Ninja Assault

by Don Pendleton

  It wasn’t much, in terms of strategy, but splitting up let them cover more ground, more quickly, than they could have as a team. It also doubled chances of escape, if anything went wrong inside.

  Bolan scoped the two guards on the patio, framing each in turn with the Steyr AUG’s integrated telescopic sight. He chose the taller of them as his first mark, stroked the rifle’s trigger and sent four grams of copper-jacketed death hurtling downrange at 3,100 feet per second. It drilled the lookout’s temple, tumbled on a ragged path while passing through his brain, and took out the opposite side of his skull in a burst of pink and scarlet.

  Shifting slightly to his right, Bolan triggered another silenced round, clipping the second mobster’s vocal cords before he could raise an alarm at the death of his friend. He fell across the first gunner’s twitching legs, clearing the way for Bolan and Kayo to advance.

  “No stopping once we’re on the grass,” Bolan advised. “No turning back.”

  “Banzai!” Kayo whispered in reply, and smiled.

  * * *

  THE FIRST EXPLOSION made Kazuo Takumi jump and spill his sake, the warm liquor soaking through his slacks. He dropped the cup and scrambled to his feet, eyes wide, resembling those of a startled deer. The Three moved to surround him instantly, each man armed with an automatic weapon in addition to the ninja gear they carried with them everywhere.

  Takumi did not need to ask what the explosion represented. He could work that out himself. His enemies had followed him from Tokyo somehow, and now they meant to finish what they’d started in the capital.

  He cursed them silently and offered up a silent prayer, no feeling of hypocrisy at all, asking to learn the cause of all this persecution, at the very least, before he died.

  Which, at the moment, seemed entirely possible.

  Instinctively, Takumi drew his Glock 25, though no target was yet visible. He trusted The Three to a point, but their recent reduction from four had caused him to question their skill for the first time since he had employed them.

  “Where is Tadashi?” Takumi demanded.

  “Checking the guards,” Nakai replied. “You should come with us now.”

  “Come where?”

  “To find a safer place.”

  The clan leader wondered if there was a safer place. His country home did not contain a panic room, and it was just as well. He’d sampled some, when they became a craze with wealthy CEOs in Tokyo, and found them claustrophobic, with the smell of airline lavatories. Worst of all, once locked inside the box, a test run, he immediately felt more helpless than secure.

  “We should get out of here,” Tamura suggested.

  “And go where?” Takumi challenged him.

  “It doesn’t matter. Back to Tokyo, or pick another city. Anyplace that isn’t under fire.”

  “I’m staying,” Sato said. “These are the bastards who killed Koyuki.”

  “You don’t know that,” Nakai replied.

  “I feel it,” Sato said.

  “He’s right,” Takumi interjected. “We must stay and fight.”

  Running a second time, he knew, meant that he might have nothing to come home to, even if he managed to survive the night. Tamura and Nakai did not see fit to argue.

  “Smoke,” Sato said, sniffing at the air. Takumi took another moment to detect it, but the ninja was correct, as usual. The house—some part of it, at least—was already on fire.

  “We need to get outside,” Tamura said. “These houses burn like a tinderbox.”

  Takumi had never seen a tinderbox, but he understood the allusion. Wood and paper sliding doors guaranteed that fire would spread swiftly through any home built on traditional lines. Culture had triumphed over common sense in that regard, despite the lessons learned in World War II, when the American B29s rained hell on Tokyo, Kobe and other cities.

  “To the bunker, then?” Nakai suggested.

  The estate was not entirely indefensible, despite its classic style. One building stood apart, almost concealed by greenery, where Takumi could stand and fight.

  His final stand, perhaps. And if it came to that, he meant to go out like a samurai.

  * * *

  KENICHI KAYO SAW the first round from Matt Cooper’s 40 mm weapon strike a corner of the roof on the east wing of the mansion, erupting into instant flame that spread with startling speed. He guessed it was a thermobaric round, recalling a briefing he had received on military weapons likely to be used by criminals and terrorists. He did not understand exactly how they worked, nor did he care. The grim reality was frightening.

  Halfway across the lawn, Cooper unleashed a second 40 mm round. This one punched through the shōji sliding door in front of them and detonated in the room beyond, a high-explosive blast this time instead of blooming fire. Kayo heard men screaming in the house and gripped his .38 so tightly that his knuckles ached as they approached the shattered door and plunged inside.

  It felt strange, even in those circumstances, to barge in without first taking off his shoes. Tatami flooring underfoot felt alien through layers of leather as he stood with Cooper in the smoky wreckage of a game room, with its billiard table kneeling on one broken leg. Two Yakuza gunners were dying there, riddled with shrapnel from the blast, neither of them possessing fortitude enough to do it quietly.

  Cooper ignored them, once he’d kicked their weapons out of reach. “We split up here,” he said, according to their plan.

  Kayo nodded. “Hai. Good luck.”

  “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  An optimist, Kayo thought, not speaking of an afterlife. As for himself, turning away toward a connecting shōji door, he had already made his peace with death.

  Shōji served dual functions in Japanese architecture. As sliding doors, they saved space wasted on Western swing doors, and their strategic placement also let rooms be expanded or closed off at need, either providing more room or allowing for a modicum of privacy. The privacy was out for Kazuo Takumi and his soldiers this night, Kayo thought. Before long, if they chose to stay inside the burning house, they’d be reduced to ash and cracked white bones.

  As would Kayo, if he let himself be trapped.

  He pushed the shōji door aside and stepped into a dining room. Its furnishings were minimal: a table with truncated legs, perhaps twelve inches off the floor, and chairs with none at all, though they had upright backs. It looked as if some prankster with a chainsaw had passed through and trimmed them down, taking the legs away with him.

  There were no targets in the dining room. Kayo left it as he found it, with the table bare, and passed on through another shōji door to reach the kitchen. As he cleared the threshold, someone fired a submachine gun at him from behind an island in the middle of the spacious room, slugs ripping through the paper door and sizzling past into the dining room.

  Kayo hit the floor and rolled, ending his move with shoulders pressed against the stainless-steel island that stood between him and his would-be slayer. Silence on the other side told him the gunner was waiting, possibly holding his breath, afraid to step out in the open.

  Lure him out, then.

  Drawing in a deep breath, the lieutenant released it in what he hoped was a convincing moan. For emphasis, he muttered curses with a feigned sob, trying to sound desperate.

  Footsteps approached, circling the kitchen island to his left. Kayo gripped his .38 in both hands, waiting, and squeezed off the second that he had a target, firing one shot from a range of six or seven feet. His bullet drilled the Yakuza hardman beneath his chin and did not exit, though it may have bounced around inside his skull, shredding the brain. The soldier dropped, shivered and then lay still.

  Kayo grabbed his weapon, recognized it as Minebea PM-9 used by the Japan Self-Defense Forces as standard equipment. He holstered his revolver, then checked the corpse for extra magazines and found three, one hundred rounds in all, minus those spent trying to kill him seconds earlier.

  Better, Kayo thought, and went in search of other p
rey.

  * * *

  BOLAN HAD SWITCHED back to his Steyr when he left the lieutenant in the rec room, heading in the opposite direction through another sliding door. They gave Kazuo Takumi’s home a fun house aspect, though he doubted whether any of its occupants were having fun right now.

  The room he entered next was empty, but Bolan heard shooters moving nearby, catching distorted silhouettes in motion through the paper of adjoining sliding doors. Instead of waiting for his enemies to make the next move, Bolan dropped into a crouch and started plinking them through paper, trusting the suppressor on his AUG to add a measure of confusion to the mix.

  At least three men were in the room immediately to his left, and Bolan took them down like targets in a midway shooting gallery, one round apiece, working from left to right. A couple of them cried out as they fell, the sounds alerting their collaborators in the room or corridor to Bolan’s right. He saw those soldiers crouching, trying to make smaller targets of themselves, betrayed by lights that cast their shadows on the paper door.

  Two more went down before his semiauto fire, and while he’d gone for kill shots, Bolan still used caution when he slid the nearest door aside, surveying the result. One of the two men in the corridor was still alive, but not for long, struggling to breathe with ruptured lungs. The other had already gone to his reward or punishment, if there was any to be had.

  Thin walls could work both ways, he knew—and they also transmitted sound. Takumi’s house had turned into an echo chamber, angry voices shouting questions and replies in Japanese, some simply cursing from the sound of it, none of their racket useful to the Executioner, except in finding hardmen to kill. He didn’t know where he should look for Kazuo Takumi in the rambling house, now filling up with smoke, and realized the architecture gave his enemies escape hatches to the outside from almost every room.

  He switched off to the Milkor one more time and fired an HE round through the nearest sliding door, angling from south to north. The grenade wouldn’t detonate from slicing through paper, but a wooden wall or other solid obstacle would set it off. The blast, when it came, was at least sixty-odd feet downrange.

  More shouts, mixed in with screams. Bolan slashed through the ruptured paper door without retracting it and went on with his hunt.

  * * *

  THE BUNKER WAS located in the Yakuza chief’s decorative garden, built to blend in with the greenery. Entry was through a space behind a miniature Shinto shrine, concealed from inattentive passersby. The inner room was twenty feet by thirty, reinforced concrete above, below and on all sides. Air circulated through vents in the roof, concealed among ferns and flowers. Gun ports on all sides permitted grazing fire from its defenders, pillbox style. A periscope allowed perusal of the garden on three sides. The bunker’s door was solid steel, three inches thick, rated as bulletproof and blast resistant.

  Stepping into it, surrounded by The Three, Takumi knew how his ancestors had to have felt, crouching in caves and bunkers very much like this one, waiting for American marines to burn them out with flamethrowers or shred their flesh with satchel charges on a hundred different Pacific Islands in the final war of empire.

  He felt trapped and sorry that they had not tried to flee after all, in one of the cars.

  Too late now.

  The sounds of battle from his nearby house were muffled in the bunker but still audible. Takumi pictured the destruction of his summer home and felt a fleeting sense of loss, but he refused to focus on it. Houses were available to anyone with money, and his cash reserves were deep. Not that they helped him here, below ground, waiting for the end.

  “We should have brought Tadashi,” he declared.

  “There was no time to look for him,” Nakai replied.

  “He might come yet,” Tamura added. “He knows where to go.”

  Takumi knew better. His first lieutenant would be dead soon, if he wasn’t already. Even if he came, the clan leader doubted that The Three would crack the heavy door to let the man in.

  They were protecting him, of course. Why did he feel as if he were their prisoner?

  Nothing to do but wait, Takumi thought. One of his men, at least, should have been on the phone by now, summoning reinforcements. Even if they all forgot, or died before they had a chance to call out, he could trust his neighbors to alert police and firefighters. That meant investigation of the weapons carried by his men, a threat of prison for collecting them, but Takumi employed a firm of lawyers dedicated to defending him from any charge or lawsuit. At the very least, he could delay a trial for years, and if convicted, could postpone incarceration while he went through various appeals.

  But there would be no trial and no appeals if he died in the bunker.

  The Yakuza mobster sat down to hide the sudden tremor in his legs, hoping The Three would not sniff out his fear and turn against him, leaving him to face his enemies alone.

  * * *

  KAZUO TAKUMI’S FUN HOUSE was in flames. Bolan’s incendiary round had lit the farthest point from where he planned to enter with Kayo, buying time, but once the fire caught hold there was no stopping it. Firefighters might save parts of it, if they arrived in time, but Bolan heard no sirens in the distance yet.

  He’d cleared four rooms so far, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, with no sign of the Yakuza boss or Tadashi Jo. Bolan was feeding the Steyr a fresh magazine when a screaming hardman crashed through the paper wall to his left, swinging a sword that he’d picked up somewhere along the way.

  Bolan blocked the first swing with his rifle’s fiberglass-reinforced polyamide stock, the blade missing his left hand by an inch or less, then lashed out with the Steyr’s muzzle, clouting his adversary with the weapon’s sound suppressor. The swordsman stutter-stepped away from Bolan, spitting curses the Executioner couldn’t translate, and was winding up another swing when Bolan shot him in the chest at point-blank range. The Yakuza died on his feet, gaping at Bolan in surprise, as if he’d thought he was invincible.

  Bolan moved on. Behind him, he could hear the flames now, racing through the house, devouring everything before them. Men were screaming back there, leaping for their lives from any exit they could find before the fire caught up with them and made escape impossible.

  Apparently, their willingness to die for their godfather had limits, after all.

  Good news for Bolan if they kept on running once they cleared the house.

  Not good if they regrouped outside and waited for him to emerge.

  He put that out of mind for now, with rooms still left to clear, but spared a thought for his companion, somewhere in the far wing of the house, wondering if Kayo was alive or dead. Bolan couldn’t afford to dwell on that, however. They’d agreed on a meeting place if both of them got clear, but Bolan wasn’t going anywhere until he’d satisfied himself that he had finished off the job he’d come to do.

  Cut off the viper’s head and leave it thrashing, bleeding out. Whatever happened to it after that was someone else’s problem.

  By the time he’d cleared eight chambers in the house of sliding doors, Bolan knew he was near the end of his selected wing. The central portion of the house was blazing like a bonfire, moments from implosion as its walls burned through like pages of a book. He didn’t hear much screaming from the heart of the inferno anymore, a blessing for the mobsters who’d been trapped inside.

  Was Kazuo Takumi one of those who’d been incinerated? Thinking so would make the rest of Bolan’s mission simple, but he couldn’t swallow that on faith alone. He had to see the man dead or, at the very least, convince himself that the godfather of the Sumiyoshi-kai had not escaped.

  It was not finished yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I should be out there with my men,” Takumi said.

  None of The Three disputed what he’d said. Shoei Sato was on the periscope, turning it slowly while he scanned the garden, seeking enemies. Tamura Min and Nakai Ryo crouched before two of the bunker’s gun ports, peering through the slits
with automatic weapons close at hand. Their silence, the impression of ignoring him, made the Yakuza boss angry.

  “I said—”

  “We heard you,” Sato interrupted, without turning from the periscope’s eyepiece. “With all respect, you must protect yourself in the best interest of the family.”

  With all respect, he’d said, and yet it did not sound respectful. Takumi imagined that The Three were judging him, condemning him for cowardice, although they would not voice their thoughts aloud.

  “What do you see?” he asked them, all at once.

  “Nothing,” Tamura said.

  “No one,” Nakai echoed.

  “The house is nearly gone,” Sato stated, adding as an afterthought, “I’m sorry.”

  He did not sound sorry, but that was no surprise. Did any of The Three feel anything at all?

  The house meant nothing, merely wood and paper. Takumi could always find or build another one, if he survived this night. He normally disdained all contact with police but now found himself hoping they were on their way to rescue him. Perhaps they would wipe out the enemies he had not managed to identify.

  Unless…

  A grim, unworthy thought occurred to him. What if his neighbors failed to call for help? Would they stand by in silence, hoping that Kazuo Takumi and his soldiers would be purged forever from their midst?

  Another notion, more disturbing than the last. What if the same policemen he had paid so generously over many years decided that they’d had enough of him and dragged their feet before responding to his present crisis? They could always make up some excuse, why they were late arriving on the scene and found him dead.

  Ridiculous.

  Money bought loyalty, and the police would suffer from a failure to perform their duty properly, as well as losing all that future income from Kazuo Takumi’s family. As for his proud, aristocratic neighbors, it was foolish to suppose they would allow a war to rage unchecked around their homes without calling for aid.