“You going in there?” she said.
“Just for a minute.”
“Alone?”
I nodded. “Then we’re going to their armory.”
“Not smart,” she said. “I should come in with you.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. “As a witness, I guess.”
“To what?”
“To whatever they do to you.”
I smiled, briefly.
“Terrific,” I said.
I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded. The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward. People stood where they were. Stock-still. Then they turned to face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd. Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their shoulders, left and right. I bumped back, in the silence. I stand six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I can hold my own in a shoving competition.
I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned toward me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path. He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its contents on the linoleum tile.
“You spilled my drink,” he said.
I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his eyes.
“Lick it up,” I said.
We stood face-to-face for a second. Then I moved on past him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But I wasn’t about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a bottle shatter against a table behind me.
I didn’t hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned around and started back. The return journey was no different. The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a little.
I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room, slowly, one group at a time,
Summer wasn’t there.
I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the bar. I figured she had been watching my back.
She looked at me.
“Now you know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman.”
She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their armory was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn’t been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job, up at the Pentagon.
“Over here,” Summer said.
She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open with an open padlock hung on the chain- link by its tongue. Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn’t salute. Didn’t come to attention. But he didn’t turn away either. He just stood there and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper etiquette as Delta ever got.
“Help you?” he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of every description. I saw five different submachine-gun models. There were some M16s, A1s, and A2s. There were handguns. Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.
In front of the guy on the desk was a logbook.
“You check them in and check them out?” I asked.
“Like valet parking,” the guy said. “Post regulations won’t allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas.” He was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone’s new P7.
“What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?” I asked.
“Trifonov? He favors the Steyr GB.”
“Show me.”
He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.
“Nine-millimeter,” Summer said.
I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.
Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.
“Got a phone?” I said.
The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant’s desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.
“Get me Sanchez at Jackson,” I said.
I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
“What?” Sanchez said.
“Did they find the shell cases?” I said.
“No,” he said. “The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.”
“Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.”
