"Van Lustbader, Eric - Jake Maroc 01 Jian(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)
They went by the manager and, abruptly accelerating, sped through the rear curtain-doorway. Two kimonoed guards drew pistols as they broke through, but Mandy and one of the others smashed the edges of their hands against collarbones, then the backs of necks. Kimono pooled across the polished wood strips of the hallway, and the raiders stepped quickly over them.
With silent prearranged signals, Jake motioned for two of his men to take the north gambling room, two others to take the south room. He and Mandy raced down the hallway toward the west room, where, his information told him, Nichiren would be.
Flinging aside the fusuma, Jake found himself in a kind of antechamber. It was a six-tatami room. Deep red and dove-gray futon curled on the reed mats. Tansu chests, their metalwork opalescent with age, crouched at the four corners of the room. On the walls were the repeated crescents of scabbarded katana.
At that moment he stopped dead in his tracks. Another sliding door was opening, and two men stepped into the room. For an instant the three stood at opposite ends, staring at one another.
Then the two men, bare to the waist, irezumi rippling with their long, sleek muscles, drew swords, advancing toward Jake. Mandy was just outside the door lintel, engaged in silent combat with another guard.
Jake darted to his right, away from the first blindingly swift strikes and toward the scabbards on the wall. He reached up, withdrew a katana. He knew instantly that it was old, perhaps more than three centuries. Its heft and balance were exquisite. It was a museum piece, but that did not mean it had lost its deadly edge. Over and over the pure steel had been refolded in upon itself with the master swordsmith's Zen dedication to create the finest blade the world had ever known.
Seeing him thus armed, the irezumi-men separated so that they could come at him from either side and so increase their chances of success.
Jake knew that time was slipping away from him. With each added beat of the clock, the likelihood of his capturing Nichiren was rapidly decreasing.
As they rushed him, he employed the techniques of kumi-uchi, stopping in midair the overhead blow from the thinner of the two irezumi-men, the one on his right, with a horizontal parry that sent a clashing ring around the room.
Within the same blinding motion, he disguised until the last possible split second the wrist-flip that now continued the horizontal slash at waist height, away from the thin man's blade and inward in a vicious arc, slicing through skin, flesh, and bone, into the second man's abdomen.
The heavier of the irezumi-men screamed and, clutching at the sliding mass of himself oozing through the rent, dropped to his knees. His useless katana clattered to the floor as Jake pushed him forward and down on his face with his left hand while his hips began the powerful right-facing swivel away from the path taken by his first opponent.
Mad-eyed leopards in reds and lurid yellows leapt at Jake, the irezumi bulging with the man's efforts to bring his previously deflected overhead strike down on Jake's skull.
But Jake was already in another position, swiveled enough so that he was facing the man's side, out of range of his frontal attack.
As the yakuza's fierce momentum pushed him forward, Jake lifted his blade to shoulder height, bringing the pointed end of it outward in a shallow arc. There was a brief shout as the razor edge slashed through the meaty part of the man's arm.
Because of the fineness of the edge and because Jake was leaning his entire weight behind the strike, the steel severed the arm completely, slicing hotly into the rib cage and the vital organs it protected within.
Blood spurted and there was a fetid wind, as of a coffin briefly opened. Jake leapt over the settling corpse, turning his head briefly as he heard movement outside the door. Mandy and the rest of the raiding party were piling through the open doorway.
Using the katana, Jake slashed through the shoji into the connecting room.
He saw three men surrounding an object on a low table. Heads, shape of a hatbox-filled with what? shiny black straw?-faces turning in his direction like pale flowers to the sun. Then Jake was focused on only one person.
That man was clad in a black-on-black kimono. His obsidian eyes were quite large in a rather narrow skull. His face was triangular, almost feline. He had a long, almost feminine neck and finely sculpted features. He had small, flat ears. His thick hair was blue-black, worn long in the style of another generation.
"Nichiren!''
It was a sibilant whisper that Jake could not contain. His heart thudded painfully in his chest and his mouth was abruptly dry. He remembered as a youth in Hong Kong going to see a film called The Horror of Dracula, and being frightened out of his wits. Irrationally, he felt the same unexplainable terror welling up in him now. He was remembering what had happened at the Sumchun River and it sent a shiver through him.
Then Jake was aware of a subtle movement Nichiren made beneath the folds of his kimono. He leapt forward, the katana raised before him. But Kisan had stepped in front of Nichiren, his balled right fist outstretched. A honed sixth sense warned Jake and he thrust the katana to the vertical as Kisan's fingers unfurled like the petals of a flower.
His shouted kiai stunned those in the room not prepared for it. But Jake had known what lethal weapon lay within the oyabun's palm, and as the metal links came hurtling at his face, he shifted the point of his blade fractionally, catching the weighted end. The manrikigusari whirled around the katana but before Jake could grab it, Kisan used the kakoiuchi, a circular twist, to disengage.
Immediately he was on the offensive, using a sukuiuchi, a vertical figure-eight pattern, to get inside Jake's defense. He came in hard and Jake broke away, raising the katana. This Kisan blocked with the jodan-uke, immediately bringing his fists together for the eye strike that would end the struggle.
He grunted heavily as the blade made contact because Kisan was already twisting away. The blow cut through arm and shoulder, encountered ribs.
Kisan's eyes filled with an unnameable emotion even as he began to sink to his knees, shuddering. Jake was unsure how deep he had gone and was bringing the blade forward and down for another strike when there came a swirl of movement from just behind Kisan. A savage cry, as if reluctantly ripped from a tightened throat. Had Jake's vision not been blocked, had his mind not been fixed on the killing blow, he might have had more warning. Spherical blurred shape arcing at him.
Desperately he shouted to his men. There was a sense then of reality breaking up into tiny discrete fragments, dizzying and overlapping one upon the other until clarity was lost and only a vague impression was left, like smeared pastel hues upon a canvas.
Mandy grabbed his arm, turning him backward. He felt the other man's body close against him, felt his warmth, the protection it afforded him. But in that shifting his gaze fell upon the other people across the room, now far back against the opposite wall. Japanese faces. And the woman. Blurred sense of time shifting, of an element being acutely out of place. Then an arm was being raised and, like a brocaded curtain, a kimono sleeve rose up to shield her face from his sight.
Then the room turned yellow-white. It seemed to balloon outward at him. A ferocious howling filled his ears until it became too painful to hear. The walls split apart and shot at him; the ceiling broke apart like an ice floe and dropped inward with a sickening rush.
The monstrous percussion reached him then, hurling Mandy into him, flattening them both against the floor with incredible force.
Cursing Nichiren's name, Jake went down into blackness and unending pain and it was as if the entire building followed him down, pinning him to the depths.
Book One
[to respond instinctively, spontaneously]
Washington/Hong Kong/Beijing/Tokyo/Moscow/Tsurugi
SUMMER, PRESENT
'Throw it onto the screen."
Color shot, eight feet by ten, made grainy by size: a human face that radiated power in precisely the way a tiger caught in mid-leap will. Curly black hair above a wide, intelligent brow. Hooded coppery eyes, extraordinary in their intelligence. An aggressive, clean-lined jaw, high cheekbones that set the eyes deeply into the skull.
"Is there an update on him?" This was another voice, somewhat warmer in tone.
"I don't think he was hit too hard," Henry Wunderman said. "Although we're not yet sure of the extent of the damages, it's fairly certain the worst part will be the psychological aspect of the dantai's death."
"Dantai?" Rodger Donovan asked.
"Yes," Gerard Stallings said in the slightly supercilious tone he used when addressing Donovan. He was a large, rawboned man of six-four who had the chiseled countenance of an Englishman but spoke in a deceptively soft Texas drawl. Suntanned, his lined face was lean, as muscular as his body, dominated by deep-set jade-green eyes below a high, freckled forehead. He had thrived in 'Nam; when Henry Wunderman had recruited him for the Quarry in 1971, he was leading the rebel forces in a small but strategic African country. Heavily supplied by the Russians and not giving a damn, Stallings had been about to mount the final assault on the capital when Wunderman had intervened. Wunderman had recognized Stallings' superb strategic mind and what had to be done to win the man over. He had selected a Soviet military cipher that had been intercepted by the Quarry. Its vowel-transposition, inconstant-double-consonant code had been broken, but despite that, no one in staff could make head or tail of it. Wunderman took it to Stallings, who had one good look at it and was hooked.
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