“Have you ever been to Kansas?” Mr. Esmeralda asked, turning off the freeway onto Hawthorne Boulevard, heading directly south through Torrance toward the airport.
“Kansas?” asked Eva, confused.
Mr. Esmeralda glanced at her in his rearview mirror and his eyes smiled. “We’re about to take a little flight.”
He drove up to the wire airport gate which led onto the tarmac. There was a high-pitched whistling of executive jets, Learjets and Canadairs, and an oily smell of aviation fuel on the wind.
The security guard came out of his hut, and Mr. Esmeralda showed him his pass.
“Mercury Custom Air Services down there to your left,” he said.
A black van had drawn up behind Mr. Esmeralda’s limousine. “This is my baggage,” Mr.
Esmeralda smiled.
“You got a pass for your baggage? I’m not supposed to allow baggage vehicles on the field without a pass.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Just go ask the driver.’’
Mr. Esmeralda waited, his eyes fixed on his rearview mirror, while the security guard walked back to the van. Eva said, “Carlos, what’s happening? We can’t go to Kansas] For God’s sake, what’s happening?”
Mr. Esmeralda smiled. In his mirror, he had seen the flying fist of one of Kappa’s Oni adepts drop the security guard to the ground. He tugged the Lincoln’s gearshift into drive and turned left along the perimeter fence.
The Gulfstream III was waiting for them on its apron, a large executive jet with its lights flashing and its engines already warming up. As they drew up to the side of the tarmac, Mr. Esmeralda said to Eva and her girls, “We are going to alight from the car now, and we are all going to be smiling. You understand me? This is going to be a happy family flight to Kansas. I have my gun in my pocket, and if any one of you attempts to make a fool of herself, like shouting or signaling or trying to run away, then I shall instantly shoot to kill.
Believe me, this is not a jest.”
A steward from Mercury Custom Air Services opened the limousine doors for them, and they stepped out into the warm and breezy evening. “Mr. Esmeralda? Right this way, please. This way, ladies. Fine evening for a flight, isn’t it? You should have a wonderful view of the city as you take off.’’
“I shall be just one moment,” said Mr. Esmeralda. The van had now parked behind his Lincoln, and flashed its lights just once. “I have to speak to my employees before I leave.”
He took two steps toward the van, and he knew that it was all going to go wrong. The arrangements had been for the Tengu, in the company of Kappa’s last three Oni escorts, to follow Mr. Esmeralda down to the airport for a final briefing, before driving farther south to Three Arch Bay, and their ultimate destination–the nuclear-power station. But Mr. Esmeralda had felt in his bones, right from the very beginning, that the Tengu needed no further instructions, any more than Kappa’s vicious Onis. And when he heard the rear doors of the van banging open, and one of the Onis screeching ‘‘ Toral Toral Toral Toral” he hesitated for only a split second before he turned around and began running toward the jet, shouting at the Mercury Air representative, “Get this plane off the ground! Now!”
Kathryn and Kelly screamed. For as Mr. Esmeralda ran past them, the Tengu appeared in the lights which flooded the Mercury Air apron, both arms raised in a ritual greeting to the devils which swarmed in the night air. He was even more grotesque than the previous Tengu: his body was not only gaping with the wounds from Doctor Gempaku’s silver claws, but smashed and misshapen from his 27-story fall from Gerard Crowley’s office window.
His eyeballs were totally white: he did not need to see, not in the ordinary sense of the word. He was already dead, although not yet dead, and he strode toward Mr. Esmeralda with all the purpose of a creature that is possessed by a hideously powerful devil.
Mr. Esmeralda was halfway up the steps to the jet’s cabin, leaving Eva and the girls on the tarmac, when the Tengu .reached the foot of the steps, grasped them in his hands, and shook them violently, until they rattled and thundered.
“Take them shrieked Mr. Esmeralda, pointing to Eva and her twins. “Take them instead! They are yours, as a substitute!”
The Tengu raised his face blindly toward Mr. Esmeralda, then hesitated, turned, and groped the air. Eva and the girls stood where they were, mesmerized by fright.
“Take them!” screamed Mr. Esmeralda. “Take them!”
Still the Tengu hesitated, but then he took one or two uncertain steps toward Eva, his hands raised, his wounds glistening blue in the airport lights. Although Mr. Esmeralda couldn’t hear her above the whistling of the Gulfstream’s engines, she stepped forward to meet the Tengu and whispered, “You can have me. But not my daughters.”
With one sweeping blow, the Tengu knocked Eva’s head sideways and snapped her neck. She stood where she was for a second or two, her head at a sickening angle, and while she did so, the Tengu wrapped his arms around her, dug his hands into her lower back until he had seized her ribcage, and then, with one grisly and explosive wrench, opened her chest out like the ribs of an opening umbrella. Stomach and guts splashed onto the concrete apron, and even Mr. Esmeralda stood on the steps of the jet and stared in horror. Without even looking at Kathryn or Kelly, the Tengu stalked back toward the black van. Two of the three Onis were waiting, arms folded, to receive him and help him back into the van. The third Oni was hidden in the shadows, although what he was doing, Mr. Esmeralda couldn’t tell.
“I want to get out of here,” he said to the stewardess who was standing behind him, white-faced, in the cabin doorway.
The stewardess couldn’t speak. “We have to leave now snapped Mr. Esmeralda. “We have to!”
The stewardess shook her head, speechless, too shocked by the murder she had witnessed to move.
“Where is the captain?” Mr. Esmeralda demanded. “We have to go!”
There was a sharp swishing sound, and a flash, and Mr. Esmeralda halfturned to look back down toward the van. That was the last conscious movement he made. The third Oni, resting against the hood of the van, had fired a single antitank round from an 84-mm.? Carl Gustaf rocket-launcher, a 5.7-pound high-explosive projectile which penetrated the fuselage of the Gulfstream close to the wing and instantly exploded.
Fully loaded with fuel, the plane blew up in a huge, rumbling burst of orange fire. Pieces of incandescent aluminum were hurtled into the air like a fireworks display.
The black van was already speeding away, without lights. But as it reached the perimeter of the airport and turned south again on the Pacific Coast Highway, it was picked up for the second time that evening by a beige Cutlass, driven by Detective Pullet. Beside him sat Sergeant Skrolnik, and in the back seat were Detective Arthur and a police marksman named Woschinski, who had blotchy red Jtcne and a habit of sucking peppermints, but who could hit a moth at yards and clip only its legs off.
Skrolnik rapped into his radio, as Pullet followed the “Something’s happened at Torrance Airport. A van, damned great explosion. As soon as you get any word on it, let me know. Meanwhile, what about that call to Sennett? Did you get through? Did you tell him to get down here? I want him down here! He knows what the hell’s going on, all this Japanese crap, which is more than I do. Tell him to take the Long Beach Freeway as far as the Pacific Coast Highway, and then head south. Tell him to get his ass in gear. Does he have CB? Well, that’s one goddamned relief. Tell him to get down here fast. This is it. The balloon’s going up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Four miles out of Marina del Rey, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter intercepted the yacht Paloma and hailed her to heave to. The yacht immediately cut her engines and wallowed for almost ten minutes in the water, without navigation lights, without putting down her anchor. After hailing the yacht four more times and raking her from stem to stern with floodlights, the Coast Guard captain finally decided to send aboard three armed enlisted men.
They discovered, on the foredeck, still a
live–but only just–a tall Japanese who was later identified as Doctor Gempaku. He had knelt by the rail, and in the ritual manner of seppuku, and sliced open his own stomach with a razor-sharp samurai sword. Down below, in the galley, they found a Chinese girl who had been killed by being garrotted with a redhot wire. There were signs of her breasts and buttocks of severe sexual assault.
In an inner cabin, dead, were three young Japanese men wearing black silk masks. They had all committed suicide by thrusting sharp knives, one in each hand, into their own eyes and deep into their brains.
It was in the very last cabin, though, that they found the greatest horror of all. Sitting in a cushioned basket, surrounded by hundreds of burning candles, a small deformed figure, naked, like a glistening fledgling that had fallen featherless from its nest before it could learn to fly. The heat and the stench inside the cabin were overpowering, but the tiny figure smiled at them as they stepped in, their eyes wide with caution and fright, their carbines held high.
‘‘Holy shit,’’ said one. “Holy shit, this isn’t even real.
The tiny figure continued to smile at them. The most unnerving thing about it was that, on top of that deformed and twisted body, it had a perfectly normal head, the head of a handsome 37-year-old man.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” it whispered. “It seems that you have caught me at a disadvantage.”
One of the Coast Guardsmen nodded; and, ritually, in return, the tiny figure nodded too. It’s heavy head dropped forward onto its chest, and for a moment it whined, and whined again, and then fell silent.
“What’s the matter with it?” asked one of the Coast Guardsmen. “Do you think it’s okay?”
“Would you think you were okay, if you looked like that?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Why don’t you go take a look.”
“I’m not taking no fucking look.”
The other man glanced behind him, to make sure that no other Coast Guardsmen had boarded the yacht. Then, with the barrel of his carbine, he knocked five or six lighted candles onto the blankets and cushions that lay on the floor. He watched them for a second or two, to make sure they were well alight. Then he closed the cabin door and struck at the lock with the butt of his gun to jam it. “We didn’t even go in there, right?” he asked his companions.
“We didn’t even go in where?”
The man checked his watch. “Let’s give it ten seconds,” he said. “Then we’ll shout fire.”
The Paloma burned for less than twenty minutes before listing over to port and quickly sinking.
Kappa, the water devil, had returned at last to the water. There was a smell of steam and oil and charred varnish on the wind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They reached the power station at Three Arch Bay only five minutes after Sergeant Skrolnik.
Jerry parked the Dodge beside Skrolnik “s Cutlass, and turned immediately around to look at El Krusho. Wrapped in a blanket on the back seat, alternately nursed and tortored by Nancy Shir-anuka, Maurice was in a state of feverish trance, twitching and mumbling and murmuring.
Mack and Gerard, both in the front seat with Jerry, glanced at him uncertainly, as if they weren’t at all sure they should continue.
“This isn’t going to kill him or anything?” asked Mack. “I’ve known that poor sucker for years.”
“He is completely possessed now,” said Nancy. “Nothing will hurt him, not even bullets.”
“Nothing?” asked Gerard. “Not even another Tengu?”
Skrolnik came over to their car and slapped on the roof. “Esmeralda’s dead,” he told them. Jerry lowered the window to hear what he was saying. “He was trying to escape in an executive jet at Torrance Airport, and it seems like these Japanese bastards fired some kind of rocket at him. The whole plane went up. Six, maybe seven people killed altogether. Most of the corpses haven’t even been identified yet.”
“My wife–my daughters,” said Gerard. “Any news of them?”
“You’re Gerard Crowley?” asked Skrolnik.
“Yes, sir.”
Skrolnik raised his head, so that his face couldn’t be seen from the interior of the car. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Crowley.”
Gerard said, “Jesus. Did they suffer?”
“Not as far as I know.”
Gerard was silent after that. Jerry said to Skrolnik, “If they’re attacking this power station, then presumably they’re going to try to set off some kind of nuclear explosion.”
“That’s what I thought,” agreed Skrolnik. “They’ve parked their van around the side there, not far from the beach. We’re keeping them under close observation, and I’ve already called for reinforcements. They won’t even get close, I promise you.”
“Don’t count on it,” said Jerry.
Skrolnik peered in through the open window. “Is that Needs you’ve got in the back?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“What’s the matter with him? He looks sick.”
“He’s okay. He needs some air, is all.”
Detective Arthur came over and said hastily, “Sergeant,, they want you around at the fence.”
“Okay,” said Skrolnik, and then to Jerry, “Don’t wander away too far. I may need you.”
“Okay,” said Jerry.
Once Skrolnik had gone, Jerry and Mack and Gerard climbed out of the car, opened the rear door, and helped El Krusho onto the grass. He coughed and swayed, 325 pounds of entranced muscle, a human machine possessed by a violent spirit. Jerry could have sworn that he saw tiny blue fires twinkling around El Krusho’s head, but he guessed it was fatigue or reflections from the power station.
The power station was floodlit now: a compact collection of white concrete buildings with a tall red-and-white striped chimney, a battery of shiny aluminum ventilator shafts, and a cylindrical roof over the fusion reactor itself like a huge sailor’s cap. Plumes of steam rose from the slender chimneys that exhausted the power station’s cooling plant, and the deep reverberating thrum of generators was carried toward them by the evening wind.
“Tell Maurice to go in there and kill the Tengu,” Jerry instructed Nancy.
Nancy said, “You are sure this is what you want?”
“It’s what Maurice wants.”
“Very well, then,” said Nancy, and spoke rapidly to Maurice in Japanese.
“He’s going to understand that?” asked Mack. “He doesn’t even understand English.”
“I am speaking to the Tengu, not to Maurice,” said Nancy.
She had to pause for a moment while a police helicopter flackered overhead, its searchlights running across the ground like a frightened ghost. Then she finished her incantation and bowed to Maurice with the respect of one who recognizes extreme power when she confronts it.
There was shouting from the far side of the fence around the power station, and a sharp crackling of gunfire. Nancy said to Maurice, “It’s started. You must go. Kill the Tengu. Kill it swiftly.”
Without hesitation, Maurice seized the wire of the perimeter fence and ripped it apart like unraveled knitting. He stepped straight through it, followed closely and anxiously by Jerry and Mack. Gerard stayed behind with Nancy.
As they came around the corner of the cooling plant, they saw a double cordon of police and security guards, all armed, facing the Tengu across the parking lot. Every floodlight was lit, giving the scene the brilliant unreality of a movie set.
But there was no question that the Tengu was real. He came slowly forward, toward the main doors of the power station, his head bound tightly with a scared sweatband painted with magical characters, his eyeballs white as boiled eggs, his body damaged and scarred and torn so viciously that the naked sinews showed through his wounds. God, thought Jerry, you can see the blood pulsing through his arteries.
Nobody challenged the Tengu. The police had bullhorns, but they didn’t use them. Instead, an officer simply said, “Fire,” and there was an ear-spitting fusillade of carbine and pistol shots.
The Tengu was hit again and again. Bullets blew lumps of raw flesh from his shoulders and his chest. One bullet turfed the skin and muscle away from the left side of his face, so that his jawbone and teeth were bared. But he didn’t waver. He kept advancing on the ranks of police and security guards, his arms raised above his head, even when a sharpshooter hit his forearm and elbow, smashing the bone and digging up the muscle.
The police cordon began to waver and break, unnerved. “Fire demanded the officer, but none of them did. They watched in horrified fascination as the Tengu, bloody and maimed, walked right through their ranks, up the concrete steps of the power-station entrance, and then burst open the doors with a single blow of his fists. Before anybody could react, he had disappeared inside.
Skrolnik ran forward, screaming, “Stop him! For God’s sake!” but the confusion and panic were too much. Most of the officers stayed where they were, unable to admit to themselves that they had seen a man hit by seventy or eighty large-caliber bullets and still walk. Jerry and Mack guided El Krusho up the concrete steps to the broken doors of the power station, and although one policeman challenged them and asked, “What are you doing?” nobody else stood in their way. Tengu In a moment they were inside, following the spatters of blood which the Tengu had left behind him on the floor. Inside the power station, it was coolly air-conditioned, and lit with dim, greenish fluorescent lamps. The floor was polished vinyl, as reflective as water, and the walls were as white and sterile as a hospital.
Skrolnik, at the smashed door, yelled, “Sennett! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
But Jerry and Mack kept pushing El Krusho onward, up a flight of steel Stairs, along a steel latticework catwalk, and around at last to the main hall where the fusion reactor was housed.
Mack pointed down to the reactor itself and said, “There he is. For God’s sake, he’s playing around with all those switches!”
Tengu Page 37
