Chapter Eight
The cliff towered grim and foreboding, fully the height of a three-story building. Except for a few scrawny weeds dotting its face, indicating outcroppings or crevasses, it was a sheer drop onto the rockslide. It was enough of an obstacle that even the strongest of heart would take time to look for another route.
The man at the top of the cliff didn’t look for another route or even break stride as he sprinted up to the edge of the precipice. He simply stepped off the cliff into nothingness, as did the three men following closely at his heels. For two long heartbeats they fell. By the second beat their swords were drawn—the world-famous Katanas, samurai swords unrivaled for centuries for their beauty, their craftsmanship, and their razor edges. On the third heartbeat they smashed into the rockslide, the impact driving one man to his knees, forcing him to recover with a catlike forward roll. By the time he had regained his feet, the others were gone, darting and weaving through the straw dummies, swords flashing in the sun. He raced to join them, a flick of his sword decapitating the dummy nearest him.
The straw figures, twenty of them, were identical, save for a one-inch square of brightly colored cloth pinned to them, marking five red, five yellow, five white, and five green. As they moved, each man struck only at the dummies marked with his color, forcing them to learn target identification at a dead run. Some were marked in the center of the forehead, some in the small of the back. It was considered a cardinal sin to strike a target that was not yours. A man who did not identify his target before he struck could as easily kill friend as foe in a firefight.
The leader of the band dispatched his last target and returned his sword to its scabbard in a blur of motion as he turned. He sprinted back toward the cliff through the dummies, apparently oblivious to the deadly blades still flashing around him. The others followed him, sheathing their swords as they ran. The man who had fallen was lagging noticeably behind.
Scrambling up the rockslide, they threw themselves at the sheer cliff face and began climbing at a smooth effortless pace, finding handholds and toeholds where none could be seen. It was a long climb, and the distance between the men began to increase. Suddenly the second man in the formation dislodged a fist-sized rock that clattered down the cliffside. The third man rippled his body to one side and it missed him narrowly. The fourth man was not so lucky. The rock smashed into his right forearm and careened away. He lost his grip and dropped the fifteen feet back onto the rockslide.
He landed lightly in a three-point stance, straightened, and gazed ruefully at his arm. A jagged piece of bone protruded from the skin. Shaking his head slightly, he tucked the injured arm into the front of his uniform and began to climb again.
As he climbed, a small group of men appeared below him. They hurriedly cut down the remains of the straw dummies and began lashing new ones to the supporting poles. None of them looked up at the man struggling up the cliffside.
They had finished their job and disappeared by the time the lone man reached the top of the cliff. He did not pause or look back, but simply rolled to his feet and sprinted off again. As he did, five more men brushed past him, ignoring him completely, and flung themselves off the cliff.
Tidwell hit the hold button on the videotape machine and the figures froze in midair. He stared at the screen for several moments, then rose from his chair and paced slowly across the thick carpet of his apartment. Clancy was snoring softly on the sofa, half-buried in a sea of personnel folders. Tidwell ignored him and walked to the picture window where he stood and stared at the darkened training fields.
The door behind him opened and a young Japanese girl glided into the room. She was clad in traditional Japanese robes and was bearing a small tray of lacquered bamboo. She approached him softly and stood waiting until he noticed her presence.
“Thanks, Yamiko,” he said, taking his fresh drink from her tray.
She gave a short bow and remained in place, looking at him. He tasted his drink, then realized she was still there.
“I’ll be along shortly, love. There’s just a few things I’ve got to think out.”
He blew a kiss at her, and she giggled and retired from the room. As soon as she was gone, the smile dropped from his face like a mask. He slowly returned to his chair, leaned over, and hit the rewind button. When the desired point had been reached, he hit the slow motion button and stared at the screen.
The four figures floated softly to the earth. As they touched down, Tidwell leaned forward to watch their feet and legs. They were landing on uneven ground covered with rocks and small boulders, treacherous footing at best, but they handled it in stride. Their legs were spread and relaxed, molding to the contour of their landing point; then those incredible thigh muscles bunched and flexed, acting like shock absorbers. Their rumps nearly touched the rocks before the momentum was halted, but halted it was.
Tidwell centered his attention on the man who was going to fall. His left foot touched down on a head-sized boulder that rolled away as his weight came to bear. He began to fall to his left, but twisted his torso back to the center line while deliberately buckling his right leg. Just as the awful physics of the situation seemed ready to smash him clumsily into the rocks, he tucked like a diver, curling around the glittering sword, and somersaulted forward, rolling to his feet and continuing as if nothing had happened.
Tidwell shook his head in amazement. Less than a twentieth of a second. And he thought his reflexes were good.
The swordplay he had given up trying to follow. The blades seemed to have a life of their own, thirstily dragging the men from one target to the next. Then the leader turned. He twirled his sword in his left hand and stabbed the point toward his hip. An inch error in any direction would either lose the sword or run the owner through. It snaked into the scabbard like it had eyes.
Tidwell hit the hold button and stared at the figure on the screen. The face was that of an old Oriental, age drawing the skin tight across the face making it appear almost skull-like—Kumo. The old sensei who had been in command before Tidwell and Clancy were hired.
In the entire week they had been reviewing the troops, he had not seen Kumo show any kind of emotion. Not anger, not joy—nothing. But he was a demanding instructor and personally led the men in their training. The cliff was only the third station in a fifteen-station obstacle course Kumo had laid out. The troops ran the obstacle course every morning to loosen up for the rest of the day’s training. To loosen up.
Tidwell advanced the tape to the sequence in which the man’s arm was broken. As the incident unfolded, he recalled the balance of that episode. The man had finished the obstacle course, broken arm and all. But his speed suffered, and Kumo sent him back to run the course again before he reported to the infirmary to have his arm treated.
Yes, Kumo ran a rough school. No one could argue with his results, though. Tidwell had seen things in this last week that he had not previously believed physically possible.
Ejecting the tape cassette, he refiled it, selected another, and fed it into the viewer.
The man on the screen was the physical opposite of Kumo who knelt in the background. Where Kumo was thin to the point of looking frail, this man looked like you could hit him with a truck without doing significant damage. He was short, but wide and muscular, looking for all the world like a miniature fullback, complete with shoulder pads.
He stood blindfolded on a field of hard-packed earth. His pose was relaxed and serene. Suddenly another man appeared at the edge of the screen, sprinting forward with upraised sword. As he neared his stationary target, the sword flashed out in a horizontal cut aimed to decapitate the luckless man. At the last instant before the sword struck, the blindfolded man ducked under the glittering blade and lashed out with a kick that took the running swordsman full in the stomach. The man dropped to the ground, doubled over in agony, as the blindfolded man resumed his original stance.
Another man crept onto the field, apparently trying to drag his fallen comrade back to the sidelines. When he reached the writhing figure, however, instead of attempting to assist him, the new man sprang over him high into the air, launching a flying kick at the man with the blindfold. Again the blinded man countered, this time raising a forearm which caught the attacker’s leg and flipped it in the air, dumping him on his head.
At this point, the swordsman, who apparently was not as injured as he had seemed, rolled over and aimed a vicious cut at the defender’s legs. The blindfolded man took to the air, leaping over the sword, and drove a heel down into the swordsman’s face. The man fell back and lay motionless, bleeding from both nostrils.
Without taking his eyes from the screen, Tidwell raised his voice.
“Hey, Clancy.”
His friend sat up on the sofa, scattering folders onto the floor and blinking his eyes in disorientation.
“Yeah, Steve?”
“How do they do that?”
Clancy craned his neck around and peered at the screen. Three men were attacking simultaneously, one with an axe, two with their hands and feet. The blindfolded man parried, blocked, and countered, unruffled by death narrowly missing him at each turn.
“Oh, that’s an old martial artist’s drill—blindfold workouts. The theory is that if you lost one of your five senses, such as sight, the other four would be heightened to compensate. By working out blindfolded, you heighten the other senses without actually losing one.”
“Have you done this drill before?”
Clancy shook his head. He was starting to come into focus again.
“Not personally. I’ve seen it done a couple of times, but nothing like this. These guys are good, and I mean really good.”
“Who is that one, the powerhouse with the blindfold?”
Clancy pawed through his folders.
“Here it is. His name’s Aki. I won’t read off all the black belts he holds, I can’t pronounce half of them. He’s one of the originals. One of the founding members of the martial arts cults that formed after that one author tried to get the army to return to the ancient ways, then killed himself when they laughed at him.”
Tidwell shook his head.
“How many of the force came out of those cults?”
“About ninety-five percent. It’s still incredible to me that the Zaibatsu had the foresight to start sponsoring those groups. That was over twenty years ago.”
“Just goes to show what twenty years of training six days a week will do for you. Did you know some of the troops were raised into it by their parents? That they’ve been training in unarmed and armed combat since they could walk?”
“Yeah, I caught that. Incidentally, did I show you the results from the firing range today?”
“Spare me.”
But Clancy was on his feet halfway to his case.
“They were firing Springfields today,” he called back over his shoulder. “The old bolt-action jobs. Range at five hundred meters.”
Tidwell sighed. These firing range reports were monotonous, but Clancy was a big firearms freak.
“Here we go. These are the worst ten.” He waved a stack of photos at Tidwell. On each photo was a man-shaped silhouette target with a small irregularly shaped hole in the center of the chest.
“There isn’t a single-shot grouping in there you couldn’t cover with a nickel, and these are the worst.”
“I assume they’re still shooting five-shot groups.”
Clancy snorted.
“I don’t think Kumo has let them hear of any other kind.”
“Firing position?”
“Prone unsupported. Pencil scopes battlefield zeroed at four hundred meters.”
Tidwell shook his head.
“I’ll tell you, Clancy, man for man I’ve never seen anything like these guys. It’s my studied and considered opinion that any one of them could take both of us one-handed. Even…”—he jerked a thumb at the figures on the screen behind them—“. . . even blindfolded.”
On the screen, a man tried to stand at a distance and stab the blindfolded Aki with a spear, with disastrous results.
Clancy borrowed Tidwell’s drink and took a sip.
“And you’re still standing by your decision? About extending our entry date to the war by two months?”
“Now look, Clancy…”
“I’m not arguing. Just checking.”
“They aren’t ready yet. They’re still a pack of individuals. A highly trained mob is still a mob.”
“What’s Kumo’s reaction? That’s his established entry date you’re extending.”
“He was only thinking about the new ‘super-weapons’ when he set that date. He’s been trained from birth to think of combat as an individual venture.”
“Hey, those new weapons are really something, aren’t they?”
“Superweapons or not, those men have to learn to function as a team before they’ll be ready for the war. They said I would have free rein in choosing men and tactics, and by God, this time I’m not going into battle until they’re ready. I don’t care if it takes two months or two years.”
“But Kumo—”
“Kumo and I work for the same employer and they put me in charge. We’ll move when I say we’re ready.”
Clancy shrugged his shoulders.
“Just asking, Steve. No need to…whoa. Could you back that up?”
He pointed excitedly at the screen. Tidwell obligingly hit the hold button. On the screen, two men were in the process of attacking simultaneously from both sides with swords. Images of Clancy and Tidwell were also on the screen standing on either side of Kumo.
“How far do you want it backed?”
“Back it up to where you interrupt the demonstration.”
Tidwell obliged.
The scene began anew. There was an attacker on the screen cautiously circling Aki with a knife. Suddenly Tidwell appeared on the screen, closely followed by Clancy. Until this point they had been standing off-camera, watching the proceedings. Finally Tidwell could contain his feelings of skepticism no longer and stepped forward, silently holding his hand up to halt the action. He signaled the man with the knife to retire from the field, then turned and beckoned two specific men to approach him. With a series of quick flowing motions, he began to explain what he wanted.
“This is the part I want to see. Damn. You know, you’re really good, Steve. You know how long it would take me to explain that using gestures? You’ll have to coach me on it sometime. You used to fool around with the old Indian sign language a lot, didn’t you? Steve?”
No reply came. Clancy tore his eyes away from the screen and shot a glance at Tidwell. Tidwell was sitting and staring at the screen. Every muscle in his body was suddenly tense—not rigid but poised, as if he was about to fight.
“What is it, Steve? Did you see something?”
Without answering, Tidwell stopped the film, reversed it, then started it again.
Again the knifeman circled. Again the two mercenaries appeared on the screen. Tidwell punched the hold button and the action froze.
He rose from his chair and slowly approached the screen. Then he thoughtfully sipped his drink and stared at a point away from the main action. He stared at Kumo. Kumo, the old sensei who never showed emotion. In the split second frozen by the camera, at the instant the two men stepped past him and interrupted the demonstration, in that fleeting moment as he looked at Tidwell’s back, Kumo’s face was contorted in an expression of raw, naked hatred.