“Woof!”
The Boss began by sending three “bullets.” He shipped them off from Toyama Port on a fishing boat late one night, and from there they transferred mid-ocean to the cargo vessel that carried them to a port in the Primorsky Krai. After that, he sent seven more bullets. Trained assassins. Up to this point, they were all new recruits, youngsters. Show us what you can f*cking do for the organization, boys, he’d told the new recruits, all barely in their twenties. Think of it as a sort of hustle. Go pop a few of them f*ckhead Ruskies for me.
He had done well, he thought, put some fear into them. Can’t have ’em f*cking besmirching the old escutcheon now, can we? And in fact, the young guns had brought in a whopping sum. A cool forty million yen per head. Japanese yen. Even when you factored in “transport fees” for illegal entry and the various other little presents they had to distribute, and even if you offered the bullets—or their families, in some cases—a reward for seeing their jobs through to a successful conclusion, the profits that came streaming into the organization were still unf*ckingbelievable. And of course, the Boss mused, it wasn’t just that nice cash reward; I also set it up so they could spend the eve of the attack whooping it up with beautiful white chicks. Sexy Slavic sisters. Blond-haired blue-eyed supermodel-class hotties, f*ck yeah. Some harem. Bet they knocked themselves out, lucky pricks. Then I had ’em batten the hatches with vodka and caviar. Very nice indeed. Shows what a f*cking tenderhearted yakuza daddy I’ve been.
The man—the Boss as they called him—cast his thoughts back, agony written all over his face. The thing was, the bullets were just that. Bullets. They went out and didn’t come back. In the beginning, they’d had better than a fifty percent survival rate, but now it had sagged below twenty percent. Only one in five made it back alive, in other words. If that. But what choice did he have? He had to keep sending the poor f*ckers in. Stormtroopers. He hunted around for hit men who wouldn’t just follow the money, going through one of his “brothers” from his time in the clink. He located four, trained ’em to do their work as bullets, and sent ’em off on a Russian transport vessel, this time from Niigata Port. He snuck ’em in without dicking around, no stupid paperwork. Next he picked up some f*cking traitors. Dickheads who’d betrayed their gang and were lying low under aliases, trying to keep from getting caught in the wide net their old bosses cast. He sent off eight of them, one after another. Gave ’em good tools. A nice cache of pistols: Tokarevs; Makarovs; Italian-made automatics; M-16s that had found their way out of American bases, now equipped with 40mm grenade launchers; Uzis; and last but not least twenty-three hand grenades and seventeen sticks of dynamite. Plus some other stuff.
These “soldiers” kept getting more flashy all the time, putting more bang into their work. One guy had gone into a nightclub the police ran jointly with the Russian mafia and shot the hell out of the place with a submachine gun. Miraculously the attacker managed to get out of the club alive, not that it mattered—they found his body in Nakhodka Port. Others had taken aim at two successive chiefs of police, both times bringing about a change in personnel. They slaughtered executives in a bank the mafia controlled. After the organization started using yakuza from outside, though, the bullets’ survival rate sank below ten percent. Soon, no doubt, it’d be grazing zero. Still, this little hustle had already brought in more than six hundred million yen in pure profit. How the hell could this be? the Boss wondered. What was going on? he asked himself. He didn’t know the answer. And he had no choice, he had to keep sending these f*cking stormtroopers in. How could he refuse? They had his daughter.
The client had his daughter.
It doesn’t f*cking make sense, the Boss moaned. How many months had his stomach been hurting like this? Sure, I expect to be threatened, used. But why are the f*ck are they paying us these fees? He knew the Russian market. You could hire a hit man, some guy with no fear of death, for a lot less; you could take a zero or two off the figure they were paying him, even if the target was a policeman or a kingpin type. And you could do it domestically. What the hell was this client thinking? The Boss had lost twenty pounds over the past few months. He’d grown thin. Skinny, even. He couldn’t make sense of the situation. He had no idea what effect these dramatic attacks were having on the local population. No idea how a certain paper—a dissident tabloid specializing in yellow journalism—was fanning the flames. He didn’t even know where all this cash was coming from. Who was behind the client, funding him?
Someone, he was sure, was behind the client.
Shooting pain in his stomach. Blood in his urine.
His daughter had been taken hostage.
The Boss sent over three more bullets. The client kept making demands. ELIMINATE THE TARGET. I mean, what the hell? The Boss clutched his stomach with both hands. What’s the plan here, what the f*ck are you trying to do? The information the client sent regarding the targets’ location, routine, and protection was always precise, detailed, and up-to-date. It’s better than a damned spy flick, for f*ck’s sake! And the second we pop the target, the money comes through, wired into one of the organization’s underground bank accounts. What are we, businessmen? the Boss asks. Speaking to himself, of course, since there was no one else to ask. It’s just another kind of business. How many f*cking ulcers have I got in my stomach now? Already the supply of yakuza-on-the-run was drying up; he was having to rely on non-yakuza. F*ckheads who had been drummed out of the criminal world forever by their own groups. And he had to hire these guys as bullets. Totally f*cking against the rules. I’m no underworld daddy, not anymore. Forget underworld, this is just plain old hell. But who the f*ck cares. I can’t f*cking let it bother me. After all, the Boss thinks, becoming defiant, this is the best hustle ever!
Until then, what little income the organization brought in had consisted of protection money from bars and restaurants, betting on baseball, underground casinos, black-market lending, various degrees of blackmail, ranging in size from tall to venti. They didn’t deal much in speed. The key, f*ckers, is how much money you can launder, the Boss was always saying. Use your heads and f*cking rake the shit in. The twenty-first century is right around the corner, and then it’ll all be business! Business! That’s what we’re aiming for with this Russo-Japanese joint venture!
Only…was this the kind of business they’d wanted? No, no. The Boss had chosen defiance—that was the way to go. Just think how much his men had suffered trying to gather the fees they had to send to the main branch. How much f*cking pointless suffering they had been through. This business was his reward for all that, as their underworld daddy.
Or rather, their hell daddy.
Shit. Hell…hell. Whatever.
He tried to reason his way out of the dilemma. His stomach twitched. It hurt like f*ck. He had diarrhea too. The client was using him, it was clear. That was one way of looking at it. He was just a piece in someone else’s game, a pawn, the king of the pawns. You could look at it that way. ELIMINATE THE TARGET. ELIMINATE. ELIMINATE. The three bullets he’d just sent over brought in more than a hundred million yen. Again. Business. What am I supposed to do, my daughter’s been taken hostage! My f*cking hands are tied.
I just have to keep sending over more bullets.
He would send another.
Recruiting even non-yakuza wasn’t easy anymore. Still he demanded that arrangements be made. Arrangements couldn’t not be made. They had his daughter. Though he realized, in some shadowy corner of his heart, that maybe this was just an excuse. Maybe all the spiritual agonies he was suffering, the blistering pain in his stomach, the boys the organization had sacrificed…maybe none of it had anything to do with his daughter.
He clutched his stomach. F*ck, have I gotten skinny.
Losing my imposing presence.
He had a bad feeling about all this. And his instinct was right. The main branch registered its displeasure. They were scraping the bottom of the barrel, and they hadn’t yet found a taker. One of the main branch’s advisers came as a messenger. He implied, without actually saying so, that the Boss was guilty of actions at odds with the Way of the Yakuza. It was perfectly clear what the problem was. Perhaps, the Boss thought, he’d gone overboard in trying to find his bullets. The messenger told him of various other unpleasant rumors.
Then, finally, he cut to the chase. “So you mean to start a war in Russia?”
The Boss gaped. Had someone ratted on him?
You’re sending hit men over, aren’t you? the adviser shouted. The main branch will not stand for out-of-control violence of that sort! He went on bellowing. It dawned on the Boss that they must have heard about the cash flowing in from the far side of the Japan Sea. Aha, he thought. So that’s it. They noticed how well we’re doing, so they did some poking around.…We made a bit too much, I guess.
The messenger’s next statement confirmed his suspicions. “The main branch is considering your expulsion. Your territory would go right to the Chief. They’re ready to replace you. If you want to put things back in order, it’ll cost five hundred million. You’ve got the money, I’m sure. You’ve been making it hand over fist in Russia.”
“Five hundred…million?”
“That’s what the main branch wants.”
They did their homework, the Boss thought. With our f*cking coffers as larded as they are, we could send ’em five hundred million in a flash. And they want us to hand it over, just like that? Pay our dues? You must be f*cking kidding, the Boss thought. The man they called the Boss, who had just been threatened with the loss of that title. My boys died for that money. The first guys I sent over as bullets were my own, you know, official members of this organization! They laid their lives on the line, all for my little darling. And you’re telling me to f*cking cough up that money? Cash I got at the price of my boys’ lives?
No boss would agree to that.
Not even a hell boss.
The messenger gazed coolly at the Boss. As if to say, So, what’s it going to be? You dick, the Boss thought. You think you’ve got me by the balls, and you’re laughing inside. You’re f*cking chuckling. Messenger from the main branch, my ass. Think you can give me advice, do me the favor of sharing your great wisdom? Just trying to get your bit, you f*ckhead. No sooner had this thought flashed into his mind than he put his hand behind his back, lifting his suit jacket. He kept a Beretta tucked into his belt for protection. He whipped it out. He fired. The gun. At the f*ckhead.
Three shots.
No, four shots.
Then, without so much as a glance at the body, he grabbed his stomach and moaned.
The incident had taken place in a closed room. The Boss’s office at headquarters was totally soundproof, bulletproof, constructed so that it would be safe even if people smashed their way into the building—or, conversely, even if his boys were working some bastard over, torturing him. The Boss took three or four small bottles of medicine out of a cabinet, grabbing at them like straws, and gulped them down. Digestive tonics. He rocked his head back and forth a few times, trying to reset himself. He rubbed his hands down his front where the esophagus was, to make sure the medicine was on its way. Phew, he sighed. The gastric acid in his breath stung, but not so much he couldn’t bear it.
He dropped himself into a leather chair.
He picked up the remote control on the table. This one worked both the TV and the video deck. The TV was positioned in front of him. He turned it on. The screen flashed white for a second, then faded to black. The video player was already going. There was already a tape in the deck. He rewound it for a while, then pressed PLAY.
His daughter appeared.
My darling.
She sat in a cold-looking room with a dog, glaring into the camera. Glaring, that is, through the screen at him. At the man they called the Boss, her father, him, himself. A f*cking hostage video. The client in Russia sent them at regular intervals. This was the latest. Nothing had changed. The girl still cursed at her father. The same foul-mouthed harangue. “F*cking dick,” she spat. The only thing that had changed was the dog. The dog looked like he was guarding her. He’d been a puppy the first time he appeared in a video, but in no time he had grown into an adolescent, and now he could have been called a young dog. The dog, too, glared into the camera.
A girl and a dog, staring, unblinking, straight at the lens.
Fact is, they looked creepy.
They looked heartless.
C’mon, the dog too? the Boss thought. Even the dog looks at me like that!
What, are you sizing me up? Seeing how much weight I carry?
Darling, the man thought again. My darling by my first wife. F*cking little brat. He stared at the screen, transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away. He remained slumped in the leather chair as if in a trance. “All the shit I’ve been through for this brat…” he said, aloud this time. All the men I’ve sacrificed, he continued voicelessly, in his mind. Then, once again, he spoke aloud. “My child…my own child. You think I f*cking love you? Damn you!”
The second he’d said those words, the floodgates broke. Okay, it’s true, it was my fault. I’m the one who forged that f*cking parasite’s death certificate to make it look like she’d been sick. I would never have married that dumb bitch if my uncle hadn’t forced me. What was I gonna do, he would have made me chop off a finger. Besides, I needed someone like her if I was gonna set up my own organization, starting so late in the game, in my thirties already. Except that she was f*cking useless. She was a totally hard-core f*cking stupid dumbass bitch. So I popped her. Dirtied my f*cking hands with her. That was good, though, because that way I was able to make my woman official, make her my woman. The Boss’s second wife was only twenty-three. She was tough. She looked after the young guys in the organization real well. The boys. They looked up to her, the Boss’s woman. They called her Big Sister. She gave me a daughter too, another daughter, bound to me by blood. A year-and-a-half old. The half sister of that one there…that one.
I hate her. The Boss admitted it. He hated that darling in the videos. But even I couldn’t bring myself to pop my own daughter. We’re father and daughter, after all, so I let you live, as if I had no alternative. Even after I killed that stupid bitch mother, which I could do because she was nothing to me. And just look what happened! The way she glares at me, that girl. The way she glares at her stepmother. Who did she think she was? And then she started swelling, getting so fat it was like someone put a hex on her. As if her dead mother’s deadweight shifted to her. Her face got pudgy. She was in elementary school, but you could hardly believe it. Her wrists bulged, bulged more. My god, I thought, she looks like a f*cking fat infant! What, is she f*cking imitating her newborn sister…her half sister? Man, is she creepy. And ugly. And the way she looks at me, revulsion in her eyes. And demanding. I want this, that, that. I WANT IT! She screamed, and I bought the shit. Bought everything, no matter what. Everyone has it, so buy me one! That was never her game. She told me, ordered me, to buy things no one had. Forced me.
Buy me Gucci so people don’t f*cking piss around with me.
Tokyo Disneyland is for middle-class f*cks. Take me to Florida.
I felt like I was being tested, so I did everything she asked. It got so I thought she was always silently asking me, You wouldn’t, by any chance, happen to have popped my mother?
She couldn’t have guessed, there was no way. And yet…
It’s just my imagination.
And every time I gave her anything, the brat got fatter. Creepily obese.
And then, finally, when I was going to Russia for a business talk, she ordered me to take her along, take her where ordinary f*cks, laymen, couldn’t go. And we were attacked, and she was taken hostage.
By the client.
“I’ve had enough,” the Boss said. “I’m gonna end this with my own hands.”
He stopped the video. He stood up. For the first time, he looked long and hard at the body of the messenger from the main branch, this new Buddha, lying in the corner. Oh shit, he said. But his tone was cheery. How old am I? Thirty-…nine, that’s right. Still in my prime. Pecker’s still in working order. If you think I’m gonna be a pawn in someone else’s game, f*cking think again. He pushed open the door to his office. Walked out into the hall. Went in to say hi to the boys in the main office. His expression was bright, relaxed.
“Gather the soldiers,” he said. “All of ’em.”
You mean…all of them? they asked.
“Yup. We’re crossing the Japan Sea. It’s war.”
What the hell, why not set up an organization in Russia? Take over Siberia, maybe, the Boss thought with a chuckle. A hacking sort of chuckle: Kekh kekh kekh kekh. He hadn’t noticed, but his stomach wasn’t hurting anywhere near as bad. He briefly explained the situation to the guy in charge of the boys and gave instructions for disposing of the body, told him to find someone to take care of the slime, say some hothead got out of control or something, find a way to buy some time.
But, uh, Boss…what are we going to do then? someone asked.
“Hmm? We’re gonna pray. Pray for the f*cking main branch once it’s f*cking dead. But first, we’re gonna take some Russian mafia heads to the Chechens as a souvenir.”
After that, the Boss flew to the Primorsky Krai, taking twenty-seven men along. He set up an unmarked office in the city there, in the Russian Far East, at a cost of about twenty million yen. Japanese yen. There was no longer any need to scramble searching for non-yakuza recruits. Because he had ditched the middleman: he and his men were the bullets now. They were the stormtroopers. Two days after they arrived in Siberia, they had already killed the target, acting on information from the client, and confirmed with the local police that he had indeed been a bigwig in the Russian mafia. It had cost about five hundred thousand yen to establish a pipeline to a certain faction within the police. He blew another two hundred thousand yen on the cover-up, to make sure the attack wouldn’t be traced to them. They went to pay their respects to the Chechen mafia, taking along the bigwig’s head and a gift of thirty thousand dollars. US dollars.
Things were going even better than the Boss had expected. And for good reason: the bullets he had been sending in, one after the other, had turned the region into a sort of f*cked-up war zone. The Chechens and the Russians were both weakened. The two main organizations were practically bleeding each other to death, and the power vacuum this had created attracted all sorts of little dipshit crime rings from the rest of the country. And the local underworld was internationalizing too. Heroin was streaming in from the Korean continent. Rumor was the North Korean secret service was bringing it in with help from the Koryo-saram—common knowledge among the criminal class. Amphetamines and a nice selection of coca-derived drugs were shipped in from China. And there was traffic in the other direction too: Russian prostitutes sent off to Macao, Beijing, Shanghai. The Triad had a monopoly over this “trade.” At the same time, mafia organizations based in Central Asian countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States were trying to grab a slice of the pie by providing higher quality drugs. Minor interorganizational battles were popping up.
The Boss was puzzled by the situation on the ground. Can the bullets I’ve been sending be responsible for all this shit? As it happened, the penetration of various East Asian criminal organizations had rendered the Japanese bullets’ presence much less noticeable. They had draped the bullets in a cloak of invisibility, as it were.
And to top it all off, the yakuza’s killing of Russian mafia bigwigs and others with vested interests in their doings had been rather fancifully interpreted as an expression of the honorable Yakuza Way. Everyone knew that members of a Japanese organization had visited this city for important business talks with the Russian mafia, only to suffer a fatal attack at a hotel restaurant. Immediately after that, the yakuza had cut all ties with the Russians. And then the assassinations began. No doubt that’s how they do things, those yakuza. So people imagined. Yakuza don’t listen to excuses, they adhere absolutely to…something. It was revenge, with rage thrown in for good measure. Honorable conduct, in other words. So people believed, mistakenly. The rest of the criminal underworld found the yakuza kind of creepy. Not that they couldn’t understand their point of view. Their method of gaining satisfaction was, after all, not unlike the Chechen’s krovnaya mest, blood revenge.
So when the Boss showed up on the Chechen mafia’s doorstep with the head of an enemy boss and thirty thousand dollars as an icebreaker, they were willing to form an alliance. They responded right away to the yakuza’s money and strength. Even if it was a creepy kamikaze sort of strength. The Boss wasn’t entirely pleased by their success, though. No repeat performance of that hacking laugh: Kekh kekh kekh kekh. Things were only tilted to their advantage now because someone was running the game. That was why the Chechens were so eager to jump at any cash that came their way, because this constant battle was wearing them down.
Yeah. All this shit, it was all the client’s doing. He was orchestrating it all. I’m going to smash that f*cker, the Boss thought. He’d made up his mind. He shelled out seven hundred thousand yen to develop a relationship with a group of retired veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. This got him a free pass to a market where you could get all kinds of old Soviet firearms. You could buy anything there, dirt cheap, even antiaircraft missiles. In three days, all twenty-seven of his boys were heavily armed. It cost him about sixty thousand yen per man. Cheap. He expended another 1.4 million yen on weaponry for his own use, including four trench mortars and cases of cartridges. He had the Chechens introduce him to a “launderer” free of charge. He had the guy figure out the stops the last payment made after the client wired it, for popping the bigwig, backtracking from the unlicensed bank in Japan where it ended up. The money had only been wired the day before, so there were still plenty of clues to go by. He told the launderer he’d cover unlimited expenses and give him a bonus of five million yen if he succeeded. Two days later, the launderer requested that he bring in a micro-organization specializing in technocrime. The Boss had to pay that group three hundred thousand yen just to get acquainted.
Russia produced the best hackers in the world. It kept the twentieth-century international underworld well stocked with sophisticated techies. For two million yen the Boss got the undivided attention of a rare specialist in the illegal use of computer systems for a half day. That night, he ended up paying the launderer a total of 7.5 million yen, but he had the tracks he was after. They led to the city’s old Communist Party headquarters—to a particular room in the building, in fact. They led to a statue of Lenin that had somehow remained standing, and to a secret meeting that had taken place at its base. The Boss then got in touch with four former KGB officers whom he hired for between five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand yen each to assemble the last few pieces of the puzzle.
See there? the Boss said. Just like the movies. You want pounded rice? Buy it at the f*cking pounded-rice store.
When I’ve grabbed the tiger’s tail, I don’t let go.
He spent 1.9 million yen on a covered military truck. This wasn’t from the black market. It had been sold off by a private company, and he bought it more or less legally. All twenty-eight of the yakuza, including the Boss, piled inside. Four men sat up front; everyone else went in the rear. They wore fur coats and felt boots, and were armed not only with guns but also with items that seemed appropriate for an interorganizational war. They left the city at daybreak, heading west. Grasslands sailed by the windows. Then wetlands. Then grasslands again, and a graveyard for old cars. The heaped-up bodies had been stripped of their parts, left as mere shells. After that came a stretch of houses. A suburban farming town, apparently. They kept pigs. The grasslands changed into plowed fields. It wasn’t clear what they were growing, but whatever it was there was a lot of it. The roads had been sprinkled with sand. Plenty of sand, to keep the pavement from icing over. Clouds of sand billowed in the truck’s wake like smoke from a signal fire. Once again they plunged into an expanse of uncultivated grasslands, and then, four hours after they had set out, they caught sight of the dense dark taiga ahead, outlined against the horizon.
Up ahead, the Boss saw. He gripped a map in his hands. A map on which the location of a town that wasn’t on any map had been drawn in, precisely, by hand. The map had cost him twelve million yen. There it was. A closed city, left over from the Soviet era. There he was. The client. All of a sudden, the Boss felt like he might, at last, be able to laugh again. You want pounded rice? Buy it at the f*cking pounded-rice store indeed, he laughed. No one beats us yakuza when it comes to a scrap.
Man-made structures came into view over the taiga, in silhouette, high above the treetops. Observation towers. Not one, not two, but four. Set at intervals. Then a sliver of land belonging to the town, enclosed by a concrete wall. We’re here, at long last, the end of the road, the Boss thought. Beyond it, a world within walls.
“Looks like a prison,” the Boss said. F*cking jaily sort of place, isn’t it? he thought with a chuckle.
“We’ll f*cking make this day go down in history,” he said. “F*cking Independence Day.”
The truck stopped a hundred yards short of the wall. A young yakuza sprang out of the covered cargo bay. He carried a mortar, pre-loaded with a 51mm high-explosive grenade. He squatted down close to the ground and hoisted the weapon up. He wasn’t using the angled aiming device, he just fired straight in, level with the ground. Straight into the doors. The gate, the entrance, the way into the town unmarked on any map.
In a flash, the two doors were destroyed. Blown to hell by a force ten times stronger than a hand grenade. The next second, the truck was moving again. Charging in. The young guy who had fired the mortar jumped in as it passed. And on they went, into the world they had forcibly opened—liberated. They raced ahead a few dozen meters. Paved roads divided the town into fairly regular blocks. There were a lot of potholes, though. Big depressions. One of back wheels slammed down into a hole and the truck ground to a halt.
The Boss and his twenty-seven men, giddy with the excitement of war, immediately jumped out of the truck, all at once, even though no one had given any sort of signal. A total of twenty-eight yakuza, armed to the teeth with three million yen worth of firearms. They scattered. A few held back, staying near the truck to manage the mortars, which they aimed out in four directions. They had the whole town in their sights. The Boss wasn’t one of them. He had no intention of staying in the safety zone, giving the others orders while the youngsters protected him with the mortars. He dashed out with a new-model Kalashnikov in his hand. He was in this too! He felt something snap in his head. YESSSSS! he thought. I’m f*ckin’ over the game! He had a young yakuza on either side, watching out for him, but he felt like he’d come out punching, ready to kick ass, all on his own.
“In fifteen minutes sharp, I want to know the lay of this place!” he yelled. “Take anyone you can. Don’t hesitate. Kill. Go!” he ordered. The Boss was raging, wild. He barreled past a cluster of white buildings, bellowing something that sounded like Ghuuuoogh! Things weren’t yet heating up, though, in terms of actual military action. Because there was no one there. The town kind of looked abandoned. In fact, it was abandoned. The official residents were gone. As for unofficial residents…well, there were perhaps some…just a few…
Then, suddenly, something was coming.
Dogs.
Here they came. And a little more than ten minutes later it was all over. Things didn’t go quite the way the Boss had imagined. First, he heard three shrieks. Then he heard seven more. For the first few minutes he had no idea what was going on. Because the dogs didn’t bark. Fifty dogs had fanned out around them, and not one so much as whined. Silence, too, was a weapon. The dogs attacked. Killed without a sound. They moved in formation. Two dogs would take aim at each yakuza, tear into his throat—their victims left with gaping holes under their chins—and then run off with his submachine gun, automatic rifle, or pistol. Six highly trained members of the posse attacked the truck, with its four-mortar guard. It fell in no time. The mortars had been aimed out in four directions, yes, but there were six dogs, and none of them was running less than forty miles per hour. Two of the mortars did go off, but randomly; one grenade plowed into the ground and the other ended up hitting an observation tower. Which was half-destroyed. The tower tilted, toppled, creaked, fell. It exploded onto the ground with a mighty whabang. That, it seemed, was taken by some to be a sign. Shots were fired into the air throughout the town, in different areas. Some yakuza shot out of fear, some didn’t shoot but screamed “I’ll f*cking blast you! I’ll f*cking blast you!” It wasn’t clear how effective shouting at the dogs in Japanese was. They were clearly unfazed by gunfire. They kept calm.
Still, some of the dogs did die. One fell victim to an out-of-control machine-gun burst of fire. Another three died. Gnyaarhf! they uttered as they went down. Hhuunn, they whined as they died. The other forty-six decided, at this point, that the battle had progressed to the second stage, and started barking messages back and forth. Finally the Boss understood. Dogs? he asked himself. Finally he realized that the town wasn’t abandoned, because there were dogs. He began to grasp what was happening. Are the dogs attacking my boys? Is that it? Taking down the young guns? Whatwhatwhatwhatwhatthef*ckisgoingon—dogs? Why dogs? I’m looking for the client! What is this? Meanwhile, the dogs had moved into the “mopping up” stage. They had been conscious from the start that THIS IS NOT PRACTICE, but the loss of their comrades—they had communicated the fact of their deaths to one another by warning barks—made the forty-six dogs wildly, fiercely calm. They cornered people. They chased two yakuza into a four-story building, killed one on the stairs, on the landing, drove the other off the roof. THERE’S NOWHERE TO RUN, THIS IS OUR TOWN, OUR TERRITORY! YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT, THIS IS THE DEAD TOWN! TOWN OF THE DEAD! TOWN OF DEATH! Not surprisingly, some unfortunate mistakes were made in this, the first real battle they had fought. These dogs were absolute pros when it came to fighting, but they weren’t invincible. Another two died. Another one. But the yakuza were being weeded out even faster. The twenty-second died. The twenty-third bit the dust. The Boss had a sense of what was happening. He suspected the horrible turn things had taken; he saw the evidence, heard it, felt it in his spine. A kind of sixth sense told him, a quaking in his vertebrae. You f*cks! Whatareyouwhatareyouwhatareyouf*ckingdoing…what are you…to my boys? Risking their lives for the organization! Whenever a dog came into view, he immediately fired at it. He glared furiously around him, his eyes practically emitting death rays. You f*cking a*sholes! he screamed, and killed more dogs.
The two young yakuza at his side were still alive.
Protected by the Boss’s intuition, that quaking in his vertebrae.
Someone’s going to die. Now.
A large dog leapt out of his blind spot, tore into the throat of the man on the Boss’s right, then, camouflaged by the spraying blood, wriggled across the ground and took aim at the man on the Boss’s left, his leg. He attacked. Took him down. Rolled, bit, killed him. This dog was not a member of the posse. Not a dog in active service, not a current fighter. But before age took its toll, he had been perfect. Even now he had a dignified aura that told you he was not a dog to be trifled with. Gravitas. He had a terrifying sense of gravitas. You could feel it now that he had reared himself to his full height. The Boss, standing face to face with him, could feel it.
Face to face. That wasn’t a blind spot.
The dog opened his blood-smeared mouth and barked.
Bang.
The Boss watched the dog tumble, dead, to the ground. He lowered the barrel of his new-model Kalashnikov, but he stayed there, motionless. He didn’t take a single step. He hardly even shifted his gaze. He was looking, now, at the first non-dog resident of this town unmarked on any map. The first human. Here, to this field of battle, his darling had come.
You killed Belka, she said.
In Japanese.
Hey there, hostage, the Boss said. Haven’t lost any weight, I see.
You killed Belka, his darling said again.
The Boss called her by her name. Her Japanese name. The name he had given his darling. The name he had given her because he was her father. She didn’t reply. She continued glaring at him. Ah, the Boss thought, just like in the videos. So, he asked, ready to break jail?
“Think again,” he said without waiting for her answer. “I came to end this,” he said.
“I’m talking about you,” the Boss continued.
“You’re a pain in my ass. F*cking brat,” her father continued.
He had raised the barrel of his new-model Kalashnikov.
His daughter didn’t flinch, didn’t avert her eyes for a second, not even as she spoke. Said something. Issued a command. In Russian. Instantly the shadows sprang into motion, darting from a cluster of trees along a road, from behind a building, from a second-floor window. Dogs. Seven dogs. Still too young to be called adults. KILL, his darling was saying in Russian. ATTACK. ALL OF YOU. AND YOU, FORTY-SEVEN, FINISH HIM. Six dogs in a cluster. First one of them snatched the Kalashnikov in its mouth, flung it away. The weapon clattered as it hit the ground. The target’s arms and legs were splayed, as if he were being crucified—the dogs were tugging on his felt boots, biting into his bare palms and the sleeves of his coat, pulling. He stood there, almost upright. And then one more dog, number 47, came running. Thirty-eight miles an hour. He leapt. Bared his fangs. Sank them into the soft, fleshy throat. Twisted. Took him. Finished him.
He was finished.
He tumbled forward, spouting blood.
The Boss. The man they called the Boss. Her father.
And there was his daughter.
There was the girl, seven dogs, already done with their prey, gathering at her feet.
For a few minutes, none of them moved.
They stayed there, perfectly still. The girl and the dogs.
Then the girl turned around.
She had noticed that someone was there.
The old man.
She said only a few words to him. In Japanese. “Hey, Old F*ck, I just earned the name. I’m Strelka now.”
Her voice was shaking. Tears brimmed in her eyes.