and an anesthetic nurse began manually compressing the bag, forcing oxygen into the patient.
The patient was waxy white and his skin was clammy and cold to the touch. He was struggling and bewildered, straw-colored serous fluid leaking from his wounds, his clothing saturated in clotting blood. Closer examination showed his breathing to be thirty-five gasping breaths per minute and his blood pressure to be over eighty and unrecordable. His pulse showed one-forty beats per minute.
Fitzduane was showing a basic animal response to severe injury. Unbidden by his conscious mind, he was cutting of the blood supply to the less important areas and preserving the blood supply to his brain so that his body could fight back.
Gilmartin percussed Fitzduane's chest, and hearing the dull sound, immediately ordered a chest drain. Quickly, he injected a local anesthetic, and without waiting for the three to five minutes it took for the drug to fully effective, made an incision in the muscles over the lower end of the fifth rib space and opened up the muscle with a forceps.
It was not enough. He inserted his surgical-gloved finger to open the wound up more, then replaced it with a forty-centimeter-long plastic tube.
Blood, a mixture of bright-red arterial and bluish venous, rushed out in a bubbly, dirty-red stream through an underwater seal and into a container on the floor. A second tube protruded from the container and released the air that was escaping from Fitzduane's lung. Half a liter of blood came out in the first two minutes.
Oblivious to his surroundings, semiconscious, confused, and terrified, Fitzduane was struggling. The anesthetist and her staff watched with concern and quickly moved to tape down the cannulas. It was all too easy for them to dislodge from the veins and go into tissue.
Gilmartin exposed the wounded leg and applied a fresh pressure dressing, while a nurse applied a direct manual pressure. The leg was unnaturally white, a sign that the femoral artery and vein were damaged. Further, the patient had clearly sustained a multiple fracture.
'What a bloody mess,' he said. 'Let's prep him for the theater.'
The preparations continued. Fitzduane's blood pressure slowly improved to ninety to one hundred systolic and his heart rate had slowed to a hundred beats per minute.
He was now adequately resuscitated for surgery.
Thirty minutes had passed since his arrival at the hospital. It had been one hour and fifteen minutes since the shooting.
He was wheeled into the operating theater.
4
Tokyo, Japan
January 3
Chifune left sometime around dawn.
Adachi had opened one eye as she touched her lips to his but had not protested. She had never yet stayed a full night with him and refused to explain why, and what was just the way of it. In time things might change. Meanwhile, murder and kendo and lengthy lovemaking were exhausting. He drifted back to sleep.
He awoke officially when the alarm clock shrieked. The Japanese electronics industry was a great believer in innovation, and this ridiculous thing, which was a clock in the form of a parrot, had been bought for him one Sunday when they had been browsing around Akihabara. It looked horrible, the digital clock face that peered out of its stomach was obscene and sounded revolting, but it did wake him up and it had some sentimental value. Nonetheless, he was determined to shoot it one of these days. Which reminded him. Where was his gun?
He went hunting and found it under his socks. It was a. 38 Nambu Model 60 with a five-chamber cylinder. It was not exactly state of the art compared to American personal firepower, but in peaceful Japan it looked like overkill. He buckled on the damn thing, and two speedloaders to balance out the weight, with regret. Orders were orders.
The thought came to him that the vast majority of Japanese had never handled a gun. Neither would Adachi if he had any choice in the matter, but weapons were not an option, even in the Japanese Defense Forces.
Adachi had had a good time in the paratroops but had never seriously associated the military life with the need to kill anyone. He just enjoyed the camaraderie and jumping out of airplanes. He regarded infantry badges and Purple Hearts that he had met at Atsugi during training. He just could not imagine deliberately killing another human being.
Adachi slurped a bowl of herb tea and ate some rice, a few pickles, and a little grilled fish. He bowed toward the ancestral shrine he kept in a niche of the living room and headed for the subway. He had looked a little hollow- eyed when he checked himself in the mirror earlier, but apart from a certain understandable fatigue – he had slept only about three hours – he felt great.
It was not yet seven in the morning, but the train was jammed with work-bound sararimen – male salaried employees in their uniforms of blue or gray business suits, white shirts, and conservative ties. Squeezed in between them were OLs – office ladies – the catchall title given to women office workers. Some OLs might have university degrees and other excellent qualifications, but even so, the serious work belonged to the men. An OL's job was to make the tea and dot he chores and bow prettily and get married. An OL was a second-class citizen.
Adachi thought of himself as moderately progressive, but he admitted to himself that he had more or less accepted the status quo until he had met Chifune. Now he found himself looking at OLs and other Japanese women with renewed interest. If Chifune was representative of the true nature of Japanese womanhood, Japan was in for some interesting times.
He slipped his folded copy of the Asahi Shibumi out of his pocket and scanned the news. There was another bribery scandal in the Diet, the Japanese Parliament, and the Americans were getting upset about the trade balance.
Nothing ever changed. He refolded the paper with some skill – it was an art form like origami to do such a thing in a subway car during rush hour, but you got good with practice – and checked the stock market. Nothing had changed there, either. The Nikkei was still going up. Day after day, that was all it did. Half of Japan seemed to be buying shares. Property values were going insane. Adachi was glad he had been a paratrooper. There was nothing like jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft to remind you that what goes up must come down. He invested, but cautiously.
The train swayed and Adachi looked up. Several feet away, a young and rather pretty OL was looking his way, an expression of subdued distress on her face. Then she looked directly at him, a silent cry for help in her eyes. The carriage was jammed. Pressed up directly behind her was a round-faced middle-aged sarariman, his face expressionless.
The practice was all too common. A man would press up against a woman in a crowded subway and grope her or otherwise excite himself sexually, confident that the woman would not complain. A Western woman would tear herself away from her assailant or otherwise protest. Japanese women were taught to be submissive. Other travelers, packed together but isolated in their own worlds, would not interfere.
Adachi sighed. Chifune would be the death of him. He squeezed toward the beleaguered OL until he stood beside her, then smiled at the sarariman. The man smiled back uncertainly. Adachi reached out and put his hand in a friendly manner on his shoulder and squeezed. He thought he had the place about right. The sarariman 's face glazed over with pain and he went very white, and at the next station shot from the train as if rocket- propelled.
The girl looked at Adachi uncertainly. He had helped her, but this was not usual behavior. She was not sure what was coming next. Adachi winked at her and she blushed. He could not think of what else to do, and then he remembered that he had a bunch of these idiotic MPD public relation cards in his pocket. The cards featured the MPD mascot, a mouse called ‘Peopo,’ and promoted the emergency service 110 number and the name, rank, and telephone number of the officer concerned. It was the kind of thing you gave to a citizen and not to a yakuza, if you did not want to be laughed at. The girl looked reassured and gave a little bow of thanks. Adachi's station came up and he smiled briefly and left.
