Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  Unfortunately for the Funabashi gang’s subordinates, such direction was in short supply on that side. Infighting among the various Funabashi mafia factions had started no more than twelve hours after Vasilev’s death. There were three potential new bosses, and they were all about as weak as each other with roughly equal support among the lower ranks. Most of the lower-ranking members just wanted someone, anyone, to take command. Right now, they were disorganised and the Shiroi attacks had taken them by surprise. The situation would have turned into a massacre if the riot squads had not turned up to intervene. The Shiroi groups retreated as soon as armed police turned up, but that turn of events was no predictor of what would happen as things got worse.

  Tatsu sat in her apartment, wearing combat armour and watching the situation unfold on tactical feeds from HQ and the riot units. No one had asked her to lend a hand yet, so she watched. When things started to get really bad, that was when she would be called in.

  There were flare-ups all along the Funabashi territorial borders by midnight. The Chinese gangs were hitting the Mihama Yankees on two fronts, so the tongs had decided that they needed to get involved. There were even reports of Hispanic gangs arriving in Funabashi territory around Mimomi and Yachiyo. But it was still brushfire war, proxy war. None of the major players were getting involved yet. Everyone was acting through the expendable pawns they used to distribute and smuggle drugs.

  By the time dawn broke, the fighting had stopped. There had been a few arrests, but nothing major. It was not going to end there.

  7th September.

  The escalation began in the early hours of Monday morning, but did not really make itself known until darkness fell again that night. Tatsu had spent some time during the day going over a Shiroi drug lab which seemed to have been hit with more precision than might be expected of the local street gangs and had suggested that the major players were starting to act. There had been little to be done about it then, but she had been listened to. She could not fault her superiors for ignoring her.

  She continued to not find fault as she worked through a warehouse structure in the docks, backed up by a team of riot officers, as they tried to stop the battle inside from escalating to take in the whole area. It was not easy. They were dealing with Funabashi and Shiroi mafia with military weapons and armour. The warehouse was full of crates stacked high in blocks, and there were overhead walkways which the criminals were using.

  It was from one of those walkways that a metal ball fell, hitting the ground right beside Tatsu, bouncing once, and then exploding. The blast hit her in the back, and she felt several fragments hitting her legs. There were some cries from the officers behind her, but Tatsu barely noticed the concussion. She raised her rifle and fired into the walkway. The thin metal provided almost no protection to the men above her and they fell, metal needles driven at high speed into the legs.

  ‘Get anyone badly hurt out,’ Tatsu ordered over the communications link with her team.

  ‘No major injuries,’ came back from the squad leader. The body armour they were all wearing was not exactly military grade, but it was close. Soldiers in the JSDF wore powered armour now and that had not been felt to be a requirement for police officers, even riot squads, but they were all decked out in monocrystalline suits with a tactical vest fitted with trauma plates over the top of that. Their helmets came with infrared vision, built-in radio and GPS, hearing protection, and air filtration. For Tatsu, that was all over her natural armour.

  Injuries were a concern. Some of the bad guys were using coilguns, and the hypervelocity needles fired from those could penetrate fairly thick armour. Most of the injuries being taken were to the limbs, however, since the vests did not protect there. They were not usually life threatening. Of course, the Russians could wear armour too.

  ‘Move up,’ Tatsu ordered. ‘Two groups either side of me. We clear as we find them. Watch out for more grenades.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Tatsu stepped forward, her rifle held at her hip. It made no real difference where it was; she had the view from its sights in her sensorium and anything which got into those sights was going to discover that it was a bad day to be a bad guy.

  ~~~

  A report came through on the robot Tatsu had trashed at Vasilev’s apartment building while she was being driven to yet another war zone. It was not especially encouraging reading and she could have done with some encouragement about then.

  There was nothing specifically custom about the machine. It had been constructed from parts you could buy at just about any hobbyist shop or online, aside from the weapon, of course. The construction was unique, however. It followed no commercially available design, so it had been built either by or for the killer. Analysis of the software indicated that that was a commercial design, but not one that should have been available to a hobbyist. The killer had access to military hardware and software from somewhere, but that was hardly impossible if you cultivated the right contacts.

  Forensics had found a partial fingerprint, probably a right index finger, on one of the circuit boards. They had not managed to match it to anyone yet, but they were still looking.

  Basically, aside from taking one of the killer’s toys off the table, trashing the robot had got Tatsu nowhere. Right now, that was not really a major issue since her quarry had achieved what she had apparently set out to do: start a war in Chiba. The armoured van Tatsu was riding in came to a stop and she pushed out through the rear door.

  This was going to be a room-clearance operation. The criminals involved were occupying a disused apartment block. Well, disused by all except for the Funabashi gang members who had been running a brothel out of it and, right now, the Císhàn tong members who had decided to end that. There were flames pouring out of a couple of windows and gunshots could be heard from within.

  ‘There are civilians in here,’ Tatsu said. ‘We take it slowly and carefully. Check your targets.’

  ‘Understood, Sergeant.’

  Tatsu had a strong feeling they were going to be carrying body bags out of this one with relatively innocent young women in them. Hopefully, not too many of those would be down to police gunfire.

  8th September.

  Sachiko was a little surprised to see Tatsu on her door screen. It was far from being an unpleasant surprise, however, and she opened the door immediately. ‘Hi! I thought you’d be up to your neck in gangsters with machine guns.’

  Tatsu stepped inside and let the door close behind her. Then she propped her rifle against the wall. Then she said, ‘They have to let us rest occasionally. I wasn’t far from here and I thought I’d check up on you.’

  Sachiko slumped onto her stool, pulling one knee up under her chin. She was dressed in a thong at ten in the morning and her bed was unmade. ‘Bored,’ she said. ‘The Hole is closed until further notice. It’s too dangerous to have it open. I’ve not got much to do aside from streaming whatever boring crap is available while keeping an eye on the news feeds. It doesn’t seem to have got too close to here yet. You, uh, you smell kind of weird.’

  ‘Explosives residue, probably. Kind of acrid?’ That got a nod. ‘There have been grenades and a lot of propellent. I’ve stopped noticing it.’

  ‘G-grenades? Are you okay?’

  Tatsu grinned. ‘Worried about me? Not had a scratch.’ The grin vanished. ‘But staying inside and out of this is a good idea. So far, they’re sticking to after dark, so you should be good to go out shopping during the day. But keep your eyes open.’

  ‘Any signs of it ending?’

  Tatsu shook her head. ‘The Funabashi gang are still trying to work out who should be the new leader. They’re not that organised and they’re still fighting back. If they get behind one candidate, things could turn really nasty.’

  ‘You think that’ll happen before the Shiroi lot or the tongs finish them?’

  ‘Yes. Whether it’ll happen soon enough is another matter.’

  Nodding, Sachiko looked around at her ro
om for a second. ‘Uh, want to stay for a bit? Relieve the boredom and some stress, you know?’

  ‘Sounds great, but I need to go home and sleep. I’ve got about eight hours before I’ll need to be out there again.’

  ‘Another reason to hate the mafia then: they’re messing up my love life.’

  Tatsu turned and picked up her rifle. ‘You and me both.’

  9th September.

  Tatsu spotted a van pulling up outside a small factory in Kamagaya and immediately started toward it. By the time she got there, Yamauchi and Suzuki were climbing out, both wearing ballistic vests. The reporter’s vest was over the top of one of her ubiquitous summer dresses, and it looked a lot like they were planning to do a report.

  ‘Make sure you get the cordon in shot,’ Yamauchi said. Then she spotted Tatsu closing on her and said, ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Yamauchi?’ Tatsu asked. ‘Do you have trauma plates in those vests? Because I’m guessing not, so they’re going to do squat to stop an armour-piercing round from giving you a really bad day.’

  ‘What’s a trauma plate?’ Yamauchi asked. She shook her head. ‘Not the point. The channel finally agreed to let me come out and shoot some extra footage for my report. You’ve got a siege going on here.’

  It was, in fact, mid-afternoon and there was indeed a siege. A large number of Shiroi gangsters had been traced back to the factory. The police had surrounded the place and were being held off with assault weapons, a few heavier pieces, and a lot of grenades. A number of anti-personnel mines had been identified at the entrances. It was something of a standoff, and it was not that far from the boundary between Chiba and Tokyo which ran through the Kamagaya district. At least it was daylight, even if that meant Tatsu was running on minimal sleep.

  ‘You can hear the gunfire from the apartment buildings over the border,’ Yamauchi went on. ‘It’s a matter of public interest that–’

  ‘I’m more concerned about your interest,’ Tatsu said. ‘They have at least two sniper railguns in there. They see a van from TNM out here, they might decide to bag themselves a wild reporter.’

  In Tatsu’s ear, one of the squad leaders was reporting. ‘… signs of movement. One of the loading bay doors is opening.’

  ‘I’ve a right to risk myself for a good story if I want to,’ Yamauchi said. ‘This is going to make a great– What the fuck is that?!’

  Tatsu could see it in the view from the squad leader’s helmet camera. A massive, blobby shape was moving out into the factory’s loading yard. Its body seemed to have been constructed of a number of interlocked, metal spheres. Then someone had bolted blocky robotic arms and legs onto that. The arms were holding a big gun, probably a gauss minigun, an electromagnetic machinegun. There was no sign of a faceplate, but there were things which looked like eyes mounted on the uppermost sphere. It stood a good two and a half metres tall and had to weigh a tonne or so. ‘Down,’ Tatsu said, dropping to the ground just before the weapon the thing was holding opened up like a firehose of mass destruction.

  Yamauchi demonstrated that her reflexes were fairly good. ‘What is it?’ she asked again, now from a position on the tarmac beside Tatsu.

  ‘It’s a repurposed D-DOPS,’ Tatsu replied. She went on before Yamauchi could ask the obvious question. ‘That’s a deep-dive operations suit. They’re used to work on the sea floor out beyond the continental shelf. Heavily armoured, obviously. The limbs are motorised so it can handle that minigun well enough. Normally, those things are mounted on vehicles. The suit’s clumsy, but with the rate of fire that gun has, it doesn’t really matter, and our rifles aren’t going to penetrate that armour.’ She reached behind her back and pulled her pistol out of its holster.

  ‘So, you’re going to shoot it with a pistol?’

  Tatsu dropped the magazine. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What do you mean, not yet?’

  A second magazine was slotted into position. Tatsu checked the load. ‘Whoever’s in there is firing at the full cyclic rate and hosing the place down. We’re probably going to need new riot vans after this. However, at that rate, he’s going to run out of ammo after only about–’ Silence, or a near approximation, fell. ‘That long.’

  Rolling into a crouch, Tatsu raised her pistol and took aim. Across the parking lot, the bulky suit was busy swapping the massive ammo cassette slung beneath its weapon. Tatsu pumped out three rounds from her pistol as the replacement cassette was being lifted into position. Three explosions blossomed on the blobby suit’s torso, if it could be said to really have one. Masked by the small outer detonations, each round became a sphere of superheated gas which lanced through the hull of the monster machine and into the body within. The arms stopped moving. First the ammo cassette and then the minigun dropped from the metal hands. The pressure suit listed forward, seeming to refuse to fall for a second or so before gravity delivered the final verdict. With an almighty clang, the D-DOPS crashed to the ground.

  ‘With a pistol!’ Yamauchi squeaked. ‘Tell me you got that, Shisen?’

  ‘I got it,’ Suzuki replied. Tatsu hoped that he had got up into a kneeling position when she had. Otherwise, the man was a bigger idiot than she thought. ‘Not sure how good it’ll look on-screen, but I got it.’

  ‘That was amazing! Does every cop have one of those pistols? I mean, nothing could stand up to that. You–’

  ‘I’m glad they didn’t get their hands on some real military hardware,’ Tatsu cut in. ‘D-DOPS are tough, but compared to a modern battlesuit… However, enough is enough.’ She cut in her radio feed. ‘Someone get some assault drones in here and level the place. I think we’re past pissing around.’

  Yamauchi’s eyes widened. Was she really calling for what amounted to an air strike?

  ‘Yes, I mean it,’ Tatsu said, obviously talking to someone else but answering Yamauchi’s unspoken question. ‘They’ve got too many heavy weapons to be messing around. We’ve lost… at least three AVs here and there are wounded men for sure. Get it done.’ She turned to look at Yamauchi. ‘I’d suggest backing off. We will be.’

  ‘You’re going to blow them up?’

  ‘Unless they come running out with their hands up when the drones arrive, yeah. Things around here have got way too serious. And that’s without the Funabashi gang being up to full strength. What happens when they elect a new leader is anyone’s guess.’

  ‘It could get worse?’

  ‘A lot worse.’

  ~~~

  The Funabashi gang was celebrating. In the middle of a war for their survival, the upper ranks had put aside their guns and set up shop in a hotel they owned, and they were drinking to the health of their new leader, Ilia Viktorov. They had started in daylight, and there were a lot of guards, but Tatsu still felt it was stupid. Now, with almost no light left in the sky, it just seemed stupider.

  Given that Tatsu had managed to infiltrate the building and was watching the proceedings from a cracked-open fire door, the guards were not doing an especially good job. The party was ongoing in the hotel’s restaurant, a room which afforded plenty of cover should a fight break out. It was not like the gang members were entirely unarmed; they had put down their weapons, but most of them had put them down on the tables they were sitting at. They were stupid – all gathering in one place to make it easy to end them – but not entirely brain dead.

  And the cover just made it easier to listen in on Viktorov’s speeches, of which there had been more than one. He was not the obvious choice for the new boss; he had been the leader of the support group up until today. It seemed likely that he was the least worst choice, the compromise candidate, though his section did planning and resource management, so maybe they thought a strategist was a good choice at the moment.

  ‘We will leave here and take our territory back,’ Viktorov was saying. ‘Maybe we take some of the Shiroi territory and give those Chinese fuckers a beating too.’ He was not a big man. He looked more like a planner than a warrior. Blonde and fairly hand
some. A lover, not a fighter. Until he opened his mouth, it seemed. ‘How, you ask? I am in logistics. I have a shipment of… useful items coming in in the next hour which will make things far more interesting. There are some very big fireworks in this party pack. They won’t know what has hit them.’

  Great. He was shipping in some really heavy armaments. Speculation on what was pointless, but Tatsu figured it would be messy. Missiles? Missiles seemed likely, maybe with thermobaric warheads. Okay, so it was difficult not to speculate. That was going to need stopping.

  ‘Intelligence says that those Shiratori bastards are starting to make a play,’ Viktorov went on. That was news to Tatsu. ‘We find them and send them back across the border. In body bags, obviously.’ That got cheers. The cheers were still dying when one of the doors into the restaurant burst open and a pair of flying robots buzzed in.

  The twin agents of death were opening fire before anyone could get to a weapon. Men fell, riddled with needles. Tatsu recognised the machines and pushed her door open, stepping into the room to look for the assassin. And then all hell broke loose.

  ‘They’re here to finish us!’ Exactly who shouted it, Tatsu was not sure, but the result was immediate and consisted of a lot of flying lead.

  A shotgun slug hit Tatsu’s chest, low on the left side, stopping against the trauma plate in her vest. She turned and put a needle in the gunman’s right arm, disarming him almost literally as the bone was cleaved in two. Then she shifted her aim, raising her weapon to her shoulder and tracking one of the robots across the room. She fired a ten-round burst, hitting with three of the needles, and the bot twisted in the air as though flinching. But then it just kept on firing, so Tatsu fired again. This time it dropped out of the air, fans buzzing fitfully, and someone noticed the machine lying on the carpet and blasted it with a shotgun. One down, probably.

  One of the nearby thugs had decided to take on Tatsu hand-to-hand. Well, shotgun butt-to-hand; he swung his weapon like a club at Tatsu’s head and she ducked under it before shooting him at point-blank range in the gut. ‘Get out of my way, idiots!’ Tatsu yelled. ‘She’s here for your new boss!’ No one was really paying attention and Tatsu’s focus returned to Viktorov.