He rose, was on the verge of daring anyone to stop him as he left the bunker, when a powerful explosion echoed through the garden, stinging his eardrums. He could not feel the shock wave there inside his concrete womb, but pictured the destruction of his country home.
“The propane tank,” Sato advised.
“I’m going out,” Takumi said.
The Three exchanged cool glances, then Tamura answered, “That’s a bad idea.”
“You will not stop me,” the Yakuza boss said, rising to his full height, wearing an expression of determination.
“No,” Nakai agreed.
“All right, then. Bring your weapons.”
“We won’t stop you,” Sato told him, “but we are not going with you, either.”
“What?” Kazuo felt as if he had been slapped across the face.
“You brought us to defend you, Master,” Sato explained. “We cannot do that if you make yourself a target.”
“You owe me a duty!” Takumi insisted.
Sato nodded. “Yes. But if you go out there, you’ll die, and what becomes of duty then?”
Takumi glared at each of them in turn, then went back to the camp chair he’d just left and sat again. It shamed him when he felt a surge of sweet relief.
* * *
BOLAN WAS ON his last room when the wild man came for him. Another shouting Yakuza hardman, but this one hadn’t brought a sword to the gunfight. He had an FN Minimi, the standard model, fifteen pounds of bloody murder plus a fat box magazine containing two hundred rounds of 5.56 mm NATO ammunition on an M27 disintegrating-link belt. He came on firing short bursts, as if he knew what he was doing, cutting zigzag patterns through the paper walls, apparently without regard to who might be on the receiving end.
After the second burst, Bolan was on his belly. He couldn’t tell if the shooter had seen him and missed on his first try, or if he was just spraying death all around in the hope that he might get lucky. Either way, he stood a chance of scoring if he kept it up.
So Bolan had to stop him. Fast.
He waited for a clear view of the shooter’s upper body, legs still hidden by the tattered, sagging remnants of a sliding door he’d shot to hell. The Steyr’s Swarovski 1.5x sight framed his opponent’s chest and shoulders in its black ring reticle and Bolan squeezed off, going for a double-tap from twenty feet.
The slugs ripped through his target’s sternum, separated by an inch or less. Dying, the gunner lurched backward, index finger locked around the light machine gun’s trigger, firing all the way until he hit the floor and impact jarred the roaring weapon from his hands. As if on cue, a portion of the ceiling tumbled down on top of him in flames, with dark smoke swirling after it to mask the scene.
Bolan was out of time. The fire was catching up with him, and if he lingered in the house, he would be roasted with the others he’d heard screaming earlier. That wasn’t how he planned to go, particularly with his mission uncompleted.
Sparing Kayo one last thought, somewhere between a silent requiem and prayer, he rose and backed off from the wall of fire, to reach the nearest exit. Like the rest, it was a sliding door that opened on the night. Flames had short-circuited the power on the grounds, but now offered illumination of their own to light the way.
Outside, surviving members of the Sumiyoshi-kai were running every which way, maybe looking for their godfather, trying to spot an enemy, or simply working up the nerve to flee and leave it all behind. Bolan would be outnumbered on the open ground, as he had been inside the house, but he would also make a better target there.
No way around it. If he meant to find Kazuo Takumi and Kayo—if he meant to live at all—he’d have to take the risk.
Another section of the ceiling fell as Bolan stepped outside into a scene from hell.
* * *
TADASHI JO WAS LOST. Not literally—he knew where he was and how he’d gotten there—but he was dazed, his thoughts spinning like truck tires bogged in mud. He stood on the south lawn and watched Kazuo Takumi’s house burning while soldiers, many of them singed or wounded, milled about like chickens in a farmyard, obviously having no idea where they should go or what they should do next.
The worst part: he had no idea himself.
He had returned from his inspection of the troops to find his boss, when the shooting started, but the man had vanished with The Three. Jo cursed Takumi for abandoning him, and the so-called ninjas for usurping his authority to help the godfather escape. Now he was stranded, burdened with an automatic rifle he had yet to fire, no enemies before him, no coherent thoughts on what he should do next.
Jo had already counted cars and found none missing. If The Three had taken Takumi away somewhere, they had to have fled on foot. Where would they go in that case? Not to any of the neighbors, he decided. They were rich snobs who were forced to tolerate a gangster in their midst, because his wealth and influence matched theirs, but none of them would shelter Kazuo Takumi from killers in their homes.
Where, then?
He could not picture the escapees walking to the nearest town, when they might meet police at any point along the way. They might find someplace in the woods to hide and phone for help from Tokyo, more than an hour’s drive away, but that, too, seemed unlikely.
Gunfire broke Jo’s focus on the problem. Turning toward the sound, he saw three of his men firing at shadows cast by leaping firelight, wasting ammunition on ephemeral opponents. Moving toward them cautiously, aware that they might turn on him if startled, he began to call out from a distance.
“It’s nothing! Hold your fire!”
It took another moment for the three to register his order and obey. Turning to face Jo, their expressions mirrored his disordered thoughts, making him hope that he seemed more composed.
“Have any of you seen the godfather?” Jo asked.
Two soldiers shook their heads. The third muttered, “No, sir.”
“Then we must find him,” Jo said. “Come with me to search the grounds.”
The one who’d found his voice turned toward the burning ruin of the house and asked, “What if he’s in there?”
Then I’m in charge, Jo thought, feeling a sudden surge of hope. But he replied, “In that case, we can’t help him. But we must be sure.”
“He could be anywhere,” another of them said. “Was he not with The Four? I mean, The Three?”
“He was,” Jo said—and then it hit him.
If Takumi and his escorts were alive, if they’d escaped the house before it started to collapse, there was someplace where they could hide without leaving the grounds. Jo cursed himself again, for having overlooked the obvious.
“This way!” he snapped, and started toward the decorative garden with its secret buried in the shadow of a shrine.
* * *
BOLAN WAS TWENTY YARDS from the house when four Yakuza gunners spotted him and tried to bring him down. They had enough firepower, but they weren’t coordinated, didn’t think it through. Sometimes the hasty, crazy firing worked, scoring a lucky hit, but this was not one of those times.
A drop and roll left Bolan facing them, the Steyr AUG tracking to find them, while the Milkor’s weight was slung across his back. He worked the skirmish line from left to right, scoping the fattest of the shooters first and drilling him below the loose knot of his necktie with a single 5.56 mm round from fifty feet. The gunner dropped to his knees, wide-eyed, and toppled over on the grass, twitching the final seconds of his life away.
That caused the other three to hesitate and reconsider their position, but they didn’t have much time. The second round from Bolan’s AUG opened another mobster’s gut and knocked him sprawling, clutching at himself and bellowing in pain.
Leaving him to it, Bolan caught the third hardman as he turned to run, a grave mistake under the circumstances. Round three clipped his spine below the rib cage, shattered, blasting fragments through his stomach and liver, severing his descending aorta. Death was seconds away as he belly flopped onto t
he lawn, useless legs splayed behind him, immobile.
That left one, and he was smarter than the others, sizing up his target while the Executioner was taking down his friends. The shooter almost got it right, but jerked his submachine gun’s trigger at the last second, instead of squeezing it. The burst that should have shattered Bolan’s skull missed him by inches, chopping fresh 9 mm divots in the lawn.
The guy had missed his chance and seemed to know it, as the Steyr swung to find him, but he wasn’t giving up. He shouted something in a high-pitched voice and stood his ground, ready to fire another burst and get it right this time—until his weapon jammed. The sudden, stunned expression on his face would have been comical, if it were not the look of death.
Bolan fired one more time, center of mass, and finished it. His target lingered for a heartbeat, spitting blood and still defying gravity, before his knees buckled and he fell over backward, landing with his arms outflung, embracing—what?
Bolan was in no hurry to find out.
Springing to his feet, he moved on in his circuit of the country home that had become a funeral pyre. He didn’t know how many men were trapped inside there, roasting, and he felt no sympathy for any of them but Kayo, hoping the lieutenant had been able to escape—or, at the very least, that he had met a quicker, more merciful death.
If Bolan found Kayo, they could go on with the hunt together. Otherwise, he’d finish it alone.
But either way, the search for Kazuo Takumi wasn’t finished yet.
* * *
KENICHI KAYO HAD escaped the burning house, in fact, but not before a falling ceiling beam had struck him, nearly knocking him unconscious, opening a ragged wound across his scalp that bled into his eyes. His jacket had caught fire at the same time, searing his cheek and left arm as he struggled to remove it. He had nearly lost his submachine gun in the process, but retrieved it from the fire before he fled, crashed headlong through a wall of washi paper and collapsed outside.
The trick was getting up again.
He could have lain there while the house crumbled around him, buried him in burning rubble, or Takumi’s soldiers found him lying helpless on the porch and executed him. Instead, Kayo struggled to his feet, cast about him for a target or a clue.
Where would he find the Yakuza boss in the chaos of the once immaculate estate?
Kayo did not see the godfather, but he did spot Tadashi Jo, retreating from the house with three companions, moving briskly toward the estate’s large garden. Were they leaving? Did they plan to meet their oyabun somewhere beyond the firelight? Either way, Jo was a target worth the effort, if Kayo could not find the man in charge.
He followed them, checking his Minebea PM-9 to verify that it had not been damaged during his near miss with fiery death. It seemed all right, and he picked up his pace, closing the gap as Jo’s party neared an ornate gateway leading to the garden. Shadows lay beyond it, and Kayo feared that he might lose sight of them there, unless he stopped them now.
He shot the soldier farthest from the clan’s first lieutenant first, no qualms about a short burst of 9 mm rounds into the gangster’s back. The SMG’s vertical fore grip helped him steady it, although the recoil sent a shock of pain along his scorched and throbbing arm.
The other hardmen were turning when he shot the second soldier, not a clean job, bullets ripping through the target’s groin, but it was good enough to put him down. Tadashi Jo and the next-to-last man standing both returned fire, muzzle-flashes blinking at Kayo while he tried to hold his weapon steady, using its iron sights to frame the younger man, stitching holes across his chest.
Kayo never knew which of them finished him. Perhaps Jo, maybe both of them together. He could no more count the bullets striking him than he could trace them back to a specific weapon. As he fell, Kayo squeezed the trigger of the submachine gun he had taken from a dead man, emptying the Minebea’s magazine in one half-second burst. Before he hit the sod, he saw Jo’s soldier slump and crumple, while the second in command of Sumiyoshi-kai reached down to clutch a wounded leg.
It was the best that he could do.
Kayo flashed back to his meeting with the Monk, the blind man speaking of his chosen path, telling him, Pursue it to the end. He’d found the end now, felt the warm blood pulsing out from wounds below his rib cage, and was pleasantly surprised to feel no pain of any magnitude.
That’s shock, he thought, and welcomed it.
A shadow loomed above Kayoi, blocking out the firelight from the crumbling house. Tadashi Jo coming to finish him?
Already done.
Kayo tried to reach his revolver, but his hand would not respond. The figure knelt beside him, pressing fingertips against his neck, and then Kayo felt nothing at all.
* * *
NO PULSE. KENICHI KAYO’S eyes were open, but whatever they might see, if anything, it was invisible to Bolan. Had some ancient mystery been solved, or was it simply darkness everlasting?
He had seen Kayo’s last stand from a distance, ran to help him, but arrived too late. The cop had taken two Yakuza gunners with him, but Tadashi Jo, wounded, had limped and staggered through a gateway leading to Kazuo Takumi’s garden, vanishing in shadows there. Bolan went after him, leaving the lieutenant where he lay.
Bolan already knew the garden sprawled over an acre, maybe more. He’d seen that much on Google Earth, but hadn’t noted any feature that would serve Tadashi Jo as a sanctuary. If the fugitive just wanted darkness to prepare an ambush, he had come to the right place, but he was hurt now, and it would be difficult for him to scale the garden’s wall, if he was planning on escape.
Bolan followed the garden path in front of him, proceeding cautiously and silently. After a few yards, he picked up the sound of someone moving in the dark ahead, dragging one foot and whimpering. He liked the sound of that and followed, picking up his pace.
Another minute, and the faint moonlight above showed him Tadashi Jo, no longer hobbling, standing dead still on the path, using his rifle as a cane and speaking softly. Talking to the shrubbery? Bolan could not translate his words, but from his tone, it seemed Jo was expecting a response.
And when it came, it was a muzzle-flash, low down, around knee level, winking twice. The bullets struck Jo with a killer one-two punch and dropped him facedown on the pathway’s paving stones.
Bolan moved to his left, merged with the greenery and started edging forward. As he neared the spot where he had seen the muzzle-flashes, he made out a low rise in the ground and recognized a bunker, cunningly concealed by grass and ferns. He couldn’t see the entrance, and he didn’t need to. At the moment, he was more concerned about the gun ports.
He could think of only one good reason for a bunker on Kazuo Takumi’s rural property: to hide the oyabun if things went terribly, irrevocably wrong. Whether Takumi was alone in there, Bolan could not have said and didn’t care.
The bunker’s occupants could fire out through their gun ports, which meant Bolan could fire in.
He slipped the Milkor off its shoulder sling and broke the cylinder, replacing its spent rounds with more incendiary loads. The 40 mm XM1060 thermobaric rounds were little versions of the hellish fuel-air bombs, more energetic than conventional condensed explosives. Each round used oxygen from the surrounding air to generate an intense, high-temperature explosion, featuring a longer blast wave than a normal HE round.
How much air could there be inside a bunker?
Bolan was about to answer that.
He’d marked the gun port, memorized its placement, knowing that there had to be others. They would only help him, if he placed his first round properly, drawing more oxygen inside to fuel the roiling flames.
Using the weapon’s reflex sight, he aimed, held steady and squeezed off. The Milkor made its standard popping sound, and then all hell broke loose. There was a flash, low down, and then the fire seemed to be sucked inside the bunker, blossoming within while startled voices screamed. Along the sloped side of the bunker, tongues of flame licked
out from two more gun ports.
Bolan waited, reasonably sure he’d never know who was inside the pillbox, frying, then a door he hadn’t seen flew open and a smoking figure spilled onto the grass outside. Waiting for more people to follow, Bolan gave it twenty seconds, then decided no one else was coming.
Switching off, he drew the Glock and moved to stand above the supine figure. It was Kazuo Takumi, his clothes in smoky tatters, with the left side of his face heat-shriveled, glistening. His breath came out in little panting gasps, lungs seared, a wound no medic could have healed.
“Gaijin,” he gasped.
“That’s me,” Bolan acknowledged.
“Why…have you…destroyed me?”
“Not just you. Your family.”
Takumi forced a smile at that. “You cannot…stop…the Sumiyoshi-kai.”
“I meant your other family,” Bolan replied. “Your son’s dead. Killed himself, trying to help a psycho-cult spray anthrax over Tokyo.”
He saw the knife go in, could almost feel it twist. Takumi’s good eye leaked a drop of sorrow. “Toi?”
“You leave nothing behind except bad memories. They’ll be forgotten soon.”
“But…why?”
Bolan considered how to answer, then discovered there was no one left to hear him. With a final wheeze, Kazuo Takumi had checked out.
Now it was Bolan’s turn. He glanced back toward the embers that had been a stylish home, saw half a dozen hardmen staring at the ruins, and he left them to it. Fading back into the night, he focused on a job that still demanded his attention.
EPILOGUE
Marunouchi, Tokyo
It was a fine day in the capital. The air was relatively clear for Tokyo, and Colonel Fulian Sun had picked a café on Hibiya Dori, near the Imperial Garden Theater, for his lunchtime meeting with Captain Takahira Amago of the Metropolitan Police.
Amago had called twice before Sun answered, at his office in the Chinese embassy. The colonel had been tempted to ignore him, but the man knew things. If arrested, he could link Sun to Saikosai Raito, to Susumu Kodama and the anthrax plot. Sun had diplomatic immunity, of course, but he could still be exposed and expelled from Japan as persona non grata. That, in turn, would mean denials from Beijing, blame shifted onto Sun alone, an exercise in fervent hand-washing.
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