by Barry Eisler
From the station I walked along the esplanade that follows the waterline of Yokosuka Harbor. A cold wind sliced across the water into my face, smelling faintly of the sea. The sky was dark, in contrast to the clear weather in Tokyo. Too good to last, I thought.
The harbor surface was as gray and foreboding as the sky. I paused on a wooden walkway overlooking the harbor, watching the brooding U.S. warships at rest, the clumps of hills behind them startlingly green against the gray of everything else. The detritus of the military was rhythmically washing up against the sea-wall below me: empty bottles, cigarette packs, plastic bags like some bizarre and decaying species of sea creature that had been wounded in the deep and come to the surface to die.
The harbor reminded me of Yokohama, and the long-ago Sunday mornings when my mother would take me there. Yokohama was where she went to church, and she was going to raise me as a Catholic. Back then we left from Shibuya Station, and the trip took over an hour, not the twenty minutes in which the distance can be covered today.
I remember the long train rides, on which my mother would always take my hand, literally leading me away from my father’s displeasure at the imposition of this primitive Western ritual on his impressionable young son. The church was an insidiously sensory experience: the settled, wooden smells of old paper and seat cushions; the erect pews, rigid as body casts; the glittering light of stained-glass angels; the ominous echoes of the liturgy; the bland taste of the Eucharist. All catalyzed by a dawning sense that the experience took place through a window that my father, the other half of my cultural heritage, would have preferred to keep closed.
People like to say that the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.
But I can tell you as the Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity: if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.
I heard tires crunching gravel, and turned toward the parking lot behind me just in time to see the first of three black sedans brake to a stop a few meters from where I was standing. The rear doors flew open and a man got out on each side. All Caucasians. Holtzer, I thought.
The follow-on cars stopped to the left and right of the lead; with my back to the water, I was encircled. Two more men got out of each of the additional cars. All of them were brandishing compact Berettas.
“Get in,” the one closest to me growled, gesturing to the lead car with his gun.
“I don’t think so,” I said evenly. If they were going to kill me, I’d make them do it here.
Six of them stood around me in a semicircle. If they closed in a little tighter, I could try to blast through one of the guys at the outer edge — his opposite number would be afraid to shoot, lest he hit his comrade.
But they were well disciplined and resisted the urge to close. Probably they’d been briefed on the dangers of getting too near.
Instead, one of them reached under his jacket and pulled out what I instantly recognized as a taser — a stun gun.
Which meant they wanted to take me, not kill me. I pivoted to launch myself at the nearest man, but too late. I heard the pop of the taser firing its twin electrical darts, felt them sink into my thigh, current surging through my body. I went down, jerking helplessly, willing my hand to pull out the darts but getting no response from my twitching limbs.
They let the current surge for longer than they had to, standing around me while I spasmed like a fish on a deck. Finally it stopped, but I still had no control over my limbs and couldn’t draw a breath. I felt them doing a pat-down — ankles, thighs, lower back. Hands pushed up the back of the suit jacket and I felt the Glock being taken from its holster. I waited for the pat-down to continue but it didn’t. They must have been satisfied that they had found my weapon, and searched no further — an amateur mistake that saved the flashbang, which had stayed in place.
Someone knelt on my neck and handcuffed my arms behind my back. A hood was pulled over my head. Someone else moved in and I felt them pick me up, limp as a burlap sack, and dump me onto the floor in the back of one of the cars. Then knees were pressing down on my back, doors were slamming, and the car jerked into motion.
We drove for less than five minutes. From our speed and the absence of turns, I knew we were still on National Highway 16 and that we had passed the base. During the ride I tested my fingers, wiggled my toes. Control was coming back, but my nervous system was still scrambled from the electric jolt I had received, and I felt sick to my stomach.
I felt the car slow down and turn right, heard gravel crunching beneath the tires. We stopped. Doors opened, and a pair of hands took me by each ankle and dragged me out of the car. My head smacked the bottom edge of the door on the way out and I saw stars.
They pulled me to my feet and shoved me forward. I heard footsteps all around me and knew I was surrounded. Then they were pushing me up a short flight of stairs. I heard a door open, then slam shut with a hollow aluminum bang. I was shoved into a chair and the hood was pulled off my head.
I was inside a construction trailer. Dim light came through a single sliding window. A figure sat with his back to it.
“Hi, John. It’s good to see you.” It was Holtzer, of course.
“Fuck,” I said, deliberately radiating an air of defeat and despondency. Not so hard, under the circumstances. “How did you get to me?”
“I knew you’d hear about Bulfinch, that you’d make another play for the disk. I know you’ve got sources, that you might be able to put together enough of the pieces to track me. As a precaution, we set up checkpoints around the likely staging areas near the base. You walked right into one of them.”
“Fuck,” I said again, meaning it.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You got pretty close. But you should have known you were going to come up short, John. You always do, when you’re up against me.”
“Right,” I said, trying to see how I was going to get out of this. Without the handcuffs, I might be able to get past Holtzer and the two men at the door, although I didn’t know who was still outside. With the handcuffs, I wasn’t going anywhere.
“You don’t even know what I mean by that, do you?” he went on. “Christ, you’ve always been so blind.”
“What are you talking about?”
His fleshy lips twisted into a loathsome smile and he silently mouthed four words. I couldn’t catch them at first, so he kept mouthing them until I did.
I was the mole. I was the mole.
I dropped my head and fought for control. “Fuck you, Holtzer. You never had the access. It was someone on the ARVN side.”
“You think so?” he said, his face close to mine and his voice low and obscenely intimate so his men couldn’t hear. “Remember Cu Lai?”
The Cambodian village. I felt a sick feeling creeping in that had nothing to do with the aftereffects of the electric shock they had administered.
“What about it?” I said.
“Remember ‘Waste ’em’? Remember ‘Son, I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me’? You were tough, John! I had to use three sets of voices to convince you.”
Keep control, John. Focus on the problem. How do you get out of this.
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a source, a guy who could do a lot for me. I had to show him what I could do for him. Someone in the village had lent him a lot of money, was causing some problems about it. I wanted to show him how I could make those kinds of problems go away.”
“So you massacred an entire village to get to one guy?”
“Had to. You all look alike, you know.” He laughed at his joke.
“Bullshit. Why not just give t
he source money to pay back the loan?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “C’mon, Rain, the bean counters were paying much more attention to the money being expended than they were to the bullets. Some dead villagers? Just a few more V.C. to add to the body count. Christ, it was easier to do it that way than it would have been to requisition funds, fill out the paperwork, all that shit.”
For the first time since some of the nightmares of the war, I could feel real despair starting to drill its way into my mind. I began to understand bone deep that in a very few minutes I would be dead, that Holtzer would have won, as he’d been winning all along. And while the thought of my own death no longer particularly fascinated me, the knowledge that I had failed to stop him, at the same moment that I came to understand what he had caused me to do so long ago, was overwhelming.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, playing for time. “What were they giving you that would have been worth it? I know it wasn’t money — you’re still a government bean counter in a cheap suit, thirty-five years later.”
He made a face of exaggerated sympathy. “You’re such a farmer, Rain. There’s the way of the world, and you just don’t get it. You trade intel for intel, that’s the game. I had a source who was passing me information on NVA movements — information that was critical for the Arc Light raids that we used to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply chain. And even though SOG’s missions weren’t doing any real operational damage, the North had a bug up its ass about you cowboys because you made them look like they couldn’t control their own backyard. So they wanted intel on SOG, and were willing to pay a lot for it with intel of their own. I was bartering pigshit for gold.”
I knew he was telling the truth. There was nothing I could say.
“Oh, and let me share just one more tidbit before these men take you outside, shoot you in the back of the head, and dump your body in the harbor,” he went on. “I know all about ‘Crazy Jake.’ I volunteered you for the mission to get rid of him.”
My throat constricted. I couldn’t speak. It was like being raped.
“It’s true, it was just good luck that the problem of his little Montagnard army came to my attention. But I knew just the guy to handle it — his old high-school pal, John Rain. No one else could get close enough.”
It was over. I was going to die. My mind started to drift, and a strange calmness descended.
“I got the word out afterward. It was supposed to be confidential, but I made sure people knew. ‘Just between you and me,’ don’t you love that phrase? You might as well say, ‘make sure it gets in the papers.’ It’s great.”
I found myself remembering the time I had first climbed Mount Fuji. I was with my father, and neither of us had dressed properly for the cold. We took turns wanting to go back, but somehow the other always insisted on going on, and eventually we made it to the top. We always laughed about it afterward, and he had loved to tell the story.
“I’ll tell you, it made people uncomfortable, John. What kind of man can off his own best friend? Just sneak up on him and cap him? Not someone you could ever trust afterwards, I’ll tell you that. Not someone you could promote, whose career you could advance. I guess that bit of ‘just between you and me’ info pretty much ruined your career in the military, didn’t it? You’ve been nothing but a murderous little half-breed errand boy for your betters ever since.”
The old man had always liked to tell that story. And how glad he was that we had managed to take turns convincing each other to go on until we had made it.
“Cat got your tongue, Rain?”
Yeah, it was a good memory. Not a bad one to have with you on your way out.
He stood up and turned to the two men at the door. “Don’t kill him here — it’s too close to the naval base. The military still has his dental records, and might ID the body. We don’t want anyone to make any connection between him and the U.S. government — or with me. Take him somewhere else and dump him when you’re done.”
One of the men opened the door for him, and he walked out.
I heard car doors opening and closing, then two sets of tires crunching the gravel as they drove off. We had arrived in three cars, so only one was left. I didn’t know if there were other men outside.
The two men remained at the door, their faces impassive.
Some deep part of me welled up, insisting on going out fighting.
“These cuffs are starting to hurt,” I said, standing up slowly. “Can you do anything?”
One of them laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the pain in a few minutes.”
“But my arms hurt,” I said again, making a face of near-tears and lifting my elbows to create space between my upper arms and my torso. I saw one of them sneer with disgust.
“Oh God, I think I’m losing circulation,” I moaned. I worked my shoulders in circles until the flashbang was poised over my sleeve, then raised my elbows and started jiggling my arms violently. I felt the device ease into the upper part of the jacket sleeve.
The flashbang wouldn’t slide as easily because of the pressure of my handcuffed arms against my sides. I realized I should have tried to force it out onto my back, where it would have dropped down more easily into my handcuffed hands. Too late.
I lowered my wrists, straightening my arms, and started bouncing on my toes as though I had to urinate. “I need to take a leak,” I said.
The men at the door looked at each other, their expressions indicating that they found me pathetic.
Each bounce brought the device down another crucial centimeter. When it got past my elbow, I felt it slide smoothly down my sleeve and into my waiting hand.
The device had a five-second timer. If I rolled it out too early, they might make it out the door before it went off. If I waited too long, I would probably lose a hand. Not exactly how I was hoping to get the cuffs off.
I pulled the spoon free and counted. One-one thousand . . .
The man at the left of the door reached inside his jacket, started to slide out his gun.
Two-one thousand.
“Wait a second, wait a second,” I said, my throat tight. Three-one thousand.
They looked at each other, expressions disgusted. They were thinking, This is the hard case we’d been warned would be so dangerous?
Four-one thousand. I squeezed my eyes shut and spun so that my back was to them, simultaneously shoveling the flashbang at them with a flick of my wrists. I heard it hit the floor, followed by a huge bang that concussed my entire body. My breath was knocked out of me and I collapsed onto the floor.
I rolled left, then right, trying to take a breath, feeling like I was moving underwater. I couldn’t hear anything but a huge roaring inside my head.
Holtzer’s men were rolling on the floor, too, blinded, their hands gripping the sides of their heads. I drew a hitching, agonized breath and forced myself to my knees, then pitched onto my side, my balance ruined.
One of them pulled himself onto all fours and started feeling his way along the floor, trying to recover his gun.
I rolled onto my knees again, concentrating on balancing. One of the men was groping in a pattern of concentric circles that I saw would lead him momentarily to his weapon.
I planted a wobbly left foot forward and tried to stand, but fell over again. I needed my arms for balance.
The man’s groping fingers moved closer to the gun.
I rolled onto my back and plunged my hands downward as hard as I could, forcing my cuffed wrists below the curve of my hips and buttocks and onto the backs of my thighs. I wriggled frantically from left to right, sliding my wrists down the backs of my legs, slipping one foot, then the other, through the opening, and got my hands in front of me.
I rolled onto all fours. Saw the man’s fingers clutching the barrel of the gun.
Somehow I managed to stand. I closed the distance just as he was picking up the gun and kicked him soccer style in the face. The force of the kick sent him spinning away and kno
cked me over backward.
I lurched to my feet again just as the second man regained his own footing. He was still blinking rapidly from the flash, but he could see me coming. He reached inside his jacket, going for a weapon.
I stumbled over to his position just as he pulled free a pistol. Before he could raise it, I thrust the fingers of my cuffed hands hard into his throat, disrupting his phrenic and laryngeal nerves. Then I slipped my hands behind his neck and used the short space of chain between them to jerk his face down into my rising knee, again and again. He went limp and I tossed him to the side.
I turned toward the door and saw that the other one had gotten to his feet. One hand was extended and I flash-checked it, saw the knife. Before I could react by picking something up and getting it between us, he charged.
If he had stopped and collected himself he would have had a better chance, but he had decided to trade balance for speed. He thrust with the knife, but without focus. I had already taken a half step to the right, earlier than would have been ideal, but he couldn’t adjust. The blade just missed me. I spun counterclockwise, clamping onto his knife wrist with both hands. I tried to rotate him to the ground, aikido style, but he recovered his balance too quickly. We grappled like that for a second, and I had the sick knowledge that I was about to lose the knife hand.
I yanked his wrist in the other direction and popped my right elbow into his nose. Then I spun in fast, crudely with no setup, taking a headlock with my right arm and grabbing the lapel of my jacket under his chin as though it was a judogi. The knife hand came loose and I hip-threw him with the headlock, my left hand coming in to strengthen the grip on his neck as his body sailed over me. When his torso had reached the extreme circumference of the throw, I jerked his neck hard in the other direction. A crack reverberated up my arms as his neck snapped where my forearm was pressed against it. The knife clattered to the ground and I released my grip.