Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

Bump ...

  Bump ...

  Bump ...

  Down the stairs it had come, splattering the walls with blood before it hit the floor of the sushi bar and rolled over to Jackie’s foot like a bowling ball.

  Then she’d heard the grunts.

  Punctuated by a muffled voice.

  Male or female, the corporal couldn’t tell.

  Any moment, she had thought, the grunts will turn to screams. But they hadn’t. Then finally, the mystery car had exited the garage and, caught by the security camera that fed the screen in the sushi bar, vanished into the first tendrils of mist creeping up the mountainside.

  Again, the screen had faded to black.

  Then nothing ...

  Nothing ...

  Not a peep from above.

  And as time stretched into what her anxiety computed to be an eternity, Jackie began to wonder if Tokuda had departed with his son, leaving her to stare down at the cold eyes gazing up at her from the Sushi Chef’s severed head.

  Snaking her way down the mountainside in her half-brother’s car, Lyn Barrow wondered how her twin would react when he learned what she had done to his father.

  Poetic justice.

  Her Way of the Warrior.

  Still, she had little doubt that her half-brother would be enraged by this twist of fate.

  All his life, he’d been struggling to understand who he was. Now that a relationship with his father was finally within his grasp, she had snatched it from him to meet some needs of her own.

  Would her half-brother want to kill her?

  Probably.

  And if so, what should Lyn do to defend herself?

  Fratricide might be the only answer.

  Tracking a suspect through the West End was like hunting the Minotaur in the labyrinth.

  These days, the West End is a maze of streets.

  In the beginning—1862—“the three greenhorns” were Vancouver’s first white settlers. That trio had visions of building a big metropolis named New Liverpool on their 550-acre parcel of rainforest. But “the three greenhorns” turned out to be an apt nickname, for their development savvy was sorely lacking. Indeed, a U.S. cavalry raid on an Apache village in Arizona had, bizarrely, turned up a stack of promotional pamphlets aimed at selling their lots.

  The coming of the railroad in 1887 had helped the three greenhorns realize their dream, however. Almost overnight, the West End was the place to be. Victorian top hats began constructing mansions with gardens, stables, and ballrooms with floors laid over dried seaweed for “bounce.” The area became known as “Blueblood Alley.” The end of the Gilded Age turned those castles into rooming houses, and the explosion of high-rise mania in the 1960s helped transform the West End into the most densely populated square mile in Canada.

  With all those settlers crammed into cell blocks of two hundred apartments or more, the streets—which had been laid out for horses and buggies—were choked with belching autos. City planners responded by blocking off the most congested intersections with shrubs and benches to deter traffic from veering off the main byways. Today, you need a guide to help you navigate your way through the urban canyons, and that’s what the T1 yakuza thugs had in their car.

  An electronic guide.

  A twenty-first-century scout.

  “There,” DeClercq had said shortly after the cellphone was tossed out. His finger was pointing at an image that had been captured by one of the fiber-optic cameras in Joe Hett’s hearing aids and beamed to the bank of closed-circuit TV monitors in back of the command van. Inside the target vehicle, the captive was craning his head right and left as if to look at the goons flanking him in the back seat. He was actually giving Special O the layout of who was sitting where within the car.

  But now the signals were dead and the screens were blank; the hearing aids had also been ejected from T1. The stalking had turned into a game of cat and mouse through the narrow, foggy canyons of the West End.

  “If we’re being followed,” the Special I tech had translated, “then I’ll claw his eyes out, and you cut his throat.”

  “I’m eastbound on Robson,” the current control reported. “T1 just turned south on Broughton.”

  “And T2?” DeClercq asked.

  “It’s turning too.”

  “Cover cars?”

  “Negative. All traffic’s going straight on Robson.”

  “If we go bare on the bumper, the colonel is dead. Backdoor?”

  “Here, Chief.”

  “Turn a block before Broughton and head south on Nicola.”

  “Roger.”

  “Control,” said DeClercq, “keep on going. Once you’re past Broughton, turn south. I want you driving parallel on the other side of the targets.”

  “Got it.”

  “Both parallels?”

  “Here, Chief,” said one of them.

  “Ditto,” replied Craven. After relinquishing control, he had cycled around to the empty parallel position.

  “Head for Davie Street. One at Jervis. One at Nicola. If either target emerges at that end, holler.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Roger.”

  “Double back?”

  “Here.”

  “Break away and head for the causeway through Stanley Park. To get to the North Shore, if that’s where they’re going, they must pass Lost Lagoon. Eye the road and the underpass. If they escape down Georgia or around the lagoon, you’ll see them.”

  “Will do.”

  “Okay, everyone, listen up. We’re tracking the target cars on parallel streets. Because the West End is a labyrinth, that limits their choice of routes. Once they know they’re not being followed, Oscar will regroup. How’s the fog?”

  “Bad, Chief.”

  “Thicker by the minute.”

  “Good. That’ll slow the targets down to a crawl. As soon as you’re in position, pitch the feet.”

  From his position between Tattoo and the Mole, Joe had sight of one corner of the rear-view mirror. Since they threw out the cellphone, they had been shadowed by what Joe assumed was a counter-surveillance car. But after they zigzagged a block east from Broughton onto what Joe read as Jarhead Street—which had to be wishful thinking, the Marines and all, because he could barely make out the signpost through this gray shroud—the vehicle behind them fell out of sight.

  With a jerk, the driver wrenched the lead car west and accelerated, picking up speed faster than those inside could see ahead.

  The Mole said something.

  The wheelman checked the mirror.

  There was nothing back there for him or Joe to see.

  As the navigator called out directions from the digital map, the car weaved through the West End. Judging from the oooo-wah, oooo-wah of foghorns grumbling in the haze, they had just one or two blocks more before they would plunge into the sea.

  “Chief, it’s Winter. Yamada just arrived.”

  “Does he have the MOU?”

  “Yep. Showtime.”

  “Good. We’re going to need it. Bring him in.”

  Most people who passed the command van and the cluster of similar trucks on the downtown side street wouldn’t have taken a second look. Decades of moviemaking in Hollywood North had accustomed Vancouverites to hundreds—more likely, thousands—of similar-looking shoots. “When I hear the thunder of hoof beats, I think horses, not zebras,” the old saying goes, and it would be thinking zebras to conclude that the white van was really a mobile cop shop.

  The back door opened.

  Two men climbed up and in.

  The back door closed.

  And shut out the world.

  The inside of the box could have been the set of a techno-thriller or the monitor room of a network like CNN. DeClercq sat in the director’s chair facing a wall of screens, each of which was fed by mobile cameras in the field. The watchers working this case were “wired up,” which was actually a misnomer, because each had a microscopic wireless plug buried in one ear. Each was also “miked�
�� with a transmission device so sensitive and multidirectional that it captured both nearby voices and background noise. Sergeant Winter was wired up and ready for action, but as commander of this intricate operation, DeClercq had headphones clamped over both ears so nothing distracted his focus.

  Yamada bowed.

  DeClercq swiveled his chair, releasing an earphone so they could talk.

  “The situation is worse than we thought this morning. In addition to killing Colonel Chuck Hett and launching a kamikaze dive at the convention center, Genjo Tokuda and his gang have abducted both Colonel Joe Hett and his granddaughter, Corporal Jackie Hett, whom you met in my office.”

  “He’ll kill them,” stated the diplomat.

  “I know,” said the chief. “We don’t know where Corporal Hett is, but we’re tracking the car with Colonel Hett in it through the foggy West End.”

  DeClercq gestured toward the bank of screens, each of which was fuzzy with so much haze that it looked like static.

  “Does Tokyo understand that I will do what I have to do?”

  “Yes,” confirmed the consul.

  “Good,” said the Mountie, indicating the MOU in Winter’s grasp. “Does the memorandum of understanding cover whatever eventualities I might face?”

  “Tokyo knows Tokuda.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “The document can be read that way.”

  “Then that’s how I’ll read it. I’m going to turn on the speakers so you can follow along. It’s cramped in here, but I’m sure we can find you a seat. Sergeant Winter will explain what we’re doing. Please excuse me. I must get back to work.”

  On one of the screens, a car was taking shape in the fog.

  DeClercq flicked on the speakers.

  “I’m picking up a fare,” reported one of the feet. “Southbound on Jervis. He’s inching along.”

  “That’s taxi talk,” the sergeant explained. “You’ll hear a lot of that. Back in the early days of Special O, all frequencies were open. There were no ciphered channels. Because what they said could be monitored by crooks with receivers, the watchers communicated with cryptic talk that mimicked cabbies working the streets.”

  “Tricky,” said Yamada.

  “You’ll hear, ‘I’m occupied.’ Or, ‘He’s in my pocket.’ That means they’ve found the target. ‘I’m dropping off my fare’ tells us the target is exiting from his car. ‘I’m out of pocket’ or ‘I’m vacant’ means a watcher has lost his target. ‘VCB’—or visual contact broken—is what’s used if the target is temporarily out of sight. The sort of loss that happens if a truck cuts in. ‘VCB vacant’ is the worst of all. That means the target is lost and the speaker has no idea where it is.”

  “The crooks have escaped?” said Yamada.

  “And the operation has failed.”

  The same car that had appeared on the initial screen was slowly materializing on a second.

  “I’ve got the wheels,” a new voice reported through the command van’s speakers.

  “That’s one of the younger guys,” Winter said, “so no taxi talk. At the moment, Special O is going through a shakeup. The oldsters who go back to day one are nearing retirement. In thirty years on the force, some never left the section. They see themselves as shadows, plain and simple. Taxi talk is their signature, though it’s no longer needed, and they don’t get involved in takedowns.”

  “Pros,” said Yamada, with respect.

  “The new blood is full of piss and vinegar,” Winter said. “Like so many people these days, they have short attention spans. Special O is no longer seen as a career assignment. The youngsters transition the section to get good at surveillance, before heading out to mix it up as regular Mounties. And if an O operation results in a takedown, they’re champing at the bit to get their hands dirty.”

  “Amateurs,” said Yamada.

  “But good for the section. Sure, there’s friction, but the dynamic is healthy. The newer guys are giving the older guys a shot of Viagra.”

  “Team leader?” A different voice.

  “I’m listening,” replied DeClercq.

  “Since I got pitched, I’ve been walking a dog down Jervis. Aren’t there supposed to be two targets?”

  “Yes,” said the chief.

  “One behind the other?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “All I can see is one car blocking the road, and all the feet seem to have the eye on it.”

  The fog and the counter-surveillance car.

  Two wild cards.

  And reacting to both had broken up Oscar’s five-car plan.

  The five feet too. The two wild cards had broken up their plan as well.

  Normally, pitching the feet worked like this: Each car had both a driver and a rider known as “the foot.” The vehicles tailed the target by cycling through their five-car ballet until the target got ready to “lay down the wheels.” The moment the bad guys began to park their car, each driver had to surreptitiously pitch his foot so the foot trackers could pick up the tail. At that point, the drivers “buried” their cars, blending into the background while finding parking spots. The others continued the ballet on foot.

  The first foot was control.

  The second was his backdoor.

  The third was double back.

  And the last two flanked the backdoor as parallels.

  Pitching the feet, like surveillance, was an art. You had to stay far enough back not to be noticed but close enough to switch to shoe leather. And you had to perform both in a way that appeared natural, in case you were being watched by a counter-surveillance team.

  It was like “Spy vs. Spy” in Mad magazine.

  The wild cards, however, had undermined that, forcing Special O to pitch the feet from parallel streets, and when none of the watchers had the eye, T1 had slipped away in the fog while T2 fell back to run interference.

  It was decision time.

  Lives hung in the balance.

  With T1 gone, there could be no error with T2 or DeClercq would have the Hetts’ blood on his hands.

  “Who’s not VCB vacant on T1?” he asked.

  Dead air.

  “Is T2 moving?”

  “Negative, Chief.”

  “What’s going on inside?”

  “Hard to tell. Tinted windows and all. I can see the lit-up screen of a navigation system.”

  “That’s what we’re up against. A digital map. T2 can navigate this city on the fly.”

  “If we lose them, game over,” warned one of the feet.

  “Okay,” DeClercq decided. “Here’s what we do.”

  The plan he laid out was overheard by every ear wired to the ciphered channel.

  That’s why they paid him the big bucks.

  “Take them,” ordered the chief.

  Fixed Bayonets

  The members of the Emergency Response Team—ERT, to the Mounties—drove Chevrolet Suburbans big enough to muscle other cars off the road. When it came to vehicular takedowns, the goal was to wrest control, and they didn’t want the bad guys elbowing their bulk on through. Instead, they tried to hit them hard, cut them off, and pinch them in, jamming them from both sides. Hitting them hard was taken very literally—the bigger the bang, the better—and during those precious few seconds when the bad guys were stunned, the Mounties would smash windows with hand-held battering rams and blow the occupants away the instant they drew guns.

  Normally, that was just common sense.

  Live and let die.

  But today, DeClercq had said, “I want the car in one piece.”

  An ERT package usually shadowed Oscar from way back, biding time until the command was given to move in. But this was going to be hand-to-hand with fixed bayonets, so the Mad Dog and Ghost Keeper parked their wheels at Robson and Jervis and began to sneak in on foot.

  Ordinarily, black was the color of an ERT cop’s garb. Pull-down balaclava cap to cover the face. Turtleneck beneath a combat jacket over cargo pants. Tactical vest with movable
Velcro pouches stuffed with tear gas, pepper spray, ammo clips, and stun grenades. Nine mil on the hip and a submachine gun in the hands. Still, this was the Great White North, so the team also had winter camouflage. In the white wear the Cree and the Mad Dog pulled on, they looked like ghosts in the fog.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Let’s do it,” Ghost Keeper said.

  They called themselves the Assassins, the triad inside T2. All were lean, mean, and hungry, and on their way up in the yakuza. Back in Tokyo, they had jumped at the chance to make their bones for the legendary kumicho, Genjo Tokuda. So now here they idled, blocking the street in case any cops were on their tail, while the Claw made a getaway with the old American who was marked for death.

  “Anything behind us?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  The Assassin in back was squinting out the rear window.

  “The man with the dog?”

  “Nothing. He vanished into the fog.”

  “We’ll wait a minute more. Then we’ll vanish too.”

  “I’m north on Jervis, nearing Barclay,” Craven said into his mike.

  “I’m east on Barclay, nearing Jervis,” said a gruff voice in the plug in his ear.

  “Hang on.”

  “You too.”

  Bang!

  They collided.

  The impact of the collision spun both Oscar cars around a quarter turn, effectively blocking the hazy intersection just a few car lengths in front of the target vehicle.

  “You stupid asshole!” Craven shouted as he staggered out into the mist, holding a hand to his temple.

  “Fuck you!” the other driver shouted back, waving a clenched fist as he emerged from his door.

  “I had the right of way, dick wad!”

  “You were speeding.”

  “Yeah, sure. In this weather.”

  “Come here and I’ll knock your block off!”

  “You and whose army?”

  “Just me, you dumb cocksucker!”

  And that was it. The street fighters might as well have been rolling up their sleeves as they closed on each other in between their banged-up cars.