Angels of Vengeance

suwari-waza, for instance - kneeling techniques in which she spent hours of her first weeks dizzy with suffering as the skin peeled from her knees, followed by the thin mantle of flesh over her kneecaps. Those wounds would scab over at night, only to crack open with exquisite pain the next morning as she bent to the tatami mat again.

The dojo was life itself. Unyielding, unforgiving and inescapable.

Lying prone in decaying leaf matter, with insects crawling all over her and slick with sweat, Caitlin reached now for the lesson of Yoshinkan Hombu. It was something she’d learned only at the very end of her training, when her technique, her jutsu, or art, had been honed to a cutting edge as dangerous as a Sengo Muramasa blade, a weapon forged by the infamous Muromachi-period swordsmith and reputedly imbued with his violent madness. It was said that the steel of a Muramasa katana was ‘hungry’ …

After eleven months of shit kicking, shit eating and having the shit kicked out of her by remote and often witlessly vindictive sensei and uki, Caitlin Monroe too, was hungry. Chosen to fight in a closed tournament, to test herself against some of the instructors before an audience of invited masters from other schools, she stepped onto the tatami, where she had spilled so much blood and sweat and, yes, even tears. She felt herself to be the most dangerous woman in the world.

I am become death, she thought.

Her first opponent, a potbellied man with only half his teeth and toe-curling halitosis, took her apart as perfectly as a fugu chef removing the poisonous liver from a puffer fish. Before she could initiate her opening attack, she had been punched in the face and taken two shuddering elbow strikes in her rib cage. As the injury exploded through her nervous system with white-hot shock, her opponent swept her leading leg out from underneath her and drove a kick into her sternum when she dropped to the mat.

The young woman regained her feet and took up a fighting stance again, suddenly aware of just how many old masters were watching and judging her. Every time she advanced, the gap-toothed, potbellied fiend was just outside her line of attack. Every defence she threw up, he swarmed over. Within two minutes she was breathing hard, labouring for air. At the end of that first session of kumite, she felt herself entirely defeated. With another nine fights ahead of her.

She fought on.

Every opponent bested her. She failed to land a single blow or kick. Her arms turned black with bruises, as poorly focused blocks warded off strike after strike. But still she fought on. Not because she knew this would end, but because as the other fighters came on, each after the next, she came to understand this would never end. This was life.

It. Would. Never. End. Not until life itself ended.

When they were done with her, the crisp white gi she had specially laundered for the day was heavy with sweat and pink with her blood. And only her blood. Her stiff black belt, the obi of a newly minted shodan, was limp and foul. She hurt everywhere. In her joints, her meat, deep down in her bones. But the pain was a distant, illusory thing.

She could hardly stand to bow off the mat, yet she could not leave without doing so. Every man she had fought lined up and bowed deeply to her, the young American whom they had bested. Inside, she felt empty. But happy in a way she had never known before. She had lost herself in battle, her actual self.

An arrogant, self-conscious and pitiably vain student had stepped onto the tatami just a short time ago. A warrior limped off.

Nine years after this, she found that same unspoilt clarity of mind as she breathed out and let go of vanity, of desire, of worldly attachments - including the attachment to life itself. She became death and she waited.

Forty minutes later, Caitlin Monroe attacked.

*

The heavy wooden door swung open on creaky hinges just as the day was reaching its hottest hour. Perhaps if the two errand boys had returned by now, Facility 183 would already have been dozing through an afternoon siesta. But they would never return, and when enough time had passed, the two most junior militia men were sent out to investigate. This they accomplished by slowly stepping off the veranda and squinting into the sun, shading their eyes with their hands.

Concealed within the thick brush growth not much more than a long stone’s throw from them, Caitlin flicked off the safety on her HK-417, laid the iron sights on the centre mass of the larger, closer man and breathed out.

Three rounds sped down-range with methodical, calm, singular squeezes of the trigger. As before, a mix of armour-piercing and hollow-point, with Caitlin channelling the recoil into a short, efficient movement that swept the muzzle of the suppressor from the first target onto the second. The men died instantly. A bloody squall of viscera and shattered bone chips sprayed the dirty white stucco behind them. Instantly, she shifted her aim to the front door where, as she had hoped, the facility’s corpulent, hapless commander soon ducked his head around.

A single pull put a round of 7.62 mm through the officer’s forehead, spraying hair, bone and brain back into the building. Another brace of shots destroyed the junction box, where a single phone line ran into the building.

She rolled to the right, retreating a few steps into the heavy undergrowth. The assassin moved swiftly along the same path as before, emerging at speed at a point by the side of the road where she could approach the building at a run, without being directly seen from inside. Not that Caitlin expected the altogether more impressive deputy commander, the only surviving militia man in there now, to show himself.

Sprinting across the road, she leapt high onto the old hitching rail, using it to boost herself into a second leap skywards. She grasped the broken clay half-pipe of the building’s guttering and used her momentum to swing up onto the roof in one fluid movement. Caitlin crossed to the rear, where she quickly darted her head over the roof line to recon what lay below. It seemed to correspond with the fuzzy satellite image in her data set. Pressing on with her attack, from a completely different direction now, she swung down from the roof and landed with feline grace, and very little noise, next to a blank section of the rear wall.

Crouching to keep her head below the line of a window, the Echelon agent moved quickly to enter the building through the small cook-house. She adjusted the stock of the HK for close-quarters work. A small hand mirror on a telescoping extension allowed her to survey the interior before swinging in. Two pots stood bubbling on the wood-fired stove, next to an old coffee pot. The kitchen was longer than it was wide, leaving no room for a table. An internal doorway gave out onto the small open-plan office she had spied earlier from the brush. There was no sign of the second militia officer.

She took care now. Unlike his boss and the men under him, this one was no fool. He knew the layout of the building and would use it to good effect. Caitlin eeled around the corner, gun up, safety off, ready to fire and roll.

Nothing. Only the cries of the prisoners in the cell block. They were mostly incoherent, although one did babble, calling for help from his ’compadre‘. Caitlin ignored them. They were not yet relevant.

Covering the small area of the barracks, she could see through the kitchen doorway, she moved forward, cautiously again, taking up a secure position just before the entrance to the office area. Once more, she used the mirror to scope out the room before entering; crouching down at first to take a view from about knee level, before slowly sliding back up and holding the mirror high, so as to look down on the space, hoping to catch the man if he’d hidden himself behind a desk.

Few things were more nerve-racking than trying to single-handedly clear a building of an enemy who knew you were coming, and who knew the ground on which you would have to fight. As important as it was not to just charge in and get your head blown off, Caitlin was aware that it could be fatal to hesitate. Having initiated the attack, she could very easily defeat herself now by giving in to uncertainty. ‘Divided energies’, they had called it back at Yoshinkan Hombu. A fatal tipping point between fight and flight where the unprepared so often died.

She mapped out the room in her head. To her front, a cluster of desks. On her right, the grimy windows overlooking the dirt road that ran in front of the building. The heavy wooden doors hanging open, with the reception counter just inside of them. Behind that counter lay a closed door, undoubtedly leading to the cells.

And like a chess master running through every possible combination of moves before committing their own piece to a new square on the board, Caitlin studied the line of attack from her opponent’s point of view. Which items of furniture would provide him with the best cover, which firing angles the greatest chance of taking her