Don Pendleton - Serpent's Lair

Honey smirked. “Great. You’re not only a shining knight, you’re an eternal optomist.”

“Planning ahead for possibilities and probabilities. I’m hoping to avoid conflict the rest of the way back to Tokyo, but in case we can’t, I’m going to make the most of the fights,” Bolan answered. “Even if that means looting a few dead bodies.”

Honey’s lip quivered, then she shrugged. “I don’t mind. They kidnapped me, and they want to kidnap me again.”

Bolan took a moment to withdraw the Walther and replace its partially spent magazine with a fresh one. He set the weapon in the grass and Honey reached for it. Bolan froze, looking at her as she held the weapon in her lap.

“I don’t want to leave it behind,” she said. “It’s the only gun you have, right?”

Bolan regretted ditching the hunting rifle, but he had no spare ammunition for it, and he’d needed his arms free to carry Honey. “Yeah.”

Bolan removed the Yakuza gun belt and unhooked the pouches and holster from it. They were all connected to the belt, by J-hooks, so he didn’t have to take off his own belt and run it through the loops. He clipped them on firmly, then stashed the partially spent magazine in its pouch. He held out his hand for the Walther.

Honey seemed reluctant to turn it over, though she wasn’t aiming it at him.

“Honey, we don’t have time for this. What’s wrong?”

“How do I know I can trust you?” she asked. “You don’t look like an FBI agent.”

“What makes you think that?” Bolan asked.

Honey pointed to the scars across his body, visible through the open front of his torn shirt. “An FBI agent with that much scar tissue would have had a desk job by now. Knifed and shot that many times? Plus you have another gun,” she said, pointing at his shoulder.

Bolan gingerly slid out of the Glock’s holster, the leather scraping his injury.

“Hogan, your father’s mercenary, gave me a dead pistol. Took the firing pin out so it wouldn’t shoot. I had to ditch it.”

He took the shoulder holster and began digging briefly. When he had a hole big enough, he shoved the useless belt, holster and Glock ammunition into it then pushed and smoothed leaves and dirt back over it.

Honey moved closer to Bolan, her eyes wide. She handed over the Walther, and Bolan took it, instinctively knowing that their pursuers were close. He made a count of the enemy. There were nine visible across the section of woods that he could see.

“That way,” Bolan said, pointing. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“Yeah. Let me go first into any traps?” Honey asked. “Who knows what kind of shit that creepy skinny guy left all over this valley.”

“Don’t make any noise,” Bolan answered. “They’ve slowed down, and they’re looking for tracks.”

Honey glanced back at the trail Bolan’s big boots had dug up in his desperate run. She looked to him, doubtful, but he nodded her on. She turned and scrambled along as fast as she could without making the leaves rustle loudly with her passing. Behind her, Bolan followed, using a branch to wipe out their tracks.

They moved slow and low, and they kept their heads below the level of the saplings and tall grasses growing between the trees.

On the other side of some waist-high grasses, Honey paused. Bolan slipped in beside her.

“Aww, dammit. We’re closing in on a rise,” she noted. “They’ll see us.”

“Cut right. We’ll travel parallel to them. The ground is uneven and there’s a depression at the base of those trees,” Bolan whispered. “Get moving.”

TOSHIEE RAN ACROSS the compound. He knew that Master Zakoji was not to be interrupted, but with the sounds of gunfire rattling on the hill overhead, there was a threat of their facility being discovered.

Camouflage netting cast crazy, obscene shadows on the ground as he raced across the camp to the main building, where Zakoji kept his laboratory and office. It was wide and squat, and he knew that it sunk deep into the ground, where the bodies were taken, to be changed by the almost sorcerous machinations of Master Zakoji’s whitecoats.

Toshiee threw open the doors in time to see his leader, the man chosen by God to carry on the name of the great alchemist who dared defy a corrupt shogun, reborn in this time to bring Japan back to glory. He clapped his fist to his chest and bowed swiftly.

“What is it?” Zakoji asked, puffing a cigarette as he overlooked the glass enclosed underground labs.

“There was the sound of gunfire on the hill,” Toshiee said breathlessly.

“The Yakuza bring another of their victims and execute him, and you worry about that?”

“There was much gunfire,” Toshiee continued. “More than just when they render a body useless to you, my lord. This was the sound of thunder splitting the air. Like the sounds of a great battle.”

Zakoji turned, narrowing his gaze. He then nodded to the man to his left. “See if our scout on the hill is responding.”

“Great Master, so soon on the heels of the previous intrusion—”

“I shall have to get in touch with our men dealing with him,” Zakoji said. “You have done well.”

The young man bowed again. He caught the flurry of robes as his master turned, glimpsed the twisting form of the great crimson serpent embroidered into his kimono as he disappeared up the stairs toward his office.

TOJU SAKEI, KNOWN TO his followers as Master Zakoji, tore through the door to his office, his mind racing.

It couldn’t have been coincidence that brought a gun battle to his doorstep so soon after the government agent invaded. And yet, why would federal agents begin a gun battle so close by, ruining their element of surprise?

Sakei shook the many possibilities out of his mind. He needed all the information he could get. He glanced over to Umon, one of his lieutenants.

“Any word from our sentry?”

“Kawai isn’t answering his radio,” Umon answered, bowing his head reverently.

“Call our team torturing the government man back to the compound. And send some patrols into the woods. I want everyone on full alert, that means body armor and automatic weapons,” Sakei said.

“Who do you think is attacking us?” another man, Rikyu, asked.

“I’m not sure we are being attacked,” Sakei responded. He rubbed his black-bristled chin. “I think someone else brought their fight with the Yakuza into our backyard.”

Umon and Rikyu glanced at each other. “And if the Yakuza discover that the men they’ve been burying over the years are missing?” Umon asked.

“We won’t let them live long enough to analyze that information,” Sakei assured them. “Send out the patrols. Shoot to kill!”

Umon and Rikyu vacated his office, and Sakei looked out over the compound.

If he was going to take over Japan, fulfilling the legacy of the original Master Zakoji, he was going to need a few more days of privacy. Once he perfected the disease’s interactions with the corpses, then he would be able to bring down the great gleaming cities of steel and glass, sweeping away the neon modernization that poisoned the beautiful nation he lived in. He could make Japan a simpler, more noble land once again.

It was regrettable that he had to use the trappings of modern science, but the germ, the lowliest of all organisms, was older than mankind. It was ancient, and thus, in a way, it was worthy of his goal. Did not the alchemist Zakoji develop superior poisons and diseases with which to strike down his enemies centuries ago?

All that came to an end when the lone swordsman came to the secluded valley. Zakoji’s dying curse against the man had been heard over and over again, in tale upon tale in Sakei’s family.

Sakei thought that the government agent being tortured to death on the hill might be the reincarnation of that lone swordsman.