“Oh,” Paxtun said, “this is too good.”
“What?” Arzee said. “The weapon?”
“No,” Paxtun said as he turned the magazine around on the desk. Pointing to the picture of the man holding the Jackhammer he said, “This man is Ted Reaper, late of the U.S. Navy. I now believe that this is indeed a very small world.”
“Reaper?” Arzee said puzzled. “Reaper? You man that guy who screwed up your deal in Bosnia five years ago?”
“The very same,” Paxtun said with a smile. “Allah works in interesting ways. He’s not only set the tools we need into our hands, he delivered an old enemy to me. This man crossed me badly once, he will now learn just how foolish that was.”
“But you can’t imagine he’ll sell us what we want?” Arzee said. “And what the hell is he doing in Michigan?”
“Making guns, by the looks of things,” Paxtun said. “And no, I certainly wouldn’t expect this man to sell us anything no matter what we offered. He’s as upright as a Boy Scout. But he will have a weakness, everyone does.
“I want you to find that weakness. Find out everything you can about this man and his business as quickly as you can. And you have to keep it quiet. I don’t care what it takes, costs, or what favors you have to call in—you find a handle that we can use to control this man.
“It would be very sweet to force this particular individual to break the law in order to help us. But it will take something very solid to make him hand us over the weapons. If there aren’t enough of them available, he can just make more of them. This article lists a shop address and phone numbers. You find out if he has a family, parent, kid, girlfriend, whatever it is that brought him to Michigan or that he has around here. The records are out there, you just have to find them.
“This man tried to take me down once,” Paxtun said with hatred in his voice. “Which makes using him all the better.”
Chapter Five
A loud buzzing roar filled the small room as the big man in the dark blue shop apron held the long steel bar against the wheel, the flexible cloth buffing wheel spinning at more than 1,700 rpm. With his feet spread out for stability, the big man leaned close to the buffer and ran the long steel bar across the face of the wheel. The buzz increased in volume as the rapidly moving cloth stripped dark, cloudy layers of buffing compound off the surface of the steel—leaving a bright shining surface in its wake.
His face hidden behind the rubber and cloth of a respirator mask and his eyes behind safety goggles, the man leaned into his work, concentrating on the path the steel took as he guided it across the surface of the buffer. His hands were covered in Kevlar gloves, the fingers of which were wrapped in layers of worn tape to insure a good grip. A solid grip was important not only to make sure that the steel was guided properly across the rapidly moving cloth wheel, but also necessary for safety as any observer could quickly see that the object being so carefully buffed and polished by the man was the long blade of a broadsword.
In his dark blue shirt, jeans, and black boots, the man was almost completely still except for his hands guiding the steady passing of the blade back and forth across the wheel. His concentration was on keeping the shape of the blade distinct, smooth, and even—while not allowing the sharp edge to dig into the cloth wheel. The power of the spinning wheel would tear the blade from his hands and drive it into the floor, wall, or possibly something that could bleed quite a bit.
Watching silently from the doorway, the stocky, gray-haired man sitting in a wheelchair knew not to interrupt the man standing at the buffer. He waited quietly until the man at the machine stopped and straightened up. After looking along the edges and body of the blade to be certain he hadn’t missed polishing a spot or blurred the lines of the blade’s edges and corners, the man switched off the buffer and the wheel whined down to a stop.
Pulling down his respirator, the man turned to the doorway and noticed the individual sitting there. “Oh, didn’t know you were there,” Ted Reaper said as he pushed the safety goggles up to his forehead.
“Somehow, it didn’t seem to me to be a really great idea to bother a man either while he was buffing, or holding a yard of sharp steel,” Keith Deckert said with a big grin spreading out under his bushy white mustache, his teeth splitting the features of his face. “But you did want me to remind you when it was coming up to lunchtime.”
“Thanks,” Ted said as he looked at the watch on his left wrist. “I’ve got just enough time to clean and box this thing and get back to the house before Ricky gets home.”
“You might want to take a moment to wash up as well,” Keith said with a chuckle. “You look like a reversed raccoon.”
Catching a glimpse of himself in the glass front of a cabinet, Ted could see that the goggles and respirator had protected his eyes and lungs, but the greasy residue from the buffing wheel had spattered the exposed parts of his face with gray muck. The only parts that were clean were his mouth, mustache, nose, and eyes.
“Here, give me that pigsticker,” Keith said. “I’ll get the tape off the grip and pack it while you clean up.”
“Thanks,” Reaper said as he handed over the blade, hilt first.
Deckert turned his powered wheelchair and ran it over to a tall workbench on top of a large parts cabinet where he laid the sword down on a carpeted surface. Turning the armrests inward across his chest, he moved a control and his Life Stand Compact Model LSC wheelchair began to unfold and extend the back and seat upward. In a moment, Deckert was in a standing position, secured to the chair by the armrests, which had formed a padded brace against his chest. In an almost straight up-and-down standing position, the muscular arms of the man could reach the top of the workbench and manipulate the materials there easily and skillfully.
“And a mighty big pig you could stick with it, too,” said Keith as he started stripping off the dirty masking tape that had been protecting the finish of the blued-steel cross-guard and wire-wrapped grip.
Reaper stepped away from the grinding room and walked to a small workbench where he kept his own toolbox and materials. He unclipped the small Uncle Mike’s pocket holster he had in his right front pants pocket and placed it and the stainless steel Taurus Model 445 five-shot .44 Special concealed-hammer revolver it held into a large central drawer in the toolbox.
Since he had been in the civilian world and not in the military, Reaper had to have a need to go armed. Security was always something you had to think about in a gunshop, even one frequented by customers who were in law enforcement. The shop hadn’t always been a gathering place for cops, and civilian customers still came in. It would take a fairly stupid crook to rob a gunshop, but dumber things had happened.
Moving across the workshop, Reaper went over to the opposite wall where a large utility sink stood next to a long, shallow, steel tank with a tight-fitting cover.
There was a smell of solvents coming up from the covered cleaning tank, but the smell would have been a lot worse if the shop had been hot. The tall, barnlike shop building was well insulated against the winter cold or summer heat, both of which could get pretty extreme in southeastern Michigan. But even if it wasn’t as heavily insulated as it was, there would be little enough to hear in the way of noise this far out in the country.
The steel building was attached to the back of a two-story brick farmhouse and sat on twenty-five acres of land less than five miles from the Saint Clair River and the border between the U.S. and Canada. The location was closer to Port Huron than Detroit, both cities being less than an hour’s drive away. The area was open countryside with stands of trees separating fields. The house and barn were set back from the main road, a quarter-mile of blacktopped driveway leading to a semicircular drive at the front of the house, with an extension leading out to the back shop building.
It was an out-of-the-way location for a business, but that’s what the farmhouse and steel barn had been converted into. The front part of the first floor of the house was a gunshop, the barn a well-equipped machi
ne shop with facilities for polishing and finishing metal and wood. D & R POLICE SUPPLIES AND GUNSMITHS was all it said on a small sign on the white siding at the front of the house. The sign was a fairly new one, the paint on it being much fresher than that of the tan-painted twin doors leading into the house. The doors were at the top of a long ramp, allowing the owner’s wheelchair easy access to the building.
There would be plenty of room for additional workers once business picked up. The gunsmithing and small gun shop had been at the farm for a number of years, but the police supply business was new. So for now, there were just the two men living and working in the building.
The farm and buildings were both owned by Keith Deckert, a big, gray-haired ex-Army sergeant who had lost the use of his legs several years earlier in a racing accident. Outside of the limitations on his mobility, the only thing remarkable about Deckert’s body was that his arms, shoulders, and chest were even more muscular than when he had been an Army Ranger.
As Reaper was scrubbing his face and arms, Deckert was polishing the grip and hilt of the sword with a soft cloth.
“Damned big for a knife,” Deckert said with a chuckle. “This from some movie or something? One of those Harry Potter books? Conan?”
“Sort of,” Reaper said from across the room. “Ricky saw one like it in that Hobbit movie, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Apparently, there’s a sword like it in some role-playing game he’s into with his friends.”
As he was drying his face and hands on a wad of paper towels, Reaper walked over to where his friend was placing the sword in a long, wooden box. The shining blade, diamond-shaped and double edged, was thirty-six inches long with a simple blued-steel cross guard. The round disc pommel was also blue steel and secured an eight-inch grip that was covered with twisted steel wire. The pattern of the wire seemed to almost flow in an optical illusion as you kept looking at it.
“Hopefully, he’ll like it,” Reaper said as he tossed the wad of towels in a trash can. He looked with a critical eye at the blade lying on a bed of red velvet in the long, polished wood case, but could see no flaws in it. “I made it real, not a toy. It’ll be something that can stay with him forever if he wants, maybe better than his old man did.”
“Things haven’t improved between you and Mary?” Deckert asked quietly.
“No,” Reaper said with a note of sadness in his voice. “And I’m not sure they ever will. But I have to make certain that Ricky knows it isn’t his fault and that I still love him. So I made this for him, something from my own hands.”
“Well, it’s a little big for him now,” Deckert said. “But I’m pretty sure he’ll grow into it. You’ll have to get him fencing lessons so he knows how to swing one.”
“You don’t learn how to wave one of these around in classical fencing,” Reaper said. “He’s getting into something called the Society for Creative Anachronism, SCA they call it. Bunch of kids, some adults, too, get together and re-create the knights of old. They stage sword fights with padded fake blades and other weapons.”
“Uh-huh,” Deckert said, “sounds weird as hell. But at least it doesn’t seem like something that would keep him sitting in front of a computer all day.”
Reaper closed the lid on the long wooden case and secured it in place with two brass latches. Picking it up by the leather handle, he turned to the nearby door that led into the house.
“Nope,” Reaper said, “the boy does like his activities. Gets out and moves around, better than a lot of kids today. He’s smart enough to like getting on his computer and playing games with his friends. But he doesn’t spend all day sitting in front of a computer or game console.”
“Sitting down all the time isn’t necessarily all bad,” Deckert said as he pushed a control and his wheelchair started to slowly collapse back into a sitting configuration. Chuckling at his friend’s mild embarrassment at what he had said, Deckert turned to the doorway and started to roll toward it.
“So, you hear that news out of Canada?” Deckert said, to let his friend off the hook and change the subject.
“What news?” Reaper said. “I’ve mostly been in the grinding room the last few days and the noise level isn’t the best for listening to the radio.”
“There’s these great new inventions called headsets,” Deckert said as he rolled through the door Reaper was holding open. “You should look into them. At any rate, seems that Canadian customs up in Toronto found some container ship with a bunch of guns and ammunition on it. At least they found one container with a load of hardware hidden in the walls—you know how the news exaggerates these kinds of things.”
“Yeah,” said Reaper following Deckert out of the shop and into the house. “They find a couple of boxes of shells and two weapons in a takedown and the guy had an arsenal of guns and ammunition. So what did they find really? Did you hear?”
“Seems it really was a bunch of small arms,” Deckert said. “Real bad-guy stuff. Military AK-47s, RPG-7s, ammunition, even grenades and explosives.”
“Shit,” Reaper said surprised. “Sounds like they busted a supply run for some terrorist cell. Did they get any leads on where the stuff was going?”
“Not that I heard,” Deckert said. “According to the news, they didn’t know if the stuff had arrived for some Canadian group or was headed somewhere else. It was close enough that it could have been heading here to Michigan, Chicago, or maybe that big ship terminal down in Toledo. The Canadians made a great big deal of finding the stuff, not a hell of a lot of guns in the Great White North.”
“They would have made a big deal of finding that kind of stash even here in Detroit,” Reaper said. “Good to see that the security is starting to work.”
“Yeah, well you better change into something a little cleaner than those clothes before you head to see Mary and Ricky,” Deckert said as he rolled past the kitchen of the house and into the office that had originally been the dining room.
“There’s an idea,” Reaper agreed as he laid the sword case on the kitchen counter and headed to the stairs leading to the second floor. He had been living in the shop/house for some months now—ever since he had separated from Mary, his wife of fifteen years. Times had been hard since he was forced to leave the service, and he knew that he hadn’t treated his family the best way that he could in the intervening years.
Losing his career and being forced to leave without any retirement or benefits had been hard—both financially and emotionally. He had gone out with his buddies from the Teams a few too many times while the family lived down in Imperial Beach in Southern California. It was when his old friend and Teammate Bear, who had now retired from the Navy, had looked him up that things had seemed as though they would improve.
Bear had said that there was a friend of his back in Michigan who could use some help. Being that Reaper had spent more than a little time working in the armory, and had learned metalworking in high school, Bear thought he would be a great addition to his friend’s gun shop. It was the chance for a good job doing something Reaper would like.
Going out to Michigan, Reaper met Keith Deckert for the first time and the two men hit it off well. Mary and Ricky were tired of moving across the country as they had so many times when Reaper was in the Navy. But he had sworn that this would be the last time. The bulk of the family’s savings had been spent in making the move.
Things had improved a bit in Michigan for the Reaper household, at least the cost of living was a hell of a lot better than it was in Southern California. Mary had been able to do part-time teaching, which she had always loved. Ricky was making friends in school now. He even was starting to like winter sports, not exactly the sort of thing he could have done in the San Diego area.
In spite of the good things, there was still a lot of hardships. Reaper wasn’t making much money at the gun shop. It was grating against Reaper that his family was living more on what his wife made as a substitute teacher than on his earnings. The lack of his retirement pay was keenly felt at leas
t once a month. But he was working hard to change that.
Months earlier, Reaper had put forward the idea of making his friend’s small custom gunsmithing shop into a larger business. The production rights were available for the Jackhammer assault shotgun and Reaper felt he had the contacts to make it a successful seller. The big growth in Homeland security, customs, and police response units looked to be a good source of revenue. Deckert agreed and had put in his savings to expand the business. They secured the rights to the Jackhammer shotgun and had built a number of prototypes. These had been displayed and demonstrated by Reaper at a number of police, military, and trade shows.
The new shop had missed out on the market that had boomed just a few months before with the outbreak of the Iraq war. The Jackhammer had not been picked up by any of the services yet. Losing that business had put Ted Reaper back in the dumps, especially since his friend Keith Deckert had risked his farm and home as collateral to expand the shop.
That depression had resulted in more than one argument in the Reaper household. Finally, he had separated from Mary, moving into one of the mostly unused upstairs bedrooms at the farmhouse. Deckert had told him that the rooms weren’t a lot of use for him right now, he had already converted the downstairs family room into a bedroom to keep from having to use a lift to get up and down the stairs.
So Ted had moved out of his home, leaving his wife and twelve-year-old son living in the small house they had bought with what they got out of the place they had sold in Imperial Beach. The house was in a nice, old neighborhood south of Mount Clemens—and only a relatively short ride from the farm on Ted’s Harley. His 1983 Electra-glide was a holdover from his Team days.
Deckert had a hell of a nice garage, fitting for an old Detroit-area gearhead. He still had the hot rod that was built up from an old Checker cab, and his customized 2001 Chevy Venture van. The van had a power lift installed on the driver’s side rear door that Keith could strap his wheelchair into. Once in the van, he locked his chair in place and could drive the van with its modified controls. There was still room in the garage for Reaper’s bike. Even some space left over for a good collection of weights and workout gear.
Undeclared War Page 6