Tengu (34 page)
He hissed at my attack, and his eyes only glowed more furiously. I pulled back the fan and rammed upward in desperation, this time catching him in the soft spot under the chin. He reared back in a snorting gurgle and the motion was enough. I grabbed his collar, the fan still in my left hand, pulled and simultaneously hiked my body up to dislodge him a little. My freed right hand pushed him in the direction of the edge. It was feeble, but it was enough.
The Tengu tumbled off me and went spinning over the cliff, into space. Finally, he made a sound. It was a shriek, not of terror, but of rage, a final assault enduring until the impact on the rocks below drove it out of him for good.
I spun awkwardly around onto my belly to see: I had to be finally reassured that it was over. Bad move. Because our struggle had weakened the edge and the rocks were shifting. I felt the hard line of earth under me begin to crumble. I was too close to the edge and could feel the momentum of the slide begin. I threw my arms back frantically, trying to recover. As I flailed around, a piece of the cliff tumbled off, spinning down and out to crash onto the rocks that waited to greet me as they had the Tengu.
My center of gravity was sliding over the edge. My right arm was useless and the left hand kept gouging itself into the streambed, coming up with pebbles and mud and little else. I tried to
will
the toes of my boots to dig in and stop the fall, but I found that there was nothing for it. I looked down below, toward the rocks and the crashing waves. Maybe I should have resigned myself to death like a good samurai, but my mind fought it.
To have come so
far
, I thought in protest.
The edge began to disintegrate beneath me, and I stopped breathing for a second. I looked, wide-eyed, at the sea foam washing the rocks and felt the final slide begin.
Someone grabbed me hard by an ankle and I was yanked back from the brink. And whoever it was didn’t stop for a good ten feet. I got dragged through the stream, rocks and all, feeling the cool scouring of gravel against my belly. It hurt and felt good at the same time.
I rolled over onto my intact left side and looked up. I was ringed by a group of soldiers, lumpy in black jump suits, harnesses, and helmets, submachine guns held across their chests. One of them squatted by my ankles, his face splattered with mud from our trip back from the edge.
I lay there, completely spent, panting. They stared at me, openmouthed. I was covered with blood, my clothes torn and muddy. My left eyelid was twitching and I tried to keep my useless right arm clamped tight to my side so the bones wouldn’t grind together. I tried to think of something to say in the silence.
Finally, one of them stirred. “Holy shit, man,” he said. Another spoke into a small handheld unit clipped to his battle harness, calling for a medic.
I squinted at them when I heard that. “Army?” I croaked. I had the urge to drink the stream dry.
The guy crouched in the water with me grinned. “Dr. Burke?” I nodded silently in affirmation. “Colonel Baker sends his regards.”
There was a commotion among the soldiers standing around me and a ragged figure pushed its way through. He didn’t look much better than I did. He was torn and battered; part of the hair on one side of his head had been singed away and the skin on his face looked shiny with burns. He collapsed down next to me, his body touching mine, and said nothing. The mere act of contact was enough.
Micky.
I leaned my head against his. It was good just to feel the heat of him, the strength of bone. The presence. My brother. My eyes burned and I was convulsed by a painful sob. We pressed our heads harder together like two kids, joined in a silent communion, the tears making tracks down the dirt and blood on our faces.
I still think about the events of that last morning in the jungle. They flash into awareness. I grunt as the therapist forces my arm back, stretching it until the fibers scream, and I remember the feel of the attacker collapsing on top of me in the bamboo grove. I stand, sipping a steaming mug of coffee in dawn’s half-light, and once again I’m tethered to a post, to watch my last day brighten the sky. It’s not an act of will. I don’t do this because I want to remember; it happens because I can’t forget.
They never found the Tengu’s corpse. The sea took it. It’s just as well. Maybe waves and tides exist in part to scour the world of our leavings. Enough bodies remained in the jungle to serve as witnesses to what happened there.
I had been in contact with Colonel Baker from Manila once I had learned about the connection between Yamashita’s kidnappers and the murder of the two embassy guards. And it turns out that Art had been in contact with Baker from the start. He fed him the GPS coordinates that Ueda eventually got for the camp. Baker had been told to stand down and let the Filipino Special Forces take the lead on the raid. Art said that he could practically hear Baker’s teeth grinding over the phone, but the politicos in Manila were steering this and he had to comply. When Aguilar’s choppers went down, I made frantic attempts to make contact with Baker again using the satellite phone, but never got through. As we drove up the rutted jungle path behind Ueda and Marangan into an ambush, I had no idea whether Baker was going to be able to help.
And Marangan? He’d been playing both sides. The
eskrimador
had been most interested in who was the highest bidder. He had gotten onto Mindanao ahead of us, and contracted to lead us into the ambush. We had our suspicions that he was doing the Tengu’s bidding from the start. The Tengu had access to the Abe ransom money and he could easily afford to outbid Ueda. The ransom, like the kidnapping, was meaningless to that old demon. It was merely a means to an end.
Marangan disappeared right after the ambush. I never saw him at the Tengu’s camp. The word on the street was that he’d gone to ground. The cops looked for him. So did the Japanese. And some Special Forces troopers I knew. He eluded them all for a time. But it’s hard for people to stay away from their lives, no matter what the threat. And Marangan was someone who believed in his self-proclaimed identity as a
batikan
, a warrior. Eventually, he surfaced trying to make contact with a few associates who could set him up with a new assignment.
They found Marangan floating face-down in Manila Bay with two 9mm slugs in his head. Witnesses said that they had caught a glimpse of him at the docks, getting into a battered fishing boat with a big, thick black man wearing a Hawaiian shirt. An American, the witnesses thought. Probably an off-duty serviceman. The investigating officer, a Tomas Reyes, had shrugged and let the case go cold. Sergeant Cooke was back in Mindanao before anyone knew he was gone.
The guys in the Nomex jump suits that pulled me off the cliff that day were from Delta Force. Baker had done more than grit his teeth when he was told to stand down. He’d alerted a Delta troop that just happened to be participating in covert Malaysian coun-terterrorist activities. I thought back to the intensity on Baker’s face long ago when I’d first seen the video of the execution of the embassy guards and wondered how much he knew about what was going on in the Philippines in the first place, and how many strings he had pulled to have troops on hand and ready to go. I was forever thankful that he did.
The feeling of being on the brink of that cliff, of the earth shifting beneath me and knowing that my hold on life was crumbling away, has never left me. More poignant are the memories of facing death together with my teacher.
But then I remember the almost electric surge of joy when I heard Micky’s ragged voice shouting above the gunfire to head for the trees. And when I’m tired from the therapy, drifting in the uneasy half-sleep where things return unbidden, I sometimes give a convulsive sob of deep gratitude for the remembered feel of his head against mine.
They immobilized my arm and put field dressings on me in three different places. The soldiers hauled Micky and me to our feet and we started to make our slow, hobbling way back up the trail.
“Wait,” I told them, and went back for something. I gripped it tight in my hand, feeling its hardness even through the padding of the bandages.
There was smoke in the clearing, and more soldiers prowled the edges, dragging out bodies. A group of Filipinos sat disconsolately in a cluster, arms bound behind them with plastic ties. The troopers had brought us back along a slightly different route, and I was disoriented for moment, not knowing where to look. I stumbled into the trampled grass of the clearing, looking left and right with increasing concern. I began to panic, but caught sight of them at last. I hurried over, my feet clumsy and catching on the tufts of grass, my stride jerky and broken as the uneven ground I stumbled across.
He was propped up in the shade against a tree trunk. Yamashita. His eyes were closed. Art sat quietly watching him, a canteen in his hand. He was raising it to his lips when he spotted us. He smiled and drank at the same time, and the clear liquid spilled out of either side of his mouth. Art didn’t seem to mind. He stood up carefully and put a finger to his lips, looking at Yamashita and motioning us away.
Art gave both of us a hug. Micky grimaced in embarrassment.
“You got him,” Art said to Micky in a pleased yet tired voice.
My brother and I sat down heavily. Art was a bit more graceful. “Took some doing,” Micky told his partner.
Art eyed me, trying to assess the damage. He shook his head. “Man, Connor, what’d ya do, jump in a blender?”
I squinted at him and just shook my head. I was trying to watch Yamashita at the same time that I listened to Art.
“I saw you take off down the trail with the Deltas,” Art confided to Micky, “I thought I was goin’ to pass out. Bad enough that we lost track of Connor; there was no way I was gonna go home and have to face Deirdre without you.”
“Yeah, well,” my brother agreed “that would be bad.” He smiled. “Glad to spare you the experience.”
Art nodded in mock relief and looked at me again. “I don’t even want to know what you’ve been up to, you lunatic. You couldn’t have stayed put?”
I shrugged and inadvertently moved my right shoulder.
Ow
. But I didn’t answer right away.
“I still don’t know how you two made it out of the ambush,” I finally said.
“Simple,” Art began. “The old skills never leave you . . . ”
“Sure,” Micky interrupted, “basic rule of surviving an ambush. When everyone’s shooting at your car . . . ”
“Get out . . . ” Art concluded.
They had floored the jeep backward in a hail of gunfire. When they whipped around a bend, the two of them jumped and tried to roll clear. Scrambling into the brush, they’d been singed by the explosion caused by an RPG. While the Filipinos poured bullets into the burning hulk, afraid to get too close because of the ammunition that was cooking off, Micky and Art had scurried off through the undergrowth to follow in my wake.
“We got out with our weapons,” Art explained.
“And the satellite phone,” Micky added with quiet satisfaction. And so they’d used it to update Baker, letting him get his force to within striking distance.
“The girl?” I asked.
“The Deltas almost gave her a stroke when they grabbed her halfway down the mountain,” Micky told me.
“They’ve already taken her down to the landing spot,” Art said. I looked at him quizzically. “They came by water, Connor. Choppers would have given them away, remember?” I nodded in response.
Art looked slowly out across the clearing, growing somber at the sight of the dead and wounded, the chewed up foliage, and the odd bits of clothing and equipment that got strewn across the field of battle. “Was there much more?” he asked Micky, quietly gesturing at me. “When you went down after him?”
“Some,” Micky answered. “But it was all pretty much over except for the shouting when we got there.” Then we were quiet for a time, each caught in our own thoughts—hard shards of memory struck off the different facets of our individual fights.
I saw Yamashita stir and went to him. He had a bandage across his chest and shoulder and a tag taped to him with a record of the initial drugs that had been administered. Art had told me that
Sensei
had taken a stray round in his shoulder but the wound wasn’t life threatening. My teacher’s eyes fluttered, struggling to come open. I knelt before him and bowed awkwardly.
“Burke.” The name came out half whisper, half sigh as he recognized me.
“Yes,
Sensei
.” My throat was tight with emotion.
He tried to sit forward. The action made him wince in pain and he sat back, but the sensation seemed to make him more alert.
“The old one?” he asked me urgently.
I held out the
tessen
, the iron war fan I had gripped so tightly all the way back from the cliff. I set it down on the ground between us and bowed again.
My teacher nodded. “So . . . ” he sighed and gestured at me. “You have done . . . well.” The words were halting and the effort to bring them forth appeared immense. “But,” he said slowly, thickly, “At what cost?” Then he drifted away, the drugs taking hold once more.
The damage done to my teacher was extensive. We were evacuated to a ship and eventually to the U.S. Naval Hospital at Okinawa. It’s close by Nara, one of the centers of Okinawan karate, but I didn’t get to do much sightseeing—I wasn’t in great shape, either. When they finally got Yamashita stabilized, they bundled us off to Kadena Air Force Base and back to the States.
There was the usual screaming and yelling by the NYPD when Micky and Art got home. Faced with letters of commendation from the State Department, the Japanese government, and the U.S. Army, the police brass toned it down to a low growl. Eventually, my brother and his partner were transferred to the anti-terrorism task force. It sounded good, but in reality they had been shunted off into a career dead end. They knew it, too.
But it wasn’t all bad news. The State Department had rewards posted for a few of the Arabs I had met in the bamboo grove. It was an unexpected windfall that I shared with Micky and Art. They had thought about sticking it out until they had twenty years on the force and could retire. Now they were fantasizing about starting their own security and investigations firm.
