Stacy took what she thought was her last look at the others. Mancuso seemed stricken, while Weatherhill stared back at her with great sorrow in his eyes. But it was Giordino who caused her to do a double take. He gave her a wink, a nod, and a smile.
“You’re wasting time,” Kamatori said coldly.
“No need to dash off,” came a voice from behind the two robotic guards.
Stacy turned, certain her eyes were deceiving her.
Dirk Pitt stood on the threshold, leaning negligently against the doorframe, gazing past her at Kamatori. Both his hands rested on the hilt of along saber whose tip stabbed the polished floor. His deep green eyes were set, an anticipatory grin was on his rugged face.
“Sorry I’m late, but I had to take a dog to obedience school.
52
NOBODY MOVED, NOBODY SPOKE. The robots stood motionless, waiting for a command from Kamatori, their data processors not fully programmed to react at Pitt’s sudden appearance. But the samurai was in the opening moments of shock at seeing Pitt standing there without a scratch on his body. His lips parted and his eyes spread, and then slowly the beginning of a forced smile twisted the lines on his curious face.
“You did not die,” he said as his mind pushed through the curtain of surprise and his face became a dark cloud. “You faked your death, and yet the blood—”
“I borrowed a few things from your hospital,” Pitt explained casually, “and performed a bloodletting on myself.”
“But you had nowhere to go but into the surf or onto the rocks below the cliff. And if you survived the fall and dropped into the water, you would have been swept away by the vicious undercurrents. You could not have survived.”
“I used the tree you saw floating in the surf to cushion my fall into the water. Then I floated with the current until it released me a few hundred meters from shore. After drifting a short distance, I caught the incoming tide and swam until I reached a small cove and climbed the palisades below the resort.”
The surprise in Kamatori’s eyes transformed to intense curiosity. “The security perimeter, how was it possible for you to slip through the robotic guards?”
“Speaking figuratively, I knocked them out.”
“No good.” Kamatori shook his head. “Their detection systems are flawless. They are not programmed to let an intruder pass.”
“Bet me.” Pitt lifted the saber, rammed its point into the wooden floor, and released his grip, leaving it quivering in the polished wood. He took the small object from under his arm that could now be seen as a sock with something wrapped inside it. He moved unobtrusively toward one of the robots from the rear. Before it could turn, he pressed the thing inside the sock against the plastic wall surrounding the computerized midsection. The roboguard immediately went rigid and immobile.
Realizing too late what Pitt was doing, Kamatori shouted, “Shoot him!”
But Pitt had ducked under the muzzle of the second robot’s automatic rifle and shoved the strange object against its processor. Like the first, it became inert.
“How did you do that?” Stacy gasped.
Pitt pulled the sock off a small six-volt dry cell from the portable X-ray machine and an iron pipe wrapped with two meters of copper wire. He held the package up for all to see.
“A magnet. It erased the programs from the disks inside the robots’ computer processors and fouled up their integrated circuits.”
“A temporary reprieve, nothing more,” commented Kamatori. ‘ ‘ I badly miscalculated your ingenuity, Mr. Pitt, but you have accomplished little but prolonging your life by a few more minutes.”
“At least we’re armed now,” said Weatherhill, nodding at the stationary guns held by the robots.
Despite the turn of events, Kamatori could not conceal the expression of triumph on his face. He was back in total control. Pitt’s near-miraculous resurrection had been for nothing. “The guns are tightly molded to the flexible arms of the robots. You cannot remove them with anything less than a cutting grinder. You are as helpless as before.”
“Then we’re in the same boat now that your bodyguards have been unplugged,” said Pitt, tossing the magnet to Stacy.
“I have my katana.” Kamatori’s hand raised and touched the hilt of his native Japanese ancestral sword that rested in the sheath that stuck out behind his back. The sixty-one-centimeter blade was forged from an elastic magnetic iron combined with a hard steel edge. “And I also carry a wakizashi.” He slipped a knife about twenty-four centimeters in length from a scabbard inside his sash, displaying its blade before resheathing it.
Pitt stepped back toward the doorway leading to Kamatori’s antique arsenal and yanked the sword from the floor. “Not exactly Excalibur maybe, but it beats swinging a pillow.”
The sword that Pitt had taken from a wall of Kamatori’s study was a nineteenth-century Italian dueling saber with a blade ninety centimeters from hilt to tip. It was heavier than the modern fencing saber Pitt had used during his days at the Air Force Academy and not as flexible, but in the hand of a skilled fencer it could be used with great effect.
Pitt had no illusions of what he was plunging into. He didn’t doubt for an instant that Kamatori was a practicing expert at the Japanese sword sport of kenjutsu, while he hadn’t swung a blade in a practice match for over two years. But if he could just stay alive while Stacy somehow freed Mancuso and Weatherhill, or distracted Kamatori so Pitt might gain an advantage, there was a slim chance they could still escape the island.
“You dare to challenge me with that?” Kamatori sneered.
“Why not?” Pitt shrugged. “In truth samurai warriors were little more than overblown toads. I figure you were bred from the same slime pond.”
Kamatori brushed off the insult. “So you’re to wear a halo and play Sir Galahad against my black knight.”
“Actually I had Errol Flynn against Basil Rathbone more in mind.”
Kamatori closed his eyes and in an unexpected movement sank to his knees and went into a meditating trance. He became immersed in the art of kiai, an inner force or power attributed with accomplishing miracles, especially among the samurai class. Mentally, long practice in uniting the soul and conscious mind and bringing them into a kind of divine realm supposedly raises the practitioner to a subconscious level that aids him in performing superhuman feats in the martial arts. Physically, it involved the art of deep and prolonged breathing, the reasoning being the man who has a full load of air in the lungs has it all over the opponent who has exhaled.
Pitt sensed a quick attack and flexed his legs and body in the on-guard position.
Nearly two full minutes passed, and then suddenly, with lightninglike speed, Kamatori leaped to his feet and pulled his katana from its scabbard with both hands in a long sweeping motion. But instead of losing a microsecond by lifting the blade over his head for a downward stroke, he continued the motion in an upward diagonal cut in an attempt to slash Pitt open from the hip to the shoulder.
Pitt anticipated the move and narrowly parried the wicked slice, then made a quick thrust, penetrating Kamatori’s thigh before jumping backward to avoid his opponent’s next savage attack.
The tactics of kenjutsu and Olympic saber were wildly different. It was as if a basketball player was pitted against a football halfback. Traditional fencing had linear movements with thrusting strokes, while kenjutsu had no limitations, the katana wielder wading in to cut down his opponent in a slashing assault. But they both relied on technique, speed, and the element of surprise.
Kamatori moved with catlike agility, knowing that one good cut against Pitt’s flesh would quickly end the contest. He moved rapidly from side to side, uttering guttural shouts to throw Pitt off balance. He rushed fiercely, his two-handed strokes beating aside Pitt’s thrusts with relative ease. The wound in his thigh went seemingly unnoticed and caused no obstacle to his nimble reactions.