At the top of the escalator, I looked back. There they were, at the bottom, trying to squeeze past the people in their way. Perfect.
There was a double set of green doors just ahead and on the left. They were propped open; beyond them was a loading area in front of a freight elevator. At the top of the escalator I shot ahead, out of the field of vision of the men behind me, and ducked left into the loading area. I moved left again and hugged the wall, wedged partly behind one of the open doors, looking out through the gap at the hinged end. From here I would see them as they moved past. I tested the door and found it satisfyingly mobile and heavy. If they saw me and tried to move inside, I’d slam the door into them and attack with the flail as best I could. But it would be better if they went past me entirely.
They did. I watched them moving through the gap in the door. When the last had gone by, I took three deep breaths, giving them another couple of seconds.
I moved out. Adrenaline flowed through my gut and limbs. There they were, stopped where the corridor ended in a “T,” looking left and right, trying to make out which way I had gone among the thick crowds of shoppers to both sides. They were clustered up tight, the guy in the middle slightly ahead of the other two. Probably they thought proximity would afford them safety in numbers. In fact, they were turning themselves into a single target.
When I was six meters away, the one in the center and slightly ahead of the other two started to turn. Maybe to consult; maybe, if he had any sense, to check his back. I increased my pace, hurrying now, needing to close the distance before he turned and saw that his understanding of who was hunting and who was hunted had become suddenly and fatally inaccurate.
When I was four meters out, the lead guy completed his turn. He started to say something to one of his comrades. Then his eyes shifted to me. His head froze. His eyes widened. His mouth started to open.
Three meters. I felt a fresh adrenaline dump in my torso, my limbs.
His partners must have seen his face. Their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn.
Two meters. The guy to my right was closest. He was turning to his left, toward whatever had made his partner start to bug out. I saw the left side of his face as he came around, slowly, everything moving slowly through my adrenalized vision.
One meter. I stepped in with my left foot, bringing my left arm up across my body, partly as defense, partly as counterbalance. I let my right hand drift back, the flail uncoiling on the way, then whipped my arm around, the palm side of my fist up, my elbow leading the way, my hips pivoting in as though I was doing a one-armed warm-up with a baseball bat. The weighted end sailed around and cracked into the back of his skull with a beautiful bass note thud. For a split instant, his body completely relaxed but he stayed upright-he was out on his feet. Then he started to slide down to the ground.
The flail swung past him, my body coiling counterclockwise with the continued momentum of the blow, the flail wrapping itself halfway around my thigh. The guy to my left had now completed his turn. I saw him look at me, the universal expression for “oh shit” moving across his face, his right hand going for the inside of his jacket. Too late. I snapped my hips to the right and backhanded the flail around. He saw it coming, but was too focused on deploying his weapon and couldn’t concentrate on getting out of the way. It caught him in the side of the neck-not as solid a shot as his buddy had received but good enough for my purposes. I saw his eyes lose focus and knew I’d have at least a couple seconds before he was back in the game.
The third guy was smarter, and had more time and space to react. While I was dealing with the other two, he had stepped back and gotten himself out of swinging range. He was groping inside his jacket now, his eyes wide, his movements frantic. The flail was passing between us, back to my right side. I saw him pulling something out of the jacket with his right hand. I let the flail’s momentum bring it around and under, releasing my grip at the last instant and sending the whole thing sailing toward him like a softball pitch aimed at the batter. He saw it coming and jerked partly out of the way, but it caught him in the shoulder. He stumbled and managed to get out a silenced pistol, a big one, trying at the same time to regain his balance. But his motor skills were suffering from a large and probably unfamiliar dose of adrenaline, and the long silencer made for an equally long draw. He bobbled the gun, and in that second I was on him.
I caught the gun in my left hand and used my right foot to blast his legs out from under him in deashi-barai, a side foot sweep that I had performed tens of thousands of times in my quarter century at the Kodokan. I went down with him, keeping my weight over his chest, increasing the impact as he slammed into the floor. I felt the gun go off as we hit the ground, heard the pffft of the silenced report and a crack as the round tore into the wall behind me. Keeping control of the gun, making sure it was pointed anywhere but at me, I rose up to create an inch of space between our bodies, spun my left leg over and past his head, and dropped back in juji-gatame, a cross-body armlock. I took the gun from him and broke his elbow with a single sharp jerk.
The second guy had now recovered enough to get a gun out. But, like his partner, he was adrenalized and having trouble with fine motor movements. His hand was shaking and he hesitated, perhaps realizing that if he pulled the trigger he might hit his partner, over whose torso my legs were crossed and whose ruined right arm was pulled tight across my chest.
I straightened my right arm and focused on the front sight, placing it on the second guy’s torso, center mass. The gun was a Glock 21 in.45 caliber. Healthy stopping power. I willed myself to slow it down, make it count.
The guy under me jerked and my aim wavered. Fuck. I squeezed my legs in tighter and leaned back closer to the floor, trying to offer the second guy a reduced profile. I knew from experience that bullets tend to skim close to the ground rather than bounce off it. The guy under me would function as a human sandbag for any shots that hit the deck short of our position.
The second guy moved the gun, trying to track me, the movements overlarge and shaking. Then, maybe because he saw the cool bead I was drawing on him, his nerve broke. He started shooting in a spray-and-pray pattern, his eyes closed, his body hunching forward involuntarily. Pffft. Pffft. Pffft. Small clouds of dust kicked up along the concrete around me, puffing out lazily in my adrenalized slow-motion vision. I heard the sounds of ricochets. Someone screamed.
Slow. Aim. Breathe…
I double-tapped the trigger. The first round caught him in the shoulder and spun him around. The second missed, going off into the wall near the ceiling. I compensated and fired again. This time I nailed him in the back near the spine and dropped him to the floor.
I lurched to my feet and moved toward him. Around us, people were running from the scene, pushing up against the mass of other shoppers. The immediate area was suddenly empty.
I walked up to the one I had just dropped. He was on his stomach, writhing, groaning something unintelligible. I shot him in the back of the head.
The first one I’d hit with the flail was flat on his back, his legs splayed back under him, seemingly unconscious. I shot him in the forehead.
I turned to the last one. He was on his ass, scrambling away from me on his feet and good arm. His face was green with pain and terror. I shot him in the chest and he collapsed to the ground, his legs still kicking. I took three long steps forward and shot him again, in the forehead. His head rocketed back and he was still.
I looked around. Pandemonium now. Screams and shouting and panic.