6
Connemara RegionalHospital
January 18
Fitzduane opened his eyes.
What had awakened him? Who was out there? He must react. He had dropped his guard before and look at what had happened.
The imperative to move coursed through his body and was counteracted by his painkillers and sedation.
Still the warning screamed at him.
Sweat broke out on his forehead. He tired to rise to a sitting position, some body posture from which he could react more forcibly than when lying down helpless and defenseless.
The effort was terrible. His body did not want to respond.
He drove it into submission and slowly he could raise his head and bandaged torso, but he was too weak. He screwed up his eyes as the pain hit, and a low cry of agony and frustration escaped from his body.
He heard a voice, and it was the voice of a friend. There was no threat. He was safe. Boots was safe. Suddenly, he knew where he was.
And then he saw her and felt her hand soothe his forehead and heard her voice again. "Hugo," she said. "You're safe. Relax. Lie back. There is nothing to worry about. You must rest and get well."
The digital wall clock read 2:23.
Kathleen, a warm, dark-haired woman in her early thirties, was changing his drip. On Linda Foley's initiative, she had been seconded from Intensive Care. Burke's patients tended to do better than most. She had the touch.
She finished her task and checked his pulse. She had an upside-down watch pinned to her uniform and she was looking at it as she counted silently. He liked the touch of her fingers and the clean, warm smell of her body. There was the mark of a recently removed ring on the third finger of her left hand.
"Can I get you something, Hugo?" she said very softly.
Fitzduane smiled. It was strange. The pain was still there but somehow remote. He felt rested and at peace. He lifted his hand and took hers. There was nothing sexual in the gesture. It was the kind of thing you might not do in broad daylight but which is somehow appropriate when it is two in the morning and the rest of the world seems asleep.
"Tell me about it," he said sleepily. His fingers stroked the spot where the ring had been.
Kathleen laughed quietly. She was a very pretty woman, all the better for the signs of the passing of the years etched on her face. "It doesn't work that way," she said. "You're supposed to do the talking. It doesn't do for a nurse to give away her secrets to a patient."
"It takes away the mystique," said Fitzduane quietly, with a smile, quoting what a nurse in Dublin had once told him. "Patients want support and strength — solutions, not problems. It doesn’t do to get emotionally involved with a patient." He grinned. "One way or another, we move on."
He started to laugh out loud. Outside in the corridor, the Ranger on duty heard the sound and felt mildly jealous. It would be nice to recline in bed with a pretty nurse as company. Then he contemplated what he had seen and heard about Fitzduane's injuries and decided that he had the better part of the bargain, after all.
The nurse came out of the room some ten minutes later and there was a smile on her face. She looked more relaxed, happier somehow. Earlier on, when he had checked her on screen before letting her through the double security barrier, the Ranger could have sworn she had been crying.
A message sounded in his earpiece, and he responded by pressing the transmit button in the day's coded response. Then he concentrated on the routines that the General had laid down to keep Fitzduane safe from another attack. The Ranger hadn't needed any reminders that lightning can strike as often as it takes. He had been one of the force that had relieved the siege of Fitzduane's castle three years earlier. As far as he was concerned, if you were a player in the war against terrorism, you were in a state of permanent danger.
Simply put, either you killed them or — sooner or later — they would inflict lethal force on you.
* * * * *
January 24
General Shane Kilmara — it was really rather nice being a general at last — thought that Fitzduane looked terrible.
On the other hand, he looked less terrible than three weeks earlier. The sense that you were looking only at a receptacle for tubes, electronics, and the drug industry was gone. Now Fitzduane looked mostly like a messed-up human who was still being stuck together. Shades of Frankenstein when he needed more work, only Fitzduane was better-looking.
He was pale, he'd lost a lot of weight, and he was strapped, plastered, and plugged into a drip and a mess of other hardware, but he was sitting up and his green-gray eyes had life in them again. And that was good. Also, he was talking. That, perhaps, wasn't so good. Hugo was a particularly bright human being, and his questions meant work. And tended to have consequences.
"Who and why?" said Fitzduane.
"How about ‘Good morning,’" said Kilmara. "I haven't even sat down." He pulled up an armchair to demonstrate his lack and began to nibble at Fitzduane's grapes.
It was curious how hard it was to talk to the sick. You tended to meet and deal with most people in full, or at least reasonable, health. A person laid low was like a stranger. You no longer possessed a common frame of reference. The same applied to a soldier on the battlefield. When he was mobile, he was fire support and valued. After injury he was a statistic, a casualty — and a liability. It wasn't very nice, but it was true. And like many things in life, there wasn't much you could do about it.
Fitzduane, it appeared, wasn't going to accept the convention. He might look like something the cat had chucked up behind the sofa, but his brain was working.
Kilmara formed the view that his friend — actually his closest friend, now he thought of it, except maybe for Adeline, who was his wife and therefore didn't actually count in that particular census — was on the mend; maybe. The medics were still hedging their bets.
But it was going to be a long haul. Being shot with a high-powered rifle tended to have that effect. As they used to say in Vietnam, "A sucking chest wound is nature's way of telling you you've been hit." Hugo had been hit twice, and it showed.
"Shane," said Fitzduane. There was something about the tone.
Kilmara was caught in mid-munch. He swallowed the pits.
"No speeches," he said. "I embarrass easily."
Fitzduane was silent. "In case I forgot to mention it," he said, after a very long pause, "thank you."
"Is that it?" said Kilmara, sounding incredulous. "Is that all?" He grinned. "Truth to tell, we were lucky. Well, relatively lucky."
Fitzduane raised an eyebrow. "That's a matter or perspective," he said. "Now let's get to work. The white suits have cut back on the pills and needles, so I'm beginning to be able to string together a thought or two, and these first thoughts are not kindly. I want whoever is behind this. You've got some of the puppets and that's nice, but that's not what counts. What really matters is nailing the puppetmaster."
Two nurses came in and started to do things to Fitzduane before Kilmara could respond. They asked Kilmara to wait outside. When he came back in Fitzduane was paler, but his pillows were puffed up and his bed looked neater.
Kilmara had been shot in his life and had had malaria and other reasons for being hospitalized. He had formed the view that the medical professionals sometimes had their priorities mixed up. They liked their patients to look sharp so that they could show them off to the doctors. The patient's rest didn't seem to come into it. Nonetheless, he had a weakness for nurses. He could forgive most nurses most things.
He switched his mind back to Fitzduane. He had been told in words of one syllable that the patient was not to be worried and that stress was to be avoided at all costs. And now Fitzduane, his medication at last down to manageable proportions so he could think reasonably clearly, wanted to dive straight into the investigation. Tricky. Hard to know what to do.
"Hugo," he said, "are you sure you're ready for this? You're still a very sick fellow."
Fitzduane looked at him long and hard, eyes blazing.
"Shane," he said deliberately, the words punched out, "they nearly killed Boots. I saw the back of my son's head open up and his lifeblood pour out. I thought he was dead. Next time they could succeed. Don't fuck with me. You're my friend. Help me. These" — he paused now, shaking with emotion and weakness, searching for the right word — "these vermin have to be found, fixed, and destroyed. And I will do it, with or without your help."
"Found, fixed and destroyed."
The military phrase brought back a flood of memories to Kilmara. Fitzduane as a young lieutenant in the Congo. His first recon mission. The brutal firefight that had followed. Other missions. Other demonstrations of his effectiveness at the skills of deadly force. The man had a natural talent for combat. But then, that was his heritage.
Kilmara picked his words to ease the tension.
"There were three men who attacked you," he said. "Unfortunately, all were killed. Their identification papers were all false. Their clothing had been recently purchased and revealed nothing. There were no distinguishing marks."
Fitzduane still looked at him. It has been three weeks, the look implied.
"The one characteristic they all had in common was that they were Asian, or at least looked Asian. More specifically, they looked Japanese," continued Kilmara. "We put in an inquiry worldwide through Interpol and specifically to Japan through the Tokyo Metropolitan police. We trawled through other sources as we normally do when a terrorist profile is involved. And we phone our friends and called in a few favors and otherwise did a little rousting along the Information Highway."
"And?" said Fitzduane.
"The replies have been a little slow in coming. Of course, Interpol is not renowned for its reflexes and the Japanese are likely to chew things over before they swallow. Finally, it emerged that the three were members of a right-wing extremist group that had supposedly been broken up nearly three years back. Our three had been locked up on some technicality but were released about eight months ago."
"The timing is about right," said Fitzduane. The motive would have stemmed from his encounter with Kadar, the Hangman. If this was a revenge mission, he would have expected it to happen earlier. The designated hitters' being out of circulation at the Japanese government's pleasure could explain the timing. "But why Japanese?"
"The only thing," said Kilmara, "is that according to Tokyo our three violent friends shouldn't have turned up on your island."
"And why not?" said Fitzduane.
"They are supposed to be in the Middle East," said Kilmara cheerfully. "That's what the computer said. But what do computers know? More to the point, there is a slightly strange rhythm to the way some of the other sources have been responding. Silence, then the absolute minimum, and then a veritable feast. It's as if some people have figured out that we might be able to make a contribution to their particular game. As to who these people are..."
He looked at Fitzduane with some concern. The man was looking decidedly strange. "Hugo," he inquired tactfully, "are you sure you want to get into this?"
"Aahh!" said Fitzduane, in what sounded like a long sigh of understanding or acknowledgment.
"Adeline says that sometimes," said Kilmara cheerfully, "and I'm never quite sure if it's good or bad. It's a contextual noise."
"Aahh!" said Fitzduane again. He was propped up by pillows in an uncomfortable-looking hospital bed. He had turned frighteningly pale. Now he leaned forward, as if propelled from the back, and was violently sick.
Kilmara hit the emergency button, conscious that even medical help would be delayed for precious seconds by the security he had put in position. To die because of your own security, what an irony. Hugo would certainly appreciate that.
He looked at his friend. Fitzduane had sunk back against his pillows. He was now more green than pale. "Apologies," he muttered. His eyes closed and he slid to one side, unconscious. Some color came back into his cheeks.
The door burst open and white-clad bodies filled the room. Fortunately, they seemed to know what they were doing.
It's not nice being shot, thought Kilmara; it's not nice at all. And it's about basic things we don't like to think about — like the spilling of blood and the discharge of mucus, and splintered bone and traumatized flesh and time and pain.
The room smelled of vomit and things medical. But there wasn't the faintest trace of the smell that accompanies the passing of a life, the reminder of each and every human's mortality. The air was clean of the smell of fear.
Kilmara, sitting in the visitor's armchair, temporarily ignored by the focused emergency team, felt immensely relieved. He knew at that moment that Fitzduane was really going to make it. Hope became certainty. He felt curiously weak, as the reaction to endless days of tension set in. He wanted to laugh or cry or shout out loud, or just lie down and sleep. His face showed no change of expression.
An intern turned around to get something from a nurse and noticed Kilmara. The intern had been on duty for some ridiculous length of time and was tired, unshaven, irritable, and short on words. "Out," he ordered. "You there — get out of here."
"Get out of here, General," said Kilmara agreeably.
He exited. Fitzduane was clearly back in the ballgame, but it was going to take a little time before he became a serious player. But, knowing his friend, not too long.
* * * * *
Tokyo, Japan
January 24
Wearing fatigues to avoid the distinctive smell of propellant clinging to her street clothes, Chifune shot for forty-five minutes on the Koancho Number Three internal range, working mostly under low-light conditions.
She fired at least a hundred rounds a day five days a week to keep her edge.
The work demanded total concentration. The scenarios she had selected to be projected on the target screen covered hostage-taking and similar complex situations where, apart from shooting accurately, only brief seconds — and sometimes even less — were allowed in which to determine who were the targets and who were the victims. The poor light made the work even harder, but she was practicing this way because it was the nearest thing to the environment where she was going next.
She practiced both with and without an optical sight. The EPC subminiature optical sight, of British design — the U.K. had considerable expertise in the manufacture of counterterrorist equipment — allowed her to keep both eyes open, and replaced the conventional sight with a prismatically induced red dot which automatically adjusted to the infrared level of ambient light. The sight was passive — it did not project a line of red light like a laser sight — so it was ideal for covert operation. It was proving to be particularly effective under low-light conditions. The optics gathered the light like a pair of high-quality binoculars, and where the large red dot was placed, so went the rounds.
Using the EPC optical sight on her Beretta, Chifune found she could aim and fire accurately — hitting a nine-inch plate at twenty meters — in one third of a second. The qualifying standard was double that time.
Chifune Tanabu was an exceptional shooter.
* * * * *
Adachi was going through the standard checklists that were used for a murder investigation and then updating his personal operational plan on his word processor.
The investigation of the last few weeks seemed to indicate that Hodama had met everyone and been everywhere. And he had lived too damn long. The classic routines of interviewing all friends and acquaintances and cross-checking their stories was taking forever. And as for trying to work out who had a motive to kill him, well, who didn't? Hodama had schemed and manipulated and bribed and double-crossed all his life. His list of enemies must be endless.
Somewhere, Hodama must have records. The house was clean and, more important, there was no indication that any volume of papers had been removed. There were no empty shelves or open filing cabinets or safes with doors open. No, Adachi was of the opinion that he had kept his goodies elsewhere. He was a devious, cautious son of a bitch, and that would be in character. Alternatively, the place had been sanitized by a true professional; and that in itself was food for thought.
They had discovered the security video — the recorder had taped all the comings and goings at Hodama's house — but could not read it. Evidently, Hodama liked to keep a permanent record of his visitors, but in such a way that it was secure. The video recording was scrambled and needed a decoder to work. Right now, the technical boys were trying to decode the thing. It was bloody frustrating; they might have a complete recording of the killers, but they could not view it. But why had the killers not removed the tapes? Elsewhere, their preparation had been so meticulous. Would they slip up on a visual record? For some reasons of their own, did they deliberately want to leave a record?
"Boss!" shouted Fujiwara.
Adachi looked up.
Inspector Fujiwara was waving his telephone handset around and grinning. "Progress. We turned over the homes of all of Hodama's people, and we've hit pay dirt at Morinaga's."
"Who the fuck is Morinaga?" said Adachi. He was tired and felt drowned in paper. Reports written on the heat-sensitive paper used by the built-in printers of the little word processors used throughout Japanese officialdom seemed to be curled up everywhere, interspersed with even curlier faxes. Adachi longed for good, old-fashioned plain paper. Apart from being horrible to handle, heat-sensitive paper had an annoying habit of fading when exposed to direct sunlight. He could just see the crucial report. "And the murderer is..." fading as he looked.
"Harumi Morinaga was one of the Hodama bodyguards shot inside the house," said Fujiwara. "He took a burst in the torso and a couple in the neck. Kind of a slight physique for his line of work. Aged mid-twenties."
Adachi flipped through the file. He knew most of the victims through the photos taken as they lay dead. They were the ones that left the most vivid impressions. Somehow, the pictures collected afterward of a victim while still alive seemed to have an air of unreality. The real thing, the most memorable image — the most recent picture — was that of the corpse. He nodded at Fujiwara as he found the bloody mess that had been Morinaga.
"Morinaga's father," said Fujiwara, "was with Hodama for many years. Father and son, it appears, were estranged for a while. Father wanted son to work for Hodama and carry on the family tradition, and son wanted to go his own way. He went to work for one of the big corporations. Then, unexpectedly, he left the corporation, acceded to his father's wishes, and went to work for Hodama."
Adachi nodded. They had expected an inside man. It was common in such killings, and there was the detail that the front gate had not been forced. Someone had given the intruders the combination — or they already knew the code.
"We found young Morinaga's financial records," said Fujiwara. "He's been buying more on the stock market than he could ever afford from a bodyguard's salary — and there was over a million yen in cash in his apartment."
Fujiwara was still grinning.
"There's more?" said Adachi.
"We found a nightclub receipt and a couple of cards in one of his suits. We went to the places concerned and had them identify Morinaga and the company he was with. Young Morinaga was out with some people from the Namaka Corporation."
"Eenie, meenie, miney, mo!" said Adachi.
"What does that mean?" said Inspector Fujiwara.
"Damned if I know," said Adachi. "Let's grab a few of the boys and go have a beer."
* * * * *
Chifune lay concealed behind a pile of packing cases on the third floor of a warehouse near the Fish Market at the back of the Ginza, and reflected upon the psychology of informers.
One of the packing cases held the pungent Vietnamese fermented fish sauce Nuoc Mam, and clearly a bottle or two had broken. The stuff stank. What the hell was wrong with good old-fashioned soy sauce? she wondered. The Japanese had the longest life span of any nationality, living proof that the traditional diet was superior.
Strictly speaking — if you wanted to evaluate the pure functionality of the issue — it was scarcely ever necessary to actually meet an informant. Information could be communicated by phone, by radio phone, by fax, or even posted — and that was without the more exotic methods of communication beloved of spies: dead-letter boxes, loose bricks, hollow trunks of trees, and the like. If you were computer literate, you could even use CompuServe, for heaven's sake.
No, the communication of information in itself did not require a meeting. It was the human element that dictated such an impractical, functionally unnecessary, and dangerous activity as a face-to-face encounter between informant and controller.
In accordance with Koancho operating procedure, Chifune had been trained not only by Koancho themselves, but also be a designated foreign intelligence agency. Traditionally, the foreign agency of choice had been the CIA, but Japan's ever-growing economic success had fostered a desire to exert some degree of independence, and in the late sixties, America's — and the CIA's — prestige being at somewhat of a low point thanks to the Vietnam War, Koancho had started trolling the field. There was plenty of precedent for Japanese traveling abroad to pick up foreign expertise. The initial impetus for the success of the Japanese economy had come from exactly this approach.
In the case of intelligence, Koancho hit pay dirt with Israel. Chifune's foreign training stint had been spent with Mossad, ‘the institute’ — in Hebrew, Ha Mossad, le Modiyn ve le Tafkidim Mayuhadim, the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.
She had undertaken the arduous course at Mossad's training center north of Tel Aviv that produces the elite of highly effective katsas — case officers — which are the backbone of Israeli intelligence. Chifune's grandmother was Jewish, a fact known to Mossad, which played no small part in the care they put into her training.
It was the Japanese side of her character that had Chifune waiting for a meeting with her informant. The Israelis had emphasized the inherent dangers and threats to security of such meetings, and had stressed that sheer logic dictated the importance of keeping such arrangements to a minimum. In contrast, her Japanese upbringing and even her Koancho training stressed the importance of ninjo, human feelings.
Ninjo were fundamental in all human relationships, even between police and yakuza or in the grubby world of case officer and informer. Even in the deadly business of counterterrorism, in Japan there was a need to respect one's giri, or obligations. For her part, Chifune felt a strong sense of obligation toward her informants. This was sensed and normally returned, and the resulting bond helped greatly toward her operational effectiveness.
The price she paid was that her life was not infrequently in danger. Her solution was her own personal version of ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick.’ She put a great deal of care into the preparations for every meeting and carried not a big stick, but her silenced Beretta.
Unless there was a foolproof cover story, Chifune varied the location of each meeting with an informant and tried to make each meeting place a plausible scenario.
In this case, her informant — code-named Iron Box — had a brother who was the accountant for the food importers who owned the warehouse and had his office in a partitioned-off area of the floor below. Accordingly, Iron Box had a solid reason for visiting the place, and right now, though the regular warehouse staff had gone home, her brother was working away downstairs on his abacus trying to reconcile stock. This was never an easy task where food was involved. The damn stuff was too portable and too easy to dispose of. The brother was convinced that packing cases of food had legs.
Iron Box was a code name randomly selected by the Koancho computer, and by design it was singularly inappropriate for the slight, demure, and rather pretty twenty-seven-year-old medical receptionist, one Yuko Doi, that Chifune was waiting to meet.
Miss Doi was also a terrorist, a member of a group known as The Cutting Edge of The Sword of the Right Hand of the Emperor — a name which did not roll easily off the lips, even in Japanese, and which was known as Yaibo — Japanese for ‘the cutting edge’ — for short. But Yaibo, despite their ridiculous name and rightist propaganda, was no laughing matter. It was the most effective Japanese terrorist group since the Red Army, and its specialty was assassination.
Yaibo also operated a five-person cell structure and was exceedingly difficult to penetrate. Iron Box was something of a coup. She was a by-product of Yaibo's habit of conducting regular purges, of killing its own people who were suspected of being informers.
Iron Box's lover had been just such a victim. He had been beaten to death over several days by her cell — including Iron Box herself — and the experience had dented her idealism. She had made a rather shaky call to the kidotai, the riot police who were in the front line of the battle against terrorism as far as the media were concerned, and then the connection had been quietly handed over to Koancho.
Slowly and carefully, Chifune shifted her location from the cover of the fish sauce to a pallet of bags of rice. Whatever the smell, the thought had occurred to her that if shit started to fly, the undoubtedly rice had better ballistic stopping properties than glass bottles of fish sauce. Better still, it was Japanese rice. Thanks to subsidies, it might be many times the world market price for rice, but every good Japanese knew it was superior.
The elevator started to creak and groan. The warehouse floor was rectangular in shape, with the elevator and stairs located side by side to one end. Directly facing the elevator door, but to one side, Chifune was concealed. Her position gave her quick access to either the fire escape or the stairs if she had to make a run for it. Locating the fastest way to get the hell out was one of the first lessons you learned in training. Heroics were not encouraged.
There was a rattle, a further series of groans, and a crash, and the doors of the goods elevator were open.
Chifune's gaze was fixed on the opening. She was expecting Iron Box, dressed in her normal smart suit, too-high heels and crisp blouse, but it could be the night watchman up to check the stock and decide what to steal that night. Chifune had noticed in her reconnaissances that with typical Japanese modesty he limited himself to one case per night.
The minimal warehouse lighting, presumably a gesture toward security, was provided by a series of low-power naked lightbulbs dangling above the intersections of pallets. The filthy ceiling of the room and the matte colors of the packing cases absorbed the light, and clear visibility was difficult.
It was dawning on Chifune that she should have brought an image intensifier. Still, perfection was an aspiration, not a human characteristic. Instead she focused the EPC optical sight of her silenced Beretta on the elevator entrance, just as a small figure wearing either slacks or trousers stepped out and looked uncertainly from side to side.
It was Iron Box. Chifune registered that fact just as the significance of the flared sighting dot in the sight hit home. The sighting dot reacted to infrared light. Someone was scanning the gloom with an invisible infrared beam — invisible except to someone with an infrared viewer or the EPC sight. Someone else, who wanted to be covert, was in the warehouse.
Chifune tracked the source of the beam. Through the sight, it was like tracking a beam of light. Her gaze terminated at the crude wooden structure on top of the elevator shaft that housed the motor. She had considered that very hiding place herself, and she went cold at the thought. Her next question was, how did someone get up there without being seen by me?
There were two alternatives: either the watcher had arrived before Chifune and knew the Koancho agent was there, or else the watcher, or watchers, had entered the small motor room directly from a roof trapdoor in the elevator. Chifune tried to remember if she had seen such a trapdoor and decided she had not. It was an old, crude installation dating back to the postwar building rush, by the looks of it, and constructed with scant regard for building regulations.
Iron Box walked out hesitantly onto the warehouse floor, just as Chifune came to her disturbing conclusions. A split second later, flame flashed from the motor room, there was a hollow explosion, and almost immediately afterward, the Vietnamese fish sauce behind which she had been hiding exploded in a lethal mist of shrapnel and glass shards.
The destruction was near total. Two seconds later, there was another flash and double explosion from the grenade launcher, and what was left of the warehouse's trial shipment of Vietnamese Nuoc Mam sauce was vaporized. Chifune flinched behind her rice as hot metal thudded into the rice sacks, and gagged at the smell. She was spotted from head to toe with the awful stuff.
Iron Box was crouched on the floor, trying to take cover behind a pallet-load of drums of cooking oil. She was screaming, and oil was spewing from several of the drums where grenade fragments had penetrated.
The access door of the elevator room flew open and three figures in black ski masks jumped down onto the main warehouse floor.
Two figures with slung automatic weapons grabbed Iron Box. The third stood guard, a U.S.-made M16 automatic rifle fitted with an underbarrel grenade launcher in his hands.
Chifune realized that she was supposed to be dead, and certainly it was not for lack of trying. Two M79 grenades against one slight Koancho case officer and a few cases of fish sauce was overkill. The explosions had blown out the lightbulbs in her section. She crouched down behind the rice bags, thankfully shielded by the darkness. One handgun against three automatic weapons was not good odds. It did not make sense to die for an informant.
For a split second, Japanese giri and Israeli pragmatism fought a battle, and in the end sheer irritation at being fucked around by three goons won out. She heard a cry of fear and, looking over the top of her barrier, caught a glint of metal. Iron Box was struggling in one terrorist's hands, and he was pushing her onto her knees as the other raised a sword above his head. The third terrorist still kept a lookout, his weapon traversing the gloom of the warehouse as he scanned from side to side.
Chifune placed the red dot on the third terrorist and fired four shots when the combination was pointed well away from her. In case he was wearing body armor, she aimed for his head, and all four rounds impacted. The grenade launcher exploded with its characteristic double blast, and a pallet of the local version of Scotch whisky at the other end of the warehouse went up in flames.
Distracted by Chifune's attack, the terrorist with the sword looked away from his victim toward this new assailant, and Iron Box kicked him very hard in the balls.
He doubled up in pain just in time to be missed by Chifune's next burst of fire. She swore and ducked down, as the remaining standing terrorist got his automatic weapon into play. Rice showered in the air. It was like a wedding.
She sprinted a dozen paces to fresh cover, changing magazines as she ran, then rolled into the aisle and fired again in a long burst of aimed shots, just as Metsada, the action arm of Mossad responsible for the more direct approach, had trained her.
The standing terrorist was ducking down to change magazines as she skidded on the cooking oil, invisible in the gloom. Her weapon slid under a pallet.
The surviving terrorist had raised himself to his knees and now brought his katana down in a sweeping blow. Chifune just managed to roll to one side, but her left arm was gashed and she felt suddenly weak with shock.
Iron Box cried out a long "Nooooo!" and then there was a dense dull sound as the terrorist's next blow cut down through the side of Iron Box's neck and on through her torso to terminate close to her pelvic bone. Nearly split in two, the informant, a look of horror on her face, slumped forward.
The terrorist looked fascinated at her as she collapsed.
Chifune picked up the fallen M16, switched the fire-selector switch to automatic, and with two bursts forming a rough Y, which she thought was appropriate, terminated the killer's short career as a swordsman.
Flames were licking up the warehouse, the floor was slick with blood, and the smell of the slaughterhouse and burning whisky mixed with Vietnamese fermented fish sauce was indescribable.
Iron Box had been due to tell Chifune about the involvement of Yaibo in a hit on an Irishman called Fitzduane. The terrorist group was indeed ‘The Cutting Edge,’ but the real issue had been who was wielding the blade. Chifune had her suspicions, but proof was in short supply.
It did not look as if Iron Box was going to be of much assistance.