Kage: The Shadow

by John Donohue

  YMAA Publication Center

  Wolfeboro, NH USA

  Also by John Donohue…

  Novels

  Sensei

  Deshi

  Tengu

  Nonfiction

  The Overlook Martial Arts Reader

  Complete Kendo

  Herding the Ox: The Martial Arts as Moral

  Metaphor

  Warrior Dreams: The Martial Arts and the

  American Imagination

  The Human Condition in the Modern Age

  The Forge of the Spirit: Structure, Motion, and

  Meaning in the Japanese Martial Tradition

  YMAA Publication Center, Inc.

  PO Box 480

  Wolfeboro, NH 03894

  1-800-669-8892 • www.ymaa.com • info@ymaa.com

  Paperback edition

  978-1-59439-210-8

  1-59439-210-2

  Ebook edition

  978-1-59439-239-9

  1-59439-239-0

  © 2011 by John Donohue

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Editor: Leslie Takao

  Cover Design: Axie Breen

  POD XXXX

  Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication

  Donohue, John J., 1956-

  Kage : the shadow / John Donohue. -- Wolfeboro, NH : YMAA

  Publication Center, c2011.

  p. ; cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-59439-210-8 (pbk.) ; 978-1-59439-239-9

  (ebook)

  “A Connor Burke martial arts thriller”--Cover.

  1.Burke, Connor (Fictitious character) 2.Smuggling--

  Arizona--Fiction. 3.Martial artists--Fiction. 4.Arizona--Fiction.

  5.Martial arts fiction. 6.Suspense fiction. I.Title.

  PS3604.O565 K34 2011 2011927806

  813/.6--dc22 2011

  To the Sweeney family

  for welcoming me in.

  Prologue

  Dawn. I lay for a time coming back to the world: the warmth of a blanket, the cool air of a day yet unborn touching my face. The hitch of old injuries. The tug of memory.

  A Tibetan monk once told me I walked a path as narrow and dangerous as a razor’s edge. As in many situations, he could see far and well. That monk wasn’t just concerned with peril in the normal sense: life is, after all, suffering. He was worried, instead, about things of the spirit.

  I look across the room where I have slept alone: even in the half light I can see a table against a wall. My swords rest there in a wooden rack that I made by hand. The stand is nothing fancy; merely the functional product of the whine of a saber saw, my hands’ guidance, attached to the familiar aroma of cut wood. The weapons had become so much a part of me that I felt they deserved a holder that was equally personal. I’ve read comments about the cold steel of a blade, but they’re written by people who are strangers to my art. The blade isn’t cold; it is warm, a thing alive like the cycle of breath or the pulsing of blood.

  The old adage is that the sword is the soul of the samurai. I used to dismiss it as equal parts hyperbole and mystic mumbo-jumbo. I’m no longer so sure. When you spend hours, days, years with a thing, surely a connection of some kind is shaped. The wrapped cloth of the katana’s handle, the nubby ray skin beneath, no longer feel like things that are external to me: they fit. They fill the void of my curved fingers as if my hands were shaped to hold the weapon.

  It’s a tool of sorts, of course; a means to an end. But there’s more to it than that. Maybe I’ve been in the dojo so long that things Japanese have become part of me; form and function, beauty and utility, merged into one. The swordsman’s art is a curious alchemy: a synthesis of steel and spirit where the outcome is more than the sum of its parts.

  The old timers tell stories of swords that were finely wrought and yet cruel: setsuninto, killing swords. They were weapons whose inmost essence drove their owners mad. Other blades were as cruelly beautiful, but imbued with a spirit that inclined to do good. They sang in their scabbards to warn of danger; they were bright and clear and miraculous things and, in the right hands, could be katsujinken, life-giving swords.

  In the right hands… how to tell and who is to judge? I’ve made decisions in my life and done things I am not proud of. And yet they seemed necessary. Like a pebble tossed in a pool of still water, each action sent waves in many directions. Some I anticipated. Many I did not. And I wonder.

  In the half-light of each starting day, I lay in silence, alert to the swords in the rack. Hopeful. Fearful.

  In the silence of dawn, will the blades moan to me or will they sing?

  1 Coyote

  The coyote picked his way quietly over rough ground, climbing up the slope to a spot where he could watch and wait. The border smuggler, the coyote named Hector, settled down and listened to the faint rustling of the desert night. There was movement all around him; things hunted in the darkness, skittering and squealing, unseen. After a time he heard a different noise—the sound of men as they scraped their way over the canyon lip. Their voices were soft murmurs pulled apart by the night breeze. Hector strained to hear what was being said, but could not. The intruders paused at the canyon rim as if getting their bearings. They shone green lights on the dirt, tracing the tracks of the men Hector had sent off into the gully to the rendezvous. Hector watched calmly and waited for the small knot of men to head up the gully as well. If he felt anything at that moment, it was chagrin that the people he had led might be caught. But, they knew the risk. He himself didn’t sense a threat, and was confident that without the burden of his human cargo he would melt away and leave these pursuers behind. But instead of following the trail leading up the gully, they swung their lights around in measured arcs, looking for additional sign. Hector’s eyes narrowed as a faint concern began to flicker in his chest. The lights steadied, focused on a new track.

  Hector’s.

  He realized with a shock of cold certainty that he was wrong about the danger. The pursuers that he had vaguely sensed during the night journey across the border had not been intent on intercepting the men he was delivering. They weren’t the Border Patrol. They weren’t even interested in the identity or purpose of the men he was smuggling into the US. They had, instead, been following him to learn the secret of the route he had made through the desert. It was a basic foundation of his trade: control the route and you can control the business, he thought. He slipped out of the shadow of the rock outcropping he was crouched beneath and began to make his way away from this new source of danger. He moved cautiously, tense with concern that he make no sound. He knew that once a specific trail was known, a guide like himself became merely a liability. And on the border, liabilities were inevitably abandoned to the rocks and sun. Their remains gleamed, bone-white with the passing of years, a reminder to travelers of the danger of the territory through which they passed.

  Hector had been a border smuggler for more than five years. He knew all about the dangers. If the desert was harsh, the competing gangs that struggled to control the border’s business were even more so. Hector had learned to trust few people, hug the darkness like a friend, and to choose the more difficult and out of the way crossings for his business. A coyote had many things to fear.

  The Americans were the least of Hector’s problems. No matter what their publicity claimed, the Americans could not close the border. The long line between Mexico and the United States was an abstraction on a map. It was an illusion bent by topography and cracked in the desert sun. On the ground, lines on a map had little meaning. The Border Patrol rocked along rutted tracks near the most likely points of access. They scanned the horizon for movement, safe in their trucks, the murmur of the radio a faint under-current in the wash of the a
ir conditioning. Hector the coyote had learned the lessons well from his uncles and cousins who had gone before him into this business: go where the gringo did not wish to go. Go at night. Move quickly, but don’t rush. Plan.

  And watch your back. Hector was careful to keep a low profile in the border towns. He maintained respectful relations with the various gang leaders in the area, paid the protection money demanded of him, and relied on a small network of family members to assist in the growing business of smuggling “special” items across the border. They were efficient, discrete, and successful. That was why, when the strangers from the capital had come looking for experienced guides, Hector’s people were chosen.

  Like most things, there was a hierarchy of services in the coyote’s world. Anyone could try to cross the border, and any number of eager young men, armed with broken down sneakers and makeshift canteens crafted from old bleach bottles, would offer to serve as guides. The true coyote watched them silently through squinted eyes, the skin on their faces taut and etched by the hot breath of the desert. They said nothing and let the young men go. More often than not, their careers were short-lived; the desert, or the gangs, or the Border Patrol people saw to that end. Amateurs were a sad feature of most professions, but not a significant drain on business in this one. In the coyote’s world, success was survival.

  The stakes grew exponentially once the coyote moved beyond smuggling campesinos desperate to work backbreaking days on American farms and construction sites. There were other things to smuggle, and if the risk was greater, so too was the reward. These were deals that were not cut on a dusty roadside by the rear of an old pickup truck. The men you met were not hungry and weighed down by their past and lumpy bundles of possessions formed into packs with garbage bags and old twine. These deals were made by quietly assured men, whose eyes were as fathomless and glittery as vipers. The parties met in the dim shelter of bars after each side had carefully weighed the competence of their intermediaries, had listened to the rumors on the street, and after each side had scouted out an alternate means of exit.

  Hector’s people would watch the late model SUV’s churn a cloud of dust down the street. When they reached the rendezvous, young men with dark glasses jumped out and scanned the rooflines. They dressed for the city, yet their shiny boots were immediately coated with the powdery dust of the desert. The wind pushed, hot and fitful, at paper trash in the street. You could hear sounds coming from a distant alley, where stringy dogs snarled and fought each other for the gristle and bone remains of something unidentifiable. People scuttled toward doorways, nervously eyeing the men from the SUV—quick, tight sideways glances, before they shut themselves behind the safety of thick doors. The young men didn’t seem to react to anything in particular, but took it all in. They watched the pattern of activity, sensitive only to the ripple of the unexpected. At a signal, their principal would emerge from the vehicle and the coyote’s people would follow him into the dark room.

  In these situations, respectful greetings were always the first item of business. Drinks offered. The conversations were formal, reserved, and terse with an odd combination of respect and tension. The deals themselves were models of simplicity. Something needed to cross the border. Sometimes it was an object. Other times it was people. The coyotes never asked what the packages contained or who the people were. They weren’t interested in details beyond the professional assessment of the logistics of transport. A target date for departure was made. Another was established for delivery. The coyotes always insisted on some flexibility with the dates for security purposes, but they knew the value of dependability as well. A pickup point was proposed, debated, established. The price for services was negotiated. Payment arrangements were made.

  Hector had developed a reputation as the man to come to for particularly sensitive transport jobs. Even the viejos, the old timers, admitted that he had a knack for moving through the roughest terrain, of scouting out routes that consistently evaded the American interdiction patrols. He used these routes sparingly, saving them for the most lucrative jobs. The men from the capital paid well for this work, and the high price guaranteed Hector’s continuing enthusiasm as well as his silence. But just below the surface of these deals there lurked something more sinister: the potential for violence or betrayal. The chance that it could blow up in your face, or that the price for failure would be higher than you could bear.

  Most times, Hector convinced himself that he was too good to fall victim to these undercurrents. He was young and crafty and therefore successful. He was sure that one day he would be a legend on the border. But the old women would watch him silently from a distance and murmur darkly. In life, they knew, there was beauty, and merit, and skill. All these things faded. And the only thing left to you was suerte, luck. It was the most fickle of powers, alighting on one man for a time and then deserting him for no apparent reason. They watched Hector, the coyote, marveling at his success. But then they crossed themselves and gestured against the evil eye. The day will come, their looks said silently. Even for you, Hector, the day will come when luck will betray you, disappearing like water spilled in the desert sun.

  This latest crossing had been an important one—the arrangements had been meticulous and the deal was cut with great formality between Hector and the men from the capital. They were men of great seriousness, and he treated their need for special arrangements with respect. The three men he was to take across the border were young and fit, dark eyed, but not Mexicanos. It was imperative, Hector’s clients insisted, that there be no contact with the Border Police. If a crossing were not possible, he was to bring them back rather than risk their arrest. They provided Hector with a cell phone and a number to call once he reached the rendezvous point on the other side of the border. His instructions were to use the cell to make a call once they were across, leave the three men at the location specified, smash the phone and bury the parts, and not look back.

  Hector had taken in the instructions without comment, content in the details and the payment. His knowledge of different routes was a valuable commodity. There were various families and gangs vying for control of the most lucrative smuggling routes. Hector went to great pains to avoid observation from rivals, to hoard this knowledge, and to use his most secure routes only for special jobs. His discretion was rewarded with jobs such as this one. His secret trails were as secure as sparing use could make them, and their nature made them practical only for the fittest travelers. His cargo would be up to desert travel, his clients had assured him. And they smiled at each other as if enjoying a particularly good joke.

  Hector couldn’t remember the precise moment during the night crossing when he began to suspect that he was being shadowed. He always made a habit of scanning his route ahead whenever the terrain made that possible. He often checked his back trail as well. He paused to listen in the night, having the cargo crouch down in silence at intervals. They did what he said without protest. To Hector, they seemed like men familiar with noise discipline and quiet travel in out of the way places. They waited patiently in the darkness. Their eyes sometimes caught the glitter of starlight, but they said nothing to give away their location, content to let their guide set the pace.

  Hector’s vigilance had revealed nothing alarming during the night passage. But a nagging feeling, like a faint breath of clammy wind across the nape of his neck, lingered with him. He redoubled his security checks, scanning the night’s horizon lines for threats, pausing often to strain to hear the telltale sound of a boot scraping across the hard ground. He typically did not travel armed, but on these special trips he sometimes found a weapon useful. An old long-barreled .38 was tucked into his waistband, covered by his shirt. He had never used the pistol in anger and it gave him little comfort this night. To shoot, you needed a target you could see.

  They reached the drop off point two hours before dawn. Hector led the men into a small canyon that opened from a spur of rock that pushed out from the hills rising in a rough jumble of rock
in front of them. He walked quickly into the darker confines of the canyon, his hand brushing lightly against the side of the wall. He felt more protected out of the open desert and uttered a faint sigh of relief at completing the journey. He almost laughed at his fears, but some residual sense of foreboding choked off the emotion. He cautiously flicked on a flashlight, the lens covered with a red filter to preserve night vision. The canyon was littered with boulders of various sizes. There was a winding path through them, but it took caution and care. Hector hadn’t come this far only to break his leg.

  The men he was delivering followed him to the end of the canyon. Here, the narrow defile widened to a roughly circular space perhaps twenty meters wide. Looking up, you could see the night stars shining; remote pinpricks in the remote disk of sky at the top of the canyon. Hector motioned to his travelers to squat down around him. He flicked the light off and could hear their faint panting in the darkness, the sound contained and amplified by the rock walls.

  “What now?” one asked him in English. He did not sound like an American. But Hector forced himself not to speculate. These men were packages. Nothing more.

  Hector checked the fluorescent hands of his watch. “We wait until four. Then I call.” He stood up and stretched his back. He turned back down the trail, straining to see in the darkness of the canyon. Nothing. He faced the men and flicked on his light once more, playing it along the wall of the canyon.

  “The Old Ones lived here,” he told them. Up the cliff at a ledge some ten meters off the ground, the men saw the jagged opening of a doorway, framed by uneven rock masonry. In the daylight, they would have seen the black stain of ancient campfire smoke that licked out across the dwelling’s ceiling and up the doorway’s lintel. The coyote played the light carefully up the surface of the cliff, showing them the regularly-spaced handholds. “You climb up here to the mesa top. Follow the gully northeast for perhaps two kilometers. It washes out into a sandy bed. The truck will pick you up there.”