Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Helen, I believe you have a gift for this kind of work,” said J.P. as they sped away.

Les was raised Catholic, and still considered himself a believer, but he didn’t like to waste the man upstairs’s time on minor matters. But he broke his own rule this time.

Dear Lord, he prayed, please, please, please let Helen be all right. Sir, I couldn’t get along without her, and she’s the best mom any kids ever had, plus my own mother loves her to death, and she only stepped off the path this one time to help us out of a jam, so please, sir, this is Lester from the West Side, please, sir, let her be all right.

It didn’t seem to have much effect on reality, as nothing happened or changed. Before prayer, after prayer, he was the same, just a fellow in too fancy a suit sitting on a picnic table in a glade of trees right across the Red River Bridge into Texas from Arkansas. Maybe a cloud shielded the sun, maybe the breeze kicked up, but neither of these could be taken as a message from God, so he decided that God must be busy elsewhere, with much to do that day, and just didn’t have room for Lester from the West Side. He didn’t take it personally. Though his temper had gotten him in trouble his whole life — had invented his whole life, as a matter of fact — he knew it was absurd to be angry with the same God who had guided so many bullets fired his way to miss, and so he didn’t feel at all ill-used by God.

He felt ill-used, he decided, by John Paul Chase. That was how his brain worked: he always had to have a target, a grudge, something to fuel the processing of his mind and thereby provide him with energy, passion, and courage. He had wanted to kill Homer, and if a chance had come, he would have. But now that seemed laughable, since Homer had gotten clipped in the head by a bullet and wasn’t himself — all this after saving everybody’s bacon in South Bend. He was the sort of man who said “I’d like to kill you” about people all the time and it didn’t mean anything — that is, unless he actually killed you.

So he focused on John Paul. Like many men with close friends, he didn’t really trust his close friends. He was too complicated for that. They got along so well, Les the boss, J.P. the servant, and as helpful as that was, it sort of sickened Les that J.P. took so much abuse, was so obedient. What was the problem with him? Les thought maybe he wasn’t too bright.

And he could see J.P. making a stupid decision, just like that idiot farm boy Charlie Floyd had at South Bend, because he didn’t really trust J.P. to do the right thing. So he could see J.P. panicking and plugging a cop, and he and Helen getting pinched when J.P. turned the wrong way down a dead-end street, and Helen goes up for accessory to murder one and is given fifteen-to-thirty, and he never, ever sees her again. That was a possibility, and it was so immense and destructive, it made him shaky.

Pretty soon he’d convinced himself not only that it could happen but that it did happen, and he decided, if so, he’d get himself arrested in Arkansas, he’d go to the same prison just so that he could kill J.P. to pay him back for what he’d done to Helen, then somehow he’d bust out. He felt righteous rage steaming through his insides, building up a pressure so intense, he thought he’d burst, and the more he thought about it, not only the madder he got but the more tragic it seemed, until he couldn’t tell whether he was in a killing rage or a sobbing tantrum. He knew one thing and one thing alone: he felt miserable.

“Honey?”

He looked up. Helen had a big smile on her face, and J.P. was smoking a cigar. Les hadn’t even seen them cross the bridge, he’d been so wrought up.

He raced to them.

“This gal of yours,” said J.P., “she’s the best!”

MACHINEGUN.COM

McLEAN, VIRGINIA

The present

One thing the world had no shortage of was machine guns.

A wonder of the late nineteenth century, the serial-firing, belt- or magazine-fed, recoil-operated weapon had been produced in bewildering variety since at least 1883 with the advent of the original, the Maxim gun. Every industrial culture tried its hand and the results were an infinity of ventilating holes, barrel jackets, cooling tanks, belt-linking designs, magazine curvatures, bolt protrusions, mounting iterations, stock or grip configurations, sight apparatuses, muzzle brakes or flash hiders (or both!), tri- or bipod support structures, carrying grips, to say nothing of the endless array of maintenance devices, ammo boxes, shipping crates, the detritus of the machine-made world, all in the service of chopping down men with industrial efficiency in battle. And of course each gun itself had then gone through model issues, dedication applications, prototypes, and experimental advancements, thus multiplying the base number by a staggering amount. There were thousands of the goddamned things, and the guns of ’14 through ’18 were particularly ornate, where the pressure of war had upped the pace of research and design and manufacture. The Great War guns lacked mobility — that would arrive in War 2—but were superb at their task, which is why the best of them, the Maxim, was often called the Devil’s Paintbrush. It left landscapes of ruined flesh, which it had stroked on the world’s scabrous battlefields, but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of imitations — Vickers, Browning, and so on — that attempted to duplicate the Paintbrush’s effect on the world.

At a variety of websites, Bob wandered among these details at a computer station in the business center of his McLean motel. Next to the screen on the table, slightly illuminated in its moonlight glow, lay the mystery cylinder, that little bit of machined perfection that looked so similar to machine-gun muzzles from the world over, and generations of machine guns past, but never quite exactly.

Maxim?

No.

Browning?

Uh-uh.

MG-42?

Nein.

Degaratov?

Nyet.

Thompson?

Almost, goddammit. But not quite.

Type 92?

Bren?

Breda?

Chauchat?

Nix to all.

He knew the damned things. He’d carried, fired, maintained, deployed, taken down, improvised with them his whole life in the military. It was a key part of the infantry trade. It was warcraft at its most demanding, and whoever kept his own guns running hot, well-fed, and positioned creatively usually won the fight to fight again.

But even with all that time behind the hammering, and all the surgery on the gun’s guts under fire or sweltering in tropic heat, struggling to keep track of pins and springs or any of the thousand tiny parts that made the thing go bangbangbang instead of click , all the miles draped in M60 belts slogging uphill or over dikes, the creature itself banging hard against his back on an improvised strap, all of that machine-gun time, machine-gun culture, machine-gun savvy, did not aid him in placing the cylinder in the machine-gun world.

He almost got a hit on a strange French heavy beast called the Hotchkiss Model 1922. This one looked as if it had been designed in a bar in Montmartre after a long day of whores and absinthe shots, being a crazy jigsaw of angles and latches and bolts. The version of it he found even had a thumbhole stock, which otherwise was shaped like a violin trying to act tough. But the Frenchies had happily affixed a big chunk of metal to its muzzle to keep the strings of 7.9s it fired from rambling all over the landscape. It looked to Bob as if he’d struck, if not pay dirt, at least dirt, though no Net picture got close enough to tell if it had twelve slots or not. If he couldn’t get a close-up, he could at least get his eyes up close.