A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  Swagger sucked hard for oxygen. God, where was his second wind?

  “Swagger, let me finish it. No need to go out on a bad cut, screaming, your guts hanging out. I can put an instant end to your suffering.”

  Swagger responded to the offer with a diagonal issued from on high that was so awkward and poorly timed it was almost an insult to Kondo. It missed by what felt like seven yards. He had almost nothing left.

  “Just let me end it now, fast and clean, old lion.”

  Bob didn’t take the advice, as expressed in shinchokugiri, a vertical downward, but badly out of timing and harmless.

  “If you didn’t kill me early, you aren’t killing me at all,” Kondo said. “Okay. I offered. I pay my respects. This has been great. You’re a valiant guy. But the party’s over. Five hard cuts and you’ll only be able to stay with me through four. I know you will die strong, great samurai.”

  “Fuck you” was all the blown man’s wretched mind could come up with.

  “Hai!” screamed Kondo.

  The blows came so fast Swagger’s eyes could not stay with them, only the dying warrior reptile far inside took over his instincts and got soft parries on the first left-hand diagonal, the second left-hand diagonal, somehow got horizontal for a harder, low-blade block on a vertical, lurched to the right to dissuade the fourth, now right-handed diagonal, and dropped to come against the final side cut, the yokogiri.

  No time.

  No gas.

  No speed.

  His blade couldn’t catch up with the blur of steel that seemed to pick up acceleration as it vectored hard to his body.

  It was perfect yokogiri, with Kondo’s full might and genius behind it, and as he knew it would, it flew true into the shred of opening under Bob’s lagging defense. Kondo had an image, almost of woodcut clarity, of what must happen next.

  Yakiba—tempered edge—sheers through hip bone, shattering it, continues downward, shattering the femur ball by the inevitable physics of its own impact reverberation, then shatters the femur itself and with it nips the femoral artery, that torrent of blood. Sundered, the femoral deposits its fluid in midair in a fine and driving rush to turn the snow below to purple slush. The blade itself, far from spent, cleaves through what remains of flesh, breaks free, its amputation complete, and Bob falls as he exsanguinates. Clinical death is possibly not instantaneous but certainly occurs within eight seconds.

  Yet even as his brain told Kondo that must happen, it did not happen. Instead odd vibrations of uncertainty came his way, as he felt the cut stop hard and shallow and his own hilt torque wildly, almost out of his hands, though he was fast enough to recover even as an old adage somehow came to mind. Who said it? Where? When? Why was it so familiar?

  Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel.

  He struggled to regain timing but was not quite fast enough.

  It was the migi kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, the scythe cut, Swagger’s best, honed on desert slopes under a hard and ceaseless sun. For his part, bad old Muramasa was with it all the way. His blade hungered for blood, driving up from just above the hip, through hoses and ducts and wet linkages and mechanics, through a whole anatomy lesson of viscera, splitting them wide so they could jet-empty their contents upon the snow. It wasn’t Swagger’s best cut, for it wore out at the halfway point before cutting the spine, much less the lungs. But even Doshu would have counted it adequate.

  He withdrew, and seeing that which was far as if close and that which was close as if far, segued rather gracefully from recovery into the next most accessible position, which was kasumi (“mist”), a horizontal, over-the-shoulders construction supported on reversed wrists.

  “Feel the fear at last?” Bob asked, and maybe saw a glint of it in the man’s stricken face: I am mortal, I will die, my time is up, why why why?

  Bob’s kasumi then transcended miraculously and of its own volition into tsuki, not well aimed but well enough as it punctured and passed through Kondo’s throat, splitting his larynx and jugular, half-severing his spine, and weirdly sustaining him in midfall for a half-second before withdrawal.

  Kondo toppled, issuing fiery liquids from his ruptures. His face was blank, his eyes distant, his mouth slack. When he hit, a reddened puff of snow flew up.

  Swagger stood back from the carnage and his hand flew to his hip, where the steel inserted courtesy of a Russian sniper in Vietnam decades ago had stopped Kondo’s brilliant cut. It was Swagger’s only card, and he’d been wise enough to play it last. The cut was precise butchery, smooth but shallow, and some black gruel pulsed from it, but it wasn’t geysering spectacularly, meaning no artery had been cut. Bob got a pouch of QuiKlot out, tore the top off with his teeth, and poured the clotting agent into the wound, knowing again that stitches were mandatory within an hour, if he had the strength. Then he poured more on the bloodier cut on his left shoulder.

  Christ, it hurt.

  He retreated, found his saya, and stood for a second.

  Do it right, he thought. Thank the fucking sword.

  Feeling foolish and white, he held the weapon horizontally before him and bowed to the little Japanese god inside the steel, and said arigato as best he could. Then since the thing wore a dapple of disfiguration, he snapped it hard to the right, flinging its contents off to splatter an abstraction on the snow—chiburi, in the vernacular, big in all the movies.

  Now noto: he sheathed the sword, as ceremony demanded, drawing the dull spine of the blade through his left hand and fingers while clutching the saya’s opening until he reached the tip, then smoothly snared the tip in the opening, then ran the wood casing up to absorb and protect the blade, the whole move ending with a gentle snap as tsuba met wood.

  His watch read 5:39 a.m., Tokyo time. He turned and looked at the body of the man he had killed. Kondo lay in a sherbet field of blood and snow, and the spurting had stopped. It was only drainage now. Somewhere a big fat golden carp came to a placid surface and seemed to burp, leaving a widening burst of rings in its passing.

  Swagger looked back at the body. He could have taken the head as he’d promised. But really—what was the point?

  46

  OFFICE POLITICS

  She arrived at the American embassy promptly at 8:45 because nowadays it took a good fifteen minutes to get through security. She wore a new Burberry pantsuit she’d bought recently at Takashimaya, a smartly tailored pinstripe on gray wool, a white silk blouse and pearls, a pair of Christian Louboutin round-toed platform pumps, her Armani horn-rims. Her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, her foundation Lanvin, her blush Revlon, her mascara Shiseido.

  She got to his office exactly at nine and, of course, he let her wait ten minutes, a kind of humiliation ordeal—more of which would be coming her way, assuming she survived the next few minutes in any case—then he ushered her in.

  “So nice of you to join us, Susan.”

  “Doug, I’m very sorry, I—”

  Doug had graduated from Annapolis, and though he had never had a command at sea, his office was filled with nautical gewgaws, like brass sextants, charts, gaffs. In office lore it was called “the Bridge,” though never when he was around. He was the sort of man who demanded results yesterday but then forgot to ask for them tomorrow.

  “Sit down, sit down.”

  She sat opposite: he was a large-headed, red-faced beefy man, ten years older, from an old family that was by reputation third-generation Agency. His hair was a brusque graying crew cut and he wore his suit jacket at his desk. He was a well-studied imitation of the man Swagger represented naturally, without self-consciousness or reflection.

  “Look, I shouldn’t have to give a pro like you pointers, but goddammit, I have to be able to reach you twenty-four hours a day. That’s why we have cell phones, pagers, the like. It doesn’t work if you turn the goddamn things off.”

  “I didn’t turn anything off. I just didn’t answer because I was in an awkward situation.”

  “Anythi
ng you care to discuss with your chief of station?”

  “It’s all right, Doug. It was a Swagger issue.”

  “I told you the Swagger thing wouldn’t work. He’s too old, he’s too slow, he’s too stubborn, he’s nothing but trouble.”

  Like to hear you say that to Swagger, asshole.

  But she played his game: “I know it was my idea to bring the guy back. He proved harder to manage than I thought. However, now it’s fine, it’s great, I’ll have him out of country as soon as I can make arrangements. He made some progress. He—”

  “I want a report. First thing tomorrow.”

  “Sure. Is that all? I—”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no, it’s not over, Susan. This isn’t just more Swagger bullshit. That was just the start. The issue is much more serious. As in, Why the fuck did you send an unauthorized request to SAT-D to orbital on seven houses and thirteen business locations in the greater Tokyo area?”

  “Oh, that?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “It was mission-related.”

  “There is a big flap at Langley.”

  “I made a judgment, possibly it was wrong. I had to confirm something fast.”

  With an egomaniac like Doug it was important to show contrition. Defiance simply enraged him, and enraged, he was even more erratic than when calm.

  “Tell me why it was so goddamned important for the birds to eyeball Japanese mansions and warehouses when they could have been looking at North Korean launch sites, Chinese naval bases, Taliban outposts, or god knows what?”

  “I have a guy who has a network, mostly low-grade stuff, but you never can tell. Somehow he picked up a whiff that a certain ultra-wealthy Japanese national had sympathies in a certain direction and was unstable. It wasn’t enough for any hard action. I didn’t put surveillance on him, I didn’t discuss him with Japanese intelligence, because we knew he’d hear. I didn’t try to penetrate or eavesdrop, I didn’t recruit within his organization. But I decided on a look-see.”

  “Come on, Susan. You’re stalling. Why, please?”

  “Doug, there are a lot of tall buildings in Tokyo. If someone flew an airliner into one of them, we’d look foolish. Plus, it would kill a lot of people. I was trying to split the hair between being overreactive and being responsible. I was trying to do my job. I flash-prioritized it over your signature because if you don’t, it takes weeks. You weren’t around to sign off, as I recall.”

  “You can use that one to justify anything, Susan.”

  “Yes, Doug. I know. However—”

  “What did you find out about Mr. Miwa?”

  “Oh, at Langley they made the connect?”

  “And how. They are not pleased. What did you learn?”

  “Well, frankly, nothing. At one mansion there was what might be termed unusual activity. That is, a great many people, vehicles, a lot of movement outside in the courtyard. Possibly it was a business conference, possibly a company retreat of some sort, even some kind of reunion. Then it occurred to me, since I’d looked into him, that it might have been yakuza-related. I believe he has yakuza ties. But the infrared picked up no concentration of explosives, the spectroscope didn’t indicate nuclear, and we don’t have bio-chem sensors yet.”

  “Susan, assure me you didn’t muss, even slightly, Yuichi Miwa’s hair.”

  Hmmm, Susan wondered, does cutting his fucking head off count as mussing his hair?

  “Doug, no entity under any possibility of my influence or under my direction has had anything to do with Yuichi Miwa. We looked at him from three miles up, that’s all. It couldn’t have been softer or more discreet. If anybody finds out, it’s because of a leak somewhere, nothing that I have done or caused to have done.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I was going to eyeball him from upstairs another few times, just to make certain. Maybe I’d put some discreet feelers out. That’s it. I was just checking.”

  Doug sat back. He looked immensely relieved.

  “Okay, fine. Good. The man is not to be touched, even watched. He is to be utterly ignored.”

  “Of course.”

  “Strictly hands off. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “Until you figure out how to destroy him.”

  “Ahhh—”

  “That’s why they’re in such a frenzy at Langley. That’s what this is all about.”

  He reached into his desk, pulled out a large folder wearing the usual TOP SECRET stamps across its top.

  “The file on Miwa-san. It’s come to our attention that some years back, Miwa-san almost went under. He owed yakuza, he owed banks, the whole thing was going away. He convinced himself it was an American plot against him, that the mafia wanted to crack Japanese porn and to do so they had to destroy him. He was Japanese porn; he was Japan, for god’s sake. So he turned for help to the enemy of his enemies, the North Koreans; he told them if they helped him, his newspapers would always sing their song. They funded him. They can’t feed their own people, but they’re giving millions to a Japanese pornographer to produce DVDs the likes of which I can’t even begin to describe.”

  “Teacher-blows-Johnny.”

  “Thank you, Susan. I knew I could count on you. Anyhow, he turned it around, got in on the Internet early, found some disgusting niches, pushed the technological edge, made sharp investments, and became a major, major billionaire. So your boy’s sense of him may be right. We just have to coordinate all this and stay organized.”

  “I have it.”

  “Now he’s involved in some election for the king of pornography or something. It’s all in here. He’s got to win that election, he’s got to find some way to make himself an institution. He’s got to do something big, to get all the mucky-mucks and all the little people behind him.”

  She just smiled a bit. Nick had it a week ago. He beat Langley’s bright boys by seven full days.

  “If he wins, the next step will be the bestowal of something called the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum on him, Japan’s highest civilian honor. He’s had lobbyists pushing that in the Diet for months now.”

  Now there was something new.

  “That will have the impact of instantly legitimizing him, and it’ll gain him access, influence, and so forth. He’s a North Korean agent. He’ll be set to get them stuff on the Japanese and on us they’ve never gotten before.”

  “Do the Japanese know this?”

  “No. One of our listeners is in North Korea, and if we tell the Japanese, they will understand we have a good North Korean earhole. Then maybe someone finds that out from them. Do you see?”

  “Of course.”

  “Susan, make up for your bad judgment on Swagger and put it all behind you. This will take all your creativity and imagination. It’s your number one priority now: you must figure out a way to derail the Miwa express, but you must do it in a fashion that leaves no footprints to us. We must appear entirely innocent and uninvolved. But he has to go down before his big PR push makes him legit and the emperor gives him that award. You’ve got to somehow move through Japanese entities, perhaps in ways that they themselves won’t even recognize. It won’t be easy; you have somehow got to do it, Susan. Your job and my job depend on it.”

  “What’s the time frame?” Susan asked.

  “Well, you’ll need a week or so to recon and develop some sources, another to come up with an operating plan, we’ll have to get it approved, then you’ll have to staff it. You’ve got at least three months. No more. I know it’s hard, but sometimes we have to do the hard thing.”

  “Okay,” said Susan, “suppose I can bring it off by…four thirty this afternoon?”

  “What? Susan, this isn’t a joke. This isn’t—”

  “Doug, do I look like I’m joking?”

  “I—well, aren’t you overconfident?”

  “Doug, you’re scheduled to rotate back to Langley in the spring. Are they going to bring in another stateside tool to be head of station?”

>   “Susan, that’s not fair.”

  “Focus, Doug. Nothing personal, but I’m so tired of answering to tools. By four thirty today, Doug. All right? And then by five thirty you’ve sent the first of many, many wires in which you single me out for extraordinary praise and recommend to all your old-fart buddies I get head of station here. Do we have an understanding?”

  “What do you know that—”

  “Do we have an understanding?”

  Actually, the announcement of Miwa Yuichi’s death of “natural causes” came at 3:25; she beat the deadline by an hour and five minutes.

  47

  NOTO

  He came out of unconsciousness on the second day and floated through a semiconscious state, aware of bindings on many parts of his body, aware of the ceiling, of the occasional Japanese medical staffer, and the slow passage of time.

  On the third day, he could sit upright, and some clarity and memory returned; on the fourth, more clarity, more memory. It was around then that his Japanese caretakers were subtly replaced by two clean-cut American boys, whom he took to be, on no evidence except that they called him Gunny, navy corpsmen working in mufti. They were good kids, though, and who knew from what secret installation they had been assigned.

  On the fifth, his brain had settled enough so that he could watch the television. He quickly discovered a nation in—well, not exactly mourning but something like morbid fascination, perhaps, a sense of mass irony, perhaps, a secret pleasure in the tragedy of the other. This was occasioned by the sudden death of Yuichi Miwa, aka “the Shogun,” one of Japan’s leading geniuses of the silver screen, the porn billionaire, the founder of the aggressive Shogunate AV company, and later publisher, radio station owner, media mogul, playboy, and nationalist crusader.

  Swagger watched without comment the coverage on bilingual TV news. The man, by rumors all but awarded the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum, had died suddenly of a stroke. Swagger was one of the few who knew whose stroke it was, and with which weapon it had been delivered. But watching, Swagger could tell: the Japanese weren’t that broken up about it, not really. Miwa was, after all, a pornographer. In any event, soon enough the news passed from attention.