Ian Slater: Payback

“Thanks,” said Johnny, then informed Jenny Osaka, who was now tying her shoulder-length black hair into a ponytail so that it wouldn’t interfere with her firing if she had to.

“Hope he comes quietly,’ she said.

“Listen,” Johnny warned her. “This guy’s a pro, right? A ninety-year-old can pull a trigger same as a nine-year-old, only with better aim. So when we get there, have your weapon drawn before we get anywhere near his apartment. I’ll enter first.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” she said.

“I know.”

Tayama Omura’s face had none of the serenity that long life sometimes brings those who have endured and have peacefully turned their backs on the mad rush of humanity in the congested places of the earth. His countenance was more like that of an angry mask from one of the early Tahitian warriors. The effect of a mask, however, ironically caused many a warrior to assume the personality of the mask, frightening their owners more than their enemies.

As Omura had aged, his life force had been kept strong by the ever-increasing need for revenge against a generation, most of whom were now dead. He hated what he had become, and knew deep beneath the mask of the spy against America that the spirit of Yoko would be saddened by his decline into hatred. In using it to kill so many Americans by giving secret information to the North Koreans from the Korean War on, his hatred had overwhelmed the power of her love — in avenging her he had undone himself. So that when he knew they were coming for him, his habit of revenge was so powerful that he viewed their approach as nothing less than an unwarranted attack on him and Yoko that must be repulsed.

He already had the .45 that he had taken from the Intelligence policeman, Suzuki, who’d been a party to the rape of his beloved and whose throat he had cut one night in Honolulu after the internment had ended in 1945. The .45 was an old weapon, but he had routinely cleaned and oiled it, and he had no reason to expect any of the big .45 bullets would fail, having kept them in an airtight urn next to the urn of her ashes.

His apartment was in a cream and brown-trimmed block built high on the rocky cliff just east of Poipu’s Brennecke’s Beach, whose body-surfing waves were among the world’s best and most dangerous, waves that, like allied intelligence, Tayama Omura had never turned his back on.

As he saw the unfamiliar sedan pull up outside the apartment, and the man and woman get out, he noted how there’d been no flashing lights, no sirens. No doubt they didn’t want to alarm any of the tourists, not so soon after his North Korean paymasters had killed so many Americans and when everyone holidaying on the islands had to catch a plane back home. Some tourists in the apartment block had canceled their return flights and signed on for another week in the complex or elsewhere on the island until, they said, they’d feel confident that all airports in U.S. territory had been secured against missile attacks. All the lead articles in the Honolulu Advertiser , Omura recalled, had been about the growing demand by consumer groups for expensive cutting-edge technology to be mounted on all passenger planes, like the Israelis did, and also on FedEx and other major airline courier planes that carried so much of the nation’s business.

Omura took down a hollow gourd helmet/mask from his collection on the wall. As a spy, he had a predilection for masks, the hollowed-out gourd one that had been worn by warriors long before Queen Liliuokalani’s reign. The hardened, sun-baked gourd helmet had only two hockey-puck-sized holes for the eyes and seven hide tapers dangling from it like a segmented beard. If he didn’t get the first shot in, the gourd would offer some protection.

He unlatched the door then walked back to the sofa by the window through which he had watched a thousand sunsets. Lying down on the sofa, he drew the Advertiser up over his masked face as if he’d dozed off while reading, the gun in his right hand, by his side between his right thigh and the sofa’s back. He wasn’t going to go meekly. He’d take at least one of them with him. To add authenticity to his dozing-off pretense, he let his left leg slide off the sofa, its black rubber sandal resting idly on the carpet.

He heard the knock and didn’t stir, but breathed deeply so they’d see the rise and fall of the old man’s chest as he slept.

“Mr. Omura?”

No answer.

“Maybe he’s deaf,” Jenny, her gun drawn, whispered.

“Maybe he isn’t,” said Johnny softly. “Mr. O—?”

Omura fired, the force of the impact punching Jenny back through the doorway, the second shot, from Suzuki, hitting the old man as he fired his second. Suzuki’s body flung back, like Jenny’s, but against the wall. And it was over, Omura’s throat, though he was dead, gurgling like one of the tiny, man-made streams said to have been dug by the Menehunes, another kind of outcast in Hawaii, who had also been conquered. “You okay?” a winded Suzuki asked Jenny Osaka, who, after being hit by the .45 slug and slammed back rudely against the hallway wall, had slid down, her breath knocked out of her. “I think I’m—” She paused, looking about for her sidearm. She was still holding it. “I think I’m okay. You? Oh, Lord—” She’d just seen the gruesome gourd helmet, the blood gushing from beneath it.

Suzuki walked unsteadily toward the grotesque mask and, after checking for a pulse and getting none, gingerly removed the hollowed-out gourd. He frowned, unconsciously creating a transitory image in his face of the old man’s, its wizened-up skin so cleft with anger that it reminded Suzuki of a small papier-mâché map of deep, dry desert coulees devoid of any suggestion of life. It was as if Suzuki’s bullet hadn’t killed him but that he’d died years ago.

“Well,” said Jenny, picking herself up, already feeling the bruise on her left breast from where the .45, fired by Omura at virtually point-blank range, had been “stopped hot,” as they said on the police shooting range, by the newly arrived Hagvar vest, “thank God for that new Hagvar stuff.”

“Hagvar,” said Suzuki as he covered Omura’s face with the blood-soaked newspaper. “What kind of a name is that? Sounds like some Nordic god. Hagvar !”

“I don’t know exactly what it is,” said Jenny Osaka. “Some fish stuff and new Kevlar. Whatever it is, we owe our lives to it.”

“Amen to that.”

Upon hearing yet another news clip of Freeman calling the North Korean government “scumbags” and “the gutless child murderers of Pyongstink,” General Lesand, amid a group-viewing by the Joint Chiefs, shook his head again. “The President better put a leash on that man.”

“Yes,” agreed the Army Chief of Staff.

“No,” demurred the Chief of Naval Operations, surprising his colleagues. “Not yet.” The CNO was a wiser, older man than the Air Force, Army, and Marine Chiefs, and he reached back in memory to the unbleeped words of a sound tape of the inimitable Winston Churchill, who, in his speech to celebrate the first substantial victory against the Nazis’ vaunted Afrika Korps at El Alamein in 1942, warned his already weary and blitzed population, “Now this is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

There would be battles yet to come and, Freeman’s diplomatic failures notwithstanding, there would be more paybacks to come until the scumbags’ nests were found and destroyed, as many as possible per one hit but, if necessary, as Aussie said, “one by bloody one until the job is done.”

On the Yorktown , as earth passed into night and a translucent blue haze lay over the East Sea and the Sea of Japan, the sun a disc of beaten gold, Freeman, a sheaf of e-mail hard copies in his hand, climbed high up the stair ladders to find a place on the ship’s Vultures’ Row, not because it afforded him a vulture’s view of the dangerous, accident-prone business of combat aircraft taking off and landing, but because it afforded him a private place where he could be alone and think upon yet another victory in his legendary career. He thought of Bone, for whom a memorial service, with a recovering Chief Petty Officer Tavos attending, would be held on Yorktown .