Ninja Assault

by Don Pendleton

“Looks like. Black tights and balaclavas, swords and split-toe shoes. It’s all on video.”

  “So, no ID on any of the perps.”

  “Not even close. They’ve got ICE working on it, too, the passport angle.”

  “ICE” was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Homeland Security umbrella that had theoretically shielded America from foreign attacks since September 2011. In practice, Bolan knew, safety required much more than uniformed guards and a roster of alphabet agencies.

  “They’re thinking Japanese, then?” Bolan asked. “Ninja originals?”

  “Why not? We know they’re out there.”

  Right. Bolan had faced some personally, once upon a time, and lived to tell about it. If he was allowed to tell. If anybody would believe it.

  “So?”

  “I sent a coded file to your smartphone, when you get a chance to take a look,” Brognola informed him. “Same password as usual.”

  “You want to run the basics past me?”

  “Abridged version, Wolff had been negotiating with a company in Tokyo to build a Nero’s Far East, matching this one, the joint he’s got—well, had—in Vegas, and the Nero’s San Juan, down in Puerto Rico.”

  “There’s no legit casino gambling in Japan,” Bolan stated.

  “Say he was hopeful, betting on a sea change.”

  “Or he had some other kind of action in the works.”

  “Or that.”

  “Which was it?”

  “All I hear, so far, is that he’d stepped on certain toes in Tokyo. The Sumiyoshi-kai, for starters.”

  “Big toes, then.”

  “And highly sensitive.”

  The Sumiyoshi-kai was Japan’s second-largest Yakuza family, claiming some twenty thousand oath-bound members and at least that many hangers-on. As number two, they tried harder, chasing the larger, stronger Yamaguchi-gumi, while the Inagawa-kai snapped at their heels.

  “Still, taking out a guy Wolff’s size, with his high profile…”

  “Sends a very public message,” Brognola filled in for him.

  “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a one-off?” Bolan asked.

  “Because you know your way around. Six months ago, out in LA, Merv Mendelbaum dropped out of sight. He hasn’t surfaced yet. The family’s been sitting on it, but they’re lawyered up and getting out the carving knives.”

  “That’s Mendelbaum of Goldstone Entertainment?”

  Brognola nodded. “Owner of casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, one up in New London and another in Biloxi.”

  “So, coincidence?”

  “Goldstone was also putting feelers out to Tokyo, feeling its way around the National Diet, schmoozing with the prime minister and leaders of his party.”

  “More toes bruised,” Bolan surmised.

  “The Yakuza likes things the way they are, most forms of gambling banned but readily available through outlets they control. They stand to lose a fortune—not a small one—from another US occupation.”

  “What about their operations stateside?”

  “They’d love to have a stake in gambling where it’s legal, if they don’t lose anything at home. Right now, they mostly smuggle methamphetamine and heroin into the States, and take guns home.”

  Bolan knew that Japan’s gun control laws ranked among the world’s strictest. Police estimated there were 710,000 firearms in civilian hands, scattered among 128 million citizens—or one gun for every 180 Japanese. America, by contrast, had at least 270 million guns floating around the civilian population, one for every 1.2 men, women and children. The upshot was 32,000 gun deaths per year in the States, versus eleven annually in Japan.

  Coincidence?

  Unlikely.

  Bolan brought his mind back to the topic on the table. “So, the Sumiyoshi-kai could benefit from taking out a few top men,” he said. “Keep US gaming corporations out of Tokyo and cause a power vacuum over here.”

  “It cuts both ways,” Brognola said. “Just like a sword.”

  “Suspects?”

  “They’re listed in the file I sent you, but we don’t have any solid evidence. The Sumiyoshi-kai had kyodai—‘big brothers,’ similar to capos in the Mafia—both here and in Las Vegas. If the family killed Wolff and Mendelbaum, they’ll be the place to start.”

  Brognola didn’t have to say the rest, but Bolan looked downrange. “What about carrying the fight back home?” he asked.

  “It’s not my place to second-guess a soldier on the ground,” the big Fed said. “But obviously, if we have a chance to make the problem go away, at least for now…”

  He let the sentence trail off, staring up at the casino. There was no need to explain what both of them already knew from long experience.

  The predators would never be eradicated. Some defect within humankind itself produced a new crop every time the old one was cut down. Evil could be beaten down and held at bay, but it could never be extracted from the human genome. There was no cure, no inoculation, for the plague of avarice and cruelty that lurked behind the thin facade of “civilized” society.

  No cure, perhaps, but he could fight the symptoms when and where they surfaced.

  Starting now.

  The file was waiting for him, just as Brognola had said.

  Roughly two hundred years older than Sicily’s Mafia, Japan’s homegrown version of organized crime had arisen from a merger of two criminal classes: the bakuto, itinerant gamblers, and the tekiya, peddlers who furnished goods and services proscribed by feudal law. After resisting for a time, the Edo Dynasty had bowed to the realities of daily life, legitimized the syndicates and granted their leaders—known as oyabun, “fathers, or godfathers”—the right to carry short wakizashi swords, while the larger katanas were reserved for full-fledged samurai. The overall syndicate’s name, ya-ku-za, translated as “8-9-3,” a losing hand in Oicho-Kabu, the Japanese version of blackjack.

  This day, the Yakuza consisted of some seventy-odd rival clans, fighting for turf in the shadow of Japan’s top three families. Only the Sumiyoshi-kai concerned Bolan as he began to scan Brognola’s file.

  The outfit’s oyabun was Kazuo Takumi, based in Tokyo, which kept him near the seat of government and all the major economic action. Sixty-one years old, he’d earned his reputation the old-fashioned way, by wading in the blood of rivals, and had risen to the status of a recognized philanthropist whose generosity to charity was known throughout Japan. He held shares in a score of thriving companies and sat on several of their boards, ensuring that the firms he graced were never short of cheap materials or healthy profit margins.

  The oyabun’s only son and heir apparent was Toi Takumi, something of a cipher in the file Brognola had provided. He had earned a playboy’s reputation in his early twenties, but now, approaching thirty, he had dropped out of the social scene and rarely showed his face in public.

  Growing into his position as the next boss of the Sumiyoshi-kai, perhaps.

  Or was it something else?

  Atlantic City’s “big brother” was Noboru Machii, thirty-one, an ex-con who’d done time for smuggling methamphetamine before a key witness recanted and committed suicide—seppuku in the native tongue. That had blown the prosecution’s case, freed Machii on appeal and helped restore the honor of the dead man’s family—along with a substantial contribution to their bank account, supposedly the payoff from a life insurance policy that didn’t quibble over self-destruction in a righteous cause.

  Now, Machii had a foothold on the boardwalk and was bound for bigger things, it seemed. If he could hand a piece of Tommy Wolff’s casino empire to the Sumiyoshi-kai, he would be well positioned for a top spot in the syndicate. Who could predict what might transpire when old Takumi finally cashed in his chips?

  It was a gamble, right, and Machii had one strike against him, going in.

  He didn’t know Bolan had dealt himself into the game.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sunrise Enterprises, Atlantic City

  The office
complex wasn’t much to look at in comparison to the casinos standing tall along the boardwalk, one block closer to the ocean. Just four stories high, a drab rectangle painted beige, it gave no hint that anyone inside was tinkering with local history or planning to tap a vein of gold from the exalted gaming industry that kept Atlantic City on the map.

  To spot those signs, a person had to look behind the stucco, maybe close one eye and make believe there was no weedy vacant lot next door, where homeless people had been known to light a bonfire on a winter’s night. A person had to know about Sunrise, and it was helpful if there was a team on tap like Hal Brognola’s crew at Stony Man, hidden within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, picking secrets from the cloud, thin air, wherever, and reviewing them until they all made sense.

  In this case Sunrise Enterprises was a paper company, incorporated like so many others of its kind in Delaware, existing for the sole purpose of purchasing and selling stock in other companies. On paper, it was all strictly routine, aboveboard, and the company filed tax returns on time, paying its debts without complaint.

  Look deeper, though, and Sunrise was an offshoot of another company, the G.E.A. Consortium, whose initials stood for Greater East Asia. It was just a fluke, perhaps, that during the 1930s and ’40s, Japan’s imperial masters had called their captured territory in the Far East and South Pacific the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  Maybe.

  Look deeper yet, and G.E.A. was owned by three middle-aged members of the Sumiyoshi-kai, including the family’s administrative officer, its legal adviser and its top accountant. Needless to say, they served at Kazuo Takumi’s pleasure and could be replaced at any time they ceased to please him.

  Break it down. The drab four-story box was Takumi’s nerve center in Atlantic City. Strings were pulled inside those offices that ended human lives and had potential to disrupt the city’s—and, perhaps, the state’s—economy.

  Bolan saw two approaches to the viper’s nest. He could obliterate it, salt the earth and scatter any stray survivors, or he could attempt a soft probe, look for opportunities to gain further intelligence and plan his final killing stroke accordingly.

  On second thought, why not combine the two ideas?

  One item in his bag of tricks was an infinity transmitter, designed to monitor conversations within a room through its telephone line, whether or not the phone itself was in use. Its name derived from the fact that phone line transmissions could be received at an infinite distance, unlike other bugs with a finite physical range.

  But it still required that Bolan get inside to plant the bug.

  And for that, he needed a diversion.

  The internet provided a schematic drawing of the office block, showing him where and how to cut the building’s juice. There were battery-powered emergency lights on all floors, but severing the trunk line would deactivate security cameras found on all floors, while leaving the fire alarms live. If he could generate sufficient smoke to rout the office occupants, it all came down to a matter of time and nerve.

  Sorting through his mobile arsenal Bolan selected weapons first. He wasn’t planning an attack, per se, but meant to be prepared for any unforeseen eventuality. An MP-5 K submachine gun fit the bill ideally—“K” for kurz, or “short,” in German, easily concealable even with a suppressor screwed on to its threaded muzzle. He would wear it on a shoulder sling, beneath a lightweight jacket, backed up by a Glock 17 that was lighter, easier to handle and loaded a higher-capacity magazine than the Beretta he had carried into countless other skirmishes.

  For the diversion proper, Bolan chose four AN-M8 smoke grenades, each filled with nineteen ounces of Type C hexachloroethane—HC. Each cylindrical canister would emit thick white smoke for 105 to 150 seconds following ignition, enough to choke a four-story building’s ventilation ducts and keep any occupants scurrying for the nearest exit once fire alarms set them in motion.

  Getting in and out before firefighters reached the scene was Bolan’s problem.

  Make that getting in and out alive.

  * * *

  NOBORU MACHII FELT like celebrating. He had carried out the order from his oyabun without a hitch, had seen the two imported killers off, beginning their long flight back to Japan, and felt he had the local situation well under control. It was too early yet, of course, for a direct approach to Tommy Wolff’s estate, but Machii had his battery of lawyers hovering, gauging the time and monitoring every move by Wolff’s board of directors since the penthouse massacre, the night before last. As expected, there was posturing and jockeying for power, but Machii held the winning hand.

  He’d spent the past eight months uncovering the secret sins of every member on the board at Wolff Consolidated. There were seven of them, and Machii knew them well, although they’d never met. In fact, he knew them better than their partners, wives and children did.

  Machii knew that one of them collected child pornography and traveled once a year to Bangkok, where his indiscretions had been filmed. Another had been stealing from the company, a third selling insider knowledge to the firm’s competitors for half again his yearly salary. A fourth was what Americans presumed to call a “high-functioning” alcoholic, though he had not functioned well enough the night he struck and killed a homeless African-American with his Mercedes-Benz in Newark. No suspicion had attached to him so far, but that could change within an instant.

  So it went, on down the line, with six of seven board members. The seventh was above reproach—a miracle, of sorts—but he could not prevail once Machii had secured a majority of the directors to support his takeover of Wolff Consolidated. In addition to the preservation of their guilty secrets, he would promise them secure positions and the standard golden parachutes in place.

  As if a written contract could protect them when Machii tired of having them around.

  He would have another kind of contract waiting for them then, and nothing any lawyer said would rescue adversaries of the Sumiyoshi-kai. Machii had taught Tommy Wolff that lesson, and if the dead man’s underlings refused to learn from his example, their deaths would be tantamount to suicide.

  As far as celebrating went, however, it was premature. The prize was now within his grasp, but he had not secured it yet. Until the transfer of authority was finalized, Machii could not rightfully claim victory.

  “How long shall we wait for the approach?” Tetsuya Watanabe asked.

  Machii’s lieutenant was younger, still learning the art of patience. Left unchecked, he might have overplayed their hand, but he inevitably followed orders from his boss.

  “After the funeral is soon enough,” Machii said. “A few more days will do no harm. If we approach them prematurely, they might panic and do something foolish.”

  “I understand.”

  Of course, Watanabe understood. The order had been simple and required no verbal answer, but he still observed the standard courtesy.

  Noboru had another thought. “We should send flowers, yes? Preserve proper appearances, and—”

  Suddenly, the lights went out. The air-conditioning gave a little gasp and died.

  Machii swiveled toward his office window, with its view of the boardwalk casinos. Lights were blazing in the massive pleasure palaces, along the piers and on Atlantic Boulevard below. Rising from his chair, he told Watanabe, “It’s our building only. Find out what is wrong.”

  “Yes, sir!” Watanabe was halfway to the office door when he acknowledged the command, already reaching for the knob. Beyond the door, the hallway’s emergency lights had kicked on, illuminating escape routes from the building in case of disaster.

  A simple power failure that affected only Sunrise Enterprises?

  It was possible, of course. And yet…

  Machii reached into his desk’s top right-hand drawer, removed the SIG Sauer P250 pistol he kept ready there, and held it at his side. There was no need for him to check the weapon. It was fully loaded and ready to fire as soon as he depressed its double-action trigger.
Its magazine held ten .45-caliber rounds, with one more in the chamber, enough to keep any prowlers at bay until his security team reached the office.

  Machii was moving toward the panoramic office window when the fire alarm went off, making him flinch. The action was involuntary, barely noticeable even if he had not been alone, but it embarrassed him, regardless.

  Fire?

  It seemed unlikely, but it might explain the power cut. Instead of waiting in his office, he should—

  Even as the thought took form, Machii smelled it: smoke. The scent was unmistakable.

  Coming from where, exactly?

  “Jesus!”

  There was no one in the room to hear him curse or note his momentary loss of calm. With pistol still in hand, Machii went to find out what was happening and right the situation.

  * * *

  BOLAN HAD PARKED his rented car on Atlantic Avenue and locked it. As it was getting on toward closing time, he’d crossed through spotty traffic in the middle of the block and made his way along an alleyway behind Atlantic Avenue, past long ranks of commercial garbage Dumpsters bearing names of their respective pickup companies. He’d met no one along the way, except a stray cat that examined him in passing and decided that he wouldn’t make a meal.

  At the rear of Sunrise Enterprises, Bolan found a fire escape. The lower portion of the ladder operated on a counterbalance system, wisely using nylon bushings and stainless-steel cables to ward off corrosion. When he jumped to grasp the lowest rung, that section of the ladder dropped to meet him, making no more noise than Bolan would expect from a bicycle passing through the alley.

  Scrambling up the fire escape, bolt cutters dangling from his belt, the MP-5 K swinging underneath his right arm, Bolan checked each window that he passed. Some of the offices were empty, others occupied, but no one noticed him, bent to their work as if clock-watching at day’s end had been decreed a mortal sin.

  Atop the roof, he found the junction box and used the bolt cutters to clip the padlock’s shackle. Once the small gray door was open, he could see the trunk line pumping power through the building, keeping it alive.