He walked the fringe of the crowd. The riot squad filed quietly out of the vans to follow him. They looked like medieval warriors with their shields, pikes and helmets.
Sergeant Noda approached Ichiro as he stood watching the crowd.
"Orders, sir?" Noda asked.
Ichiro turned to him. "The Sonnojoi are near the fence, Sergeant, as always. I want them isolated, I want them taken. We'll use whatever force is necessary to accomplish this."
"How much force..." the man began.
"Deadly force, Sergeant," Ichiro said. "These people are killers and terrorists. They are probably armed and extremely dangerous. You and your men have my permission to do whatever it takes to isolate and arrest them."
Sergeant Noda smiled through the rain-spotted visor of his helmet. "Yes, sir!" he said enthusiastically. "We await only your orders."
Ichiro felt Natsume at his arm. He turned to the man. "If you don't have the stomach for this, you may go now," he said.
The older man nodded slightly. "I was busting cheap Yakuza out of waterfront bars when you were still an infant," Natsume replied. "Just point me in the right direction and see what I do."
Ichiro smiled, patting his assistant on the arm. "Good," he said and turned to Noda. "At your order, Sergeant."
The man nodded, his face tightened now, instincts ready. He turned to his men and raised a fist in the air. "Let's go!" he called.
They waded into the crowd, Ichiro and Natsume right along with them. The demonstrators were suddenly surrounding them like floodwaters, but the waters broke and receded under their relentless push. Their pikes swung low, clearing a wide path, and within a minute they had fifteen Sonnojoi walled off from the rest of the demonstration.
The Sonnojoi, backs to the fence, trapped, stood facing the forces of law. Several seconds elapsed — a standoff — when all at once one of the punks lowered the sign he was carrying and a riot cop found himself looking down the barrel of a Remington .12-gauge pump shotgun.
The punk fired, but the shot deflected from the cop's body armor. It was the biggest mistake he'd ever make.
The cops charged, swinging high with their pikes. The punk with the shotgun lost his helmet to thrashing bamboo, then lost his life under a blast of Ichiro's .38 when he tried to pump and shoot again.
Cornered, the punks fought back viciously with fists and guns and knives. Ichiro's highly trained tactical squad responded with machinelike precision. They poked and slashed with the flexible poles, and blacksuited punks fell like mown hay under the scythe.
Ichiro and Natsume, side by side, threw two men up against the fence. APs on the American side pushed the Sonnojoi back with their billy clubs when the punks tried to climb over.
Ichiro butted his man in the gut with the barrel of his .38, then ripped his helmet off when the man doubled over. The punk came at him with wild eyes. He was young, snarling like a vicious animal through clenched teeth.
All of the anger that had built up in Ichiro erupted. The lieutenant drew his arm back, and a weapon-filled fist drove into the man's face. The .38 barrel busted through the curtain of teeth to go down the punk's throat, gagging him.
The punk's hands went to his face, and Ichiro kicked him viciously in the groin, driving the screaming Sonnojoi to the pavement.
Ichiro turned to Natsume, who was delivering karate blows that dropped his man in a quaking pile on the ground. The two men shared a look, then they both went to their knees to handcuff their quarries.
Ichiro stood and looked around. Sonnojoi lay all over the ground, their faces bloody, their clothes slashed from the poles, long streams of blood pouring from the cuts. Two cops were down, but neither appeared seriously hurt.
"Haul them in!" Ichiro shouted into the rain. He was breathing heavily. "Take any ID you can from them, any ID. Start processing. Question them to get their background and information about their organization. Do what you have to do, but give me results by morning."
He turned to walk away, then spun back around. "They're animals," he spat, "treat them that way."
* * *
Mack Bolan sat on the hard floor of the tree house and watched Junko sleep. They were twenty feet in the air, on the strong cross limbs of a huge larch. The tree house itself was capped by a red pagoda roof that would be visible in the daytime but blended completely with its surroundings in the dark.
The local cops were persistent, he'd have to give them that. They'd been moving around Bolan's position for the better part of four hours, crossing and recrossing the pathway beneath the tree house, even looking up from time to time but never seeing them through the leafy branches.
The rain had settled to a soft drizzle that fell gently on the thatched roof, restful and hypnotic. It had finally gotten the better of Junko, and she'd curled up in the cramped space and gone to sleep, her head in his lap.
Designs, so many designs. Her head in his lap was close and loving, but it also served to keep him there. Whether she intended that to happen was probably a moot point. That he was thinking along those lines was, however, of tremendous importance.
He had begun to question his connection to Hashi-san. It didn't matter that the man loved and trusted him. It didn't matter how he felt about the man's daughter. The fact was that the Executioner was filtering all his thoughts and information through someone else, someone he barely knew. He had never operated this way before. Never. He had survived and succeeded by depending upon himself and a select few he had handpicked. Hashi-san was a beguiling, generous, trusting man — but was he trustworthy? It was a question Bolan had no answer for, and that bothered him.
He sat there in the black rainy night, stroking the hair of a woman he could love, and thought about internals. Hashi-san trusted Bolan not through instinct but because he had access to the Executioner's files and history. Mack Bolan was a man who lived his life up-front, his honesty on his sleeve. He wasn't hard to figure. You either had to take the Executioner the way he was or leave him alone. But Hashi-san was a game player. What did he actually know about the man?
He certainly wasn't the warrior he had presented himself to be. His motivation came through his guilt, guilt over the betrayal of his family honor during the Second World War, guilt over the death of his son. His honor sprang, then from external forces, not from deep internal commitment.
What else did he know about this modern, monetary Bushido warrior? He forced his daughter to live a double life in order to fulfill his emotional needs, yet didn't care for her much beyond his own wants. He seemed to be using her as chattel to bargain with Bolan, without a care for her own feelings. He had a mercenary on his payroll, a man whose commitment came only through money, something that a businessman like Hashi-san would understand but something that made Bolan's skin crawl.
Between Bolan and Hashi-san, the dealings had been fruitful, at least on the surface; but ever since talking to the Aussie, the Executioner had begun looking under the surface. What was really going on? How did the Sonnojoi know to find Bolan and Junko on the highway that day? How did they know where to find Dr. Norwood? He had no idea if or how Hashi-san could be involved with these things; he was simply trying to give the man credit for a mind capable of many thoughts.
When he had gone back to the man's house at Ashi after disposing of the APs at the cable car, he had been told by Hashi-san that no connection between the words on the bottom of the helicopter skid and a business could be made. Ail right. He'd start there. Instead of completely depending on the man, he'd initiate his own investigation into that possibility. If his suspicions were proven wrong, fine. He'd been wrong before, no harm done. But if the suspicions were correct ...
He looked down at Junko, sleeping so peacefully. What was her connection to all of this? What would his doubts do to her? In many ways her world was as innocent and isolated as a child's. Her respect and trust for her father was certainly childlike, one of her most endearing qualities. He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She stirred, smilin
g in her sleep, but didn't awaken.
12
Kendo Ichiro sat with his feet up on his desk, nursing his eighth cup of coffee and trying to make sense out of the scattered pieces of puzzle that were laid out before him in the form of pages of information. Outside, morning had broken, rainy and depressing. There seemed to be no end to it. His stomach hurt, and his wife, Mika, was angry at him for missing their son's piano recital the night before.
"We have quite a glamorous job, don't we?" Natsume said from the doorway. He shuffled in, his suit wrinkled and stained with coffee and blood, and placed two more sheets of paper on the desk.
"Anything?" Ichiro asked hopefully, sitting up and looking at the computer printouts.
"Of course," Natsume replied. "They've all confessed and given us the names and dates of every crooked dealing they've ever done."
"That is not very funny," Ichiro said.
"Sorry." Natsume sank heavily into his own chair, a deep sigh escaping his lips. "They all have the same basic story and they stick to it no matter what we do."
"I know," Ichiro said. "They have no formal meetings or hierarchy. They formed themselves at work through love of their native land and communicate by telephone. They've never performed any illegal actions and don't intend to perform any."
Natsume clapped his hands lightly. "You could join them yourself at this point."
Ichiro smiled dully. "Anything on Bolan?"
"They've given up the search," Natsume said, apologizing when Ichiro groaned. "They thought they had him last night, but he somehow managed to slip away."
Ichiro rubbed his eyes. "I wonder if he got any sleep?"
"What now?" Natsume asked. "Short of pulling out their fingernails, I'm not sure what else we can do to those punks in there. They're already screaming about their rights."
"Well, we've got plenty of cause to hold them," Ichiro began, "just from last night's trouble. Meanwhile, I've worked out a composite of the typical Sonnojoi member. Let me try it on you and see if we can find any weak links in their chain."
"Shoot."
Ichiro picked up the piece of paper that contained his synopsis of all the other pieces of paper on his desk. It wasn't much, but it was all he had to go on. "The typical Sonnojoi," he read, "is male, nineteen to twenty-five years of age. He's idealistic and impressionable, with no record of prior criminal offenses. He's doggedly loyal and more than willing to die for his cause. He lives with his family but is secretive enough to keep his affiliation with his political groups to himself. He works in a blue-collar job and is highly regarded at the workplace. He works for either the Asano Corporation in their steel mill, the Hoji-Honshu Trucking Company, the Blue Star Aircraft Parts and Material Company, or Genji Produce as a boxcar loader. He has a rigid code of ethics and conduct. He's quiet and undemonstrative. He has no wife or female friends."
"Almost like a warrior class," Natsume said.
"We have no warrior class," Ichiro returned. "Anything else strike you?"
Natsume laid his head on the desk. "Nothing outside the geography," he said softly.
"What do you mean?"
The sergeant sat up, grabbing a bottle of antacid off his desk. "Years ago," he began, popping several tablets into his mouth, "when I drove a squad car for a living, the area around the steel mills was my beat. Now I'm not sure about the produce company, but the other businesses you mentioned are all grouped within several square miles of the Yokota and Tachikowa Air Bases."
Ichiro stood, walking to a huge wall map of the Tokyo area. He moved to the section of the map containing the bases and stared at them.
"Do me a favor," he said, continuing to stare. "Get out a phone book and look up Genji Produce for me. Let's see where it is."
Natsume rummaged through his desk and got out a tattered telephone directory. Ichiro listened to the pages rustling behind him as he kept watching, trying to stop his brain on the point of intersection with the information on the map.
"Got it," Natsume said. "Genji Produce is less than a mile from the trucking company."
Suddenly Ichiro began backing slowly away from the map. "I've got it," he whispered.
"What? What is it?"
"Chikatetsu!" Ichiro yelled. "Chikatetsu! I think I know what it is!"
"What?"
"No time now," Ichiro said, grabbing his sports jacket off the back of his chair and moving toward the door. "I've got a job for you. Look up all those businesses. Find out all about them — how long they've been there, who owns them — just do a work-up for me."
He opened the door.
"Where are you going?" Natsume asked.
"The library."
"It's closed this early."
Ichiro walked out the door, then poked his head in again. "We're cops, remember? We can make them open it."
* * *
Mack Bolan stood at the pay phone in the gift shop, trying to balance the phone on his shoulder while studying the huge volume of kanji script translations in his hands.
"What the hell did you do over there?" Hal Brognola asked, his voice sleepy and distant. "Everybody up to and including the joint chiefs are going nuts over this Yokota thing."
"It wasn't me," Bolan said. "Wentworth confronted Jamison with information about Operation Snowflake. Jamison killed him and blamed it on me."
"The end result's the same, though, isn't it?" Brognola asked.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, Jamison's sealed in tight, in control. He can frame you all he wants. You're odd man out, Mack."
Bolan paged through the huge, hard-bound book. Kanji is a complex form of character writing adopted from the Chinese and containing over thirty thousand characters. More were added all the time through katakana, a shorthand process used to merge Western words into the Japanese system.
"What about making things happen on your end?" Bolan asked.
"I checked before I left the office tonight," Hal said. "We've got an investigating team going over there, but they won't arrive until tomorrow. Any word sent from here will only get filtered through Jamison's system. If I step forward..."
"Don't do that," Bolan interrupted. "That will only tie you to me. I wouldn't wish that on anybody right now."
"Do you know when the coke's going out?" Brognola asked.
"Tonight," Bolan said. "On two KC-135s."
"I can probably arrange to search those planes when they arrive in the States."
"Yeah," Bolan said, stopping at the characters for snow in his book. "If they even land in the States. Jamison is logged out on one of those planes himself. God only knows where he'll land them now that the heat's on."
"If he wants to sell the stuff, he'll still have to work through his contacts."
Bolan grunted, his finger running down the page of American words and their kanji counterparts. "Maybe," he said. "There's something else, Hal."
"What?"
"The two hydrogen bombs that the Sonnojoi forced Dr. Norwood to make. I have no idea where they are. In fact, I'm not convinced that Jamison isn't all tied up with them somehow."
"What would anyone want with..."
"To blow something up, Hal," Bolan said. "You don't make atomic weapons just for fun. The Sonnojoi or Jamison or both intend to do something with those bombs."
"What are you going to do?"
"Find the coke and find the bombs before the Air Force, the Sonnojoi and the Tokyo Police find me."
"Sounds like your dance card's full."
"I'm a popular guy," Bolan returned. "You keep an eye out for those planes, Hal."
"Mack, I..."
"Save it, Hal. Words just get in the way."
Bolan hung up the phone, angry at the corner he'd boxed himself into. He'd assumed that Wentworth could take care of himself, and now he was paying the price for that assumption.
Bolan leaned against the inside of the booth for a minute, looking out at the shelves full of knickknacks and Japanese china that filled the small store. In the book
his finger still rested on the kanji for snowflake. They were nothing like the characters he had found on the skid of the Huey. Nothing like that all.
Hashi-san had lied to him.
He closed the book and moved away from the phone. This changed everything. Where Hashimoto and Junko stood or what their game was, he didn't know. All he was sure of was that he could trust no one but himself at this point, something he should have known from the beginning.
He moved to the counter to pay for the dictionary, and the woman who ran the store figured the price on an abacus. On impulse Bolan once again wrote down the characters he had seen on the helicopter and shoved them in front of the gray-haired woman.
"Can you read this?" he asked.
She narrowed her eyes, then put on bifocals and held the paper out at arm's length. "You kanji very bad," she said.
"So I've been told."
She set the paper down on the countertop, her fingers pointing to the first of the characters. "This say... maybe company, like business. This say Asano, very famous hero to Japanese."
Bolan felt a hard knot in the pit of his stomach. He pointed to the first set of characters again. "Could this be... corporation?"
"Hai... corporation. Yes, that's right."
"Thanks." Bolan replied, sick at heart.
"Do itashimashite," the woman responded, making change for the thousand-yen note Bolan had laid on the counter.
He moved out of the gift shop into the drizzle of the early afternoon. When he and Junko had escaped the tree house and gotten back to her car, she had driven him to his place and then hurried off on business for her father. Despite the danger he had walked up to the complex of shops near the base to set his mind at rest. He had accomplished just exactly the opposite.
This revelation made absolutely no sense to him. He had fought the Sonnojoi for Hashi-san, had killed them for him. They had attacked his own daughter viciously. At every step the old man had shown his hatred for the organization. It made no sense that he could be involved with it.
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