“Hope you’re right, bro,” the Armorer said. “Short hairs at the back of my neck don’t tell me there’s men with rifles all set up to take us. Then again, I could be wrong.”
“More likely try and waste lots of army,” Jak said. “Not just half dozen of us.”
“Lure the rest in, you mean?” Ryan considered that possibility. “Could be, Jak. Could be.”
Mashashige had stopped, holding up his hand, looking behind him for his foreign allies. “Now we go in,” he said.
Ryan stared him in the face, sensing the unspoken challenge. “Yeah, why not?” he said.
Chapter Nineteen
As soon as they were inside the heavy glass front doors, Ryan knew that they were safe in the rambling motel. The place smelled as though it had been empty for a good hundred years, the air stale and dull.
“If they were here, they’ve gone,” he said to Hideyoshi. “And they didn’t stay long.”
“Could have left a few suicide troops behind,” J.B. said to Ryan. “That was the Nip way in the Second World War in the Cific. Considered it an honor to take a few Yanks with them to their happy hunting grounds. Bite on a gren.”
Mashashige and his colleagues were already vanishing into the shadowy interior of the old motel. Behind Ryan, the afternoon sun was sinking lower, turning a deep red as it dropped away. It was becoming markedly colder.
“This could be good base for night,” Jak suggested, hands in his pockets, narrow shoulders hunched. “How far we chase them ronin?”
Ryan shook his head, seeing a long sofa squatting in a corner and sitting cautiously on it. “Don’t know, Jak. There’s all this honor crap that means so much to the shogun and his merry gang. Seems that the invasion of his palace really put the rats in the corn for him.”
J.B. walked around the lobby, looking at the pictures that hung on the walls. Most were stylized landscapes, some of them showing the strange foam-topped waves they’d seen before. “Strange, this place wasn’t stripped,” he said.
Yashimoto reentered the room, hearing the Armorer’s words and laughing harshly. “This was for gaijin . Many were massacred here in skydark time. Bodies thrown into sea. It was revenge against Americans for many bad things. So place is now haunted by spirits of dead.”
Mashashige appeared, almost invisible in the darkness. “But all that was generations ago, Takei. We are wiser now.”
He turned to Ryan. “The ronin were here but they have gone.”
He spoke to Hideyoshi. “Bring men and supplies. Here we will stay for the night. Any spirits left can do us no hurt.”
THE WAGS CARRIED large supplies of candles and lamps, and the old Best Eastern motel was soon filled with light and noise, dismissing the shadows to the blackest corners.
Cooking fires were lit in an overgrown atrium courtyard, with cauldrons of fish, vegetable soup and spiced rice soon bubbling merrily over them.
Hideyoshi was sitting with the outlanders in one of the lounges, golden light dancing off his balding pate. Like the rest of the samurai, he had peeled off his ornate, heavy armor and looked like a middle-aged storekeeper relaxing after work in a deep imitation-leather armchair.
“How many sentries you posted?” J.B. asked. “Place positioned like this should be easy to guard against a mass attack. Ocean on three sides of it.”
“One samurai and ten men, changing them every two hours. Lord Mashashige fears No, not fears. Thinks that the ronin might steal boats up the coast and try and attack us from the sea, up the cliffs.”
Ryan nodded. “Could be.”
He had scouted the motel, both inside and outside, and suspected that the sheer rock face down to the turbulent ocean might prove unscalable, which didn’t mean that desperate men might not attempt it.
In the old war wag days with the Trader, he’d watched as some jolt-crazed stickies had come at them through banks of coiled razor wire. They literally ripped their bodies apart, leaving chunks of bloody flesh and gobbets of muscle hanging on the wire, but still fighting to reach the norms.
Most of the shogun’s sizable army was camped in what had once been a ballroom or conference suite, a huge vault of a room, well over a hundred feet square, with a polished wood-block floor and heavy steel sec shutters over all of the windows, making it a good place to defend.
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