Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“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.

He reached the compound just as the buses that would take the raiders out of the area pulled in. He walked to Fujikawa.

“What are your losses, Major?”

“We got out clean. A few bad cuts, now stitched. A few concussions, sprains, a lot of bruises, that sort of thing. The worst was a trooper knocked unconscious by a cook, who escaped.”

Swagger knew who that would be.

“How many kills?”

“Fifteen. Lots of wounded, though. Our people are stitching up the badly hurt yaks and getting plasma into them. They’re pretty goddamned lucky. Another yak crew would have let ’em die.”

“Sixteen. I had to take a fat one down. Anyhow, it looks like you’ll be out of here before light.”

“We have a last job.”

He turned and gestured. Bob saw Yuichi Miwa, shivering in a kimono-bathrobe that exposed his scrawny old man’s chest, kneeling in the snow. Nobody was touching him or abusing him, but his face was down and grave.

“Possibly you don’t want to see this,” said the major.

“I’ve already seen it.”

“This is the old way.”

“It’s the right way.”

“The men think so. We voted. It was unanimous.”

He nodded to Sergeant Major Kanda, who approached with what Bob recognized immediately: a red silk sword bag, neatly tied. Quickly, Major Fujikawa untied it, removed a blade in shirasawa that Bob knew intimately, as it was the blade his father recovered on Iwo Jima.