The body of the sec man, his mouth still jammed with dead locusts, lay where it had fallen.
For a quarter-mile around, the vegetation had been stripped, leaving only bare, broken branches and peeled stumps of trees.
Nothing else remained.
Nobody spoke for a minute or more, everyone wandering around, staring at the devastation.
Jak suddenly looked around. He knelt and laid the palm of his hand flat on the barren earth. “Quake,” he said.
Everyone froze. Mashashige stared at the white-haired boy. “I feel nothing,” he said.
“Nor do me,” Yashimoto agreed. “Perhaps it is the trembling of fear.”
“No.” Krysty was standing still, her emerald eyes tight shut. “I can feel it, too.”
Then Ryan knew that he could detect the faint tremor. It had been there for several seconds, but it just hadn’t forced itself into his consciousness. “Me, too,” he said.
It wasn’t a bad one, the familiar roaring, just below the surface of the earth, like a full-throttle wag.
A deep rattling rose from the stranded bullet train, just behind them, one of the stressed windows shattering into starring splinters of glass.
The land itself moved gently, back and forth, dust flying everywhere, damaged trees toppling over.
There was the sound of tortured metal, and the bullet train shifted a couple of feet sideways, settling deeper on the left, more of the remaining windows smashing.
Several of the sec men flung themselves onto the ground, hanging on as if they were participating in some sort of nightmare funfair ride.
Ryan kept his balance easily, riding the shifting dirt like the waves on a schooner. The noise began to diminish after a half minute, the dust settling, the world quickly returning to what passed for normal.
“It is over,” Mashashige pronounced. “Collect that body and we will return to the fortress.”
NOT LONG AFTER they had passed through the high wire fences and gates to the hunting zone, the ronin attacked again.
But it was a poor, halfhearted effort, a sporadic burst of firing, at maximum range. The shooting came from the farther side of a wide-bottomed, shallow valley, the puffs of smoke visible among the dark green trees.
There was time to dive for cover, and nobody was hit.
Ryan had a look through the scope of the Steyr, using the laser image enhancer. But the range was too great, the would-be assassins too well hidden in the woods.
“Should we go after them?” J.B. asked.
“They’d just slip away into the back country,” Ryan replied. “Soon realize they’re wasting ammo at this distance. Best keep our heads down.”
Yashimoto realized that the bullets that hissed among the leaves were spent rounds, offering very little danger. He stood, waving his drawn sword, screaming out boastful threats in a mixture of Japanese and American, echoing across the valley.
“Dung-eating corn rats! Belly-crawling gekokujo! Cowardly metsuke! Yakuza scum who would fuck your own obasan . Which of you will come and fight against Takei Yashimoto, man to man, hand to hand, throat to throat, sword to sword?”
One of the spent rounds pinged off the blade of the sword in his hand, almost knocking it from his grasp, making him aware that he was still in some danger. With a final flourish, the samurai made a hasty retreat among the trees.
As Ryan had predicted, the ronin realized that they were wasting precious ammo, and the shooting faded away into silence. One by one the Japanese and the outlanders stood, brushing dried leaves and dust from their clothes.
“They finished?” Krysty asked.
“For the time being.” Ryan picked a few twigs from her hair. “But I’d be surprised if that was the last we ever heard from them. Don’t strike me like men who are going to just leave and ride around the problem.”
Mashashige heard him and nodded. “It is truly said, Cawdor-san. But we will return to our humble home. Collect and train more men. And so it will go on.”
RYAN COULDN’T UNDERSTAND why such an efficient man as the shogun was so casual about the threat from the landless samurai, the ronin.
Hideyoshi had sent out messengers proclaiming that Lord Mashashige was keenly interested in recruiting new sec men for his palace, and at least two hundred of them had arrived, some traveling fifty or sixty miles on foot in less than forty-eight hours.