Rainfall

reached inside his jacket, going for a weapon.

    I stumbled over to his position just as he pulled free a pistol. Before he could raise it, I thrust the fingers of my cuffed hands hard into his throat, disrupting his phrenic and laryngeal nerves. Then I slipped my hands behind his neck and used the short space of chain between them to jerk his face down into my rising knee, again and again. He went limp and I tossed him to the side.

    I turned toward the door and saw that the other one had gotten to his feet. One hand was extended and I flash-checked it, saw the knife. Before I could react by picking something up and getting it between us, he charged.

    If he had stopped and collected himself he would have had a better chance, but he had decided to trade balance for speed. He thrust with the knife, but without focus. I had already taken a half step to the right, earlier than would have been ideal, but he couldn’t adjust. The blade just missed me. I spun counterclockwise, clamping onto his knife wrist with both hands. I tried to rotate him to the ground, aikido style, but he recovered his balance too quickly. We grappled like that for a second, and I had the sick knowledge that I was about to lose the knife hand.

    I yanked his wrist in the other direction and popped my right elbow into his nose. Then I spun in fast, crudely with no setup, taking a headlock with my right arm and grabbing the lapel of my jacket under his chin as though it was a
judogi
. The knife hand came loose and I hip-threw him with the headlock, my left hand coming in to strengthen the grip on his neck as his body sailed over me. When his torso had reached the extreme circumference of the throw, I jerked his neck hard in the other direction. A crack reverberated up my arms as his neck snapped where my forearm was pressed against it. The knife clattered to the ground and I released my grip.

    I sank to my knees, light-headed, and tried to think.
Which one of them had the handcuff keys
? I thought. I frisked the first guy, whose blue skin and swollen, protruding tongue told me the cartilage fracture had proven fatal, and found a set of car keys but not the handcuff keys. With the other guy I hit pay dirt. I pulled out what I was looking for, and a second later I was free. A quick search on the floor, and I was armed with one of their Berettas.

    I stumbled out the door and into the parking lot. As I had expected, there was one car left. I got in, slid the key into the ignition, fired up the engine, and raced out into the street.

    I knew where I was — just off the national highway, five or six kilometers from the entrance to the naval base. Standard operating procedure would be to stop Holtzer’s sedan before it could enter the grounds. Holtzer had left less than five minutes earlier. Given the traffic and the number of lights between here and the base, there might still be time.

    I knew the odds were massively against me, but I had one important advantage: I didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died. I just wanted to watch Holtzer go first.

    I wheeled left onto National Highway 16, flashing the high beams and working the horn to warn cars out of my way. I hit three red lights but forced my way through all of them, cars screeching to a halt on either side of me. Across from the local NTT building I saw that a red light ahead had created an opening in the oncoming traffic lane and I shot into it. I accelerated madly into oncoming traffic, leaning on the horn, then swung back into the correct lane just as the light changed so I could charge ahead of the cars that had been in front of me. I managed to buckle the seat belt as I drove, and noted with grim satisfaction that the car was equipped with an air bag. I had originally planned on tossing the flashbang into Holtzer’s car as a means of gaining entry. As I had told Midori, I was going to have to improvise.

    I was ten meters from the main gate when I saw the sedan turning right onto the access road to the base. A Marine guard in camouflage uniform was approaching, holding up his hands, and the driver-side window was coming down. There were a lot of guards, I saw, and they were doing the checks several meters ahead of the guard gate — the results of the anonymous bomb tip.

    There were too many cars in front of me. I wasn’t going to make it.

    The sedan’s driver-side window was down.

    I leaned on the horn, but no one moved.

    The guard looked up to see where the commotion was