A seven iron, Tuck, thought. After all these years I need a seven iron.

Tucker Case did not play golf. He’d tried it once, and although he’d en-joyed the drinking and driving the little electric car into the lake, he just didn’t get the appeal. It seemed—and he’d examined the game closely be-cause his father had loved it—an awful lot like a bunch of rich white guys in goofy clothing walking around on an absurdly large lawn hitting ab-surdly small white balls with crooked sticks. If the greens were at opposite ends of the same fairway and foursomes had to play against each other, defending their own green while assaulting the opponents’ and risking getting hit with a ball or a club at close quarters, well, then you’d have a game. If the game was scored on how quickly one got through the eighteen holes instead of the fewest strokes and they dropped small-block Chevys into the little carts, why, then you’d have yourself a game. (Maybe

put those little Ben-Hur food processors on the wheels and make it legal to hamstring competitors.) But traditional golf, as it was, had always left Tuck cold. Strange, then, that he absolutely yearned for a seven iron, or maybe a shotgun.

Tuck had been up since before dawn, awakened rudely and kept awake by what seemed like eight million roosters. It was now ten o’clock and they were still going strong. What joy to feel the thwack of a seven iron on red feathers, the satisfying impact of balanced metal on poultry (suddenly si-lenced and somewhat tenderized for your trouble). He saw himself wading into a bucket of roosters, swinging his seven iron madly (but always keeping his head down and his left arm straight), dealing death and de-struction like the Colonel’s own avenging angel. Welcome to Tucker Case’s chicken death camp, my little feathered friends. Now, kindly prepare to have your nuggets knocked off.

Tucker Case was not a morning person.

He decided that he’d give them five more minutes to shut up, then he was going to get dressed and go borrow a seven iron from the doc. Five minutes later he was preparing to leave when Beth Curtis knocked and opened his door without waiting for an answer. She was wearing disposable surgical blues and a hairnet; she wore no makeup and the vapid housewife smile was gone from her eyes.

“Mr. Case, we need you to be ready to fly in two hours. Can you do it?”

“Uh, sure. I guess. Where are we going?”

“Japan. The navigational settings should already be programmed into the plane’s computer. I need you to have your preflight finished and the Lear fueled and on the runway, ready to go.”

Tucker felt as if he was talking to a different person than the one he had seen for the last week. There was no hint of the soft femininity, just hard business.

“I haven’t had time to go over the controls for the Lear.”

“You took the job, didn’t you? Can you fly it?”

Tuck nodded.

“Then be ready in two hours.” She turned and marched toward the hospital building. Tuck started to follow her, then noticed movement through the trees, down by the beach: men unloading fuel drums from a longboat onto the pier. He could see a white freighter anchored outside the reef.

“Mrs. Curtis!” he called.

She turned and regarded him like an annoying insect. “Yes, Mr. Case.”

“That ship. You didn’t tell me there was a ship.”

“It doesn’t concern you. They are simply delivering some supplies. Now please, prepare the plane.”

“But if they’re delivering supplies, why do we need to…?”

“Mr. Case,” she barked, “do your job. The doctor needs me.” She threw open the hospital door and stepped inside.

“Ask him if I can borrow his seven iron,” Tuck said weakly.

Tuck shuffled back toward his bungalow. Just a few seconds in the sun had given him a headache and he felt as if he would pass out any second. He was going to fly again. He was sick and dizzy and suffered from talking bat hallucinations and he was going to get to do the only thing he had ever been any good at. It scared the hell out of him.

It had been fifty years since men with guns had entered the village of the Shark People. As the four guards went from house to house, Malink walked the paths of the village, his cordless phone in hand so the people could see that he had things under control. He’d been calling the Sorcerer since the four Japanese had arrived in the village, but he’d only gotten the answering machine. He had told everyone to go inside their houses and not to resist the guards, and even now the village seem deserted, except for the sobs of a few frightened children. He could hear the guards kicking their way through the coconut husks that had been piled in the cookhouses for fuel.

Suddenly Favo was at his side. Favo, who had seen the coming of the Japanese during the war, had seen the killing. “Why does Vincent allow this?”

Malink really didn’t have an answer. He had lit the Zippo and asked Vincent that very morning. “It is the will of the Sorcerer, so it must be the will of Vincent. They want the girl-man.”

“We should fight,” Favo said. “We should kill the guards.”

“Spears against machine guns, Favo? Should the children grow up without fathers like we did? No, they will find the girl-man and they will go away.”

“The girl-man has gone to live with Sarapul. Did you tell them?”

“I told them. I took the Sorcerer there.”

The guards came out of the old church and crunched in single file down the path toward Favo and Malink. The old men stood their ground, making the guards walk into a stand of ferns to get around them. They made no eye contact and said nothing. Favo hurled a curse at them, but it had been too long since he had spoken Japanese and it was not a language suited for swearing. He ended up telling them that their truck tires smelled of sardines, which elicited no response whatsoever.

“Excellent curse,” Malink said, trying to raise his friend’s spirits.

“It needs work. English is the best for swearing.”

“They have machine guns, Favo.”

“Fuckin’ mooks,” Favo said.

“Amen,” Malink said, crossing himself in the sign of the B-26 bomber.

The two old men fell in behind the guards, following them from house to house, waiting outside on the path so the villagers could see them when they were roused out of their houses.

For the guards’ part, it was a wholly unsatisfying endeavor. They had been looking forward to kicking in some doors, only to find that the Shark People had no doors. There were no beds to throw over, no back rooms to burst into, no closets, no place, in fact, where a man could hide and not be exposed by the most perfunctory inspection. And the doctor had told them that no one was to be hurt. They did not want to make a mistake. For all the appearance of military efficiency, they were screwups to a man. One, a former security guard at a nuclear power plant, had been fired for taking drugs; two were brothers who had been dismissed from the Tokyo police department for accepting Yakuza bribes; the fourth, from Okinawa, had been a jujitsu instructor who had beaten a German tourist to death in a bar over a gross miscarriage of karaoke. The man who had recruited them, put them in the black uniforms, and trained them made it clear that this was their last chance. They had two choices: succeed and become rich or die. They took their jobs very seriously.

“He might be in the trees,” Favo said in Japanese. “Look in the trees!”

The guards scanned the trees as they marched, which caused them to bump into each other and stumble. Above them there was a fluttering of wings. A glout of bat guano splatted across the Okinawan’s forehead. He threw the bolt on his Uzi and the air was filled with the staccato roar of nine millimeters ripping through the foliage. When at last the clip was empty, palm fronds settled to the ground

around them. Frightened children screamed in their mothers’ arms, and Favo, who was lying next to his friend with his arms thrown over his head, snickered like an asthmatic hyena.