Don Pendleton - Serpent's Lair

The warrior grabbed the man’s sword from his insensate fingers and reversed it, drawing its length across his chest in a deep slash that severed his aorta. Zakoji’s cultist dropped to the stones and moved no more. The four surviving clansmen spread apart to avoid the wounded man’s fate, their blades aimed at the black-clad warrior.

The ronin stepped between them, a sword in each hand, like the claws of a scorpion, awaiting the next wave of attacks.

“You have a chance to live. Turn your back on Zakoji, and I shall not slay you,” he told them. “You fought with courage.”

The one-armed fighter lunged. The black-clad warrior blocked with one sword blade and sliced the man from hip to hip. The stroke stopped the man cold, giving the ronin time to sweep the other sword around to cleave the man’s head cleanly from his shoulders.

He sensed the next attack, but Zakoji’s fighter still managed to open up a scratch from shoulder to hip with the tip of his katana. The ronin reversed one sword blade and pivoted, spearing the attacker just above his kidneys. With a turn, the ronin grabbed the dying man’s sword before he tumbled to the ground, blood leaking among the cobblestones at his feet.

And then there were two.

Two, and Zakoji.

Who knew what skills the self-proclaimed sorcerer possessed, but the ronin bled now. It was a scratch, but it was enough of a distraction to slow him by a heartbeat.

It could mean the difference between life and death against a man of true skill.

The two remaining swordsmen took their positions, one to his left, one to his right, but both staying in front of him, away from the water’s edge.

They waited for him. Eyes searched his, sought out any sign of weakness that they could exploit. One blink, one moment of hesitation, and they would be upon him, their curved blades deep within his flesh. He gave them that blink, and as his eyes opened, he turned sideways. The two men sought the ronin as he faced them head-on, their goal to carve at his arms and sides as they passed him. Instead, he presented himself as a slimmer target, one sword reversed around his back, the other swooped in front of him as Zakoji’s fighters passed him.

The katana he swung behind him glanced off pelvic bone as it parted its way through the side of the man who sought to harm his right side. The man on his left screamed as the black-clad swordsman’s edge sunk deep into his back, lodged between two vertebrae and levered the handle from his grip. Both men fell.

The cult leader walked toward the exhausted warrior, his feet invisible beneath his robe so that he appeared to float, ghostlike. The sword cleared its scabbard with a hard push of his thumb. He leveled the point at the warrior, then down to the earth.

The ronin raised his sword above his head with both hands, arms pressing together in perfect position for a downward stroke. Zakoji didn’t adjust his pose, still keeping his sword-point at ground level.

The ronin thought about the stories that Zakoji had sorcery, of sorts. He used trickery and venom to distill success in the form of a potion.

“Has your courage left you?” Zakoji chided. “Has your will to serve the emperor once again abandoned you, executioner?”

The ronin bristled for a moment at his old title. Each new utterance was like sand ground into an old wound. His cut ached, blood caking at the small of his back, his hatori grown stiff with dried blood. Sweat trickled down his forehead and neck, and each breath parted the slice in his back a little more, pain growing with each inhalation.

The ronin breathed deeply again. He twisted his hands around the corded handle of his blade, screwing up his strength, forcing himself back into the mind set of everything and nothing. The pain went away.

The black-clad swordsman lowered the sword from above his head and leveled the tip at Zakoji’s heart.

It was with sudden fury that the cult leader lunged. The ronin blocked the blade with his own, sparks flew from the impact of metal on metal. The black-clad warrior tried to slip his sword past the other’s defense and stab him, but only clipped the kimono sleeve, leaving a crease in the man’s arm. Zakoji’s blade also glanced off the ronin’s flesh, nicking his ribs and coming away with a trail of blood.

The cult leader lunged again, but this time the ronin was ready for the attack and batted it to one side. He sliced down to carve through the embroidery of the serpent on Zakoji’s kimono, parting muscle and flesh as he did so. Bones gleamed from the opened wound.

The ronin winced as he felt his shoulder carved again. As they retreated from each other, Zakoji stumbled, teetering out of the way of a backswing that would have opened up his belly in one swoop. The ronin, however, felt the brutal bite of steel in flesh, his forearm nicked deeply. Blood seeped down to his grasp, both hands sticky and wet.

Zakoji snarled, clutching his wounded bosom, squeezing his kimono’s slashed fabric tight against the cut. The crimson serpent image on the front darkened, growing more sinister as it drank deeply of the necromancer’s blood. Wild, enraged eyes stared at the ronin and his control was completely gone.

Hacking with one arm, Zakoji lashed out. The ronin blocked two staggering blows with his sword, then pivoted out of the way. He speared the cult leader through his stomach, in the wake of a wildly missed downswing. The two fighters’ bodies were tight against each other.

“You slay me now, you defeat me now…” Zakoji spit. Blood poured over his lips. “But in another lifetime…another lifetime…it is you who will taste bitterly of defeat on this very spot.”

Zakoji gripped the injured ronin’s clothes, coughing up more blood, but in a single spasm, he was dead. The ronin lowered the man to the ground, shaking his head.

He stumbled away, knowing that he had to return to his infant son, to be on the road once more. He would not return this way again. He would not forget Zakoji’s promise, and he offered a prayer to the universe that whoever came to this valley would be able to defeat the sorcerer’s prophecy.

A convoy of two vans and two automobiles tracked its way up the side of the hill overlooking the stagnant stream. Their passing sent doves flying from tree branches, fluttering into the sky with startled warbles and the flash of wings.

A man in a black windbreaker and black jeans stared out the window at the brown water cutting its way among the cobblestones. His cold blue eyes lingered on the scene for a moment, and his memory searched, as if for some handle on the sudden wave of déjà vu that washed over him.

Mack Bolan dismissed the feeling, returning instead to his thoughts of the mission ahead.

He was posing as FBI Hostage Rescue Team Agent Matt Cooper. He popped the magazine on the Glock 23 pistol, checking the load. He reinserted it and pulled back the slide, observing the blunt .40-caliber nose of the bullet in the chamber. His stark blue eyes looked up to greet Rhode Hogan, who sat across from him in the back of the van.

“Satisfied, Agent Cooper?” Hogan asked. “I know the FBI started using those a few years ago. I wasn’t sure if you’d be happy with it.”

“As long as it goes bang when I pull the trigger,” Bolan said, shrugging the nylon shell of his black windbreaker off his shoulders. He stuffed the gun back into its holster, with two spare magazines to balance it out.

Hogan smirked. It was all he could do to suppress a full-blown laugh. “That’s the kind of attitude I like from a man. Maybe it won’t be so bad having you on hand.”

“I’m not exactly thrilled with this job either, Hogan.”

“I know,” the mercenary said. He leaned back, looking at the lush Japanese countryside. The valley dropped away as the van crawled up the road. “One man sent for this job. Usually the Feds send a dozen of you guys on one of these cases.”