The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  He knew he would die; his strength was ebbing and the pain in his guts rose.

  Gradually the stronger American seemed to prevail, but the captain thought of kendo, of perfect emptiness, and found a blow to the throat, and the man jacked upright, lost his grip, and somehow the captain put strength in it, then took it away, and the American’s own strength toppled him, so the captain slithered over him, and was atop him in terrible intimacy. His right hand flew to the leather haft of a knife the American wore on his belt; he snatched it, again feeling the friction as the blade freed itself from a metal scabbard. He rammed his wrist into the man’s throat, driving him back, and continued on the roll, thrusting the knife upward, nesting it between two ribs so that it would slide easily into the central chest cavity. The grip was wood or leather, grooved heavily, a little thick for him, but he controlled it quickly enough, securing it in his strong fingers. He felt the knife point pressuring the skin, the skin fighting, then yielding, as the blade penetrated a quarter of an inch. Two ounces more of pressure and he could thrust through to the man’s heart and take one more with him.

  Earl was dead. Where did the scrawny man find the strength? He looked into the Japanese’s eyes, felt the pinprick of the blade of his KA-BAR between his ribs, and fought to get his hands around the man’s throat but was too late.

  I am dead, he thought.

  He got me.

  He beat me.

  He closed his eyes. He felt the wrist heavy against his throat, smelled sweat and oil and fish, felt their two hearts beating almost against each other, locked in the murder embrace.

  The deadly point of the KA-BAR probed his skin, bent it down, maybe drew a drop of blood. It would slide in easily, climb through lung tissue, and find the clump of muscle called his heart.

  Oh, Christ, Junie, I tried so hard.

  The captain leaned into the knife hilt and—stopped.

  He saw on the ground next to the American’s head a flexible metal tube with a syrette screwed to its mouth. He realized instantly it was morphine. The American hadn’t been trying to cut his throat; he’d been trying to ease his pain.

  He drew back. It seemed suddenly wrong to kill a man who meant to save him.

  But it seemed wrong to surrender to him too.

  I wish I done gave you a child, I am so sorry to leave you alone. There wasn’t no time, I had so much to tell you.

  But he felt an immense liberation as the pinprick went away and the man somehow heaved himself off Earl’s body, and lay a foot away, breathing hard.

  A smile came to the man’s grimy face.

  “Samurai,” he said.

  Then he reversed the heavy war knife, plunged it into his own neck, where a major artery carried a river of blood to his brain. The jab was expert, and the blood spurted out in a bright and gaudy fountain. In eight seconds his brain had devoured the oxygen and glucose that remained, and his eyes closed.

  “He killed himself,” Susan said.

  “Yeah. Dad told Sam he thought the guy may have seen the morphine single he was trying to inject. It was right there on the floor next to them. Or maybe Hideki Yano had had enough killing. Or maybe he was saying, I’m the better man, I can kill you or not, and then I can embrace death. Whatever, my father always felt he’d lost that battle. The Japanese officer won it. And for whatever reason in the middle of a battlefield, the worst battle on earth, the most dangerous—on a ‘moon of hell,’ as someone called it—the officer let Earl Swagger live. That’s why my dad gave up that sword. Maybe that’s why he never talked about the medal. And also because of that, Earl got to go home, where he got his wife pregnant and they had a little boy called Bob Lee. And how Mr. Earl loved that boy, and helped him and taught him. So Bob Lee not only got his own life in the deal, he got nine more years with his daddy, who was a great man. And thirty-odd years down the worthless road, Bob Lee himself got a daughter out of it, and she’s a great one too. It all goes back to the decision that Japanese officer made in that pillbox. So you could say Bob Lee, he owes the Yanos something big. Call it on, call it whatever you want. But what he owes them is everything.”

  “He does,” said Susan.

  Bob looked at his watch. It was 4:59:57 a.m.

  :58.

  :59.

  “Okay,” she said. “Samurai up.”

  43

  CHUSHINGURA

  The last thing Swagger said was, “When you hit the ground, wait a second, then pull down your goggles and go to night vision.”

  But in the one-tenth of a second of fall, she forgot, and she landed with more thud than she expected: it was seven feet, she felt her body elongate to full extension then accordion shut with a bang when she landed, snapping her head hard enough to drive bangles and spangles before her eyes.

  She could see—nothing. It made no sense. Light and dark, nothing focused, nothing where it should be, all confusion, her will scattered and gone.

  “Goggles,” whispered Swagger, who had come down beside her.

  She got the goggles down—PVS7s, she’d had a day on them at a Delta Force counterterror workshop at Fort Bragg a few years ago—and hit the toggle, which was no longer where it should be but an inch to the right, evidently resettled on her head in the landing. This led to another moment of confusion, but then she got them aligned right and it all popped to. Things were beginning to happen.

  It was a green, fuzzy world. Still, she made out the house. To the left, a glowing amoeba seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. It was Tanada’s rear team, coming hard over the back wall, in fact most were down, pausing only to withdraw their katana, then peeling off individually to the left rear. Meanwhile to the right, the same optical phenomenon reiterated itself, this being Fujikawa’s front team, maybe a tad behind the curve, but peeling right. She swept the house, saw nothing, but then the front door opened and she saw a man with a rifle—AK-47, she ID’d it, again from her Bragg tutorial—and behind her she heard the sound of—well, of what? It was light, a wet piston floating through the grease of a hydraulic tube, nothing sharp, but surprisingly vibratory. It was a silenced rifle, wielded by Sniper 3 Kim, and before the sound had even dissipated, the rifleman went down as if someone had cut his knees and they no longer held, and he just flopped down hard and fast.

  She realized, I just saw a man die.

  “House clear,” came the voice of 3 Kim from above.

  At that moment a series of bright flashes syncopated to hard pops lit off in the basement of the house, as the first team of intruders had gotten their flash-bangs into the area where the yaks were.

  “Go, go,” said Bob, but she was already on the way, low, hard, cutting directly across the courtyard to the house, reaching it and sliding along it. She felt Swagger beside her. She reached the open door, stepped over the body of the guy with the rifle, and, clutching her wakizashi in her right hand, ducked inside.

  Captain Tanada was not the sort to direct; he was the sort to lead. So he hit the ground and took off, and fuck anybody who couldn’t keep up with him. But that got him close to the rear of the house first, and he pulled his flash-bang, got the pin out, and almost—but not quite—launched it through the window.

  He got himself under control.

  Four other men reached him and to each he gestured with the small munition, and each duplicated his move. Flash-bang out, pin out, lever secured, each man placed himself next to a window and in the next second, on Tanada’s nod, each shattered the window with a pad-protected elbow, tossed in the illumination device, and peeled back, withdrawing katana from scabbard, waiting for a target.

  The things went off almost simultaneously, not in concussive explosion—they weren’t bombs, after all—but with a harsh bang and a white phosphorous flash that blasted anyone’s night vision to pieces. You could be forgiven for thinking that the devil himself had chucked a nuclear device through the window. They caused one of two responses: utter paralysis or complete panic. Four of them quadrupled the effect.

  In a sec
ond the first man came out, unarmed, and Tanada hit him with the hilt hard in the head. Two more came out, one to be conked, the other took a roundhouse slash at Tanada, who neatly evaded and watched one of his men hit the yak with a hard diagonal cut, left to right, so that he jacked, pirouetted, dropping his weapon, and went down, spurting blood.

  And then suddenly it was happening, exactly as the men had dreamed about and believed they wanted, exactly as had not happened in Japan, except on movie sets, for more than a century: the yaks poured from the house and began to spread out, each unleashing a sword, and the soldiers moved forward to engage them, a kendo-to-the-death in dull light as the snow swooped downward, the cuts hard and serious and meant to kill, the evasions equally hard and serious and meant to avoid, the whole thing happening in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.

  Tanada killed two men in a single second as they came at him, his technique superb: kesagiri on the first, diagonal, a flowing block from the second assailant’s kesagiri, which led quite naturally into a horizontal yokogiri, with four inches of blade opening eight inches of body. The destroyed man made a gasping sound, tried to step back, and fell.

  Tanada looked about and saw war everywhere and was happy. Then he got back to work.

  Nii was dreaming, filthily, completely, in anatomical detail, dreams that would shame most but only gave him a boner the size of a V-2. But then the V-2 exploded, and he came hard awake in time for another V-2 explosion, then a third and a fourth. Around him, he heard screams, starts, lurches; men jumped, some wailed, some grabbed weapons. The door was open, and someone rushed out, and Nii caught a glimpse of him brought down with a wicked blow.

  Attack, he thought.

  His mind dumped clear and empty. He had a moment of stupendous confusion as all his reflexes broke down. Two more, then two more explosions went off, but after the first, he got his eyes shut and buried in his fists.

  When he opened them, the big room was half empty. He saw a man jump in, blade whistling, and take one of his friends down with a single blow, and in the ferocity of the blow, he knew there was no mercy this night, it was to the death. More men flooded the room, blades slicing the air, cutting through meat, killing. Someone threw a charcoal hibachi at an invader, who ducked and killed him with a cut across the belly.

  Nii rose to fight, then remembered his mission.

  Kill the little girl.

  It wasn’t a judgment call. It was what he owed Oyabun. It became the only thing in his life, that plus the fact he would fuck her first, then kill her, then commit his beloved seppuku and go happily to his ancestors, his honor restored.

  He rose, grabbed his sword, and as men surged forward and death and chaos were everywhere, he cut against the tide, found the steps, and rushed up, one flight, then another, and, entering the upper hallway, saw that so far it was empty. He counted the doors, which were popping open, and men were pouring out, until he reached the door to the white room that contained the little girl. He got out his key and fumbled to insert it.

  Major Fujikawa saw that the plan was not quite working. That is to say, the congestion point seemed to be the doorways, where the violence was sharp and ugly and the whole thing coagulated into a subway platform at rush hour with swords. Not pretty.

  He pulled out a whistle. There was no plan; in the hurried assembly of assault details this one had not been considered. But he understood that his people couldn’t kill efficiently enough at this rate. He blew the whistle, hard, and watched as dozens of eyes popped to him.

  “Let them out, goddammit,” he screamed, “then kill them.”

  What a good idea, everyone understood, and the crowding at the doorways immediately broke out as the raiders made way and the yakuza spilled out into the falling snow. There was a moment of near poetry, if the death even of evil men can be considered poetic.

  Someone’s flash-bang went off in the crowd of fighters. It was a moment with the snow falling in the gentle Japanese fashion, and behind the screen of lulling white, men were briefly isolated by the flare of white chemical light in postures of attack and defense, the cuts stopped in midflight so that the whole had the clarity of one of Kuniyoshi’s woodcuts, an orchestration of muted color and delicate grace though applied to the subject of maximum violence. Fujikawa wished he had seventeen syllables at his command to press into a poem, but then he remembered he was a soldier, and he rushed forward, sword in hand, looking eagerly for someone to kill, aware that the chance to fight with a sword would never arrive at his doorstep again and he’d better take advantage of it.

  The raid caught the great Kondo in an unfortunate position. He was in the shower, performing ablutions, readying for the next day’s events, when the first bomb went off, followed by three more.

  His first thought: Fuck!

  He knew immediately that by some magic, the gaijin had located them. He had a moment’s rage for the fellow’s guile and wondered who had helped him, and imagined their heads on the table next to the gaijin’s.

  He got out, threw on his robe—naked, they caught me naked!—and edged quickly to the door. His bathroom was on the second floor, above the living room. He edged down the hall, looking for a view of the events, to decide upon an action. Though he couldn’t see much, he noted shadows on the wall from a stairway leading downstairs. The violence of the shadow-work dancing hard on the wall conveyed the violence of actuality. Then another flash-bang went off.

  By chance he’d been looking directly at it and the brightness stunned him. He could not think, he could not see, he was defenseless.

  Fuck!

  He knew he could not retreat into the bathroom, for to do so would equal his death or his capture, actually the same thing. Yet he could not go back to his room where his swords were, because he could not see.

  He heard the rising screams and smashing of fists, flesh, and swords as the fighting rose and knew that his men had been engaged by a force as large as they. He yearned to rush to his swords, claim them, and turn, whirling with violent purpose into the melee, cutting and cutting and cutting, knowing that he could turn the tide.

  But he was blind.

  He thought, The bathroom window.

  It was a low drop—say ten feet to earth.

  Blindly, he groped his way back to the bathroom window, slid it open, tried to remember exactly where the bathroom was with regard to the floor plan of the estate, realized that thinking cost him time and he had no time, so he launched himself forward, fell through cold space, and hit the ground with a thud.

  “There’s one,” someone said, “grab him.”

  In seconds four men had him.

  “Give it up, brother. We won’t kill you if you surrender.”

  “Don’t hurt me,” he said, going limp and sad. “I am a cook. Please, I only work here, don’t hurt me.”

  Miwa tried to be calm. He listened to the general roar outside and understood what was happening. His only thought was to escape, but of course he was too frightened to attempt such a thing on his own. Therefore he assumed that Kondo, the ever-loyal retainer, would come for him.

  After a few minutes, he realized that Kondo would not come for him.

  Cursing his luck, he crawled to the doorway, slipped it open half an inch, and saw the same shadows on the wall that Kondo had seen.

  They really frightened him.

  He fought panic.

  He thought, If I can hide, I will survive. They cannot stay long. They must attack, kill, then flee. I will never escape, but I can hide.

  On all fours, he scrambled down the hallway, found steps downstairs, and like a snake, slithered down, into darkness.

  “Please don’t hurt me, I am a cook,” Kondo said, as the arms locked him down, and someone pinned his arms.

  “He’s nothing,” said a raider. “Akira, take him to the courtyard; we’ll continue.”

  Three of his captors dashed away to join the general melee, still intense behind them.

  “Come on, asshole,” said the rema
ining raider, “get going. Christ, you’re not even dressed, you poor son of a bitch.”

  True, he wasn’t dressed, but Kondo blinked and watched as the strobes flashing in his brain shut down. He blinked again, watched vision assemble itself out of sparkly chaos, and he found himself alone in the backyard with his assailant, his arm pinned behind him as he was being roughly driven ahead.

  “Sir, my arm?” he said.

  “Shut up,” said the raider, or perhaps meant to say, but somewhere between the Sh and the ut, Kondo got leverage, hit the man with a left-handed dragon punch out of the most basic aikido text, knocked the man to the snow, then drove a palm into his temple with a thud, not knowing whether he’d killed him or not.

  He felt the man collapse with a groan.

  He snatched up the man’s sword, a good utilitarian cutter, and went to the wall. He was over it in a single bound, lay on the other side, breathing hard, waiting to see if anybody had followed him.

  No.

  He stood, naked but for the robe, and ran barefoot through the snow. He found a nearby house, broke a window, and entered. He raced upstairs to face a scared man and his wife in bed. “You stay there or I’ll kill you. Now, I need some clothes. And a cell phone.”

  Nii got the door open and stepped into the white room. All was dark. To the left he recalled a light switch and, not thinking clearly, popped it. The room leapt to view, all its detail brilliantly exposed—the knotted bed, the television, the painted white window, all of it, white, white, white. But where was the child? A bolt of panic knocked through him, then fear: he could not fail. He ran to the bed, pulling it apart to find nothing, dropped low and looked under it, saw nothing. Then he thought to touch the sheets, found them warm.

  She’s hiding, you fool! he thought.