The force of his momentum bent her further over the tread. Her feet lost touch with the floor, and the man’s eyes glistened as he pursued the most obvious strategy available to him. All he had to do was keep her going, and the pressing machine would swallow her up. He shoved harder and Evira felt her back and shoulders begin their slide to a bloody end.
Evira managed to grasp the safety rails that rose slightly over the tread and stop her progress. But by then the guard was standing over her, straddling the apparatus with a foot poised on each of the rails. He yanked a pistol from his belt and snarled, his own back less than a foot from the monstrous rollers that pressed plastic into programmed widths and sent it spewing out the other side.
Evira could see the trigger starting to give when a piece of corrugated piping from the ceiling directly above him gave way and smashed him hard in the chest. The angle of the blow forced him backward. He recovered his bearings, but not before the ever-churning rollers caught him by the holster and began to reel him in. The pistol jumped from his hands as his arms flailed to grasp something to pull him out, but there was nothing to find. His screams overwhelmed the factory’s sounds and Evira thought she heard bones crunching as the rest of his frame vanished into the mechanism.
All command of her senses and motor functions was lost as Evira sank dazedly to the floor. All she would remember later was the impossible sight of a small shape climbing down from the rafters, from the same area as the corrugated pipe that had miraculously smashed into the final guardsman. And then the shape was hovering over her, passing in and out of her blurred vision.
A boy! It was a boy!
“Don’t worry,” came his voice as he struggled for a grip on her. “I’ll get you out of here before more of them come.”
Chapter 10
“Are you sure this is the place?”
McCracken bolted upright abruptly at the driver’s question. He realized he must have been dozing the last stretch of the way from the airport and gazed at the computerized meter which listed the fee due in both yen and dollars in bright LED figures.
“Planning to retire early?” Blaine asked in English.
“This the place?” the driver responded, anxious to be gone.
Blaine gazed out the open window through the postdawn light, not sure of the answer himself. The address was thirty miles outside Tokyo in the Japanese countryside. A dirt road had taken them the final stretch of the way and at its end stood a bridge rising over a small rushing brook. They were in a placid forest, full of blooming flowers and trees, the only evidence of man being the perfect landscaping and a dark-stained wood building across the bridge. It was constructed against a sloping hillside, accessible only by a set of steep stone steps and rimmed everywhere by plush, full trees that swayed faintly in the breeze. Blaine looked back toward the driver, wondering in that instant whether Traymir had misled him, whether—
His thoughts veered suddenly. Just as suddenly, his hand swept for the door latch.
“This will do fine,” he told the driver, and fumbled amidst his wad of cash for the amount rung up on the meter.
He stepped away from the car and the driver backed fast down the dirt road. Bujin did mean warrior and the man who had taken that name was obviously taking it to heart. The building before him, Blaine realized, was a martial arts training hall, or dojo. He knew it by feeling more than sight, and he felt immediately at home.
He had come to Japan after his tour in Israel was over with Vietnam still weighing heavily on his mind. The Cong had taught him much about what Johnny Wareagle still referred to as the hellfire, not the least of which was how inadequately prepared American soldiers were to go up against Oriental prowess and philosophy. It had been that lack of understanding, McCracken felt, that had cost the U.S. the war and plenty of men their lives. The true warrior learns from his enemies, and he came to Japan to sample a number of arts. Eventually he settled on a school of Dai-Ito Ryu Ju-Jitsu that included study of the wooden sword in addition to traditional self-defense forms. His sensei was named Yamagita Hiroshi, a descendant of a long line of actual samurai and top instructor for the Japanese police and military. Blaine trained day and night, working his mind as hard as his body, until he began to grasp what had made his foe in Vietnam so difficult. His goal was to make himself proficient in such skills, but what he learned, finally, was just how much he would never know. He had stayed in touch with Hiroshi for years afterward until the master fell into disfavor with the Japanese government and disappeared.
Blaine approached the wooden bridge slowly, making sure his hands were always in plain view. He stole one last glance at the cab before it passed out of sight, and turned back to find a dark figure facing him from the center of the bridge. The figure was dressed in the black robe and hakama traditional to the samurai warrior. Angled across his left hip was the handle of a razor-sharp long sword or katana, its black scabbard comfortably wedged through the belt tied within his robes. His right hand rested on the sword’s equally black handle.
There was a soft shuffling behind him and Blaine swung around to find another samurai, hands within easy reach of the sword stretching across his left hip. Before Blaine could move or speak, another two swordsmen closed in on him from either side. Facing modern day samurai presented him with a situation even he would never be able to talk himself out of under the circumstances. He was trespassing, an uninvited guest on another’s land, and that marked a violation of the sacred code of honor. His best chance of survival was to do precisely as he was instructed.
The samurai on the bridge beckoned him on and McCracken started forward with the other swordsmen maintaining a sword’s distance away. The bridge creaked as he moved across it with the lead samurai waiting on the other side ready to lead him up the stone steps. A single sliding door stood at the top, and the lead samurai opened it to reveal a small foyer with yet another set of doors just ahead, this time of the paper variety called shoji. His escort parted these doors gracefully as well, glad to see McCracken had knelt to remove his shoes. Bowing slightly, he bade Blaine to enter. Blaine returned the gesture and passed through, feeling more than hearing the shoji doors close behind him.
He found himself in a large room with a ceiling full of regularly placed skylights arranged three to a row. Through them the sight was breathtaking, the sky seeming a reach away from the trees scratching at the glass. But Blaine was concerned more with a figure kneeling before a wall highlighted by a hand-etched scroll bearing the Japanese calligraphy for Bujin. Within easy reach by the figure’s side rested a katana in its scabbard.
The kneeling figure seemed to read his thoughts and turned an open hand behind him. McCracken followed the gesture toward another katana that had been placed in the corner of the straw tatami mat diagonally across from the kneeling figure’s position. Grasping the unspoken instruction, Blaine slid across the tatami and bowed toward kamiza, the seat of honor his host was facing. Then he eased himself on his knees toward the second sword. Honor was everything here. To disgrace himself in any way was to assure his own death. He had not been searched outside, partly because the samurai would have sensed he was weaponless and partly because his honor was not to be violated either. If he dared reach now for a weapon other than the long sword by his side, he’d be dead before he touched it. He had to play along in the hope the Bujin would at least give him a chance to explain himself under interrogation.