CHAPTER 49
It should work. He had set her up with the gun, shown her how to use it, more or less, warned her about the safety notch, how to shift mags. Bullets facing OUT. Really, that’s it. Bullets facing out, into the housing till it snaps, pull the bolt back, and start shooting again. OUT. OUT. She didn’t have to learn the difference between “bullet” and “cartridge,” which was beyond the scope of all journalists, especially the ones who’d been to Harvard. Fortunately she had good education for this kind of work: she hadn’t been to Harvard.
Her job: when she heard him scream, “Go!” she was to lean around a rock with the weapon locked under her arm at hip height, point the gun at the men as best as possible, and squeeze the trigger. It would fire thirty times in about four seconds. She should try and hold it low, fighting its need to rise, but not worry about targets. The point was to send a fusillade down the pathway so their trackers would leap off it into the brush, seeking cover, and consider their next move.
At that point, from behind them, Bob would pull five pins on five No. 36 Mills bombs and toss them exactly where the bad guys had gone to rest. Those whom five blasts and one thousand pieces of supersonic steel filling the air didn’t kill would be quite dazed. Moreover, a turmoil of dust and smoke would blur everything. Bob would step into it with his Sten and shoot anything that still moved.
“Get the dog,” she said.
“I can’t make no guarantees about the dog. But he will probably die.”
He thought the dog would probably be turned to Alpo by the blasts, but who knew? You can’t never outthink a dog.
So now he sat with his Sten and his No. 36s behind a rock a few yards farther down and a few yards off the path. It was just waiting.
“A lot of war is waiting,” he’d told her. “You go crazy waiting. Don’t go crazy. Think of something else.”
Swagger himself thought of weapons, those he wished he had and the lesser quality of those he did have. Each grenade was a classic olive-drab egg, cross-checked by grooves meant to facilitate fragmentation. It had a mechanism at one end that sustained a pin, and the pin locked down what some called a spoon and others a lever, just a junk prang of metal that would pop off under spring tension when the pin was removed and the thing thrown, as the hammer pivoted under spring power to smack a detonator that lit a fuse that, 4.5 seconds later, turned the thing to noise and death. Grenades were tricky. You did not take grenades for granted. Drop it at the wrong time and it killed you, not them. Another grenade problem: you tossed it, it hit an overhanging branch or limb and bounced back. Not pretty. Thus he had checked and made sure his throws would have free passage. He also made sure all pins were loose in their holes, easy to yank. Too many guys had died from grenade mistakes in Vietnam. Grenades were heavier than they looked, and although some men got quite good with them, it took practice, and Bob had not thrown one since 1966, first tour in ’Nam. He got through two more tours without any grenade work and counted himself lucky.
But these were seventy years old. Boom or no boom, that was the question. That was why he would throw five, because if only two went boom, he still ought to win the war. Or at least get to the Sten part.
No uglier gun existed. You could not love it unless it saved your life countless times, and even then it would take some willpower. It was just a variety of steel tubes welded together at 4:57 P.M. Friday, British summer war time, three minutes before the end of the shift. Blobs and smears of liquid weld, now hardened into little disfigurements, littered its ostensibly smooth surface. They looked like lumps of butter hardened and spray-painted. It was beyond nuance, as if designed at the kitchen table, and in fact, that was where it had been designed. It rattled, nothing in it fit well, all angles were sharp and punishing to the hand or body. It was just a tube with stuff sticking off it at weird angles. The magazine inserted horizontally so that it was infernally out of balance; its trigger guard appeared to have been engineered before anyone thought up the curve. It lacked elegance, streamline, grace, ergonomic concession, or solidity. It lacked a front sight; its rear sight was a small nubby projection with a hole in it, which was why nobody ever used them. It even had a stupid nomenclature; machine carbine. The only thing it did well was kill people.
If he had to fight for his life, this was not quite what he would have come up with. However, the British won their part of World War II with this stuff, so in for a penny, in for a pound. Mili Petrova was worth it. He would have fought with a can opener for her.
Now he heard them. At last. It was almost a relief. By canting a little and staying low, he was able to get an eyeball on them.
There were six, seven if you counted the dog, who came first, sniffing bravely for pheromones that weren’t there. It pulled Thug One on a leash and was followed by Thugs Two through Five, in sweatsuits or jeans, really heavy, strong, tough-looking guys. Gangster meat, each carrying a short-barreled AK-74 with the long forty-round plum-colored magazine. Jerry Renn hadn’t flown in an A-Team from Dubai or anything like that. He’d hired off the Moscow street, probably Mob soldiers, cheap and expendable, complete with heavy brows, jawlines stark with testosterone, necks like diesel tires, huge hands, an aura of instant, thoughtless brutality so necessary to instill terror in potential resistants and keep others in the outfit in line, as well as to guarantee the boss’s comfort. Drug couriers or security, rule enforcement, lords of snitch discipline, collection experts, takedown crew, gunfighters, whatever was called for, these men provided it without a lot of thought before or guilt afterward. They were the universal soldiers of the Mob, any Mob. They did it for the blow, the chicks and the gold necklaces. On a good day they got all three, on a bad, nothing but lead at twelve hundred feet per second.
Then came Jerry, last in line, but with a shorty AK as well. That made him one of the boys, that made him killable. Bob tried not to personalize this stuff, but he thought it would be kind of cool to kill Jerry. You could tell he was convinced he was pretty hot stuff, and that Swagger was years beyond effectiveness, an old goat with a bad case of crankiness and a steel ball for a hip. Be nice to blow the smug off his face with eighteen or twenty Sten-gun rounds.
Jerry had added a baseball hat, khaki, and one of those shoot-me-first tactical vests the contractors all wore. All his shit was sand-colored, so he’d spent a lot of time in the sand. He also wore Oakley killer shades, what looked to be a SiG 226 strapped to his thigh in a Tommy Tactical rig, and a nice pair of too-expensive tactical boots. He looked like a model for the iTactical.com site.
At least the six weren’t talking, bullshitting, smoking, joshing, or laughing. They weren’t quite that cocksure, though their postures were far from the kind of Condition Four readiness that kept you alive on combat patrols. It was clear they thought they had this one whipped. An old man with a bad hip, a not quite so old woman, an actual grandma, no weapons, no water, in wilderness about which they knew nothing, mostly moving uphill as fast as possible, but grinding down every step of the way. What was there to worry about?
Reilly couldn’t think of Paris. She couldn’t even think of Ocean City. It wasn’t fear, not as some experience it: weight, dread, air painful to skin, breath raw and raspy and somehow not satisfying. It was more like: Do I really have to do this? And: I can think of a lot of reasons why this is not a good idea. What would Marty say? “You what? You killed gangsters? Don’t tell Legal.”