Girl Rides the Wind (25 page)

If only they’d been able to capture the Crown Prince before he made it to Hokkaido, where their support was thinnest. The problem had been that their operatives hesitated to kill the Prince, but the Prince’s man, Ozawa-san, had not hesitated to kill anyone in his path. It was only a matter of time before the Crown Prince emerged from hiding, at which point the people as a whole would rally to him. The only thing still to be determined was what would remain for anyone she loved when that happened, and much depended on managing Soga Jin’s optimism. If she were capable of Gyoshin’s sober judgment, Jin-san would already have moved to shift all the blame on to her, and then arranged her assassination. But the prospect of ultimate power so close to her grasp prevented her from seeing the truth.

Old man Okamoto’s voice snapped her out of this bleak reverie. “It would be better for her if you came by. I am sorry to ask, Heiji-sama. I know you have important things to take care of in Tokyo. But she keeps asking for her Auntie Go-Go.”

If only she could run through the forest with her niece, chasing imaginary dragons and letting the world slip by. What wouldn’t she give for one more carefree afternoon? But she had more instructions to give.

“Listen carefully, Okamoto-san. You must do exactly as I say. If a day comes when the bodyguards leave the estate, you must act quickly. Take everyone, your wife, and Haru-chan and Hana-san, and go back to your house. Make sure the estate car is in good working order against that day.”

She knew what she said had shaken the old man – it was audible in his voice, if not in his words. He now recognized what she’d been thinking this whole time. “No, Heiji-sama. You mustn’t let this happen.”

“I have no choice. This is where my grandfather’s dreams have brought us. Be ready for the day, and keep Haru-chan safe, above all else.”

Gyoshin ended the call and looked out the window over the darkened landscape. She flew north to Misawa Air Base, the headquarters of the Northern Air Defense Force, to shore up support among key officers, and especially Colonel Hosokawa. Jin-san would visit the Air Force Training Academy at Hamamatsu, which was much closer to Tokyo. Gyoshin recognized that this was one of the devices by which Jin-san meant to consolidate her power, and that sending her north was meant to keep her from some key negotiations.

Time was too short for any of this to matter. Unless, of course, she could persuade the base commander to order an air-search of the hills north of Sapporo, and his men were more willing to fire upon the Crown Prince’s party than their mercenaries had been – none of which was likely. All things considered, she might as well travel north and stay out of Jin-san’s way.

T
he moon provided
as much illumination of the shoreline of the Y’Ami Islands as it did of the seaplane, which made all of them wary. Kathy had climbed to eleven thousand feet to minimize the noise of the first pass, and maybe take them out of range of any small arms and RPG’s.

“There, right there,” Connie said, clutching a pair of binoculars. “A light, just below the notch connecting the ridges, maybe a campfire. It’s gone now.”

“If someone put it out, it may mean they’ve spotted us,” Perry said.

“Could be. Not much we can do about it now.”

“No sign of their boats,” Danko said. “But if I had to guess, they probably pulled them ashore in that lagoon. It’s a sandy shoreline, narrow enough to haul them to the treeline.”

Kathy cut the engine and prepared an approach that would carry them around to the far side, keeping the moon at their backs as long as possible. Those were Connie’s instructions.

“It’s gonna be a hard landing,” Kathy said. “This crate isn’t really built for gliding. It’s heavy in the nose, and the pontoons don’t improve the aerodynamics.”

“As long as we can take off again, if we’re wrong about this island,” Connie said.

“I’ll do what I can, but no promises.”

At five hundred feet, Kathy banked left around the western coastline, slanting closer as the plane shed altitude, wind noise whistling around the wings.

“This is the point of no return,” she called back into the cabin. “Any lower and I may not be able to start the engine in time to pull us out.”

“See,” Perry said. “There, along the eastern ridge, something’s moving. The moonlight glinted off something metallic.”

“Take us in, Gunderson,” Connie said.

A bright flash lit up the night, and the smoke trail was unmistakable. Kathy plunged the nose toward the water and banked right. A second flash pursued them.

“Shit,” Danko yelled. “RPG’s. I think we got the right island.”

“Bank left,” Connie yelled. “We need to round the point to get out of range.”

The first RPG missed them altogether, and Kathy pitched everyone toward the front of the cabin a second time, in an effort to evade the second, but it exploded just below the fuselage, tearing a ragged hole in the cabin floor. The plane lurched to one side and tilted sharply.

“If we roll over, we’re done for without an engine,” Connie cried out.

Oil sprayed across the windscreen and beaded up around the edges, and smoke streamed past the cabin windows.

“Crap, it looks like we lost one of the pontoons, and there’s no way that engine’s starting again,” Perry shouted.

“Everybody, get on the port side,” Kathy called back through the cabin. “We’re rolling too hard and I’ve got almost no aileron control.”

“… and try not to fall through the hole in the floor,” Perry added.

“At least we’re on fire,” Emily said, pressed against a window by Perry’s body. “That may come in handy.”

Kathy cackled at this, and finally managed to get control of the plane. “It’s way too sluggish, and the rudder control is shot. I don’t know how long I can keep us aloft.”

“Can you bring us around the point?” Perry asked. “If we can ditch on the other side, and the western ridge screens our landing… maybe blow the wreck… assuming we survive it… the illusion might buy us a little time.”

Kathy nodded, and wrestled the stick around again, now even stiffer than a moment ago.

“It’s as good a plan as any,” Connie said. “We need to get below the ridge when we turn the point. Danko, you and Perry get the cases ready. We’ll need to clear the wreckage quickly, before the spotters pick us up again. Gunderson and I will get Durant off.”

“Once we blow the plane, we have to hit the ground running,” Emily said. “We need to be inside the treeline ASAP. Mick, are you gonna be able to move that fast?”

“I’ll do what’s necessary, LT.”

“Kathy, put us down a few yards off shore. We don’t want to make it easy for them to investigate the wreckage. Once we’re clear, we hit it with a couple of grenades.” Emily handed her sidearm to Danko and took off her boots. “Make sure these get off the plane. I’ll need them later.”

The fire caused by the RPG had begun to burn through more of the cabin floor and gunfire could be heard over the wind-noise.

“Can you slow us down?” Emily called forward. She cinched up the harness on her shoulders and pushed open the starboard door, letting more smoke stream through the cabin.

“What the hell are you doing?” Danko yelled over the wind. “We’re going much too fast.”

“Pull the nose up, Gunderson,” Connie roared. “You need to brake now.”

At barely thirty feet above the water, and with Perry helping her pull on the stick, Kathy managed to point the nose up just as Emily leapt from the cabin.

“Holy shit,” Danko said, his mouth agape.

“Go get ’em, LT,” Durant said.

“Put the nose down,” Connie said. “Aim for that sand bar. We should be able to wade in from there.”

Danko and Perry pressed their faces to the aft windows, scanning the waves to see if Emily had surfaced.

“Oh, crap,” Danko said. “The impact must have stunned her, maybe broken her neck. She’ll drown for sure, if she isn’t already dead.”

“No, there she is,” Perry shouted. “On the point, see… pulling herself out of the water.”

“How the hell…”

“That’s my girl,” Connie muttered.

Danko stared out the window as a figure, barely silhouetted in the moonlight, darted into the forest. He barely had time to wonder at the fact that she had survived before the lone pontoon touched the water.

“Brace yourselves,” Kathy shouted. “The nose is gonna hit any second…”

The plane lurched as the pontoon dipped beneath the water, not buoyant enough by itself to support the weight. The portside wingtip caught the waves just as the nose pitched forward, and the craft twisted sharply down and to the left, until it came to rest in a few feet of water, its tail jutting out at a steep angle.

“Is everybody still in one piece?” Connie took a quick count of the bodies scattered around what remained of the fuselage, and then started shoving them through the open hatch. “Change of plans… Perry, you and Danko carry Durant to the shore. Gunderson and I will bring the guns. Now get moving. We’ve only got a few seconds to blow this crate.”

Once on the shore, Perry admired the smoke plume, which reached a hundred or so feet into the air. Standing next to him, Connie aimed the M4 Emily had scavenged a few nights earlier and fired two HE rounds into the wreckage, lighting up the night sky with a secondary explosion as the fuel caught fire.

L
eaves stuck
to Emily’s bare feet, too damp to crinkle in the humidity, as she sprinted up the slope. Voices drifted down, not even echoes, smothered as they were by the foliage, but clear enough for her to determine a source. Four men came toward her, two by two, seventy yards above, and struggling to control their descent by digging boots into the loose soil and sliding with each step.

Emily found a suitable clump of bamboo to conceal herself behind and watched their progress with lynx eyes, and ears attuned to the noise of their gear, and the body armor slapping against their chests. As they closed on her position, she took a breath and slipped the
wakizashi
out of its
saya
, confident that their own racket would prevent them from hearing the sound.

A moment later, the lead pair passed in front of her position, not six feet away – close enough to recognize them from Diao’s martial arts demonstrations on the
BHR
. She let them pass, and after a three-count, confronted the trailing pair, slashing at the throat of one and then hacking across the collarbone of the second, which gave them not time, or breath, to alert the others. Each man was dead before he hit the ground.

She turned and leapt into pursuit of the first two, closing the gap in seconds, launching herself feet-first at the back of one man, driving him face first into the trunk of a kalantas tree. The sickening crack of the impact brought the last man’s head around just in time to catch the glint of the blade before it stabbed through the base of his neck, penetrating the chest and severing the aorta just above his heart. As she withdrew the sword in a spurt of warm blood, for a brief moment his eyes came to focus on her face, bathed in moonlight. Did he recognize the pallid demon that had stripped his life away with the suddenness of thought? She shivered to think of it.

“No time for self-pity,” she thought, and turned to the task of stripping the body armor off her kills. “Durant and Kathy will need these.”

A few short moments later, she’d made her way back to the shoreline, just in time to see Connie blow up the wreckage in a suitably dramatic fireball.

Danko spotted her first and shrank instinctively at the sight.
What does he think, that I’m some sort of monster?
She didn’t have time to explore her resentment at this thought before Perry and Connie noticed her.

“Did you settle with them?” Connie asked.

Emily nodded and handed Perry what she’d scavenged – two Type 81’s, Chinese made Kalashnikovs with ammo-belts, four sets of body armor and a radio. “Put the armor on Kathy and Durant.” A voice crackled dimly over the radio.

“Should we respond to that?” Perry asked.

“Only if one of us speaks Cantonese, and even if I did, my voice would probably destroy the illusion.”

“No matter,” Connie said. “The reception’s breaking up… must be the ridgeline. It looks higher from down here. I doubt anyone on the other side even heard the blast.” She paused to examine the handset in the moonlight. “At least we can figure out what frequencies not to use.”

“If they did hear, it’ll probably take them ten minutes to get a second team over the ridge,” Danko said. “That’s how long we have to get our plan going.”

“Satphone’s dead,” Perry said. “We’ve got a few smoke grenades to signal the birds with. Do we want them to come here?”

“Not if this is gonna be a hot-zone in ten minutes,” Connie said. “I think we bring ’em in around the point, that clearing at the base of the eastern ridge.”

“Fine.” Emily pulled on her boots as she spoke, and strapped on a sidearm. “We can dig Durant and Kathy into those rocks. They’ll have some tree cover and a field of fire across the entire lagoon. You take the Chinese rifles and the AK47’s, Mick.”

“Danko and I will hold the high ground on the western ridge,” Connie said. “That should give you cover across the entire area between the ridges.”

“We’ve got two hours before sunrise,” Emily said. “The sky will begin to lighten in one. Perry and I will round the point and climb the eastern ridge to clear it of fire teams.”

“Right now, our best bet is the notch encampment,” Connie said. “We should have eyes on it rom the western ridge, before you can recon it.”

“One last thing. Nobody shoots Sergeant Yan.”

“You mean Diao’s goon?” Durant said. “What are we saving his ass for?”

“We need a Chinese witness to verify the sequence of events,” Emily said.

“Yeah, but why him? After that sparring session on the BHR…”

“The one where you got all bruised up,” Perry said.

“… and threw him into the wall.”

“Just take my word for it, guys.” Emily huffed at them in exasperation. “He’s the one we want.”

“How we will recognize him?” Danko asked.

“Bald, broken nose, built like a tank,” Durant said. “He’s hard to miss, so to speak.”

“
G
et a move on
, old man,” Connie called behind her in a hushed tone. “We need to clear the ridge before more of Diao’s men come across.”

Danko glanced up at her, some forty feet above him. “I am definitely too old for this sort of thing,” he muttered. One last heave and he got himself moving through the underbrush on the slope, branches slapping and grabbing at him as he went. A few more yards and he stumbled into a patch of bamboo, tall stalks standing alone or in clumps but no lower branches to slow him down. The ground felt firmer under his feet, until he placed his boot on something irregular, a snake-hole maybe, or an entrance to some rodent’s tunnel… except for the sticky way it clung to him.

When he looked down, and let his eyes adjust, he saw the problem. A dead man with a huge gash across his chest, and Danko’s boot was caught. He wrenched it free. “Holy crap.” The man’s blank eyes gazed up at him, but did not see him. Another man lay a few feet away, his neck slashed so deeply as nearly to have decapitated him. Two more bodies were visible now, further down the slope –
how had he managed not to step on them?

The muffled sounds of a commotion snapped his head around in time to see Connie struggling with two more men. He scrambled up the hill, his heart pounding in his ears, just in time to smash the butt of his rifle into one man’s ear. He crumpled to the ground, giving Connie an opening to slash at the throat of the other man. Danko watched, relieved and embarrassed at having left her exposed, as she crouched to stab the first man in the side of the neck – no mercy, no hesitation –
yes, this is the woman he remembered from so long ago
.

“I hope you can shoot better than you run.”

Danko winced at these words, bitingly true, and barely had time to register the other two bodies she had already dispatched.

“Man, you women are tough.” He tried to laugh, but Connie’s eyes, so hard and cold, stifled him.

“You go that way,” she said, gesturing off to the left. “I think there’s good cover past the rise… and remember, we’re not free to fire until Emily clears the camp.”

Now that they’d made the ridgeline, radio reception would be four by four. He adjusted his earpiece and checked the frequency. How many engagements had been lost merely because someone screwed up some trivial detail like that? Sure enough, a rocky outcropping less than a quarter klick along the ridge offered good cover, and a field of fire over most of the northern half of the ravine between the ridges. Strange that Diao’s men hadn’t already occupied it… or had they? Once he settled in, he noticed the cigarette butts, probably left by the men Connie had just killed, or maybe the one’s Emily killed earlier. He’d have to watch the slope just below his position for any reinforcements making the climb.