From the Fatherland, with Love, page 66
While the others were building barricades and loading guns or setting antipersonnel mines, Takeguchi and Sato used knives and a crowbar to peel back about twenty meters of carpeting from either end of the elevator hall, and hid the auxiliary busbars underneath it. Sato was worried the mines might rip through the wires when they exploded, but Takeguchi assured him that the blast would be angled above the horizontal. All these activities took about twenty minutes, during which time the Koryos had moved down to floor twenty-one. Just thirteen floors away. Thirty or thirty-five minutes, Hino figured. But he had learned the trick to cutting the shaggy material—letting the wind from the blade form a part in the pile before pressing down—and that speeded things up considerably. His team managed to finish rooms 8036, 8039, and 8042 in exactly fifteen minutes.
When it was reported that the squadron upstairs had reached the seventeenth floor, the tension was palpable. Below seventeen, they would switch to the lower-floor elevators. With the mine detonators, the Uzi, and the grenade launcher at the ready, Kaneshiro, Fukuda, and Ando took up their positions behind the first barricade at line D. They had a clear view of the floor indicators from there. As soon as the Koryos reached the tenth floor, everyone but the people setting the charges would be summoned to their battle stations. Okubo and Shibata would be behind the rear barricade D, reloading magazines. When the Koryos left floor ten, Hino would turn off his electric cutter, to make sure they weren’t tipped off by the noise.
With the door of 8045 open, Hino could see the elevator hall and lines of defense B and D. The Koryos were approaching at a pace of about two and a half to three minutes per floor. They would arrive here within twenty minutes, by which time the Hino and Takeguchi teams would have moved behind the rear barricade to 8050 or, hopefully, 8052. Hino had always had a recurring nightmare in which he found himself in a confined space, unable to move as a murderer slowly closed in. Now it was really happening. “Fifteenth floor,” Ando reported. Hino could feel his heartbeat pound in the bone-dry walls of his throat. But strangely enough he was working faster and more efficiently than ever. It wasn’t that the fear had waned—he was definitely still afraid. But knowing you were afraid was different from pretending you weren’t. He may have been on the verge of wetting himself, but at least he knew what countermeasures they would take when the Koryos materialized. Even if you were terrified, as long as you were aware of it and had decided on a course of action, you could face the object of your fear head on. As he thought about this, he suddenly remembered his mother.
With dust flying around him and the towel bandanna sodden from spit and snot, Hino saw his mother’s face—the face of the woman who’d stabbed his father to death, stabbed and seriously injured her own son, and then killed herself. He had never thought about her at all since that time and hadn’t felt anything even when they told him at the institution that she’d committed suicide. But coming into focus in his mind’s eye now was the image of her eating lunch with him in a neighborhood park when he was little. They’d bought box lunches at a convenience store. His mother always got the tofu chili, and he the hamburger steak.
His mother hadn’t had anything to do, and as a result she was always seeing and hearing things she had no business seeing and hearing. Not realizing that the fear came from inside herself, she had blamed it on the building materials in their new house. It wasn’t connected with the materials, of course: the object of her fear might have been anything—needles, the moon, shopping malls, high places, her own sweat—but as long as she believed it was something outside her, it was outside her control. Poor thing, she didn’t even know there was any way of dealing with her fears. Hino had never felt sorry for his mother before. He’d never felt hatred or resentment either, but rather had buried all his feelings about her. And yet now, of all times, they had been unearthed in an eruption of sympathy.
He felt he could understand her now. Living had become such agony for her that she’d had no way of coping other than to stab those closest to her and then kill herself. With this feeling of sympathy, something deep in his gut seemed to melt and radiate a kind of warmth throughout his body. Waves of an emotion he hadn’t known before surged up inside him, and tears accumulated at the inner rim of his goggles. His vision was blurred, and he couldn’t see his own cut line. He took the goggles off and wiped his eyes with the knuckles of his leather gloves. Shinohara asked him what was wrong. “Nothing. Just got some stuff in my eyes,” he said, and gripped the cutter again. I’ll avenge you, he muttered under his breath. Keep watching from hell. See what your son is going to do. He pictured her sitting on the grass in the park, eating her tofu chili, as he inwardly repeated these words. Just watch.
They were nearly finished in 8050 when Ando popped his head in and said that the Koryos had left the tenth floor. “Fuckers,” Hino said as he switched the cutter off. Shinohara said, “Shit! We’re almost done.” After this room, there was only the final one, 8052. “I reckon that’s about the size of it, though,” Hino muttered, remembering the old guy who’d taught him how to use arc welders and cutting torches at a construction site in Shinagawa. The geezer had used this expression habitually, always following it up with, “If things go too smooth in life, you end up dyin’ before your time.”
Still standing in the doorway, Ando asked if they could spare Tateno. “Kaneshiro says if he’s not needed here, he should come help load the magazines.” Tateno was already removing the binoculars from his neck when Hino said, “No, we need him here.” He was going to object, but Shinohara silenced him with a small shake of his head. And just then Takeguchi, Sato, and Kondo piled in through the doorway, sideswiping Ando and nearly knocking him down. They had finished setting and wiring the LSCs in 8048, and now, without a word, they got to work on the column in this room. Their teamwork was so good now that it took them only about two and a half minutes to set charges on all five of the spots that Hino and Shinohara had exposed. Sato quickly connected the wires in the corridor, then came back to the doorway and said, “If you hear things heating up down the hall, just keep going. No need to worry about making noise anymore. Let’s get it finished.”
Hino nodded, but Tateno asked in an anguished way why he shouldn’t go and help the others. He was nearly in tears. “They’re going to shoot it out with the Koryos,” he said. “What good am I here?” Shinohara told him to stay put and not worry about it. “But why?” Hino, plucking bits of material from the blade of the cutter, said, “Because this is the safest place. There’s nothing wrong with resting while everyone’s working their ass off, and there’s nothing wrong with running for safety when everyone’s shooting each other. Listen, Tateno. This isn’t about anybody being a hero. We’re here to do a job, not because we’re all eager to die side by side. You don’t have to obey Kaneshiro’s orders. You don’t have to obey anybody. A minute ago your thumb was killing you when you tried to load that magazine. You think you’ll be any use reloading if some of the Koryos survive and it turns into an actual firefight? I mean, I don’t know. Do what you want to do. If you really want to reload magazines, go. If you don’t want to, don’t.”
Tateno slumped to a sitting position on the floor beside the window. Then they heard someone say, “Here they come.” Hino scuttled to the doorway and lay prone there, alongside Sato and Takeguchi, looking up the corridor through the gap in the rear barricade at D. They heard the ding of an arriving elevator, and Sato whispered, “It’s B.” All was silent except for the mechanical whir of the door opening, and then a number of footsteps and the clatter of metal against metal. Lying on his stomach, his hands over his ears, Takeguchi turned a pale face toward Hino and mouthed: It’s a dud! The Koryos’ footsteps were coming this way but suddenly stopped. They must have reached the corridor and seen the mini-fridge barricade. Something was said, then shouted, in Korean and—ding—another elevator arrived. “That’s C,” Sato whispered, and two seconds later came a deafening roar and a shock wave that lifted them off the floor and seemed to turn their insides to jelly. This was followed almost immediately by a hurricane-force blast of scorched-smelling wind through the corridor.
Hino hadn’t covered his ears and for a moment couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched ringing. He had in fact wet himself. But the sprinklers in the room and corridor had sprung to life, and everybody was getting soaked. Carefully shielding the cellphone, Takeguchi scooted back to the middle of the room, contacted Matsuyama in 8052, and shouted that he mustn’t let the exploder get wet. Pointing, Kondo said, “What’s that?” and when Hino peered up the corridor he saw Miyazaki with his back to them, one shoulder hanging at an unnatural angle. He was staggering forward with his hands outstretched, groping his way toward the elevator hall. “He’s supposed to be at line C,” Sato said. “What the hell’s he doing?” Takeguchi said that he must have been wounded by the mine and lost his bearings.
Something more than just urine had exited Hino’s body when he peed himself: the thing they called ego or soul or spirit or something. He didn’t feel the cold water of the sprinklers as unpleasant, or as anything else. All he knew was that he had to get back to work. His ears were still ringing loudly, and he could hear only intermittently what the others were saying. He bent down with a grimace and picked up the electric cutter. He was about to switch it on when a hand stopped him. The egg-like smoothness of the face told him it was Shinohara, but he wasn’t sure how he knew this person. “Not yet,” Shinohara was telling him. “Not till all the elevators have arrived. We don’t need to let them know we’re in here cutting stuff up.”
He couldn’t grasp what Shinohara was saying. Water was still spraying vigorously from the sprinklers. His field of vision was distorted as if by a fish-eye lens. He went back to the doorway and leaned out, and in the distance he could see Miyazaki, covered with blood. His understanding of what was going on came down to two words: “explosion” and “Koryo.” Explosion, Koryo. Because of one or the other, blood was oozing like melted ice cream from Miyazaki’s shoulder and the top of his head. “What happened to the first group of Koryos?” someone asked. “They went back to the elevator hall when the others arrived,” said a voice he recognized as Takeguchi’s. “The mine got ’em.” And then, over the ringing in his ears, he heard two consecutive dings. “Miyazaki’s out there!” Tateno said, and Sato, diving to the floor and covering his ears, said, “It’s A and D—two at once.” Hino also got down and covered his ears, but the second explosion lifted him right up in the air and then slammed him back down face-first on the carpet. The shock wave threatened to squeeze his intestines out though his asshole, and the sprinklers rained sideways upon him as a sulfurous wind blew over his head and down the corridor.
He could hear Takeguchi saying, “Too many cookies in those things! They took out some of our guys too!” Tateno asked what had happened to Miyazaki. Sato’s voice said, “Shouldn’t there be flames?” Takeguchi said, “This isn’t Hollywood,” and Shinohara shouted, “Koryos!” Figures had appeared in the elevator hall toward which Miyazaki had been walking moments ago. Kaneshiro turned to the rear barricade at D and yelled, “Hand grenade!” and Mori rose slowly behind the mini fridges, like a child who’d been found out at hide-and-seek. He was winding up to throw his grenade when bright, tracer-like streaks raced toward him. His right arm separated from his shoulder and spun off on its own, and most of his midsection was ripped out in an explosion of blood. The green Koryo shadows moved jerkily, like broken marionettes. Kaneshiro was firing the Uzi nonstop. “What happened to Miyazaki?” Tateno kept chanting as he climbed to his feet. “What happened to Miyazaki?” Suddenly Ando staggered in through the doorway. A red chunk of someone’s flesh had landed on his face and stuck there. “Get it off me!” he shrieked. “Somebody get it off me!” He was slapping hysterically at his own cheek, apparently oblivious to the hole in his neck from which blood was spurting in small parabolas.
Takeguchi said, “Let’s get to it.” Hino grabbed the cutter from a puddle on the carpeting and began crawling toward the next column. Tateno was in the corner. Right in front of him Ando, still slapping at his face, buckled at the knees and toppled to the floor. As he lay there twitching, blood from the hole in his neck crawled over the carpet like worms in grass. Hino stood as if mesmerized by the sight. He kept hearing a harsh, metallic keening, but he wasn’t sure if it was his ears ringing or bullets whizzing through the air. Only Takeguchi’s “Let’s get to it” had registered clearly.
At construction sites, you heard those words without fail at the end of the lunch break. Hino had always loved being part of the flow of workers heading back to their stations and enjoyed reuniting with his own section of steel frame or pipework, through which the blue flame of his blowtorch would soon be slicing like scissors through paper. He turned the cutter on. His spirit had left him along with his urine, but he could still strip veneer from columns.
Water continued to squirt from the sprinklers. The walls and floor were all wet, and the long-piled coverings were actually easier to cut through because of being drenched. Shinohara was waiting with crowbar, hammer, and chisel, but he laid the tools next to the column, then turned around and slapped Tateno’s face, hard. “If the Koryos come, you kill them,” he said, stripping the backpack from Tateno’s shoulders and slamming it against his chest. “Got it?” Was he telling him to kill them with his boomerangs? Or just trying to get him to snap out of it? Tateno stood there like a sleepwalker, cradling the backpack and staring down at the stream of blood making its way from the neck of the now motionless Ando toward his own shoes. It was as if the tentacles of blood were alive and Tateno himself some sort of wooden object. The gunfight was still raging, and smaller explosions echoed through the low-ceilinged corridor and made the air itself seem to tremble. Hino heard Sato say, “Kaneshiro’s the only one shooting,” and then Takeguchi: “Shibata, Okubo, and Kondo are down.”
He did the rest of the cuts in about thirty seconds. After watching Shinohara finish his bit, he turned to Takeguchi to say, “We’re done.” He unplugged the cutter and was heading out the door to move to 8052 when Sato, who was crouching there, grabbed his ankle and brought him down. “What’re you, crazy?” Sato shouted right in his face. “There are still Koryos out there!” With a jerk of his head, he drew Hino’s attention to Kondo, who was lying just outside the doorway. From under Kondo’s arm extended a tube-like thing about the size of a child’s finger, the exposed end of which was merrily spraying blood. It was an artery. Takeguchi and Sato crawled over to move Kondo’s body and grab the bundle of LSCs he’d fallen on. Keeping low, they hurried back to the column at the room’s far wall and got to work. Hino and Shinohara now crawled out into the corridor for a look. Behind the rear barricade, with its half-collapsed pile of mini fridges, lay Mori’s body, about a meter away from his right arm. There was another corpse on top of him, but Hino didn’t know who it was.
After he’d set fire to the reformatory, one of the attendants there had shown Hino photographs of charred bodies, and all he’d thought was that they looked like chocolate-coated figurines. But there was a distinctive atmosphere about dead people in real life. Something had leaked out of them. It wasn’t just blood and fluids, or viruses or bacteria fleeing the host, and it wasn’t the spirit either. Hino’s spirit had leaked out of him a while ago, and he wasn’t dead. What was it that had left these bodies? He was wondering about this as he crawled on toward the stern, when another explosion shook the entire corridor. The percussion went right through him, from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull, and a nauseating, sulfuric stench overwhelmed the metallic smell of the blood-saturated carpeting. The shock wave gave his insides another good squeeze, but no piss came out this time. Shinohara, his elbows red with carpet-blood as he crawled along beside him, explained: “Kaneshiro must have thrown a grenade.” They were about half the distance to the doorway of 8052 when they heard Kaneshiro call out to them: “One Koryo coming your way!” Terrified, Hino turned to look behind him, but there was no one there. Realizing he must’ve meant the other direction, he turned back and caught a glimpse of a gun barrel, a green camouflaged sleeve, and a blood-soaked hand in the shadows of the sternmost emergency stairwell. The Koryo had circled around from the port-side corridor.
Kaneshiro switched from the Uzi to the M16 and was firing in three-shot bursts. Several of his bullets hit the fire extinguisher at the end of the corridor, attached to the wall behind which the Koryo was holed up. A large splinter of wood from the paneling lodged in Hino’s shoulder as he lay there face down, and two of the bullets that ricocheted off the fire extinguisher banged one after another into the door to 8052. Matsuyama, mistaking the sound for someone knocking, opened the door a crack to look out and was met with a flurry of AK fire at short range. The Koryo then fired a second sustained burst that chewed into the door, causing it to swing wide open, rebound, and slam shut again. He pulled back into the stairwell until Kaneshiro stopped firing, then thrust the barrel of the AK out from the shadows. But before he could shoot, something exploded behind him, and as if propelled from a trampoline he did a high-speed twisting somersault, bounced off the door to 8052, and dropped heavily to the floor. “That’s all of them,” Sato said, stepping over Hino and Shinohara on the way to 8052. “All the Koryos are dead.” Takeguchi, close behind him, yelled at them to get up and get back to work. They both jumped to their feet, grabbed their tools, and followed. The Koryo was sitting slumped against the wall next to the door, legs outspread. He was dead, but there were few visible wounds. Takeguchi explained that a grenade’s shock wave can rattle your brain so hard it kills you.
