. Mike Bergin, if anyone could, would understand.

You shut out the sadness and you did what had to be done, and only afterwards did you weep. That was the way of it. There was no other.

* * * * *

The Spider waited in his command vehicle as the deadline approached, and although he had seen no official status, Yoshokawa waited with him.

The meeting at the Hodama residence was the focal point for a vast police operation involving concentric rings of the top-secret Airborne special antiterrorist unit and armed riot police. In all, over eleven hundred men and a host of specialized equipment were deployed, and the hardest part of planning the operation had been devising ways of concealing the buildup. Fumio Namaka and his terrorists and Katsuda and his yakuza must be allowed into the trap before it was sprung, or the whole exercise was pointless.

The downside of that vital qualification was that response time to Hodama's villa would not be as fast as the Spider would have preferred. However, he was reassured that whoever got into the residence would not get out, and he had the advantage of Fitzduane and his team visually monitoring the operation from on high.

He had broached the question of downloading a video picture of the scene from the airship's observation cameras, but Fitzduane had looked straight at him and shaken his head. Silently, with only the slightest movement, the Spider had nodded his agreement.

There were some things he, the Deputy Superintendent-General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, should not be officially aware of.

* * * * *

Fumio Namaka sat in the back of his long, black armored limousine and rechecked his arrangements. What he had planned would, perhaps, not have been so unusual in a country such as the U.S., but in tightly controlled Tokyo, it was unorthodox in the extreme.

He thought it possible that he would not need his full reinforcements. The irony was that the gaijin Fitzduane would quite likely be there as arranged, seriously thinking he could arrange a truce after all that had happened. Actually, a truce would make sense. This kind of endless war was a gross distraction from the more productive business of ever expanding the Namaka organization. Further, given that the feud with Katsuda was unresolved, it was not very wise to be fighting on two fronts.

Still, Kei's death had to be avenged. It was the overarching imperative and had to be accomplished whatever the price. And in a fundamental way, the ultimate price had already been paid.

From the moment Fumio had seen his brother's bullet-ridden corpse in the chill surroundings of the mortuary, and the last vestige of hope that somehow he had been misinformed had vanished, Fumio had died inside.

He no longer had a life. He only had obligations.

"Sensei, it is time," said his driver.

"Very well," said Fumio. The limousine slid forward out of the private parking space and turned into the street. Since timing was critical, they had waited in a safe house only three minutes from the Hodama residence. Within five minutes, ten at most, this accursed gaijin Fitzduane, this murderer of his beloved Kei, would be dead.

Deep inside, Fumio knew that even this vengeance would make no real difference, and inside he despaired. Whatever he did or tried to do, his splendid big brother was no more.

His mind went back to the ruins of postwar Tokyo and those earlier poverty-stricken joyful days when all they had was each other and every day was a new adventure. He was smiling to himself when they arrived at Hodama's gates.

* * * * *

All inside the airship were now linked with head-mounted headsets equipped with miniature boom microphones. The airship was, in fact, quiet enough for normal voice communication, but the use of an intercom meant that you did not have to move your head and look at your audience to be heard with perfect clarity.

Such a detail was important. The watchers were focused with total intensity on the scene below. They knew that whatever was going to happen was likely to be unexpected, sudden, and lethal, and they would have to react immediately. A tenth of a second could make the difference between living and dying. They were dealing with some very dangerous people.

Fitzduane was acting as a spotter and fire commander. He was observing the scene below through gyroscopically stabilized, twenty-power, range-finding field glasses.

The diagonal to the garden below as they circled was almost exactly five hundred yards, and this range appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of his vision, together with other targeting details. The picture quality was outstanding. In visual terms, he was a mere twenty-five yards away. There were night-vision options, but he did not need them. Within its fifteen-foot-high walls, as agreed, the Hodama gardens were brightly illuminated. The benefit of this level of brightness was not just that everything in the garden could be clearly seen, but also that looking up meant looking into glare. The airship could not be detected.

The gondola was now in darkness. This was something of a relief to Fitzduane, since the slaughter surrounding him could no longer be seen. His own hands and clothing were covered in blood, and though the observation windows were open he could still detect the acrid smell. A split-second picture of Mike Bergin's body flashed before him, and he thrust it from his mind.

That was then and this was now. Focus, focus, focus on the scene below.

Fortunately, the copilot was turning out to be damn good. After the initial shock of seeing his superior's face half blown away and deposited on the Plexiglas, Inspector-san had rallied and now was flying superbly. There was the occasional very slight vibration in height and distance due to variations in the night breeze, but mostly the airship held its circular course as if tied to the Hodama garden by some invisible line. Thrust vectoring of its two duct-mounted propellers, the ability to swivel the complete drive units in flight, was supposed to give an unusual degree of control — and it showed.

Fitzduane was also linked to the Spider on ground control. Now he watched Fumio drive into the Hodama grounds, leave his limousine, and take up position as arranged.

Fitzduane took care making his identification. Bearing in mind what he had planned, he was acutely conscious that Fumio could attempt a switch. His instinct told him it was unlikely. Fumio would want to be there personally to see his brother's killer destroyed.

Still, it was best to be certain. Fitzduane examined Fumio's distinctive crippled walk, his build, and his features with great care and quickly switched to infrared mode to detect any mask or similar anomaly. There was little doubt.

"Fumio has entered and is in position," said Fitzduane on the open net. "No surprises so far."

The Spider's people were watching all approaches, leaving Fitzduane and his team to concentrate on the garden. "Katsuda's limousine should arrive in about thirty seconds," said the Spider.

"Any sign of a backup for either of them?" said Fitzduane.

Surely there would be car- or vanloads of reinforcements ready to rush in. Both men were always heavily guarded and were devious in the extreme. He found it hard to believe that neither of them would be planning anything. It would be downright unnatural. And yet the Spider's men, who had the area saturated, had reported nothing so far.

Very weird.

Where were Yaibo? What was Katsuda really up to? Probably Schwanberg had known, but he was not going to tell anyone anything now.

"Still nothing," said the Spider. He, too, was unsettled.

* * * * *

Katsuda's truly repulsive appearance severely limited his public appearances.

He lived in the seclusion of his own world, in the darkness and shadows of his own creations. This behavior limited neither his work nor his ambition, but regularly he felt a need for release. Apart from his women and the ambivalence he felt toward them because of his burn-distorted features, his relaxation and his window to the outside world were the movies.

He watched them to the point of obsession. The movies were not inwardly disgusted by how he looked. They were pleasure, pure and simple.

Film fulfilled his need for escape, stimulated his imagination, and appealed to his sense of the dramatic. Privately, Katsuda considered that if events had not taken the direction they had, he would have made an outstanding actor. He had a fine voice and projected it well, and his movements were well-coordinated. All that was missing were looks.

From the movies, Katsuda had followed the extraordinary developments of special effects and, of even more interest, specialized makeup. Sometimes, the results on the screen were so good that it seemed to him he could apply them to his own situation and appear, albeit for a limited time, normal.

He had cultivated one of the leading makeup artists in Japan and had even sent him to Hollywood to advance his craft to state of the art. The results were encouraging, brilliant even, if he was seen from a short distance away, but in close-up the artificiality was always detectable. It was a bitter disappointment, but he persevered. One day, he thought, they would get it right, and it was undeniable that makeup skills were steadily improving.

For the meeting with Fumio Namaka, such an artifice was arguably not necessary, but it appealed to his sense of theater.

It would be an entirely appropriate way to lead into the final act of his destruction of the Namaka clan; and the actual execution method he planned to employ deserved such a buildup. Decades ago, Hodama and the Namaka brothers had eliminated Katsuda's family in a locked, burning house. Now the last of the Namakas would also die in flames.

Katsuda was very aware that Fumio might have a few tricks up his sleeve, so had devoted a great deal of time to taking precautions. He had studied the plan of Hodama's residence for several days and finally had come up with something that he was sure beyond any doubt at all would guarantee surprise. And, of course, his own preparations were in addition to the fire support he would be getting from Schwanberg in the airship.

Nothing was certain, but as his limousine approached the gates of Hodama's house, Katsuda was as sure as any reasonable man could be when making a major movie that his preparations would ensure success.

* * * * *

"See anything?" said Fitzduane.

"Negative," said Chifune, what was all business when operational.

"A lot of pebbles," said Lonsdale, who felt the mood could do with some lightening.

Both Chifune and Lonsdale were professional and would report instantly anything untoward, but Fitzduane was getting increasingly concerned and a little strain was showing. He could still see nothing but Fumio standing beside the open-sided summer house where they were to have the meeting and Katsuda being checked in and searched at the gate. Surely, he should have detected something else by now. He could not see the pair of them meeting and just sticking out their tongues at each other.

He had two snipers, Lonsdale and Chifune, eyeballing the confrontation, but their vision was severely restricted because their eyes were glued to their telescopic sights. That had been the original plan and had made sense with Fitzduane and Mike Bergin and the pilot monitoring the bigger picture, but it was somewhat problematical now they were short two pairs of eyes.

It was time to make a change in the arrangements.

Lonsdale was targeted, but Chifune was not yet allocated, and right now it was not much good having an extra sniper if she had nothing to shoot at. Also, in training he had noticed that Chifune was about as fast as anyone at acquiring a target, so if she had to return to her scope in a hurry, it should not cause any serious grief. Chifune was not as good with the Barrett as Al, but she was one hell of a combat shot p to about a kilometer.

For both of them, five hundred yards, with precision equipment, made for virtually guaranteed single-shot kills. The best of special-operations people were somewhat frightening.

"Chifune," said Fitzduane. "Try binoculars. We need a second kibitzer. I think I'm missing something here."

"Affirmative," said Chifune, and put down her rifle. Her binoculars gave her a much wider field to examine, and the brilliantly lit triangle seen from above was easy to search.

She followed the driveway in and searched the open garden area to the right. There was a bench, some stone pots containing dwarf plants, and a couple of stone lanterns strategically placed on a bed of pebbles. It was very simple and beautiful, and the thought came to her that whatever villainy Hodama had been up to, he had good taste. The entire garden was an exercise in simplicity. Which meant there were very few places to hide in, and the house had already been searched by representatives of both sides and sealed. No, Fitzduane was right to worry. Something they had not anticipated was going to happen.

She swung her binoculars to the left of the driveway and began searching the much larger area of garden there. Her glasses rested on an ornate well with a small pagoda top, but she was looking diagonally and could not see down it.

"The well," she said. "It's a possibility. It's big enough."

"Maybe," said Fitzduane, "but it doesn't lead anywhere and it was searched and sealed when they did the house."

"They're going to zap each other with telepathy," said Lonsdale.

"Shut the fuck up, Al," said Fitzduane politely. "Please," he added.

Chifune scanned to the open-sided summer house. Still nothing, except Fumio Namaka standing there and Katsuda, still about thirty yards away, walking toward him on the irregular stone path that circumscribed the house. By agreement, their respective drivers had both stayed with the limousines.

She was running out of time. She searched the bank of ornamental plants. No room to hide even a midget here. She swept on past another ishi-doro to a decorative pond which was positioned to the side of the house fairly close to the surrounding wall. A stone bridge led to a miniature island which actually touched the perimeter wall.

"A way-out thought," she said. "Could they have tunneled under the wall?"

"Supposedly not," said Fitzduane. "There are sensors against that possibility and the police have the outside walls under observation."

Chifune did a quick sweep along the back of the house past an inscribed Garden Tablet and then moved on to a boulder garden. Still no sign of anything except what was supposed to be there.

Something niggled at her.

The circling airship had now moved on so that she could see not only Hodama's residence, but also the adjoining house and gardens. This was an area of luxury residences. The neighboring house also had a pond and it was on the other side of the wall from Hodama's Neither actually touched the wall, but the congruence looked more than coincidence.

Suppose they shared the same water? A culvert between them or maybe just a grating. Sensors in the water with goldfish and turtles paddling about the irises? Unlikely!

"The pond," she said urgently, her binoculars now focused on the black surface of the water. "Hugo, LOOK AT THE POND!"

Fitzduane had been concentrating on Fumio Namaka and the approaching figure of Katsuda, but at Chifune's shout he looked quickly at the black water. Something was decidedly odd about it.

As he watched, it began to undulate, as if it was coming to a boil or was haven to a mass of writhing snakes.

Suddenly, he understood at least part of what was happening. And he had an uneasy feeling that this was only the beginning.

"Hold your fire, people," he said. "But stand by on my mark."

This was a scene that had to be played out. Chifune returned to her .300 Winchester Magnum.

Fitzduane focused on Namaka and Katsuda and the summer house with its broad-eaved thatched roof. Katsuda, unaware of the airship on high and assuming support from Schwanberg, knew better than to go inside. His guardians had to be able to see him.

It was going to start happening any second now.

"Fitzduane-san," the Spider's voice sounded in Fitzduane's headphones urgently. "Something we did not expect in central Tokyo. I have received reports of two Huey helicopters without lights approaching low and at speed. No flight plan has been filed and they are headed precisely in your direction. ETA within two minutes, perhaps sooner."

Civilian helicopter overflight was supposed to be banned in central Tokyo, particularly in Akasaka, where not only did Hodama have his exclusive residence but so did the Emperor of Japan. Clearly, the imminent arrivals were no respecters of the rules.

A neat operation looked like it was turning very messy; or maybe a great deal worse.

Their invisible airship suddenly felt like the very large target it was.