The uniformed official was sprawled on the floor at the end of the corridor. His eyes were dazed as he stared at the open door. The two thugs had smashed him to one side in their haste to get away from the approaching American.
To get away, or to lure him topside?
"No must do!" groaned the astonished conductor above the roar of the wind, struggling to sit up even as he was losing his grip on consciousness. "Must ride inside."
Bolan gave him a reassuring shrug. "Yeah, well, somebody better tell them."
Wrapping his fingers around the edge of the door frame, Mack Bolan backed out of the opening. The windrush buffeted him as he stretched his right foot out to reach the narrow fenderlike ledge that ran around the rear of the coach.
The next handgrip was difficult to find. His finger-tips felt a ridge molded into the streamlined skin to drain-away rainwater. Bolan loosened his hold on the door. The air almost blew him off as he swung around into the relative shelter of the end of the coach.
There were four indented steps provided for the maintenance crews to reach the roof. Bolan mounted them cautiously.
An overtaken motorist saw two men flattened out on the roof of the "bullet" express. .. and a third clambering up to join them. He very nearly collided with a streetlight.
It was impossible to stand upright on the roof. The airstream would whisk Bolan away, and he knew it. Also, the crossarms carrying the overhead cables were too low. Bolan could feel them whipping past as he crawled along the roof's service strip that went the length of the train.
Half crouching, half kneeling, he worked his way from one handgrip to the next. He managed to keep a hold on a small drainage pipe, then grasp a ventilator cowling as he advanced on the two ninja hit men.
"Hey, Tanaga!" Bolan yelled. "It's you and me—"
The wind filled his mouth, ballooning his cheeks. Even shouting against the airflow was impossible.
Tanaga's sidekick produced a glittering steel throwing star. He aimed at Bolan and let fly.
The razor-edged disk curved toward him, then was thrust downward by the wind. It buried itself in the roof near Bolan's hand.
The henchman gave a sharp underhand twist to the second missile. Bolan ducked as the airstream plucked the projectile up and over his head. It reached the top of its arc and clattered into one of the gridwork crossbars flashing by overhead.
Bolan drew his gun, but the weapon was as useless in the ripping wind as the metal disks had been. It would take two men just to hold it steady—and the other guy would not cooperate if it was pointed at him. Just as Bolan reholstered the Beretta, the henchman followed Tanaga's bellowed order and launched himself toward Bolan.
He came hurtling toward the Executioner in a kamikaze attempt to drive Bolan off the roof.
Bolan stayed put, and from a crouch he supported his body with his arms as he swung out both legs in a classic scissor kick. His legs wrapped around the oncoming ninja's neck, then closed in a viselike grip. The man's neck twisted, snapped.
Bolan released the wiry soldier, who slithered along the roof and vanished over the edge. The dead guy hit the stones beside the track in an explosion of bone and viscera.
Tanaga was heading for the top of the next compartment. Bolan went for him. But Tanaga was not trying to escape. He knew there was nowhere left to run. He would finish this American meddler before the same treatment was meted out to him. Bolan was still a few feet away when Tanaga turned and lashed out with a long chain he had kept concealed around his waist, under his black jacket. A deadly ninja kasari-fundo, the fighting chain.
The chain's weighted end wrapped itself round Bolan's forearm. Tanaga jerked hard and Bolan fell forward. His free hand shot out to grasp hold of an air duct louver. Now it was his turn to pull the chain. Maybe he could "flush" Tanaga away!
The sneering assassin held the chain taut between them for a few seconds, then kicked out at Bolan's straining fingers. Tanaga aimed to stomp loose his grip. Bolan reached forward suddenly, far enough to slacken the chain, then he tugged back hard, pulling the weapon from Tanaga's grasp.
Bolan flailed out with the chain's free end. Not to keep his enemy at bay, but to entice him.
Zeko Tanaga saw his chance. He triumphantly leaped up from his straddling position on the roof to pounce—between the lashes of the chain—in rage upon his prey.
Too late he realized the trick. He was almost upright in his crazed victory leap. The solid steel girder of the oncoming crossbar struck him at the base of his neck.
His head snapped forward, and the metal edge sliced off the back of his skull as neatly as opening a soft-boiled egg.
The terrorist made a ghastly death shudder, dribbles of gray, pink, white and red spraying around in an uneven semicircle as he jigged low along the roof.
But his mouth was still twisted in a superior sneer as the wind plucked him from the top of the coach.
Tanaga's broken body was a part of the turbulence left behind by the speeding train. One of the most dangerous terror merchants of modern times had finally been felled, the victim of a cool play by an American superagent who would not give up the chase, even when the quarry turned upon him.
Bolan disentangled himself from the chain and began to crawl back to the rear of the roof. Swinging back into the doorway was much easier than getting out.
The conductor was still massaging the huge bump on the back of his head. He stared groggily at the foreigner who came springing back in through the door.
He waited dazedly for the other two to appear. Bolan tapped him on the shoulder. "It's all right," he said. "They got off."
18
"YOU PLEASE REMAIN HERE," demanded the conductor, still totally confused by what had happened. The express was beside one of the platforms of the small Umishi terminus. "There will be some questions."
"Of course." Bolan nodded, assuring the man he would dutifully answer anything the authorities might like to ask.
As soon as the befuddled official had gone to alert the local railway policeman, Bolan let himself off the train on the side away from the platform, long-legged it across the tracks, doubled back over a pedestrian bridge and was quickly lost among the other tourists inspecting the wares outside the souvenir shops. He followed the two fat Germans aboard a sightseeing bus before the conductor and his colleague had returned to find him gone.
SO THIS WAS WHERE IT BEGAN.
The bus driver told his passengers they had one hour to wander around the shrines before going on to see Umishi's famous hot springs and mud pools.
The visitors gawked at the exquisite handiwork of the native craftsmen . . . while the priests pointed to the bowls where they could leave a contribution.
Bolan, his Beretta machine pistol concealed under his arm, strolled away from the crowd, circling to find the spot where the original Shinoda snapshots must have been taken.
Kenji Shinoda had visited the land of his forefathers. There was nothing unusual about that. Americans were always retracing their heritages. But, either by accident or by design, Shinoda had been in Japan at the same time as an international scientific conference. And he would have known the dates of that meeting from his professional journals.
He had driven to this peninsula and stopped to survey these peaceful shrines. And, just like the two Germans were doing, he had taken some photographs of the beautiful thatched wooden buildings. Then he had walked out to the cliff edge and snapped a few more shots of the sacred rocks below.
Shinoda had seen a small group off to the side, and a face in that group had been a familiar one from home. Akira Okawa, who headed the research and development team for Biotech Industries, looking like a solemn young owl, was in discussion with Professor Naramoto, his opposite number and potential rival at Red Sun Chemicals. Sandy had underlined that Naramoto was unmistakably marked by that odd streak of white hair. Bolan presumed that Shinoda had also recognized him.
But what of the other man? What of Kuma? If Shinoda had cared enough to mak
e this personal pilgrimage, had he also stayed in touch enough to recognize Japan's gangster overlord? Or was the missing finger the only clue Shinoda needed to guess that Kuma was on the wrong side of the law?
Now not one of these men remained alive.
The woman, that treacherous chauffeur, was still on the loose, but Bolan sensed she was not far away. That was good. He had a score to settle with her.
A well-behaved class of schoolchildren from Shi-mizu wound around the tall American, taking care not to disturb a man so deep in contemplation.
Bolan continued his thoughts. All those dead men could not have been after the secret of the brand-new biochip technology: Shinoda—the brain that could design it—had been killed first. No, there was another secret. It was enmeshed in an evil web that was spun out of Shoki Castle.
Tanaga had been but one link.
And biochemical bugs were another. Not the kind that might become the unwitting tissue of a new computer's inner workings, but a far more deadly strain—for this link stretched back through time to a bacillus bred in the festering hatreds and fervent nationalism of the prewar years, to a germ developed at a secret laboratory in Manchuria by the elder Yamazaki and his brilliant young student, Naramoto.
It was not the sea breeze stirring in the pines that caused Bolan to feel a sudden chill.
He would further wager that the power behind the Red Sun conspiracy was not interested in cryptography at all, but rather in codes of an entirely different kind, in the honor of a family name and the dreams of an empire that was never meant to be.
Bolan had seen enough. He climbed back into the bus and took a seat at the rear. Since this was an organized tour from Tokyo, there was no guide to keep a head count on the passengers. Good, then no one would miss him when he failed to ride back from the next stop.
BOLAN SMOKED A CIGARETTE before walking back to the parking area. The bus had just left without him.
He waited only another five minutes before Sandy appeared.
She looked a little flustered when she got out of the car. "You got here!" Her expression registered a flicker of relief.
"Yes, I did," he replied, "but they didn't."
She looked at him with a concerned expression, then pointed at the newspaper lying on the seat beside her. She was indicating a story at the bottom of the front page.
Bolan shrugged. Those complicated little ideograms meant nothing to him. "Sorry, I can't read it."
"Neither can I, at least not all of it, but enough to make out that Kuma's been killed, and there have been two more yakuza executions in Osaka and Yokohama."
So the sharks were closing in for a feeding frenzy to devour Kuma's fiefdom. It sounded like the start of a full-scale gang war.
Sandy looked at him accusingly. "You knew Kuma was dead, didn't you?"
He stared past her for a few moments. Finally he nodded. "Yes, I knew."
"And tomorrow the papers will carry a story on the sudden death of poor Mr. Manutsu."
Bolan doubted if the retired wrestler was quite as poor and innocent as Sandy seemed to think. And she was certainly better off for not having heard whatever Manutsu was going to tell them.
"John, in the last twenty-four hours I've felt exhilarated and very scared." She touched his arm. "I don't want to pry into who you are or what you're doing here, but I do want to have some idea of what's going on."
It was a fair question. In Bolan's view there was no soldier in the world who would not fight better for knowing the big picture.
"Okay, I'll tell you. I believe your story about the Circle of the Red Sun. The Circle might not be as powerful and all-pervasive as it once was, but I think the Red Sun has the most evil designs for the world. And it's headquartered at Shoki Castle."
Sandy's eyes did not leave his face.
"I don't know exactly what their plans are," he continued, "but I'll find out when I get inside the castle."
She looked enthused. Bolan shook his head. "You're not going in there."
He squatted, picked up a stick and drew a wiggly line down the left of the bare patch in front of him. "This is the coast road," he told her.
Next he scratched a lopsided oval at the bottom and to the right. "Here's where we are. The hot springs."
He waved the stick toward the fringe of trees about three hundred yards away. They could smell the sulfurous fumes of the gurgling mud pools in among the stunted pines.
"I've scouted around. I guess the castle is about a mile through those woods." He drew an X on his diagram at the point he had calculated the castle must be.
"As soon as you see me get safely through the perimeter defenses, you're to come back here for the car. The road is thickly lined with trees all the way to the main gate—there's plenty of cover—so find a good place to hide, as close to the front entrance as possible, and just wait for me."
"Lie low?"
"Yeah, very low." He glanced at his watch. "Give me until midnight. If I'm not out by then, you cut and run. And tell Paul Ryan what's happened. He'll know who else to contact."
19
BOLAN WAS A SILENT SHADOW gliding from tree to tree. Sandy could barely make him out as he signaled for her to follow. They had reached the fringe of withered foliage that lined the bank by the scalding mineral pools.
They could taste the foul air. The area had the stink of hell about it.
"Keep absolutely still," he whispered.
She froze.
Bolan did not even move his head as he scanned the thickly wooded slope on the far side.
Sandy now understood why he wanted her to move the car nearer to the castle's main entrance. It would be impossible to retrace a path across this treacherous network of slurping mud pits in the dead of night. As if to underscore the danger, a nearby fissure belched forth a cloud of superheated steam.
"He's standing right over there," said Bolan.
It took her a moment to make out the sentry half hidden in the greenery, his colorful costume acting as a camouflage in the dappled shadows beneath the trees. The man, looking away from them, remained as motionless as an Apache.
Shoki Castle was guarded by a wall of living eyes. "He's dressed up like a samurai of the eighteenth century!" Sandy hissed in awe.
Bolan made no reply. He was timing the frequency of the geyser far to the right of their position. It bubbled up again. "Seems to go off every three minutes," he said.
To Sandy it seemed forever.
"I'm going to cross behind that geyser, using the steam cloud for cover. It will take me four to five minutes to get to the start line. The next time it blows, you work your way around to the left." His hand wheeled in the opposite direction to the one he would take.
She nodded.
Bolan did not tell Sandy to show herself occasionally through the bushes. He doubted she could crawl through the undergrowth without the guard's spotting some sign of her movement.
"I'll see you tonight." He patted her shoulder before vanishing like a dark wolf amid the twisted trees.
Bolan waited for the vent to blow its top.
It was right on time.
The breeze strung out the misty vapor into a hot white veil. Behind the fog Bolan padded swiftly over the exposed rock, the hardened mud, the scrawny grass patches. He reached the woods and paused to survey the scene to his left.
The guard was close, in profile, focused intently on the bank of scrub opposite his position. Even as Bolan began to creep toward him, the warrior drew an arrow and readied his bow. He was about to kill the woman.
Bolan took in every detail of the man's fantastic uniform. Sandy was right: this guy looked as if he'd stepped out of a samurai movie.
The sentry was taking aim when Bolan sprang from behind the nearest tree, covering yards in a single leap, and enveloped the sentry in a bear hug. Bolan reached forward with his long arms to grasp the bow and jerked back hard to wrap the weapon across the guy's windpipe. The arrow thunked harmlessly into a nearby branch.
There was a cracking sound. Not sure whether it was the bow or the man's vertebrae, Bolan kept up the relentless pressure until the sentry fell limp. With the wooden bow still bent under the guard's chin, Bolan began to drag the body toward the cover of some rocks close by. Suddenly he felt a strange drumming vibration through the ground. There was a crashing sound tearing through the bushes.
It came from the left.
And the right.
Horsemen.
"John!" Sandy's cry echoed through the forest. "John, help me!"
He raced to the border of the wood, trying to pinpoint the location of her scream.
Three mounted swordsmen were threading a zigzag path through the hot springs. They were heading for Sandy's hiding place.
Stealth was out of the question. Bolan drew the Beretta from beneath his Windbreaker and took aim.
The first 9mm hit a rider dead center at the base of the spine. He fell to the ground with a clatter of steel armaments.
The second horseman had to run his steed off the path. The crust of mineralized mud cracked beneath the horse's weight. The horse panicked as its feet broke through into churning slime.
The horseman jumped down onto solid ground. Bolan's next slug blew him back into the hole the horse had made. The guy lay at the feet of his struggling animal, his face buried in the sulfurous mud. The horse used the corpse to secure its footing, burying the sword-laden body deeper into the slime as it took off out of the steaming bog.
Bolan raced out across the same track the swordsmen had used. The third sentry was galloping to the spot where Bolan had left Sandy.
The American marksman led his running target by a hair and squeezed the trigger. The direct hit was seemingly without effect. Bolan shot once more to finally bring the sentry down.
Sandy stood up in the bushes not twenty feet from where the third horse had lost its rider. Bolan ran up the short slope and grabbed her hand. "Come on—back to the car."
"Over there, John! Behind you!"
Executioner 053 - The Invisible Assassins Page 11