From the Fatherland, with Love, page 39
He was holding a strangely shaped rifle in both hands—a futuristic-looking contraption, like something out of a sci-fi movie. It seemed to be just a flat, rectangular metal case turned on its side. Attached to the bottom was a pistol grip and to the top a scope. There was no discernible barrel, and it was hard to make out where the muzzle might be. It looked less like a weapon than a new kind of electronic musical instrument. Takei descended the final stairs with a look of reverent humility, timing his steps to the Wagner. When he reached the bottom, he turned to face the group, stood at attention, and bowed. “This,” he said, indicating the apparel with a wave of his hand, “is the uniform of the German GSG-9, or Border Guard Group 9, and we’ve chosen, as appropriate accompaniment, the work of a composer said to have been loved by Hitler himself, the great Richard Wagner. Thank you so much. And now allow me to draw your attention to this beauty. This is the future of assault rifles, the much-talked-about Heckler & Koch G11. It fires 4.73-millimeter rounds with no casings to eject, allowing three-round bursts at up to an incredible two thousand rounds per minute.
“Shinohara, skip to the next piece, please. That’s right, just hit fast forward.” Takei took off his helmet and cap and gloves as Shinohara cued up the music. It was classical again, and this time Felix muttered “Tchaikovsky.” Takei swept his right arm toward the top of the stairs, like an emcee introducing a singer to the stage, put on a big smile, and said, “Kondo, come on down… It’s Spetsnaz! Yay!” Kondo the Satanist walked down the stairs dressed in a bulgy, shiny white, jumpsuit-style uniform and carrying three guns. Attached to the hooded jumpsuit, at spots corresponding to the wrists, elbows, shoulders, chest, and hips, were straps with attachments to cinch the material in. “He looks like the Michelin Man,” Okubo said, and others grinned and nodded. Kondo had a rifle slung from each shoulder and one more in his hands. The two on his shoulders were both AKs, like the one the Koryo soldier had used the other day to drill those holes in the yakuza’s head. The rifle in his hands was longer. Kondo wasn’t small by any means, but he was thin and weedy, and it was clearly a lot of work for him to carry all three guns.
“Look here, everyone,” Takei said, indicating the handgun in a holster on Kondo’s hip. “You guessed it—it’s a Tokarev! Thank you. And the uniform, here, as you can see, is what’s known as a snow camo suit, very hard to come by, used by the former Soviet Union’s Spetsnaz ‘special purpose’ forces. And this here—oh, baby—is the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. That’s right, the Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova. It spits out 7.62-by-54-millimeter rimmed cartridges at an unbelievable speed. Thank you so much. And this one, well, pretty ordinary, just an AK-74—that’s Avtomat Kalashnikova 74. And over here, the AKM, or Avtomat Kalashnikova Modernizirovanniy. There were a lot of complaints about the AK-74 failing to bring down an enemy with a single 5.45-millimeter round, so they remodeled it to fire the 7.62-by-39 rounds used two generations earlier. Yo, Kondo! Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open! Draw the Tokarev and hold it in the firing position.” But Kondo shook his head and groaned, “Can’t. These guns weigh a ton. My arms are about to fall off.” He let the sniper rifle slide down until he was holding the end of the barrel, with the butt resting on the floor.
“Kondo! Stand up straight and hoist that weapon! Do you have any idea what a magnificent firearm you’ve got there? It’s not a walking stick!” But in response to this outburst, Kondo just curled his lip. “Why is it only me who’s carrying three rifles?” he said, and shrugged the two AK straps off his shoulders. He handed the guns to Hino, who was standing right in front of him. “No, no, no! We’ve only got one Spetsnaz uniform, so you’ve got to be the one carrying the AKs,” Takei shouted as he relieved Hino of the rifles and gave them back. Kondo leaned the sniper rifle against his leg and took one AK barrel in each hand, propping the butts on the floor. The snow camo suit was completely waterproof, and his face was dripping with sweat. “Hot?” asked Shinohara, and Kondo wiped his forehead with his sleeve, letting the AK in that hand slip and clatter to the floor, and said it was like being in a sauna suit. “What the hell are you doing?” Takei bellowed. “If this was a battlefield, you’d be dead already!” Ishihara looked up from his photo book. “You don’t even know you’re already dead,” he said, quoting a famous line from Fist of the North Star, then laughed and said, “Let it go, Takei. Get on with your little fashion show.”
“Next tune, please,” Takei said curtly. He was clearly miffed that Ishihara had called it a fashion show. Shinohara pressed a button on the boombox, and ‘Santa Lucia’ came on. “Oh! Italy!” Ishihara cried as Shibata, dressed in black combat gear, appeared feet-first from the top of the stairs. He too was wearing a bulletproof vest, as well as a helmet and goggles. The vest had a plethora of pockets to hold extra magazines, binoculars, a walkie-talkie, grenades, and what have you, but filled for now with styrofoam. Shibata was short and chubby, and the cuffs of his trousers dragged on the floor as he walked. In his left hand was a pistol and in his right a shotgun with a fat barrel and a stock like a gaff hook. Takei pointed at the shotgun.
“All right! This right here is your Franchi SPAS-12, considered the best shotgun of our time. SPAS-12—that’s Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun, model number 12. Thank you. Now please take a close look at the pistol. You’ve all heard of Berettas, of course. This is the Beretta M92F. The Italian Special Forces uniforms are pretty tame, so I got one from elsewhere in Europe—the Special Operations Forces of the Spanish national police. Thank you very much.”
“Next,” Ishihara said. “Let’s go. Next!” He got up from his rocking chair and approached Kondo and Shibata, inspecting their gear with sudden interest. Kaneshiro put a hand to his chin and peered at the guns in a pensive way, perhaps already imagining the coming battle. Hino was gesticulating wildly as he tried to convey his excitement at holding the AKs in his hands. Takei signaled to Shinohara, and the music changed again, this time to a spirited march that not even Felix—a walking encyclopedia of music—could identify.
“I thought that maybe Ishihara-san, being about the same age as me, might recognize this tune,” Takei said, and Ishihara shouted “COMMMBAT!” and began loudly humming along. Apparently it was the theme song of an old American TV series about World War II. Sato was now descending the stairs in an outfit of dappled-brown camo. The transparent visor of his helmet was down. On the back of his bulletproof vest were four pockets, each about big enough to hold a slim can of soda. Fukuda explained to everyone that this was the uniform worn in desert conditions by Delta Force counter-terrorism units, and that it was designed so that the man behind could reach into one of the pockets of the man in front and take out a stun grenade (or “flashbang”) and toss it into a roomful of terrorists. It seemed there were no stun grenades to be had, however, so these pockets too were packed with cylindrical sections of styrofoam. The helmet had a headset attached, but since there was no radio it amounted to mere decoration.
Sato had an automatic pistol in his right hand, a sub-machine gun in his left, a strange gun on a shoulder strap with a barrel even thicker than that of the Franchi, a holstered revolver on his hip, and hand grenades hanging from clips at his chest. Sato had a sweet face but was powerful and well proportioned and taller than everyone else except Shinohara. Even holding the two automatic weapons, his hands were steady. His face was painted with black stripes, and when he reached his spot in front of everyone he held the guns out and swept the room with them left and right, going DADADADADADA and jerking with imaginary recoil.
“Everyone, please,” Takei said, and pointed at the sub-machine gun. “This is the legendary Thompson, as used by Sergeant Saunders. It fires seven hundred 11.25-millimeter rounds per minute. And this one here is the M16, the most famous of all automatic rifles, along with the AK. The cartridge is only 5.56 millimeters, but the high velocity makes it totally lethal. Now then. Please direct your attention to the weapon hanging from Sato’s shoulder. It’s the US M79 grenade launcher. Unfortunately, this isn’t the original but the KM79—manufactured under license by the South Korean firm Daewoo. Works perfectly, though. And this is the famous wide-bore pistol, the Smith & Wesson model 1006 A1, with a ten-millimeter cartridge. Outstanding offensive weapon. All right! Turning now to the uniform… I thought of using the uniforms of SWAT, the SEALs, and the Green Berets, but finally decided on the Delta Force desert camo. The hand grenades are M67s, the newest model used by the US army, and they explode on impact—your average terrorist can only dream about a grenade as cool as this.”
At some point Ishihara had started punctuating Takei’s explanations with more or less meaningless refrains from old Japanese folk songs while writhing around and waving the photo book as if it were a fan. There was no underlying rhythm to his movements—he wasn’t doing a dance, or an exercise, or a martial-arts routine. His gyrations lacked any grace or equilibrium, and they definitely weren’t symbolic of anything. Erratic and random though they seemed, however, they had quite an effect on people and always lifted Mori’s spirits. They made you feel that nothing was forbidden, that you could do pretty much whatever you pleased as long as you could get away with it. Whenever Ishihara started squirming like this, it meant that something major—good or bad—was brewing.
Kondo had now propped his rifles on the floor in a tripod configuration. Yamada reached out to touch them, one by one, then turned and said, “They’re cold!” He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. Tateno seemed more interested in the bayonet Takei wore in a sheath attached to his belt. He asked Takei if he’d show it to him, but was told to wait until afterwards. Hino, who had already held the AKs briefly, was muttering to himself, “The real thing is awesome. It’s got real, you know, heft…” Long-haired Matsuyama and skinheaded Felix were pointing at the grenades hanging from Sato’s belt and laughing about how if one of those went off right now they’d all be blown to bits. Matsuyama had a long face to go with his hair; and Felix, who always wore a blue cotton shirt and jeans, was built like a silverback gorilla. Okubo, who had been a popular child actor and later an arsonist with a total of forty-six fires to his name, seemed quite taken with Sato’s uniform and asked if he could try it on later. Mori tried to picture the skeletal, skull-faced Okubo in the Delta Force desert camo.
Takei gave the signal again, and the music changed to a woman singing a sad song to the accompaniment of a violin and accordion. He raised his arm diagonally, and in a high-pitched voice called, “Orihara, s’il vous plaît!” Matsuyama said, “What? What did he just say?” and Felix told him it was French for something like “please.” Felix spoke English and Spanish fluently and also had some French and Italian, but he couldn’t read much Japanese. Orihara, who though only eighteen had the face of a seventy-year-old, came shuffling down slowly to the Frenchwoman’s dirge wearing an olive-brown beret and a beige uniform and carrying a strange weapon rather like a wind instrument in silhouette.
Orihara was the one who’d first come up with the Satanism idea and researched how to conduct actual Satanic rituals. When Mori asked what these were like, he was told that they involved painting strange-looking symbols on the untanned hide of a goat with a mixture of rat blood, pig urine, and powdered bat carcasses, then hanging the hide out of a window. Mori wondered if it was because of doing things like this that Orihara’s face had aged so drastically, but apparently he’d been born that way. Orihara took his place alongside Sato, Kondo, and Shibata. Holding the odd-looking weapon in his left hand, he struck an elaborate pose, dropping to one knee, extending his right arm, and pointing his index finger at the ceiling. “Sous le ciel de Paris coule la Seine,” Takei intoned, and with arms outspread he walked around him. “This is the uniform of the French 11th Parachute Brigade, the crack squadron that distinguished itself in the Algerian War of Independence, becoming as feared as a quiver of cobras. The song’s a chanson; and this—are you ready?—this is the famous FAMAS, the service rifle of the French army, nicknamed the Trumpet, capable of firing 5.56-millimeter NATO rounds at the incredible rate of nine hundred per minute. I don’t mind telling you that this Trumpet here, along with the paratrooper uniform, was the most difficult item to get my hands on. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much.” Takei bowed with a flourish, tucking his right arm in at the waist like a crooner after nailing a song.
Kaneshiro seemed particularly impressed by the FAMAS and began clapping, whereupon all the others joined in, with Matsuyama and Felix using their fingers to deliver ear-piercing whistles. Orihara seemed to enjoy the applause. He leaped into the air, raising both fists and smiling like a boxer who’d just knocked out his opponent. When he smiled, you could see that all his teeth were dark brown. Apparently this was the result of another Satanic ritual, the details of which Mori had yet to hear.
“Where did Takei-san get these things?” muttered Okubo, who was sitting behind Mori. “Lots of different places, I guess,” Mori said. He had heard that Takei bought most of his weapons from Russia and the Philippines, and that it wasn’t as difficult as you might think. Rumor had it that if you went to the Otaru Canal in Hokkaido, even in daytime, you could see Russian sailors selling Tokarevs to high-school students, but Mori had never heard of machine guns or sniper rifles being readily available. Through his connection with the Islamist guerrillas in Yemen, Takei had dealings with professional arms smugglers in Russia and the Philippines, who paid off crew members of cargo ships to bring stuff in to the Port of Hakata, Kure Harbor, and Kobe. The ships flew under the flags of various nations—largely places like the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Indonesia, but sometimes South American countries like Panama, Chile, or Argentina. Weapons from the former Eastern Bloc were apparently easiest to get because of loose regulations over serial numbers. You could get an AK on the black market for under a hundred US dollars.
Kondo’s face was still dripping sweat, and in a croaking voice he asked for something to drink. With a laugh, Ishihara wriggled up to him, touched the snow camo uniform, and said, “Which direction were you facing when you had that snowball fight with the polar bear?” He wriggled and squirmed and laughed again. Nobody could predict what he would find interesting or funny, but there always seemed to be something behind his laughter, something he alone could see. He never revealed it in so many words, so you just had to wait and see what developed. “What do you want to drink?” Shinohara asked, and when Kondo said a Pocari Sweat, a number of voices called out, “Me too!” Tateno and Hino helped Shinohara in the kitchen, and they came back with trays laden with paper cups, soft drinks, bottles of mineral water, and a carton of milk. Ishihara asked for a tall can of beer, which he chugged at thirstily. Kaneshiro was sipping from a paper cup filled precisely halfway with mineral water. Tateno and Hino drank oolong tea, Shinohara and Felix milk, Kondo and the other Satanists Pocari Sweat, and Mori and Yamada Java tea. No one but Ishihara drank alcohol. Alcohol gave Mori a headache, and Yamada claimed to have immediately puked after once sneaking a cup of his father’s sake and finding the taste repulsive. In fact, none of the boys in Ishihara’s group had any use for alcohol or its effects.
Alcohol, it was said, liberated people. But nobody here wanted liberation, or would have known what to do with it. Alcohol was usually drunk in an intimate atmosphere, and an intimate atmosphere was one fraught with problems. You were compelled to conform, to respect the spreading sense of closeness in a group. If you didn’t, you were punished. If you sat by yourself thinking in a room full of the fug of intimacy, people asked you what was wrong or if you were bored, and from there it would escalate until you were being blamed as an energy-suck and a gloomy bastard. When drinking, if someone made even the dumbest joke, you had to laugh. Everyone here felt that the sort of people who gathered in bars to drink and roar with laughter should be wiped out. And most of these kids had already acted on impulses like that.
“Gentlemen. Your attention, please,” Takei said. “Next we have a duet.” The music changed to something by a children’s choir. Now Ando, who had once chopped up a female classmate, and Miyazaki, said to be the most violent of the Satanists, started down the stairs hand in hand. Both were wearing dark-blue uniforms and camo-pattern helmets with yellowish, translucent visors covering their faces. Ando carried an automatic pistol, and Miyazaki held a compact sub-machine gun just like the one carried by the Koryo officer who’d died in the explosion at Ohori Park. Miyazaki’s cheekbones were long and angular, his nose as small as a wad of chewing gum, and his eyes and lips like mere wrinkles in a face as expressionless as a Moai statue or a Haniwa clay figure. Even when he thought he was smiling, to others it looked more like a spasm in his cheek muscles, or as if he was trying to dislodge something stuck between his teeth. Back when the morning tabloid shows were reporting heavily on the Satanists, the cameras had always closed in on Miyazaki’s face—the very picture of a youth possessed by the Devil.
Ando looked almost Latin with his dark skin and sculpted features, and was the handsomest of all the boys. Felix had nice features too, but the long, single-fold eyelids and small mouth and nose gave him an almost comically classical Japanese look. Ando was more striking and exotic-looking. Takei claimed that when he first met him he assumed he was part Arab. After killing his classmate and cutting her into pieces just to prove that anyone can be turned into nothing more than bloody chunks of meat and bone, Ando had lost his sex drive. It was rumored that he’d had sex with the lower half of the girl’s dismembered corpse, but Ando denied this and said he was still a virgin. He didn’t turn religious, or homo, but ceased even to masturbate. The prodigious amount of sperm produced by an eighteen-year-old body accumulated and stagnated inside him and seemed to infuse his skin, giving him a peculiar sort of polluted vacuity. Strikingly handsome though he was, girls weren’t attracted to him and gays never looked at him twice. Mori had once gone with Ando to rent some videos and noticed that all females, from toddlers to grandmothers, instinctively shrank away from him.
