My Little Armalite

by James Hawes

  27: Thinking Clearly

  I was relieved to find myself thinking so clearly despite the drink.

  If the gun was assembled, in one piece, I would be able simply to fling the whole damn thing out of my car in a single swoop. Like a spear. I could javelin it out without even stopping, or whip it over the railings of some innocently sleeping mosque, for example. Now that would make sure no one ever bothered thinking about whether it had come from anywhere else, ha ha!

  One throw, one single brief, discrete moment of danger, and I would be free.

  Right then.

  Surely it couldn’t be that hard to put it together? After all, I had plenty of time, because I obviously had to sober up properly before driving out into the night with an Armalite, whether it was in bin bags or not. So I might as well assemble it, if that would make things at all easier, as it undoubtedly would.

  Very well.

  Let’s see now.

  Just as I had explained to my boys about their Flying Fortress gun turrets, the trick was to lay all the pieces out properly and take a good, relaxed look, with the end product in mind, not just charge wildly ahead with the first thing that seemed to fit.

  Set out the packages then, without opening them as yet.

  First clean this bloody grease from the bags. Rags? Here, Dad’s old rags. Horrible goo. But there, it wipes off quite well. So: now to open the bags! Hmm, tough stuff. Need a knife. Has to be sharp. The Stanley knife, of course. Always knew it would come in handy. God, the fumes from this filth.

  Open the door of the shed, that’s better. Moonlight. Air. Very private and non-overlooked, yes, ha ha! Which is no doubt why they chose this house in the first place. Christ, would my head never clear? What idiot had decided that all beer had to be 5 per cent these days? In my Devon youth 3.6 per cent had been considered strong. Stupid bloody barmaid. Nothing, nothing compared to my Sarah. What, does she think just because she’s young and firm-breasted she can dare tell me that my life has been …

  Anyway, even 5 per cent beer would clear in a couple of hours. By about three or four a.m., I would be under the limit again. Not a bad time, really. It would still be dark and London would be dead. Just the time to lose an unwanted Armalite …

  Here we are, at the back door. Shoes off, this time! Sit down. Wet arse still. So what? Who knows what nice Dr John Goode is up to tonight? A long time since I had such a secret! Carefully through the house, touch no wall or handle, creeping as if it’s Christmas Eve, setting out presents. Good presents too, this year, special presents if the VIP goes well. Perhaps a Wii for the boys after all? Yes, yes, it’s Jap-Yank crap but do we want them to be the only boys in the school without one? Mustn’t train them up for life under Heath and Wilson!

  But then, for life under what? Under ten feet of melted ice-cap water? Poor little sods. Must sort things out for them.

  Here: the Flying Fortress kit.

  Locate and cement assembly #1 (child’s psyche) to assembly #2 (society), ensuring that all cogs turn smoothly.

  The knife. Thanks, Dad.

  So. And now back out.

  Shoes back on, idiot.

  Wet socks too now. Oh well.

  The dark garden again. The big night. The little shed.

  The wallowing torchlight.

  Kneel again, select a package and slowly, slowly in with Daddy’s blade …

  28: An Icy Male Paradise

  My infant school.

  As I slit open the first package, the smell of my infant school blossomed out at me again across the years. The effect was so strong that I rocked back on my heels and actually got halfway to shielding my face with my hands, as though this sudden leak in time must be the pre-echo, or perhaps the after-effect, of the booby-trap explosion that was going to kill me or had already done so.

  But the world still spun, and I still breathed. Whatever the smell meant, it was real.

  I now examined things rationally, and found that within their layers of plastic wrapping, the various pieces of the gun were encased in perfectly ordinary children’s modelling clay. Hence, I realised, the curious squashiness.

  Of course, the stuff must have absolutely no water content at all, so it never goes off. Just flour and oil. That would be it. Perfect protection. And see how easily it peeled away. Yes, each part of the gun had evidently been carefully oiled before being mummified in play dough. With WD-40 perhaps? My father had always used WD-40 on everything …

  Slice, rip, peel.

  Soon I had removed all the putty and was laying the gleaming components of the gun out in a fine and orderly fashion. That was the way. Order. Not for nothing had I spent my entire twenties filling box after box with colour-coded filing cards about soon-to-be-forgotten personages, soon-to-be-meaningless events and soon-to-be-remaindered books from a shithole run by the Red Army. I knew the value of thoroughness!

  I stood up, my knees creaking lightly, and surveyed the puzzle below me from a godlike height. Right, now, boys. The butt and magazines we already have. And obviously there’s no question about the bit I just opened. That’s the barrel, everyone knows that! Interesting word, boys, when you think about it, suggesting clearly that the very first wrought-iron guns had looked, to their late-medieval makers and users, rather like barrels. As indeed they did. Now, the barrel must obviously fit on to the body or chassis or whatever you call it. Which must be this, the big part with that distinctive carry-handle thing I had recognised immediately (—How did you recognise it, Dad? —Oh, never mind that just now, boys!). Never realised the carry-handle was actually metal, part of the same casting. So, in that case, this packet must contain the actual main bit of the gun, the, well, yes, exactly, the main bit of the gun.

  I now had the bullet things, the barrel, the what-everyoucallit that goes against your shoulder and the main bit of the gun. The form of the whole was clear. But what, then, was in the final parcel? Better see. A quick slash with the Staney knife and …

  What? Damn!

  This was unexpected. Lots of little squishy balls of clay wrapped together in a big plastic envelope. Shit, they must be vital little bits and pieces, like the screws and keys in some blasted IKEA flatpack. Quite a few of them. Oh God, perhaps I should never have started this. Well, it was too late now. Anyway, this was better fun than sudoku. Not to mention work on the VIbloodyP.

  However, I was not going to be able to work it out by sheer meditation on the object before me. Technology had progressed too far for an all-round man: I was going to need detailed instructions, locate and cement part #156 and suchlike.

  A problem? No.

  The web, of course. That icy male paradise where nothing is so obscure, so banal or so vile that you cannot find another man, somewhere, who has thought it worth setting down. An entire silicon cosmos generated by vast banks of servers stacked up in desolate, air-cooled warehouses on the edges of dead-end towns. A world without touch or feel, filled with the desperate yet drearily monotonous voices of lonely males, yearning for the only communication they can imagine, to share facts and lists and pictures. Somewhere deep in this clamouring void there were sure to be American gun-nut survivalists talking to fellow males who had happened to fixate not on cars, model boats or porn, but on Armalites.

  Of course, I might have to pretend to be a White Supremacist to get what I needed out of them, but that would be easy: I could model my fascist-bastard chat room persona on Phil.

  I strode happily back to the house, looking forward to some e-action and wiping my hands on one of my father ’s manly rags as if cleaning up from one piece of honest work simply to prepare for another.

  Let’s see now. Google. Ah yes, this is where experience and education pays off. Advanced Search; Exact Phrase: Armalite Reassembly. Now, let’s see if we can find some real Yank nutters out there …

  29: The Home of the Black Rifle

  Within thirty seconds I found myself facing the gleaming homepage interface of AR-15.COM: Home of the Black Gun. NRA#1 recommended clubhouse an
d armory for all things ARMALITE.

  —Of course. Trust the Yanks. Incredible! I puffed out loud to myself as I stared at this wide-open portal to a grotesque yet utterly public and perfectly unashamed realm. A legal world where machine guns were normal.

  Unbelievable.

  There were 1, 035 members currently online and a quick scan of the various forums revealed most of them to be blatantly insane. Chat was dominated by discussion of how to get round anti-assault gun legislation, what excuses could be concocted to own Teflon-coated bullets (which only evil lying Beltway scum referred to as cop killers, apparently) or how best decent folks should prepare for an imminent catastrophe which evidently loomed very large in the minds of many AR-15 owners and which they called simply shtf.

  I had no idea what shtf was, but it seemed to involve one, several or in some cases all of a Katrina-style natural disaster, a vast al-Qaeda strike (probably with the collaboration of the FBI and/or the CIA), global warming, anti-global-warming campaigners, Cuba, sub-prime home loans, anti-Christian local governors, Hispanic birth rates, Black Power, Big Oil, Jewish Money, felons and liberals. The plot was of such labyrinthine deviousness that no one had any idea exactly what it might be, except that it was coming.

  Jesus H! What is wrong with the bloody Yanks? I mean, look at this ad for a shooting range outside Las Vegas. Anyone can just turn up and blaze away! If I actually lived in Nevada, I could, however mad I was, just go there and buy an Armalite together with as many bullets as I wanted from their armory (stupid bastards, why do they spell things that ridiculous way?) and, then, well, then I could …

  Oh well. What did I expect? America. Should make it easy enough to find some diagrams, though. Let’s see. AR-15 TECHNICAL INTRODUCTION. Well, why not?

  Click.

  Ah, right. O-K. Hmm.

  A-ha. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Actually, you know, that really is pretty fascinating.

  The AR-15 Armalite is technically known as an ‘assault rifle’, not a machine gun, is it? ‘Assault rifle’? Well? Think about it. A splendid example of where an appreciation of history and language can help us. Who said teaching German history was useless? That term ‘assault rifle’ is clearly a direct translation of the German word Sturmgewehr. Now, this fanatically upbeatsounding, offensively minded name was one of Hitler’s personal favourites. No doubt the term ‘machine gun’ (Maschinengewehr) had, in the crazed and trench-locked mind of this former WWI Private first class (he was never a ‘corporal’ in the Allied sense), too many connotations of fixed and unbreakable defences. Hitler had personally insisted on the use of the word Sturmgewehr instead, just as he had made his engineers call a cannon on a tank chassis not a mere ‘self-propelled gun’ (how boring!) but a SturmgeschÜtz, i.e. an ‘assault gun’. Even though in both cases the weapons in question were actually desperate and defensive responses to growing Soviet power. Yes, the Nazis pretty well invented spin, and much good did it do them! So then, let us ask: how did this quintessentially Nazi name come to be used by the American army, replacing such time-honoured names as ‘carbine’ and ‘sub-machine gun’? More expatriated ‘good’ German weapons engineers in the US after 1945, presumably (cf. Werner von Braun)? A give-away sign of the excessive respect among ‘Western’ (i.e. American-led) militarists, booted or armchair, for the ‘tactical excellence’ of the Wehrmacht (each of whose defensive ‘successes’ not only killed poor conscripted farmboys from Ohio, Devon or Minsk, but kept Auschwitz open for another day)? Or simply the American military’s addiction to euphemistic abstraction (cf. ‘collateral damage’), which may well itself derive from the Prussian/German military tradition? Hmm. Perhaps there might be a nice little paper in this snippet? You see, you never know where you will come across inspiration! Yes, yes certainly, that might be interesting: ‘The National Socialist Roots of US Military Jargon’ by Dr John Goode (London)? Shit, the New Left Critical Review would take that one at the drop of a hat! They take anything anti-American, especially if the writer has just given a plenary paper at the national peer-group conference and …

  And there it was.

  I had been meandering about the site as I pondered my ideas, and had got as far as FIELD STRIPPING. Suddenly, unbelievably, there now stood as clear as day an entire technical drawing of an AR-15.

  30: Special Relationship

  I see. So that was what that bit was called. Not the body of the gun. The main receiver assembly. O-K. And that part I had recognised straight away, the part with that trademark handle, that was the upper receiver.

  Who knew?

  Tools required: 1/8” punch, 5/32” spanner. Thank God that Dad’s tools aren’t metric, then. Perhaps there really is something to the Special Relationship, after all!

  Always work in a well-lit area and on a hard flat surface. There are many small pins and rings and they have a tendency to roll or fly away. Yes, yes, obviously, the same as with a plastic Flying bloody Fortress model, you idiot Yank. This is by no means the only correct method, but unless you are experienced, follow the color-coded sequence presented and you will be successful. Oh really? Will I? I should bloody think so you arrogant colonial shit who can’t even spell English! Color! Well, yes, OK, I know that Nelson’s officers were as likely to write home about the honor of their colors as about the honour of their colours, but that doesn’t change the main point, which is that if some brainless bloody Bush-voting yee-hahing piece of Duff-sodden inbred Ku Klux trash can do it, I venture to suggest that I, Dr John Goode (Old England, Europe), who conquered the working rigging of a scale model of Lord Nelson’s Victory at fourteen years of age and perceived in five seconds flat, earlier this very evening, how the retracting ball turret of a Flying Fortress should be linked to its undercarriage (parts #165–181), might just about be able to work it out!

  If you are constructing your own AR-15 from new castings, some of the small holes can have debris in them from the forging process. A small drill bit, turned by hand, will clean these nicely. You don’t say?

  Laughably easy. But hold on.

  No!

  Yes.

  Bill bloody Gates!

  Even if the gun nuts at AR-15.com, or the people watching the gun nuts at AR-15.com, had not put cookies into my system, as they surely had, there was still the entire panoply of unseen demons that work away in the bottomless deeps of Windows: hard-disk traces, swap files, Internet trails, registry entries. There was no escape. Somewhere on my computer there would now be God knew how many ghostly references to AR-15s and Armalites.

  Think about it and tremble.

  If anything did go wrong, if I was caught dumping the gun and the police took a look (as they certainly would) at my laptop? Now they would find, as well as unguarded liberal chit-chat, the digital shadows left by my downloading technical drawings of assault rifles.

  Shit.

  There was no escape.

  Now I would have to dump or destroy the bloody laptop as well as the gun. More bloody expense. More lies to Sarah. And who knows how to truly annihilate a hard disk? I would have to make sure it never got found by anyone, just in case. Into the Thames with it too, then. Surely, it would never be dredged up, and surely even if it ever were, a few weeks of total submersion in filthy polluted water would wreck the bloody thing?

  I had no choice, sod it.

  Impatiently, I waited while all my recent work was blipped across to the university and backed up on my memory stick. Oh come on, you heap of Japanese crap. For God’s sake, this is supposed to be broadband! Einstein was right, time is relative and PC down-time is the longest kind of time in the universe.

  But at last the interminable three and a half minutes had finished. Huffing with annoyance, I snatched up the printed-out AR-15 plans and rose swiftly from my chair.

  —Aaaah! Shitting fucking stupid little …

  Having recovered from the brain-shaking impact on the underside of the stairs, I got to my feet again and stalked angrily to my shed.

  31: The Irrat
ional Fear of Physical Violence

  I was in no hurry to build the gun.

  I had several hours until I was sober enough to drive, and my plan was in any case the sort best carried out during the coldest, darkest hours of the night, when the living give up and the dying die, and good, normal people are all asleep. So I took it slowly and methodically.

  With my perfectly legal plans printed and spread out before me on the floor of my shed and a pint of double-strength coffee inside me, I had, rather to my own surprise, no great difficulty in reconstructing the Armalite using my father’s Imperial-gauge toolbox.

  The greatest problem was that I had firmly decided, just in case, to take great care that no possible trace of my bodily contact should remain on the gun.

  After all, you never know who, public or privatised, might have access to your innocent bio-data in New Labour’s quasi-police state! So I kept Sarah’s kitchen gloves on throughout the entire process, though it made things very fiddly. But however long it took, nothing deterred me. No bruises and pinches set me back. This was striking, because I had often given up completely on a piece of IKEA furniture for much less. I was delighted to find myself working away at the sort of problems which would normally have stopped me dead.

  —Here I am, Dad, look at me!

  Yes, well, now, what next? Install hammer in receiver

  with feet pointing rearward away from hammer. Feet? Whose? Mine? Oh, I see. Yes, that seems right. Use 5/32” punch to retain hammer in place as you insert hammer retaining pin. Fine, OK, got that. When installing the bolt catch, first drive the roll pin about halfway into the rear hump from the rear of the receiver. Rear hump? Rear hump? So, does that mean … Aha! Yes, yes, perfectly clear. Install spring on to hammer, ends of spring to rear and shoulder on back of hammer. Eh? Oh, I see. Yikes! Ouch!

  I whipped my fingers out just in time to avoid them being seriously caught and checked that the rubber gloves had not been perforated.