Killer Warrior Read online

  The training was brutal. Intense and concentrated, seven days a week, with emphasis equally on technique and concentration. Both men spoke only Japanese, and for a week Sand had found it difficult again to eat a diet of all Japanese food. After a week, raw fish, rice, and seaweed tasted good, and the hard training lifted his heart back to his happy, satisfying years with Master Konuma and the Japanese men Sand had learned to call brothers.

  No doubt about it, Western living was too easy. “In the West, you do not walk, you ride,” said Master Kisao. “That is bad. Must walk. A man must walk. Strengthens his legs. Why do you sit on chairs in the West? You must remember, because you are much Japanese, no? Sit on the floor. Remember.”

  The black man smiled. It wasn’t easy to sit on the floor all the time, but the old man was right. Life was too easy in the West. Too easy. What wasn’t easy were the occasional feelings Sand had of not knowing who he was. He was black and American, yet he had spent the most important part of his life in the Far East, training intensely to become a fighting warrior belonging to another century.

  He smiled again. Black Samurai. Well, it wasn’t always confusing. He felt much better when he just accepted the fact that his life was different and would always be so. As long as he had the strength he could do and be what he wanted. Accept it, that was the best way. And don’t sit on chairs.

  Today, he had gotten out of bed at four in the morning, run five miles through the small darkened village, out into the fields and along the dirt road leading to the highway. He enjoyed the quiet the peace and the feeling that once more, he was pushing his heart and body to the limit.

  Memories of his Samurai brothers and Master Konuma flashed across his mind as he ran through the cold darkness, and for a few seconds, his heart ached with the pain of knowing he would never see them again. Putting that out of his mind, he ran, sweat trickling down his face and neck.

  Today’s practice was unusual. “Left side,” said Kisao, his wrinkled old face smiling at the thought of the difficulties Sand would soon have. “You right-handed, so today we practice left side. Punch, kick, defend, attack all with left side. You must be even strong.” The old man grinned.

  They began. Sand punched the air with his left hand, slow at first so the old man could see. “Tighten fist. Don’t keep your fingers loose.”

  Tightening his fist, the black man continued to punch, a little faster, then at a sharp command from the old man, he punched with all of his speed and power, his sweat-dampened karate uniform snapping with the precision of his punch.

  “Right fist,” said the old man. “Draw it back more, all the way, and keep your elbow down more. Down.” More punches, over and over, again and again, the old man’s small slanted eyes missing nothing. Sand’s arm ached at the shoulder and his elbow burned with fatigue. “Faster,” said the old man. “You are slowing down. Faster.” Tensing his face, his lips pressed tightly together with determination, the black Samurai threw a murderous punch at an imaginary opponent in front of him.

  That night, he fell exhausted into bed, careful to lie on his back or on his right side. His left arm and leg felt as though someone had been scraping at the muscle and nerves with broken glass.

  The next morning. More running, his left leg moving stiffly but not hurting as much as it had last night. A light breakfast of fruit and rice, followed by 45 minutes of cleaning the small practice area by himself. Seconds after he finished, the old man stood in the doorway.

  In both hands, he held chains. “Come. This morning you practice outside.”

  Ten minutes later, the black Samurai stood in front of a thick tree on top of a small hill overlooking the river. Behind him, the sound of the water rushing over rocks was as sharp and as clear as the chilled early-morning air he breathed.

  The chains were attached to a steel hook imbedded in the bark of the thick tree, and he stood holding the ends, a few inches of chain wrapped around each wrist.

  In a soft voice, the old man commanded, “Now.”

  And swiftly, as though trying to flip a man or perhaps pull the tree out of the ground by its roots, the black man turned his back to the tree, bending his knees forward until they almost touched the ground, leaning as far forward as he could go. He pulled on the chains with all his strength.

  Cold steel links cut into his hands. The muscles of his bare back bunched up and the veins leaped from his neck.

  “Stop,” said the old man.

  Sand relaxed, letting the chains slack.

  “That is how you must do your throwing techniques. You must turn fast, even faster than you did. Above all, you must have total commitment to the throw. Hands, legs, the whole body must be in the throw. And your mind, you must use all of your mind, just as you did just now. Now again, this time faster.”

  The cold wind blew across Sand’s bare chest, now damp with perspiration. Gripping the chains tightly, he took a deep breath, then with an incredible burst of speed, pivoted, yelling “Kiaaaii!” and pulling on both chains as hard as he could.

  Ping!

  One chain burst, several links flying through the darkness.

  The black Samurai fell forward to one knee, one end of the broken chain in his hand, the other end of the chain on the ground behind him. Breathing hard, he looked at the old man, now standing with his mouth slightly opened in surprise. Quickly, the old man recovered, looking from the tree, then to the black man now on one knee staring at him, muscular black chest heaving with his mighty effort.

  Bowing his head slightly, the old man said softly, “Samurai!”

  Sand’s hands were bleeding, and there was a sharp pain across his back. But with a mixture of humility and pride, he lowered his head and answered, “Thank you, sensei.”

  He had five more days to go when the message arrived. He slept in Master Kisao’s small plain home, and that’s where the message found him. Late at night, a car pulled up and a fat Japanese man with blue-tinted eyeglasses walked up the red-and-gray flagstone walk and knocked on the door.

  He waited while Sand read the cable. “Emergency. Important. Imperial Hotel. Mr. Gray.”

  Mr. Gray. Code name for William Baron Clarke, former President of the United States, a Texan with $500 million, plus a strong sense of justice, and an incredibly up-to-date file on people he called “sumbitches with power and a whole lot of mean in their bones.”

  William Baron Clarke. Nicknamed the Baron. More than a Texan with a fat wallet, he was also a man who had molded the acquisition and use of power into an art. He knew power, loved it, caressed it with hands and heart, but at the age of 64 realized that unless he did some good with it, there would be no point to his life.

  Together, he and Robert Sand had gone after those who used power to destroy others while enriching themselves. “You got the skill, the balls and the brains, son,” he’d said to Sand. “I got the money and the power and I got my fingers and eyeballs everywhere. Together we can pull somebody’s foot off somebody else’s throat.”

  They had teamed to destroy the men who had killed the black Samurai’s 22 Samurai brothers and Master Konuma.

  But there were others who needed destroying.

  And that’s what the message was about.

  And with the Baron, emergency meant exactly that.

  The taxi driver watched with eyes hidden behind blue-tinted glasses. He had been told to wait.

  In his room, Sand packed his few things swiftly, looked around the room once more, feeling the pain of leaving something close to him. In a sense, it was like leaving Konuma over again. As he turned to walk through the door, Kisao stood silently in front of him.

  Sand looked down at the floor. “I must leave, sensei.”

  “I know. I shall miss you, Robert-san. Thank you for what you have done for me.”

  Sand looked up, slightly puzzled. “I did nothing for you, sir. You helped me.”

  The old man smiled. “In you, Konuma-sensei lived again. You brought my friend to me, if only for a little while. You brought the past alive once more, for a short time. You are Samurai.” His small wrinkled face quivered with emotion, and his eyes grew bright with tears and memories. “Thank you,” he whispered. He turned and was gone from the doorway.

  For a few seconds, Robert Sand stood in the silent empty room, his small suitcase in one hand. Then with his fingers he gently brushed the tears beginning to fill his eyes and slowly walked from the room and into the dark hallway. His lips were pressed tightly together and his jaw trembled as he fought to hold back the tears.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Mission

  “VALBONNE SELLS GUNS TO anybody,” said William Baron Clarke, rolling up his white shirt sleeves, then reaching for the glass of bourbon and branch water on the small table near the long black couch. “Been harder than hell trying to get a picture of him, and for me that’s sayin’ something. I got a damn good file on the bastard, though.”

  It was a good one. The Baron had informants all over the world, in governments, in business, even in somebody’s bed when need be. He paid them well, cash and tax-free, on time and steadily. In return, he wanted constant reports on anyone about to start worldwide trouble.

  The information poured into him like water bursting through a broken dam. In the cellar of his sprawling Texas ranch house sitting in the middle of 1,250,000 acres of land were cases of microfilm, folders, files, photographs on thousands of people. Some were future trouble, others were immediate trouble.

  Some of those on file were his contacts in different countries, on different levels of governments, businesses, in dozens of other areas. They collected the information and passed it on, and William Baron Clarke, not too many years out of the White House, remained one of the most informed men in the world on anything and anybody he wanted to know a
bout.

  What Clarke wanted to know was who was using his power to turn the world into more of a hell than God had made it. When he found out, that person became the mission. To the mission, the Baron brought information, power, money, influence. Robert Sand brought the heart, mind and skill of a Samurai warrior.

  The Baron trusted no one he had once worked with. He’d learned that much from politics, where he’d made more than a few enemies. But he trusted the black Samurai, who because of his training with Master Konuma served moral right rather than the right made by might. It was Sand who had said, “Maybe we can’t fight city hall, but we can burn it down.” The Baron had laughed when he heard it, but his eyes were bright with its truth.

  Now he sat in a gigantic penthouse suite in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, drinking iced bourbon as though he were fighting 120-degree Texas heat.

  “Damn Frenchman is a sumbitch, better believe it. He’s selling guns to them Arab terrorists and hijackers. He’s also selling guns to the Arabs in the Mideast. Jews too, if they got the money. He’s selling to some bad-ass people over in Ireland, and at least five countries in South America. He’s got dealings in Africa, too.”

  “Where is he getting his supply?” asked Sand, pouring himself a glass of water.

  “Steals some. Buys some. Pays off guards, warehouse people. Kills if he has to. Picked up a lot of stuff in Vietnam, a lot of it sad to say from some greedy Americans and South Vietnamese. I just learned recently that he came across three goddam huge caches of weapons the Nazis had put away for a rainy day years ago. Found thousands of rifles, pistols, automatic weapons buried in the North African desert somewhere by Rommel. And he came across two piles of guns the Nazis hid in the Swiss mountains. In today’s gun-happy world, all that stuff is worth a lot of money.”

  Sand drank the entire glass of water, then turned the empty glass around in his hand. “Too much of a coincidence those German guns turning up at the same time.”

  The Baron grinned, his tanned hawk-nosed face filling with creases and lines. “You are good, son, you goddam as hell are good. No coincidence at all. Somebody told Valbonne about those Nazi guns, and make no mistake about it those guns shoot just as well as anything made yesterday. Hell, there’s people out in the world killing each other with 60-, 70-year-old guns. Valbonne’s getting ready for something big; that’s one of the reasons why he learned about those guns.”

  Sand looked at the palms of his hands. The scars from the chain were healing well. He thought of the old, gentle-looking man he left two hours ago. “A lot can happen in almost a month.”

  “Sorry to pull you out, but I guess I’d better make it short ’cause you got some travelin’ to do. You’re heading to Europe soon as possible. Valbonne’s collecting people. That’s right, people. He’s collecting top German scientists from World War II, who worked on Germany’s atomic bomb project. We stomped their butts before they could come up with the bomb, but they was only a hair from doin’ it at the time. Some of their scientists are now working in America, some in Russia, some in Egypt. Valbonne’s now got a handful of them working for him on something that—well, dammit, I find it hard to believe, but we got to look into it.”

  He stopped, then looked at Sand. “Hear me carefully, son, ’cause it ain’t the bourbon talkin’. I’ve got reason to believe that the goddam Frenchman is buildin’ his own atomic bomb.”

  Sand lifted his eyes to the Baron’s face. “Why?”

  “That’s why I’m in Japan. You heard of a fella called Gozo Saraga?”

  Sand knew the name. A Japanese shipowner, wealthy and militaristic, always calling for Japan to resume her days of military glory. He had read about Saraga for years and knew he was a potential troublemaker. “What’s the connection between Saraga and Valbonne?”

  “I been keepin’ an eye on Valbonne since the beginning of the year, and sooner or later, I figured we got to stand in his way. Well, it’s sooner. If he’s buildin’ that A-bomb, and that’s what we both got to find out, then he plans to sell it to Saraga. I’m here because one of my informants close to Saraga says that Saraga has been talkin’ about getting even for what America did to his family in World War II.”

  “They were in Nagasaki,” said Sand. “Saraga’s always saying that in his speeches, books and interviews. He’s never forgotten their death. Claims he lost 29 members of his family in that atomic bombing. For him, I guess the atomic bomb falls every day.”

  “Better believe it. My informant, who I’ll brief you on later, says that Saraga’s feelin’ happier than a pig in shit these days on account of he feels that he’s gonna be gettin’ even soon. So far, there’s not much to go on, but—ah hell, Sand, I just might as well come out and say. My man thinks Saraga’s planning to A-bomb New York City.”

  The black Samurai frowned, his eyes on the six-foot-four Texan.

  All he could say was, “You serious?”

  “I didn’t trust more news on this comin’ in by letter, tape or phone call. I came here to get it in person, and when I got it, I grabbed hold of you. That’s the Lord’s honest truth, on my sainted mother’s grave. That yellow bastard—’scuse me, son—plans to A-bomb New York, with Valbonne’s help. At least that’s what it looks like, and that’s why I need you now.”

  Sand walked a few steps away from the Baron, turned, and frowned. “Unbelievable. What’s in it for Valbonne?”

  “Same as he gets for gunrunning. Money, a lot of it. A hundred million dollars is the figure being kicked around.”

  Sand nodded his head several times. “Smart. He steals an atomic bomb, or even tries to, and in seconds somebody comes down hard on his head. This way, he builds his own and he doesn’t have to worry about a knock on the door. Smart.”

  “Too goddam smart, if you ask me. I’ve got some people near him too, and let me tell you they’re scared shitless. Valbonne’s a mean sumbitch, and other people’s blood is his hobby. He’s got a bunch of hard cases workin’ for him. That’s why it’s been hard for me to get a pitcher of him. Got a faded snapshot over on the desk, taken when he was at an airport in Saigon a few years back. Check it out before you leave. Watch out for one of his men in particular, a full-blooded Apache named Mangas Salt. He’s big as a house, and is as tough as any of his redskin ancestors.”

  Sand moved the corner of his mouth in a smile. “Apache?”

  “File on him over there, too. Born in Arizona, served in Vietnam, six feet five of pure mean. Keeps the old ways of his people and hates white men, particularly American white men.”

  “Since when is that a personality defect?” asked the black man.

  “When you start castrating them or hanging them upside down over a fire and sit around watching until their skull splits open and their brains leak out. And that’s just a few signs of his displeasure. He can be a helluva lot meaner ’n that.”

  “How did he and Valbonne get together?”

  “Check the file. Salt deserted the Army in Vietnam, joined the Viet Cong, and fought against the American Army like his ancestors did a hundred years ago. Met Valbonne when the Frenchman was in North Vietnam on a huge gun deal. They been tight ever since. There’s more to it than that, but it’s all on paper. It’s that bomb that grabs me by the cubes. Saraga’s got a lot of money and a lot more hate for America. He’s been the cause of a couple of riots just this past year, trying to get the Japanese government to go big on the military.”

  Sand knew that. There were those in Japan who wanted the old days of military power and expansion to return. But Saraga was different. He wanted that too, but he also wanted America pulled down to its knees. With his money and Valbonne’s greed, anything was possible.

  “Hell, son,” said the Baron, reaching for the bourbon bottle, “Valbonne’s sold everything you can think of. Rifles, pistols, bombs, planes, cannon, walkie talkies, you name it. But you think about it. He’s got a big ego, and he would get a kick out of being the first man in history ever to sell an atomic bomb. Damn, he don’t care what happens when he sells a piece of machinery that kills. If this stuff checks out, and something tells me it’s gonna, Valbonne’s got $100 million, plus some new guns his new German friends put him on to. And Saraga? He’s set to get the thing an Oriental prizes a whole lot—revenge.”