“Roger that,” said the pilot. Then, “Ah, Tango One, better hurry. We’ve got company. I count four vehicles approaching your AO. You expecting anybody?”
Fumiko was on her feet, fighting for breath, a look of triumph on her bruised face.
“You okay?” Scott shouted over the din from the chopper.
She waved him away.
The chopper dropped lower, until it was hovering over the garden, the hurricanelike downdraft from its spinning rotors whipping debris into the air. A powerful beam of light shot from the ship’s cabin and played over the garden and villa.
“Move it!” Jefferson shouted.
Fumiko started ransacking cabinets and drawers for papers, jamming whatever she found into a canvas shoulder bag.
“Forget that shit, we don’t have time,” Jefferson bellowed. He rounded up their gear and weapons, then picked up and threw a heavy chair through one of the glass panels facing the garden. Rotor wash roaring through the shattered panel ripped scrolls and pictures from the walls, tossed furniture around like toys.
Buffeted by the downdraft, Jefferson grabbed the lowered sling and held it open for Fumiko to put over her head and under both arms. A helmeted crewman in the open door 30 feet above got ready to reel her in.
“Where’s Jake?” she shouted. “I don’t see him!”
“He’s coming!” Jefferson urged the sling on Fumiko, but she twisted away and ran back into the villa. Jefferson took off after her as something pinged against the helo’s fuselage. Automatic weapons fire began popping and snapping outside the walled garden. More rounds spanged off the helo’s rotors and armor plate.
Inside Fumiko found Scott kneeling beside Tokugawa. A deep red stain had soaked through the kimono’s blue silk where Ojima’s wild shot had pierced his chest above the heart. Frothy blood bubbled from Tokugawa’s mouth. Scott tried to help him sit up, but the old man refused and weakly pressed the point of the ceremonial dagger against Scott’s throat.
Fumiko dropped to one knee beside Scott. “Jake, is he?…”
The noise and wind howling through the villa made it hard to hear what Tokugawa was saying. Something about a warrior’s duty to die an honorable death. But the old man didn’t have the strength left to cut open his belly in ritual seppuku.
“Jesus Christ, are you both crazy?” Jefferson said, standing over them. “Forget him, let’s go!”
Scott brushed the dagger aside and leaned close to the dying Tokugawa. He saw that something had changed: Moments ago the man’s eyes had shimmered with a cold, pitiless resolve; now they projected a bleak, transparent uncertainty. The man who hated America even as he profited from it, who spoke its language and now plotted to destroy it, looked at Scott with something akin to sorrow.
A thin smile arched Tokugawa’s lips. “How unfortunate for America that you won’t have the opportunity to test your skills against the shark.”
“The ‘shark’? What shark? What are you talking about?” Scott felt precious seconds slipping away. The security forces had arrived; the helo couldn’t hover forever. He felt control over his anger slipping away. “Where are the weapons? Tell me, goddamnit!”
Tokugawa turned a palm up, red from the blood-soaked kimono. Dark red drops trickled down his wrist and wicked into the folded-back cuff. “Chi.”
“Blood,” said Fumiko. “He said, ‘Blood.’ ” She leaned close to hear him say something else. “He says he doesn’t want to die disgraced by bleeding to death. It’s the Bushido Code, he wants to die like a warrior.” She looked up. “Jake, he wants you to kill him.”
“Then do it so we can get the hell out of here,” Jefferson said. He looked over his shoulder into the garden being flailed to ruin by the downdraft from the hovering chopper.
“Tell him,” Scott said, “tell him I’ll do it if he tells me where the weapons are hidden.”
Tokugawa responded in Japanese. “He says surrender is not an option for him,” Fumiko translated.
“Then I won’t do it.”
“Shit, I’ll do it,” Jefferson said, brandishing his pistol.
“Back off, McCoy!”
Jefferson gave Scott a black look. “We’re fucking out of time, Jake.”
Scott stood, looked down at Tokugawa, who was still holding the dagger weakly in his fist, and said, “Then it ends here.”
Tokugawa, his strength ebbing, cried out in Japanese.
“Blood shark,” said Fumiko. “He said, ‘Blood shark.’ ” She shrugged, lost.
Scott knelt again. “What is the blood shark?”
Tokugawa, drawing on his last reserves of strength, said, “Sang-O — Red Shark. The weapons are aboard the Red Shark. A submarine.”
Scott, stunned, said, “You’re lying.”
Tokugawa slowly shook his head.
“Where is it?”
“The Yellow Sea.”
“How many weapons are on board?”
“Kill me…”
“Only if you tell me.” Scott looked up at Jefferson. “Give me your pistol.”
“No, give it to me instead,” said Fumiko. “I’ll do it — for Higashi.”
Jefferson hesitated a moment, then handed it over butt-first. Fumiko made sure Tokugawa saw that the weapon was in her fist before she pressed the silencer against his temple.
“Tell me how many weapons,” she said.
Tokugawa sucked air between clenched teeth. “Three.”
“Where is the Red Shark headed? To what country? What port?”
Tokugawa didn’t respond, and for a heartbeat Scott thought he’d died. But he said, “The Philippines. Davao.”
Tokugawa’s eyes pleaded for Fumiko to pull the trigger. Instead she gave the pistol back to Jefferson. She leaned close to Tokugawa and said, “You don’t deserve to die a warrior’s death.” She stood and looked down at Tokugawa with undisguised loathing, until the knife fell from his hand onto his chest, inches from the oozing bullet wound. He went limp.
Jefferson took Fumiko’s arm. “Jake, you coming…”
Scott remembered hearing guns crackling and bullets whining off the helo’s skin. Then they were up over Noda and sweeping south toward the Kanto Plain.
42
From the darkness of the Seahawk’s cabin, Scott, wedged between pilot and copilot, looked out the windshield at the lights of Tokyo. Seated behind Scott, Fumiko and Jefferson leaned forward to hear his conversation with Karl Radford, who had been patched through to the chopper from Crystal City.
“She’s going to be damned hard to find and kill,” Scott said into the mouth mike of his headset.
Radford’s voice came over distorted by the patch-through and muffled under the noise from the chopper’s rotors. “A follow-up to our first message from Pyongyang confirmed what Tokugawa told you. ‘Red Shark’ made no sense to us either, until we received a second message from Pyongyang about a Type 213 submarine. That, plus the intercepted comm from the North Sea Fleet Lushun, that one of their amphibs reported a contact with an unidentified sub.”
“That contact was the Red Shark,” said Scott. “Bet on it.”
“We have. We also have satellite imagery we think is the same target but haven’t made a positive ID. Still studying its heat blooms. Looks like diesel-electric, not a nuke. If it was a Chinese nuke, we’d know it from its heat signature.”
“Any idea, General, how the NKs got hold of a Type 213?”
“No, but we’re working on it. Obviously we missed something, missed it by a mile.”