But, uh, Boss… what are we going to do then? someone asked.
“Hmm? We’re gonna pray. Pray for the fucking main branch once it’s fucking dead. But first, we’re gonna take some Russian mafia heads to the Chechens as a souvenir.”
After that, the Boss flew to the Primorsky Krai, taking twenty-seven men along. He set up an unmarked office in the city there, in the Russian Far East, at a cost of about twenty million yen. Japanese yen. There was no longer any need to scramble searching for non-yakuza recruits. Because he had ditched the middleman: he and his men were the bullets now. They were the stormtroopers. Two days after they arrived in Siberia, they had already killed the target, acting on information from the client, and confirmed with the local police that he had indeed been a bigwig in the Russian mafia. It had cost about five hundred thousand yen to establish a pipeline to a certain faction within the police. He blew another two hundred thousand yen on the cover-up, to make sure the attack wouldn’t be traced to them. They went to pay their respects to the Chechen mafia, taking along the bigwig’s head and a gift of thirty thousand dollars. US dollars.
Things were going even better than the Boss had expected. And for good reason: the bullets he had been sending in, one after the other, had turned the region into a sort of fucked-up war zone. The Chechens and the Russians were both weakened. The two main organizations were practically bleeding each other to death, and the power vacuum this had created attracted all sorts of little dipshit crime rings from the rest of the country. And the local underworld was internationalizing too. Heroin was streaming in from the Korean continent. Rumor was the North Korean secret service was bringing it in with help from the Koryo-saram—common knowledge among the criminal class. Amphetamines and a nice selection of coca-derived drugs were shipped in from China. And there was traffic in the other direction too: Russian prostitutes sent off to Macao, Beijing, Shanghai. The Triad had a monopoly over this “trade.” At the same time, mafia organizations based in Central Asian countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States were trying to grab a slice of the pie by providing higher quality drugs. Minor interorganizational battles were popping up.
The Boss was puzzled by the situation on the ground. Can the bullets I’ve been sending be responsible for all this shit? As it happened, the penetration of various East Asian criminal organizations had rendered the Japanese bullets’ presence much less noticeable. They had draped the bullets in a cloak of invisibility, as it were.
And to top it all off, the yakuza’s killing of Russian mafia bigwigs and others with vested interests in their doings had been rather fancifully interpreted as an expression of the honorable Yakuza Way. Everyone knew that members of a Japanese organization had visited this city for important business talks with the Russian mafia, only to suffer a fatal attack at a hotel restaurant. Immediately after that, the yakuza had cut all ties with the Russians. And then the assassinations began. No doubt that’s how they do things, those yakuza. So people imagined. Yakuza don’t listen to excuses, they adhere absolutely to… something. It was revenge, with rage thrown in for good measure. Honorable conduct, in other words. So people believed, mistakenly. The rest of the criminal underworld found the yakuza kind of creepy. Not that they couldn’t understand their point of view. Their method of gaining satisfaction was, after all, not unlike the Chechen’s krovnaya mest, blood revenge.
So when the Boss showed up on the Chechen mafia’s doorstep with the head of an enemy boss and thirty thousand dollars as an icebreaker, they were willing to form an alliance. They responded right away to the yakuza’s money and strength. Even if it was a creepy kamikaze sort of strength. The Boss wasn’t entirely pleased by their success, though. No repeat performance of that hacking laugh: Kekh kekh kekh kekh. Things were only tilted to their advantage now because someone was running the game. That was why the Chechens were so eager to jump at any cash that came their way, because this constant battle was wearing them down.
Yeah. All this shit, it was all the client’s doing. He was orchestrating it all. I’m going to smash that fucker, the Boss thought. He’d made up his mind. He shelled out seven hundred thousand yen to develop a relationship with a group of retired veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. This got him a free pass to a market where you could get all kinds of old Soviet firearms. You could buy anything there, dirt cheap, even antiaircraft missiles. In three days, all twenty-seven of his boys were heavily armed. It cost him about sixty thousand yen per man. Cheap. He expended another 1.4 million yen on weaponry for his own use, including four trench mortars and cases of cartridges. He had the Chechens introduce him to a “launderer” free of charge. He had the guy figure out the stops the last payment made after the client wired it, for popping the bigwig, backtracking from the unlicensed bank in Japan where it ended up. The money had only been wired the day before, so there were still plenty of clues to go by. He told the launderer he’d cover unlimited expenses and give him a bonus of five million yen if he succeeded. Two days later, the launderer requested that he bring in a micro-organization specializing in technocrime. The Boss had to pay that group three hundred thousand yen just to get acquainted.
Russia produced the best hackers in the world. It kept the twentieth-century international underworld well stocked with sophisticated techies. For two million yen the Boss got the undivided attention of a rare specialist in the illegal use of computer systems for a half day. That night, he ended up paying the launderer a total of 7.5 million yen, but he had the tracks he was after. They led to the city’s old Communist Party headquarters—to a particular room in the building, in fact. They led to a statue of Lenin that had somehow remained standing, and to a secret meeting that had taken place at its base. The Boss then got in touch with four former KGB officers whom he hired for between five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand yen each to assemble the last few pieces of the puzzle.
See there? the Boss said. Just like the movies. You want pounded rice? Buy it at the fucking pounded-rice store.
When I’ve grabbed the tiger’s tail, I don’t let go.
He spent 1.9 million yen on a covered military truck. This wasn’t from the black market. It had been sold off by a private company, and he bought it more or less legally. All twenty-eight of the yakuza, including the Boss, piled inside. Four men sat up front; everyone else went in the rear. They wore fur coats and felt boots, and were armed not only with guns but also with items that seemed appropriate for an interorganizational war. They left the city at daybreak, heading west. Grasslands sailed by the windows. Then wetlands. Then grasslands again, and a graveyard for old cars. The heaped-up bodies had been stripped of their parts, left as mere shells. After that came a stretch of houses. A suburban farming town, apparently. They kept pigs. The grasslands changed into plowed fields. It wasn’t clear what they were growing, but whatever it was there was a lot of it. The roads had been sprinkled with sand. Plenty of sand, to keep the pavement from icing over. Clouds of sand billowed in the truck’s wake like smoke from a signal fire. Once again they plunged into an expanse of uncultivated grasslands, and then, four hours after they had set out, they caught sight of the dense dark taiga ahead, outlined against the horizon.
Up ahead, the Boss saw. He gripped a map in his hands. A map on which the location of a town that wasn’t on any map had been drawn in, precisely, by hand. The map had cost him twelve million yen. There it was. A closed city, left over from the Soviet era. There he was. The client. All of a sudden, the Boss felt like he might, at last, be able to laugh again. You want pounded rice? Buy it at the fucking pounded-rice store indeed, he laughed. No one beats us yakuza when it comes to a scrap.