Victor O'Reilly - Rules of The Hunt

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.