“Fair enough.”
“You deserve a report on how it all shook out.”
“I been wondering.”
“Well, to start with, the Japanese government clamped down on it right away. The fight, the deaths, never reported. No scandal. They got there and closed it all down. They don’t want it public.”
“It would take a lot of explaining.”
“And they don’t like to explain. But two days later, Major Fujikawa and Captain Tanada surrendered to the authorities.”
“Good lord!”
“Yeah. They felt they had to do it. Japanese thing, don’t ask.”
“What’s going to happen to them?”
“Not known yet. Depositions have been taken and all have been released on administrative leave while the government figures out what to do. You might think, eighteen men are dead, including a multibillionaire, huge deal. But seventeen of the eighteen are low-ranking yakuza who could have died in any of a hundred squalid ways and the eighteenth is Miwa. But dead, Miwa has no power, no heirs, no legacy. And it turned out he had some unsavory foreign connections that made him very problematic. Finally, the yakuza people don’t want to upset the working relationship for vengeance, since he wasn’t really one of them. I’m hoping that the whole thing will be brushed under the carpet. The Japanese are very good at brushing things under carpets.”
“Can you help the officers?”
“There’s not much I can do. Maybe it’ll work out. At least they won’t be ordered to commit seppuku.”
“That’s something. And how about you?”
“Well, it worked out to my advantage. Long story, still classified, but as I said, Miwa had some contacts that had lots of Agency people worried, and getting him out of the picture-well, you got him out of the picture-worked out to my benefit. I’m going to get a promotion. I’m the new queen.”
“You were born to be a queen, Okada-san. Glad I helped. Still, I have to ask about the child. Is she-Is she all right?”
“She’s better. She’s sleeping through the night.”
“I guess that’s the important thing. Still, I wish I had seen her one last time. There at the end, it was so crazy, I just lost sight of you and her. You just disappeared. It was so sudden.”
“I got her back to my place and then we got her back into the system. She’s safe now.”
“I just hate the thought of her in that hospital.”
“She’s not there anymore.”
“Oh, they found someone to take her? Well, ain’t that nice. I suppose that’s all for the best.”
“She went on a long trip.”
“She went to gaijin?”
“There was no one left in Japan. We had to look hard to find someone to love her.”
“I hope it’s a good family.”
“I know it’s a good family, Swagger-san. Nikki!”
She called, and Nikki climbed out of the truck, delighted, holding a wrapped but lively bundle that twisted in her arms mischievously, and he recognized Miko.
She looked over at Swagger and her eyes filled with something.
“Miko, it’s the Tin Man. He came and rescued you. He helped you so much.”
The child looked at him, then buried her shy eyes in Nikki’s chest, then found the courage to look again, decided it was okay, and smiled.
“Hi, there, sweetie,” he said. “Don’t you look swell today? Oh, you’re a peach, I’ll say.”
“Here, give her a hug,” Nikki said, handing the child over.
She squeezed him, he squeezed her.
“It’s so nice to see you,” he said to her, now worried that his daughter and Okada-san might see him cry. Big guys don’t cry, it was a rule.
“It’s so nice that she’s here.”
He was trying to put it together. Somehow Okada-san had taken charge of the child and was bringing her-well, where?
“You say that now, but maybe you’ll change tunes in fifteen years when she brings home a boyfriend with fishhooks in his eyebrows,” Okada-san said.
“What?”
“It’s very tough for a foreigner to adopt a kid in Japan, but it turned out that Miko tragically fit all the criteria. When I found that out, I couldn’t just leave it alone. So I went to the ambassador, who went to the prime minister, and maybe someone whispered something in someone’s ear about certain behind-the-scene occurrences. Anyway, there’s still paperwork to catch up on and some pro forma interviews, but everybody concerned thought it was better to get her over here sooner rather than later and play catch-up on the other stuff. Swagger-san, say hello to your new daughter.”
“Oh, god,” said Bob, “I don’t believe this.”
“Mom is so excited!” said Nikki. “She’s out buying a child’s bed and toys and the whole shebang.”
“Okay, sweetie,” said Bob, holding his child closer, “it’s time to go home.”
Acknowledgments
Readers of the entire Swagger saga will see that the account of Earl’s heroics on Iwo Jima, even as to date and unit, have evolved slightly from previous accounts. As I have progressed through what has become a life’s work, I keep encountering small areas where the joinery between volumes is untidy, and I can only plunge ahead, correcting or reinterpreting as I go. I count on your goodwill to understand that such awkwardnesses are unavoidable and make a promise that if I can ever convince a publisher to negotiate the complicated rights (among the issues: a trilogy in which each volume was issued by a different publisher!) and put the whole thing together in a uniform set, I’ll try and reconcile all such annoyances.
I must also say that the great Musashi, oft-quoted here, said many provocative things about the art of the sword, but “Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel” was not one of them. It was Hunter who said that, sitting in his third-floor office in Baltimore, Maryland.
This is another way of pointing out that no reader should impute to me any deep knowledge of the way of the sword. I’m a writer, not a samurai; I tell stories, I don’t cut enemies down. My weapon of choice is the adjective, not the katana. I based my accounts of sword encounters mainly on secondary sources, a slew of texts, and dozens of DVDs of samurai films, high and low. I took sword-cut terminology from Shinkeudo: Japanese Swordsmanship by Toshishiro Obata. Devotees will possibly be upset that I’ve mixed kendo and combat terms in my quest to give the encounters a different feel; send angry e-mails to Hunter-doesn’tcare@aol.com.
I relied on friends for support and encouragement. My old pal Lenne Miller gave me the advantage of his insightful enthusiasm; Gary Goldberg did as much, plus Gary-the world’s most advanced networker!-set me up with Dr. David Fowler, the medical examiner of the state of Maryland, who gave me an hour of his time to discuss the biomechanics of sword cuts, very helpful in a book as bloody as this one. My pal and hunting pard and former collaborator John Bainbridge gave me the gift of his great eye for proofreading. Jeff Weber, way out in California, was uniformly enthusiastic and had a number of extremely useful insights I was happy to incorporate into the text. James Grady, great navigator of the Condor and a Washington fixture, also was a shrewd and helpful early reader, as was Jay Carr, the former film critic of the Boston Globe, who in retirement has become a Washington screening- room regular and a good and valuable friend.
Bob Beers continues to maintain the unofficial Stephen Hunter website, there being no official one. What he gets out of it, I’ll never know, certainly nothing from me, but he’s made it into something solid. Check it out at Stephenhunter.net. Thanks again, Bob. Alan Doelp, as always, was an invaluable advisor on computer issues.
In the world of the Washington Post four colleagues gave of themselves to my advantage. The great Kunio Francis Tanabe, retired after forty years on Book World, advised me on Japanese names and gave the manuscript a
