The 47th Samurai (Bob Lee Swagger Novels)
Stephen Hunter
Language: English
Pages: 496
ISBN: 0743458001
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The 47th Samurai, Bob Lee Swagger, the gritty hero of Stephen Hunter's bestselling novels Point of Impact and Time to Hunt, returns in Hunter's most intense and exotic thriller to date.
Bob Lee Swagger and Philip Yano are bound together by a single moment at Iwo Jima, 1945, when their fathers, two brave fighters on opposite sides, met in the bloody and chaotic battle for the island. Only Earl Swagger survived.
More than sixty years later, Yano comes to America to honor the legacy of his heroic father by recovering the sword he used in the battle. His search has led him to Crazy Horse, Idaho, where Bob Lee, ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, has settled into a restless retirement and immediately pledges himself to Yano's quest.
Bob Lee finds the sword and delivers it to Yano in Tokyo. On inspection, they discover that it is not a standard WWII blade, but a legendary shin-shinto katana, an artifact of the nation. It is priceless but worth killing for. Suddenly Bob is at the center of a series of terrible crimes he barely understands but vows to avenge. And to do so, he throws himself into the world of the samurai, Tokyo's dark, criminal yakuza underworld, and the unwritten rules of Japanese culture.
Swagger's allies, hard-as-nails, American-born Susan Okada and the brave, cocaine-dealing tabloid journalist Nick Yamamoto, help him move through this strange, glittering, and ominous world from the shady bosses of the seamy Kabukicho district to officials in the highest echelons of the Japanese government, but in the end, he is on his own and will succeed only if he can learn that to survive samurai, you must become samurai.
As the plot races and the violence escalates, it becomes clear that a ruthless conspiracy is in place, and the only thing that can be taken for granted is that money, power, and sex can drive men of all nationalities to gruesome extremes. If Swagger hopes to stop them, he must be willing not only to die but also to kill.
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contents off to splatter an abstraction on the snow—chiburi, in the vernacular, big in all the movies. Now noto: he sheathed the sword, as ceremony demanded, drawing the dull spine of the blade through his left hand and fingers while clutching the saya’s opening until he reached the tip, then smoothly snared the tip in the opening, then ran the wood casing up to absorb and protect the blade, the whole move ending with a gentle snap as tsuba met wood. His watch read 5:39 a.m., Tokyo time. He
it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. That’s all. A minor point, I forgot to—” “Do you have a list of the people your husband visited?” “I have his notebook. It’s hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what is—” “I have to set some things up. It’ll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer
military career. What he did that day was beyond question one of the great feats of arms in military history. From my vantage point on the slope beneath, he was literally Superman. How many Japanese shot at him we’ll never know, but he never showed a single moment’s hesitation and managed to single-handedly destroy the emplacement. He saved the lives of a hundred men that day! Anyway, a few days later I was hit, thus ending my adventure in combat. Because I had not been a dynamic leader, I was
like they were oiled, and when they moved, they passed through air and time at a rate other mortals could barely comprehend. It began with some kind of draw, an uncoiling with blade, so that the sword came out and began to cut in an economy of movement. Sometimes you couldn’t even see the cut it was so fluid; sometimes it was a thrust, but more usually it was a cut, conceived from a dozen different angles, the cut hidden in a turn or a pivot, dancelike but never effeminate, always athletic. And
features, the swelling, the shattered delicacies of the face and teeth, the bloated lips—then looked away. You train yourself not to see that stuff. He knew he had to focus. The gun, the gun! The 96 was no BAR, but enough of them had shot enough lead at him for him to respect it. He looked at it, understanding its principles immediately; machine guns were pretty much alike in most respects. He rummaged around for a pouch of mags, found one, shifted to a new, fresh tin of ammo, locked it in,