He’d come at last to a large corrugated shed toward the rear of the complex. It bore the sign, OPERATIONS MOTOR POOL/NO ADMITTANCE TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.
Why did he enter? Because it was there. No one stopped him as he slid in and in the darkness he blinked to adjust his eyes. He found himself in a garagelike structure of some size, in the center of which a number of men were bent over benches, working intently. The odor of gasoline, grease and some kind of chemical solvent filled the air like a vapor. He heard the click and snap of metal parts. He smiled at one of the workers, who just worked away contemptuously.
He saw then they were working on guns. Machine guns or assault rifles, complicated, dangerous-looking. They were snapping them, assembling them, greasing them, goofing around with them. And there were bullets too, crates of bullets, and some of the men were fitting the bullets into magazines. They all looked like barbarians. They were wild boys, yardbirds, the same breed of tough, scary trash that had frightened Dobbler into Russell Isandhlwana’s comforting ministrations. Some had crew cuts, some ponytails, all had tattoos and bad teeth. And the guns: he could tell. They loved the damned guns.
There was so much electricity between the men and their weapons. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. How they adored them!
The guns, Dobbler thought.
“Well,” said Colonel O’Brien, “I’d guess you think you might find that damned rifle and make yourself a half a million dollars. Friend, I’d bet you’re chasing a mirage. I think it’s buried in some unknown hole with its poor last owner.”
Bob couldn’t tell him he’d fired the damn thing in Maryland last January.
“Now you know that the Ten Black Kings were ten extra-fine Model 70 target rifles in the model known as the Bull Gun, with a heavy, extra-long barrel that the company planned to put out as Presentation Rifles in the year 1950. These ten rifles – serial number 99991 through 100000 – were stocked from a trunk of black American walnut from a tree that had been felled in Salem, Oregon. For some odd reason, the wood in the tree really was black; that is, it was so old and dense it was almost like ebony. The completed rifles were so lovely that someone came up with the name ‘Black Kings’ to describe them. I’ve handled several. They are beautiful rifles, believe me.
“The rifles were then presented to the usual great men and now rest in various museums around the world. Except for the last one – serial number 100000, in the thousand-yard caliber – ”
“.300 H & H Magnum,” said Bob.
“You have it, son. This one was presented to an employee, Art Scott, who’d for many years been Winchester’s expert marksman. Art was a wonderful rifle shot. He’d won the Wimbledon cup and won the thousand-yard match at Bisley, in England, and won the nationals at Camp Perry, and had been the NRA shooter of the year several times. He may have been the best shot this country ever produced, until that man in Vietnam came along.”
“You must mean Carl Hitchcock?” said Bob.
“That’s the boy.”
“Go on, Colonel,” Bob said. “What happened to the Tenth Black King? You didn’t say in your book. You said, ‘Someday the tragic story of the Tenth Black King will come out, but for now, as it is unfinished, I will not begin it.’ ”
“Well, it’s a sad story. The Tenth Black King was the only one of the ten that was regularly used in competition; its action had even been specially milled from a new Swedish steel so that it was mighty strong and could stand up to the heavy powder loads the thousand-yard shooters burn up. It was used not only by Art, who was in his sixties by that time, and had lost a bit of his edge, but by his son Lon. Lon Scott was a lovely young man, handsome and fair, a Yale graduate, a shooter’s shooter. He had his whole life before him; he’d been accepted at Harvard Law School in 1954; he had everything, including the Tenth Black King and his father’s inherited fund of shooting knowledge, learned from growing up in a shooting family. A father-son thing, quite holy in certain precincts. Do you shoot, young man?”
“Now and then,” said Bob.
“It’s not as simple as point and pull the trigger, you know?”
“So I hear,” said Bob.
“Well, anyway, in 1954, Lon Scott finished fourth in the National Thousand Yard Rifle Championships at Camp Perry. The season was over. He had a few of his loads left, and he and his dad went out one afternoon to shoot them up. But you know the curse of the rifle. When you think you’ve mastered it, it’ll punish you for your vanity, reach out and destroy everything you’ve ever earned or made in your life. A rifle can be a cruel and vengeful slut. One of those stupid accidents, where the basic law of safety – treat every gun as if it’s loaded – was violated. A target-grade trigger, very delicate, one of them putting the rifle in the case, the safety not off but not quite on either. Art Scott accidentally shot his son in the spine, paralyzing him forever from the midchest down. Sentencing him to a lifetime in a wheelchair.
“The boy was in the hospital and in physical therapy for two years. All that he’d wanted for himself and that Art had wanted for him was gone. A week after the shooting, Art used the same rifle on himself. Blew his own brains out in the family cabin in Vermont. The boy lost everything in that second’s carelessness: his legs, his life, his father.”
“What happened to him?”
“When he recovered, he didn’t destroy the rifle. You’d think he would, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t, because he believed that the firearm was simply a tool, and it had no guilt. But he wasn’t untouched. If anything, he set out to master it. For about five years in the mid-fifties he gave himself up entirely to the discipline of the rifle and became one of the premiere thousand-yard shooters because he could still fire from the prone, of course. Won the championship in 1956 and 1957. He was a great benchrest shooter, too. But I wonder? What can it do to a vital young person to have his life twisted so terribly by a bullet?”
Nick, silent all the time they had been there, finally spoke up.
“I think I know. I was married to a woman accidentally paralyzed in a shooting. If you were a good person, like my Myra, you become a better one. But if you were bad – fundamentally bad – it can turn you black and horrible. I used to talk to the doctors when I took Myra in for therapy once a week. They once told me that there was nobody more bitter than a strong, firm man exiled into a metal chair forever.”
Bob said, “Is that what happened to Lon Scott?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say,” said the colonel. “That’s between himself and God.”
“What did happen?”
“He gave up. He disappeared. No one knows where he went. But he was a genius, all right. He was one of the first to enter the world of micro-accuracy. He was the first, for example, to see the importance of neck-turning for precision reloading, to get maximum accuracy. In 1963, his last year of competitive shooting, at the National Bench Rest Championships at Lake Erie, Ohio, he shot a three-hundred-yard group that measured.289 minute of angle; it’s been surpassed in the last few years now that the equipment has gotten so refined, but it stood for over thirteen years, the longest single accuracy record in American history. And that was the last time anybody ever saw him.”
“There must have been rumors,” said Bob.
“Oh, the usual nonsense. That he was this or that. More likely, he just went off and got on with the rest of his life. Nothing dramatic. That’s all. But that rifle today – hell, it would be worth a half a million dollars, I’d bet.”