Satori - Don Winslow [87]
The bullets were real, however, and Nicholai heard the hollow thunk of a round strike the soldier beside him. The boy reached down to the hole in his stomach and looked at Nicholai with an expression of hurt surprise, as if to ask if this were really happening, then howled with pain. Nicholai eased him to the ground as gently as he could. The boy would die and there was nothing he could do.
He could only try to save the cargo.
Nicholai exchanged his pistol for the soldier’s rifle and moved out.
Yu was already rallying the men he had left toward the crates stacked in the monastery’s central pavilion. A few of the sentries guarding the crates had already fled, two others lay slumped dead at their posts, while three crouched behind the boxes and returned the shots that were coming from the bamboo thicket on the far side of the pavilion. But they were under heavy fire and it was obvious that they couldn’t hold out for long.
Yu started across the pavilion for the pile of crates but Nicholai held him back. It was brave but useless to join the three soldiers in their isolated post. We would just become additional targets, Nicholai thought, a few more sacrificed stones in a soon-to-be eliminated position on the board. Better to create a new position and give the bandits something new to think about.
So Nicholai squatted behind a stone bench set at the edge of the pavilion. He waited until he saw a muzzle flash come from the bamboo and fired at it, then heard a man scream in pain. Yu did the same with the same result.
The shooting from the bamboo stopped as the bandits considered how to handle the new situation.
Nicholai used the pause to belly-crawl across that side of the pavilion to a bench on the perpendicular side. It would be better, he thought, if the bandits formed a tactic to deal with a situation that had already changed.
Go is a fluid game.
It was quiet for a moment longer and then a spray of bullets hit the stone bench that Nicholai had vacated. Yu pressed himself flat on the stones and survived the blast, but the bullets kept him down as a group of a dozen or more bandits sprang out of the bamboo and rushed the crates.
Nicholai, on the flank of the attack, easily picked the lead bandit off with his first shot but missed the second one and had to fire again. He dropped the next man, but the bandits in the bamboo adjusted quickly and turned their guns on him. Nicholai flattened out and the bullets passed over him.
Then he pushed himself up on his hands and the balls of his feet, took a deep breath, and vaulted over the bench.
Lit only by muzzle flashes, the scene before him played like cinema in a bad old theater with a creaky projector. Nicholai saw flickers of the melee at the crates — a bayonet thrust, a pistol fired at close range, a wounded man’s mouth agape. He plunged in, firing his rifle until the clip was empty. Then he used it like an ancient Chinese weapon — a sharp blade on one end, a blunt object on the other. He swung and thrust, ducked and dodged, beyond thought in the realm of instinct that came from constant training.
But the bandits were simply too many. The most skillful Go player will lose his few isolated white stones against a tide of black ones.
It was inevitable.
Die with honor.
Hai, Kishikawa-sama.
The cherry blossoms of Kajikawa floated in front of his eyes as he recalled his walk, so long ago, with the general. Kishikawa had focused on the beautiful blossoms to prepare himself for his death.
Then through the flashes of light Nicholai saw a row of brown-robed monks, bamboo staffs in their hands, advance onto the pavilion.
The fight became a whirling blur of bamboo, a tai-fung, but the rain pellets were wood striking flesh and bone, and then it was over, like a sudden squall. The surviving bandits fled back into the forest.
Without the precious cargo.