“She calls me…but I’m not answering. She gets a burr under her saddle, she’s got to get it out. She calls me, I ain’t there. What does she do? Call someone else? Who else would she call? She’s been to a gun store, she had a Bible she got from the Reverend, she can’t find no satisfaction, she calls me, I’m not there, who else does she call? It’s early evening, most places are closed down. Who does she call? The newspaper? Could she have called the newspaper?”
“But you said she didn’t.”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe she didn’t call anyone. Maybe she just up and left for home and the driver caught her and-”
“No. Gal wouldn’t give up. That’s not how she was taught. She’d want to do something positive, achieve a sense of progress. So somehow she’d continue to search. So, who’s open that late? Who never closes? Who has information on anything on tap even if you’re in the woods in rural Tennessee in the dark?”
They looked at each other.
“She had a laptop, right?” said Nick. “Wireless, right? She went to the Internet. She tried to Google Mark 2:11 and came up with what we came up with-ten thousand explanations of how Jesus cured the cripple and sent him home, and she couldn’t make any sense of it. Who does she call next?”
They looked at nothing and then they looked at each other again.
They looked at the package that Bob had just dumped on the floor. It said AMAZON.
“She buys a book!”
THIRTY
Vern’s cell rang.
“Yes sir.”
“What’s the word, Vern?”
“Ernie, what’s the word?”
“Ain’t no word, goddamnit, Vern, and you’d know that if you done your job. Don’t know how you can take money for tonight, just sittin’ there hammerin’ on that poor little girl and her family.”
Vern sat next to the little girl on the sofa, his big hand draped protectively about her. Gently he’d been caressing her arm for about and hour, whispering softly into her ear.
“Well, sir, Mr. Holy Water, I will do my job, same as you, and earn my money, same as you.”
He went back to the phone.
“Sir, I-”
“Vern, I heard discord. I told y’all I didn’t want no discord. Discord is what makes things fall apart, that I know true and straight.”
“Sir, Ernie and I are fine. We just ran into some unexpected situation is all. As for that old man, he ain’t peeked out a bit. Ernie kept a good watch on him, yes he did. There’s no move or nothing.”
“Okay, we are about to let hell out of the jar here. The race’ll be over in a little bit-they’re up to lap four eighty or so now-and they’ll let the traffic build a bit, and then they go and we jump. Like I said before, that’s when you go up, you bash in the door, you hit him with both barrels, a lot of shooting, it don’t matter, no po-lice getting there for six hours with the mess we making here. Then you git gone but good. I’ll call you later so’s you can pick up your swag.”
“That is a good plan, sir.”
“Boys,” said the Reverend, “I just want you to know, you’re doing Grumley work tonight, but more important, you are serving the Lord.”
“Sir, He has rewarded me. I have met the gal of my dreams here tonight, yes sir!”
THIRTY-ONE
Bob tore open the Amazon package.
It was The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting by Major John L. Plaster, a sniper expert and former SOG war dog in Vietnam, who Bob actually knew.
“Sniping,” said Nick. “So she was trying to find something about snipers.”
“She couldn’t have found a gun. Nobody loses a gun. She’d found, I don’t know, a piece of equipment, a gillie hat, a range book, or maybe some shell-related thing. The shell itself, the box, a piece of carton, a manifest, a bill of lading, something with a shell designation on it. But it had to be something unusual. The girl is my daughter. She’d been around cartridges her whole life. She knew the difference between a.308 and a.30-06 and between a shell, a cartridge, and a bullet.”
“And it had to be arcane then, if she didn’t know it right away and sought someone with more information-the guy in the gun store, you, finally the book.”
“Let’s try Mark 2:11,” Bob said.
He went to the index. Damn! No Mark 2:11. But he was so close now, he could feel the answer almost as a palpable presence, floating just out of focus in the corner of the room.
“Damn,” said Nick. “I was so sure it-”
“Wait,” said Bob, “I think technically they abbreviate ’em. And we never saw the word ‘Mark’ written in her own hand. Don’t know if it really was a Mark or some kind of abbreviation. I think the military uses ‘M-k period’ as its abbreviation, left over from the old days. But I don’t see-”
“Go back to the index.”
Bob found the designation “Mk.211, 622.”
Bob turned to page 622 and immediately saw a photo of a group of long, big, mean-looking cartridges, missiles really, their sleek brass hulls propped upright as they rested on a rim, while at the top, a bullet like a warhead promised speed, precision, and destruction. The conical, streamlined-to-death-point thing itself was sometimes black, sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes tipped in these colors, all a part of the complex system of military enumeration, by which armies on the prowl in far dusty places could keep their logistical requirements coherent.
And there, finally, it was: Mk.211 Model O Raufoss, with green-over-white painted tip.
They read. The Mk.211 Raufoss is a dedicated armor-piercing.50 caliber round, meant to penetrate light steel, of Norwegian manufacture (NAMMO being the name of the firm) and design, in play in specialized roles in the American war effort in the Middle East. It consists of a tungsten core buried in the center of the 650-grain bronze bullet and was designed so that the bullet itself, traveling at over twenty-five hundred feet per second and delivering four thousand foot pounds of energy at impact, would bore through the armor of the vehicle. A nanosecond later a small charge would explode, thus releasing the tungsten rod within, which being heavier and harder, would fly into the crew compartment, shatter and fragmentize, quickly wounding, disabling, or simply slaughtering the human beings and any delicate electronic equipment inside.
“It’s for light armored vehicles,” said Bob. “Not a tank, but an armored personnel carrier, a Humvee, a car, a radar screen, an aerial, a mobile command center. Or maybe a bunker or barricade, a helicopter, a plane on the ground, a wiring junction, a stoplight, a camera or infrared scope, any number of military applications which are classified ‘soft targets,’ anything short of the real, big mechanized stuff. I’m betting they do a lot of damage wherever they’re deployed.”
“The.50 caliber. That’s the big one?” Nick wanted to know.
“They call the original gun the Queen of Battle. Ma Deuce, from the heavy machine gun designation which is M-2. You rule the battlefield with it in certain situations, say on a hill way out in bad-guy land. We used a lot of ’em in ’Nam. We loved ’em. But this here’s the newest wrinkle. It ain’t for a machine gun. See this Mk.211 shit’s for a rifle built by an outfit called Barrett, a big son of a bitch, just barely man-portable. Six feet long, forty pounds or so, off a bipod. Looks like an M16 on hormones for Arnold Schwarzenegger. You couldn’t carry it in a holster to rob a store. But placed with a trained operator, you could use it to snipe at over a mile to take out trucks and lightly armored defensive positions, you could rain havoc and brimstone on your target zone with pinpoint accuracy. You could take down people, low-flying planes, missiles on their launch pads, radio and radar installations, anything. You could use it on the president with that ammo. It ain’t the gun, it’s the ammo. It’s strictly military-only, banned from civilian use, and I don’t think even the NRA cares about that. It’s for blowing up stuff, for multiplying the killing force, for bringing down planes or choppers, That ammo’ll go through anything and cut the shit out of what’s on the other side.”