Enzan: The Far Mountain (14 page)

Chapter 14

Here’s the thing about getting hit hard in the head: it’s not the immediate burn and blackness, the taste of something in your mouth like concrete dust, that’s worrisome. It’s that the aftereffects can linger long after you resurface into the land of the living. Getting hit like that does things to your brain, slamming it up against your skull. And I like my brain. I was worried about it, because I was feeling nauseated and it might mean I had a concussion. I’ve had them before, of course. But right now, I needed my brain to help me figure out a way to escape from Lim.

He and his pals were in the downstairs living area, and I could hear the rumble of urgent conversation, but couldn’t make anything out. Maybe they were speaking Korean—an entirely different language group from Japanese—so I was out of luck. Then again, maybe my brains had been scrambled so hard that everything sounded like Korean.

They had tied me up with my own tape, binding my wrists and ankles. I wormed my way into a sitting position, spit some carpet fiber out of my mouth, and blinked.

Chie Miyazaki was sitting on the bed, watching me with the cool intensity of a cat.

“Your father’s worried about you,” I said. I had to clear my throat to get the words out.

She looked dismissive. “My father’s nothing but a suit,” she said. Her English was colloquial, unaccented. “He’s not worried about me. He’s worried I might be having some fun and it won’t fit in with the refined image—diplomats and all that.”

“Your family’s worried,” I persisted. “Your grandfather.” It was hard for me to believe that old lizard cared much about anyone, but maybe I was reading the situation wrong.

She jumped up from the bed, her body tensed as if anticipating an assault. “My grandfather!” Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen him?”

I nodded. Big mistake. It made the headache that was lurking in my skull a little sharper, a bit more insistent. Just then Lim came back in with his pals.

“Lim,” Chie said, “my grandfather sent him.” She was standing in front of Lim and her voice vibrated with tension.

Lim put a hand on each arm and steered her toward the door. “Go get dressed now,” he said.

“My grandfather!” she insisted. I don’t know what was behind the sudden anxiety. Could it simply be the knowledge that her grandfather was in the country and hunting her down? Whatever it was, it generated a fear in her that was real and powerful.

Lim’s voice got a little harder. “I said go get dressed. We’ve got things to do.” He softened slightly, saying, “It’ll be OK,” and gently moved her to the door. Then he looked at me. He waited until Chie was gone before speaking. He sat down on the bed and sighed.

“What am I going to do with you, Mr. Burke?”

So he knew who I was—maybe I could use that
. I shrugged as if the answer was simple. “I think you’re going to let me go,” I told him. I tried to get my voice to sound calm and confident.

He smiled when I answered him. “And why would I do that?”

I’d been working on this little scam and was pretty proud of myself as I launched into it. “Because just before I came in the house I called my partner and said if he didn’t hear from me in an hour, he should get the state troopers down here.”

Lim looked at me, and for a minute I thought my threat was going to work. His expression was blank while he considered the implications of what I said, but then his eyes narrowed. “You called him from outside?” I nodded.
Ouch
. I had to stop doing that. He got up from the bed. “You made the call here, right near the house?”

“Sure,” I told him. “With my cell.”

Lim smiled again. This time for real. “With your cell.” He bent over the bed. There was a pile of stuff there that they must have taken when they tied me up: the flashlight, some energy bars, the knife. He rummaged through the pile and found my cell phone. Picked it up and turned it on. It was a cheap folding unit. He opened the phone and turned the glowing display to face me.

“You are so full of shit,” he said. I didn’t respond. He waved the phone in my face. “No bars, Burke,” he said. “You can’t make a cell call from here. I’ve tried. You have to go all the way up to the top of the resort to get any reception. So I don’t think anybody’s coming.” He paused. “And I don’t think there is any partner. I think it’s just you.” He nodded to himself. “If you had someone else with you, you’d have used him to come in here and take us down. But you didn’t …” He looked out the window at the gloom and snow, momentarily lost in thought. “Man, it’s really coming down,” he noted. Then he looked back at me and smiled. It was not a happy smile. “I’d better get up to the resort. I’ve got a phone call to make. And you know what? I’m not going to rush. The roads are going to be slippery. And I think we’ve got all the time in the world with you.” He tossed the little phone on the floor next to me and left. I heard some male conversation downstairs, the heavy glass doors slid open and closed, and the sound of a big engine starting.

Then they came in. Lim’s pals.

They still seemed a little spaced out to me, but the anger was burning through the fog of whatever they were on. Everyone was dressed by this time. Their boots had lug soles. Just the sturdy sort of thing you need for a winter hike, but useful in other ways as well. The two guys I had taken out on my way into the house were maybe still a little stunned and maybe not at the top of their game, but they were close enough. I could see from the set of their shoulders and the way they placed themselves on either side of me that something bad was coming. I tried scrunching myself into a tight ball, but it ultimately didn’t do much good. With my hands tied behind my back, it was hard to shield my head effectively. And, as Lim said, they had all the time in the world.

There was some good momentum and windup to the first kick. Maybe the guy had played some soccer in his youth. Maybe it was all that taekwondo. The end result was the same. His kick caught me high on the left rib cage and actually lifted me up off the ground. I felt something give, like a piece of plastic coated in rubber, breaking with a dull, muted crack. His second shot was aimed at the same target and I rolled my shoulder down to attempt to block it, tensing to take the impact. When the kick landed, it slammed into the meat of my triceps. But his partner was on the other side of me—the unprotected side—and saw the gift I had given him. He caught me with the toe of his boot, right in the solar plexus. My breathing stopped and my lungs burned. I gasped and tried to roll away from both of them. But I couldn’t get out of range effectively. Then one of them clipped my head and the world roared and went dark for a minute. I gasped some air into me, and tried to keep moving, rolling this way and that to avoid presenting an open target. That was the theory, at least. As they rained kicks down on me, I convulsed. They laughed.

I was desperate to keep my head down and my back up, using the bone and muscle there to serve as some sort of shield. I was afraid they’d turn me over, exposing the soft tissue of the abdomen to attack. It’s hard to kick someone to death. It takes time and technique, especially if the victim knows how to cover up. However, stomping someone to death is relatively straightforward if you can turn the victim onto his back. You can crush the throat or simply jump on the unprotected stomach area. Then the internal bleeding starts. It’s not quick and it’s not pretty, but it works.

But these guys weren’t trying to kill me; it seemed they were just trying to hurt me. Payback is an international custom understood in any language. But it was hot and sweaty work, and once they were sure they’d inflicted enough damage, they got tired of it and simply left me on the floor.

My ears rang and my body was on fire. I tried to get up into a sitting position but couldn’t. I retched weakly. The big muscles in my thighs were paralyzed with a scalding flood of lactic acid. I simply lay there and tried to get my breathing under control. As the roaring in my ears faded I could hear the sound of a wet animal rasping and realized it was me. I panted like a dog for some time, helpless to resist the instinct to gulp as much air as possible. I spat out the bile in my mouth in a series of weak, fluttering actions, like a faulty machine sputtering before it finally runs out of steam. But I worked at summoning up some discipline and, little by little, I pulled it together.

It is what Yamashita has taught me—the way you forge a link between body and spirit, no matter what the cost. How you work through the pain. How you endure. I’d forgotten it for a time on the waterboard. Maybe I was making up for my past failure. Maybe that beating was a perverse kind of gift, one more chance for me to get it right.

It’s easy to talk about the Warrior’s Way in the dojo. Training is hard, but nobody’s really going to die. And you’re putting yourself through it voluntarily. There’s a point to it, a goal. And you’ve chosen the experience. You. It implies a type of personal control. All that talk about losing the ego in martial arts training is right in some ways, but really wrong in others. Because in a contradictory sense, it’s all about ego, about the hard bright spark deep down that believes you’re going through something that, in the end, makes you better, stronger, more complete. You choose to do it. You.

It’s different when you’re trussed up and helpless on the floor. Being the victim of an assault like this makes you realize just how fragile your hold on life is, the insignificance of that spark of ego, and how easily snuffed out the whole enterprise can be. Bound and helpless, it’s easy to feel there is no will, no ego in control. In some ways, it’s easier to surrender totally. You become just an organism. Nerves fire, capillaries fill and drain, muscles tense and go slack. You’re just meat and moisture, bone and reflex. A locus of pain.

Or you can try to be more.

I may have drifted for a while. A sob jolted my broken ribs awake. Was that noise me? I rolled onto my knees and lay my forehead flat on the floor as the roaring started in my head again. I waited it out.

I got an image from my early days of training with Yamashita. It wasn’t unusual for him to cross swords with novices like me. He wasn’t doing it to be nice, to give me some personal attention. He was testing my worth by simply trying to grind me down. He would do just that, of course, and, when I was gasping for breath, he’d dump me onto the floor with casual disdain. He’d nod slightly to himself as if at a job well done. Then he’d turn to go. As he walked away, I’d watch the broad expense of his back, the play of the fabric of the dark blue training top across his torso, the ridgeline where his shaved head met his neck. Sometimes I’d wonder whether I could stand it anymore. Whether I had it in me. And what he ultimately wanted from me. He’d pause slightly as if he could feel my eyes on him, as if he could sense the questions I was silently asking. He never answered them directly. Instead, he would pause, turn his head, and simply say, “Get up.” It was a command as simple as it was inexorable.

In the end, I learned to fall less. To endure more. And I learned there was no real secret insight he was teaching beyond the simple act of getting up once more. Of taking it, no matter what the cost.

I rocked there on the floor, feeling the damage I’d taken from the beating.
Get up
. It was hard to gauge just how broken I was. Pretty battered at the least. But I flexed my arms and legs slightly, tugging against the duct tape. Some ability to move, I noted. So it was pain getting in the way more than any real structural damage. Good news of a type.
Get up
. I’d clenched my hands into fists during the attack and I was pretty sure the finger bones were intact. I worked my hands, opening and closing the fingers. Slow, but OK. I rolled my head to one side and squinted around the room. My eyesight wasn’t the greatest—there was some swelling across my brows and the concussion made the visual field dance—but I could see.
Get up
.

It took me a few tries to get upright. I listed against the bed and just let myself breathe for a while. When they left, they had closed the door, satisfied I wasn’t going anywhere. A good beating generally solves all kinds of problems and, besides, I was bound hand and foot. So they never even thought to take the flashlight and other things off the bed—like the knife.

If I could get up onto the bed, I might be able to somehow get the knife and use it to cut the duct tape. But just being on my knees and leaning against the bed made me sick.
Get up
. I wasn’t sure I could actually stand tied up the way I was. My balance was too rocky. I needed my hands to help get me up. And they were pinned behind me.

But they had only bound my wrists. If they were real pros, they would have taped my upper arms together as well. But they weren’t pros. At least I didn’t think so. It had been too easy to get in the house. There had been no security set up. And if they were real kidnappers, how come they were all partying? Lim was going to make a phone call and I assumed it was to get some instructions about what to do with me. He might have a good idea of what needed to be done, but fortunately for me he wasn’t sure. That meant he was taking orders from someone else and was new to all this. And I knew they weren’t pros because, after delivering a fairly competent beating, they had made a major mistake. Two mistakes, actually.

The first was that they hadn’t seriously crippled me. Lim knew my name, but clearly he and his pals really didn’t know anything about me. They didn’t realize after what they had done, I was going to have to come back at them. A normal person would just roll around in pain. But I wasn’t normal. I knew something about pain and how it was possible to work with it. You never really fight it; you just accept it and force yourself to function anyway. It’s about will and control and how far you’re willing to go in pursuit of a goal. The ego thing again.

The second mistake they made was even worse. Amateurs that they were, they had left a knife in the same room with me.

So I got up. Simple to say, but it wasn’t pretty, and it took a while. I really needed to be able to use my arms, and that wasn’t going to happen with them tied behind my back. I sat on the floor, feet stretched out in front of me, rocked from side to side, and worked my bound wrists under my butt, up along the backs of my thighs and down toward my feet. I’ve spent years stretching like this and it should have been easy. But it’s hard to work against the reflex that tightens muscles when they’re damaged or in pain. It takes time and concentration even in the best of circumstances. When I got my wrists down to about my heels, I almost despaired—I was wearing hiking boots with thick soles, and they added an extra few inches to the stretch. As I leaned into it I crunched down on whatever had snapped in the ribcage. There was a bright, hot thrust of pain that made me catch my breath. But I let it come. I worked on the breathing. I pushed.