I slipped all of the rounds back into the clip, and pulled an extra shell from a box of ammo sitting in the case, setting it next to me. I slid the clip into the gun and racked the slide putting one in the chamber. Then I thumbed the clip release, and it dropped into my hand. I picked up the round I had set next to me, and topped off the clip, fitting it back into the gun. I pulled back the hammer, then made sure the safety was solidly on, and I added the thumb slide for ‘Condition One’ carry mode. Cocked & Locked.
I hefted the gun trying to get the feel of it, then I pulled one of Colts’ out of its holster, slipping the H&K into the vacant spot. It was lighter, even with the added rounds. I pulled and pushed it back and forth in the holster for a few tries. It felt comfortable, but big. The one thing that seemed to stand out was its size. It was even larger than my Colt, and the Colt was a big gun.
Westwood pulled out a small notebook and bringing her thumb to her mouth, she wet it with her tongue then began flipping through pages working from back to front. When she’d found the page she wanted, her hand went up in a stop signal, then she pointed at me.
“This is for you, from Lorrie, so listen up.” She glanced at Godsen, and she nodded back setting down her notes and heading for the washroom. The taps turned on as soon as the door was shut. Ultimate deniability came to mind, but why would a pistol make her so cautious?
Westwood’s voice took on a different tone, and she started slowly making technical points relevant to the H&K pistol. She was out of her area of expertise, and repeating these instructions verbatim from the sounds of it.
‘The H&K’s frame is a polymer resin more commonly known as nylon. Not your average nylon, mind you, but a nylon fibre tough enough that it would make a pretty decent bullet for general purposes if we’d bother to order some. But, for example, stopping an expertly trained enemy target, with full body armour, calls for a whole different breed of fish. That’s where the H&K comes in.
The sheer number of different load types that it accepts without modification, puts it at the top of the list. As for the accessories, well, let’s just say that this USP, that’s Universal Self-loading Pistol to you, has more than enough add-ons, attachments, augmentations, and conversion options to fill a Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Almost. The ones that you will want have been thoughtfully included in the case, and even some you may not want. The list follows.
Laser Targeting Attachment. Excellent for those occasions when ‘Almost Perfect’ just won’t cut it.
Extended Magazine. This was modified from the RDAW, or Rapid Deployment Assault Weapon. It adds a modicum of cumbersome handling to the USP, but those fifty rounds can come in pretty handy when you’ve got no other way to go but through the ‘hot zone’. It also makes for a fair grip-area for your second hand.
Custom Sights fitted with your favourite pistol in mind, the Colt 1911-A1, with a few improvements. Such as three-dot Tritium sights. The top of the USP is fitted with a locking groove to hold a sniper-scope. The scope also comes in a night vision model, also included.
You may be wondering by now what the hell good a scope is on a handgun. Well, without fail, assuming a good shooter at the trigger, this USP is accurate within two inches of center, from a distance of one hundred and fifty feet, ten times out of ten, in an action scenario. With a shooter accustomed to the unit and with it adjusted for his or her natural shooting pattern, the scope starts to make sense. Depending on the load being fired, accuracy extends well beyond the norm for this type of weapon. Let me emphasize ‘well beyond the norm’.
Recoil/blowback has been all but eliminated, with the design bleeding off the force to the polymer frame. This results in rapid-fire accuracy as well as take-your-time accuracy. The issue of recoil leads us to the inevitable silencer. It’s light, it’s short, it’s baffled to help deter barrel lift, and it’s quiet enough to virtually eliminate any pinpoint sourcing for the shooter. You could be standing right next to your subject in a busy street during daytime hours, and everyone would be looking around to see where the shot might have come from.
Last, but far from least, are the different types of loads this gun will take. We have a nice selection, for handling situations where a gun is hardly called for, to situations where an RPG, rocket propelled grenade, would be more likely to get the job done. For the high end of the range, we have a load that is specially made for us by H&K USA. These loads do not exist on our paperwork, and they never will. We suspect that H&K USA feels the same way. They don’t break the Geneva convention, mostly because nobody thought of it I’m sure, but they bend the hell out of it. We call them ‘Bluebells’, because of their tendency to make the target stop to smell the flowers. The load is hot, with a forty percent increase in muzzle velocity, but it’s not the impact that drops the target, it’s the projectile. They’re explosive. It’ll blow out most body armour on the first hit, then whatever’s left underneath gets the full treatment. Bluebells will penetrate a stone wall one foot thick. There are a limited number of these rounds, so don’t go around using them for a job that can be accomplished in another manner.
All of the other loads are of various configurations, you’ve been given your share, in the bottom of the case, and each box is coded with an alpha-numeric tag. That lets you know which is which. Despite the different types of load, they all share one common factor, they carry a hotter black powder than routine military issue. They all travel with at least a twenty-five percent higher muzzle velocity than a standard .45 calibre round.
Someone with your file shouldn’t have any trouble adapting on-the-fly, so to speak. The first time you use it will be when it becomes a permanent part of your gear.
There will be a hand written list of the codes for the loads. Memorize it in front of Westwood, then give it back to her for destruction. Do not write the codes down. Anywhere. Do not talk about them, they don’t exist. These two pistols are brand spanking new, as are all of the accessories. They now belong to you. This is a gift. We have ensured that these weapons cannot be traced back to us, so if you ever have to explain them, your call to us should be your last resort, and even then, think twice. Good luck.
P.S. If you never have to use them, all the better, but if you do, use them properly and you'll win. Regards, Littlefox.’
Well that’s about it. There’s one more thing, though. The types of load that are illegal on most continents these days are the source from which your loads were picked. There are Teflon-coated titanium tips, flat-nose loads with no tips at all, soft-nose tips with a hollow centre, but the hollow isn’t empty. There are two types of those, one with a highly explosive agent, and one with phosphorous, which as I’m sure you know burns like mad with exposure to oxygen. Even the trace oxygen in some highly aerated sea-water will induce a burn. Once the phosphorous is activated, the only way to stop the burn is to look the other way. This round will be more effective when you’re outnumbered, because the rolling around on the ground screaming, assuming you were smart enough to get a leg or arm shot, and not just kill the target outright, will put the heebie-jeebies into the rest of the enemy team, thereby opening up opportunity for mistakes on their part and seized opportunities on your part.”
Westwood handed me a hand written note, as Littlefox had promised. I scanned the codes, saw how they were set up and gave the paper back to her about thirty seconds later. She looked at me in an enquiring manner, and I nodded my head in the affirmative. I’d been through this so many times before…
Westwood simply said, “Close it up, I’ll get the Colonel.” She walked over to the washroom door and knocked twice, then returning back to her seat.
I replaced the top layer of foam with the communications gear neatly fitted into their various slots, holes, and so on, on the top layer.
Godsen walked out of the washroom with a notepad and a pen in hand. Work, work, work. We wrapped up the rest of our business in about ten minutes, with Godsen getting it her way, naturally, and called it a night. Our morning meeting was set for 8:00 AM, i
n the hotel dining room.
I closed my new case hefted the weight of it, and headed back to the ranch. All the little animals were safe in their pens, and if I had wanted to, I could have gotten a few hours’ sleep before the breakfast meeting. Instead, I sat down on my couch and opened up the case, going over each and every piece of gear it contained.
When I got to the H&K’s, I pulled them both out and field-stripped them looking for the design changes that would convince me that I should switch. Littlefox had left a great little speech-cum-lecture for Westwood to lay on me, and many parts of it were valid. The question I had was this: would anything I found convince me where her speech had failed to?
All that talk about accuracy, and special loads, accessories, and so on ad-infinitum. What I like is a simple setup. If I really do have to shoot someone, for whatever reason, the Colt .45 does a vicious job of it. I’ve dropped a running man at one hundred and fifty yards with a hot-powder load and a hand cut ‘X’ on the lead tip. I managed to just nick his left elbow. The result was drastic, spinning him around about one & a half times before he dropped, fully unconscious from the shock of hitting the bone at the elbow area and the loss of blood before he even hit the ground. The bullet had split into about six fragments, each one bouncing off on its own angle through his arm. I suppose it was like being shot a half dozen times in a fraction of a second. It’s not pretty, and you will spend a lot of time explaining about how & why you had to pull the trigger in the first place. Unless you’re working for the people who live above the invisible screen. Then you can count on extraction, which makes it easier.
I don’t know what more you could want in the way of stopping power, unless you felt the need for portable rocket launchers on the job. Hard to hide those under a jacket though.
The guns were well designed, no question. Basically it was Browning’s design when it started out, with modifications and improvements numbering many, and proving to be excellently implemented. The one accessory that hooked me though was the laser targeting add-on. It slipped into place below the front of the barrel and stopped just in front of the trigger guard. At no point did, it exceeds the width of the barrel and slide. There was a clever bit of thought that went into the on/off mechanism. You could rig it about four different ways from what I could see. A pressure pad on the hand-grip, which could be set on the left or right side, according to the shooters’ needs. The pressure pad was attached to the laser sights by a small cable. Press the pad, and a small red dot shows you where the bullet goes. The other way of handling it was to leave off the pressure pad attachment completely and extend a finger from the shooting hand to press the on/off sensor directly on the laser attachment. This looked like it could be ordered in left or right hand mode. Mine was pre-set for me in the right handed mode. It was a hell of a selling point for the gun. It was also highly illegal for any non-military personnel to be carrying a laser sighting mechanism for a pistol, even without carrying the pistol at the same time.
For us ‘Civvies’, and, I have to admit, for a lot of the law agencies as well, we get a similar arrangement, but instead of a laser mechanism, we get a high-power and tight focus white light source. Xenon gas or some such. The problem with that of course, is as soon as you trigger the light, you broadcast the location of your shooting hand and your weapon. The laser doesn’t do that. All you get from the laser sight is a small red dot, showing you where your shot will hit, without showing the quarry where the source is. The laser light does a lovely job of showing coherency only when it’s reflected, like when something such as smoke gets in its path. Otherwise, the only place it shows is at the impact point. Smooth.
H&K may have just made this whole new kit available for the U.S. Armed Forces and Special Police Units, but I’d seen this type of arrangement used before. On a custom-built sniper rifle. The man who used it could drop death down on a man from well over a thousand metres away under the right conditions. Mind you, he had to wear special goggles to amplify the specific wavelength the laser used because it wasn’t in the visible spectrum. This unit was far more simple than sophisticated, given the current state of the art, and miniaturized to boot.
If this went well, I was thinking I would try for a legitimate license for this kit. And the boy dreamed on.
I took one of the H&K .45’s out of the case, and mounted the laser sighting mechanism. After spending about fifteen minutes changing the configuration of one of the Bianchi holsters on my rig, it fit in nicely. The draw was slowed down somewhat, to be sure, but in the event of needing to use laser sights to tag the target, I doubted very much whether that extra few seconds would make much of a difference. I picked a flat-nose load for the first five, and the Teflon coated rounds for the remaining seven. I filled a clip, slipped it into place and racked the slide, putting one in the chamber, and then dropped the clip into my open hand. I fitted the missing bullet back into the clip from the supplied box of ammo, then put the clip back into the gun. After setting the safety and the hammer lock, I had the gun just the way I would carry it if I kept it. Thirteen rounds, ‘cocked & locked’, Condition One carry mode. I fitted it into the right side holster, and put away the rest of the H&K gear.
I put the communications gear level of form-fitted padding on top of the gun section. All the comms gear that would be required today for both Therese and I came out piece by piece and was laid on the coffee table in front of me. Very modern, very small, and very expensive. Then I closed and locked the case.
I wasn’t tired at all yet, so I sat back and opened the bottle of single malt whiskey I’d brought over in my case, poured a couple of fingers, and sat back into the sofa with a cigarette, slowly sipping the whiskey. Thinking of the case. What we had. What we didn’t. The most important thing we didn’t have was Ted Dawson, and hopefully that would change this next few days. Maybe even today.
~
Chapter Fourteen
T
he morning brought the first sunlight I’d seen in a dog’s age. It came up suddenly, in a visual barrage from the other side of the mountains across the valley from Dietikon, thrusting down into the towns, laying itself on the fields in between them, all in a perfect sequence of deep reds, oranges, yellows and finally, golds, which quickly drifted up through the spectrum to daylight. I sat at the window of the sitting room and watched the whole thing. My spirit was starved for the sun, and I soaked it up like a man who’s been lost in the desert soaks up water from the newly-found oasis.
I had nodded off for about two hours or so, earlier on, but it didn’t stick. I was up before the sunrise started, at about 5:40 AM. I was just smoking my Camels and letting my mind wander over the events of the previous day. Four-hour sleep in all was what I had managed that night. Enough to work with, but too little to feel right on top.
My mind was working overtime even when I told it to stop. There were too many irons in the proverbial fireplace, and they were all starting to heat up. The reports I’d been given the day before had opened my eyes to a whole new set of possibilities, and it was time to start sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Obviously to the world around her, Therese was still sleeping. I’d looked in to see how she was, and it was amazing how young and vulnerable she looked while she slept. I had started feeling very protective towards her, and I still wasn’t sure what those feelings were based on. Time would tell, no doubt.
Checking my watch, I saw that it was six o’clock. Midnight back in Toronto. Walter would just be starting to work his night shift. I sat down next to the telephone and placed a call to him. His communications program answered the phone for him on the first ring. The computer generated voice mail program gave me the choice of a few options I didn’t want. At that stage I punched in the special code that triggered a screen message for Walter, letting him know that there was someone on the line that he actually wanted to talk with. I knew for a fact that there were very few people that had that code, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. The computer persona asked me to
‘Please Wait’, so I did. Exactly two minutes later Walter came on the line.
“Yeah, speak up, time is money.”
“I’ve missed you too, you Wascally Wabbit.”
“Jeff, how nice to hear your voice again. It means two things, of course. One: you remembered I was alive and wanted to converse on an intellectual level denied to you in the routine and austere life you lead. Two: you have a problem that needs solving, and as usual you can’t… oops, I mean, don’t have the time, to do it yourself. How am I doing so far, hmm? Should I open up a psychic hot-line, do you think?”
“If you were truly psychic Walter, I wouldn’t need to answer that question at all now, would I?”
“Well done! Now, down to business, my equipment is telling me that your call is emanating from the Swiss Public Telephone & Telegraph system. A bit out of your backyard there Jeff. What’s up?”
Walter had better equipment of all styles and descriptions than I’ve ever been able to accurately assess. One of the reasons for that was his penchant for upgrading practically everything he owned that ran on electrical power at least once every three months, and in some cases, every two months. He’s got one of those food-processor things in his kitchen, and I’ve sat there right at his kitchen table watching him use it, and I still couldn’t tell you all of the stuff it does. Walter’s loved technology since we were kids together back in Montreal at Westmount High. He’d been in the boy’s home we all just referred to as Weredale, and I’d been living in a two room partition in an older home converted to a rooming house, basically. I could see the school from our one and only window just across the street. I was always late for the morning bell. The true irony was that Westmount High was in Westmount, of course, which was where all of the people who owned the city of Montreal lived. Not on my street exactly, but just a bit further up the hill. Walter and I had bonded as buddies from the first time we met. He was a genius at everything, but couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, as the old saying goes. The first time we met he was being given a pretty severe working over by two guys who were both bigger than him and with combined I.Q.’s wouldn’t have come anywhere near the ten percent mark of his. I didn’t like the odds, so I intervened. There had followed a police visit to the school concerning one of the guys who’d had to be kept for a few days over at the old Reddy Memorial Hospital, whereas the other guy just spent one night for observation. I played it cool, shrugged my shoulders and denied any knowledge of wrong-doing, never mind being the one who did the wrong. In my mind I hadn’t.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 30