Royce waited a few seconds.

"Do you accept?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"We always have choices."

"I assume once I go black I can never come back out?"

"Good assumption."

"I'm in."

Royce didn't seem overjoyed.

"It's not that easy."

Vaughn hadn't figured it would be, and he waited.

"You have to prove yourself first."

"How?"

"Do a little job for us. If you're successful, you join Section Eight. You fail…well, if you fail that means you're dead."

CHAPTER 4

"It is over."

Abayon looked up from the desk his wheelchair was behind.

"It was faster than I thought it would be."

The taper shrugged.

"His spirit did not fight well. Once he realized his fate, he gave up."

"You know where to send the DVD."

"Yes, sir."

Royce drove them into the tunnel. Lights tripped by infrared sensors came on, illuminating the way as he drove into the mountain. They went on for about a minute at a slow crawl until they came to a second barricade, this one manned by two Special Forces soldiers, which Vaughn found interesting. To put such highly trained men on a guard detail was unusual, to say the least.

This time Royce rolled down the window. One of the guards had his weapon trained on the vehicle as the other came up to it.

"Mr. Royce," the guard said. He looked past Royce at Vaughn.

"And this is?"

"The last member of the team."

The guard nodded.

"Proceed."

Royce drove on, and they reached a large circular cavern, with a half-dozen tunnels radiating out like spokes on a wheel. Royce stopped the Rover and got out. Vaughn joined him.

"This way," Royce said.

Vaughn shouldered his gear and followed Royce into one of the spokes. Royce opened a steel door twenty feet down the tunnel and gestured for him to enter. Vaughn hesitated, realizing this could as easily be a trap, but he went in.

Lights flickered on, revealing a small chamber, about twenty feet wide and long. A cot, a large table, a sink and toilet: an unsophisticated jail cell was the best way to describe it. Except for the papers piled on the table, which Royce went over to.

Vaughn dropped his gear and joined him. On top of the papers was a grainy black and white photograph of a man.

"Who is that?" Vaughn asked.

"The man you're going to kill tonight in order to make the team."

And with that, Royce walked out of the chamber, the steel door slamming shut behind him.

The flat screen TV was the largest and best model produced in Japan. The man who owned the company that built it sat on one side of the table among men who were as successful and powerful as he. There was one middle-age woman among the dozen in the room, the first of her gender ever to sit there, her place farthest from the head of the table. She was lean, her body tense as she listened and observed.

"Watch, please," the man at the head of the table ordered as he pressed a button and an image was displayed on the television. A man – the Yakuza representative who had been sent to negotiate with Abayon – was tied to a wooden stake set upright in the ground. He was bound to the stake with coarse rope.

"The time lapse of this DVD covers over twenty-six hours," the man informed them.

In a series of shots, the man tied to the stake went from struggling against the rope to struggling against whatever virus was spreading through his blood. The first indication was involuntary spasms. Then frothing at the mouth. Then vomiting blood. The spasms grew worse, to the point where it was obvious the man broke both arms in his convulsions, one a compound fracture with white bone sticking out of the skin of his forearm. More blood was vomited, then it began to trickle out of his eyes, ears, and nose. His mouth was often open, in what appeared to be a scream, but fortunately there was no sound to accompany the image.

Even with the advanced time lapse, it still took five minutes of video before he finally stopped moving. The man at the head of the table left that image on the screen as he turned to face the other eleven people in the room. Some of the men at the table had seen something like this before, long before.

"Meruta," one of the men muttered, which earned him a hard look from the man in charge.

"As we expected, the Yakuza have failed to resolve the Abayon issue."

One of the others nodded.

"It was worth the effort, though. We have pushed Abayon off his center of balance."

The man across from him snorted. He was old, as was everyone in the room except two of the men and the woman. The nine oldest had all fought in World War II. Six of those had served in Unit 731, Japan's infamous biological warfare unit in Manchuria that had killed thousands in their experiments. They knew what message Abayon had sent with this video, since they had done the exact same thing to prisoners to test their various viruses at 731. The prisoners at the camp were called meruta - logs – dehumanizing them and putting them in their place as things to be used to perfect weapons of mass destruction long before the term became well known.

"Abayon is not a problem," the man in charge said.

"There is a plan being implemented to remove him. This, however" – he jerked his finger at the corpse – "along with many other incidents over the past decade, proves we can no longer deal with our criminal associates. They have become incompetent and lazy. And too well known."

"The Yakuza are useful," one of the others argued.

"They are a blunt instrument of violence that can be wielded when needed."

"The world is becoming a place," the man replied, "where blunt instruments of violence are as dangerous to the user as to the target. Worse, the government has been trying to penetrate the Yakuza for a long time. We have intelligence that they have managed to insert several deep undercover agents inside the Yakuza. The Black Wind is no longer secure."

That brought a quiet to the room. The man waited. One by one, each person at the table nodded their assent to his decision.

Except for the last person. The only woman not only nodded, she spoke.

"I wish the honor of completing this task."

Every head in the room swiveled from her to the man in charge. He pursed his lips, deep in thought, and then his head twitched, almost imperceptibly giving his assent.

"Why do you want him killed?" Vaughn demanded as Royce came back into the chamber after an absence of over an hour. During that time, Vaughn had pored through the documents, which contained little more than a time and a place where the target could be "interdicted" later that day. There were photographs of a street intersection taken from numerous angles. And of the target – a middle-age Japanese man, always dressed in black suits and usually accompanied by several other men that Vaughn could tell were professional bodyguards. Sometimes, though, the entire group accompanied another man, who they all seemed to be guarding, which didn't make much sense to Vaughn.

"I don't want him killed," Royce said.

"Section Eight wants him killed."

He checked his watch.

"We need to get you in the air if you're going to make the interdiction."

Vaughn had noted that the target was in Tokyo, several hours flight from Okinawa, and the time window was tight. He looked over at the pile of gear he'd brought from the Philippines.