White-faced, cloaked in black, with massive earlobes and the joking, malevolent smile of a trickster. Jerry gently lifted it up, and its head and arms flopped back. Where it had been lying, there was another sheet of scrollwork paper, neatly rolled and tied with string. He opened it up and read, in growing fright, the message: “We have your son. Wait patiently for instructions. Tell nobody.”
Beneath the writing was a brushwork picture of a dove with its wings aflame.
Jerry went immediately to the telephone, picked it up, and dialed Sergeant Skrolnik’s number.
Then, before the police switchboard had answered, he set the phone down again.
He felt at last as if his nightmares had broken through from the past into the present day, like devils crawling and scrambling out of one of those huge pandemonic eggs in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. He felt as if everything had turned to fire, as if hell had come to life, as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were again incandescent.
He said, “Oh, God,” but the words sounded empty and pitiful.
BOOK TWO BLAZING EAGLES
CHAPTER ONE
They had expected Admiral Knut S. Thorson to die within hours of his last and most paralyzing stroke. He was 78, after all, and his last ten years of life had been dogged by serious heart disease and delibitating collapses. But “Inch-Thick Thorsen,’’ as the Navy had always nicknamed him, was made of tough, durable stuff, and his hours of life had lengthened into days, then months.
He had lain for nearly a year now inside his oxygen tent at Rancho Encino Hospital, one of the most luxurious acute-care facilities in the whole of southern California, a stumpy little gray-haired man with ferocious eyebrows and a ruddiness in his weathered face which even twelve months of hospitalization had been unable to fade.
Every two days his wife visited and sat watching him breathe inside his plastic cocoon; a plain woman who always wore flowers in her hat. On holidays and anniversaries, his entire family came to Rancho Encino, and stared at him with respect, regret, and boredom. “Inch-Thick” remained with his eyes closed, his heartbeats monitored by the latest and most sensitive of cardio-pulmonary equipment, his brainwaves monitored by electroencephalograph.
His wife was still with him at 9:06 the evening after Jerry Sennett had been asked by Sergeant Skrolnik to come down to police headquarters and look at Maurice Needs. She had said nothing to him for most of the afternoon; but toward nightfall she had recited to him, without any hope that he could hear or understand her, one of the love poems he had written to her during the war.
How can a love so gentle be so fierce? How can a soft caress grip with such strength? How can your tenderest glance so quickly pierce My heart its very depth, my life its length?
Admiral Thorson had never written any poetry before the war; and he never wrote any more afterward. But Mary Thorson kept in an old ribboned candy box in her dressing-table drawer a collection of nearly 40 poems that had expressed his feelings for her in those days when it was quite possible he would never see her again.
They were the only words of his that she now possessed.
At 9:08, Nurse Abramski, a brusque but charming woman with a striking resemblance to Mary Tyler Moore, looked in to check the admiral’s heartbeat and drip, and to ensure that his waste-disposal bags did not need emptying. She smiled the whole time, but said little; she knew that Mary Thorson preferred not to chatter. Mary Thorson had enough to cope with, paying this long drawn-out homage to her comatose husband and lover.
Nurse Abramski finished in Admiral Thorson’s suite at 9:11. At the very moment she closed the door behind her, a Chevrolet van drew up outside the hospital grounds on Balboa Boulevard and doused its headlights. Out of the driver’s seat climbed a young Japanese called Masahiro Yoshino, a kendo adept who had arrived in Los Angeles only four days ago from Kobe. Out of the passenger seat, puffing slightly, climbed Commander Ernest Perry Ouvarov, wearing a belted raincoat and chewing an unlit corncob pipe, an unconscious impersonation of Mac-Arthur.
The commander took off his tinted glasses and looked around the hushed hospital grounds. The spreading California oaks rustled in the warm evening wind, and the lights from the hospital facility sparkled through their leaves. “Okay,” he said at last, in a hoarse voice. “Let’s get it over with.”
He and Yoshino went around to the back of the van. Yoshino unlocked it and opened both doors wide. Inside, the van was almost dark, except for a row of beady red safety lights. The walls, floor, and ceiling were padded with black silk quilting. Among these flags, suspended on silver claws, swung the second Tengu, dressed this time in nothing more than a black headband and the tightly bound loincloth of the sumo wrestler. The motion of the van on its way to Encino had caused the silver claws to work their way even more deeply than usual into the Tengu’s flesh, and one of them had pierced his thigh muscle completely. The Tengu was not alone: sitting next to him in the darkness were two of Kappa’s black-masked disciples. After Yoshino had opened the doors, they quickly and quietly took over, lowering the Tengu to the floor of the van and speaking to him in long, magical murmurings as they raised him up to a sitting position.
Commander Ouvarov said, “We don’t have too long, you guys. This place has one of the hottest security patrols going.”
The black devil-people didn’t turn to look at him. Their concentration was reserved entirely for the Tengu, who was now rhythmically raising and lowering his white-masked face and uttering a high, keening sound that made Commander Ouvarov shiver. It reminded him of a 4.7-inch naval shell screaming high and deadly overhead.
Yoshino glanced at the commander nervously. He was a serious young man, devoted to the samurai ways, a fanatical believer in Japan’s ancestral honor. He was close to his gods. But dealing with a Tengu was something different. A Tengu was the fiercest martial horror that ancient Japan and her magical traditions were capable of creating; and until today, Yoshino had never seen one in the flesh.
In Japanese, the black disciples of Kappa incanted, “O great and terrible Tengu, master of all that is evil and frightful, stalker of the night, deathless one, wrencher arid devourer of flesh and spirit, use this servant of human clay to revenge our dishonor.
At last, the Tengu rose jerkily to his feet, the claws still hanging from his body. One by one, the disciples unhooked them, until the Tengu stood free, his muscles still distorted, his body still pierced with ghastly wounds, but breathing strongly now behind his bland white mask, breathing powerfully and harshly like a wolf that rushes up behind you in the night.
“He is ready,” said the black-masked Japanese, bowing to Commander Ouvarov.
“Yoshino,” said Commander Ouvarov. “Wait here with the van. Any trouble, any questions from security guards, tell them you’re having a problem with the electrical system, you’ve called for a tow truck. And, for Christ’s sake, smile a lot. What’s the time?”
Yoshino checked his large stainless-steel wristwatch. “Nine nineteen, sir.”
“Right, we shouldn’t be longer than six or seven minutes. If we’re very much longer, or if you hear a disturbance, wait five more minutes and then go straight back to Nancy Shiranuka’s. You got me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Quickly now, with Commander Ouvarov leading the way, the four of them crossed the lawns surrounding Rancho Encino Hospital, keeping to the shadows of the trees. Behind him, Commander Ouvarov could hear the Tengu’s panting, foul and suppressed. For the first time since he had started working for Nancy Shiranuka and Gerard Crowley, he really understood that he was involved in something far more hair-raising than murdering two or three innocent people for the sake of some rich client’s revenge. The discreet disposal of business opponents or political enemies or smart young men who had overplayed their romantic overtures to rich men’s daughters–that was all a question of day-to-day American business which Commander Ouvarov could accept. But this Tengu was something different. Behind that expressionless white mask was the face of a man who was actually possessed, body and
soul, by something from what Commander Ouvarov could only conceive as hell itself. The Tengu’s eyes glowed like blue coals in a midnight furnace, his breath rushed and thundered inside his mask, his nearly naked body was hideous with weals and deep holes that actually bared the fibers of the muscles and the bones themselves.
The Tengu was a demon-creature, a man who had voluntarily given himself to a fate which other men would have happily committed suicide to avoid. Yet, according to Doctor Gempaku, to become a Tengu was a far greater honor than to commit seppuku. The busbi who committed seppuku were simply opening the way for themselves to heaven, those who gave themselves to the Tengu were condemning themselves to eternal life and endless purifying pain. It was the Shinto principle of mortification of the flesh to the nth degree.
That was why the first Tengu mission had been less than a complete success. The Tengu had not had sufficient pain inflicted on him to reach a state of total possession by the ancient demon; he had been halfway between euphoria and utter agony, and when Yoshikazu had tried to drive him back to the ranch, his demon had gradually slipped away from him, leaving him in terrible pain but without the spiritual possession that would have enabled him to endure it. Lying in the van, he had gone partly mad.
This time, with the second Tengu, Doctor Gempaku had taken no such chances. He had suspended the Tengu on hooks until the last possible moment, to maximize his suffering.
Beneath the Tengu’s loincloth, which was already spotted with fresh Hood, a ten-inch-long steel spring, an eighth of an inch in diameter, had been pushed inside his urethra, the length of his penis, into his bladder. The pain from this device alone, Doctor Gempaku had told Commander Ouvarov, would make a god out of anyone. They reached the corner of the hospital’s main administration building. From there, they would skirt around the gardens where the patients sat during the day to the intensive care building.
According to the drawings of the hospital Commander Ouvarov had secured yesterday from the Encino planning department, they could gain access to the room where Admiral Thorson lay in his oxygen tent by forcing a pair of double doors, walking the length of a 32-foot corridor, and then turning left.
Close by Commander Ouvarov’s shoulder, the Tengu breathed beneath his mask with all the roughness of a creature that knows it is about to kill. Commander Ouvarov took a deep breath himself, to steady his nerves, and then said, “Let’s go.”
They walked quickly between the rows of flowering bushes; past the ornamental pool and the deck furniture. Their feet were silent on the grass and the patio paving. Only that lascivious breathing betrayed their presence.
Suddenly, with no warning at all, a dazzling security light picked all four of them out in blinding relief. The Tengu stopped, twisting this way and that. But Commander Ouvarov hissed, “Keep going! We’ve taken them by surprise, so keep going!” A door slammed. A voice snouted, “Mr.
Davison–there’s someone out there!” Then another door slammed, and there was the sound of running feet.
The four of them had almost crossed the gardens now, and were only twenty feet away from the double doors which would take them into the intensive-care unit. But from both sides of the building, hurrying to intercept them, came two security guards with drawn guns.
“Oka.y, freeze’.” one of the guards ordered. “Put your hands up,” and don’t move!”
The black-masked Japanese hardly broke stride. One of them uttered a terrifying screech and rushed forward at the security guard with his arms whirling as fast as helicopter blades. The guard fired one wild shot before the Japanese struck him on the bridge of his nose with a Oni move known as “the splinter.” The broken cartilage of the guard’s nose was rammed upward into his brain, killing him instantly.
The other guard, a heavily built man with a gingery mustache, backed away down the side of the intensive-care block, holding his revolver in both hands.
‘‘Keep back there, or I’m going to blow your head off!’’ he shouted, his voice high-pitched and frightened. “Keep well back there!”
The second Oni adept zigzagged toward him, running in such a fast and complicated dance that the guard could hardly keep his gun trained on him. Oni students were taught this evasive running by having to dodge a constant shower of crossbow bolts. But even “the dance of the dragonfly” was not enough to protect the Japanese from an erratic and nervous security guard with a .38 revolver. As he flickered toward the guard like a hovering shadow, the guard fired one shot which hit the Japanese straight in the face. A spray of blood pattered on the paving stones, and the Japanese rolled backward.
The first adept took up where his dead comrade had left off: dodging toward the security guard with his hands flailing. The security guard should have fired a second time, but his nerve and his eye failed him. The Japanese screamed out, “Kappa!’’ and dropkicked the guard on the side of the head. The guard went down with his neck broken, and lay on the ground twitching like a dead chicken.
Now all the floodlights in the hospital grounds had been switched on, and Commander Ouvarov knew that it would be only minutes before the police arrived. He could cope with a few security guards and frightened nurses, but the police would be altogether different. He rapped out to the one remaining Japanese, “Set him loose! Set the Tengu loose!”
The Japanese uttered a strange, chanting cry. The Tengu, who had been standing a little way behind them, now moved purposefully forward to the double doors of the intensive-care unit and stood in front of them, his mutilated chest rising and falling as he gathered his strength. Each door was glazed with a small circular window, out of which light illuminated the Tcngu’s white mask. The Japanese called out again, and this time the Tcngu lifted both his fists, hesitated, and then plunged them with a slushy crash through the wire-reinforced glass.
Hooking both arms through the broken windows; the Tengu tore the double doors off their hinges and hurled them away across the grass.
Commander Ouvarov waited as long as he dared; but he could already see three more guards making their way, crouched and furtive, across the hospital gardens. He said to the Japanese,
“Let’s get out of here. I’ll give you a hand with your friend.” In the distance, police sirens were warbling, and it was becoming more than clear to Commander Ouvarov that the highly sophisticated security which protected most of southern California’s wealthier citizens was going to prove a severe obstacle if Gerard Crowlcy wanted anyone else done away with. He helped the Japanese lift the dead Oni adept from the lawn, and between them they dragged him away through the bushes and into the shadows, and began to make their way back to the van.
“We go back for the Tengu?” asked the Japanese.
Commander Ouvarov shook his head. “This has all gotten out of hand. We’re going to leave the Tengu behind. If he doesn’t, then it’s tough luck. But you won’t catch me scampering back into the arms of the law, just for the sake of some masochistic Oriental.”
The Japanese looked at Commander Ouvarov through the eye-slits of his mask. It was clear that he was uncertain and suspicious.
“We cannot leave the Tengu,” he argued. “It is our holy order that we must stay with him, and bring him back.”
“I’m in charge of this particular sortie,” said Commander Ouvarov, as they dragged the dead Japanese through a low cypress hedge. “If I say we leave the Tengu, then we leave him.”
“We must go back,” insisted the Japanese. The howling of police sirens was already very close.
Commander Ouvarov let the body of the dead Japanese drop to the grass. “C’mere,” he said to the Oni adept. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do.”
Commander Ouvarov had learned, more years ago than he could remember, that cunning must always be countered with cunning. He had sent countless irate letters to the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, protesting the way in which American forces had blundered with their bombing and defoliants and armored vehicles into a country of philosophical ruthlessness and extraordinary tactic
al subtlety. You cannot frighten a man who is not frightened of death, he had told them again and again. You cannot overwhelm an enemy whose dedication to fighting and winning grows fiercer, rather than weaker, the nearer he is to defeat. If you live on steak and French fries, if you drive even a moderately comfortable car. if you sleep in a bed and like beer and television, you cannot possibly confront face to face–and beat–a man who knows and wants nothing more than rice, shoes made out of Goodyear tires, and political independence.
Not face to face.
That was why, when the Oni adept approached him, a trained killer who could have plunged his fist right into the commander’s body and wrenched out his living heart, the commander smiled, and put his arm casually and amicably around the boy’s shoulders. The boy didn’t even realize that he had walked straight into the five-inch shaft of the commander’s open switchblade until the arm around his shoulders abruptly tightened around his neck, and the commander gave a loud grunt of exertion and ripped him upward from his groin to his ribcage.
The Japanese stared at Commander Ouvarov, startled. Then his insides slid out like a bloody fertilized egg yolk sliding off a spoon, and he collapsed on top of them.
Commander Ouvarov snapped his knife shut and began to hobble and run for the van, hoping that the Tengu would be causing enough commotion to divert attention from the front of the hospital. It wasn’t the first time he had killed a man. He had probably killed hundreds, with sixteen-inch naval shells, from distances of twenty miles away; and once in Okinawa he had cut the throat of a Indonesian pimp who had been trying to hustle him over the price of an eight-year-old girl.
Inside the intensive-care block, the Tengu had reached the door of Admiral Thorson’s suite. It was 9:28, and inside the suite Mary Thorson had only just become aware of all the shouting and commotion outside. She put down the faded poems she had been reading, and stood up to see what was going on.
With two powerful kicks, the Tengu smashed down the outside door of the suite and stepped into the chintz-decorated anteroom. He stood there in his white No mask, both hands raised, turning his head slowly from side to side as he sensed where to go next. His hearing and eyesight were as sharp as samurai sword edges; he was alert to every shuffle and scrape of everything and everybody around him. The pain which burned in his body, gave his senses a demonic acuteness, and he could feel, like a roaring white fire, the presence within him of the Tengu itself, the relentless devil of evil and destruction.
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