After reading Lon’s letter, I burned it in the fireplace. Probably a week hasn’t gone by in the fifty years since that I haven’t thought of it, for it made, as I knew it would, what happened possible. It was the fulcrum of the event. I think I remember it pretty well, so I will now give it to you as I got it from my great and tragic cousin Lon:
Let me begin by narrowly defining the technical requirements. You, James Bond, have been assigned to eliminate one Dr. No for his multifarious crimes. Yet you cannot be caught, and there can be no evidence of your involvement or the British Secret Service’s involvement. Fortunately, you have a handy patsy, Felix Leiter of the American CIA, that dunderheaded American would-be intelligence service. Poor Felix: you can manipulate him into almost anything because he so wants to be like the debonair, suave, bunny-bagging Commander Bond. So you have easily conned him into taking a sniper shot at Dr. No. Alas, he has only one weapon available, and that is a surplus war rifle of Italian vintage, namely a Model 38 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano carbine with a dreary Japanese telescopic sight of questionable utility. You worry that Felix is incapable of making the shot, so you have arranged for a backup shooter of much higher ability to be present at the moment of the killing. If Felix, as is probable, misses, the agile backup shooter will take the kill in the next second or so. But all ballistic evidence must point at Felix; he is the Judas goat in the operation.
I will not worry here about firing angles, getaways, placement, any of that stuff. That is your department. I will not worry about the disposition of poor Felix; that is yours as well. Mine is simply the technicaclass="underline" how can backup Shooter X put a bullet into Dr. No’s cerebellum and leave no trace of his existence so that the apprehended Felix Leiter is held responsible for the shot, as proved by the ballistic forensics scientifically applied by experts. It’s the case of the bullet that never was.
This is what I would do. First, I would provide Felix with the ammunition he is to use, having previously secured an example of it myself [this I had already done, basically on instinct, so I was ahead of the game]. So we give Felix a box of 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company under contract from the Italian government, declared surplus by the Italians, resold to American wholesalers, and packaged in a nice white box. The bullet Shooter X fires is basically identical to Felix’s and off the same cartridge-manufacturing line at Western’s St. Louis manufacturing facility.
We have before us one of those cartridges. Let us examine it. It is blunt-tipped with a copper-coated bullet protruding from its brass case that has an unusually exaggerated length given the overall size of the cartridge. It doesn’t look like a missile so much as a cartridge case with a cigar stuck in it. It is a heavy, dense item for its size, speaking eloquently of its seriousness of purpose.
You are aware, Commander Bond, that firearms and ammunition are not the stolid, imperturbable things they seem? They are plastic; they may be altered, customized, improved, their tasks changed, their performance envelope shifted, all kinds of magical tweaking and petting may be applied to them. That is what we are going to do with our 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge.
(If you’ve forgotten or never knew: a cartridge is composed of several units. It contains a bullet, which is propelled down the barrel to terminal effect. The bullet is powered by rapidly burning – not exploding – powder, which is contained in a brass vessel often called a shell or a case. The rear of the shell, called the head, contains a rim which is machined to fit tightly, held in perfect alignment by cleverly machined grooves on the bolt, thus locking it into the chamber of the rifle. The head also contains, wedged tightly into its center, a magic gizmo called the primer, a chemically potent nubbin of specific materials that becomes a spear of flame when struck by the hammer, lighting the powder and producing the expanding gas that propels the bullet down the barrel and into history. Not that it matters, but the cartridge is an extraordinary device, so efficient and well designed that it has not been replaced in over a hundred years and will not be for another hundred years. But back to our cartridge, our 6.5 M-C.)
The first thing we do is pull the bullet from the shell, easily done with a common reloading implement. We throw out the cartridge case, full of powder, with its primer. Don’t need ’em. This is about bullets, not cartridges. Now let us examine (as I have done at length) what is before us. It is 1.25 inches long. It weighs 162 grains. It is copper-covered, and its copper covering is somewhat thick, thicker than normal, as it is designed to be a hard object that does not deform when it strikes flesh but penetrates deeply. The copper is wrapped around a lead core, which can be seen by looking at the base of the bullet, observing the lead interior where the copper hasn’t covered.
We put this bullet in a vise, upside down. Or we put it on a lathe, horizontally. Any advanced hobbyist’s shop has one or the other. We drill a .200-inch tunnel through the latitudinal (lengthwise) center of the bullet, that is, through the lead from the base, up toward the nose of the bullet, though we stop at 1 inch depth, leaving the nose of the bullet intact.
Now what have we got? We have a bullet that weighs probably 20 grains less than it did originally but has been substantially altered in terms of its performance, without sacrificing any of its accuracy.
Next we return the bullet to the vise and we carefully saw or file off about an eighth of an inch of its blunt nose, removing enough copper to open up the lead (which is much softer) to the impact point of the bullet.
It is now substantially more volatile than it was, and instead of being counted upon, by virtue of its structural integrity – its hardness – to penetrate and stay more or less together on penetration, it may be counted upon to disintegrate when it strikes a living target, particularly if it strikes the skull or other bone structure. That is because of two dynamics: first, the nose of the bullet, which is now soft lead, will rupture on impact, peeling backward, almost blooming like a flower. Second, from within, the bored-out center has left the whole far more fragile; it will atomize in the violence of the explosion. Expect massive brain damage if the round hits the brain.
Next we take that doctored bullet and reload it in a case for shooting at Dr. No. But wait! We threw out the Mannlicher-Carcano case and its powder. Why, we have a dressed-up bullet with no place to go. Or do we?
Here’s the key: we reload that bullet into the case of a cartridge called the .264 Winchester Magnum!
How is such a thing possible? Stop and think, Commander Bond. The 6.5 mm Italian cartridge is simply measured in metric-system terminology: 6.5 mm equals .264 inches diameter, or close enough for government work, like assassinations. The Carcano bullet fits neatly into the .264 Win Mag case and produces a new cartridge, the hybrid .264/Carcano, which slides neatly into the chamber of a .264 Winchester Magnum rifle. In the interest of making this less boring, I simplify. You might have to make slight adjustments to the hybrid cartridge or the rifle to get it to fit. The actual diameter of the 6.5 is .267, three thousandths of an inch larger than the barrel diameter of the .264 rifle. That might make a difference in the cartridge fit to the chamber, but it doesn’t require surgery to fix, only minor alterations. For example, you might turn the Carcano bullet on a lathe against a hard blade held at a precision measurement and whittle it down three thousandths of an inch. Or you might “neck turn” the cartridge casing, meaning you mount the shell in a fixture and rotate it by hand against a blade set to a particular depth. Benchrest shooters do this all the time, because manufactured cartridge shells are frequently inconsistent in their neck thickness, and in that game, regularity – ZZZZZZZZ! Wake up, Bond! More coffee, damn you! – is the key to accuracy.