“Precisely,” Kenzo said. “We have a replica I will show you later. You’ll see that lizards were actually Chinese dragons and the ball that tumbled out would be caught by the mouth of a bronze frog. You should not omit such details.”
“I told you we’d find dragons in here,” Joe said.
“Statues don’t count,” Kurt replied, before turning to Kenzo. “I hope we’re relying on more than brass drums and large-mouthed frogs here.”
“Come with me,” Kenzo said. “I’ll show you.”
Kenzo led them across the foyer and down a hall. Kurt noticed how Akiko never left his side—not like a servant, more like a bodyguard.
They passed through a courtyard and then along a parapet that ran above the water. The lake was like glass beneath the moonlight, and a dry moat could be seen between the outer wall and the castle.
Joe tapped Kurt excitedly on the shoulder. “What about those?” he said, pointing.
Kurt glanced down into the moat. He saw several Komodo dragons, prowling on their short, stubby legs. “How about that. There be dragons here.”
Joe grinned. “I’d like to see them eat.”
“Maybe later,” Kenzo said.
He led them over the moat on a small bridge and they entered a large open room. The décor was a strange mix of ancient Japanese and early industrial.
A glass atrium covered part of the ceiling and one entire wall. Copper fixtures and pipes ran along the opposite wall, disappearing behind bamboo panels. Red velvet couches occupied the center of the room, inviting them to sit by a warm fire that crackled in an old stone hearth. Cluttered all around were polished wooden tables, antique globes and strange examples of mechanical equipment replete with springs, levers and visible gears.
Some of the contraptions held weapons; others had valves and small pressure tanks attached to them, perhaps someone’s idea of ancient diving equipment. Still others were beyond understanding.
In one corner stood an old hand-cranked Gatling gun.
“Reminds me of an antiques store,” Gamay said.
Kurt had to grin. He enjoyed eccentricity and this place did not disappoint. “There’s a certain flavor to it, I must admit.”
Kenzo walked to the far wall and stopped in front of a large cabinet. “This is my detector,” he said.
He opened one of the stained-glass doors to reveal the workings, which included hundreds of thin and tightly strung wires. Glittering crystals were suspended in the wires like insects in a spider’s web. Each of them a different shape and size.
“As you probably know,” Kenzo explained, “quartz crystals vibrate when placed in an electrical field. These wires of gold are perfect electrical conductors. When the earthquakes occur, a great deal of mechanical energy is released. Some of it becomes electromagnetic. As that energy emanates outward from the Earth, it passes over the wires, which conduct the electrical charge to the crystal and create a harmonic vibration. That gives us the signal of the Z-wave. And since no one else is using such a design, no one else can detect them.”
“What’s this?” Joe asked from a few yards away.
Joe was a born wanderer, curious to a fault. He’d already stepped away from the bulky cabinet and was standing in front of a large wall map, complete with silver-leaf borders. Like everything else in the room, it was ancient-looking, in some ways, but had been marked with myriad lines that were drawn in modern red pen.
“Those are the courses each bank of Z-waves took,” Kenzo explained.
Paul accompanied Kenzo to where Joe stood. Kurt moved up beside Gamay, watching from a distance. It was clear who the skeptics in the group were.
Kenzo reached for a tarnished protractor. Using it as a pointer, he directed their attention to the long straight lines. “Each incoming wave was measured in strength and charted. They come from individual events, which I call ghost quakes since no one sees them but us. Unfortunately, I can only plot the direction they came from, not their precise location. But they propagated along these headings.”
“Why can’t you determine a location?” Gamay asked.
“It requires a second station,” Kenzo insisted. “Like intercepting a radio signal, one receiver can give you direction, but it requires two receivers and the crossed lines they create to get a fix.”
“So why not set up a second station?”
“We have,” Kenzo insisted, “but there have been no additional events in the week since I did so.”
Kurt whispered to Gamay, “Sounds like running out of film just as Bigfoot stumbles into your camp.”
“Amazing how often that happens,” she said.
“What about the numbers written beside each line?” Paul asked.
“Dates and strength indicators,” Kenzo insisted.
Unlike the American system of date notation, which went month/day/year, or the European system, which put the day first, the Japanese system placed the year first, then the month, then the day.
Once Kurt had accounted for that, he was able to make sense of the map. If Kenzo was correct, the Z-waves had been doubling in frequency and intensity every ninety days.
Kenzo was explaining exactly that when a light began to flash beside the stained-glass door of his machine.
He rushed over to it as a soft tone began to emanate from inside the box. Several of the golden strings could be seen vibrating ever so slightly. A printer that looked like it was made from an old phonograph scratched out a two-dimensional shape of the waves.
“Another event,” Kenzo said excitedly. “With the secondary group. This is our chance to find the epicenter.”
He rushed to a large desk and grabbed a nickel-plated microphone that belonged in the booth of an old radio station. Kurt could imagine Walter Winchell using it to broadcast his news program: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.”
After flicking several switches, Kenzo called out to someone.
“Ogata, this is Kenzo. Confirm you are receiving.” Letting go of the talk switch, he waited and then tried again. “Ogata, do you read? Are you picking up the event?”
Finally, an excited voice came back. “Yes, Master Kenzo. We’re picking it up now.”
“Do you have a direction?”
“Stand by. The signal is wavering.”
Kenzo looked up at his visitors. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. Your arrival is fortuitous.”
Very, Kurt thought.
Ogata’s voice returned over the speakers. “We calculate this as a level-three wave,” he said. “Bearing two-four-five degrees.”
“Stand by,” Kenzo said. He rushed back to his own machine and rotated it carefully, using a large brass lever. It turned smoothly on a pewter gimbal. “Two-six-zero,” he said, reading off the bearing marker.
Kenzo went to the map and placed the oversized protractor against it. From their current position at the castle, he marked a straight line running 260 degrees. It slashed down the length of Japan, crossed over Nagasaki and ran out into the ocean. Satisfied with this mark, he located Ogata’s position on another part of the island and then drew a line along the 245-degree bearing.
The lines crossed out in the East China Sea. The intersection was nowhere near the edge of the tectonic plate. As far as Kurt could tell, it was solidly up on the continental shelf, no more than a hundred miles from Shanghai.
Kenzo seemed just as surprised. With the mark in place, he rushed back to the large microphone. “Are you certain of those numbers? Please reconfirm.”
Ogata came back on the line. “Stand by for—”
He was interrupted by a stuttering noise.
“Was that—” Gamay said.
“Gunfire,” Kurt said, suddenly on alert.
“Ogata, are you reading me?” Kenzo transmitted. “Is everything okay???
?
Thick static came first and then: “There are men coming up the hill. They’re carrying—”
Additional gunfire cut him off, but the line stayed open long enough to hear shouting and then some kind of explosion.
“Ogata?” Kenzo said, clutching the microphone tightly. “Ogata!”
His face went white, his hand began shaking. His stricken appearance told Kurt that this wasn’t part of the show.
As Kenzo waited for an answer, a deep, somber bell started ringing somewhere high in the castle. The sorrowful tone echoed repeatedly.
“What’s that?”
“Our alarm,” Kenzo said.
Glass shattered in the atrium behind them. Kurt spun and saw an object crashing through one of the windows and tumbling across the room toward them.
8
AS THE GLASS SHATTERED, Kurt lunged forward, tackling Kenzo over the back of the heavy desk. From the corner of his eye he noticed Paul and Gamay diving for cover. He never saw Joe, who’d stepped in front of the bouncing projectile, caught it bare-handed like a second baseman and hurled it back in the direction it had come.
The grenade made a second hole in the glass and exploded on the far side. An incendiary device, it was powerful enough to kill anyone in close proximity but designed primarily to spread fire and jellified gasoline. It flared like the sun, shattering every window in the atrium and unleashing a rain of molten liquid and broken glass.
As the crystal tones of falling glass subsided, they heard the roar of motorboats on the lake. Almost immediately, sporadic gunshots were fired.
Kurt helped their host to a sitting position. “Your castle is under siege, Master Kenzo.”
“Why?” Kenzo blurted out. “By whom?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“My acolytes will defend us,” Kenzo said proudly.
The gunfire told Kurt they were going to face a stiff challenge. “Only if they’ve got something better than swords and catapults to fight with.”
“What about this?” Joe said, standing by the old Gatling gun. “Do you have ammunition for it?”
“A few boxes.”
Joe released the brake, put his shoulder into the frame and wheeled the old weapon toward the window.
“Anything else?” Kurt asked.
“We have a cannon in the tower.”
“That won’t be much use against speedboats,” Kurt said. Looking around, he spied a crossbow and a flight of iron-tipped darts sitting on a shelf. “Get Joe the ammunition,” he told Kenzo. “And keep your head down.”
Kurt went to the wall, switched off the lights and grabbed the crossbow from the shelf. By now, Paul and Gamay had reappeared. Paul had a spear in his hand. Gamay was holding a mace. There was something wrapped around the handle, but Kurt didn’t have time to ask.
“You two stay here,” he said. “If things get out of control, make your way to the garage, but don’t lower the drawbridge unless you have no other choice.”
“Where are you going?” Gamay asked.
Kurt slung the quiver of darts over his back. “To the tower,” he said. “Someone needs to take the high ground.”
* * *
• • •
AS KURT rushed out of the room, Kenzo arrived beside Joe with two boxes of ammunition. Taking cover as random potshots hit around them, Joe opened the boxes. He was happy to see that the shells were modern loads and not the same vintage as the gun.
“Where did you get these?”
“We had them made by an old gunsmith.”
“Let’s hope he does quality work.”
Joe emptied the box of shells into the hopper, grabbed the crank and angled the gun downward.
Turning the crank with a smooth motion, he got the barrels to rotate. The shells were drawn in and a half turn later began punching holes in the night. Joe turned the weapon slowly and smoothly, not wanting to use up too much ammunition too quickly.
“Lower,” Kenzo said.
Joe tilted the weapon down and fired again, as the entire room filled with a cloud of blue smoke.
* * *
• • •
KURT WAS halfway across the parapet when the first stuttering shots from the Gatling gun sounded. Glancing back, he saw gun smoke billowing out of the window. Down below, a spread of bullets stitched a line in the water and across the bow of one of the speedboats.
The driver gunned the throttle, turned the wheel and sped off into the dark. At the same time, another boat moved forward, one gunman on the bow pouring suppressing fire into the atrium while a second man readied a grenade.
With sustained cover fire hitting the building, the Gatling gun went silent. Joe had been forced undercover, but Kurt had a shot. He rose up, aimed the crossbow over the wall and pulled the trigger.
The arms of the old weapon snapped forward and the bolt flew with surprising ease, but its feathers were warped from years of sitting around. It went off course, diving and turning like a badly thrown curveball. Instead of hitting the man in the chest, it plunged through his foot.
He cried out in pain and dropped the grenade. He stretched for it and shouted, but his foot was nailed to the fiberglass. His shouts were cut off as the boat erupted in flames.
Men in one of the other boats spotted Kurt and began firing his way. He dropped down behind the thick embattlements and listened as the shells pinged off the stone behind him.
“One down, three to go.”
* * *
• • •
JOE WAS on the floor, taking cover, when the explosion flared outside. He crawled to the window to get a look.
The speedboats were making high-speed runs now. Strafing the castle walls and peeling back.
He manned his gun and tried to hit them, but the old weapon was too heavy and too hard to maneuver to track the boats successfully. He fired, shouldered the gun into a new position and then fired again. Just as he reached for the second box of ammunition, the last speedboat raced out of view.
“Are they moving off?” Kenzo asked.
“Not off,” Joe said. “To the other side of the island.”
Almost immediately, the shooting began again. This time, from the far side of the castle.
“Now might be a good time to call the authorities?” Joe suggested.
“We don’t have phones.”
“Use the radio.”
Kenzo ran over to the old shortwave, tested the microphone and then switched to a channel used by Japan’s emergency services.
“This is Seven . . . Jay . . . Three . . . X-ray . . . X-ray . . . Zulu . . .” he began, using his officially licensed ham radio designation. “Request emergency police assistance. Armed men are attacking us. Repeat. Armed men are attacking us . . .”
They received no response. Nothing but static.
“The antenna,” Kenzo replied, pointing toward the shattered windows. “It’s out there.”
“Keep trying,” Joe said. “We can’t hold them off forever.”
As if to prove the point, a grappling hook flew over the wall and lodged with a metallic clang.
Joe realigned the Gatling gun and waited. The hook shimmied back and forth and a man appeared at the top. He climbed over the wall and crouched as a second man arrived. Joe raised the barrels and pushed the crank forward. The handle moved half an inch and then jammed.
Back and forth didn’t free it, and Joe had no idea how to clear the old gun.
Out on the wall, two more attackers appeared. “Time to go,” Joe said. “We’re about to be flanked.”
* * *
• • •
KURT CROSSED the dry moat and made it back to the main building, where he found a stairway. He rushed up three flights and came up on the third floor of the pagoda. As he stepped from the shadows, a sword flashed through the ai
r toward his head. He ducked at the last second and the blade cut a chunk out of the wall behind him.
Surging toward the attacker and using the crossbow as a battering ram, he found himself colliding with Akiko. He tackled her to the ground.
“Mr. Austin,” she said.
“Careful where you swing that thing,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were one of them.”
He let her up and she stepped back, holding the sword tightly.
Kurt noticed she was now wearing a vest of loose metal plates held together by laced twine. “I see you’ve changed for the occasion.”
“I am the armorer,” she said. “I must protect Kenzo.”
She went to brush past, but Kurt grabbed her arm. “My friends are with Kenzo. They’ll protect him. Take me up to the tower; we need to take the high ground. From there, we can keep their men off the walls.”
“This way.”
She turned on her heels, pulled open a door and dashed up another flight of stairs. Kurt followed, surprised by how quickly she moved in the heavy vest.
They reached the top and broke out onto a platform that covered the highest level of the tower. The small antipersonnel cannon was there, along with bags of powder and a neatly packed pyramid of iron cannonballs. As much as Kurt wanted to fire it, the cannon was too bulky to be helpful. He ignored it and stepped to the rail with the crossbow in hand.
From this height, he could see most of the castle grounds below. The situation looked grim. “They’ve made it over the wall,” he said, noticing three groups of men moving about.
When one group appeared in the open, Kurt loosed a bolt at them, hitting the leader in the thigh. As the man fell, Kurt placed the crossbow on the ground to reload and Akiko stepped forward with a longbow in her hand.
She let the arrow fly and knocked a second man in a flash before adjusting her aim and firing again. Both shots hit their targets. One man fell where he stood, the other dropped his weapon and lumbered for cover as Akiko took aim once more.