by Wesley Chu
“I’ll saisho wa guu you for it.”
Roen left them to divvy up their assignments and then crept up to the rest of the team, who were squatting in the shadow of a row of dumpsters. All of his people appeared relaxed, almost resting, as they waited for the signal to start. It was the sign of seasoned professionals.
Roen nudged the chain-linked fence with the tip of his boot. “Why isn’t this cut?”
Pedro shrugged. “Fence is only six feet tall. We thought we’d just jump it and spare some property damage.”
Roen grimaced. “Do you know how old I am?”
“Uh,” stammered Pedro. “Actually, I do. You are–”
“–too damn old to climb a fence. Get the wire cutters.”
“Sorry, sir. Right away, sir.”
Roen looked up at the roof. “How are we looking up top?”
“Vans are parked. One is loading grunts now,” said Asha. “Most have handguns. I count three assault rifles and at least five shotguns. I also see a battering ram. They’re getting ready for war.”
“This is Nabin. I’ve found Hito Kinata’s office. He just threw on his coat and holstered a pistol. He’s giving orders to a small group. My Japanese sucks, but here goes: um, um, restoring honor, risk, something, safeguard, police. He definitely said the words Genjix and girl… kill the heir. Oh oh. The group is leaving the office and heading downstairs.”
“First van just pulled away,” announced Asha. “Second loading now.”
“The boss has left the office and gone downstairs to join his entourage. Hang on, footsteps approaching my position. I need to hide.”
“Stay safe.” Roen checked the row of dimly lit windows just below the roof. They weren’t too high up, but there was no way to reach Nabin’s position quickly. He stared at the drainage pipe Nabin had used; no way for him to get up, at least. The rest of the team would have to go from ground level.
“Second van pulling out,” said Asha.
One of the windows lit up, closely followed by a loud gunshot. Two more pierced the night, and then they were soon joined by the rattling sound of automatic fire adding to the rain’s pitter-pattering on the ground.
More rattling followed on their comms. “They found me,” said Nabin. “Took two out, but they’re swarming.”
“Second van just stopped halfway down the street and is reversing course. I’m taking the shot,” said Asha urgently. The crack of a sniper rifle joined the night chorus.
“Go, go,” yelled Roen. “Asha, don’t let the ones in the van back inside. Hekla’s team, up through the back. Josie and I will enter through the side door.” He turned to the kids. “And none of you even think about stepping foot inside.”
Hekla’s team crawled through the fence first and disappeared in the shadow of the warehouse. Roen tried to take point and squeeze through next, but was held back by Josie, who looked at him as if he were crazy.
She rolled her eyes and pushed past him. “Beauty before age, old man.”
“Beauty before age, sir,” he shot back.
“You’re retired,” she replied, sprinting away.
Roen decided to let her win this round, mostly because he didn’t have a clever retort ready. He ran after her.
“We have the ones in the van pinned down,” reported Hekla. “There’s a whole army back here. We’ll keep them busy.”
“More like they have us pinned down,” corrected Pedro.
More sniper shots punctuated the air, and then the all-too-familiar exchange of a gunfight erupted near the loading dock.
“Just keep them busy,” said Roen.
He and Josie hugged the walls of the warehouse and they crept up the steps toward the side door situated underneath a green awning. Roen checked the rounds in his shotgun, eyed the Australian to make sure they were on the same page, and breached the door with a short-range blast to the knob.
Sucking in his breath and then slowly letting it seep lightly through clenched teeth, Roen proceeded inside. Frantic yells blasted his eardrums from the side while heavy footsteps rang on the metal catwalk above. He spun to his left and watched for signs of movement. Someone shoved him from behind, knocking him to the ground. An assault rifle rattled over his shoulder.
He looked up just in time to see a yakuza fall. Josie grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back to his feet. “That was too close. I am not taking you back to the Keeper in a body bag.”
“She’s retired,” he replied.
“Once a Keeper, always a Keeper.”
Roen pointed at a set of metal stairs to his right. “Let’s go save our boy.” He touched his comm. “We’re in, Nabin. What’s your position?”
There were several seconds of silence, long enough to worry Roen. Then Nabin clicked over, breathing heavily. His words came out slurred. “I’m in a tight spot, boss. Holed up in what looks like the break room behind the refrigerator door. Bogeys cornering me in on both sides.”
“We’re on our way up. Are you all right? Your voice sounds all gummed up.” Roen stopped. “Are you eating?”
“They have mochi in the freezer.”
Static overcame their comm link. Something hard slammed near the microphone. More gunfire followed.
Roen rushed up the stairs two at a time, took a quick second to catch his breath at the turn, and then went up the rest of the way one step at a time. He reached the second floor completely out of breath. A catwalk lined the perimeter of the warehouse, leading to offices. An open space over the garage kitty-corner to where he stood looked like some sort of break room. It came to life as bursts of gunfire illuminated the darkened area like a firecracker.
Roen weaved his way to Nabin, crouching over as he sped down the catwalk. He could see a dozen people running past through the grating below. One of the side doors opened, and a burly yakuza with a laughably small revolver in his beefy hand jumped out. Roen slammed down on the man’s arm with his shotgun and put a slug in his chest.
Another appeared on the catwalk along the opposite wall and opened fire. The glass behind him shattered with a crash, and then three slugs punctured the wall perilously close to his head. Roen flattened himself against the floor, somehow getting his shotgun trapped awkwardly under his body. Cursing, he rolled to his side and opened fire, but his four shots hit nothing. He reached for more shells to reload and then rolled onto his back with his shotgun raised, just in time to see Josie trip a guy and toss him over the railing.
He nodded his thanks and continued to move. He made it halfway across the length of the building when the metal catwalk around him began to spark. Roen dove to the ground again as dozens of tiny yellow sparks exploded around him. He tried to return fire, but the barrage was too thick.
“They’ve zeroed in on you from below,” yelled Josie. “Keep going. I’ll cover you.”
The colonel dove behind a paneled section of the railing and began to lay down suppression fire, pausing only long enough to swap magazines.
The pressure around Roen abated just enough for him to continue crawling forward on his hands and knees. He made it only a few meters before his knees hurt far too much to go on. He got to his feet and tried to move forward in a crouch. That made his back ache. Finally, deciding to screw it all, he righted himself and ran. He reached the corner and stumbled into two yakuza running in the opposite direction. His shot went wide left, and then they were too close for another. Roen clubbed the first across the side of the head, and then put the second in a choke hold using the barrel of the shotgun.
The second move, in hindsight, was a mistake. Roen had forgotten how much pressure and effort he needed to apply to cut off a man’s circulation, and while the shotgun helped, it didn’t help enough. The yakuza writhed and wiggled, nearly breaking free of Roen’s grip several times. The man threw elbows and punches, and annoyingly kept slapping Roen in the face as his struggles weakened.
Roen’s arms began to burn, barely able to maintain the pressure. C
hoking the man unconscious felt like it would take all night. It became a race to see who passed out first, the yakuza from suffocation or Roen from exhaustion.
Suffocation won out, if barely. The yakuza fell to his knees, and after a few strangled cries, went limp. Roen went limp as well, falling onto all fours and gasping for breath. A nap sounded really good right about now, but the noise of the gun battle below kept him going. He gave himself a second more to recover and then pawed for the shotgun.
Roen got to one knee and looked to the side; Josie was still battling the yakuza below. He touched his comm. “Everyone still here?”
“We’re mopping up now,” said Asha. “Most of the yakuza are either down or have fled. Two black cars pulled away in the middle of the fight.”
“Pedro and I have the rest,” said Hekla. “We should have the situation under control in the next few minutes.”
“Any injuries?”
“Bullet from a pistol got under my armor,” growled Pedro. “I’m not running any marathons any time soon.”
“Nabin, you still there? Nabin?”
Roen willed himself to his feet and staggered into the breakroom. He found Nabin on the floor next to an overturned table tussling in close combat with at least half a dozen men. It looked like a tornado had whipped through. All of the chairs were broken, and the refrigerator door was torn off its hinge.
Roen aimed his gun at the tangle of arms and legs. “Everyone freeze.”
No one froze. No one was even paying attention.
“Hey,” yelled Roen. “I have a shotgun here.”
The mob continued to attack Nabin. The Nepalese was a force of nature, however. This wasn't graceful this time; he was fury in a bottle, a torrent of savagery that tore down those who got too close. He was bloodied and cut, but was giving as good as he got, although the yakuza were definitely winning.
Roen aimed his shotgun upward and pulled the trigger. The blast in such a small space sounded like a bomb had gone off. Everyone froze and looked his way.
Roen pointed the shotgun at the mass of bodies again. “Now that I have your attent–”
Debris from the ceiling drizzled down on him. A piece of sheetrock the size of a dinner plate broke over his head. Roen spat out the chalky soot. One of the smartass yakuza tried to take advantage of his distraction by reaching for his gun. Roen shook away the obstruction in his eyes and pulled the trigger again, blasting a hole between the guy’s feet. This time the man got the message, throwing his hands in the air.
Roen flipped the shotgun up to his shoulders, grabbed four shots from his hip, and reloaded expertly. Just to show off, he let go of the shotgun and let it roll down to his hip where his finger came back on the trigger.
“What do you know, I’ve still got it,” he grinned. Thank God he had caught it. It would have been awfully embarrassing otherwise. He gestured with the shotgun. “Let him go.”
There must have been five sets of hands clawing at Nabin. They let go, and he squirmed his way free, throwing a few extra elbows on his way up.
“Thanks for the assist, boss,” he said.
“You mean thanks for the rescue.”
“I had it handled.”
“Sure you did.” Roen touched his comm. “How are we looking downstairs?”
“The warehouse is secure,” said Hekla.
“Round them up. Move them to the first floor,” replied Roen. “Nabin, clear the upstairs and scour for intel.”
As with most things, the action was always the briefest while the cleanup afterward took forever. The team rounded the survivors up into a corner of the warehouse while Nabin searched for information regarding Ella or the Genjix. It didn’t surprise him that no one was talking. They had assumed Roen and his team were police, which likely meant they had some sort of catch-and-release agreement set up. Several of them had turned white when they realized otherwise.
Hekla and her team, still hurting from Tarfur’s death, wanted to take the screws to some of the yakuza. Nabin, anxious about Ella and feeling they were short on time, agreed. Roen forbade it, instead opting for finesse.
Over the years, he had honed his interrogation skills. Intelligence-gathering was an art, and true interrogation was just a matter of holding negotiations with an individual’s psyche. While violence and pain was one method, it was rarely efficient and reliable.
The first step was always jury selection, or in this case, finding the right person to hold negotiations with. Roen walked the lines of prisoners and picked out a particularly well-dressed and haughty-looking young man with a bandage over his nose. As the saying went in their line of work, bravado breaks. Those who show it don’t have it.
Roen had Nabin yank the kid into the boss’s office for questioning. His choice quickly proved to be the right one; the young man was the boss’s son. Roen patted himself on the back for his quality instincts and deduction skills. There was just a stink of nepotism about him.
Nabin sifted through the young man’s wallet. “Kid’s name is Masato.”
“There’s also a picture of him and his dad on the wall,” pointed Roen.
“You do not realize who you are dealing with,” spat the boy. “When my father–”
Roen put a finger to his lips. “Hush. It’s not going to be OK.”
It took Roen all of five minutes to get the information he needed, all with just a few words. All he had to do was lead Masato to his father’s office and read his cues. The boy’s eyes gave everything away. It took just a few more softball questions and an angry-looking Nabin playing bad cop for the boy’s bravado to crumble like old cheese and to give everything away.
Within minutes, Roen was able to find the hidden safe, was able to determine which drawer held the important papers, and the general logistics of tonight’s activities. It looked like a pretty large operation. The one thing he still did not have, however, was an address. Fortunately, young Masato was a sieve, and Roen was able to relatively easily get the kid to give up the password to his father’s laptop, which incidentally was “Yakuza123.”
From there it only took a few more minutes to locate the orders from the leader of the Aizukotetsu-kai for Kinata to supply fifty armed men for battle. This mission was to collaborate with the Genjix on an attack on a police facility this very night.
Roen frowned as he read the information. “The Genjix and the yakuza are going to attack other Genjix and the police?”
“Competing factions,” Nabin whistled. “They must want her badly. What has Ella gotten herself into?”
“It has to be Io.” Roen waved the paper in front of Masato. “There are orders here, but it doesn’t have a location. Where did they go?”
Masato shrank back. “I don’t know. The orders never mention a place. Just to be ready for battle.”
Nabin slammed his fist onto the desk. There was a knock on the door. Ella’s friends walked in. Kaoru bowed. “Sorry to disturb you, but we have a problem. Pek’s missing. He never returned after the fight.”
“What do you mean missing?” asked Nabin.
“After we took the warehouse, the rest of us met up. Pek never showed,” said Hinata.
“Why are you telling us this now? We’ve been here half an hour,” said Nabin, waving his hands.
“Pek sometimes gets bored and takes a nap,” said Daiki. “We thought perhaps he just got tired.”
“But he never showed up?” demanded Roen.
The Burglar Alarms shook their heads.
Roen took a deep breath. The last thing he needed was a dead kid. “We need to look for him right away.”
Kaoru held up a phone. “Actually, we know where he is. He thought it was a good idea to hide in one of the black cars to stay out of the rain. Then the car pulled away.”
Roen took the phone. “Pek, is that you?”
“Hellllllllppppp! I’m trapped inside the trunk,” replied a high-pitched, panicked scream. “The car is moving. It smells like s
omething died in here.”
“Hang on, kid. We’re coming.” Roen rushed out of the office and leaned over the railing. “Hekla, get me a GPS trace on that phone!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The Hunt
I do not deny it. I encouraged and actively worked against Ella and Nabin’s relationship. The last thing I wanted for the girl was for her to become a Prophus agent. Being in a relationship with one was just as bad. In either case, Ella would be bound to the Prophus.
It was a connection I could not tolerate. My influence over the girl was limited enough as it was. I did not need to have to compete with someone else. Any chance I got, I tore at the dangling threads of their commitment and watched as it slowly unraveled.
Shura stood on the crest of the hill and scanned the cluster of buildings nestled in the valley at the bottom of Mount Tateshina three hours northwest of Tokyo. It looked like a training facility. To the eastern end near the lone road was the main group of buildings. An impressive obstacle course took over the southwest corner of the camp and a cluster of hollowed-out structures that looked like they were used for urban warfare drills occupied the northwest. The near south end was a sprawling parking lot that housed military and police transports and vans. A tall barbed-wire fence lined the perimeter of the entire base with a good fifty meters between the edge and the nearby forest.
Shura had at first questioned why Rurik would choose such a remote facility to hold Ella Patel instead of, say, a centralized and accessible location like the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters. That building downtown was a veritable fortress now, nearly impregnable no matter how many yakuza she brought.
Rurik’s decision is smart. It is always better to hide than to fortify. You blasted your way through the police headquarters once, so who is to say you could not do so again?
“I am rather exceptional,” Shura said without any hint of arrogance. “Still, his choice of venue is questionable. The nearest airport is over an hour away.”
Look at that open area on the far end, next to the hollowed-out shells. Parallel to those three warehouses.