recognize him as human.”
The doctor looked briefly at each of them. He had hard eyes. How old? Leets’s age, twenty-seven maybe, but with a flinty glare to his face, pugnacious and challenging. Guy must be good, Leets thought, realizing the doctor was daring one of them to stay.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Fine. Rest of you guys, out.” The others left. Leets and the doctor were alone with the bagged form in the box.
“You’d best put something on,” the doc said, “it’s going to be messy.”
Leets took his coat off and threw on a surgical gown.
“The mask. The mask is most important,” the doctor said.
He tied the green mask over his nose and mouth, thinking again of Susan. She lives in one of these things, he thought.
“Okay,” the doctor said, “let’s get him onto the mortuary table.”
They reached in and lifted the bagged thing to the table.
“Hang on,” the doctor said, “I’m opening it.”
He threw the bag open.
“You’ll note,” he said, “the characteristics of the cadaver in the advanced state of decomposition.”
Leets, in the mask, made a small, weak sound. No words formed in his brain. The cadaver lay in rotten splendor in its peeled-back body bag on the table.
“There it is. The hole. Nice and neat, like a rivet, just left of center chest.”
Swiftly, with sure strokes, the doctor inscribed a Y across the chest, from shoulder down to pit of stomach and then down to pubis. He cut through the subcutaneous tissue and the cartilage holding skin and ribs together. Then he lifted the central piece of the chest away and reflected the excess skin to reveal the contents.
“Clinically speaking,” the doctor said, looking into the neat arrangement, “the slug passed to the right of the sternum at a roughly seventy-five-degree angle, through the anterior aspect of the right lung”—he was sorting through the boy’s inner chest with his gloved fingers shiny—“through the pericardial sac, the heart, rupturing it, the aorta, the right pulmonary artery — right main-stem bronchus, to be exact — the esophagus, taking out the thoracic duct and finally — ah, here we are,” cheerful, reaching the end of his long shuffle, “reaching the vertebral column, transecting the spinal cord.”
“You got it?”
The doctor was deep inside the boy, going through the shattered organs. Leets, next to him, thought he was going to be sick. The smell rose through the mask to his nostrils, and pain bounded through his head. He felt he was hallucinating this: a fever dream of elemental gore.
“Here, Captain. Your souvenir.”
Leets’s treasure was a wad of mashed lead, caked with brown gristle. It looked like a fist.
“They usually open up like that?”
“Usually they break apart if they hit something, or they pass on through. What you’ve got there is a hollow nose or soft point or something like that. Something that inflates or expands inside, I think they’re illegal.”
The doctor wrapped the slug in a gauze patch and handed it over to Leets.
“There, Captain. I hope you can read the message in it.”
Eager now with his treasure, Leets insisted on adding one last stop to the tour of the combat zone. He’d learned from Ryan that the divisional weapons maintenance section had set up shop in the town of Alfeld proper, not far from Graves Registration, and they headed for it.
Leets entered to find himself in a low dark room lined with workbenches. Injured American weapons lay in parts around the place, a brace of.30-caliber air-cooled perforated jacket sleeves, several BAR receivers, Garand ejector rods, Thompson sling swivels, carbine bolts, even a new grease gun or two. Two privates struggled to dismantle a.50-caliber on a tripod, no easy task, and in the back another fellow, a T-5, hunched over a small piece, grinding it with a file.
Leets, ignored, finally said, “Pardon,” and eventually the tech looked up.
“Sir?”
“The CO around?”
“Caught some junk last week. Back in the States by now. I’m pulling the strings for now. Sir.”
“I see,” said Leets. “You any good on the German stuff?”
“Meaning, Can I get you a Luger? The answer is, Can you get me thirty-five bucks?”
“No, meaning, What’s this?”
He held out the mashed slug.
“Outta you, sir?” asked the tech.
“No. Out of a kid up on the line.”
“Okay. That’s that new machine carbine they’ve got, the forty-four model. You catch SS boys with ’em, right?”
“Right.”
“Seven point nine-two millimeter
He took it from Leets and held it close.
“All right,” he said. “A hundred for the forty-four, five bucks apiece for any spare magazines you can get me.”
Oh, Christ, Leets thought.
“One fifty,” the tech upped his bid, “provided it’s in good condition, operational, no bad dents or bends. You get me one with the barrel-deflection device, the Krummlauf, and I’ll jump to two bills. That’s top dollar.”
“No, no,” said Leets, patiently, “all I’m interested in is this slug.”
“That’s not worth a goddamned penny, sir,” said the sergeant, offended.
“Information, not dollars, goddamn it!”
“Jesus, I’m only talking business,” said the sergeant. “I thought you was a client, is all, sir.”
“Okay, okay. Just look at the fucking bullet and tell me about it.”
“Frank, c’mere, willya? Frank’s our expert.”
Frank untangled himself from the struggle with the.50 and loped over. Leets saw that if the tech was the business brain, Frank was the esthete. He had the intellectual’s look of scorn; this was too low for him, he was surrounded by fools, more worthy ways of spending one’s life could certainly be found.
He picked the piece up, looked at it quickly.
“Let’s weigh it,” he said. He took it over to the bench and balanced it on the pan of a microscale, fussed with the balances and finally announced, “My, my, ain’t we got fun.” He rummaged around on the bench and produced a greasy pamphlet, pale green, that read “ORDANCE SPECIFICATIONS AXIS POWERS ETO 1944” and pawed through it.
“Yes, sir,” he finally said, “usually goes one hundred and twenty grains, gilding metal over a soft steel jacket. Inside this jacket is a lead sleeve surrounding a steel core. A newer type of powder is used. But this here mother weighs in at one forty-three grains. And there ain’t no steel in it at all. Too soft. Just plain old lead. Now that’s no good against
“Why would they build a bullet out of pure lead in wonderful modern 1945?” Leets asked.
“If you’re putting this wad through a barrel with real deep grooves, real biters, you can get a hell of a lot of revs, even on something moving slow. Which means—”
“Accuracy?”
“Yes, sir. The guy on the gun can put them on fucking dimes from way out if he knows what he’s doing. Even if the bullet’s moving real slow, no velocity at all. The revs hold her on, not the speed.”
“So it’s moving under seven hundred feet per second? That’s slow, slower than our forty-five.”
“Right. And at seven hundred fps or less, you’re under the sound barrier.”
“No pop. It’s better than a silencer, isn’t it?” Leets wanted to know.
“Yes, sir. Because any baffle system cuts down on feet per second, so you get a drop off in accuracy and range. Someone real smart figured all this out. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
