The 47th samurai

“He does,” said Susan.

Bob looked at his watch. It was 4:59:57 a.m.

:58.

:59.

“Okay,” she said. “Samurai up.”

43

The last thing Swagger said was, “When you hit the ground, wait a second, then pull down your goggles and go to night vision.”

But in the one-tenth of a second of fall, she forgot, and she landed with more thud than she expected: it was seven feet, she felt her body elongate to full extension then accordion shut with a bang when she landed, snapping her head hard enough to drive bangles and spangles before her eyes.

She could see-nothing. It made no sense. Light and dark, nothing focused, nothing where it should be, all confusion, her will scattered and gone.

“Goggles,” whispered Swagger, who had come down beside her.

She got the goggles down-PVS7s, she’d had a day on them at a Delta Force counterterror workshop at Fort Bragg a few years ago-and hit the toggle, which was no longer where it should be but an inch to the right, evidently resettled on her head in the landing. This led to another moment of confusion, but then she got them aligned right and it all popped to. Things were begi

It was a green, fuzzy world. Still, she made out the house. To the left, a glowing amoeba seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. It was Tanada’s rear team, coming hard over the back wall, in fact most were down, pausing only to withdraw their katana, then peeling off individually to the left rear. Meanwhile to the right, the same optical phenomenon reiterated itself, this being Fujikawa’s front team, maybe a tad behind the curve, but peeling right. She swept the house, saw nothing, but then the front door opened and she saw a man with a rifle-AK-47, she ID’d it, again from her Bragg tutorial-and behind her she heard the sound of-well, of what? It was light, a wet piston floating through the grease of a hydraulic tube, nothing sharp, but surprisingly vibratory. It was a silenced rifle, wielded by Sniper 3 Kim, and before the sound had even dissipated, the rifleman went down as if someone had cut his knees and they no longer held, and he just flopped down hard and fast.

She realized, I just saw a man die.

“House clear,” came the voice of 3 Kim from above.

At that moment a series of bright flashes syncopated to hard pops lit off in the basement of the house, as the first team of intruders had gotten their flash-bangs into the area where the yaks were.

“Go, go,” said Bob, but she was already on the way, low, hard, cutting directly across the courtyard to the house, reaching it and sliding along it. She felt Swagger beside her. She reached the open door, stepped over the body of the guy with the rifle, and, clutching her wakizashi in her right hand, ducked inside.

Captain Tanada was not the sort to direct; he was the sort to lead. So he hit the ground and took off, and fuck anybody who couldn’t keep up with him. But that got him close to the rear of the house first, and he pulled his flash-bang, got the pin out, and almost-but not quite-launched it through the window.

He got himself under control.

Four other men reached him and to each he gestured with the small munition, and each duplicated his move. Flash-bang out, pin out, lever secured, each man placed himself next to a window and in the next second, on Tanada’s nod, each shattered the window with a pad-protected elbow, tossed in the illumination device, and peeled back, withdrawing katana from scabbard, waiting for a target.

The things went off almost simultaneously, not in concussive explosion-they weren’t bombs, after all-but with a harsh bang and a white phosphorous flash that blasted anyone’s night vision to pieces. You could be forgiven for thinking that the devil himself had chucked a nuclear device through the window. They caused one of two responses: utter paralysis or complete panic. Four of them quadrupled the effect.

In a second the first man came out, unarmed, and Tanada hit him with the hilt hard in the head. Two more came out, one to be conked, the other took a roundhouse slash at Tanada, who neatly evaded and watched one of his men hit the yak with a hard diagonal cut, left to right, so that he jacked, pirouetted, dropping his weapon, and went down, spurting blood.

And then suddenly it was happening, exactly as the men had dreamed about and believed they wanted, exactly as had not happened in Japan, except on movie sets, for more than a century: the yaks poured from the house and began to spread out, each unleashing a sword, and the soldiers moved forward to engage them, a kendo-to-the-death in dull light as the snow swooped downward, the cuts hard and serious and meant to kill, the evasions equally hard and serious and meant to avoid, the whole thing happening in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.

Tanada killed two men in a single second as they came at him, his technique superb: kesagiri on the first, diagonal, a flowing block from the second assailant’s kesagiri, which led quite naturally into a horizontal yokogiri, with four inches of blade opening eight inches of body. The destroyed man made a gasping sound, tried to step back, and fell.

Tanada looked about and saw war everywhere and was happy. Then he got back to work.

Nii was dreaming, filthily, completely, in anatomical detail, dreams that would shame most but only gave him a boner the size of a V-2. But then the V-2 exploded, and he came hard awake in time for another V-2 explosion, then a third and a fourth. Around him, he heard screams, starts, lurches; men jumped, some wailed, some grabbed weapons. The door was open, and someone rushed out, and Nii caught a glimpse of him brought down with a wicked blow.

Attack, he thought.

His mind dumped clear and empty. He had a moment of stupendous confusion as all his reflexes broke down. Two more, then two more explosions went off, but after the first, he got his eyes shut and buried in his fists.

When he opened them, the big room was half empty. He saw a man jump in, blade whistling, and take one of his friends down with a single blow, and in the ferocity of the blow, he knew there was no mercy this night, it was to the death. More men flooded the room, blades slicing the air, cutting through meat, killing. Someone threw a charcoal hibachi at an invader, who ducked and killed him with a cut across the belly.

Nii rose to fight, then remembered his mission.

Kill the little girl.

It wasn’t a judgment call. It was what he owed Oyabun. It became the only thing in his life, that plus the fact he would fuck her first, then kill her, then commit his beloved seppuku and go happily to his ancestors, his honor restored.

He rose, grabbed his sword, and as men surged forward and death and chaos were everywhere, he cut against the tide, found the steps, and rushed up, one flight, then another, and, entering the upper hallway, saw that so far it was empty. He counted the doors, which were popping open, and men were pouring out, until he reached the door to the white room that contained the little girl. He got out his key and fumbled to insert it.

Major Fujikawa saw that the plan was not quite working. That is to say, the congestion point seemed to be the doorways, where the violence was sharp and ugly and the whole thing coagulated into a subway platform at rush hour with swords. Not pretty.

He pulled out a whistle. There was no plan; in the hurried assembly of assault details this one had not been considered. But he understood that his people couldn’t kill efficiently enough at this rate. He blew the whistle, hard, and watched as dozens of eyes popped to him.