land an airplane atop the Blue Mountain was sure to provide him a delightful afternoon’s entertainment.
He was ignoring her, busily making his plans for the day’s sumo celebration when his wife slipped away.
She arrived at the isolated cellblock vault where the American had been held since his abduction ten days earlier. The duty guard, who had passed food to the American for her and smuggled out his letter, hit the switch that opened the electric security door. Inside one of the dim cells, she could hear Ichi-san speaking softly to the American. Entering the cell, a silent scream caught in her throat.
“The honor in death—the death of honored ancestors—the true and solitary path of all warriors—” Ichi-san was whispering to the pale American kneeling before him on the stone floor. He was gently stroking the man’s head, offering him encouragement. The man’s frail body wore the scars of recent beatings. His head was bowed and he held the hilt of Ichi-san’s Samurai sword with both hands, the trembling tip of the blade already piercing the skin of his emaciated belly. She knew what this was called. In his desperation, Ichi-san had spoken its name often enough.
Hara-kiri.
“Stop!” Yasmin cried. “You cannot do this!”
The American slowly raised his head and looked up at her. His eyes looked like holes in a mask.
“Why?” he croaked, his parched lips barely moving. His hollow eyes were shining with tears. No food, no water, no sleep. He was broken, but he had not given up whatever it was they’d wanted. Had he, he’d be dead.
“Yes,” the sumo agreed softly. “Why? Bin Wazir’s method will be far less merciful than the blade of the Samurai.”
“If you do this now, others will die in vain.”
“Yasmin,” Ichi-san said. “I do not understand.”
“Someone has dared to come here to save him,” she said. “Unlike all the others who have died here—this man has not been forgotten.”
She fell to her knees beside the shaking prisoner and spoke, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Strange black aircraft have landed atop the mountain. It is believed that men have come for you. Put their lives at risk for your sake. My husband knows. He will surely find them and put them to death. He already intends to make sport of it. In the dohyo of the sumos.”
“You risk your life coming here,” Ichi-san said to her.
“I’ve had enough of this.”
“What can we do, Yasmin?” the sumo asked.
“Can he walk?” she asked. “His feet look—”
“Yes,” Ichi-san replied. “Barely.”
She pulled the black pajamas of a houseboy from the folds of her silks.
“Here. Dress him in this. And wrap his head in this. And bring that sword. If we are lucky, we will all live long enough to put it to good use.”
The sumo looked at Yasmin and smiled. He reached out his hand and stroked her cheek, flushed pink with the running and the damp cold here inside the mountain.
“No doubt. No confusion. No fear,” he said to her, his eyes alight for the first time since she’d met him. “We are ready now.”
“Yes, Ichi-san, I believe we are.”
“We must not be seen together. He is at the doyho, preparing for the ceremony. I must go there now.”
Yasmin caught his hand at her cheek and squeezed it.
“The harmonization of human beings,” Ichi-san said, smiling at her, “And, the timing of heaven.”
Chapter Fifty-One
RON GIDWITZ AND IAN WAGSTAFF, THE SQUAD’S RADIOMAN, had escaped from the remains of Phantom by sheer luck and good design. She’d sheared off both wings in the crash landing; the weight of the snow had simply ripped them away from the fuselage. But then the monocoque egg-shaped cockpit had detached, as it had been engineered to do, hit a buried slope and gone airborne. It hit the snow once more and skidded directly towards Hawke and Patterson, snow parting in front of the nose skid like a bow wake thrown to either side.
“Jump!” Hawke screamed and he and Patterson dove out of its path. The oblong black egg bounced once again and soared directly over the head of Alexander Hawke, who stared up in amazement as the carbon fiber module containing two good men disappeared over a sheer rock face.
“Good God,” Hawke said.
“Designed that way,” Patterson shouted over his shoulder, making his way up to the edge of the cliff face. “Modular. Lose the plane, keep the pilots. That’s the idea, anyway. We’ll soon see.”
Hawke, slogging as fast as he could through knee-deep snow, rushed up to join Patterson on the rocky ledge. He was expecting the worst, splintered black shards and broken bodies on the rocks far below. Arriving at the top, he found himself perched, not on the edge of nowhere, but on a simple ledge. Thirty feet below him, down an angled black ice incline, another, larger, snow-covered ledge projected out into thin air. There, he and Patterson first saw the upturned canopy dish lying in the snow about ten feet from the cockpit. The black plastic pod looked as if it had been split open with a hammer. Hawke’s face flooded with relief.
Gidwitz and Wagstaff were rolling in the snow, wrestling, and laughing like a pair of punch-drunk palookas. They weren’t dead, just drunk, victims of altitude sickness.
“Hypoxia,” Hawke said. “You were right.”
Phantom’s internal systems had malfunctioned. Oxygen deprivation in the cockpit had sent the two DSS rangers into disoriented euphoria that no doubt caused the crash. But, thanks to the Widow’s reinforced cockpit module, they were still alive.
Hawke leapt off the edge, landed hard on his butt, and slid easily feet-first down the black-ice face to the bottom. Patterson followed seconds later. Tex removed two gold foil survival suits from his backpack and managed to convince the two giddy men to climb inside. Wagstaff, the communications specialist known traditionally as Sparky, kept trying to tell him a joke about a Texan who owned a pickle factory. Tex finally shut him up and managed to strap emergency oxygen masks over both their faces. He turned to Hawke.
“It’ll take at least half an hour before they’re in any condition to move around. At least.”
“We don’t have that long, Pards,” Hawke said, flicking his HK machine gun to full auto. Both men turned to see what was making all the noise.
Emerging from a wide crack in the mountain was a Hagglund BV 206 all-terrain tracked vehicle. As it rumbled into the open, Hawke saw that it was towing a tracked troop carrier. The military ATV was built in the UK for NATO’s Rapid Reaction Force, but that wasn’t any NATO insignia painted on the door of the all-white vehicle. It was a symbol Hawke had seen before. An upraised sword in a bloody hand. On the roof, a man behind a swivel- mounted .50-cal. machine gun. Without warning, the man atop the vehicle opened up, stitching the snow, kicking up powder, stopping just short of Alex Hawke.
He and Patterson lowered their weapons.
The double doors at the rear of the troop carrier flew open and ten armed guards poured out, leaping to the ground. Two guards immediately opened fire, squeezing off long, high bursts over their heads; the rounds splintered rock and ice on the cliff face above, showering it down on Hawke, Patterson and the two sick men on the ground. In seconds, the guards had formed a semicircle around them.
“Got the drop on us, Pards,” said Tex out of the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah, but here’s the good news,” Hawke said.
“I’m waiting, Hawkeye.”
“They take us prisoner in that thing, we don’t have to worry about how to blast our way inside an impregnable fortress anymore. Classic Trojan Horse. Works every time.”
“Yup. Good point, Sunshine. I was kinda hoping we’d catch a break just like this.”
A grinning guard suddenly stepped forward and jabbed the muzzle of his Kalashnikov into Hawke’s belly. Hawke staggered backwards against the ice face, collapsing to the snow, feigning pain. Patterson lunged for the
