Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

"Isn't it odd?" I mused, "We still haven't heard zip out of Noda. He must have realized by now we have his silver case. What's he planning to do? Where'll he try to head us off?"

"Good question." She turned the key in the ignition. "I'm not going to feel safe till we've got the actual goods on his phony sword. Not just some dummy data."

"My guess is he'll try and nail us at the airport. It'd be his best shot."

"At least Ken was smart enough to make the reservations under fake names, so he won't know which flight to watch."

"There're not that many. He could be covering them all. On the other hand, he'll assume we're arriving via the MITI chopper, so maybe we can dodge his hit squad."

"I feel like I've been run through a wringer." She was pulling out of the slot, backing around to begin making her way through the rows of staff vehicles, all with special Tsukuba parking stickers.

"You can say that again. Who could have guessed all the…"

I'd reached around to check the back window, hoping to get the heat going, when my field of vision turned an incandescent orange, bright and glaring, as though the sun had just come in for a close encounter. Before I could turn to see what… the dashboard rose up and slugged me in the teeth, as a shock wave flung us both against the seat belts.

We're dead, I thought. We've been bombed. Noda's just dropped…

Then I looked up.

The MITI Aerospatiale, about two hundred feet off the ground, had become a blazing sphere, a grotesque nova. Now its rotor blades were clawing the air, askew, while it circled downward like a wounded bird. An instant later it nosed into the parking lot behind us, hurtling fragments of tail assembly through several empty staff cars.

I sat mesmerized as a second ball of fire erupted where it had crashed. One of the fuel tanks had ignited, just like in the movies.

"Ken!" Tam let out a choked cry after the first few seconds of disbelief. Then she slammed the transmission into 'Park' and began ripping off her seat belt.

Where's she going? Doesn't she realize-?

Her door was open and she was stumbling out. That's when I finally came to my senses, which included the sobering thought that there might be more fuel tanks, such as the auxiliary, that hadn't yet blown.

"Wait!" I'd ripped off my own seat harness by that time and had rolled out to begin running after her as she stumbled across the snowy stretch of asphalt separating us from the flames.

She was moving like a gazelle, but I managed to catch up about thirty yards from the wreckage. Using a modified shoulder block, I pulled her around and tried to get a grip.

"Tam, nobody could survive that. We've got to stay back…"

At which point we both slipped and collapsed in a patch of snow… just as the last fuel tank detonated with the impact of a sonic boom. Memory can be a little unreliable under such circumstances, but I still remember more wreckage sailing past us, including a strut off the landing gear that gouged a furrow in the asphalt no more than ten feet from our heads.

"Tam, he never knew what hit him. It had to be instantaneous." I was trying to brush the wet snow off her face as I slipped my arm around her shoulders. She was still holding back the tears, but only just.

"We didn't even have a real good-bye." Her words were jagged. "There were so many things… I was hoping we…"

Her voice trailed off into tears.

"Look, I only knew him for a day, but that was enough to learn some things. Kenji Asano was a wise and noble soul. Everything about him was good."

She took my hand and held it against her cheek. "Matt, he was so kind. That was what… He was… all that I…" Her eyes were reflecting back the flames, now billowing into the pale afternoon sky. Around us the labs were emptying as technicians raced toward the lot, white coats fluttering.

"You know, he said something to me today. About you…"

"What?" She glanced up, her face streaked. "What did he say?"

"He must have known there was danger. He sort of asked me to look out for you."

"Danger?" She looked back at the wreckage, and a new tear trailed down her left cheek. "I guess we don't really know for sure, do we? Maybe it was just a fuel tank rupture, or…"

"You don't believe that."

"No." The tears, abruptly, were gone. "Matsuo Noda just took away the one… Matt, I'm going to kill him."

It was a sentiment I shared in buckets. The question was merely how. Medieval torture seemed too kind. I started to say something inane, and then, finally, the shocking truth landed with the force of that last explosion.

"Tam, that was supposed to be us." I was gazing at the flames, watching talons of metal contort in the heat. "Noda thought we were going to be on that copter."

"My God, of course."

"We've got to get out of here. Now. There's nothing anybody can do for Ken."

"I'm not leaving till I've settled the score."

"Be reasonable. There's no way we can do it here. This is Noda's turf." I was urging her to her feet. "We'll find a way. All I ask is that he know we were the ones who did him in."

"But how can we just leave?"

"What else are we supposed to do? There's nothing left." I tried to take her hand. "Come on."

She finally relented and, with one last tearful stare, turned to follow me back to the car. By then a crowd of technicians was surging in around us.

Ken's blue Toyota was still running. Without a word she buckled in, shoved the stick into gear, and turned for the exit, whereupon she barely avoided colliding with the first racing fire engine.

"Look, are you okay? I can drive if you…"

"Matt, don't say anything more, please." The tears had vanished. "Can I just think for a while? Just give me some quiet to think." She was gripping the wheel with raw anger. "Please."

"You've got it."

By the time we reached the highway, she was driving mechanically but with absolute precision, almost as though tragedy had somehow sharpened her reflexes, her logical processes.

It's a curious thing, but different people respond differently to disaster, and Tam was one of those rare few who become harder, not softer. I could see it in her eyes. As the minutes ticked by, and we reached the packed thoroughfare that would take us south, it even got to be a little unsettling. What in hell was going through her head?

Finally, after about an hour of bumper-to-bumper freeways, I couldn't take the silence any more. Without asking anybody's permission, I reached over and clicked on the radio. It was set for a classical station, the music Chopin. Was this Ken's regular fare? I wondered. Was he a romantic at heart or a classicist? Guess I'd never know… that, or much of anything else about him. Which thought brought with it a renewed sadness. Kenji Asano was a man of the East who was as much of the West as anybody I'd ever met in Japan. I'd wanted him for a friend.

When you get to be my age, you don't make too many new friends, not real ones. After forty, it's acquaintances. The roots of true friendship extend so deep that there's never really time to plant them if you start too late. Maybe it's because there's always a part missing, that shared experience of being young and crazy and broke. Those times back when you both still believed anything was possible. New friends can't begin sentences with "Remember that weekend before you were married when we got drunk and…" Getting old is tough, and that's one of the toughest parts. But somehow I felt, with Ken, that I'd known him forever. Could be that's absurd, but I really did. So quite apart from the tragedy of his death, I felt cruelly robbed. It sounds selfish, maybe, but it's the truth. A sad but true truth.

I was still thinking those thoughts when the four-o'clock newscast came on. For a moment neither of us noticed, but then Tam snapped alert and turned up the volume. The report was opening with a live remote from Tsukuba Science City. I couldn't really follow very well, but she realized that and began to translate as it went along.