Another point: the thought occurred to him just to tackle her, get her somehow into a submission hold. His superior mass and leverage ought to be formidable advantages, and it would make sense to the Marines. Did he hold back, after the last point? Something went awry, though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where or when, or how she’d gotten hold of his right hand. A subtle bit of thumb pressure on the back—why couldn’t he jerk it free?—wrist pulled up and hand bent down, harrowing pain, he wanted to slap at her with his left, but he just couldn’t reach her, and when he tried to shift his hips to bring her within range she pushed forward and forced him to his knees. He looked up at her, hoping no tears would show, and she smiled back, and before he knew it she’d stepped over his helpless arm and rolled him over until his face was pressed into the grass, her feet locked over his neck and the captive arm twisted between her legs. If she’d wanted to prolong his humiliation, she could easily have prevented even the motion of tapping out.
One last fall, though he had no notion of it being needed to demonstrate her mastery. Couldn’t he just concede now? No, he’d insisted on this, as the office of a friend, and he had to see it through. Might as well fight like her, sparring-style, shotokan. He assumed the position, one fist in front of the other, one foot forward, and she reciprocated, except her hands were wrong, open, one above like a greeting, one below as if expecting a gift. What else to do, but step in and jab, maybe look to slip in a combination behind it? He knew better than to try a kick; even if he hadn’t seen what she could do with her feet in the previous matches, he’d had plenty of other opportunities to find out over the last few years.
When an opening presented itself, he couldn’t resist—a jab to set the distance for the hook, his shoulders rolling through, positioning him for the uppercut. How strange the result felt to him, his arms caught in her sticky blocks. She hadn’t grabbed his arms, merely curled her hands around his wrists—to grab on would make her vulnerable, he could see that much—and every move he made to extricate himself left him vulnerable to sharp inside strikes, his neck and face, his ribs and solar plexus. Once entangled, no way out presented itself, and he didn’t play chess as well as she did. She smiled at him again underneath those dark, deep eyes, a friend and an opponent at once. Unnerving. Had he trespassed, without realizing it, into her personal domain? The blows came fast and they stung. He was afraid to step back and catch another mule kick in the chest, so he stepped forward and tried to push her away. That’s when she grabbed his wrist and twisted him down, and then over as she pivoted to throw him across the ring.
Lying there, looking up into those dark eyes—“C’mon, big guy. I think you’re done,” she said—letting her hoist him up to his feet, he was certain she’d slipped that punch, and he could almost chuckle at how cleverly she’d manipulated the scene, the referee, the Marines who stood silently staring from the edge of the ring. His ribs made laughing risky so he tried to suppress it, that and something he saw in those eyes, the familiar darkness he’d seen before, warm, welcoming, but something more, a glint of a sharper spirit, he’d almost call it demonic… if he had the nerve. He didn’t feel as banged up as he expected, more bewildered than bruised, as if he’d lost something primal and fierce in the fight. Had she taken something from him? She pulled his arm over her shoulder and helped him out of the ring.
“Sorry about the ribs,” she said. “I got a little carried away.”
“It’s okay. I deserved it.”
She sat him down next to Connie in the bleachers, since he asked not to have to face his sister just yet.
“It looked like she took you to school,” she said, once Emily was out of earshot.
“Yup.”
“At least you managed to get a lick in.”
“Yeah, right.”
~~~~~~~
In all her matches, she knew who the audience needed to be: the Marines seated around the ring. Everything she did, every punch, kick or submission hold had to be shaped for them. But another set of eyes concerned her all the while. Dark and brooding, difficult to read, but easy to sense, Jiao Long watched her every move, studied her technique… and she studied his.
Subtle, efficient, occasionally cruel—or so Emily thought—no wasted movements, but without appearing at all rushed, Jiao progressed through the rounds of the tournament as enigmatically as she did. He preferred a soft style, deceptive, elusive, round blocks and fierce joint locks—at least that’s how he seemed to her in the first two rounds. Later, he took another tack, more direct, willing to trade punches, and giving better than he got. He won a fourth round match with three spinning kicks and a knockout. Anyone watching closely would have to conclude that he had no particular style. Emily recognized the illusion, since she was determined to create the same effect for herself.
In his last two matches, he began to pay more attention to the way she watched him. After each point, he’d scan the crowd looking for her, and tip his head once he’d found her. Jiao Long was no ordinary practitioner here on a goodwill mission, of that much she was certain. But how good was he?
“Why the worried look?” Connie asked, when Emily sat down next to her.
“I dunno. Do I really look worried?”
“You looked amazing out there, if you ask me.”
“I guess so,” Emily said. “Do you recognize that guy?”
“Colonel Jiao? Yeah, he’s been on our radar for a few years. Came up through the Chinese Navy, training crews for those little patrol boats they use in the South China Sea. He specialized in hand-to-hand combat, boarding maneuvers, that sort of thing.”
“And now?”
“No firm intel, but my guess is he’s Guoanbu, probably the Sixth Bureau, counter-intelligence. Michael could probably tell you a lot more.”
“I guess.”
“Be careful around him. He’s not here by chance.”
“I figured as much.”
After two more rounds only four competitors remained, and much to Connie’s consternation, Jiao Long was one of them. The likelihood that Emily could avoid facing him had become a vanishing quantity, so when her name was called out and he stood in the ring waiting for her, Connie begged her to reconsider.
“It won’t matter,” she replied. “At this level, I’ll have to face all three of ’em no matter what happens.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. But you can’t really expect me to back down now, can you? After everything we’ve been through?”
“I guess not,” Connie conceded. “But does life always have to dangle you like this?”
Emily shrugged and stepped into the ring, slipping a mouthpiece in and pulling her gloves on. A Marine she recognized stood on one side next to someone she assumed was a SEAL, the other two she’d have to face, she thought, and a chance for a reunion with Durant. What were they thinking? And the men milling about near them? She detected nothing supportive in their faces. Whether a competitive spirit had merely clouded over all other sentiments, or they just didn’t have any sympathetic connection to her, she couldn’t tell. Perhaps Theo and Connie had been right all along.
Scattered barking and mock howls arose from the crowd when she told the judges she didn’t want to wear headgear. She’d heard it from the Marines all afternoon—“They do call themselves Devil Dogs, after all,” she told herself—and initially it seemed resentful. Had the tone changed in the course of the day, out of curiosity, or even grudging respect? She didn’t want to count on it, and began to fear that her entire effort this day would turn out to be wasted.
The referee went through the rules one last time, speaking particularly for Jiao’s benefit.
“Yes,” he said in English. “I understand your instructions.”
Emily nodded to the referee, and then to Jiao, a fist pressed against an open palm. All the while, she breathed in and out, slowly, calmly, seeking the peaceful place in her heart, but finding something else perhaps less peaceful. He stared back at her, in no hurry, seemin
gly calm, perhaps waiting for her to make the first move. Her breath filled her up and then pressed out against his, against the referee, the judges, the other SEALs and Marines. She followed it out through the crowd, breathing through them, searching every heart she touched—Connie and Theo, Ethan and Michael, her mother’s heart beating too fast, her breath choppy, and Andie’s, too, sitting next to her. Li Li barely paying attention, sitting on Anthony’s lap, and Anthony, trying not to look, but unable to turn away… and, next to him, her heart found Stone, his breath barely moving, his heart beating even more slowly than hers. He never spoke, but she heard his voice echoing inside her mind, and it brought back all the emotions she felt when she faced his “brother” in Kamchatka. He said one word, the only word he ever spoke in her dreams: “Ama.”
She heard no other voices, no song crafted from her name—Michiko, Michi-san, Michi-sama, Michi-kami—no sign of the attention of Amaterasu-omikami. Had the Goddess of the Sun finally lost interest in her?
“I’m ready,” she muttered, to no one but herself. “I can do this.”
His hands moved like lightning when he finally attacked, much faster than anything she’d seen that day. If she didn’t already know what he would do, she never could have kept up. But she did know, she felt it in her heart and mapped it out in her mind, tracing his movements with her hands, guiding each strike off target, using the softest blocks, more like tiny nudges to push his hands awry. And she felt his consternation growing, felt his expectation that she’d be overwhelmed by the onslaught turn against him in shame and self-doubt, and his desire to glance over to the “protocol officer,” Dong, for some sort of judgment, as well as the effort it took him to resist it.
If he’d expected to manhandle her… well, that idea died the moment she used a harder down-block to deflect a strike across her body, and then snapped her wrist back and stung him on the nose with it—one of those exotic strikes the Chinese martial arts employ in their seemingly limitless resourcefulness. Sensei Oda used to call it the chicken-wrist. Jiao staggered back, caught entirely by surprise, a trickle of blood on his lip, and she heard scattered barking from the Marines. No point was awarded, since her strike wouldn’t have disabled him, even if the judges had recognized what it was. But he recognized it, and tipped his head to her.
She let a deep breath slip out through her teeth and nostrils, and contemplated his eyes and the passions she found there, or rather, the lack of them. Not even the ordinary passions one finds in a tournament, the desire to win, the anxiety, vaunting triumph, grief, none of these were on display. “He’s not here to compete,” a thin, small voice whispered to her, but she brushed it aside.
His next attack felt like a sort of homage to her, even though she hadn’t done anything like it that day: a front kick to her knee followed by a high roundhouse kick aimed at her face, or at least where her face would be when she leaned down to block the first kick. But Emily didn’t block, spinning her knee away instead, rotating it up into a high wheel kick that caught him on the ear, just over the guard he’d had to lower ever so slightly to avoid losing balance when his kicks didn’t connect. The blow drove him to the ground, where he lay for just a second, shaking the cobwebs out. That one earned a point, and even a chorus of howls from the newly appreciative Marines. It may have been the first thing she’d done all day that seemed in any way right to them. Perhaps it even felt like payback for the way he’d dispatched some of their comrades, which would account for its taunting quality this time; finally, they seemed to be taunting someone other than her.
Jiao wouldn’t attack first this time, no doubt thinking she preferred to respond—and he might not be wrong about that, she thought. A quick strike, before he’d managed to settle in to a defensive stance, one foot still moving forward, not yet planted, she kicked it out from under him and pivoted into a back kick to the chest as he lost his balance. He fell backwards and rolled away, in case she meant to follow up. The judges awarded a point, fooled by how flamboyant it appeared, even though she knew it wasn’t really forceful enough to deserve one. At least now he wouldn’t assume she couldn’t attack first.
The thought flashed through her—“It’ll sting a bit, but maybe they’ve got a point”—as she stepped inside his next attack, too close for any dangerous blows to her legs, and positioning her to lock him up after a few blocks. For just an instant the two of them glared at each other across tangled arms, almost completely immobilized, until he managed to free a hand and strike her jaw with an open palm. The slap rang out for all to hear. A second short strike to the ribs spun her around and he wrapped her up in a choke-hold. With arms flailing, trying to reach his face, she thought this would satisfy Connie and Theo, and wouldn’t be nearly as galling as losing to a Marine.
If she could tap out now, that would end the match and satisfy everyone. She’d have allowed the Marines to save face in not having a girl win the tournament, and she would have proved her mettle to them. The only difficulty was how to tap out while standing. The pressure on her throat increased, and she did the only thing she could, centering her feet underneath her as he pushed forward to defend against a back kick, she squatted down, thrust her hips behind her, and hoisted him onto her back. When she pulled her shoulders down as hard as she could, in effect doing a somersault without letting him release her, she landed on top of him, running short of oxygen, but careful to land so as not to break his wrist, which would have destroyed the illusion she still aimed to create.
Now that they were both on the ground, amid the confused growls and howls of the crowd, she slapped the ground next to them twice… then several more times, when he didn’t respond. In fact, he tightened his grip on her. In the commotion that swirled to life dimly in the distance, she only had a few more seconds before blacking out. “He’s not playing anymore,” she thought. The referee’s voice faded away, drowned out by the sound of the blood thumping in the vessels of her neck. Jiao kicked him away when he tried to separate them. But the movement of his hips shifted her position slightly and allowed her access to his groin, which she chopped at with all her might, striking the edge of a cup once, twice, three times. He flinched—it must have hurt—and she slid the other hand down his side, probing for the soft spot below the bottom rib, jamming her fingers into his flesh, bending them under the rib, pushing muscle fibers aside. It seemed to hurt just enough to create a tiny opening, because she was able to shift to one side and jam an elbow into his ribs, and force four fingers under his exposed wrist and twist it out and down.
In an instant, she’d rolled off him and on to her feet, breathing hard and expecting to find him writhing in pain on the ground. But he’d found his feet too, the referee lying a couple of yards away, not moving. Then she saw it, the glint of steel in his right hand; it must have been concealed in his boot. The stadium lights caught it in a flash she doubted anyone else could see, the way he held it curled along his forearm. He slashed at her with a jab, the finger-guard of the knife narrowly missing her chin, though the blade found her jaw, a searing cut, and nicked her shoulder, too. Blood oozed out, warm on her face and neck, and when she glanced down at her arm, the entire sleeve was shredded. No blood visible there, yet.
“This is a suicide mission now,” she said, looking for an effect. But he didn’t hesitate to attack her again, since the peculiar suspense the crowd seemed to be held in by the sudden change in the terms of the violence on display would only last a second or two. After that, the Marines would surely storm the ring and put an end to it, regardless of how they felt about her. Another sudden move, this time stabbing from above: she blocked it from below, needing to use both hands to lock him in an arm-bar—not the optimum technique, since his advantage in size and strength meant she couldn’t hold him off this way for long, but she had no option. With the tip of the knife just inches from her left eye, she glowered into his, sighting along the serrated side of the blade, and found the darkness she expected to see there, and something else, too. A peculiar sympathy seemed
to peek out from the depths, gleaming behind the fierce desire to take her life.
“It’s better this way, Tenno-san,” he said, tilting his head slightly, as if needing to reset in order to find the words in Japanese. “If I kill you here, with your family watching, no one can defile your body.”
He placed the other hand behind the knife, preparing to push through her resistance, as she mulled over the meaning of his remark. She knew one last thrust would finish her. But the crowd began to realize what they were witnessing. A voice cried out, “He’s gonna kill her,” while several others shouted, “Get in there, Devil Dogs!” One last voice sang out over the rest, husky but higher pitched—was it Connie’s?—“Hang in there, Marine!”
Jiao glanced behind her at the men rushing toward him, and in the instant it took him to refocus, she released the arm-bar, ducked under the blade, and pulled his arm down and through, as she pivoted behind him. The blade tore at his ribs in passing, and when she kicked through the knee, he fell to the ground, allowing her the leverage to break his elbow and slide the knife his now limp hand still held through the side of his neck. She felt the blade catch on bone and jammed it home with the other hand, then let him slide to the ground.
Blood spurted from both sides of his neck, and the crowd, frozen by the misty red fountain, stood agape in a wide circle, shrinking back in astonishment at what she had wrought, how quickly she had turned the tables. Jiao’s eyes fluttered at her, as if something in him needed to escape, and she saw his lips move, though nothing audible came from them. When she crouched down and brought her face close to his, she thought he said, “Forgive me, Sensei. I have tried to follow the honorable path.” She couldn’t make out anything else he may have wanted to say, with blood pooling and bubbling in his throat as his breath began to fail him… and soon whatever had wanted to escape could no longer be seen in his blank eyes.
Girl Takes The Oath Page 16