The Gamma Option (12 page)

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.

If that was not to be the case, the noble thing for the Bujin to do under the circumstances would be to offer Blaine a sword to fight with in combat against him. The Bujin would realize merely from the way Blaine moved that he had had some training. But since that training was pitifully inadequate next to that of such a master, Blaine would need to rely on subterfuge to survive. One opening and one quick lunge would be all it would take and likely all he could hope to get.

At last the Bujin’s body began to turn. Blaine tensed, thinking of his sword and how fast he could grab and draw it if it came to that.

But the Bujin was smiling. Then he was chuckling, soon laughing.

“You are too ugly a man to kill before breakfast,
Fudo-san
,” the black robed figure said as he slid himself forward across the
tatami
until the sun blazed on his face.

It was Yamagita Hiroshi.

“You’re the Bujin!” Blaine exclaimed in surprise.

“Yes,
Fudo-san
,”
Hiroshi returned in perfect English. “Strange our paths should cross this way.”

“Even stranger since no one’s heard from you in over a decade now.”

“No one’s heard from Hiroshi because Hiroshi ceased to exist.”

“Care to tell me why?”

“In time,
Fudo-san,
in time. For now your appearance tells me you need sake and a warm bed. You should have felt it was I as soon as you saw me. Fatigue can do that to a man.”

Hiroshi rose and McCracken joined him on foot. The two men met in the center of the mat and shook hands warmly. The
sensei
regarded his former pupil with a knowing grin.

“You are still
Fudo-san,
as stubborn and unwilling to change as ever. And you have become stronger in the years since our parting. I can feel that strength.”

“I’m forty now,
sensei.
What you feel are my bones calcifying.”

Hiroshi laughed again. “Dangle a bit of yarn before an old sleeping cat and see how fast he remembers his lessons.”

“Do you know why I’ve come?” McCracken asked him.

“I have my suspicions. Let us discuss matters over that sake I promised you. Come.”

They walked side by side through another set of
shoji
doors. McCracken recalled that the original
dojo
where he had trained with Hiroshi had looked much the same, simple and plain, the way a training hall was meant to. Even then Hiroshi’s school had been closed to the public and only pull from officials within the Japanese government won Blaine an interview. Much to his surprise, Hiroshi could recount Blaine’s exploits in Vietnam more clearly than he remembered them himself.

“There is a great warrior God in Japanese folklore,” the master had told him that day. “He was named Fudo and he carried a sword in one hand and a rope in the other, the tools he used to first subdue evil and then bind it. He would only use his sword to kill when another’s had shed blood already and was about to again. He stood up for the weak and innocent and was feared by all who carried blackness in their hearts. I will call you
Fudo-san
because you are such a man. I will agree to teach you because you are such a man.”

McCracken’s views on his life and work jibed almost perfectly with the creed of the samurai, and Hiroshi sensed that Blaine was destined for life as a
ronin,
or masterless samurai. He would be a protector and lone avenger much as the god Fudo had been himself.

But the significance of
“Fudo-san”
extended to a more subtle level. The word
fudo
can also mean
immovable,
and this too was a quality Hiroshi sensed in McCracken from the start. He was not a man prone to change easily, nor would he ever be. The times would pass and McCracken would pass with them, though on his own terms.

They moved down a small narrow corridor into a smaller room lined with more formal
tatami
mats. Blaine’s nostrils caught the faintly medicinal smell of warming sake and saw the ceramic flasks sitting within a pot of steaming water suspended above an open flame. Hiroshi knelt before them and poured out a pair of cups, handing the first to McCracken.

“We will drink to old times,
Fudo-san
.”

“And speak of newer ones, Hiroshi. Why did you disappear? What happened? Why did you—”

“Become the Bujin?” Hiroshi completed for him. “The answer is rather long and complicated, tedious, too.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Tradition,
Fudo-san,
is the curse of our people. It binds us to the past in a way we do not always understand but must accept because it makes us what we are.” He paused long enough to take a healthy sip of his sake. “There was a man, a bully, who made it his business to take money from working people in exchange for not hurting them, their families, or their businesses. The man was backed by a gang, and the few times police were summoned there was no one but the complainant to back up the story, and the complainant conveniently vanished or changed his mind soon after. Such is not unusual in Japan. It wasn’t my business … until this man, this bully, staked a claim in the village where I had been raised. The elders came to me. I had no choice but to intercede.

“I tried to reason with the man. I went alone, with honor. He laughed in my face, chastised my old ways, and had his men show their guns. He told me I would die if I ever showed my face to him again. He dishonored me,
Fudo-san.
He left me with no choice, if I had ever really had one. I waited for him one morning in the rice paddy he walked through to reach his office. He walked without fear, for who would dare touch him?” Hiroshi paused again but did not sip any sake. “I touched him. I drew him down into the mud and held him under until he passed out. Then I left him there to drown in the muck like the sewer rat that he was.”

“No one saw you?”

“It didn’t matter. I was bound by the oath I had sworn as an officer in the service of Japan to report my crime. There was an uproar when I did, a public outcry in which some supported my actions and some condemned them. The dead man’s friends vowed vengeance. The government was helpless to support me. I had placed them in an impossible position. So I made the rest easy for all concerned. I disappeared. I became someone else.”

“A
ronin,
masterless in your own right. Hiring yourself out.”

“To gain money to support the kind of people the man I killed had bullied. It was my way of making up for the disgrace I had committed to maintain honor. Such a dichotomy, so difficult to resolve. I chose a means of escape by which I could live with myself. I began training warriors as they were trained in days lost. Four of them escorted you into my
dojo
.”

“Oh yeah. Tough hombres.”

“To be sure,
Fudo-san.
They and dozens of others have trained as men were trained in a time long past. They live and work here in the
dojo
as
uchideshi.
Their life is their training.”

“And is your life to be their
sensei
or to be the Bujin, Hiroshi?”

“It is to be both, and it is their lot to serve me in both respects. A man does what he must to survive and find meaning in his life. Our paths are not much different. I seek to be of service to those who have been turned away at more traditional stations.”

“With one crucial distinction,
sensei
:
I don’t keep time with men like Yosef Rasin—a recent client of yours.”

Hiroshi noticed Blaine hadn’t touched his sake and didn’t press him about it. He nodded. “Just as I thought. I had my suspicions about Rasin from the beginning, but he was most convincing and offered to pay handsomely for a small service on my part.”