A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  He managed to gain access to a laptop, pulled up the Japan Times site, and got the articles from two days after his fight on the island. On the national page, he found the brief item he was looking for: an unknown body had been located in Kiyosumi Gardens, presumably a yakuza or someone who had run afoul of the yakuza, given the gravity of the cuts that had killed him. A police captain was quoted expressing concern that while the Brotherhood of the 8-9-3 was frequently violent, these crimes almost always took place in tenderloin areas such as Kabukicho; the captain worried that a corpse in the elegant, historical glades of Kiyosumi Gardens indicated some new phase in criminal culture.

  There was no other coverage; no one visited him, no one asked for a debriefing, a statement, a comment, an account. He simply lay there, regathering his strength, reading newspapers, watching the tube, eating cold eggs, cucumber sandwiches, and many kinds of fish and cutlets.

  A week into it, his wounds were checked, rebandaged, painkillers and more antibiotics provided, and then he was declared well enough to travel. The young men brought him a new suit, as well as his fraudulent passport under the name Thomas Lee.

  “Gunny, I’m told that when you get to LAX, someone from State will meet you. He’ll ask you to surrender this passport. It’ll then disappear. I don’t know a thing about this, but they told me to tell you that Thomas Lee will also disappear.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Oh, you know. The guys in the suits. That’s all I can say.”

  “Got you, son.”

  He got into his clothes and assembled his meager possessions—the passport, the United ticket for the flight scheduled for 7 p.m. that night. The keys to his bike were missing. It didn’t matter.

  The hospital insisted on a wheelchair, and one of the corpsmen wheeled him, ridiculously, to the van, a tan, unmarked Ford. The cold air was like Boise in January. He climbed in slowly, using his uncut arm and his uncut leg for leverage.

  “Got everything, Gunny?”

  “Enough to get me back.”

  “We’re off. We’ll get you there in plenty of time.”

  Nobody talked on the long drive to Narita. It was essentially the second time he’d been ejected from Japan, and he knew he was lucky he wasn’t in prison. The traffic, the small, crowded neighborhoods, the driving ranges, all fled by unremarkably, and two hours later, the low, sleek hull of Narita’s No. 2 terminal came into view.

  At the curbside, he got out, as did one of the corpsmen.

  “Ben’s going to park the van. I hope you don’t mind, but we’re supposed to stay with you till you get beyond security.”

  “Sure, you have a job to do, like everybody.”

  That ordeal went smoothly. He checked in, displayed his passport, got his boarding pass—well, well, the flight was first class, so much easier—and the two young guys took him to security.

  “This is always a pain,” he said. “I have a steel hip, so bells go off.”

  “No problem,” said one of the kids. “We’ll help.”

  “Look,” he said, “is this it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, nobody’s debriefed me, nobody’s taken a statement, nobody’s even asked any questions. I don’t know what happened to some people who were involved with me. There was a little girl who—”

  “Gunny, we’re just pharmacist’s mates. We don’t make policy. This is the way they want it.”

  “Them again.”

  “Sorry, Gunny.”

  “I just have to make sure this little girl is all right. I mean, she was just a kid.”

  “I don’t have any information for you, Gunny. They didn’t say anything.”

  “Oh…okay, okay.”

  So he turned to security and this time, at least, the bell didn’t go off. Without ceremony he was through. He nodded at the boys across the rope line, and they nodded back but made no move to leave. As this was the only exit, clearly they were to stay until eight-ball Swagger had safely departed.

  He walked toward the gate, skipping the mall area where, a few months ago, he’d so memorably fallen off the wagon. He felt—well, what? Not satisfied, not really. Old. His wounds hurt, his gait was stiff, he needed another painkiller, but at least he wasn’t on crutches or in some kind of a chair. He also felt oddly empty. The light was gray and somber, perfect for his mood: used up, useless, spent, irrelevant. Maybe even disappointed. Couldn’t put a finger on it. It was over, was all, back to the world, DEROS, all that good shit.

  Till the end, he kept his hope up. Perhaps Okada-san would show up, perhaps she’d have Miko along and they could have a nice farewell chat. That way there’d be some finality to it, some sense of ending. But it didn’t happen and then the flight was called.

  The blade flew against the scrub, bit hard and clean, and sent a sheaf of cuttings flying through the air, where a harsh wind sprayed them across the slope. Back and forth, back and forth, the scythe ate the brambles as Bob found his rhythm, leaning in, uncoiling lightly, and cutting.

  He had to start over, of course. During the months in California and Japan, the slope had grown out. Now, under a lowering winter sky, you could hardly tell where he’d cut and where he hadn’t. This was his fourth day here, the air was raw and the wind sharp, but on some principle that he could not name, he had come back, taken up the scythe, and again laid into the long job.

  “That is not what is eating you,” Julie said. “You don’t give a damn about that slope. Something is eating you alive. I can tell. You’d better get some help.”

  “Sweetie, I am fine. I started a job, now I will finish it.”

  “You should talk to someone about Japan. Maybe not me, maybe not anyone here in town, but a specialist. I have never seen you so low since the day you showed up in my front yard shot full of holes all those years ago. Bob, if you don’t deal with it, this’ll be the one that kills you.”

  “Nothing bad happened in Japan,” he said. “Everyone says it was a big success, and that we got a job done. Now I am back, everything is fine, and I have this thing to do.”

  “Yes, and you came home like you always do, tired and sad with a whole new set of scars. You only get scars like that in fights to the death. But it’s even worse than that. I can tell. Someone died, someone you cared about, and you don’t have any way to scream about it. Honey, you’ve got to find a place to scream.”

  “There were some rough times. Yes, some people died. Nothing I could do about it, unfortunately. But that’s not it. I have to tell you, there’s a child I wanted so much to help. And I couldn’t, not really. So she’s lost. Not dead, just lost. That’s all. I’ll tell you more sometime, not now.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. A child would be nice,” said Julie. “Liven this place up. I might even love a child. Tired of living with a grouchy bear, how much worse could a child be?”

  Not even Nikki, who’d come home for a spell, could really get through to him.

  “Something about a child that he didn’t want to talk about has him all hurting,” her mother said, “and he’s too goddamned stubborn to take a rest and get some help.”

  “He’ll be all right. You know him. He comes back from everything.”

  “But someday he won’t, and maybe that day has come.”

  “No, he’s fine.” But even as she said it, she didn’t believe it: her father was somehow there/not there at once, as if a hole had been opened, then lightly covered over.

  A child? What child could that be?

  So the three lived in the nice house on the outskirts of Boise, and from a distance, everything seemed fine. The doting father, the handsome wife, the beautiful daughter, now and then in town at a fine restaurant or off to the movies. Why, it looked so fine; there was plenty of money and the three of them so bright and attractive you’d have thought, Those are America’s aristocrats, not of birth but of skill and strength. They are so blessed with health and courage and even some wealth and so proud of each other. They are the best we make.
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br />   He cut, he cut, he cut. First day was the worst. Each cut brought an increment of pain. His stamina was way down too, and he wasn’t as hard as he thought he’d be. He’d lost a lot. By the end of the first hour, he breathed hot and hard through dry lips. Over the next few days, it got a little better, and by the third day he stayed out even as a squall blew through, pelting him with ice particles.

  It looked like today might bring more of the same, though the heat he’d raised was insulation against the rain and the cold. In the distance, of course, stood the mountains, dark to the point of purple, their peaks lost in the low strata. The prairies between them and him had turned yellow in the winter, dried out and cleansed of wheat or let simply go if they were only grass, so the whole earth had a yellowed, used, even dead feel to it. Yet it was so western: nothing at all looked like it could be of Japan or the East, just rolling hills and plains and the scars of the mountains lost in the dark clouds thirty miles to the east.

  It was about four when he saw Nikki’s truck. What was that damned girl doing all the way out here? He’d driven her out to look at his land once late last summer, before all this, but she’d not returned since and there’d been no talk of a visit that morning or any other morning. He was surprised she even knew the place, for it involved a cutoff and a couple of unnamed back roads before it yielded the Swagger retirement property. Maybe she’d had a bitter fight with her mother and was pulling out early and stopped off for a good-bye. It had happened before.

  Nikki’s truck pulled up at the foot of the slope, and Bob came down to greet her.

  He could see his daughter in the driver’s seat, laughing. Then he saw she had a passenger, and the door opened and out climbed Susan Okada.

  Something went off inside him; it might have been a sense of hope. He took a deep breath.

  “Well, lookie here, the lady from the embassy.”

  “Hello, Swagger. I had to come.”

  “My god, it’s so great to see you!”

  “You saved my life. I never thanked you.”

  “You saved the child’s life. I never thanked you.”

  “The child’s life is thanks enough.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You deserve a report on how it all shook out.”

  “I been wondering.”

  “Well, to start with, the Japanese government clamped down on it right away. The fight, the deaths, never reported. No scandal. They got there and closed it all down. They don’t want it public.”

  “It would take a lot of explaining.”

  “And they don’t like to explain. But two days later, Major Fujikawa and Captain Tanada surrendered to the authorities.”

  “Good lord!”

  “Yeah. They felt they had to do it. Japanese thing, don’t ask.”

  “What’s going to happen to them?”

  “Not known yet. Depositions have been taken and all have been released on administrative leave while the government figures out what to do. You might think, eighteen men are dead, including a multibillionaire, huge deal. But seventeen of the eighteen are low-ranking yakuza who could have died in any of a hundred squalid ways and the eighteenth is Miwa. But dead, Miwa has no power, no heirs, no legacy. And it turned out he had some unsavory foreign connections that made him very problematic. Finally, the yakuza people don’t want to upset the working relationship for vengeance, since he wasn’t really one of them. I’m hoping that the whole thing will be brushed under the carpet. The Japanese are very good at brushing things under carpets.”

  “Can you help the officers?”

  “There’s not much I can do. Maybe it’ll work out. At least they won’t be ordered to commit seppuku.”

  “That’s something. And how about you?”

  “Well, it worked out to my advantage. Long story, still classified, but as I said, Miwa had some contacts that had lots of Agency people worried, and getting him out of the picture—well, you got him out of the picture—worked out to my benefit. I’m going to get a promotion. I’m the new queen.”

  “You were born to be a queen, Okada-san. Glad I helped. Still, I have to ask about the child. Is she—Is she all right?”

  “She’s better. She’s sleeping through the night.”

  “I guess that’s the important thing. Still, I wish I had seen her one last time. There at the end, it was so crazy, I just lost sight of you and her. You just disappeared. It was so sudden.”

  “I got her back to my place and then we got her back into the system. She’s safe now.”

  “I just hate the thought of her in that hospital.”

  “She’s not there anymore.”

  “Oh, they found someone to take her? Well, ain’t that nice. I suppose that’s all for the best.”

  “She went on a long trip.”

  “She went to gaijin?”

  “There was no one left in Japan. We had to look hard to find someone to love her.”

  “I hope it’s a good family.”

  “I know it’s a good family, Swagger-san. Nikki!”

  She called, and Nikki climbed out of the truck, delighted, holding a wrapped but lively bundle that twisted in her arms mischievously, and he recognized Miko.

  She looked over at Swagger and her eyes filled with something.

  “Miko, it’s the Tin Man. He came and rescued you. He helped you so much.”

  The child looked at him, then buried her shy eyes in Nikki’s chest, then found the courage to look again, decided it was okay, and smiled.

  “Hi, there, sweetie,” he said. “Don’t you look swell today? Oh, you’re a peach, I’ll say.”

  “Here, give her a hug,” Nikki said, handing the child over.

  She squeezed him, he squeezed her.

  “It’s so nice to see you,” he said to her, now worried that his daughter and Okada-san might see him cry. Big guys don’t cry, it was a rule.

  “It’s so nice that she’s here.”

  He was trying to put it together. Somehow Okada-san had taken charge of the child and was bringing her—well, where?

  “You say that now, but maybe you’ll change tunes in fifteen years when she brings home a boyfriend with fishhooks in his eyebrows,” Okada-san said.

  “What?”

  “It’s very tough for a foreigner to adopt a kid in Japan, but it turned out that Miko tragically fit all the criteria. When I found that out, I couldn’t just leave it alone. So I went to the ambassador, who went to the prime minister, and maybe someone whispered something in someone’s ear about certain behind-the-scene occurrences. Anyway, there’s still paperwork to catch up on and some pro forma interviews, but everybody concerned thought it was better to get her over here sooner rather than later and play catch-up on the other stuff. Swagger-san, say hello to your new daughter.”

  “Oh, god,” said Bob, “I don’t believe this.”

  “Mom is so excited!” said Nikki. “She’s out buying a child’s bed and toys and the whole shebang.”

  “Okay, sweetie,” said Bob, holding his child closer, “it’s time to go home.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Readers of the entire Swagger saga will see that the account of Earl’s heroics on Iwo Jima, even as to date and unit, have evolved slightly from previous accounts. As I have progressed through what has become a life’s work, I keep encountering small areas where the joinery between volumes is untidy, and I can only plunge ahead, correcting or reinterpreting as I go. I count on your goodwill to understand that such awkwardnesses are unavoidable and make a promise that if I can ever convince a publisher to negotiate the complicated rights (among the issues: a trilogy in which each volume was issued by a different publisher!) and put the whole thing together in a uniform set, I’ll try and reconcile all such annoyances.

  I must also say that the great Musashi, oft-quoted here, said many provocative things about the art of the sword, but “Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel” was not one of them. It was Hunter who said that, sitting in his t
hird-floor office in Baltimore, Maryland.

  This is another way of pointing out that no reader should impute to me any deep knowledge of the way of the sword. I’m a writer, not a samurai; I tell stories, I don’t cut enemies down. My weapon of choice is the adjective, not the katana. I based my accounts of sword encounters mainly on secondary sources, a slew of texts, and dozens of DVDs of samurai films, high and low. I took sword-cut terminology from Shinkeudo: Japanese Swordsmanship by Toshishiro Obata. Devotees will possibly be upset that I’ve mixed kendo and combat terms in my quest to give the encounters a different feel; send angry e-mails to Hunter-doesn’tcare@aol.com.

  I relied on friends for support and encouragement. My old pal Lenne Miller gave me the advantage of his insightful enthusiasm; Gary Goldberg did as much, plus Gary—the world’s most advanced networker!—set me up with Dr. David Fowler, the medical examiner of the state of Maryland, who gave me an hour of his time to discuss the biomechanics of sword cuts, very helpful in a book as bloody as this one. My pal and hunting pard and former collaborator John Bainbridge gave me the gift of his great eye for proofreading. Jeff Weber, way out in California, was uniformly enthusiastic and had a number of extremely useful insights I was happy to incorporate into the text. James Grady, great navigator of the Condor and a Washington fixture, also was a shrewd and helpful early reader, as was Jay Carr, the former film critic of the Boston Globe, who in retirement has become a Washington screening-room regular and a good and valuable friend.

  Bob Beers continues to maintain the unofficial Stephen Hunter website, there being no official one. What he gets out of it, I’ll never know, certainly nothing from me, but he’s made it into something solid. Check it out at Stephenhunter.net. Thanks again, Bob. Alan Doelp, as always, was an invaluable advisor on computer issues.

  In the world of the Washington Post four colleagues gave of themselves to my advantage. The great Kunio Francis Tanabe, retired after forty years on Book World, advised me on Japanese names and gave the manuscript a close reading. He also wrote Hideki Yano’s death poem, after pointing out that my version wouldn’t pass muster in Japan. Anthony Faiola, the Post’s brilliant Tokyo correspondent, looked into and then briefed me on the structure of the porno business and its various governing bodies in today’s Japan. Finally, Tomoeh Murikami Tse took the trouble to render an early version of the death poem into kanji. Paul Richard plied me with Japanese art books. I’m greatly indebted to all of them.