NEVER SAY DIE: Mark Cole Takes On the Yakuza in His Most Thrilling Adventure Yet!

by J. T. Brannan

  But then again, he decided, perhaps they could be rationalized – lack of sleep was known to cause hallucinatory effects, and it was probably nothing more than that.

  Besides which, even if the house was haunted, the sad fact remained that this would be the least of his worries.

  Toshikatsu had positioned himself to the liberal end of the LDP spectrum, and indeed it was this one factor which had gained him both the leadership of the party, and the position of Prime Minister of Japan. During the last election, the main threat had been coming from liberals, predominantly from the Socialist Party which had been the only other group to hold power in the history of post-war Japan. The reigns had been short-lived, admittedly – only two brief punctures in the LDP’s near perfect record, once between 1993 and 1994, and then again between 2009 and 2012 – but the threat posed by the resurgent liberals was enough to make the LDP try and follow a more centrist path, away from the more overt right-wing politics that had dominated previous governments.

  And it had worked, too – the LDP had been returned in a landslide victory, and Toshikatsu had been earning unprecedented approval ratings.

  Until recently, anyway.

  The ultranationalists – believers in Japan’s supremacy and its rightful role as leader of Asia – had been making noises since the government was elected; arranging demonstrations, campaigning against what they saw as Toshikatsu’s left-wing sensibilities, peddling influence within the Diet, and building up a war chest to take the fight to the liberal end of the LDP.

  It hadn’t bothered Toshikatsu unduly before, but now things were entirely different. The near-invasion of Japan by China had changed things irrevocably.

  China had recently seen a military coup of its own, with the communist party suborned under the dictatorial leadership of General Wu De. Japan’s huge and powerful neighbor had then invaded the Japanese-held Senkaku Islands – uninhabited, but with a wealth of undersea oil – and had then overthrown Taiwan.

  The Chinese military had then been a stone’s throw away from the Japanese coastline, when the intervention of US special operations forces had turned the tide and saved the country. The communist politburo had been rescued from captivity within Beijing’s Forbidden City, command and control had been restored, and General Wu himself had been killed.

  But Toshikatsu knew that it could have all worked out very differently – and so did the Japanese people.

  A part of the problem was the security treaty between Japan and the United States - a treaty that had been in place since the 1950s, and which most Japanese citizens now believed to be entirely useless.

  The feeling wasn’t entirely fair, perhaps – President Abrams had ordered the strikes which had eventually crippled Wu’s regime, after all – but Toshikatsu understood why the people felt the way they did. Despite how things had finally worked out, the fact of the matter was that – for a long time – the United States had done absolutely nothing.

  The treaty was supposed to guarantee Japan’s security, and yet China had invaded the Senkakus – Japanese sovereign territory – and America had stood by and watched. Toshikatsu himself remembered only too well the conversation he’d had with Ellen Abrams, when she had told him that there was nothing she could do. China was too powerful, the Senkakus were just hunks of rock that nobody cared about, that General Wu had nuclear missiles and it would be unwise to push things. He remembered the terrible, devastating feeling of betrayal that he’d experienced at her words, the images of his beloved country being overrun by the Chinese, becoming just one more conquered territory of a new Chinese empire. It was a feeling of helplessness that he would never forget.

  He knew now, of course, that Abrams had planned to help all along; the delay tactics were just to confuse General Wu until all the pieces of the American counter-attack were in place, and she couldn’t take the risk of the information leaking out.

  But – from a political perspective – the damage had already been done. The normally retrained Japanese press had gone wild, publishing story after story about how Japan had been abandoned by her allies, how the Treaty of Mutual Security and Cooperation between the US and Japan was useless, not worth the paper it was written on.

  Such stories played right into the hands of the ultranationalists, who had also been campaigning for years to have the country’s ‘peace constitution’ amended, or even abolished altogether. The 1947 constitution imposed on Japan by the United States in the aftermath of the Pacific War included – in Article 9 – the renunciation of the right to wage war. A reaction against the Japanese militarism of the 1930s and ‘40s, the constitution – and especially Article 9 – was an object of hatred for many hardline right-wingers, and their dream was to have it replaced with something that gave Japan back its own ability to project power abroad.

  The situation with China had not only given the far right added impetus, it had convinced large swathes of the Japanese population that the nationalists were right – especially given the fact that the US seemed unprepared to live up to their end of the security agreement, which had been created to enable the ‘peace constitution’ to become a reality.

  With a broken security agreement, could the Japanese constitution be considered valid? Even Toshikatsu feared that it could not, and he was a staunch supporter of it and always had been.

  He had options available to him – one of which was to take the lead on the matter and order the writing of a revised constitution himself, thereby negating the possibly harmful influence of a far-right resurgence.

  The only trouble with this option was that he was fully against such a thing. He was a student of history and – no matter what the basis – he never wanted to see a return to the bad old days of Japanese imperialism. His people were aggressive and militaristic by nature, and he fully believed that the 1947 constitution was necessary to forestall a resurgence of such qualities on the international scene.

  But if he rallied against popular demand to have it rewritten, he knew the LDP would oust him as leader in a desperate bid to keep power from the far-right. They would install a new prime minister who would give the people what they wanted, even if it would do the country no good in the long term.

  They were right to fear for their position, though; the longstanding coalition of ultranationalist groups known as Zen Ai Kaigi – the All-Japan Council of Patriotic Organizations – had finally registered itself as a legitimate political party and was now ahead in almost every poll.

  Toshikatsu was terrified of what would happen to the country if such a group managed to seize power. Originally founded by Class A war criminals and now supported by various right-wing pressure groups, big business names and yakuza gangsters, Zen Ai Kaigi would lead Japan in a direction that Toshikatsu knew could only be disastrous.

  He had just been speaking on the phone to one of his most trusted advisors, who was once again insisting that Toshikatsu do the sensible thing and get out in front, getting the constitution rewritten himself. It was the only way he could stay in power, and – his friend reminded him – that was in turn the only way he could minimize the damage done by such an action.

  Toshikatsu knew his old friend was right, but bitterly regretted the situation. How had it come to this?

  He had even been receiving death threats since this whole thing began, and not just the usual glut of incoherent ramblings from crazed civilians; these were decidedly more serious. Nationalist groups and yakuza gangs were also starting to threaten him directly, and he knew all too well that acts of political assassination were hardly without precedence in Japan – his own home was proof of that.

  He had to take the threats seriously, of course – it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that a group such as Zen Ai Kaigi would have him taken out of the picture in order to cause a snap election that they would undoubtedly win.

  And this caused him to have yet another reason to go against his instincts and order the rewriting of the peace constitution; if he did, Zen Ai Kaigi would lo
se all momentum and there would no longer be any need to have him killed.

  He would have to act fast though, he knew. But – despite the danger, both professionally and personally – he couldn’t yet quite bring himself to go ahead with it. It would be the biggest change in Japanese history for over seven decades, and couldn’t be entered into on a whim.

  He would need protection though, he knew; and rather more than the normal government bodyguards.

  Luckily, Toshikatsu knew where he could find such protection; if there were some yakuza gangs against him, there were others who still owed him patronage, and he was closely acquainted with the leader of Japan’s largest – even a relatively ethical politician like Toshikatsu still had skeletons in his closet.

  He rose from his chair, finally retiring to bed; he would call his old friend Yamamoto Tsuji in the morning.

  4

  The man who rested like a coiled serpent underneath the low trees within the garden of the Yamaguchi-gumi compound in Kobe was known to his brethren as Kenzo Hiroshi. Whether that was his real name was of no importance; even he did not know for sure.

  What was of paramount importance was the job that Kenzo Hiroshi had been hired to perform; a job whose time had now come.

  Slowly, fluidly – not like a man, but like a wild predator, perhaps even a ghost – he slid out of the leaves and mud, gliding upwards and forwards in complete silence.

  He had studied the area in detail; he knew where the cameras were, where they were pointed, their fields of view, when and if they moved; and he knew the movements of the guards who patrolled the compound, their timings and their routines. The knowledge was internalized now, and he acted without conscious thought, a silent wraith moving quickly across the trimmed lawns which bordered the south side of the main residential building, at one with the world around him.

  Kenzo Hiroshi was shinobi, part of a Japanese warrior tradition more commonly known as ninja – masters of stealth, espionage and assassination whose deeds had colored hundreds of years of Japanese history with blood.

  Thought by most people in the world to have been relegated to the annals of such history – save for museum reenactments and jujitsu and karate-type ‘ninja’ clubs, barely connected to the real thing – Kenzo’s unit was not a direct ancestor, but rather a modern replica of the shinobi families which had dominated certain areas of Japan in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As such, he had been ‘recruited’ at birth and trained in the esoteric skills of the art since before he could walk. The results were exactly the same as they had been hundreds of years before, during the heyday of ninja activity – warriors of almost supernatural ability, designed and driven to kill on command.

  To Kenzo, his ninja unit was the only family he had ever known, and he had been raised to perform this act of killing to absolute perfection; missions such as this were a point of pride to him, something he could show to his family to earn their respect and love.

  But – if such thoughts occupied any part of his mind at all – they were buried somewhere deep in his subconscious, as all his senses bristled with information, his entire self given over to the completion of his task.

  Kenzo Hiroshi paused just yards from the main house, frozen immobile within the shadows cast by the buildings and the trees, in a small section not illuminated by the floodlights placed on the rooftops. He knew he was safe here, the cameras unable to detect him in the shadows due to the contrast with the bright lights elsewhere; his lack of movement also served him well, since the eyes are drawn to movement and little else.

  Staying in the shadows, he did not flinch as a partition door on the low balcony in front of him was opened, a lone guard armed with an Uzi submachine gun strolling through. He wore a dark suit and tie, the uniform of his profession, and smoked on a cheap cigarette as he peered out into the garden.

  But his efforts were pointless, as they had been the past several times that Kenzo had observed the man; he didn’t really expect to be attacked from inside the compound, and his lack of attention reflected this. He and the other men who guarded the house were the last line of defense between the outside world and the gang’s leadership, and they believed that – if anything should happen – it would be picked up far away, perhaps at the gatehouses, or in the parking lot. There were layers and layers of protection, and the sentry walking slowly across the veranda thought it impossible that anyone would be able to penetrate the compound’s security so far inside without his colleagues realizing.

  And yet this is exactly what Kenzo had done, stealing into the compound the previous night and working his way silently past all the sentries, the guards, the yakuza foot soldiers, as well as all of their hi-tech surveillance systems.

  Kenzo’s training in such skills had started when just a boy; one of the exercises he’d been introduced to when just six years old had been called ‘Don’t Wake the Scorpion’, although over the years, many creatures had been substituted for the scorpion. The main aim had always been the same though – enter the lair of a dangerous animal and remain undiscovered. Feral dogs, snakes and crocodiles had all been used at one stage or another – and if the student was caught, they were often mauled by the animals. One of Kenzo’s friends had been killed by a crocodile when he was just eight. There had been no sympathy, however; the boy should not have been caught.

  The use of wild animals was due to their powerful instincts, and – to humans at least – their almost supernatural levels of awareness. Kenzo’s masters told him that if he could sneak into a bear’s cave and get close enough to take the bear’s food, then no human in all the world would ever pose a problem.

  They had been right too, as Kenzo learned over the years; and the more people started to trust surveillance technology, the less they relied upon even their crude human instincts, until they were left with almost no awareness at all.

  And now he would capitalize on the lack of awareness of this yakuza sentry, prey upon his overconfidence.

  The man turned to follow the veranda to the door on the other side, and Kenzo moved swiftly, still keeping to the shadows as he covered the ten remaining feet to the balcony, the guard’s attention on opening the door in front of him, Uzi slung across his body.

  And yet Kenzo was still careful in his approach, keeping as best he could to the blind spots, knowing the man’s peripheral vision might pick him up if he made a mistake.

  But he made no such mistake, and within seconds Kenzo was behind the sentry, shadowing his every movement in complete silence, the cushioned soles of his tabi split-toed shoes noiseless on the polished wood of the veranda.

  The guard passed through the open door into the house, and Kenzo followed him; and when the man turned to close the sliding door behind him, Kenzo turned too. Shadowing the movements of another human was both an art and a science, and one Kenzo had learned well. The science lay in knowing how to keep away from the target’s peripheral vision, according to full understanding of the human visual system and its inherent drawbacks and weaknesses, and knowing how to capitalize on them; it was also based upon knowledge of light and shadow, and how these can be perceived and controlled. Even if Kenzo managed to avoid being seen directly, the guard could still be alerted by his shadow if he wasn’t careful.

  The art was in combining the two skills seamlessly, so that a person could remain entirely undetected, without setting off someone’s inherent ‘sixth sense’ of close proximity, or of being watched.

  Kenzo was so close to the yakuza guard now that their bodies were almost touching, their shadows moving as one as the man closed the door and turned to walk off down the left hand hallway.

  Kenzo could have killed the man, of course; but he was not the target, and the body would have to be hidden, which would take time. And so Kenzo detached himself from the guard, drifting noiselessly into the portion of the hallway that lay straight ahead, the guard now disappeared around the corner.

  Kenzo waited for several moments, hearing the man’s footsteps fading awa
y and using the opportunity to double check the location of the interior security cameras. There had been none watching the door, which was a mistake, but there was one further down the hallway which gave good coverage. Kenzo was not yet in its field of view, but in a few more paces he would be.

  The interior of the house was well lit, as guards strolled throughout on a regular basis and it was presumed that lights would act as a deterrent to any sort of nighttime attack. Whoever had designed the security of the Yamaguchi compound was right, of course; gaining access was certainly more difficult under stark illumination. But they hadn’t ever conceived of a man such as Kenzo. Indeed, no one had for the past four hundred years.

  Kenzo didn’t know if the cameras would be monitored in real-time – and if they were, if whoever was watching would be paying the proper attention – but did know that he couldn’t take the risk of being seen. Not yet, anyway.

  Still out of camera range, he tore off his black tunic and mask in a single, fluid motion and slid them into a small bag he had opened by his hip, drawing the cord tightly closed. The clothes we wore beneath were light in color – not white, which would reflect light and be too easily seen, but a muted yellow which provided camouflage against the electric lights and magnolia walls.

  He was changed within five seconds, traditional ninja shuko on his hands and feet. These ‘tiger claws’ were metal bands which slipped over the wrists and ankles, linked to other bands which wrapped around the palms and soles of the feet. On these secondary bands were immensely strong spikes, which ninja had used to scale castle walls hundreds of years before. Kenzo’s were made out of titanium alloy rather than the iron of old, but the principle was the same.

  Kenzo turned to the wall, selecting a dark wooden post to climb so that the claw marks would remain unseen, and launched himself upwards towards the ceiling. Once there, his light uniform making him blend into the poorly lit magnolia rafters, he started to climb along the corridor ceiling in an inverted position, back to the floor.