And so their belief structure was really a blindfold, or perhaps a set of blinkers, which denied the two Germans the ability to look objectively at a world that had passed them by, and to which they were unwilling to adapt. But for Popov the real meaning of this was their willingness to let him hold the money. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had adapted himself quite well to changing circumstances.
“Are you sure, my young friend?”
“Ja, I am sure.” Furchtner closed the case, reset the locks, and passed it over to Popov’s lap. The Russian accepted the responsibility with proper gravity.
“I will guard this carefully.” All the way to my bank in Bern. Then he extended his hand. “Good luck, and please be careful:”
“Danke. We will get you the information you require.”
“My employer needs that badly, Hans. We depend on you.” Dmitriy left the car and walked back in the direction of the terminal, where he’d get a taxi to his hotel. He wondered when Hans and Petra would make their move. Perhaps today? Were they that precipitous? No, he thought, they would say that they were that professional. The young fools.
Sergeant First Class Homer Johnston extracted the bolt from his rifle, which he lifted to examine the bore. The ten shots had dirtied it some, but not much, and there was no erosion damage that he could see in the throat forward of the chamber. None was to be expected until he’d fired a thousand or so rounds, and he’d only put five hundred forty through it to this point. Still, in another week or so he’d have to start using a fiber-optic instrument to check, because the 7mm Remington Magnum cartridge did develop high temperatures when fired, and the excessive heat burned up barrels a little faster than he would have preferred. In a few months, he’d have to replace the barrel, a tedious and fairly difficult exercise even for a skilled armorer, which he was. The difficulty was in matching the barrel perfectly with the receiver, which would then require fifty or so rounds on the known-distance range to make sure that it delivered its rounds as accurately as it was intended to do. But that was in the future. Johnston sprayed a moderate amount of BreakFree onto the cleaning patch and ran it through the barrel, back to front. The patch came out dirty. He removed it from the cleaning rod, then put a new one on the tip, and repeated the motion six times until the last patch came through totally clean. A final clean patch dried the bore of the select-grade Hart barrel, though the Break-Free -cleaning solvent left a thin not much more than’ a molecule’s thickness coating of silicon on the steel, which protected against corrosion without altering the microscopic tolerances of the barrel. Finished and satisfied, he replaced the bolt, closing it on an empty chamber with the final act of pulling. the trigger, which decocked the rifle as it dropped the bolt into proper position.
He loved the rifle, though somewhat surprisingly he hadn’t named it. Built by the same technicians who made sniper rifles for the United States Secret Service, it was a 7-mm Remington Magnum caliber, with A Remington match-quality receiver, a select-grade Hart barrel, and Leupold ten-power Gold Ring telescopic sight, all married to an ugly Kevlar stock-wood would have been much prettier, but wood warped over time, whereas Kevlar was dead, chemically inert, unaffected by moisture or time. Johnston had just proven, again, that his rifle could fire at about one quarter of a minute of angle’s accuracy, meaning that he could fire three consecutive rounds inside the diameter of a nickel at one hundred yards. Someday somebody might design a laser weapon, Johnston thought, and maybe that could improve on the accuracy of this handmade rifle. But nothing else could. At a range of one thousand yards, he could put three consecutive rounds into a circle of four inches – that required more than a rifle. That meant gauging the wind for speed and direction to compensate for drift-deflection. It also meant controlling his breathing and the way his finger touched the two and-a-half-pound double-set trigger. His cleanup tasks done, Johnston lifted the rifle and carried it to its place in the gun vault, which was climate-controlled, and nestled it where it belonged before going back to the bullpen. The target he’d shot was on his desk.
Homer Johnston lifted it. He’d shot three rounds at 400 meters, three at 500, two at 700, and his last two at 900. All ten were inside the head-shape of the silhouette target, meaning that all ten would have been instantly fatal to a human target. He shot only cartridges that he’d loaded himself: Sierra 175-grain hollow-point boat-tailed match bullets traveling in front of 63.5 grains of IMR 4350 smokeless powder seemed to be the best combination for that particular rifle, taking 1.7 seconds to reach a target 1,000 yards downrange. That was an awfully long time, especially against. a moving target, Sergeant Johnston thought, but it couldn’t be helped. A hand came down on his shoulder.
“Homer,” a familiar voice said.
“Yeah, Dieter,” Johnston said, without looking up from the target. He was in the zone, all the way in. Shame it wasn’t hunting season.
“You did better than me today. The wind was good for you.” It was Weber’s favorite excuse. He knew guns pretty well for a European, Homer thought, but guns were American .things, and that was that. .
“I keep telling you, that semiautomatic action doesn’t headspace properly.” Both of Weber’s 900-meter rounds were marginal. They would have incapacitated ‘the target, but not definitely killed it, even though they scored as hits. Johnston was the best rifle in Rainbow, even better than Houston, by about half a cunt hair on a good day, Homer admitted to himself.
“I like to get my second round off more quickly than you,” Weber pointed out. And that was the end of the argument. Soldiers were as loyal to their firearms as they were to their religions. The German was far better in rate of fire with his golliwog Walthersniper rifle, but that weapon didn’t have the inherent accuracy of a bolt-action and also fired a less-speedy cartridge. The two riflemen had debated the point over many a beer already, and neither would ever move the other.
In any case, Weber patted his holster. “Some pistol, Homer?”
“Yeah.” Johnston stood. “Why not?” Handguns were not serious weapons for serious work, but they. were fun, and the rounds were free here. Weber had him faded. in handguns by about one percent or so. On the way to the range, they passed Chavez, Price and the rest, coming out with their MP-1 Os, joking with one another as they passed. Evidently everyone had had a good morning on the range.
“Ach, ” Weber snorted, “anyone can shoot at five meters!”
“Morning, Robert,” Homer said to the rangemaster. “Want to set up some Qs for us?”
“Quite so, Sergeant Johnston,” Dave Woods replied, grabbing two of the American-style targets–called “Q targets” for the letter Q in the middle, about where the heart would be. Then he got a third for himself. A lavishly mustached color sergeant in the British Army military police regiment, he was pretty damned good with a 9-mm Browning. The targets motored down to the ten-meter line and turned sideways while the three sergeants donned their ear protectors. Woods was, technically, a pistol instructor, but the quality of the men at Hereford made that a dull job, and as a result he himself fired close to a thousand rounds per week, perfecting his own skills. He was known to shoot with the men of Rainbow, and to challenge them to friendly competition, which, to the dismay of the shooters, was almost a break-even proposition. Woods was a traditionalist and held his pistol in one hand, as Weber did, though Johnston preferred the two-hand Weaver stance. The targets turned without warning, and three handguns came up to address them.
The home of Erwin Ostermann was magnificent, Hans Ffrchtner thought for the tenth time, just the sort of thing for an arrogant class-enemy. Their research into the target hadn’t revealed any aristocratic lineage for the current owner of this schloss, but he doubtless thought of himself in those terms. For now, Hans thought, as he turned onto the two kilometer driveway of brown gravel and drove past the manicured gardens and bushes arranged with geometric precision by workers who were at the moment nowhere to be seen. Pulling up close to the palace, he stopped the rented Mercedes and turned right, as though looking for a parking place. .Coming around the rear of the building, he saw the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter they’d be using later, sitting on the usual asphalt pad with a yellow circle painted on it. Good. Furchtner continued the circuit around the schloss and parked in front, about fifty meters from the main entrance.