Rules of the Hunt (75 page)
He replayed the scene in his mind.
There was something — an excess of joviality
?
—
something
.
He
was missing some element.
He thought of Bergin.
Could
Schwanberg and Palmer possibly know?
Surely not.
There was
not even a hint that they suspected their nemesis was at hand.
And yet...
*
*
*
*
*
What the fuck is going on
? thought
Schwanberg.
He turned toward Chuck Palmer.
Palmer was looking contentedly out a window at the
that anything was amiss.
Of course,
Chuck would be content, since he was flying in a real airship for the first
time and knew pretty much for certain that he was going to be able to kill a
few people in the near future.
Chuck was
easy to please.
Schwanberg tried to work out a few possibilities as to what might be
going down, and then, as the options clicked into place, started to sweat.
It suddenly dawned on him that what he had
planned to do to Fitzduane, that fucking Irishman was intending to do to
him
.
Suspicion became certainty.
He leaned across and spoke into Chuck Palmer's ear.
Palmer's back stiffened as Schwanberg
spoke.
If the boss had a funny feeling,
there was no point in debating it.
The
man had a nose for trouble.
Schwanberg felt easier now that Chuck was alerted.
The next question was what to do about
it.
Frankly, backing up Katsuda was all
very well, but the prime directive was personal survival.
He looked at his watch.
Shit!
It was 01:38
A.M.
,
only twenty-two minutes before the meet.
They were going to have to act soon if they wanted to resolve this thing
before the main action went down.
After
it, he had a feeling it would be too late.
He had a disconcerting feeling he was being set up to die in the line of
duty.
He and Chuck would probably get
Distinguished Intelligence Medals — posthumously — and maybe get bronze stars
and their names on the memorial wall in
Some motherfucking consolation when you were a heap of ashes sitting in
someone filing cabinet because they had forgotten to sprinkle you in the
Well, it would be how Schwanberg would
arrange things if roles were reversed.
Death in the line of duty was a nice touch.
No trial.
No scandal.
The Agency really did
not like scandal.
The more Schwanberg thought about it, the more he was convinced he was on
the button.
Fuck logic!
It felt right.
Which raised two questions:
why had they not acted already?
And who was going to do the hit?
The delay in making their move was easy to work out.
They did not know what was going to go down
at the meet and wanted all the firepower they could get.
A reasonable decision, but
a fatal one for them.
*
*
*
*
*
Fitzduane tensed for a preemptive move against Schwanberg — and then
relaxed.
His instincts screamed danger,
but his head argued with cold logic that the scenario should be played
out.
The first priority was what was
taking place down below.
Schwanberg would have to wait — and he was covered by an ace in the
hole.
A very
experienced ace who knew exactly what he was doing.
An ace
who
was not as young as he had been,
whose reflexes were perhaps a little slow?
Fitzduane suppressed his doubts.
The situation was complex enough already without his taking any
precipitative action.
He would wait.
He glanced across
at Schwanberg and Palmer again.
Nothing untoward.
*
*
*
*
*
AS to who was going to make the hit, Schwanberg started to give some
serious thought to Bergin.
He had
dismissed the threat from that source before, but now it looked as if he had
been wrong.
This was the kind of thing
the Agency liked to handle internally.
Allowing outsiders to liquidate your personnel was not a good
precedent.
So maybe someone here worked
for the Agency or... maybe he was anticipating a threat from the wrong quarter.
Schwanberg took a fresh look at his surroundings.
He had read a briefing document on the
airship before deciding it was worth using, and now he tried to recall what he
could from it.
What he saw was now
illuminated only by dim red light.
They
were on night-vision status.
Shortly,
the light would be extinguished altogether, as the focus of attention switched
to the meeting below.
If they were going
to make a move, it would have to be very soon or they would not be able to see
what they were doing.
The gondola was, in effect, a long thin room that was suspended under the
main balloon.
At the front end were the
two pilots, separated from the main cabin by only a three-quarter-height
partition.
Strictly speaking, he
recalled, the airship did not need two pilots, but there was some safety
regulation which made belt and suspenders mandatory.
In the middle was the main cabin.
In passenger mode, it could seat up to twenty-four, but now there was only
a short double-row of seats down the middle.
Fitzduane was speaking into a microphone, and sitting beside him was the
Delta sniper, busy checking his weapon.
Farther back on the left, the Japanese bitch stood half leaning against
the rear bulkhead.
She appeared to be
dozing.
At any rate, her eyes seemed
closed.
Most probably she was into some
meditation shit.
Beyond the bulkhead, at the rear of the gondola, was a major thickness of
soundproofing and the engines.
Schwanberg again tried to recall the layout of the airship.
Wait!
He had forgotten the head on the left and a small galley space on the
right.
He had used the head, so there was nothing untoward there.
He looked toward the galley space and it was
not there — there was just a door — and suddenly
their who
fucking game plan became clear.
"CHUCK!" he screamed, and drew his Browning and pumped seven
rounds through the galley door.
The door crashed open and Bergin stumbled out, blood spewing from a wound
in his neck.
There was a silenced automatic held high in his right hand, and
Schwanberg watched as the barrel swung toward him and the black circle jumped
twice, as two rounds were fired.
They
missed him, as he knew they would.
Schwanberg felt a rush.
Once more
he had beaten them to it.
The VC could
not get him, nor could anyone else.
He
was whip-smart and fucking well invulnerable.
He shot again three times and watched Bergin's skull come apart and his
body slam back toward the galley door.
Chifune dropped to the ground just as Chuck Palmer fired his pistol, and
the round smashed through the gondola wall just above her.
She was now hidden behind the center row of
seats, and Palmer fired a burst of shots trying to guess her position.
She had moved forward as he was shooting, and now raised herself on one
knee and put two shots into Palmer's stomach.
He folded in two, and she shot him again in the crown of his head.
The bullets exited at the back of his neck.
Schwanberg could not understand the terrible pain.
He knew he had not been shot, but his vision was dimming and there was
not strength in his limbs.
He looked down, and the haft of a throwing knife was protruding from his
chest.
He saw Fitzduane's face, and then the pain was overwhelming as the blade
was removed from his torso and plunged in once again under his rib cage and up
into his heart.
Fitzduane removed his knife from Schwanberg's body and saw with horror a
double hole in the low screen immediately behind the pilot's chair.
He leaped forward and ripped the screen aside.
The copilot's face, frozen with shock and fear, looked up at him in
desperation.
The side of the screen in
front of the pilot was black with blood.
The digital chronometer on the instrument panel read 01:47
A.M.
There were thirteen minutes to go before the meet.
Fitzduane looked down at the police copilot.
"We will proceed as planned, Inspector-
san
," he said grimly.
He began to wipe the blood and brain matter from the windshield while the
copilot went into a slow circuit around the Hodama residence far below.
The parameters of the residence were defined by infrared strobe lights
that were invisible at ground level and even from the air, unless seen through
the appropriate goggles.
The object was to keep the Hodama garden below at a constant diagonal
from the airship.
A predictable range
made for more accurate shooting.
Behind Fitzduane in the main cabin, Lonsdale and Chifune clipped up
observation windows and readied their weapons.
As he went through the necessary actions, every fiber of Fitzduane's
being screamed in pain and sadness at his friend's death and then focused
totally on what had to be done.
Grieving
would wait.
Mike Bergin, if anyone
could, would understand.
You shut out the sadness and you did what had to be done, and only
afterwards did you weep.
That was the
way of it.
There was no other.
*
*
*
*
*
The Spider waited in his command vehicle as the deadline approached, and
although he had seen no official status, Yoshokawa waited with him.
The meeting at the Hodama residence was the focal point for a vast police
operation involving concentric rings of the top-secret
Airborne
special antiterrorist unit and armed riot police.
In all, over eleven hundred men and a host of
specialized equipment were deployed, and the hardest part of planning the
operation had been devising ways of concealing the buildup.
Fumio Namaka and his terrorists and Katsuda
and his
yakuza
must be allowed into
the trap before it was sprung, or the whole exercise was pointless.
The downside of that vital qualification was that response time to
Hodama's villa would not be as fast as the Spider would have preferred.
However, he was reassured that whoever got
into the residence would not get out, and he had the advantage of Fitzduane and
his team visually monitoring the operation from on high.
He had broached the question of downloading a video picture of the scene
from the airship's observation cameras, but Fitzduane had looked straight at
him and shaken his head.
Silently, with
only the slightest movement, the Spider had nodded his agreement.
There were some things he, the Deputy Superintendent-General of the Tokyo
Metropolitan Police, should not be officially aware of.
*
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*
Fumio Namaka sat in the back of his long, black armored limousine and
rechecked his arrangements.
What he had
planned would, perhaps, not have been so unusual in a country such as the
He thought it possible that he would not need his full
reinforcements.
The irony was that the
gaijin
Fitzduane would quite likely be
there as arranged, seriously thinking he could arrange a truce after all that
had happened.
Actually, a truce would
make sense.
This kind of endless war was
a gross distraction from the more productive business of ever expanding the
Namaka organization.
Further, given that
the feud with Katsuda was unresolved, it was not very wise to be fighting on
two fronts.
