hearts beating almost against each other, locked in the murder embrace.
The deadly point of the KA-BAR probed his skin, bent it down, maybe drew a drop of blood. It would slide in easily, climb through lung tissue, and find the clump of muscle called his heart.
Oh, Christ, Junie, I tried so hard.
The captain leaned into the knife hilt and-stopped.
He saw on the ground next to the American’s head a flexible metal tube with a syrette screwed to its mouth. He realized instantly it was morphine. The American hadn’t been trying to cut his throat; he’d been trying to ease his pain.
He drew back. It seemed suddenly wrong to kill a man who meant to save him.
But it seemed wrong to surrender to him too.
I wish I done gave you a child, I am so sorry to leave you alone. There wasn’t no time, I had so much to tell you.
But he felt an immense liberation as the pinprick went away and the man somehow heaved himself off Earl’s body, and lay a foot away, breathing hard.
A smile came to the man’s grimy face.
“Samurai,” he said.
Then he reversed the heavy war knife, plunged it into his own neck, where a major artery carried a river of blood to his brain. The jab was expert, and the blood spurted out in a bright and gaudy fountain. In eight seconds his brain had devoured the oxygen and glucose that remained, and his eyes closed.
“He killed himself,” Susan said.
“Yeah. Dad told Sam he thought the guy may have seen the morphine single he was trying to inject. It was right there on the floor next to them. Or maybe Hideki Yano had had enough killing. Or maybe he was saying, I’m the better man, I can kill you or not, and then I can embrace death. Whatever, my father always felt he’d lost that battle. The Japanese officer won it. And for whatever reason in the middle of a battlefield, the worst battle on earth, the most dangerous-on a ‘moon of hell,’ as someone called it-the officer let Earl Swagger live. That’s why my dad gave up that sword. Maybe that’s why he never talked about the medal. And also because of that, Earl got to go home, where he got his wife pregnant and they had a little boy called Bob Lee. And how Mr. Earl loved that boy, and helped him and taught him. So Bob Lee not only got his own life in the deal, he got nine more years with his daddy, who was a great man. And thirty-odd years down the worthless road, Bob Lee himself got a daughter out of it, and she’s a great one too. It all goes back to the decision that Japanese officer made in that pillbox. So you could say Bob Lee, he owes the Yanos something big. Call it on, call it whatever you want. But what he owes them is everything.”
“He does,” said Susan.
Bob looked at his watch. It was 4:59:57 a.m.
:58.
:59.
“Okay,” she said. “Samurai up.”
43
The last thing Swagger said was, “When you hit the ground, wait a second, then pull down your goggles and go to night vision.”
But in the one-tenth of a second of fall, she forgot, and she landed with more thud than she expected: it was seven feet, she felt her body elongate to full extension then accordion shut with a bang when she landed, snapping her head hard enough to drive bangles and spangles before her eyes.
She could see-nothing. It made no sense. Light and dark, nothing focused, nothing where it should be, all confusion, her will scattered and gone.
“Goggles,” whispered Swagger, who had come down beside her.
She got the goggles down-PVS7s, she’d had a day on them at a Delta Force counterterror workshop at Fort Bragg a few years ago-and hit the toggle, which was no longer where it should be but an inch to the right, evidently resettled on her head in the landing. This led to another moment of confusion, but then she got them aligned right and it all popped to. Things were beginning to happen.
It was a green, fuzzy world. Still, she made out the house. To the left, a glowing amoeba seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. It was Tanada’s rear team, coming hard over the back wall, in fact most were down, pausing only to withdraw their katana, then peeling off individually to the left rear. Meanwhile to the right, the same optical phenomenon reiterated itself, this being Fujikawa’s front team, maybe a tad behind the curve, but peeling right. She swept the house, saw nothing, but then the front door opened and she saw a man with a rifle-AK-47, she ID’d it, again from her Bragg tutorial-and behind her she heard the sound of-well, of what? It was light, a wet piston floating through the grease of a hydraulic tube, nothing sharp, but surprisingly vibratory. It was a silenced rifle, wielded by Sniper 3 Kim, and before the sound had even dissipated, the rifleman went down as if someone had cut his knees and they no longer held, and he just flopped down hard and fast.
She realized, I just saw a man die.
“House clear,” came the voice of 3 Kim from above.
At that moment a series of bright flashes syncopated to hard pops lit off in the basement of the house, as the first team of intruders had gotten their flash-bangs into the area where the yaks were.
“Go, go,” said Bob, but she was already on the way, low, hard, cutting directly across the courtyard to the house, reaching it and sliding along it. She felt Swagger beside her. She reached the open door, stepped over the body of the guy with the rifle, and, clutching her wakizashi in her right hand, ducked inside.
Captain Tanada was not the sort to direct; he was the sort to lead. So he hit the ground and took off, and fuck anybody who couldn’t keep up with him. But that got him close to the rear of the house first, and he pulled his flash-bang, got the pin out, and almost-but not quite-launched it through the window.
He got himself under control.
Four other men reached him and to each he gestured with the small munition, and each duplicated his move. Flash-bang out, pin out, lever secured, each man placed himself next to a window and in the next second, on Tanada’s nod, each shattered the window with a pad-protected elbow, tossed in the illumination device, and peeled back, withdrawing katana from scabbard, waiting for a target.
The things went off almost simultaneously, not in concussive explosion-they weren’t bombs, after all-but with a harsh bang and a white phosphorous flash that blasted anyone’s night vision to pieces. You could be forgiven for thinking that the devil himself had chucked a nuclear device through the window. They caused one of two responses: utter paralysis or complete panic. Four of them quadrupled the effect.
In a second the first man came out, unarmed, and Tanada hit him with the hilt hard in the head. Two more came out, one to be conked, the other took a roundhouse slash at Tanada, who neatly evaded and watched one of his men hit the yak with a hard diagonal cut, left to right, so that he jacked, pirouetted, dropping his weapon, and went down, spurting blood.
And then suddenly it was happening, exactly as the men had dreamed about and believed they wanted, exactly as had not happened in Japan, except on movie sets, for more than a century: the yaks poured from the house and began to spread out, each unleashing a sword, and the soldiers moved forward to engage them, a kendo-to-the- death in dull light as the snow swooped downward, the cuts hard and serious and meant to kill, the evasions equally hard and serious and meant to avoid, the whole thing happening in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.
Tanada killed two men in a single second as they came at him, his technique superb: kesagiri on the first,
