Flashback

battle, the Interstate Twenty-five route gives you a slightly better chance of going undetected. There’s a chance of that. Maybe. Small chance.”

Sato nodded, shook hands with the major, and led Nick out of the trailer and down the hill to where the two tan, modified Toyota Land Cruisers they’d be driving into New Mexico sat by the side of the road. Tanks were parked in the turnouts near the summit of the pass and Nick could see National Guard artillery units along the ridgeline to the north and south. The dragonfly ’copter had already departed.

The four ninjas working for Sato were waiting by the vehicles. When Sato had introduced the four young men to Nick—Joe,” “Willy,” “Toby,” and “Bill”—all Nick could say in response to their nods was “Uh-huh.” It reminded him of when he was a child before the turn of the century and would call for tech help on his computer or software and the heavily accented voice from somewhere in India would say “My name is Joe.” Uh-huh.

The four had been in faded jeans and cheap noninteractive T-shirts when Nick had met them, but in the short period he and Sato had been in Major Malcolm’s trailer, they’d changed into their body armor. This was a serious transformation. No black ninja slippers and clothing and balaclavas for these four boys. Their hideously expensive post-dragon body armor—seemingly as thin as silk covered with overlapping scales—was based on samurai armor from the eighth or tenth century A.D. or some such time. Each man’s armor was different, but each included studded shoulder pads, a sort of skirt, a helmet, studded gloves, and shin guards.

“Whoa,” said Nick, staring. “As my son would say, those are totally coolshit.”

“Hai,” grunted Joe. He was the only one of the four wearing his helmet and it was an impressive piece of work, complete with elaborately carved horns or small-hockey-stick-shaped prongs that clicked up from their inset place along the curve of the otherwise modern Kevlar-9 impact-armored headpiece.

Nick pointed to the helmet extensions. “Joe, do you mind me asking what the superhero antelope prongs there are about?”

“Clan symbols,” Joe grunted fiercely. But some of the ferocity was offset by the young mercenary’s sudden grin and by the fact that he was chewing gum. “Nakamura clan,” he added with no grin.

Nick looked at the other three helmets held under the men’s left arms as they waited by the open doors of the Land Cruisers. All had the same elaborately painted, click-up Nakamura-clan-symbol goalpost horns. So, Nick realized, Sato’s men weren’t just ronin, masterless mercenaries—they were some sort of ninja-samurai bushi not just in the employ of Hiroshi Nakamura but almost certainly fanatically loyal to the Nakamura family corporation.

“What are these things called?” asked Nick, pointing to but not quite touching Joe’s dangling shoulder pads. They looked heavy, but Nick realized that they were made of the same superlight Kevlar-9 woven material as the rest of the body armor.

“Sendan-no-ita, kyubi-no-ita,” said Joe.

Nick thought that this was a long name for a relatively small shoulder pad. “And why the extra layer of red K-nine on the left arm and not the right?”

Toby answered. He was the shortest and slimmest of the four young fighters, but his voice was almost absurdly deep. “The extra left-arm armor is called kote, Bottom-san. It can be held up quickly to deflect a sword thrust or bullet. It’s only on the left arm because the right arm must be free to allow the samurai to fire a bow.”

“Or a nine-K-forty-six Igla shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile,” added Bill as he tapped a cylindrical case strung over his shoulder.

Sato came around the closer Land Cruiser. The security chief was in his own samurai armor—all red, pure blood red, including the helmet and metallic mask. Although the mask was pushed back on his head and not yet in place, Nick could see that it had some sort of pale, whiskery fibers protruding from it like white whiskers. An actual samurai sword—sheathed—was in the stocky man’s belt.

Nick had no urge whatsoever to laugh.

“Tsugi no fourtsu desu ka yaban to jodan owa~tsu ta no?” Sato barked at his four fighters.

The four young men bowed at once. And they bowed low.

“Hai! Junbi ga deki te, bosu ni id shi masu,” said Joe.

Sato turned toward Nick, who thought the security chief looked infinitely more at home in the samurai armor than he had in his usual black or gray suits and ties. “Joe will be riding with us, the other three in the second truck. You had best get into your body armor, Bottom-san.”

Their two vehicles were made to look like Toyota Land Cruisers, but once Nick saw the scale with men standing next to them, he realized that both SUVs—a quaint term from Nick’s childhood and young-adult years— were about twice the size of even the largest vehicle from the venerable line of what he and Dara had called Land Crushers. He’d also noticed that the “Land Cruisers” had no windows of any sort—not even windshields. Every part of the rugged, dull-matte-painted surface was the same desert-tan mix of steel, Kevlar-9, and various alloys.

In truth, Sato explained after Nick had struggled into his definitely-not-samurai-looking cop armor, these vehicles were the Japanese military’s blend of the most effectively armored-up civilian trucks they had along with the twenty-year-old but constantly refined U.S. Army’s Oshkosh B’Gosh M-ATV, which stood, Sato explained, for “Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected All-Terrain Vehicle.”

This Land Cruiser’s belly was four feet off the ground and V-shaped to deflect IED blasts from beneath. In an age where every granny lady on the block paid extra to have her Chevrolet up-armored so she could get to the supermarket without being blown away, this M-ATV was still exceptional.

The huge Michelin tires were not only centrally inflatable from the cabin and two-hundred-mile run-flats, but were woven of metallic mesh. The four wheels were connected to TAK-7 military independent suspensions that would transmit only the slightest of bumps if the big vehicle decided to run over a platoon of enemy soldiers. Instead of batteries or an internal-combustion engine demanding gasoline or diesel, the two trucks were moved by two Caterpillar C10, inline-8, 700-horsepower, 1,880-pound-feet of torque turbines powered by “radioactive elements” in the vehicle’s armored core of cores. In other words, Sato explained, the two Land Cruiser–Oshkoshes could drive twice around the world without stopping to refuel.

“Decent mileage” was Nick’s response. Joe was helping him to strap in and the restraints included not only five-point metal-mesh harnesses but a series of restraint clips that attached him permanently to his sarcophagus of a passenger seat. Enmeshed in his body armor as well as the deep tub of the crash seat and harnesses, Nick suddenly wished he’d taken time to pee.

As if reading his mind, the red-samurai-armored figure behind the wheel said, “There’s a relief tube there in the door that you can attach for urinary purposes, Bottom-san. The urine will be stored in a receptacle—up to three gallons—there in the door until we stop to empty it.”

“Three gallons,” said Nick. “Great.”

There were no windows or windshields visible from the outside of the Land Cruiser, but there was the perfect illusion from the inside of two large windshields in front of Sato and Nick. It was 3DHD, the image gathered from a multitude of external micro-cams, and the data and smaller images superimposed on the “windshield” at the driver’s command furthered the illusion by looking like a regular heads-up display.

Joe was trying to put an oxygen mask on Nick.

“I don’t need that.”

“You do,” came Sato’s voice in his earphones. “If the vehicle is hit by a shell or IED blast, there will be no oxygen in the compartment.”

Nick assumed that this was because of fire-quenching elements such as CO₂ or some sort of firefighting foam and let it go. The oxygen mask had a microphone embedded in it and the surrounding helmet of the sarcophagus-seat had the earphones pressed against his head. Sato showed him the floor switch that Nick could click once with his foot to put him on a private comm line with Sato, twice to include Joe, and three times to tie into the radio band between the two vehicles and all six men.

“What else should I do here from the passenger seat?” asked Nick. He was all but encircled by high-tech consoles, LCD panels, switches, and levers.

“Absolutely nothing,” said Sato. “Touch nothing, Bottom-san.”

“Great,” said Nick, wondering if he should use the relief tube yet. He decided to wait until Sato and Joe were