Chapter 63: The Great Coconut Warehouse Explosion

TL: LittlePeach

In Southeast Asia, both the light and the dark run remarkably deep.

It's a world-famous tourist destination that draws countless visitors every year, and at the same time it's a heaven-sent stronghold blessed with the perfect conditions for opium production.

It's earned the name the Golden Triangle, which tells you just how deep Southeast Asia's infamy runs as a drug-producing region.

"So once we pin down the exact location of a production site they're running, we trace what route the drugs coming out of it take to reach Korea, and then we report that back to headquarters. That's how it works."

"Mm. It must be rough, all that grind out in a foreign country."

"Tell me about it. Everyone's really putting themselves through the wringer. Those bastards are at mango farms, coconut farms, jungles, deep bush... really, all over the place. Lately they've even started making the stuff right out in the open, bold as you please."

Maybe just talking about it had his insides burning up.

He snatched up the water bottle I'd left behind and gulped down what was left.

"Pwah! But you know what? Even after we track them day and night and hand over the transport times, the freighter numbers, the customs clearance points, every last thing, none of it counts as the Southeast Asia Team's own result. Not one bit."

"Oh, is that so?"

"Yes. In the end it all gets dressed up as, Customs seized a shipment of drugs, or, Police made an arrest after an investigation, and that's the end of it."

"Ah..."

"Now, I'll grant you that our line of work is supposed to hide its true face like that. That much, fine, I'll accept."

Then, unable to hide his sense of humiliation, he spat the words out as if chewing on them.

"But if they're going to dress it up like that anyway, then honestly, shouldn't headquarters at least hand something down to us directly? That's what I'm saying."

"They didn't?"

"No!"

He banged the table with a loud thud.

"You want to hear what they said to us once? They said it was only natural we got nothing. Said that if they credited us for results based solely on the intel we send in, all we'd end up creating down the line is a cobra effect."

"Mm."

The cobra effect.

One of the side effects that arise from incentive policies.

Back when Britain ruled India as a colony, there was a time they put a bounty on cobras to reduce the population.

At first the cobra population started dropping just as intended, but at a certain point the result flipped and the numbers actually exploded.

Because people, in order to collect the bounty, had started secretly breeding cobras on the side.

"And after they run their mouths like that, you know what else those fuckers at headquarters said? They said we're sitting pretty out in Southeast Asia, a place other people would kill to be posted to and can't, collecting our hardship pay and hazard pay steady as clockwork, and yet somehow we've got the nerve to want more. That's how they talked to us."

What makes a person sick isn't a punishing work environment.

Even if you're stuck in some brutal, sweltering hardship posting, if just one person recognizes what you're going through, that alone becomes encouragement, and your strength comes back to life.

"So these days, the second any of our guys gets a few drinks in them, they're too busy tearing into the headquarters crowd to do anything else. Assholes, fuckers, the whole vocabulary."

"Oof..."

But when reality doesn't work that way, when you run yourself ragged and nothing ever comes of it, there's no way the motivation is going to hold.

The hardships of these low-ranking agents weighed my own heart down right along with them.

"Ah, well, I'll admit it. Of course the work our Southeast Asia Team does is less dangerous than what the other teams do. What we do, in the end, comes down to watching from a distance and filing reports, that's the whole of it. I hear that over in Dandong this time, they rescued three tourists who'd been abducted by the State Security Department? Compared to something like that, well, I've got nothing to say."

"...."

A jolt.

At the sudden example my shoulders shrank without my meaning them to, but anyway.

With the Southeast Asia Team's agents this thoroughly demoralized, one day a piece of news came down.

"And then the call came in. Said a team leader would be heading to Cambodia before long, and to cooperate fully."

That men in this foul a mood decided to give me a hard time was, perhaps, only the natural next step.

Having laid all of that out, Owl No. 11 bowed his head.

"Honestly, I mean, it's not like what we did to you, Team 5 leader, was anything to be proud of, is it? Looking back on it, it was a truly petty, low thing to do. For blowing off your calls and leaving you high and dry these past four days, I'd like to offer a sincere apology."

"Thank you for being honest with me. I think it's completely understandable. You must have felt very let down by headquarters."

"...You showing that kind of understanding on top of it, it just makes me ashamed, really..."

That was the reason they'd written me off as some parachute appointee no different from the headquarters crowd and left me baking in the Southeast Asian sun for four whole days.

It was true they'd left me twiddling my thumbs for four days, but I couldn't call it much of a loss.

In that time I'd gone through the process of adjusting to the local climate, and I'd knocked out an entire conversation book while I was at it.

"All right, then, let's do this."

Now that the apologies had been exchanged, I nodded readily.

A way to solve their problem had just occurred to me.

"So even when you find the place where the drugs are produced, the result never turns into a win for the team, which makes all that intel feel like meaningless, wasted effort. That's the gist of it, right?"

"Well, yes. It's enough to drive you out of your mind."

I said it with a bright smile.

"Then we just charge straight into the place where they make the drugs, smash it all to pieces, and burn it to the ground. Problem solved."

"Come again?"

"That's a result nobody can deny, isn't it? Because the drugs they were going to send to Korea would cease to exist in the first place."

"...Hah."

At logic this crystal clear, Owl No. 11 let out a hollow laugh.

Over by the entrance, Sparrow No. 10, who'd been eavesdropping on us, snorted too.

A stinging look, the kind you'd give some half-witted idiot, came flying my way and hurt.

"No, but, team leader... if it were as easy and doable as you make it sound, would we be sitting here right now stewing in our own misery like this?"

"For starters, just mark the location of the place for me."

"No, even if we knew the location, what on earth would you go there and do?"

Lately, through taking on this task and that, I'd come to realize one thing.

That there's one method for solving any problem in the simplest, cheapest way possible.

"Is there anywhere around here that sells burner cars?"

All you need is one car packed full with a good fat gas cylinder.

Since it's come to this, I might as well blow it up first and start from there.

*****

The Irobuchi-kai.

One of the yakuza organizations that had been stamping out meth within the Japanese mainland since the old days.

Their branch, which had set up shop in Cambodia, sat brazenly right on a main road on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, in plain view of every passing eye.

On the surface it looked like nothing more than an ordinary coconut processing warehouse.

That drugs were being manufactured out in the open in a place like this was, in practical terms, the reality of Cambodia.

"Feels about time to order another cup of coffee..."

There was one pair of eyes that stole the occasional glance at that coconut warehouse.

The man watching the inside and outside of the warehouse from a window seat on the second floor of a run-down café, Crane No. 22.

He was scribbling something in a notebook, pretending to be hard at work studying Japanese.

"Nothing to report?"

"Ah, nope."

When he raised his head at the presence that had quietly sidled up to him, Owl No. 11 dropped into the seat across from him with a fresh cup of coffee.

Crane No. 22 had been waiting for him as it was, so he gave a short nod.

"So this Team 5 leader, did he not come along with you?"

"I dropped him off at the used-car lot, and we parted ways after that."

"And the Sparrow?"

"On standby down in the car. Oh, right. That guy's a Sparrow too, so be careful not to get them mixed up."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. Sparrow No. 7, apparently."

"No, what the hell is that supposed to..."

Slurp, slurp.

As if his insides were burning up, Crane No. 22 busily sucked at the straw of his cup, which now held nothing but ice.

He'd already gotten the rough version over the phone, but even so, there was no helping the sheer absurdity of it that welled up in him.

"Anyway, so what exactly is this guy saying he's going to do, and how?"

"Beats me. From the way he talked, he was acting like he was going to burn that whole factory clean to the ground... He's not seriously planning to ram a car into it, is he?"

Owl No. 11 sipped away at his coffee with a scornful chuckle.

Crane No. 22's reaction was much the same.

"Come on. Never mind wrecking himself in the attempt, there are ten armed guards stationed inside that place."

"That's exactly what I said. It's not like we've been sitting on our hands this whole time because we don't know how."

"You'd have to pour a whole squad of commandos in there, honestly..."

The two men's gazes naturally drifted outside.

The area around the coconut warehouse, laid out in full view.

Glinting.

Barbed wire, densely strung along the top of the high concrete wall that ringed the place, caught the sunlight and shone.

Around it, self-armed guards strolled about at their leisure, running their patrols.

How could a single person possibly dare to bring down and burn a place guarded that tightly?

Unless he was some kind of pathological liar.

"...What's that?"

"What's what?"

Then, all at once, a strange sight entered the two men's field of view.

A pickup truck they'd never seen around here before came tearing across the roadside in front of the warehouse, engine roaring, in one big hurry.

In that instant, a peculiar hunch flashed through them.

It was a black agent's instinct, an absolute, gut-level refusal to get tangled up in this.

"...That's not that car, is it?"

"It... kind of looks like it, though?"

The truck had been circling round and round on the same track for a little while now.

As if sizing up the warehouse, it kept busily racing along the same course over and over.

And then, a moment later.

"It's gone... What the hell was that about?"

"Chickened out and ran off, didn't he?"

Watching the tail end of the pickup truck as it drove off into the distance, the two men chuckled scornfully.

Owl No. 11 nodded in weary resignation.

"Right, of course, what else could happen? He'll keep at it for a few days, give up, and then come crawling back later brazen as anything, like he never said a word about it."

As if it had all come to nothing in the end, the two men settled back in and started chatting away again.

And then, in that very moment.

Vrooooom!

KA-BOOOOM, CRASH!

"Guhk!"

"Waaagh!"

Like a thunderbolt striking, a tremendous roar came whirling in from right beside them.

Startled out of their skins by the unexpected uproar, the two agents reflexively dropped low.

"What is it? What's going on?"

"No idea! Is, is it an earthquake?"

The reactions of the other people in the café weren't much different.

Before long, when the two agents scrambled to peer out the window,

"...What in the world is going on?"

"Fu, fuck. What is that..."

The street in front of the coconut warehouse, so peaceful a moment ago, had already been reduced to a wasteland.

The iron gate that had been shut up tight was torn like a sheet of paper and scattered every which way, and the armed guards who'd been standing watch out front were slammed into the wall, twitching.

And that wasn't the half of it.

Vrooooom!

"...."

"...."

That very pickup truck that had been circling the road moments earlier was now barreling through the shredded iron gate and into the warehouse grounds.

Bumper to hood all crumpled in and it still came on ferociously, as if bent on reaching the warehouse building standing at the far end of the lot.

Vrooooom!

"!"

"!, !!"

The Irobuchi-kai members who'd been on standby beyond the wall came pouring out, shouting something as they tried to stop the truck.

But thud, thump!

They were sent helplessly tumbling to the ground, mowed down by the car.

Whether they poured out screams and shouts or not.

Crunch!

Crash!

"Oh, what the fu..."

In the end the truck punched through the outer wall of the warehouse, burrowed all the way inside, and vanished from sight.

Every single person sitting nearby watching the spectacle clicked their tongues and shook their heads without meaning to.

"Come on, how do you drive to end up plowing in there?"

"He's dead for sure. Tsk, tsk..."

Just as everyone around was clicking their tongues and murmuring,

KA-BOOOOM!

"Guhk!"

"Hurgh..."

A tremendous explosion burst out from inside the warehouse where the truck had lodged itself.

A blaze of crimson flame that swallowed the whole building whole scorched the air and devoured it in one sweep, and then billowing black smoke rose up and began to wrap itself around the entire warehouse.

Gwooooo....

'Then we just charge straight into the place where they make the drugs, smash it all to pieces, and burn it to the ground. Problem solved?'

Only then did the two agents naturally recall the words of the Team 5 leader they'd been tearing into just a little while ago.

Before long the Irobuchi-kai production crew came spilling out of the warehouse in a blind panic, fleeing the fire.

They looked like bugs scurrying to escape the smoke.

"!!!"

"!!!, !"

At the same time, the armed guards began charging into the warehouse.

Ratatat!

Bang, bang!

The moment they went inside, an ominous string of gunshots rang out from within the warehouse.

Judging by the circumstances, they were clearly exchanging fire with the driver of the truck that had rammed in a moment ago.

Never mind the question of how anyone had survived that colossal explosion in the first place.

"...."

"...."

Bang.

Baang.

....

Before long even those clamorous gunshots died away, and while a spine-chilling silence hung in the air,

"...Is that person, by any chance?"

"Ye, yeah... th, that's him, all right..."

Out from the warehouse entrance, thick with flame and smoke, a figure came strolling, step by step.

The very man they'd been chewing up and spitting out, the Team 5 leader.

A half-scorched Hawaiian shirt, shorts, a straw hat, a mask, and so on.

His getup was leisurely, as if he'd just come out for a stroll at a holiday resort.

"...."

"...."

And here, on top of everything, an even more preposterous sight followed.

Having made it out to the main road, he abruptly flagged down a passing local motorcycle, then slid a single bill out of his pocket and held it out.

And then, as if truly nothing at all had happened, he hopped up onto the back seat of the motorcycle and vanished without a trace.

"No way..."

"...Insane."

Everyone in the café just gawked blankly at the surreal scene.

What words could possibly capture this outrageous situation in full?

The two men's eyes clung to the sight of the fiercely burning warehouse, unable to tear themselves away.

The Irobuchi-kai members, just like them, stood there dumbstruck, doing nothing but watching their own workplace burn.

"...S, slap me across the face right now, would you."

Smack!

"Nnngh."

"...."

"This isn't a dream?"

Even after taking a slap to the cheek, he couldn't get his senses back.

It wasn't a dream.

*****

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