The Kaisho (27 page)

She kept on the highway, heading more or less in the direction of her house, where she would eventually leave the car. She had arranged for a limousine to pick them up there for the ride out to the airport. She checked her mirror again, straining to catch a glimpse of the driver, but the diffuse sunlight spun off the Toyota’s windshield, making any kind of identification impossible.

“Honey, what’s the matter?” Rick said as her expression of concentration changed to one of concern.

“Probably nothing,” she said, changing to the far right lane and accelerating. A moment later, she watched the white Toyota pull out from behind a black BMW and accelerate behind her. “I don’t want to alarm you, but someone might be following us.”

“What?” Rick swiveled around to peer out the rear window. “Who?”

“See that white Toyota? I think he picked us up when we were still in the city proper.”

Rick gave the Toyota another look, then turned around again, straightening his jacket. “But that’s nuts. Why would anyone want to follow us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with what Nicholas is doing in Venice. Everything bad happens because of what he is.”

Rick grunted. “I think you’re imagining things, but just to put your mind at ease let’s give your theory a try.” He pointed. “Get off at the next exit. Let’s see if the Toyota follows us.”

Justine nodded, but as the signs for the exit passed them, she made no attempt to change lanes.

“What are you doing?” Rick said. “At the speed we’re going, if we don’t get over now, we won’t make the—Jesus!”

Justine accelerated abruptly, sliding just in front of the grill of a truck, almost clipping its fender with the tail of her car as she switched lanes. The truck’s air horn sounded angrily. The exit was coming up very fast, and there was a Nissan sedan cruising sedately in the left lane. She jammed on her brakes, slid almost sideways across the one clear space in the exit lane, and burning rubber behind her as she pumped the brakes hard, hurtled onto the exit ramp at twice the advised speed.

She almost hit the outer verge, corrected, then slowed for the long arc off the highway. When they were on the local street, she said, “Well, did you see whether the Toyota tried to follow us?”

“Are you kidding?” Rick said with a small laugh. “I was too busy trying to keep my bladder under control.”

He turned around now. Justine had just made a right turn, and he could see the road was clear behind them. “Nothing,” he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek as he settled back in the seat. “See, I told you. But, sweet Jesus, you could have made the same point by taking the exit at a decent speed.”

“Oh, God, no!”

“What is it?”

He saw her staring into her rearview mirror and, shifting, saw the familiar silhouette of the white Toyota come into view. “Same car?”

Justine nodded grimly. “Now what do you think of my theory?”

“Let’s see if we can get him off our back.”

Justine nodded again. “We’re near the house. I know this area better than any other in Japan. If we can reach the road to our house without him too close, I can lose him there.”

She took the next left with a sharp squeal of tires, accelerated dangerously through an intersection, then made another left. He could see that she was looping around, attempting to make the turns fast enough to switch positions with the Toyota and come up behind him, then veer off so that he would have no chance to follow.

He was dizzy after the sixth turn. There was also no sign of the pursuing car, and Rick was of a mind that her guilt at having cheated on her husband had begun to rub off on him.

“Coming up on the road I want,” she said. “Any sign of him?”

“No,” Rick said. But he was concerned for another reason. She was obviously an excellent driver, but she was having to concentrate on a lot of things at once: finding the right road, remembering to drive on the left, watching for the white Toyota. And she must be thinking of Nicholas.

“Slow down,” he said. “The Toyota’s not following us—if it ever was.”

“No, I’m on the road now; I want to make certain he won’t find us.”

This road was narrow and winding. Great Yoshino cryptomeria trees and massive evergreen hedges lined it so that there were no margins. He felt as if he were inside a gigantic maze. No wonder Justine felt safe here. It was almost like finding Eden after the concrete and steel megalopolis of Tokyo.

The turns were almost switchbacks. So sharp were they that many of the homeowners had installed circular fish-eye mirrors on tree trunks so motorists could see the oncoming traffic around the acute bends.

They flashed along the road, the sharp turns back and forth making him a bit queasy. “For the love of God, Justine, slow down!”

She continued to consult her rearview mirror; her face showed that she still felt they were being pursued by the wrath of God. “Just a little more, until I’m sure we’re safe.”

They sped into a turn sharper than most. There was no mirror here, and Rick experienced a moment akin to what he had experienced the first time he’d parachuted. Nothing below him but air, the ground coming up and he hurtling downward to meet it.

He heard the deep diesel roar of the giant earthmover before his brain registered what his eyes saw. Justine was looking into her mirror for any trace of their pursuer, and shouting a warning, Rick grabbed the steering wheel.

The huge machine was bearing down on them as Justine, screaming, hit the brakes. The machine’s air horn exploded into the quiet afternoon, sounding as mournful as a funeral dirge.

Rick threw himself across Justine’s seat, yanked hard on the wheel, but at that point there was less than two feet remaining between the vehicles.

What is thought, locked in an endless moment such as this? Justine’s mind was blank. She saw only a small wedge of cerulean sky, shining with a curious light behind the looming bulk of the crimson earthmover. In that luminescence she could see reflected the entire breadth of her existence as if it were a single exhalation from the mouth of God.

The two feet were covered in a split second. The massive front end of the earthmover struck her car almost head-on. The front crumpled like cardboard, and the cracked engine, split dashboard, and shattered windshield plowed like a furious juggernaut into the passenger cabin.

What was left of the car, now halved in length, was lifted like a matador, gored on the curve of a charging bull’s horn, and thrown into the air. Upside down, it struck a pair of very old cryptomeria, instantly felling them. It hung in the air for a moment while gasoline from the ruptured tank spewed out as if it were blood from an artery.

The appalled driver of the earthmover smelled the rank odor of raw gasoline and jumped from his cab, running as fast as he could. Even with that, the percussive wave of the explosion blew him off his feet. Fetched up against the bole of a tree whose trunk had been sheared off in either the initial accident or the ensuing explosion, he looked dizzily up to see an oily fireball consume the car, the blue sky, and finally his consciousness.

Science Fiction, that’s what they called the U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam, and that nickname seemed just about right. These boys did all the nasty jobs that no one ever wanted to talk about, that were certainly never logged in on INTSUM, the weekly intelligence summaries on limited distribution at Pentagon East—the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam HQ, at Tan Son Nhut. UWO, the Army called them: unconventional warfare ops.

Even so, Do Duc was a kind of anomaly within Science Fiction. He was officially an E-9, a sergeant major in the RVAF, the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces, where he had served in the Third Ranger Command, where he gained his expertise in zippos—search and destroy missions. That was how he had come to the attention of Science Fiction.

He had enlisted in the RVAF at the age of sixteen, having lied about his age and his mixed heritage. It was easier to be Vietnamese only, so he had hidden away his surname, made up another, and no one bothered to check. South Vietnam was in a fight for its life; men, not paperwork, were paramount.

Sergeant major was the highest rank an enlisted man could attain. He was officer material, no doubt about it, but he resisted with all his heart his superiors’ suggestions in that direction.

Something of his nature had been forged in this mad crucible of war. Here, life was essentially a cut-and-dried affair. Men were sent out to kill one another, and women—well, they were around to bed in between missions.

In such a hellish atmosphere it was not surprising that human beings should lose their value. Life was reduced to a commodity, to be bought and sold, to be possessed or to be terminated. Hearts quickly became so calloused that the wretchedness of existence could no longer be perceived.

In Vietnam, the jungle had a way of taking everything away from you. Inch by inch, the hive of horrors lurking there stripped away the veneer of civilization, exposing like a raw nerve all the dark things of humanity. Quickly, the foundation of benevolence was subverted, so that in the end one doubted whether one had ever had a true sense of humanity at all. No wonder Do Duc’s favorite song became the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Compassion was reduced to the remembrance of a dream; it was supplanted by the shark’s peculiar imperative to continue to move. That meant missions: the fearful plunge into the jungle, the choking terror that you would make a misstep and end up without your legs or be impaled on punji sticks—fire-hardened bamboo spikes dark with a venom that would paralyze your central nervous system. The men in Do Duc’s outfit often confessed to having nightmares of such happenstances. Curiously, these became a spur to volunteer for missions even when you were overdue leave.

Because what happened between missions? The shark’s imperative needed to be met. Sex was okay as far as it went, and there were the drugs that provided the illusion of movement. But Do Duc needed more—much more.

This was how he struck up a relationship that was strange even for the strange days in which he was living. It began when a corporal named Rock was transferred into Do Duc’s outfit. While with a grunt platoon in the Big Dead One, the First Infantry Division, elements of which were the first infantry in Vietnam, Rock had been bumped up from PFC via the courageous run he had made at a Viet Cong stronghold. He’d burned five of them before being shot in the arm. Then he’d dropped a grenade and had run like hell. That had earned him a field promotion and an impact award from a real live general.

But that was before Do Duc knew him, before he had been assigned by his own request to Do Duc’s Science Fiction outfit. He had asked for the assignment in lieu of another impact award.

About the outfit: They called themselves Werewolves. They dressed like VC, ate like VC, and had as little to do with the soldiers around them as they were able. The Werewolves were a kind of semiautonomous unit of madmen who were used on missions other outfits either couldn’t or wouldn’t undertake. Some of them, Do Duc believed, even the president wouldn’t have abided had he been told of their planning, and execution.

Who requisitioned these missions Do Duc never did find out, but the Werewolves CO was a dour-faced colonel named Bud Powell, who came from the heartland of America. He had been a college professor in the sixties who had grown bored with his work and his deferral, so he had enlisted. Not that you could tell he had been a teacher from the zeal and cunning with which he employed his men to do the bloody bidding of the U.S. Army. He was known affectionately among his men as Bowel.

It was Bowel who had first paired Do Duc with the cherry, Rock. “This is one bad dude, so I’m given to understand,” Bowel had said to Do Duc just before the official mission briefing. “How about this, he goes around with a LAW.” That was an M72 antitank rocket launcher that could blow open the side of any bunker Charlie could erect.

“Sounds like my kind of guy.”

Bowel had snickered. “So I thought. I’m giving you a zippo mission to see what he’s really made of.”

The two of them were sent to take out a VC “vampire” patrol—one of those feared, lethal entities that stole through the lines at night, killing soldiers in their sleep. This kind of behavior on the part of the enemy was “intolerable,” according to Bowel, who ought to know since he was so well connected all the way up to Pentagon East.

The psychological effects of such raids were devastating, and they had to be stopped. The Werewolves were tapped to do just that.

But Bowel told Do Duc and Rock that he wanted them to do more than destroy the patrol. “I want you to make an example of them. How you boys do that is strictly up to you.”

“Are you gonna tell us what’s in bounds and what’s out,” Rock asked.

Bowel had turned away from them. “Son, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

So Do Duc and Rock went vampire hunting.

“Does Bowel really mean what he said?” Rock asked Do Duc as they made their way out of camp by the light of a sliver of moon.

“He always means what he says. Then again he always means what he
doesn’t
say.”

Rock grinned. “You guys’ve got yourselves a whole other war here. I think I’m gonna like this setup.”

In the jungle, Do Duc said softly, “I don’t want to shoot these bastards, get me?”

“Cool,” Rock said. “I’m already thinking of the thousand and one things that’re better than shooting them.”

They camped in the jungle, sleeping one at a time for two-hour spells, until it was an hour before dawn. Then they tracked down the VC vampires—a unit of four—who were returning to base after a nightside foray.

They took them in their makeshift camp, where four others waited for them, and not a shot was fired. They strung the eight VCs up by their feet, then slit them open from neck to pubis, a line of steaming humanity, and left them there to be found, a testament to the power of human hate and the corruption of the human soul, the true and lasting damage war inflicts on its participants.