Chifune turned to Oga and flashed her devastating smile in acknowledgment of his protectiveness, then turned serious as Sub-Inspector Noda clanked over to her. She had never seen so much equipment on one man. He looked massive in his helmet, body armor, and webbing, but he was probably a mere shrimp.
Sub-Inspector Noda saluted before Chifune could stop him.
"Sub-Inspector Noda- san," said Chifune formally, her eyes slightly narrowed. She was furious, but it was important to respect his dignity. Chewing out a subordinate in the brutal manner seen so often in American police movies was not the Japanese way unless there was extraordinary provocation.
She continued. "I appreciate your courtesy, Sub-Inspector- san, but behavior which is appropriate in conventional policing is not necessarily practical during an internal security operation. Saluting prioritized targets. The person who is being most saluted is most likely to get shot. These people are not ordinary criminals. They are terrorists, they have firearms, and they use them. You must believe me."
Sub-Inspector Noda- san blushed with embarrassment and then went pale as Chifune's words sank in. He looked like a traffic light changing signals. He most certainly did believe this ogre disguised as a woman as she fixed her gold-flecked eyes on his. "Shshsh… shot, Tanabu- san," he stammered in reaction. "I am sorry. I did not understand."
Chifune began to feel almost sorry for the man. He had been assigned to her to learn, after all, and one had to start somewhere. On the other hand, you did not need formal training to acquire common sense. Mama and Papa Noda had slipped up somewhere. These days no one should be tossed out of the family nest into the police force, of all institutions, without being equipped with some street smarts. Even in lower-crime Tokyo. Low crime, after all, was relative.
"It would appear that you were not properly briefed, Sub-Inspector- san," said Chifune in a mollifying tone. She could feel Oga radiating approval beside her. The sub-inspector's face was being saved. The integrity of the group was being preserved. She was not quite sure how long she could maintain this. She was aware that she had the most unfortunate talent for slipping in a sting at the tail end of a conversation. It was most un-Japanese. Fitzduane had enjoyed it. She missed that man.
"Inspector Oga will fill you in," she said.
Oga was normally a man of few words. This was a longer speech than most, but it was right to the point.
"The senior-agent- san and I are due to meet two members of the Yaibo terrorist group in an apartment about two blocks away in fifteen minutes. They say they want to give themselves up. They have had enough. They think we are staff members of a radio station acting as honest brokers. They say they don't trust the security forces. In this kind of delicate situation, you don't want a highly visible cordon around the block. You leave it to us, but half a dozen of you, heavily armed and in plain clothes, should stay close and we will be in radio contact.
"If things go wrong, it will be surprise, speed, and firepower that will make the difference. And three busloads of uniformed Kidotai do not constitute surprise. Understand?"
Sub-Inspector Kanji Noda snapped to attention. " Hai! Inspectorsan," he replied. His right hand vibrated, but he did not actually salute. There was hope for this young man, Oga thought benevolently. His own sons were growing. Soon enough they would be Noda's age, and Oga hoped they, too, would enter the police force.
There was the slightly muffled whump of an exploding rocket-propelled grenade and then the first bus in the parked Kidotai convoy blew up. Burning fuel and debris showered the narrow street.
A second bus caught fire from the explosion of the first and then sprouted lines of holes as automatic fire swept the narrow street.
An armor-piercing rocket hit Noda's body armor on the left side, plowed right through his body on the diagonal, and exploded just before it exited.
The sub-inspector came apart, as if made from a kit like some medical teaching aid designed to show you what was inside the human body down to the entrails.
" Kuso shite shine! " cursed Oga as he leaped for cover in a doorway. The expletive literally meant ‘shit and then die’ and it came to him with some force that he was not even going to have time for the former if they did not suppress the incoming fire.
He saw Chifune flat on the ground behind their parked car. She would be out of the direct line of fire, he thought with some relief, and then he saw her arm com up and flame spurt from her automatic pistol as she fired half a clip into the lock of the trunk.
The retaining latch blasted away, the trunk flew open, and Chifune jumped to her feet and removed one of the long cases from inside.
She was just turning to throw the case to Oga when another rocket hit the front of the car and blew it backward, hitting her below the waist and knocking her to the ground.
Oga ran for the rifle case, grabbed it, and rolled for the protection of the opposite door. Chifune lay with her legs under the rear of the car, motionless. There was blood coming out of the side of her head.
The weapons case had been designed by Chifune and Oga to protect the weapon inside, but to allow it, when required, to be brought into action as fast as possible. A hundred-round C-Mag was already loaded. Forty-millimeter grenades were tucked into the retaining pouches of a load-bearing belt.
Oga clipped on the belt, slid a grenade into the under-barrel launcher, and closed the breech. He pulled back the cocking handle and an SS109 5.56mm round slid into the chamber.
Chifune was still lying there. As he looked and was about to run out to her, she raised her head and one arm and made a negative sign and pointed upward. He understood immediately.
Two Kidotai came crashing through he doorway, submachine guns in their hands. They had discarded their helmets and leg armor to move faster. Both looked resolute and experienced. A rookie officer did not, fortunately, mean untrained men.
"Sergeant Tomoto reporting, sir," said one man. "The unit have pulled back out of the line of fire. The men are breaking out heavier weapons and then fanning out to encircle these fucks. Reinforcements are on the way. It shouldn't take long."
"Follow me," said Oga, and he was already running up the stairs as he finished speaking. Chifune's tactical sense was almost always sound. They could see very little from ground level with fire being poured down on them. From a flat roof it should be a different story.
But they had to move fast. He knew them. The terrorists would not stick around. By the time the police cordon in place, they would be gone. Ambush and run. Kill and hide. Mankind had been doing it since time began, because it worked. The only solution was to react very, very fast and then lay down some serious counterfire.
The roof was not flat.
Oga swore but did not hesitate. The two Kidotai threw him up into the crawl space and he smashed a hole in the tiles. One of the policemen made it up beside him. The second Kidotai, whose cupped hands had propelled up his colleague, headed off to find a window.
Oga, peering out from between smashed tiles, could see nothing from where he stood. He had thought he was pointing in the right direction, but running up flight after flight of stairs was disorienting.
Automatic fire smashed into the tiles and the Kidotai looking through a hole to his left careered backward. He had taken an entire burst in his head.
Oga thought fast. The Kidotai sergeant's hole in the roof was facing the right way, but looking through it risked receiving exactly the same treatment. That was not the object of the exercise.
He smashed out more tiles and then hauled himself out through the enlarged hole onto the roof. Then he looked down, which was a mistake. There was a nominal parapet at the base of the sloped section in case he slipped, but despite the earthquake regulations, it did not look strong enough to stop a Japanese detective inspector. Even one who had considerable interest in continuing to live.
The tiles were nailed onto a matrix of wooden supports. Most of the thin lateral slats were too light to hold his weight, but every two feet or so there was a
stronger beam that looked more reassuring.
He thought of ducking back in and making some foot holes, but then realized there was not time. The people he was after would be gone.
He raised his automatic rifle and fired a burst into the tiles just above where he estimated the top lateral beam ran. The tiles shattered and Oga slung his rifle and levered himself up so that he was supported by the beam but able to look over the ridge. In truth, he was too high. He pulled back and lay at an angle so only what was absolutely necessary was exposed. Unfortunately, that was his head.
He felt scared and vulnerable and was just beginning to regret his enthusiasm when he suddenly saw a figure on a flat roof only two blocks away rise to aim a shoulder-fired RPG over the parapet wall.
The terrorist seemed close enough to touch. Oga felt that the man must notice him any second. They were monitoring the roofline, he knew from the burst of fire that had killed Sergeant Tomoto.
The terrorist with the launcher was intent on lining up his target below. The sergeant had been killed with automatic-weapons fire, so that meant that almost certainly there was at least one other terrorist armed with an automatic weapon on the roof. Or an adjoining roof. Or moving around.
Oga ducked down and unslung his weapon. It came to him that Chifune was lying there helpless below, and then he moved without hesitation, straightening up so that his weight was fully supported on the bar and then bringing the automatic rifle up to his shoulder and firing as soon as the red laser dot came to bear.
Rounds hammered from the flash guard of the Howa and smashed the arm steadying the launcher before hitting home just below the terrorist's throat. He fell backward, already dead, and as he hit the ground his finger was jarred against the trigger.
The rocket blasted out and blew the water-tank housing into the air. The tank inside exploded in a lethal fountain of metal, steam, and water.
A figure scurried out form behind the debris and got up on the parapet, ready to jump across a narrow alley onto an adjoining roof.
There was a split second during which the shot looked possible, but Detective Inspector Oga did not squeeze the trigger.
The think plank beneath his feet had just snapped and he had instantly dropped an unsettling two inches. There was perhaps thirty seconds' pause while the molecules in the thin laths and tiles debated whether they could sustain his weight. Oga did not dare move.
It didn't help. Tiles and laths snapped one after the other as if in syncopation before he came to a bone-jarring halt on the next, thicker lateral support. That might have been enough, except the building had been erected only a few years after World War II when really any grade of material had to do. And the building inspector was a cousin of the second cousin of the builder. And he was connected with the local yakuza clan who just happened to have a load of rather dubious lumber in need of a good home.
The wooden support hesitated, vibrated. And then snapped at a knothole.
Oga was just about to go over the edge when Chifune, her hair matted with blood, appeared through the hole in the roof and grabbed him as he was sailing by. She could well have been pulled down with him, except that the Kidotai held on to her.
As the pair of them were pulled in, Chifune thought more kindly of the brawn of the security police. There were times when she was quite in favor of big strong men. Sexist or otherwise.
*****
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department was officially run by the Superintendent General, and he was the man who appeared frequently in the public eye looking authoritative and concerned and dignified and projecting exactly the right public image.
In the Japanese tradition of public image and private reality – " tatamae and honne " – the Tokyo MPD was actually run by the remote and sphinxlike figure of Deputy Superintendent Saburo Enoke, known to one and all within the Tokyo MPD as ‘The Spider.’ Secretly, he was also director of counterterrorism.
The Spider had the social warmth of a well-iced dead tuna in the Ginza fish market, but though not liked, he was respected and, where appropriate, feared. No one knew quite how he did it, but the consensus was that he did an outstanding job with the police department. In Tokyo, the crime rate was a fraction of that in other major cities, and terrorism was regarded as being reasonably well under control. Most hard-core terrorists had fled Japan for the Middle East and elsewhere. Most.
Exceptions did not please the Spider. But the context of some exceptions was – he searched for the right word – complex. Sometimes exceedingly so. There were forces that the Spider could influence and others that were outside his control. Sometimes that meant accommodating interests that he was privately opposed to. This had been such an occasion. But the Spider believed he could operate most effectively by staying within the web, and to ensure that sometimes sacrifices were required.
Neither the Spider's face nor his body language gave any indication at all of his inner thoughts. The Spider's control was legendary. It was also quite unnerving.
Although the Tokyo MPD had a reputation for integrity, Chifune had initially harbored strong doubts about the Spider. It was only during Fitzduane's visit to Tokyo that she had realized that the Deputy Superintendent of Police was not, as she had originally suspected, an inside man for corrupt politicians and organized crime, but instead was, as the gaijin had said, ‘on the side of the angels.’
He did not look like an angel, Chifune reflected. He was very small and somewhat squat and looked almost like a mannequin in his very large and well-padded black leather swivel chair. His tailoring was impeccable but revealed nothing except a sense of order. His one human touch was a penchant for rather elegant designer glasses.
Chifune, on secondment from Koancho, had reported directly to the DSG for over a year. Working with Oga, promoted from sergeant, she had been focused on eliminating the last vestiges of the terrorist group known as Yaibo.
The gaijin, Fitzduane, had created the opportunity by destroying the inner cadre of Yaibo and killing the leader, Reiko Oshima. Since then, it had been mainly a matter of tracking down the small fry – until yesterday.
Yesterday's deliberate ambush, carefully planned and meticulously executed, was more redolent of earlier times when Yaibo had acquired their reputation. They had been the bloodiest terrorist group Japan had ever experienced since the political assassins of the thirties, who had brought the militarists into power, had flourished.
Yaibo had murdered her lover and best friend, Detective Superintendent Aki Adachi. Never a day went by that Chifune did not miss him. She would never forget, nor would she forgive. Her commitment was absolute.
"Tanabu- san," said the Spider quietly, and the effect was like a breeze springing up and beginning to thin out a mist. She might not like what she was about to behold, but she would see.
Chifune nodded respectfully. This was not proving easy for the DSG.
"It has been necessary, Tanabu- san," continued the Spider, "to keep certain information from you despite the fact that it was directly relevant to your work. This view was not mine, but I acceded to it. There were good reasons for this, but I am exceedingly embarrassed. I have your trust, I know, and I feel I have partially betrayed it. It grieves me. It was not appropriate behavior."
"Directly relevant to your work." Yaibo! Thought Chifune. What could it be? She had read every file, interrogated every suspect, checked every computer record on Yaibo, and talked to every cop with specialist knowledge. So what could she have missed?
"You missed nothing," said the Spider. "No one could have been more thorough and more resolute, but these facts were not in the records. It was a policy decision by certain members of the security service. It was felt that it would be better if you were not informed. A confusion of loyalties was suspected."
Fitzduane! thought Chifune. There had been that one night of love before he had returned to Kathleen to marry her. And she had returned to Adachi, who had died so soon afterward. Who had been slaughtered like an animal by Reiko Oshima and
her assassins. Her alliance with the gaijin had made her suspect in the eyes of her superiors. Her loyalty should be entirely to Japan, not confused by an affair with a foreigner. It was a traditionalist view but not entirely surprising. It was also a male chauvinist view, and that was profoundly irritating.
But why had the Deputy Superintendent General gone along with this – whatever it was? He knew her. He knew her sense of purpose and her utter commitment. He knew her loyalties. Inwardly she sighed. And she knew the pressures on him and the accommodations he had to make.
She came originally from that very world. Power brokers; manipulators; unspoken agreements; money politics. All tied to organized crime, with its roots in the chaos of the postwar period and the need to have Japan as a bulwark against communism. So the democratic structures set up by the U.S. government of occupation were flawed. Opposing communism came first – but there was a price to be paid. The public image of Japan was now democratic, with structures similar to those of the West. The private reality was infinitely more complex and more dangerous. And the Spider had to work within this world. It was reality.
The Spider looked straight at her. She nodded slightly, and he understood. Now she was ready to be told. There was no gentle way.
"Tanabu- san," he said, "Reiko Oshima is not dead."
Chifune's eyes widened. "But… Sensei, I was there when she was killed, as you know. Fitzduane- san, and Lonsdale- san riddled the helicopter with fire and it exploded over the sea. It was not possible that she could have survived. The aircraft blew apart completely."
"Nevertheless," said the Spider firmly.
Feeling suddenly sick with a terrible premonition, Chifune knew that what he said was true. A hundred questions sprang into her mind.
" Sensei," she said. "How did you hear…?"
The Spider made a gesture to silence her. It was the merest twitch of his arm, but it was enough. He wanted to tell the full story without interruption, and in his own way.
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