From the Fatherland, with Love, page 67
There was a small bloodstain on Hino’s shirt where the splinter of wood had pierced his shoulder, but it didn’t hurt and he had full use of his arm. Matsuyama had fallen near the column, and he had to move him aside. His face looked like a pomegranate split in half. Hino picked up the cutter; Takeguchi had already drawn the cut lines. Felix had been hit by the Koryo’s AK as well; he was bleeding from the chest and buttocks, and each breath was like the wheeze of a severe asthma attack. When they gently rolled him onto his back, they uncovered the exploder, wrapped in a plastic laundry bag. It wasn’t clear whether Felix had been shielding the device with his body or merely happened to fall on it. Takeguchi wiped a few drops of sticky blood from the panel and inspected his hell-box. “It’s alive,” he said.
Orihara came limping in. It turned out he was the one who’d thrown the grenade from behind the Koryo. A bit of shrapnel had grazed his thigh, he said. As he tore open his trouser leg to apply antiseptic to the wound, he mentioned that Kaneshiro was using his knife on the dead bodies. Not knowing what this meant, they all ignored it and went about their work in a trance of concentration, with Sato checking all the lines to make sure none of them had been severed in the firefight. They were nearly finished when Tateno came into the room and echoed what Orihara had said. “Kaneshiro is doing something to the bodies.” The sprinklers had finally stopped, five minutes after the first explosion. Hino looked around: Shinohara, Tateno, Sato, Takeguchi, Orihara. Apparently they and Kaneshiro were the only ones still alive and kicking. “How are we going to escape?” Sato said, trying to dry himself with a towel from the closet. Felix, on the bed, let out a rattling groan, and they all looked at one another: What do we do with him? Just then, Kaneshiro came bounding in. The M16 hung from his shoulder strap, and he held something cupped in his hands, half hidden by the handle of a combat knife clamped in the crook of his thumb. He had the air of a young girl carrying a bunch of freshly picked flowers.
“What’s… that?” Takeguchi asked, his voice catching as he looked more closely at what might have been a batch of gyoza dumplings. Kaneshiro seemed puzzled by the question, then glanced down at his hands. “Oh, these?” he said. “Ears. Warriors always take the enemy’s ears and string them into a necklace. I thought everybody knew that. Goes way back to the Romans, the Huns, up through the Zulus and the Viet Cong. You all go ahead and get out of here.” He dropped his trophies on the floor, gripped the knife, and cut the cable to the cellphone charger. Takeguchi, his face red with rage, was about to pounce on him when Kaneshiro said, “No choice now but to set it off by hand, right? So hurry up. Get the hell out.” Takeguchi glared at him. “You going to set it off yourself?” he said, and Kaneshiro nodded. “I’m staying here. Look at all this.” He waved a hand at the carnage in the room and out in the corridor. “This is the world I’ve always dreamed of, and I’ve finally found it. Why would I go anywhere else? I’ll take care of everything. It’s my world, so I get to destroy it myself. If the Koryos come, I’ll hit the switch immediately. If they don’t come, I’ll hit it in five—no, let’s say seven and a half minutes. That should be plenty of time. But get going.”
Why the time limit, Takeguchi asked, and Kaneshiro said, “Precious moments are precious because they’re only moments.” From the bed, Felix moaned something in a wheeze like escaping air. Tateno went to his side and bent down to listen, then reported that he was asking them to lay Matsuyama down beside him. One of them held the two parts of Matsuyama’s face together as they carried his remains over to the bed. “I guess they were homos after all,” Sato said quietly. When Tateno asked if they were just going to leave Felix there, Kaneshiro, who was taking his bulletproof vest off, said, “He’s drowning in his own blood. He’ll be dead in a minute.”
Thinking the stairs would take too much time, they decided to use one of the emergency elevators to make their escape. These went all the way down to the garage in B2, which had an exit leading to the four-lane road that circled the hotel and Dome. “But the Koryos will see that the main elevators aren’t working,” said Sato, “and they probably heard the explosions. What if they send people up, find the charges, and cut the wires? I’ll fuckin’ shoot myself.” Takeguchi patted his back and pointed at the exploder at Kaneshiro’s feet. “Don’t worry. To defuse a bomb, you always have to disconnect the detonator first, because some are rigged to go off when a wire is cut. Besides, we used what’s called serial circuitry, so unless they cut one of the buses there’ll be fireworks.”
Kaneshiro was holding forth as the others prepared to leave. “I didn’t get hit once. Not even on my vest,” he told them, picking up an ear from the floor and poking a hole in it with the tip of his knife. “The mines never touched me, and not a single bullet so much as grazed me. All the great terrorists have been like that. Wyatt Earp, Napoleon, General Patton, Vo Nguyen Giap, Fidel Castro, none of them were ever hit.” He then made a request. “When you get back to the warehouse, be sure to tell Ishihara-san to write about what happened here. In a poem or something.” With what looked like a grimace of embarrassment, he said: “Okay. Seven and a half minutes from… now.” He pushed a button on his watch and returned to opening holes in the ears.
The emergency elevators were in the service corridor, beyond the walled-off express-elevator shafts. Orihara, limping along with his bandaged thigh, held up his AK and said, “Anybody want this?” Sato took the weapon, saying he’d hang on to it for now. Takeguchi picked up a pair of hand grenades lying beside Mori’s corpse, stuck one in his pocket, and handed the other to Hino. Testing the heft of the AK, Sato said, “This thing’s surprisingly light.” It was fully loaded, too—Orihara hadn’t fired a single shot. Nor had Yamada fired his shotgun, or Miyazaki or Ando their weapons. They had all been felled by ball bearings or bullets before getting off a single round.
As they trotted along, Shinohara muttered, “Napoleon and Patton were terrorists?” Sato looked at Takeguchi. “I never heard of Nazis cutting off ears,” he said. “Just putting people in gas chambers.” Takeguchi shook his head grimly. “He’s completely out of his mind, that guy,” he said. Tateno said, “He was smiling a bit at the end, though, wasn’t he?” and looked around at the others, but apparently none of them wanted to think about it. Kaneshiro’s strange grimace may well have been an attempt to smile, thought Hino—at least, it was the nearest thing to a smile he’d ever seen on the guy. “It’s true, though,” Orihara said. “He was right out in the open, shooting away, and none of their bullets hit him. And when the mine went off, even though he was right next to Yamada, who got ripped to shreds, nothing touched him.” Blood was beginning to soak the bandage on Orihara’s thigh.
Takeguchi looked at his watch. “It’s about twelve-ten. We’d better be at the breakwater before twelve-seventeen. If I know Kaneshiro, he’ll hit the switch the instant his little alarm goes off.” Shinohara looked at the bodies of Kondo and Mori lying in the corridor, then turned away scowling. “Don’t tell me he mutilated our people too.” Kondo had been shot in the side, Mori in the arm and lower stomach, and farther along Shibata and Okubo, both in the chest; and each of them was bleeding beneath the temple and missing an ear. Hino remembered Kaneshiro once saying, “There are no enemies or allies in this life. Just you and everybody else.”
Slim cans of cola and Pocari Sweat had spilled out from a collapsed pile of mini fridges, and they excavated and guzzled two or three apiece. Hino accidentally grabbed a beer and was so thirsty that he downed half of it before realizing his mistake. He spat out what he could and tried to dilute the alcohol by draining a bottle of Evian, but as they hurried on he began to feel dizzy and when they reached the elevator hall he threw up. Tateno, Shinohara, and Takeguchi were sick as well, after seeing the bodies of Yamada and Fukuda and several Koryos there. Yamada and Fukuda had been near the second mine when it went off, and the damage was extreme. Yamada’s head lay on top of Fukuda’s severed leg, and Fukuda was face down in a pile of guts that had slid out of Yamada’s ruptured belly. A number of the corpses had been ripped open, and intestines had sprayed over every surface, along with lots of putrid-smelling excrement.
The entire elevator hall had been blown out of kilter by the explosions and was littered with lumps of scorched plastic and steel, spent shell casings, body parts, and gore. The door to elevator B had been blown apart, and the bodies of several Koryos were plastered to the inner walls. The frameworks of A and C were twisted, the cars leaning crazily. The soldiers who’d been hit with the full force of the blasts were no longer recognizable as individual human beings. You couldn’t even tell how many bodies made up the piles of torn flesh that lay soaking in pools of blood. At the pre-operation meeting they had discussed dressing in Koryo uniforms to make their escape, but there were no wearable uniforms here—nothing but bloodstained rags. All four elevators were permanently disabled. Even the button panels, vents, walls, and cables had melted out of shape.
Orihara had been alone at line of defense B when those green camos first appeared in the corridor. The Koryos had pulled up short the moment they saw the strange barricade and turned back to consult their comrades arriving in elevator D. The elevator hall was therefore jammed with Koryos when the first mine went off. It was the one set right in front of Orihara’s line of defense, and the outer frame of the device blew back and slammed into his mini fridges. He saw the Koryos fall like bowling pins, then watched Miyazaki, who’d taken a few ball bearings in the face, wander through the elevator hall with his hands outstretched, as if he were “it” in a game of blind man’s bluff. Miyazaki met the second explosion head on and burst like a balloon, his entire body erupting into little pieces that stuck to the walls and ceiling. Orihara said that with that explosion, the fridges and sofas had fallen on top of him, but when the shooting started he squirmed out and sprinted around to the port corridor, taking the long route to where Takeguchi and the others were. When he got to the stairwell at the stern, he saw the lone Koryo there, so he pulled the pin from a grenade and flung it as they’d been instructed to do. “If the first mine hadn’t been a dud, you’d be dead too,” Takeguchi said, but Orihara just blinked at him. He hadn’t even realized that one of them didn’t go off.
They passed the middle emergency stairway and entered the service corridor through a door marked PRIVATE. Inside they found a pantry with a sink and water heater, shelves stocked with disposable razors, toothbrushes, and other amenities, and enormous laundry baskets overflowing with dirty sheets and towels. Beyond these were the four emergency elevators, two on either side. A food trolley that had been on its way to a banquet lay toppled over, and broken bowls, dishes, and glasses littered the floor amid puddles of soup that had sprouted mold. Tateno, with his hand on an elevator door, wondered if it was working. The floor indicator wasn’t lit. “They’re emergency elevators,” Hino said, opening a switch panel on the wall. “They’re designed to work in any circumstances.” He flicked the power to ON, then hit the DOWN button. A moment later the floor indicator lit up, and they heard the machinery start. “Won’t the Koryos notice?” Orihara said. “These things only open on the service corridors, where they probably never even go,” Hino said hopefully. The door took some time to open. He stepped aboard, and the others followed.
The interior of the elevator was stark, with a plywood floor and linoleum walls and ceiling. Hino pressed B2, the door closed slowly, and they began to descend. “What do we do if it stops at the first floor?” Shinohara said, and all eyes turned to the AK Sato was holding. “It’s loaded, right?” Sato said, and Orihara nodded. “I didn’t even shoot once.” As they passed floor six, he said, “Sato, you’ve got to push the safety catch down or you won’t be able to pull the charging handle.” Sato moved the thing to full auto, pulled the handle back, and released it. “Whoa!” he said. “I saw a bullet!” The action made a metallic sound not quite like anything else, the sound of a powerful spring sliding through a narrow steel tube. Holding the AK at his hip, he said, “But if they fire back I’m not sure this one gun is enough.” They decided that if the elevator stopped at the first floor, Sato would fire through the opening door as the others flattened themselves against the walls and Hino pressed the CLOSE button.
Takeguchi kept looking at his watch. Hino was doing the same, with one eye on the floor indicator. Above the door was a row of numbers, from B2 to 35, which lit up one at a time as they descended. When 5 came on, it was 12:12:20. Orihara had begun sweating heavily as soon as he entered the elevator. His leg must have been hurting a lot—he was bent over with a hand on one hip, grimacing. He’d said it was only a surface wound, but maybe it was worse than that. As 4 lit up, Hino became acutely conscious of a need to relieve his bladder again. He also noticed that everyone looked like hell. Their hair and clothing were wet, their shoes and the cuffs of their pants were soaked with blood, and even their faces and necks and arms were splattered with it. If they ran into any Koryos, they’d be arrested on the spot. If they resisted, they’d probably all be shot down where they stood.
When the light for 4 went out, Shinohara startled everyone with a sudden cry. “Shit!” he said. “I completely forgot about these other guys.” He reached into his backpack, took out a Tupperware container, and held it up to the fluorescent ceiling light. “Don’t be opening that thing in here,” Orihara growled, wiping sweat from the bridge of his nose. “About half of ’em are still alive,” Shinohara said, smiling happily. “They’re eating one another.” Tateno, who had been carefully wiping the blood off his hands, glared at the container full of centipedes and pulled his boomerang bag closer. Hino was thinking about the tools he’d left behind. The electric cutter, the welder, and the acetylene tanks had been too bulky and heavy to take with them. He’d acquired his equipment little by little over the years, being given some tools and stealing others, and he’d maintained and cared for it all this time. I reckon that’s about the size of it, though, he thought. He’d just have to start a new collection.
“This elevator’s awfully slow, isn’t it?” Sato said, pursing his lips in a show of impatience. Hino reminded him that it was normally used for transporting carts full of food and things like that. He himself was focused on quelling the urge to pee. When they reached the first floor, where the current command center was, everyone pressed up against the side walls. Orihara was bent over in pain, sweat dripping from his face and neck onto the floor, and Hino wondered if he’d even be able to walk. The number 1 lit up and then went out, and Sato clenched his fist: “Yes!” Relief swept over them, but just as Tateno reached down to lend Orihara a hand, there was a ding. “What the hell?” Takeguchi said stupidly. “It’s B1,” Shinohara said, and Hino looked up in a panic as the elevator began braking. B1 remained lit.
With a high-pitched creaking of cables the thing came to a stop, and the door slowly opened to a figure in white. A woman in a doctor’s smock was standing there looking down at a notebook in her hands. Behind her were three pairs of uniformed soldiers, each pair carrying a patient on a stretcher. Beneath her white coat, the woman wore a mustard-brown uniform with a red star on the collar. She stepped toward the elevator without taking her eyes off her notes, but when one of the men behind her shouted something she stopped and looked up, eyes wide and jaw dropping. Hino was hitting the CLOSE button so hard it hurt his index finger. There were six soldiers, but they were all carrying one end of a stretcher and couldn’t reach for the pistols at their hips. Everyone on both sides of the elevator door stood there like wax figures. The woman raised her eyebrows and muttered something in Korean, gearing up to make some kind of move, but Sato said, “Annyeong hashimnikka,” and fired his AK. Three bursts of a jackhammer sound echoed inside the elevator and out. The doctor crumpled to the floor, holding her stomach with both hands, and the soldiers behind her dropped the stretchers and toppled backwards. Hino heard the heads and elbows of the patients crack against the concrete floor. The elevator door closed at a leisurely pace, the space narrowing as the smock’s red stain expanded.
The elevator began to descend but immediately made the ding sound again and shook as it braked. Sato lowered the AK, accidentally brushing the hot barrel against Takeguchi’s bare forearm and eliciting a cry of pain. Orihara was crouching on the floor. “You still got bullets?” he asked, reaching into his knapsack and pulling out another magazine. Sato took it. “That was too easy,” he muttered, a troubled look on his face. “All I did was squeeze the trigger.” Hino, having been right there, knew exactly what he meant. It was as if you could actually see the projectiles boring their way at impossible speed into the soft, white-clad human flesh. “I mean, did that really just happen?” Sato said. He looked almost tearful. Takeguchi, his own face red with tension, clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, it was self-defense.” Sato bit his lip. “It’s not that,” he said.
The elevator shivered again and stopped. Orihara groaned, and Tateno helped him up and lent him an arm. “When we get out of the elevator hall,” Takeguchi said, “the exit is across the parking lot, to the left. Get ready to run all the way.” Sato leaned out through the open door with the reloaded AK and looked up and down the hall. He gave the all-clear, and Tateno walked Orihara out first. Takeguchi trotted ahead to open the door to the garage for them and Shinohara. Hino entered the dim garage last, along with Sato, and nearly let out a scream. In front of them, in regularly spaced rows, perhaps a hundred human figures lay or sat hugging their knees on the bare concrete floor. They wore only thin cotton robes and rubber sandals. “Who are they?” Sato whispered, bug-eyed. Hino supposed that they were the “criminals” the Koryos had arrested.
