‘Help you?’ he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a
customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of
every description. I saw five different sub-machine gun models.
There were some M-16s, Als and A2s. There were handguns.
Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were
stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They
were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.
In front of the guy on the desk was a log book.
‘You check them in and check them out?’ I asked.
‘Like valet parking,’ the guy said. ‘Post regulations won’t
allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas.’ He
was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the
same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for
Carbone’s new P7.
‘What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?’ I asked.
‘Trifonov? He favours the Steyr GB.’
‘Show me.’
He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black
Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and
well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he
dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the
gun through the plastic.
220
‘Nine millimetre,’ Summer said.
I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr
Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the
Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named
Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an
unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had
many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was
a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded,
which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in
twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart
gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using
the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get
the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real
world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled.
They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec
weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t
cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in
your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything
that came its way. If I was a Special Forces soldier taking
dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of
partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be
sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out
of ten.
Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind
the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the
butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were
sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one
round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen
shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He
had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine,
and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.
‘Got a phone?’ I said.
The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar,
twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my
sergeant’s desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal.
The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer,
putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek
to work.
‘Get me Sanchez at Jackson,’ I said.
221
I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
‘What?’ Sanchez said.
‘Did they find the shell cases?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.’
‘Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.’
‘You found the guy?’
‘I’m holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less
two fired.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell.’
‘One of ours?’
‘Sad, but true.’
Sanchez said nothing.
‘Did they find the bullets?’ I said.