Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

The young commissioned officer had given you his permission.

It had happened.

“My passion brought you here. It’s true, I can see that. Take them. The second generation of heroes, and the third. If the puppies you sire are as good as I expect, I’ll name them as the true successors. The males will all be Belka, the bitches will be Strelka. That will be the mark of their legitimacy. The sign that I approved of them. The proof.”

Woof!

“Come!”

You understood that command. You leapt the fence. Jumped right over. Just like that. And you became a Soviet dog.

The Boss began by sending three “bullets.” He shipped them off from Toyama Port on a fishing boat late one night, and from there they transferred mid-ocean to the cargo vessel that carried them to a port in the Primorsky Krai. After that, he sent seven more bullets. Trained assassins. Up to this point, they were all new recruits, youngsters. Show us what you can fucking do for the organization, boys, he’d told the new recruits, all barely in their twenties. Think of it as a sort of hustle. Go pop a few of them fuckhead Ruskies for me.

He had done well, he thought, put some fear into them. Can’t have ’em fucking besmirching the old escutcheon now, can we? And in fact, the young guns had brought in a whopping sum. A cool forty million yen per head. Japanese yen. Even when you factored in “transport fees” for illegal entry and the various other little presents they had to distribute, and even if you offered the bullets—or their families, in some cases—a reward for seeing their jobs through to a successful conclusion, the profits that came streaming into the organization were still unfuckingbelievable. And of course, the Boss mused, it wasn’t just that nice cash reward; I also set it up so they could spend the eve of the attack whooping it up with beautiful white chicks. Sexy Slavic sisters. Blond-haired blue-eyed supermodel-class hotties, fuck yeah. Some harem. Bet they knocked themselves out, lucky pricks. Then I had ’em batten the hatches with vodka and caviar. Very nice indeed. Shows what a fucking tenderhearted yakuza daddy I’ve been.

The man—the Boss as they called him—cast his thoughts back, agony written all over his face. The thing was, the bullets were just that. Bullets. They went out and didn’t come back. In the beginning, they’d had better than a fifty percent survival rate, but now it had sagged below twenty percent. Only one in five made it back alive, in other words. If that. But what choice did he have? He had to keep sending the poor fuckers in. Stormtroopers. He hunted around for hit men who wouldn’t just follow the money, going through one of his “brothers” from his time in the clink. He located four, trained ’em to do their work as bullets, and sent ’em off on a Russian transport vessel, this time from Niigata Port. He snuck ’em in without dicking around, no stupid paperwork. Next he picked up some fucking traitors. Dickheads who’d betrayed their gang and were lying low under aliases, trying to keep from getting caught in the wide net their old bosses cast. He sent off eight of them, one after another. Gave ’em good tools. A nice cache of pistols: Tokarevs; Makarovs; Italian-made automatics; M-16s that had found their way out of American bases, now equipped with 40mm grenade launchers; Uzis; and last but not least twenty-three hand grenades and seventeen sticks of dynamite. Plus some other stuff.

These “soldiers” kept getting more flashy all the time, putting more bang into their work. One guy had gone into a nightclub the police ran jointly with the Russian mafia and shot the hell out of the place with a submachine gun. Miraculously the attacker managed to get out of the club alive, not that it mattered—they found his body in Nakhodka Port. Others had taken aim at two successive chiefs of police, both times bringing about a change in personnel. They slaughtered executives in a bank the mafia controlled. After the organization started using yakuza from outside, though, the bullets’ survival rate sank below ten percent. Soon, no doubt, it’d be grazing zero. Still, this little hustle had already brought in more than six hundred million yen in pure profit. How the hell could this be? the Boss wondered. What was going on? he asked himself. He didn’t know the answer. And he had no choice, he had to keep sending these fucking stormtroopers in. How could he refuse? They had his daughter.

The client had his daughter.

It doesn’t fucking make sense, the Boss moaned. How many months had his stomach been hurting like this? Sure, I expect to be threatened, used. But why are the fuck are they paying us these fees? He knew the Russian market. You could hire a hit man, some guy with no fear of death, for a lot less; you could take a zero or two off the figure they were paying him, even if the target was a policeman or a kingpin type. And you could do it domestically. What the hell was this client thinking? The Boss had lost twenty pounds over the past few months. He’d grown thin. Skinny, even. He couldn’t make sense of the situation. He had no idea what effect these dramatic attacks were having on the local population. No idea how a certain paper—a dissident tabloid specializing in yellow journalism—was fanning the flames. He didn’t even know where all this cash was coming from. Who was behind the client, funding him?

Someone, he was sure, was behind the client.

Shooting pain in his stomach. Blood in his urine.

His daughter had been taken hostage.

The Boss sent over three more bullets. The client kept making demands. ELIMINATE THE TARGET. I mean, what the hell? The Boss clutched his stomach with both hands. What’s the plan here, what the fuck are you trying to do? The information the client sent regarding the targets’ location, routine, and protection was always precise, detailed, and up-to-date. It’s better than a damned spy flick, for fuck’s sake! And the second we pop the target, the money comes through, wired into one of the organization’s underground bank accounts. What are we, businessmen? the Boss asks. Speaking to himself, of course, since there was no one else to ask. It’s just another kind of business. How many fucking ulcers have I got in my stomach now? Already the supply of yakuza-on-the-run was drying up; he was having to rely on non-yakuza. Fuckheads who had been drummed out of the criminal world forever by their own groups. And he had to hire these guys as bullets. Totally fucking against the rules. I’m no underworld daddy, not anymore. Forget underworld, this is just plain old hell. But who the fuck cares. I can’t fucking let it bother me. After all, the Boss thinks, becoming defiant, this is the best hustle ever!

Until then, what little income the organization brought in had consisted of protection money from bars and restaurants, betting on baseball, underground casinos, black-market lending, various degrees of blackmail, ranging in size from tall to venti. They didn’t deal much in speed. The key, fuckers, is how much money you can launder, the Boss was always saying. Use your heads and fucking rake the shit in. The twenty-first century is right around the corner, and then it’ll all be business! Business! That’s what we’re aiming for with this Russo-Japanese joint venture!

Only… was this the kind of business they’d wanted? No, no. The Boss had chosen defiance—that was the way to go. Just think how much his men had suffered trying to gather the fees they had to send to the main branch. How much fucking pointless suffering they had been through. This business was his reward for all that, as their underworld daddy.