The ammunition had been stored in a bag with desiccant, but the rifle was preserved with a copious amount of grease. Mizukawa understood it was to stop the weapon from rusting, but it was no way to treat a gun. He wouldn’t have the time to thoroughly clean it and oil the parts as he put them back together.
He gave the parts a big wipe with a bunch of rags and started fitting them together. If it were a different firearm, he’d be lucky to get one shot out of it in that state, but he reckoned an AK would be fine.
While he didn’t spend much time cleaning the body of the gun, he was more careful with the magazine. It too was full of grease, and he had to get rid of that to prevent feeding issues.
After completing the assembly, he tested the rifle on full-automatic… It worked fine, except that the heat made trapped grease leak out from various gaps.
He’d mostly relied on what he remembered from a lecture he took abroad several years earlier to figure out how the parts fit together. Luckily, his memory served him well.
The lecturer said that military weapons had to be simple enough for any idiot to use them. People with no education would join the army to make money, but it wasn’t only out of concern for them. Prolonged, dangerous missions pushed soldiers to the limit, and they had to be able to fight no matter how tired or stressed they were. Fortunate for Mizukawa.
So he got his hands on a rifle and checked that it could fire properly. He’d gone through one magazine on full auto. The accuracy wasn’t great… Or rather, there was a problem with the sights. All the bullets were landing left of where he was aiming. On closer inspection, the rear iron sight was slightly right of center. Mizukawa didn’t have the tools to adjust it, though. The AK-47’s design was quite old, and anything beyond basic maintenance needed a specialized thingamajig, like a vise or a clamp, to adjust the sight alignment. While Mizukawa could try to force it into the right place with the tools he had on hand, it would mean making a lot of crude adjustments, hoping to get it right in the end…and he didn’t have time for that. He’d just have to remember that the sights were misaligned, so he’d always fire slightly to the right of where he was aiming. Or he’d have to fire at close range, where none of that mattered.
“This’ll do.”
He packed seven full magazines into a shoulder bag and slung it over his head. The rifle and spare ammo went into a travel bag. He lifted it off the floor, ready to go.
He’d been working on and testing the gun in a warehouse that belonged to his gang, but an assault rifle made a lot of noise when fired fully automatic. It was the middle of the night, so someone could’ve reported hearing gunshots to the police. Mizukawa hurriedly got into a car and left the scene before anyone came by to check what was going on.
While he was driving, his phone started ringing. It was one of his informants who managed to locate Okada’s killer, Ijyuuin. Okada put the caller on the speaker so he could keep driving while they talked.
“So he’s in Kinshicho?”
“Yeah, he’s partying at a nightclub.”
“Why Kinshicho, though?”
Both Mizukawa’s and Ijyuuin’s families had their territory in West Tokyo, but Kinshicho was on the eastern side of the capital.
“Probably wants to stay the hell away from you. He definitely suspects you’re up to something.”
“Why stay in the city at all, then?”
“You know who else has their turf there, right?”
There was a group in that part of the city with a good-natured middle-aged man as its boss. He was quite the character, preferring coffee over alcohol, appearing at local festivals in person instead of sending the youngest members of his group, and tending a booth. His gang was a weird one.
But that eccentric boss wasn’t the reason even Mizukawa, from the other side of the city, had heard of the Kinshicho gang. That gang was famous because of rumors that it had ties to some government entity. Ten years earlier, the Kinshicho family drastically changed their business model, moving away from violent crime. Presently, they had almost completely stopped causing trouble not only for the police but ordinary people in general, and yet, unbelievably, they managed to hold on to their turf.
Interestingly, the gang’s makeover happened around the time of the old radio tower incident, and there were rumors that half-jokingly said the two weren’t unrelated, that it was then when the gang made a pact with some secret government organization. Well, people said lots of things. It was one more urban legend, although this one had only spread in the underworld.
It made Mizukawa think that he might have more opponents to deal with besides Ijyuuin and his entourage of thugs. It wasn’t totally far-fetched that a bunch of armed cops might come to Ijyuuin’s rescue. But he could take them on, too. On second thought, he wouldn’t have to. As long as he took Ijyuuin out, nothing else mattered…
“Thanks for the info. Keep watching that club. Let me know at once if Ijyuuin comes out.”
“Sure thing. The club’s name is—”