From the Fatherland, with Love, page 65
The elevators had been shut down since the Koryos relocated their HQ. Everyone except Kaneshiro and Okubo was in the elevator hall, watching the array of floor indicator panels. They had all brought arms with them: Mori the M16, Orihara the AK, Miyazaki the Scorpion light machine gun, Kondo the Beretta, Yamada the shotgun, and Ando the grenade launcher. But compared to the opposition, Hino thought, they were like monkeys showing up on the first tee with an assortment of golf clubs.
There was no access to the six express elevators, which skipped all the floors between three and seventeen, but the indicators showed that four of the six were moving. Tateno had counted twenty-six soldiers, all heavily armed, so they had probably boarded in groups of six or seven. It was obvious that the Koryos knew something was up.
“Why would they be onto us, all of a sudden?” Felix asked, expressing what everyone must have been thinking, then immediately came up with the correct response: “Well, no point in wondering about that right now.” Takeguchi warned Kaneshiro and Okubo by cellphone. Kaneshiro said he’d be right up to join them, but Takeguchi vetoed that. “Whatever happens, you and Okubo need to stay with the hell-box. If the Koryos show up on the fifth floor, disconnect the device like I showed you. Cut the two auxiliary busbar extensions, positive and negative, and bring the box up here, making sure the wires don’t get tangled.”
Yamada was staring at the floor indicator panels. “What’ll we do if one stops at this floor?” he said, his voice quavering. Sato told him that only the express elevators were moving, and they didn’t stop at eight. As they watched, the moving elevators all raced to the top floor, the thirty-fifth, where they came to rest. “Shouldn’t we finish our work, rather than stand here watching the elevators?” Mori said, but Shinohara kept his eyes on the indicators and said, “First we’ve got to figure out what they’re up to.”
Fukuda pointed out that in any case it would be best to retrieve the antipersonnel mines they’d set on the emergency stairways, and headed aft. There were three of these stairways—one fore, on the starboard side; one adjoining the express-elevator shafts, in the middle; and one aft, which led to the lobby. “Fukuda, wait,” said Mori, and unslung the M16: “You want this?” Fukuda shook his head. “Nah. If I bump into those guys, no weapon’s gonna do me any good.” Ando was looking back and forth from the floor indicators to his watch, and Shibata asked him what he was doing. “They must be searching the place,” he said. “I’m timing how long it’ll take them to finish one whole floor.”
The elevators began to move. Ando looked at his watch and said, “Approximately three minutes.” They stopped at the next floor down from the top. “So they’re searching one floor at a time?” Kondo said. Shibata calculated that at the rate of one every three minutes, they’d arrive here in about an hour and eighteen minutes, prompting Takeguchi to say, “Then we can finish in time. Let’s get back to it.” Tateno pointed out that they might change tactics and suggested that one person stay behind to watch the elevators, but Takeguchi was against the idea. “Fukuda’s busy with the mines, and we’re already shorthanded,” he said. “We can’t spare another man.” But Ando took a step forward. “I’ll stay,” he offered. “Tateno’s got the binoculars, and Shinohara’s way better at stripping the veneer than I am. I might be more useful here.”
Hino got back to work, wearing a towel over his nose and mouth like a bandanna. The shaggy coverings were still a problem; if he lost concentration for a moment, the blade slipped. Shinohara asked Tateno if anything was happening with the guards outside the Dome. “There are just two of them now,” he said. “And they’re both talking on their cellphones.” Still looking through the binoculars, he asked, “What about the bugs? Why aren’t they afraid of ’em now?” Shinohara cocked his head to one side as he scraped off some old adhesive with the chisel. “Good question,” he said. Hino thought the guys in charge must have decided that these twenty-six men were expendable. Even if the centipedes got them they’d hardly be missed, since a whole division was expected that evening. Tateno’s cellphone vibrated. It was Ando, reporting that the Koryos had reached floor thirty-one. That seemed faster than expected, and Shinohara checked his watch. “They’ve completed three floors in only seven minutes and forty seconds.”
“They’re getting the hang of it,” Hino said. His towel was already damp in front from his sweat and breath, making speech difficult. “After all, we’re going faster than we were at first too.” Shinohara, standing on the stepladder, inserted the tip of the chisel in a cut line, hit it with the hammer to pry the covering up, then shoved in the crowbar. He was spitting out dust and fibers and muttering to himself.
“They don’t give a fuck. They’re exterminators, is what they are. Anybody resists, they just kill ’em. They don’t care who it is. It’s all about getting rid of anyone who’s different.” He switched to the lower front of the column. Hino moved the stepladder to work on the upper right, then put the cutter down on the bed for a minute to massage his arms and wipe off the sweat with the sheets. The guests had left in a hurry, and the rooms were in disarray. At the forward end, they’d seen bloodstained sheets in a couple of the rooms and a used condom lying on the floor in another. The one right at the end of the corridor had a hot tub surrounded by large bow windows, with a green bottle sticking out of a silver wine bucket next to it.
The image of the bath and the bottle of wine stuck in Hino’s head even as he took up the electric cutter again and climbed the stepladder. Had the guest in that room been alone? No, he was more likely to have had company. What would it be like to get into a tub like that with a naked woman and drink wine and look out at the city lights? While he was speculating about this, the blade of the cutter slipped on the shaggy covering and strayed from the line. He turned the thing off and repositioned it.
What was wrong with him? Was he tired? No, he decided—it was just that the Koryos upstairs were messing with his concentration. Shinohara was fighting the copious amounts of adhesive and cursing and muttering to himself: “Fuckin’ Koryos. They can’t stand to have someone around who isn’t just like them. It’s no problem for them if people die or get killed—enemies, allies, they don’t give a fuck. Bugs, people—anyone who’s different from them, or just in the way, gets exterminated.”
Hino had never heard Shinohara talk this much; he was usually so cool and reserved. Why was he going on like that? And why were the bloody sheets and used condom and glassed-in hot tub weighing on his own mind? He’d never had thoughts intrude on him like this before. Tateno was peering through the binoculars he held in his right hand and holding the cellphone against his ear with the left, waiting for Ando’s reports and muttering useless information about the guards: They’re looking up at the sky… They’re having a smoke… They’re talking… They’re laughing. The reason we’re all acting weird like this, Hino suddenly realized, is because we’re scared shitless.
Tateno relayed Ando’s report that the Koryos had moved to floor thirty. They were definitely getting faster. And we, Hino thought, are so shook up that we’ve actually slowed down. He left the room, telling Tateno and Shinohara that he was going to have a word with Takeguchi, and they followed him. On the way they passed through the central elevator hall. Ando was there, watching the floor indicators, and when he saw them running toward him, he asked what was wrong. “I’ll explain later,” Hino said as they ran past. “Just stay here and keep watch, okay?”
Takeguchi’s team had run into problems too. Miyazaki had mistaken positive and negative while connecting one of the detonator wires, much to the exasperation of the team leader, who was now checking all the wires one by one with Sato. When Hino said he wanted a word with him, Takeguchi gave him a dubious look and asked if he’d already finished his job. Hino didn’t answer but explained what had just occurred to him. Yamada and Mori, the five Satanists, and Felix and Matsuyama, who had stopped unlocking doors and come to help with the wiring, laid down their tools to listen. “Right now we’re so scared we’re afraid to recognize it,” he said, “and we’re all trying to act calm. Me, I’m just about to piss my pants, but I’m afraid to admit it, and that’s why I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing. We’re losing time, and suddenly we’re making mistakes. At this rate, the Koryos are going to arrive before we’re finished.” Several of the others nodded, looking visibly relieved. Everybody seemed to be having a similar reaction. Takeguchi looked down at his feet. “You saying we should get out of here?” he said.
“Let me ask you one thing,” Hino said. “You’re the only one who can answer. If we stop work now and run for it, can you hit the remote control from the beach and bring the hotel down?” Takeguchi shook his head, and there was a collective groan of disappointment. Mori and Yamada looked at each other and said, “Damn,” in unison. “We still have eight columns to rig. If we set it off now, it would probably just buckle at the eighth floor and lean over but not collapse.” Takeguchi looked around at everyone after saying this. “They’ve moved to twenty-eight,” Tateno reported. Hino asked Takeguchi about the antipersonnel mines.
“They’re replicas of Claymores that Fukuda made. You put five cookies in a container that looks like a flat audio speaker, and shove in twelve hundred ball bearings. When it explodes, the balls rip the target to shreds. At three meters, they have a fan-shaped radius of four meters; at five, six meters. Set one off in front of an open elevator and you’ll kill all seven or eight Koryos inside. But there’s a problem. They’re using four elevators, and we only have three mines. Fukuda made them for the three emergency stairwells, and he can’t make another one because he hasn’t got the ingredients. Besides, they’re not going to be synchronizing the elevators to arrive at a floor at the same time—there’s bound to be a lag of at least a few seconds. When they hear the first explosion, some of the others might take cover and survive.”
“If there are any survivors, we kill them,” Hino said. He looked at the others and added, “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to fight these guys. But we’ve done all this work, and now that we’re this close, I want to finish the job. For us to concentrate on getting it done, we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do. If we’re going to fight them to the death, we need to be clear about that.”
Everyone nodded agreement at the words “finish the job.” None of them had ever worked as part of a team before. They’d never helped anyone or been helped by anyone in any sort of endeavor. They were all scared to death of the Koryos, but they wanted to see their project through. “Ah,” said Takeguchi. “So that’s what you’re trying to say. Okay. Let’s decide what we need to do when they get to this floor—how to fight them.” He told Felix and Matsuyama to take over from Kaneshiro and Okubo on the fifth floor and send them up here. After receiving a brief explanation of how to handle the exploder, the two of them headed for the stairs.
“The one thing we have going for us is that the Koryos aren’t expecting an ambush,” Hino said, and Takeguchi, looking at the ceiling, added, “Here’s hoping their guard is down by the time they reach us, after searching all those floors and not finding anything.”
Fukuda’s mines were just as Takeguchi had described them—they looked like flat speakers, covered with the same sort of mesh material. Each was supported by a low stand, had red cables extending from the rear, and was about the size of a looseleaf binder and only a few centimeters thick. Fukuda placed them in front of the doors to the lower-floor elevators. There were four of these, two on either side. He designated the forward elevators “A” and “B” and the aft pair, directly across from them, “C” and “D.” On the stairways he’d rigged the mines with trip wires, but he had disassembled these and now connected each mine to a manual detonator. These were simple devices that consisted of two dry-cell batteries, a small converter, and a switch panel of sheet copper.
Two of the mines were aimed at elevators C and D, each positioned diagonally and a couple of paces away. A certain distance from the target was needed for the little steel balls to fan out and do their job, and the angle would prevent the Koryos at the front acting as shields for those behind. Fukuda had to set the third mine even farther back, where it could do some damage to either A or B. According to Ando, who’d continued to watch the floor indicators, the lag between the first elevator to move and the last varied from six to twelve seconds, and there was no pattern to the order in which they arrived.
After they had reached a consensus on the ambush plan, Kaneshiro and Fukuda remained with Ando in the elevator hall while the rest went back to setting the charges. Hino’s team had started at Room 8027, which was located in the bow, and were working sternward toward the last room with a column, 8052. So far they had completed only 8033. Even if they continued at the pace they’d maintained till now, they probably wouldn’t finish before the Koryos arrived.
If there were any survivors from elevators C and D, they would naturally try to head aft, where they’d find Hino and Takeguchi and the others at work and shoot them all down in about two seconds. Any Koryo survivors had to be driven forward, therefore, so most of the weapons were needed aft of the elevators. Kaneshiro dragged some mini refrigerators from the guest rooms and placed four of them side by side across the aft corridors. He then piled three more on top, and braced these makeshift barricades with sofas and chairs, to create a line of defense. He built three of these in all—one across the starboard corridor forward of elevator B and one each in the two sternward corridors, just aft of C and D. He decided to position Orihara with the AK behind line of defense B; Miyazaki with the light machine gun behind C; and to concentrate the rest of the firepower behind line D, which he proceeded to fortify with a second fridge-and-furniture barricade. He stacked the refrigerators two-high at the first of these, but added a third layer for the rear one, some four meters back.
Kaneshiro and Yamada positioned themselves behind the front barricade at line D with the Uzi and the Franchi shotgun. The idea was to kill any escaping Koryos with a barrage of gunfire at close range. Behind the rear barricade were Mori with his M16 and Ando with the grenade launcher. The difference in height between the two barricades meant that those in front could kneel and fire while those behind fired standing up. In the rear barricade they left a gap on one side wide enough for a single person to run through, so that if the front barricade was breached, Kaneshiro and Yamada could fall back. Shibata, on the wiring team, was entrusted with the FN, and Felix, who was guarding the exploder, had the other pistol, the Beretta. This was in anticipation of the worst-case scenario—the Koryos breaking through both barricades and reaching the center of activity. Orihara and Miyazaki had two hand grenades apiece, and the remaining nine grenades were placed behind the line D barricades—four at the front and five at the rear.
They hadn’t loaded the weapons and spare magazines before bringing them here and had to do so now. It proved unexpectedly time-consuming, and Matsuyama and Felix were summoned back to the eighth floor to help. They brought the exploder with them and carried it to the last room, 8052, where they would stay to guard it. Tateno, too, took a break from the binoculars to help load a magazine for the Uzi. The little machine gun was made completely of shiny black steel and was surprisingly heavy, as was the magazine. Tateno took the bullets from cardboard packages and pressed them one by one into the rectangular magazine. Each time one went in properly, it made a satisfying ka-chick sound, like a hammer striking stone. In his notes Takei had said that unless you pushed until you heard that sound, it could cause a misfire. The Uzi magazine had what was called a double column, allowing for more bullets in a small space. When you shoved a round in, the previous bullet was pushed to the side and downward. There must be a powerful spring inside, Tateno said, and after inserting about fourteen rounds he announced that his thumb was killing him. The Uzi held thirty-two rounds, but he said he couldn’t possibly do another eighteen. “I might need this hand later,” he said with a scowl, and gave the magazine and bullets back to Kaneshiro.
Kaneshiro loaded the magazines with the speed and assurance of a pro. Hino guessed that he had practiced a lot with Takei. It seemed that the trick, when time was limited, was to load fewer rounds than the capacity. If the magazine held thirty rounds, for example, he would load only twenty-seven. Kaneshiro was wearing the form-fitting, dark-blue uniform of the GEK Cobra Unit from Takei’s collection. They had all dressed in dark clothing for the night-time infiltration, but he alone had chosen a uniform and lace-up boots. Elastic held the material in at his wrists and ankles and waist, and the uniform did seem to provide excellent mobility. It had pockets for magazines and grenades, and lots of belt straps to hold weapons or equipment. Kaneshiro had a big combat knife in an ankle sheath, and he was also wearing a bulletproof vest. When Yamada saw the vest, with its pleated ridges, he said, “Can I have one of those?” He got no reply, but someone tried to console him by saying that the Koryos always aimed for the head anyway.
Since his arrival on the eighth floor, Kaneshiro’s demeanor had remained calm even as he began preparations for the counterattack. For Hino and the others setting the charges, the aim was to bring down the hotel, but Kaneshiro seemed to have a separate goal of his own. In any case, the preparations went smoothly and efficiently under his direction, and once the lines of defense were ready, it was he who decided where to position everyone. “He’s the real deal,” Felix said, and Okubo agreed: “He’s studied pretty much every book and DVD ever made about war and terrorism and stuff.” Having trained with Takei using live rounds in the basement of Building E, Kaneshiro was the only one here who had actually fired a rifle or sub-machine gun; the others had only read Takei’s handwritten notes. But he was so cool as he gave them instructions that they all seemed optimistic about their chances. No one was panicky. He pointed out that they would be shooting at very close range and convinced them that if they just held their weapons firmly and squeezed the triggers, they’d mow the enemy down. He said these things as if explaining how to snap a photo with his camera. His usual energy and intensity seemed accentuated a bit, but he showed no excitement, much less anxiety. He was like a baseball player at some north-country high school playing catch after the first thaw of spring.
