“No,” a Yakuza warrior said, “look! Shadows in the horse stables, a flickering light…”
The six Yakuza marched across the dirt yard, guns by their sides, alert but giddy, about to participate in the slaughter of the innocent, God-fearing, and unarmed Miakamiian farmers that this property supported. The flickering candle threw shadows on the inside walls, shadows that were on the move.
“This is the place,” their lead said. “Someone is in there. Time to restore Japan’s honor, and the honor… of the Samurai.”
They entered the horse stable. Many stalls, no horses, a side-wall paddock door open to the starry evening, the horses wisely outside, in the corral. Hay on the floor, in the hayloft, and in all the nooks and crannies and corners. Baled hay in piles, singles and doubles. Hanging farm tools: sickles, scythes, steel leg traps for the occasional wild boars who wandered too far up the ridge. One man grabbed a pitchfork and started poking, speaking in English to the stable’s unseen, shadowy occupants.
“You must show yourself, you American worms.”
He wandered farther into the stable, jabbing, poking, grunting while he thrust the prongs of the pitchfork into the scattered piles of hay.
“You must pay for the murder of Oyabun’s grandfather eighty years ago. Come out, take your medicine. I will use my tantō, and I will make it quick, just like I did to your pilot before I rode the air to safety while his helicopter crashed into your despicable island. Hel-lo-o (jab, poke), where ar-r-re you…? My tantō is preferable to this pitchfork…”
No movement, no giveaways anywhere. “Very well then, you give me no choice.” He raised the pitchfork overhead, was about to come down hard into a hay pile.
Ben sprang from behind two nearby bales, his knife in his hand, an antique handgun in his waistband, startling the speaker, overcoming him. Ben’s short, sinewy body subdued the loudmouth Japanese Yakuza with a knife to his throat.
The other five men lifted their long rifles, trained them on him and his hostage, in the ready. Ben sized up his enemies, dropped his knife, replaced it with a handgun to the man’s cheek and an arm around his neck for a chokehold. He wandered to one side with his hostage.
“Leave my island now, without this man,” Ben warned. “Chester’s murderer! I get to keep him. Go. No questions will be asked. I implore you, man to man, be smart. You need to go. Now.”
His captive tried to speak. Ben jammed the gun into his mouth and started shoving it down his throat while tightening his chokehold.
“Roujin. ‘Old man!’” a different Yakuza said, stepping up, flexing his bravado for his peers. “The Bushido code of the Samurai reigns supreme! This warrior does not care what you do to him. He will die an honorable death, in battle, and will be honored by his family for generations. You, roujin, have no chance of survival. You call that rusty handgun a gun? It probably won’t even fire. And I thought guns on the island were against the Logan family rules—”
The Yakuza chuckled, as did the other henchmen, all presenting mocking laughs and wide smiles, all of them still flashing their long guns. “These… what we are holding… now these are guns…”
The speaker raised his weapon and his associates did likewise. The AR-15s erupted, began spraying the interior of the stable with chaotic automatic fire, aimed not at Ben or his hostage but rather at everything else: the roof, the stable walls, the floor, the windows, the stalls. The gunfire stopped, the laughing beginning again, with Ben still in command of his captive.
“Now. Back to you, roujin—”
From deep within the rear of the stable came a disembodied female voice. “Big fucking deal,” Ella said.
The Yakuza speaker turned up his nose at this revelation, did a visual sweep of his charges, the men now snickering, chiding him for letting a woman speak to him that way. He played along.
“Wow,” he said, aiming a flashlight deep into the shadows protecting the rear of the stable, where they’d heard the voice. “Guns on the island, and now their women are cursing at men! Mr. Logan wouldn’t like that a bit, you gutter gaishō…”
In the tense silence that followed, Ella poked her head through the large pile of hay against the rear wall, the Yakuza’s flashlight glinting off her eyes. In one motion she swept a tarpaulin back, exposing the old buckboard kept in church storage. Visible in its payload was a black 7.7mm type 97 aerial machine gun cannon, the one removed from the Japanese Zero eighty years earlier, fully operational, and able to feed and fire nine hundred rounds per minute from a tripod mounted inside the buckboard’s bed.
She spoke in a defiant tone. “You consider those things guns, asshole? This… is a gun.”
With the forty-one-inch machine gun chest high, she depressed the trigger, feeding the ammunition on a belt from a black box on the air cannon’s right, decapitating her targets, shredding limbs, severing torsos—“This is for Chester!”—the tinny noise of the ammunition belt the same as she heard while sleeping on the beach, her beloved Ben taking the heavy-duty artillery piece through its paces once every year or so, making sure the air cannon remained operational.
Chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka-CHICKA-CHICKA—
Ben held the last Yakuza in his arms, the man’s squirming plea for mercy so unbecoming a Samurai, Ben’s knife now against his throat just like the thug boasted that he’d done to Chester in the helicopter, and like Ella’s grandfather did to the Zero pilot in 1941. Ben told his hostage as much, told him what he was about to do to him, then
