Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

In late October 1963, none of this could be imagined. I told myself I had a question for Lon that needed answering, perhaps denying to myself the inevitability of the course I had set up. I did know that I couldn’t be affiliated by record in phone contact from house or office, and I was aware that nobody knew whom that devious busybody James Jesus Angleton was or was not wiretapping. My solution to this was to drive downtown on a Saturday afternoon wearing suit and tie, park around Fifteenth at N, walk up N, and stride boldly into the office building at 1515 upon whose facade the words “The Washington Post” were emblazoned in some sort of ancient Gothic typeface. In those days, newspapers were wide open to the public, especially if the public looked as Official Person as I did, in dark tie, dark suit, white shirt, horn rims, and natty little Princeton haircut, as it was called. I strode in, nodded at the ever-sleepy Negro guard, and took the elevator to the fifth floor, where the newsroom was sited.

It was hardly a tenth full, as a skeleton crew watched teletype machines or took dictation from far-flung correspondents on the rare breaking-news stories. I sat down at Marty Daniels’s desk, aware that I looked a little like Marty, who covered the Defense Department for the Post, and rifled through the pink stack of messages that had accumulated. I hoped Marty called Mo back, and I hoped he avoided the angry fellow at the West German embassy, and I hoped that Susan didn’t call to cancel lunch or anything more interesting, and then, lazily, I picked up the phone. As a senior correspondent, Marty enjoyed direct access to long-distance, and I quickly dialed Lon’s number.

I got Monica, she put me through to Lon in the shop, and I said hello.

“Hugh, how’s my favorite secret agent? Have you caught Dr. No yet?”

“The slimy bastard changed lairs on us again. He found a new volcano. And how’s my favorite cripple?”

“You know, Hugh,” said Lon amiably, “I thought I felt a sexual impulse below my waist the other day, but it turned out to be a house falling on my knee.”

We both laughed. I had followed his steps to Choate and Yale. He was five years older, and I’d gone down to New Haven my senior year to watch him on the football field, where I took great pleasure in the way he left the Harvard Bambis smashed and bloody in his wake. That was his strength deployed in righteous fury!

“Seriously, how are you doing, Lon?”

“I’m fine except for the ulcers on the leg. They don’t hurt, but they’re a little annoying. I’ve got a piece due for the Rifleman at the end of the week, and I’m going to a conference on combat-oriented pistol matches next month that looks to be interesting. You?”

“Just spying away like a busy little beaver,” I said. “Spy, spy, spy, all day long!”

Soon enough, our jocularity out of the way, I progressed to issues. “Lon, something has come up on the job, and I thought I’d run it by you.”

“Good Lord, Hugh, I’d think if anybody’d have experts on this sort of thing, it would be you fellows.”

“I’m sure we do, but it’s the weekend, nobody spies on weekends. Plus, it will take three days to go through and three days to come back via channels. You probably know more than they do, anyway.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’ve come across a reference to” – I pretended to withdraw it from memory – “something called an ‘Eye-tie Mannlicher-Carcano six-five.’ Now, I am a professional intelligence officer, so I have been able to determine that ‘Eye-tie’ probably means ‘Italian.’”

“Excellent, Hugh. I feel we are well protected.”

“Indeed. But the rest, other than the fact that it’s from the firearms world, is gibberish.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know too much about it. It could refer to the rifle or the cartridge, depending on context. Or both. Anyhow, the rifle was the Italian service rifle beginning in 1891 and running through the late fifties. It was probably the worst service rifle of its generation, less effective in every respect than the German Mauser, the British Lee-Enfield, our own Springfield, even the French Lebel. But they kept making ’em in various iterations, including a short cavalry or ski troop version.”

“I see,” I said. “How would an American get one?”

“Very classified. Buy a stamp. That’s the secret. When the Italians joined NATO, they converted to our arms – you know, the garand, the .30-caliber machine gun, the carbine, the .45 automatic – so they sold off a billion or so of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifles in various formats as surplus, and a great many of them came into this country, where they are being sold as downmarket hunting rifles by mail-order gun houses. I see ads for them all over the place. These guys put a cheesy Jap scope on them and sell them as deer rifles for the workingman who can’t afford a Winchester Model 70.”

“So it’s no sniper rifle?”

“It’s basically a piece of junk. Barely accurate, shoddily made, ugly as sin, with a cranky bolt throw. It shows that the Italians never took war seriously, particularly when you compare it to a brilliant piece of engineering like a Mauser. Now, the cartridge it shoots is more interesting and probably deserved a better rifle than the Mannlicher. It’s a mediumbore, flat shooting round, meant for battle at more or less longer ranges. The bullet is heavy for its size, with a thick copper coating to hold it together on those rare occasions when Italian marksmanship prevails. It’s a viable round for just about any thin-skinned game animal up to and including a whitetail. I’d use it on a man before I’d use it on a bear.”

“If you hit a man in the head with it?”

“Good-bye head, assuming a relatively short range, out to two hundred meters.”

“Hmm,” I said, by which utterance I meant information received but not processed.

“What have you got in mind, Hugh? Is this about some kind of Cuban invasion operation because you have a line on ten thousand Mannlicher-Carcanos real cheap? If so, I’d strongly suggest that you avoid the temptation. There’s a lot better rifles available in surplus than pieces of junk manufactured by people who eat spaghetti for lunch and take a nap every afternoon.”

“Thanks, Lon. Let me ask you this – what can you do with it?”

“ Do with it? Kill out to two hundred or so meters, small-game animals, human beings, possibly rabbits if you could hit them, which is doubtful. Shoot targets unsatisfyingly. Grow annoyed at the roughness of its action and the sloppiness of its trigger. Cut it up for firewood. That’s about all. But I’m a snob, don’t listen to me.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I suppose I meant could you – uh – counterfeit it?”

“You mean build a fake one? Good God, Hugh, that’s ridiculous.”

“I’m not explaining myself well, because I don’t have the vocabulary. I’m thinking about forensics, about the clues guns leave that identify them. It’s not something I know anything about except from Perry Mason. Here’s what I think I mean. If you knew you had an agent who was going to shoot somebody with a Mannlicher-Carcano, but you didn’t trust that person to make the shot, could you do something so that somebody else who was a much better shot could shoot the person with, I don’t know, the same bullet or the same kind of rifle at the same time, but it had been fixed so that no investigator would ever figure out that the second gunman with the second rifle and the second bullet was there? Counterfeit in that sense, I mean.”

“Is this for your next James Bond novel, Hugh?”

“I wish I were that clever, Lon.”

“Well. . let me think, okay? I’m guessing another requirement would be a silencer. It’s really called a suppressor. You know, so the real assassin’s shot doesn’t draw attention.”