“This looks like it might be something,” Dean later called out from a corner of the underground garage.
J.B. stopped his work on freeing the P-39’s cannon and walked over to where the boy was hunched over a wooden crate marked with a symbol that looked like an exploding rock. He looked down into the crate over Dean’s shoulder, and even though he could only see the base of the shells, he knew exactly what he was looking at.
“Those are the 37 mm cannon shells,” J.B. stated. “Take them out and line them up on the concrete.”
Dean began to lift the heavy munitions out of the crate and set them down on the loading dock. Each shell weighed more than a pound, was an inch and a half in diameter and over four inches long. When Dean was done, there were sixteen shells lined up in a row and with the shells gone, the belt that fed them into the cannon was discovered in the bottom of the crate.
The Armorer picked up a few of the shells, examining their seals and general condition. “They’re in good shape. If half of them fire, it’ll be more than enough.”
“John Barrymore, come here,” Doc shouted.
J.B. hurried to Doc’s side. He was sitting on a pile of smaller crates that had the same stencil mark on them as Dean’s crate. “What is it?”
“A gift.”
J.B. reached into the crate and pulled out a belt of .50-caliber rounds for the P-39’s machine blasters. The belt and shells still had an oily sheen on them. He pulled the belt from the crate and began walking the length of the loading dock until the end of the belt appeared and he could see both ends clearly. Then he placed the belt on the floor and began pacing out its length. It took him nine steps to get from one end to the other. “The whole nine yards,” he said with a gleeful smile.
Doc gave him a confused look. “I am afraid I do not understand.”
“The belt is twenty-seven feet long and full of ammunition. It’s as much as you can load into one of these machine blasters. In the Pacific Arena in World War II, pilots would use the expression ‘I gave him the whole nine yards’ to say that they used up all their ammunition against the enemy.”
“How do you know that?” Clarissa asked. She’d come over to join J.B. and Doc, along with Dean.
Doc turned to the woman and said, “There isn’t anything having to do with blasters and bullets that J.B. does not know about. Even the most insignificant and trivial bits of information are stored within his brain, sometimes to the exclusion of other, more valuable bits…as we have just been witness to.”
“It also means,” J.B. said, realizing Doc was just having some fun, “that we’ll be able to use two of the machine blasters rescuing Ryan, Krysty and Mildred.”
“And my sister,” Clarissa added quickly.
“Yes.” J.B. nodded. “And your sister.”
That seemed to please her to no end.
“Now that we’ve got the ammunition,” J.B. said, “let’s see if we can get the old bird to give up the blasters.”
KRYSTY ATE her breakfast in her room under the watchful eye of a young sec man who looked harmless enough. His gaze never wavered from her body the whole time she was eating, and Krysty couldn’t be sure if he was doing his job or simply getting an eyeful.
She decided that if he was enamored with her, then maybe she could use that to her advantage.
“That’s a nice blaster you’ve got there,” she lied. It looked like a Smith & Wesson Model 18, but the different metal shadings betrayed its status as a remade. It was a .22 rimfire that wasn’t good for much more than plinking cans off fence posts, but the young sec man seemed proud of it.
“Thanks,” he answered. “It’s been a friend to me.”
“I had a Smith & Wesson myself,” she said, unzipping the front of her jumpsuit, as if she were warm.
“Really?”
“Yes, a .38-caliber Model 640.”
“Wow, that’s a big gun for a…”