Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

She just looked at him.

“All right,” she finally said, “so we’ve found them.”

“You want to know who’s on the team we put over the wall?”

“Do you have forty-seven samurai waiting outside?”

“No, outside is where you have your four Korean ex-Special Forces guys, who aren’t Agency contract boys but Okada-san’s bodyguards. Every time I get near you, I gotta play bumper car with them. The kid in the second car is too aggressive. He almost creamed us on the trip back from Kyoto. I hope you reamed his ass for that. He was way too close. But I know the type. They’re all probably in love with you and they like to fight. They’ll go.”

“You’re right, they’ll go. That’s four.”

“Now for the fun part. We call one-eight-hundred-SAMURAI.”

“What’s that?”

“Here’s another surprise. I have regularly been reporting to a Major Albert Fujikawa of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. He’s in the loop and right now he’s in Tokyo with forty of his boys. He was Phil Yano’s exec in Samawah. It was his life Phil saved when the IED went off. The unit is a recon company from the First Airborne Brigade of the Eastern Army, HQ’d at Narashino. They’re paratroopers, but all they do is play sixteenth century all day long and smack each other with wooden swords. I’m betting they’re the best swordsmen in Japan.”

“If we get them involved, we break every law on the books regarding JDF.”

“They’ve figured out the patterns of on. Some things trump others in this country, and loyalty to murdered lords means more than obedience to the shogun’s law. They’re here, all set up and ready to go. You get us the satellite dope and we go in twenty-four hours.”

She just looked at him.

“You are dangerous,” she finally said. “This was your game from the start, right?”

“We hit ’em dead solid cold. They have no idea it’s coming. It’s over in a few minutes because swords leave a mess, but they don’t make no noise. Then we go home. Sometime the day after, someone notices the flies buzzing around the joint. That’s when they make the discovery. Everybody’s home and in bed by that time, and Miko’s fine. Kondo Isami’s head is on a pole. The sword is in Dr. Otowa’s vault, where it belongs. You just made head of station.”

“So, forty JDF paratroopers, plus Major Fujikawa, four ROK Spec Ops guys. I count forty-five.”

“It’s enough,” he said.

“Not quite. You forgot the forty-sixth.”

“Who’s that?”

“Me.”

“Okada-”

“Don’t even start, Redneck. Don’t you dare even start. I’m not sitting home baking cookies while you are destroying my career.”

“You’re too stubborn to argue with.”

“Forty-six,” she said. “Just for the luck factor alone, we should have one more. Who did I forget? Oh, yeah. You. You’re the forty-seventh samurai.”

It was well after dark.

Nii was alone with the little girl in the white room. He could hear, vaguely, the sound of other men moving in the large house, loafing outside, yelling and shoving and gambling, playing around. He knew that Kondo was back from whatever errands and that the thing would happen very soon, the day after tomorrow almost certainly.

He could hear traffic, though this house was on a quiet street in a quiet part of Tokyo, far from the major arteries that hummed with life and action.

He could hear the quiet whistle of wind in the trees, and he remembered how surprisingly cold it was, and he realized that the seasons had changed and he’d been so caught up in the drama of his life, he hadn’t noticed it.

He didn’t think of the future or even the past; he didn’t think of his beloved oyabun or of his oyabun’s daimyo, in whose favor they all labored so hard. He didn’t think that it was almost over, that he would be a complete and full-fledged member of the dominant yakuza gang in Tokyo, that his name would be known and that he would be mighty and feared.

That wasn’t what preoccupied him.

He stared at her.

She slept uneasily, her body spilled out. In the low, somber light, his imagination played tricks on him. He imagined she was naked, when he knew she wasn’t. He imagined she wanted him as much as he wanted her, when he knew she didn’t. He imagined, somehow, they could be together forever, when he knew it was impossible because she had to die.

Nii had never felt this before. She was everywhere in his mind. That she was four and he twenty-five had no meaning; it was supposed to be. He knew it had to be.

He could make out the soft up and down of her frail chest under the blanket, hear the melody of her breathing. He could see her small, perfect foot, her adorable toes with their flaky coat of the summer’s last toenail polish. He could see the button of her nose, the repose of her face, the quietude of her pale eyelids. He could see her cupid lips, buttercups, rose petals, candy kisses. He could see a flare of tension and relaxation in the perfect oval precision of her baby nostrils.

Nii watched until he could watch no more, then rushed out to masturbate.

The day after tomorrow, he told himself.

Bob pulled his bike into the museum parking lot. It was cold, getting on to nightfall. His chilled steel hip throbbed dully, broadcasting its message of deadness. He shook off the unpleasant feeling and its tendrils of memory. Tonight it all happened, he knew. He tried to wipe his mind blank. But he could not. No man could.

He checked his watch. It was 5:45 p.m. Tokyo time. Driving had been hellish, sliding in and out of the busy, mirror-image shunt of the cars, with things coming at him from odd angles. He didn’t enjoy it a bit. It took too much out of him.

Of course all these ill feelings had their source in the immediate few minutes, where he’d have to deliver some very bad news to a man who’d been nothing but good to him. Not a happy prospect. Was it necessary? Yeah, it was. He couldn’t proceed without what lay ahead in an office full of swords.

He thought of the parts assembling. Susan and her four Koreans, Major Fujikawa, the paratroopers, all of them quietly converging on a neighborhood in northwest Tokyo, far off the tourist way, miles from the famous spots like the Ginza and Shinjuku and Ueno and Asakusa, a place without major shrines or nightclubs or department stores. It was near there that the Agency satellites had uncovered intense activity on a Miwa property, a walled mansion in a secluded street next to a parkland called Kiyosumi Garden, once the playground of the Mitsubishi family and now a kind of wonderland of Asian garden themes. The mansion hit all the criteria perfectly: quiet, obscure, close to a park with one gated entrance, easy to command, walled off from society.

They would meet to stage at the close-by hotel banquet room, where, under a guise, Susan had made an emergency rental of the large room, claiming to represent a kendo club headed to an out-of-town meet and needing a rallying point.

Bob shivered. The weather had changed abruptly, the temperature had dropped, and he really didn’t have the clothes for the midthirties, which it threatened to reach tonight. He drew his raincoat tightly about him, for warmth, but it was a thin coat and his black suit was thin cotton, summer weight, unable to stand up to the bite of the sudden gusts of breeze or the generalized bite of the falling temperature.

He approached the museum, feeling its cathedral-like grandeur tower over him. It was a modern building, constructed after the war, of course, but its lines carefully duplicated the harmonies of classical Edo architecture. So in a sense entering it was like being swallowed by Japan, as Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Inside, it was all Japan, only Japan, and no other place was permitted to exist. The somber, gray light lent everything a stoic dignity; in glass cases, kimonoed princesses and armored knights stood nobly, reflecting the grandeur of a past so glorious and bloody and complicated, so full of opera and murder, it almost defied belief. You could see the whole thing play out before your eyes in these vast rooms, from the little men the Chinese had found living in thatched huts to the brilliant men who had invaded China, raped its cities, cut it in half. You could see the Zen priest and the samurai warrior. You could feel the presence of men so mentally tough and sublimely confident, they could fight twenty at a time and win and not think much of it, with their long, curved swords of the most sophisticated metallurgy in the world. But it was all one thing: if you had those brave men, you also had sword testers who went out in the night and cut random strangers down to see how well the blades cut, you had secret diagrams of how to arrange a corpse to perform a cutting test on it, how many times a skull could be cleaved and from what angle. You had the brilliant men who destroyed the Russian fleet in seven minutes in 1905, and their grandsons, who fell from the sky in planes that were bombs, skipping between the blasts of American flak, hunting for a nice large gray superstructure against which to obliterate themselves. It was that same utter commitment that sank the Russian ships, blew up the American fleet off Okinawa, and built the skyscrapers of Shinjuku.