The Nicholas Linnear Novels (92 page)

“I wish I
had
made a sighting,” Gōtarō said. “Anyone.” His arms held Nangi close, his warmth calming the other’s almost constant shivers. “I held off telling you because I thought I could do something about it. But now…” He shrugged. “You have some wounds. How serious they are I cannot tell. But you’ve been losing some blood.”

Of course, Nangi thought, angry that he had not realized it himself. That explained the weakness, the brief periods of warmth he felt.

“I’ve tried everything I know to staunch the loss of blood. I’ve brought it down to a trickle but still…” His eyes were very sad.

“I don’t understand,” Nangi said. “Am I dying?”

At that moment their makeshift raft gave a shuddering lurch. Apparently Gōtarō was prepared for it because he grabbed Nangi hard with one arm, held on with the other. Still, such was the force of the jar that they both slewed around on the hard surface of the bulkhead.

Gōtarō’s face was very close to Nangi’s. Nangi could see the reflection of his own frightened face in the curve of the ebon iris.

“Look out there.”

Gōtarō’s voice sounded like a death knell to Nangi as his gaze followed his friend’s lead.

“No!” His voice was a sharp bark, a terror-filled exhalation. For there just off their starboard flank was the great black triangular fin of a hunting shark. As Nangi watched, bile caught in his throat, the slightly curved fin swung around, and now it headed straight toward them. It loomed large, so large. And Nangi could imagine the size of the beast beneath. Thirty feet, forty. Its gaping jaws…

His eyes squeezed shut at the next lurch, his stomach turning over and he was retching again, what little there was left in him spewing up all over himself and Gōtarō.

“No,” he moaned. “Oh, no.” But he was far too weak to raise his voice. It was his worst nightmare come to life. Death held no terror for him. But this…

“That’s why I was trying to stop the bleeding so completely. He picked us up over an hour ago, when you were still gushing. I thought if I could stop it in time he’d get tired of hanging around and go after something else. I couldn’t.”

On the shark’s third pass, a section of three tubular baffles, already weakened by the crash, broke away. Something at least ten feet in front of the slashing dorsal fin snapped the baffles in two beneath the unquiet surface of the ocean.

Nangi began to shiver anew, and this time even Gōtarō’s human warmth couldn’t deflect him. His teeth began to chatter and he felt blood leaking from his ruined eye.

“This is no way for a warrior to die,” he whispered. The wind took his words, flung them away from him like a hateful child. He put his weary head against Gōtarō’s shoulder and at last broke down fully. “I’m afraid, Sato-san. Not of death itself. But the manner in which it has come. Ever since I was a child the depths of the sea have terrified me. It is an uncontrollable fear.”

“Even a warrior must feel fear.” Gōtarō’s deep rumbling voice filled Nangi’s ear. “A
samurai
must have his nemesis, just as he must do battle.” His arms closed more tightly about his friend as the bulkhead rocked and shuddered. Metal shrieked and then was silent. The sea climbed around them. The fin moved away from them and swung in a tight arc.

“This nemesis may come in many forms, many guises,” Gōtarō continued as if nothing at all had happened. “He may be a human foe of flesh and blood. Or then again he may be the force of an avenging
kami.
Or even a demon.”

Light was fast going out of the sky, the encroaching night seemed vast and close at the same time so that one had the uncomfortable sensations of utter isolation and intense claustrophobia at the same time. The clouds were too near for there to be any stars visible. The darkness, when it came, would be absolute.

“The world is full of demons,” Gōtarō said, his eyes on the approaching fin, “because life is haunted by creatures who cannot experience it as we can. As their envy turns inevitably to hatred, they gain in evil power.” One hand reached out like a bar of iron to grip the bafflings as tightly as he could. “Or so my grandmother would tell me at night. I could never understand whether it was to frighten me or to make me more aware that one must fight in life. Always fight to get what one wants.”

It was very bad this time, the bulkhead screaming and canting at an extreme enough angle to allow a wave to wash over them. Nangi felt them sliding sideways, and beside him Gōtarō desperately scrabbling to halt their slide. Nangi, too, did what he could to help. It did not seem much to him.

When they were righted, Gōtarō gathered Nangi back to him, as protectively as a mother will a small child. The raft still shuddered and groaned, complaining in the aftermath.

Gōtarō felt for the rift forming beneath them as he said, “I thank God now that my younger brother, Seiichi, is being taken care of by her. She’s very old now but so very wise. I think she’s the only one with enough force of will to stop him from illegally enlisting. He’s almost sixteen, and God knows the war would chew him up and destroy him utterly.”

Abruptly, his voice changed and he said, ‘Tanzan, you must promise me you will look Seiichi up when you get home. My grandmother’s house in Higashiyama-Ku in Kyoto, just off the southern edge of Maruyama Park.”

Nangi’s vision was going in and out of focus. There was a pain in his head like a steel spike hammered home and it made all coherent thought an effort. “I know it well. The park.” He could see the cryptomeria and cherry trees, youthful and vibrant, their myriad leaves shivering in the warm breeze of summer. Bright shirts of the children contrasting with the precise patterns of kimonos and oiled paper parasols. Music drifting over the carefully mowed grass, mingling with the laughter.

“‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’” Nangi heard the strange litany as if from a great distance yet he felt the vibrations from Gōtarō running through him as if they were connected, and some of his terror abated, knowing that this great bear of a man was here beside him. And he thought, Somehow, some way, we’ll make it until Noguchi finds us.

“Pray for me, my friend.”

And abruptly Gōtarō was no longer beside him. Nangi felt the chill wind tearing at him mercilessly and he rocked alone on the baffled bulkhead. A muffled splash came to him, and his good eye began to burn as he turned his head this way and that. There was just enough illumination to see the foam from Gōtarō’s powerful kicks as he swam away from the rocking raft.

“Come back!” Nangi called. “Oh, Sato-san, please come back!”

Then he gasped, his ragged breath coming like fire, as he spotted the great curved dorsal fin rising out of the water. It drew him as it repulsed him, and the fear and loathing stuck in his throat as if it were a physical thing. He wanted nothing more in the world than to kill the monster and he cried aloud, his fists beating impotently against his useless thighs as he saw the black shape cutting through the crests of the waves.

Gōtarō reared up once as the thing hit, spinning up and around, half out of the water, hurled there by the force of primitive nature.

Nangi’s vision blurred with bitter tears and he struck at himself over and over as his head bent, the wind moaning in his ears like the voices of the damned.

After a long, long time he began to pray to a God he did not know or understand but to whom he now turned for solace and the continuation of life.

[The shape of the army]

C
. GORDON MINCK, HEAD
of Red Station, sat a dizzying eight feet above floor level, his hydraulic crane-lift chair set at maximum. There was nothing much between him and the fall straight down to the hardwood floor, and that was the way Minck liked it; he thought best and most creatively when there was a sense of danger.

His was the only office in the building—six short blocks from the White House—without wall-to-wall carpeting. That was because Minck wanted nothing in here to dampen sound. He was a fanatic on the keenness of the six senses—had been for years, ever since he had graduated at the top of his unit from the elite Fairchild Academy tucked away in rural Virginia. Most of those who made it through its awesomely grueling curriculum called the place the Bonebreaker.

Minck was continually asked the importance of the sixth sense and his answer was always the same, “Intuition is everything.” While many of his fellow station leaders spent more and more time at their increasingly sophisticated computer consoles, Minck spent less and less.

And he could see the difference. These other men were becoming gray worms, their lined, worried faces lit by the green phosphor light, racked by increasingly debilitating headaches until, made aware of the insidiously malignant effects of the consoles, they began to hire assistants to relay the computer information to them. They apparently were not disturbed overmuch by the need to replace these assistants every six months or so, or by the rising budgetary expense of the maximum security sanatorium housing them within a stone’s throw of the National Zoo, an enormous sprawling mansion over two hundred years old and designated a National Landmark. Every year the Smithsonian attempted to get it opened to the public, being ignorant of its real purpose, and every year they were denied.

There were no computer terminals anywhere in Minck’s offices; they were strictly
verboten.
However, there were a number of printout stations, one of which was in his spacious office. Two of the walls below the sixteen-foot ceiling were given over to enormous rectangular panels that resembled windows more than anything else. This was deliberate. In fact, they were giant projection screens composed of a particular chemical amalgam able to “take” the rear-projected holograms, so that they blossomed to life with an astonishing reality. The holograms, of course, changed from time to time but mostly, as now, they were of two views of Moscow: of Dzerzhinsky Square, to be more accurate, the great, open plaza dotted with bundled, astrakhaned pedestrians and, in the street behind them, one black Zil limousine caught as it entered the black, blobby hole in the forbidding facade of the structure known with fear throughout the world as Lubyanka Prison and headquarters for the KGB.

On the other wall was the second view of the square. Minck knew for a fact that some of the cells within Lubyanka looked out on this other building across the square, where children strolled with their parents, hand in hand, too young yet to know or comprehend how close they really were to the one true embodiment of evil left on earth.

Minck was gazing meditatively now at this second edifice. Once again he opened up his mind, his memories, trying to find any trace of the hatred, the fear he had once experienced upon looking out at this same view. Oh, not so expansive of course. The slitted windows in the outer cells in Lubyanka were not those of a hotel.

But Minck remembered. It had been winter then, the sky grayed with clouds stretched like sinews. Lights were always on in the vast city as night swept in off the frozen steppes to the north for its eighteen-hour stay. And everywhere the noise of the city was muffled by the ubiquitous snow, turning even the most normal of sounds strange and unreal, increasing Minck’s sense of disassociation. How he had come to hate the snow, for it had brought him to Lubyanka, his wrists manacled. Snow had hidden the icy patch in the street on which he had skidded. He would have eluded them otherwise without doubt, for they were mathematically minded, drilled to precision, but, as with all KGB underlings, lacking the concept of intuition.

Intuition equaled freedom in Minck’s mind. And his intuition would have saved him that chill night in Moscow. Except for the snow.
Snyeg,
the Russians called it. In any language he hated it.

He continued to stare at the building that had been his last look at Moscow before they pulled him from the holding cell and began the “interviews.” From then on his home was a windowless space of not more than fifteen square feet, with a plywood cot bolted to the wall and a hole down which to wash his waste products. The stench was appalling, as was the cold. Heat was unheard of in the inner cells.

Sightless, like a rat in the dark, Minck fought to retain his senses against the numbing effects his interviewers were inducing in him. And to that end he conjured up in his mind memories of the view from his holding cell, for a time certain that it was the last sliver of the world he would ever see.

He observed the young Russian couples walking, the families trudging through the last of the spring snows—for these holograms revolved with the seasons—and felt the clear space within him, the embers of passionate hate and terror that consumed him, that, for the instant before he crossed over the border into neutral territory, had caused him to pause, to consider wildly returning and killing them all singlehanded.

And like a careful cowboy on a dry and dusty plain, Minck kicked over these glowing ashes, nurturing the essence of that hate: Protorov. He gave his whole attention to the crenellated building in the hologram that had come to mean even more to him than its sinister sister structure across the square: the Moscow Children’s World department store.