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.”
“So that’s what she found,” said Nick. “Some evidence of a.50 caliber rifle with deadly, military-only ammunition in criminal hands, presumably being readied for some kind of kick-ass caper. And that’s why they wanted to kill her, and when you found out, they had to try and kill you. But what would the caper be? Can you guess? And when is it going down?”
“Could it be a kill?” said Bob. “That’s what you could do with this. The president, I don’t know, the governor, some big guy, he’s in a box watching the race. They’re on the mountaintop which just barely might give you a vantage point on the speedway or somehow they’ve gotten into the speedway itself, though with a gun that big, I don’t know how. Maybe he can zero the big guy’s box, put ten Mk.211s into it, kill everybody in two seconds, I’m guessing. Or it could take out an armored limousine. Turn it to Swiss cheese.”
“The president isn’t there. The governor of Tennessee is, but…the governor of Tennessee? I suppose. I just-” Nick ran out of words. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem Grumley. It’s not their style.”
“No, no, this is good, consider it,” said Bob. “They’re hired by some mob who knows their one value isn’t sophistication but silence. That’s what they’re selling. So maybe the governor is organizing some new anti- organized crime task force, got ’em all scared. They contract the hit to the Grumleys who bring it off with their usual crudeness and violence but also a refusal to snitch ’em out if caught.”
“The tires, Bob. You were the one that discovered the tires. Were you wrong on that? How would that fit in?”
“Ahhh-” Bob thought, clinging to his thesis. “Yeah, yeah, they could count on their being an SUV there in the crowd, but not with off-road tires. Yeah, after the hit, which takes maybe two seconds, they chase a family out of its Bronco, speed-change the tires, and take off cross country, maybe to the top of that hill. A chopper picks ’em up. It sounds pretty good to me, partner.”
“But maybe you have biases. You’re a sniper. Everything to you looks like a sniper job.”
“From ten feet with a.50 Mk.211, it ain’t much like sniping. It’s like blowing stuff up real good.”
“Okay, I think we have to alert this command structure somehow. They’ve got to get people into the area, put a hold on all VIP transit, and maybe-I still don’t like it. It just doesn’t seem Grumley. Does it seem Grumley to you?”
“Until today, I didn’t know a Grumley from a dandelion.”
“Could they shoot up the race? From up above, fire the ten shells into the lead three cars as they move through the pack on a turn? You’d get a massive crash, cars all over the place, the race would be a catastrophe, they’d stop it, cancel it, something.”
Bob saw through that.
“And if someone laid money against the one-in-a-million shot there’d be no winner to the Sharpie 500-well, that person would win a fortune. But he’d get a visit from the Vegas mob enforcer to make sure his win was on the up- and-up, and since it wouldn’t be, he’d get a swim in Lake Tahoe with a pair of cement socks.”
“And it doesn’t seem to need a driver, a speed-tire change, or any of the other stuff. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” Nick said.
“And just to make it more ridiculous, the race is almost over. It’s near eleven. They start at eight and do the five hundred laps in about three hours. Man, I am so buffaloed. Come on, Nick, you’re supposed to be smart. Figure it out.”
“I’m tired, I’m old. I feel older than you look.”
“Okay, go back to basics. What do we know, absolutely.”
“We know, absolutely, they have acquired a.50 caliber rifle and a supply of armor-piercing incendiary rounds of a sort the government categorizes as ‘antimateriel.’”
“So,” said Bob, “let’s pursue this particular line. What is materiel?”
“Okay, I’d answer like this: light armor. Limousines, sure. Or, given this environment, power lines, TV trucks, light safes, radio installations, I don’t know, McDonald’s signs, news helicopters, race cars, race car trailers, propane barbecue tanks. It could be any of those. I’m afraid we’re stuck with-”
“Just make the call. You don’t have to designate a target. You just have to flood the zone with law enforcement and security and-”
“What zone?”
“I guess the race zone.”
“Yeah, but, hello, it’s full of three hundred thousand happy campers. Too bad there’s not a nice armored car in the middle of this, chock full of cash. Now that would make some sense. Okay, I’ll make the call and-”
It lay there in the room for a while. Each man considered what Nick had just blurted out. Yes, armored car. Seemingly impregnable, full of cash, stuck in traffic, yet easily taken down by such a tool as an Mk.211.
“What you just said,” said Bob, “now that makes some sense.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” But he had to fight it. “Why would there be an armored car in the middle of all this? It doesn’t track, it’s a bad idea, a red herring, it-”
Nick took out his cell, punched a number. “I’ll call a state police captain I’ve worked with. He might know something,” he said.
When he got through, Bob heard him say, “Hey, Mike. It’s Memphis, sorry for the late call. You’ve been watching the race? Cool, is it over yet? No, I could call back, it’s almost over, but let me just lay something on you. I’m here in Bristol myself. Sorry but it’s important.”
He said to Bob, “Now he’s turning the TV down. Ah, okay, Mike, we have intelligence that some very bad actors are on scene here with a piece of ugly work called an Mk.211 Raufoss antimateriel round. And a.50 caliber rifle to fire the stuff. They could use it to do all sorts of things but the more we think about it, this group seems criminal, not political, and we’re trying to figure out if there’s a target they could unzip with it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m thinking how ideally suited the ordnance would be against some sort of armored car. Is there an armored car in play here that you would know anything-”
He listened as far-off Mike told him all about it.
Then he said, “All right, can you patch through to your command center? I’m going to try to reach them from my end. I’ll try and get a Bureau SWAT team deployed from Knoxville by chopper, and then we’ll move on site fast
