The 47th Samurai

43

The last thing Swagger said was, “When you hit the ground, wait a second, then pull down your goggles and go to night vision.”

But in the one-tenth of a second of fall, she forgot, and she landed with more thud than she expected: it was seven feet, she felt her body elongate to full extension then accordion shut with a bang when she landed, snapping her head hard enough to drive bangles and spangles before her eyes.

She could see-nothing. It made no sense. Light and dark, nothing focused, nothing where it should be, all confusion, her will scattered and gone.

“Goggles,” whispered Swagger, who had come down beside her.

She got the goggles down-PVS7s, she’d had a day on them at a Delta Force counterterror workshop at Fort Bragg a few years ago-and hit the toggle, which was no longer where it should be but an inch to the right, evidently resettled on her head in the landing. This led to another moment of confusion, but then she got them aligned right and it all popped to. Things were beginning to happen.

It was a green, fuzzy world. Still, she made out the house. To the left, a glowing amoeba seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. It was Tanada’s rear team, coming hard over the back wall, in fact most were down, pausing only to withdraw their katana, then peeling off individually to the left rear. Meanwhile to the right, the same optical phenomenon reiterated itself, this being Fujikawa’s front team, maybe a tad behind the curve, but peeling right. She swept the house, saw nothing, but then the front door opened and she saw a man with a rifle-AK-47, she ID’d it, again from her Bragg tutorial-and behind her she heard the sound of-well, of what? It was light, a wet piston floating through the grease of a hydraulic tube, nothing sharp, but surprisingly vibratory. It was a silenced rifle, wielded by Sniper 3 Kim, and before the sound had even dissipated, the rifleman went down as if someone had cut his knees and they no longer held, and he just flopped down hard and fast.

She realized, I just saw a man die.

“House clear,” came the voice of 3 Kim from above.

At that moment a series of bright flashes syncopated to hard pops lit off in the basement of the house, as the first team of intruders had gotten their flash-bangs into the area where the yaks were.

“Go, go,” said Bob, but she was already on the way, low, hard, cutting directly across the courtyard to the house, reaching it and sliding along it. She felt Swagger beside her. She reached the open door, stepped over the body of the guy with the rifle, and, clutching her wakizashi in her right hand, ducked inside.

Captain Tanada was not the sort to direct; he was the sort to lead. So he hit the ground and took off, and fuck anybody who couldn’t keep up with him. But that got him close to the rear of the house first, and he pulled his flash-bang, got the pin out, and almost-but not quite-launched it through the window.

He got himself under control.

Four other men reached him and to each he gestured with the small munition, and each duplicated his move. Flash-bang out, pin out, lever secured, each man placed himself next to a window and in the next second, on Tanada’s nod, each shattered the window with a pad-protected elbow, tossed in the illumination device, and peeled back, withdrawing katana from scabbard, waiting for a target.

The things went off almost simultaneously, not in concussive explosion-they weren’t bombs, after all-but with a harsh bang and a white phosphorous flash that blasted anyone’s night vision to pieces. You could be forgiven for thinking that the devil himself had chucked a nuclear device through the window. They caused one of two responses: utter paralysis or complete panic. Four of them quadrupled the effect.

In a second the first man came out, unarmed, and Tanada hit him with the hilt hard in the head. Two more came out, one to be conked, the other took a roundhouse slash at Tanada, who neatly evaded and watched one of his men hit the yak with a hard diagonal cut, left to right, so that he jacked, pirouetted, dropping his weapon, and went down, spurting blood.

And then suddenly it was happening, exactly as the men had dreamed about and believed they wanted, exactly as had not happened in Japan, except on movie sets, for more than a century: the yaks poured from the house and began to spread out, each unleashing a sword, and the soldiers moved forward to engage them, a kendo-to-the-death in dull light as the snow swooped downward, the cuts hard and serious and meant to kill, the evasions equally hard and serious and meant to avoid, the whole thing happening in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.

Tanada killed two men in a single second as they came at him, his technique superb: kesagiri on the first, diagonal, a flowing block from the second assailant’s kesagiri, which led quite naturally into a horizontal yokogiri, with four inches of blade opening eight inches of body. The destroyed man made a gasping sound, tried to step back, and fell.

Tanada looked about and saw war everywhere and was happy. Then he got back to work.

Nii was dreaming, filthily, completely, in anatomical detail, dreams that would shame most but only gave him a boner the size of a V-2. But then the V-2 exploded, and he came hard awake in time for another V-2 explosion, then a third and a fourth. Around him, he heard screams, starts, lurches; men jumped, some wailed, some grabbed weapons. The door was open, and someone rushed out, and Nii caught a glimpse of him brought down with a wicked blow.

Attack, he thought.

His mind dumped clear and empty. He had a moment of stupendous confusion as all his reflexes broke down. Two more, then two more explosions went off, but after the first, he got his eyes shut and buried in his fists.

When he opened them, the big room was half empty. He saw a man jump in, blade whistling, and take one of his friends down with a single blow, and in the ferocity of the blow, he knew there was no mercy this night, it was to the death. More men flooded the room, blades slicing the air, cutting through meat, killing. Someone threw a charcoal hibachi at an invader, who ducked and killed him with a cut across the belly.

Nii rose to fight, then remembered his mission.

Kill the little girl.

It wasn’t a judgment call. It was what he owed Oyabun. It became the only thing in his life, that plus the fact he would fuck her first, then kill her, then commit his beloved seppuku and go happily to his ancestors, his honor restored.

He rose, grabbed his sword, and as men surged forward and death and chaos were everywhere, he cut against the tide, found the steps, and rushed up, one flight, then another, and, entering the upper hallway, saw that so far it was empty. He counted the doors, which were popping open, and men were pouring out, until he reached the door to the white room that contained the little girl. He got out his key and fumbled to insert it.

Major Fujikawa saw that the plan was not quite working. That is to say, the congestion point seemed to be the doorways, where the violence was sharp and ugly and the whole thing coagulated into a subway platform at rush hour with swords. Not pretty.

He pulled out a whistle. There was no plan; in the hurried assembly of assault details this one had not been considered. But he understood that his people couldn’t kill efficiently enough at this rate. He blew the whistle, hard, and watched as dozens of eyes popped to him.

“Let them out, goddammit,” he screamed, “then kill them.”

What a good idea, everyone understood, and the crowding at the doorways immediately broke out as the raiders made way and the yakuza spilled out into the falling snow. There was a moment of near poetry, if the death even of evil men can be considered poetic.

Someone’s flash-bang went off in the crowd of fighters. It was a moment with the snow falling in the gentle Japanese fashion, and behind the screen of lulling white, men were briefly isolated by the flare of white chemical light in postures of attack and defense, the cuts stopped in midflight so that the whole had the clarity of one of Kuniyoshi’s woodcuts, an orchestration of muted color and delicate grace though applied to the subject of maximum violence. Fujikawa wished he had seventeen syllables at his command to press into a poem, but then he remembered he was a soldier, and he rushed forward, sword in hand, looking eagerly for someone to kill, aware that the chance to fight with a sword would never arrive at his doorstep again and he’d better take advantage of it.

The raid caught the great Kondo in an unfortunate position. He was in the shower, performing ablutions, readying for the next day’s events, when the first bomb went off, followed by three more.

His first thought: Fuck!

He knew immediately that by some magic, the gaijin had located them. He had a moment’s rage for the fellow’s guile and wondered who had helped him, and imagined their heads on the table next to the gaijin’s.

He got out, threw on his robe-naked, they caught me naked!-and edged quickly to the door. His bathroom was on the second floor, above the living room. He edged down the hall, looking for a view of the events, to decide upon an action. Though he couldn’t see much, he noted shadows on the wall from a stairway leading downstairs. The violence of the shadow-work dancing hard on the wall conveyed the violence of actuality. Then another flash-bang went off.

By chance he’d been looking directly at it and the brightness stunned him. He could not think, he could not see, he was defenseless.

Fuck!

He knew he could not retreat into the bathroom, for to do so would equal his death or his capture, actually the same thing. Yet he could not go back to his room where his swords were, because he could not see.

He heard the rising screams and smashing of fists, flesh, and swords as the fighting rose and knew that his men had been engaged by a force as large as they. He yearned to rush to his swords, claim them, and turn, whirling with violent purpose into the melee, cutting and cutting and cutting, knowing that he could turn the tide.

But he was blind.

He thought, The bathroom window.

It was a low drop-say ten feet to earth.

Blindly, he groped his way back to the bathroom window, slid it open, tried to remember exactly where the bathroom was with regard to the floor plan of the estate, realized that thinking cost him time and he had no time, so he launched himself forward, fell through cold space, and hit the ground with a thud.

“There’s one,” someone said, “grab him.”

In seconds four men had him.

“Give it up, brother. We won’t kill you if you surrender.”

“Don’t hurt me,” he said, going limp and sad. “I am a cook. Please, I only work here, don’t hurt me.”

Miwa tried to be calm. He listened to the general roar outside and understood what was happening. His only thought was to escape, but of course he was too frightened to attempt such a thing on his own. Therefore he assumed that Kondo, the ever-loyal retainer, would come for him.

After a few minutes, he realized that Kondo would not come for him.

Cursing his luck, he crawled to the doorway, slipped it open half an inch, and saw the same shadows on the wall that Kondo had seen.

They really frightened him.

He fought panic.

He thought, If I can hide, I will survive. They cannot stay long. They must attack, kill, then flee. I will never escape, but I can hide.

On all fours, he scrambled down the hallway, found steps downstairs, and like a snake, slithered down, into darkness.

“Please don’t hurt me, I am a cook,” Kondo said, as the arms locked him down, and someone pinned his arms.

“He’s nothing,” said a raider. “Akira, take him to the courtyard; we’ll continue.”

Three of his captors dashed away to join the general melee, still intense behind them.

“Come on, asshole,” said the remaining raider, “get going. Christ, you’re not even dressed, you poor son of a bitch.”

True, he wasn’t dressed, but Kondo blinked and watched as the strobes flashing in his brain shut down. He blinked again, watched vision assemble itself out of sparkly chaos, and he found himself alone in the backyard with his assailant, his arm pinned behind him as he was being roughly driven ahead.

“Sir, my arm?” he said.

“Shut up,” said the raider, or perhaps meant to say, but somewhere between the Sh and the ut, Kondo got leverage, hit the man with a left-handed dragon punch out of the most basic aikido text, knocked the man to the snow, then drove a palm into his temple with a thud, not knowing whether he’d killed him or not.

He felt the man collapse with a groan.

He snatched up the man’s sword, a good utilitarian cutter, and went to the wall. He was over it in a single bound, lay on the other side, breathing hard, waiting to see if anybody had followed him.

No.

He stood, naked but for the robe, and ran barefoot through the snow. He found a nearby house, broke a window, and entered. He raced upstairs to face a scared man and his wife in bed. “You stay there or I’ll kill you. Now, I need some clothes. And a cell phone.”

Nii got the door open and stepped into the white room. All was dark. To the left he recalled a light switch and, not thinking clearly, popped it. The room leapt to view, all its detail brilliantly exposed-the knotted bed, the television, the painted white window, all of it, white, white, white. But where was the child? A bolt of panic knocked through him, then fear: he could not fail. He ran to the bed, pulling it apart to find nothing, dropped low and looked under it, saw nothing. Then he thought to touch the sheets, found them warm.

She’s hiding, you fool! he thought.

He raced to the closet, pulled it open, finding nothing. That left only the bathroom. He ran to it, pulled the door. It was locked from within. That’s where she was!

“Little Girl, open the door! You will be in big trouble if you don’t open the door! Little Girl, do what I say, damn you.”

The door was silent and still.

Outside, the din of fighting rose to a still higher pitch, the grunts, the shouts, the cries of being struck, the thud of strikes. A part of Nii yearned to join the battle. But he had duty.

“Little Girl! Little Girl, I am getting mad!”

But the child said nothing.

“All right,” he said, “you’ll be sorry.”

With that, he drew back and with his katana began to cut at the door, which, being a cheap and typical modern product, quickly splintered under the assault. He watched it dissolve with three or four great whacks, and when a ragged gap had been cut through it large enough for his shoulder and arm, he reached in, found the lock, and popped it.

Then he heard someone shout, “Back off, fatso.”

He turned, furious, and found himself confronted by what appeared to be an actual Mutant Ninja Turtle. Donatello? Or maybe one of the others. Leo? Raph? That is to say, his antagonist was unusually tiny and thin, dressed all in black, and had a single eye protruding from a mask.

Suddenly the turtle reached up and flicked off its heavy eyepiece and as the thing flew away, it pulled the hair loose and the hair cascaded free, a dark torrent, long and beautiful, and Nii realized he was facing a woman.

“Bitch!” he screamed at her.

Susan leapt through the door; her night vision goggles captured exactly what lay before her. To the left were big rooms, and from them rose the racket of battle, a humming, throbbing fusion of grunts that men made involuntarily as they came together and tried to dominate each other. Before her on the right, a short stairway led up to a hallway, while below it, at this level, another stairway led to bedrooms and the like.

Down which hall? Certainly the top one; they wouldn’t put a prisoner, even a small child, at ground level. Up she went in one bound, Swagger just behind her. They were met at the top by three men, but they weren’t combatants. They were fleeing in panic, so Susan and her companion stepped aside as the three-cooks possibly, or accountants, hard to tell as they were in pajamas-raced outside to be secured by raiders.

But suddenly two men came at them from the left, and they were yakuza. Beside her, Swagger leapt forward, evading a cut, and clocked one with his elbow hard, sending that boy to the floor in a heap, and was then so close he had no room for swordplay and instead grappled, rolling against a wall, kneeing his opponent, slamming him several times hard against the wall.

“Go, go,” he shouted.

Susan peeled off from the struggle, kicked in the first door, found the room behind it empty, sped down the hall to another, kicked it, another empty one, then heard screams and shouts from ahead.

She raced to a room whose door was already open and from which bright light flowed like water. She ducked in and beheld a strange sight, amplified by the night vision goggles, though it was completely illuminated already. A large man was brutally cutting a closet or a bathroom door to ribbons in a frenzy, his blade splintering the thin wood. He was screaming, “Little Girl, come out. Little Girl, you must obey me or I will hurt you. Little Girl, you must cooperate or I will be very, very angry.”

Susan stepped in.

“Back off, fatso,” she commanded.

He turned to her, his face bunched into a sweaty rage.

He was large and green.

Then she realized she was still wearing her night vision goggles, and she tore them off, feeling a slight snare of pain as one of the straps caught in her hair.

Her womanhood seemed to enrage him even more.

“Bitch,” he screamed.

“Cow,” she replied.

Swagger found himself in a room with six men, evidently some kind of security guard for the upper floors. He flailed about, driving them back. Now they faced each other, one on six, in the relatively close confines of the small room.

Oh, shit, he thought, wondering if he had a chance against six.

Without willing it, he went into full aggression mode, going quickly to jodan-kamae, right side, and stepped forward, ready to issue from on high, feeling that pure force was the only solution to this tactical problem.

It was, but not in the way he imagined.

His war posture, the ferocity of his fighting spirit-“The moon in the cold stream like a mirror”-and his eagerness to cut people down immediately melted the will of his opponents. Six katana dropped quickly to the floor, and the men fell to their knees, wishing to offend him with their lives no more.

This was fine, it was even an ideal outcome, for at this point killing seemed pointless, but it left him with the problem of administering to six prisoners. He ran to them, reaching in his pocket for the yellow plastic zipcuffs and discovered-shit!-only four.

He worked around behind them until he ran out of zips. It was two-handed work and he had to wedge the Muramasa katana between his arm and body.

With each man, he shouted, “Kondo Isami?”

Each man looked at him with fear redoubled in his eyes and his face yet paler by degrees. If they knew Kondo, it was only by reputation.

Ach! The assault clock continued to grind on, the seconds falling away, as Bob struggled with these boys, of no consequence but still men who couldn’t simply be released. At any moment they could have turned on him, the six on one, and knocked him down and killed him. But there was no fight at all left in them, and after still more time, he had them all neutralized, four in the restraints, two tied in their own obis, not that such binding would hold but it was symbolic of surrender.

He pushed the first one out, pointed down the hall, and marched the small parade to the stairway, from which the front door was visible. Possibly, outside, the fighting had died down, as the din wasn’t so loud. He pointed again, watched them file out to their fates.

Suddenly he heard screams, male and female, signifying the coming together of two warriors at death-speed.

One voice was Susan’s.

Outside, suddenly, it was over.

The blades stilled, the grunts died, the spurts of harsh breath rising like steam, all finished. Only the snow continued its drift downward, settling in increasingly delicate piles on the brick courtyard.

Everywhere Fujikawa looked, the men had ceased to be opposed by the enemy. Some of the enemy were down with red smears across them or lay still in large puddles, where blood and snow had fused to slush. More, however, were on the ground, either tied or obligingly raising hands to be tied.

“Secure them,” he yelled pointlessly, for that process was already happening.

“Snipers?”

The snipers were still perched on the walls, hunting for armed targets in the house.

The calls came quickly.

“Sniper one, clear.”

“Sniper two, I have nothing.”

“Sniper three, all quiet.”

“Sniper four, no targets.”

“Secure the compound,” the major yelled, again more ceremoniously than to real effect, for his well-schooled men had already begun to spread out and hunt for the hidden, the missing, the escaped.

He watched as Tanada came around toward him.

“Secure, Major,” said Tanada.

“Yeah, here too. Sergeant Major Kanda?”

The sergeant major, who’d had a fine old time laying about with a bo-a four-foot-long stout fighting stick-stood up from securing the yaks he’d clobbered solidly.

“Yes sir?”

“Get a head count.”

“Yes sir.”

The sergeant major ran off to consult with various squad leaders.

“I can’t believe it went so fast,” said Tanada.

Major Fujikawa looked at his watch. It had taken seven minutes.

“Any sign of Miwa or the child?”

“Swagger-san and the American woman are inside.”

“Get them some help, fast.”

“Yes sir.”

His rage flared: kill, smash, crush. All his anger turned chemical, the chemicals went to his muscles, which inflated with strength and resolve.

He would cut her in two. He would destroy her.

He ran at her and she at him. His sword was high, and he meant to unleash hidari kesagiri, diagonal cut, left to right, exactly as all those nights ago he’d seen his oyabun perform it on the Korean whore, and he visualized it more clearly now: the progress of blade through body, the stunned look upon the face, the slow slide as the parts separated.

Agh! He let fly and felt the blow form itself perfectly and issue from above with superb speed and violence as driven forward by the grunt, which propelled oceans of air from his lungs.

She was quick, the little bitch, and he missed her by a hair as she slid by.

But he recovered in a split second. Improvising brilliantly, he snapped his left hip outward and felt it smash into the running woman, who was so light that its momentum flung her through the air. She struck the wall with a satisfying crash. She must have hit it midspine, for her arms flew out spasmodically, the sword in her hand flipped away, her face went dull with momentary shock, as she began to slide down the wall toward unconsciousness.

Now, the end.

Tsuki, thrust. He-

“No!”

It was English. He halted.

“Daddy’s home.”

He turned.

It was the gaijin.

It was the source of his humiliation; he had a rare chance to erase a failure. His warrior heart swelled with pleasure.

“Death to the gaijin,” he said, “then the child, then this whore.”

“The reason you are fat,” the gaijin said, “is that you are full of shit.”

Nii rushed the man, sword high, issuing from on high, and cut a large slice in the universe, though alas the gaijin wasn’t in it.

He spun, went to a cocked position, and thrust forward at the man.

With both hands, he drove the sword forward to impale his opponent’s opened body and nothing halted him as he plunged onward and onward, waiting for the resistance, when at last the sword’s point passed through the flesh. The point and the blade it led must have been very sharp for the flesh didn’t fight it a bit, he just kept on going.

Then he noticed he had no sword.

The second thing he noticed was that the reason he had no sword was that he had no hands. The gaijin had cut them at the wrist, both, neatly and nearly painlessly, going into what Yagyu called “crosswind,” specifically designed against kesagiri, and culminating in the direction “cut through his two hands.” The gaijin had been the faster.

The blood did not fizz and spray. Instead, far still from coagulation, it squirted out in pitiful little spurts, each driven by a beat of his heart. He looked at them and wished he had a death poem.

He turned to smile bravely, and then the world cranked radically to the right and went to blur and he had a sense of falling but no sense of body. Then his eight seconds ran out.

Bob stepped back from the carnage he had wreaked.

The fat one’s body lay in the bed, where it had emptied a great red tidal wave across sheets and blanket. The head had bounced and rolled somewhere else.

Then he picked up Susan, who moaned as she came to.

“Oh, Christ,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Where’s the child?”

“The bathroom.”

Bob turned, went to the bathroom, reached in the gap, found the lock, unlocked it, and entered.

“Honey? Honey, are you here? Sweetie, where are you?”

“Tin Man, Tin Man,” cried the girl in broken English.

“Here I am, sweetie.”

He ran to Miko, who crouched in the bathtub, and picked her up and squeezed her hard, feeling the tiny heart beat against him.

“Will the Giant Monster hurt me?”

Swagger spoke no Japanese. He just said, “It’s all right. They’re all gone.”

“Oh, Tin Man.”

“Now listen, sweetie. I’m going to take you out of here, all right? Everything is going to be just fine.”

The child spoke in Japanese, but then Susan was there.

“Don’t let her see anything,” Susan said.

“I won’t.”

Susan spoke in Japanese. “You have to make us a promise.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I will carry you. But I want you to close your eyes very tight and press your face against my chest until I tell you it’s okay. It’ll just be a minute or so. Can you do that for me? Then we’ll get some ice cream. I don’t know where, but we’ll get some ice cream.”

“Yes, Auntie. Will the Tin Man come?”

“Yes, he will,” she said in Japanese, and to Bob said, “She thinks you’re the Tin Man.”

She picked the child up and turned.

“All closed now?”

“Yes, Auntie.”

Okada-san stepped from the bathroom and immediately saw two of her snipers, carrying their M-4s at the ready, standing there to escort her to the car, and then to wherever.

“You did good, Cheerleader,” said Swagger.

“So did you, Redneck,” she said, and carried the child out. Miko obediently kept her eyes shut and never realized that the room was no longer white.