Now, the end.

Tsuki, thrust. He-

“No!”

It was English. He halted.

“Daddy’s home.”

He turned.

It was the gaijin.

It was the source of his humiliation; he had a rare chance to erase a failure. His warrior heart swelled with pleasure.

“Death to the gaijin,” he said, “then the child, then this whore.”

“The reason you are fat,” the gaijin said, “is that you are full of shit.”

Nii rushed the man, sword high, issuing from on high, and cut a large slice in the universe, though alas the gaijin wasn’t in it.

He spun, went to a cocked position, and thrust forward at the man.

With both hands, he drove the sword forward to impale his opponent’s opened body and nothing halted him as he plunged onward and onward, waiting for the resistance, when at last the sword’s point passed through the flesh. The point and the blade it led must have been very sharp for the flesh didn’t fight it a bit, he just kept on going.

Then he noticed he had no sword.

The second thing he noticed was that the reason he had no sword was that he had no hands. The gaijin had cut them at the wrist, both, neatly and nearly painlessly, going into what Yagyu called “crosswind,” specifically designed against kesagiri, and culminating in the direction “cut through his two hands.” The gaijin had been the faster.

The blood did not fizz and spray. Instead, far still from coagulation, it squirted out in pitiful little spurts, each driven by a beat of his heart. He looked at them and wished he had a death poem.

He turned to smile bravely, and then the world cranked radically to the right and went to blur and he had a sense of falling but no sense of body. Then his eight seconds ran out.

Bob stepped back from the carnage he had wreaked.

The fat one’s body lay in the bed, where it had emptied a great red tidal wave across sheets and blanket. The head had bounced and rolled somewhere else.

Then he picked up Susan, who moaned as she came to.

“Oh, Christ,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Where’s the child?”

“The bathroom.”

Bob turned, went to the bathroom, reached in the gap, found the lock, unlocked it, and entered.

“Honey? Honey, are you here? Sweetie, where are you?”

“Tin Man, Tin Man,” cried the girl in broken English.

“Here I am, sweetie.”

He ran to Miko, who crouched in the bathtub, and picked her up and squeezed her hard, feeling the tiny heart beat against him.

“Will the Giant Monster hurt me?”

Swagger spoke no Japanese. He just said, “It’s all right. They’re all gone.”

“Oh, Tin Man.”

“Now listen, sweetie. I’m going to take you out of here, all right? Everything is going to be just fine.”

The child spoke in Japanese, but then Susan was there.

“Don’t let her see anything,” Susan said.

“I won’t.”

Susan spoke in Japanese. “You have to make us a promise.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I will carry you. But I want you to close your eyes very tight and press your face against my chest until I tell you it’s okay. It’ll just be a minute or so. Can you do that for me? Then we’ll get some ice cream. I don’t know where, but we’ll get some ice cream.”

“Yes, Auntie. Will the Tin Man come?”

“Yes, he will,” she said in Japanese, and to Bob said, “She thinks you’re the Tin Man.”

She picked the child up and turned.

“All closed now?”

“Yes, Auntie.”

Okada-san stepped from the bathroom and immediately saw two of her snipers, carrying their M-4s at the ready, standing there to escort her to the car, and then to wherever.

“You did good, Cheerleader,” said Swagger.

“So did you, Redneck,” she said, and carried the child out. Miko obediently kept her eyes shut and never realized that the room was no longer white.

44

He reached the compound just as the buses that would take the raiders out of the area pulled in. He walked to Fujikawa.

“What are your losses, Major?”

“We got out clean. A few bad cuts, now stitched. A few concussions, sprains, a lot of bruises, that sort of thing. The worst was a trooper knocked unconscious by a cook, who escaped.”

Swagger knew who that would be.

“How many kills?”

“Fifteen. Lots of wounded, though. Our people are stitching up the badly hurt yaks and getting plasma into them. They’re pretty goddamned lucky. Another yak crew would have let ’em die.”

“Sixteen. I had to take a fat one down. Anyhow, it looks like you’ll be out of here before light.”

“We have a last job.”

He turned and gestured. Bob saw Yuichi Miwa, shivering in a kimono-bathrobe that exposed his scrawny old man’s chest, kneeling in the snow. Nobody was touching him or abusing him, but his face was down and grave.

“Possibly you don’t want to see this,” said the major.

“I’ve already seen it.”

“This is the old way.”

“It’s the right way.”

“The men think so. We voted. It was unanimous.”

He nodded to Sergeant Major Kanda, who approached with what Bob recognized immediately: a red silk sword bag, neatly tied. Quickly, Major Fujikawa untied it, removed a blade in shirasawa that Bob knew intimately, as it was the blade his father recovered on Iwo Jima.

Major Fujikawa approached the kneeling man.

He spoke in Japanese, but Captain Tanada whispered the translation in Bob’s ear.

“Miwa Yuichi, this is the sword Asano retainer Oishi used in the fifteenth year of Genroku to behead Kira, who had betrayed his lord. It’s the blade that was presented to Philip Yano by this American, and had become ancestral to the Yanos by reason of Major Hideki Yano’s last battle with it on Iwo Jima. It is the blade you murdered Philip Yano and his family to obtain, for reasons of career and ambition, you who have so much, who wanted so much more. I, Fujikawa Albert, of the First Airborne Brigade of the Japanese Self-Defense Force and former executive officer of Philip Yano, claim a retainer’s right by ancient tradition to avenge the death of my lord. I do offer you a choice. If you wish, you may use the sword to end your own life, and thereby, in samurai eyes, regain your good name and honor. If not, I shall execute you like a common criminal.”

Miwa’s chest puffed importantly.

“Do what you will. Just know you are killing a man of vision. I will say that the deaths of Yano-san and family were necessary. I fight to keep Japan whole and pure. I stand for the old Japan. I fight the foreigners, and Yano-san, as is well known, had sided with the foreigners. Now, you kill me. That is your way; I would not talk you out of petty vengeance that only attests to your smallness as men. But when I die, a part of Japan dies. Let it be said, I gave you my neck, and in nights far distant, many will regret what you have done and who you have killed.”

The snow fell, drifting this way and that, covering all, cloaking all sound. The moment was silent. Even the prisoners, secured on the ground, watched with respect, acknowledging the ultimate meaning of the moment. The old man leaned forward, stretching his thin neck for not merely the ease of the executioner but also for his own ease, and the major set himself. He offered his blade for cleansing; a bottle of Fuji was emptied upon it, consecrating it. Then the major stepped into a fluid shinchokugiri, the straight vertical, and the polished blade sang in the cold air. The separation was almost bloodless. The head fell with the thud of a book hitting the floor. Then the body pitched forward, twitched, and went still. A red flow began to print odd patterns onto the snow.

The major performed a quick chiburi, flinging the blood off the blade to form a spray of red abstraction in a snowpile, then someone began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”