One thing the knowledge of Hindsight’s origins certainly did explain was the significant manner in which Donelson, as he’d already seen, was completely different to any woman he’d ever met. Thorne had said little about women of the future other than that they had a good deal more freedom of choice and were considered, to all intents and purposes, the equal of men in most things. If Eileen Donelson was a good example of women of the 21st Century, then Kransky was concerned there’d be few men who’d be a woman’s equal. Either way, it wasn’t hard to see that she knew her job and knew what she wanted in life: he’d not like to be the man who stood in the way of her achieving that, whatever that might be.
Most of that type of deep thinking regarding Donelson and Hindsight in general had occurred during the first half of the run while he was still relatively fresh. At that moment, as Kransky followed Eileen’s steady pace along the line of the fence and the gates neared once more, all he could think about was a clean change of clothes, a shower and (truth be told) a bit of a lie down.
It was close to midday as Kransky made his way down to where he had earlier passed the Australian troopers setting up inside the perimeter fence, about halfway along the runway. He was refreshed and somewhat rested, but still felt some faint pain in his feet and legs, and knew it’d be a few days before some of the aches completely dissipated. He quickly forgot about his discomfort however as he drew nearer the area and his attention was drawn to what was going on there already.
Two long, foldable trestle tables were set up with several weapons lying upon them, along with a large spotting scope on a small tripod. Roughly three hundred metres away, a pair of man-shaped targets were positioned in front of a stack of straw bales. Beside the targets and also supported by the straw stood a piece of thick armour plate about a metre and a half square that someone had scrounged up from the main naval base.
Much further away, also parallel with the concrete strip, another set of bales and targets awaited, although Kransky thought that at a distance of what appeared to be a kilometre or more, they were well out of effective range of most riflemen or rifles. He knew even his own talents, capable as they were, wouldn’t be enough to confidently make an effective ‘kill’ at what appeared to be close to a thousand yards in anything other than perfect conditions. The situation had at the very least piqued his curiosity.
The group already clustered there at the tables comprised Max Thorne, Eileen Donelson, the Australian SAS captain, Green, two of his troopers, and another man he’d never seen before. As he drew closer, the stance and the body language suggested that at least one of the SAS troopers, toting an automatic rifle, was keeping the unidentified newcomer under some kind of guard.
“Glad to see you pulled up all right, Richard,” Eileen observed cheerily as he drew near, just the barest hint of mischief in her eyes. “Not a bad work out this morning, eh?”
“Yeah — it was sure a workout, all right,” the American admitted, forcing a grin of his own.
“Bit of advice, mate,” Thorne began, stepping forward and smiling broadly. “Don’t take the lady for granted.”
“Oh, I figured that out pretty early, Mister Thorne,” he admitted, the grin genuine this time, and he shook his head as he gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “The commander sure showed me up this morning… I’ll need to get a good deal fitter, and that’s the truth!”
“One man you won’t know,” Thorne changed the subject quickly, getting down to business. He stood aside, allowing the Irishman to take his obvious cue, and Kelly stepped forward with a hand extended.
“Major Richard Kransky,” Kransky offered, accepting the handshake and meeting the new man’s friendly but neutral gaze.
“Volunteer Eoin Kelly,” Kelly returned just as quickly, and he considered the name as they parted hands once more. “That wouldn’t be the Kransky who’s been causin’ the Japs so much trouble the last few years, would it now?”
“Yeah, it might well be the same,” the American answered with a little hesitation, unnerved that his reputation had again obviously preceded him. “What might that be to you?”
“Oh, nothin’ at all, except that one of my ‘colleagues’ tried to get hold of you in Spain a few years ago with the hope of maybe teaching us a few tricks here an’ there.”
“Yeah, I remember… that mad ‘Mick’ from the Republican Army. Didn’t think he was gonna take no for an answer for a while, there.”
“That’s a kinder description of Frank Ryan than some would give y’,” Kelly laughed genuinely. “Last I heard, the fella was still in Spain and takin’ little a ‘holiday’ in a Nationalist prison.”
“Poor bastard,” Kransky said simply with a solemn nod: he’d spent enough time in Spain during the civil war there to know the Nationalist’s prisons were a far cry indeed from any kind of holiday. He turned his attention back to Thorne, deciding there would be an explanation of the man’s presence at the appropriate moment, and that moment could be some other time. “What do we have going on here today?”
“I’ll give you over to Eileen for the answer to that, Richard,” Thorne returned, casting a hand out toward to the nearby commander.
“I see you brought along your hardware, as I asked,” Eileen observed, smiling as she stepped up to the trestle tables. “We had a discussion this morning while you were… ‘recovering’… and thought that perhaps instead of just improving on what you already had, we might instead replace some of it with something a bit more impressive…” She crouched down in front of one of the tables and opened the lid of a long wooden crate lying beneath it on the ground. From it, she lifted an impossibly-large rifle, somewhat awkwardly holding it in her right hand as her left extended a pair of bipod legs beneath its fore-end. Having done that, she lowered it carefully to the table and looked up at the man once more.
“We thought perhaps you might have a use for this,” she began as Kransky moved to stand beside her, mesmerised by the weapon. With a nod from her, he reached out and lifted the rifle, momentarily surprised by the weight of it — nearly thirteen kilograms. It seemed to be almost entirely constructed of steel, the main body a single, octagonal length of receiver and breech that ended in a fixed, skeleton stock. There was a pistol grip trigger assembly and a large, ribbed box-magazine mounted beneath the weapon about halfway along, and just ahead of the bipod projected a heavy, fluted barrel with a multi-baffled muzzle brake. All up the rifle seemed to be about 150 centimetres long — close to half as long again as the scoped German weapon he carried on his back.
“It’s called a Barrett M107,” Donelson explained as he set the rifle down on the table once more, then shrugged his own weapon from his back and also laid it on the table further along. She reached out and pulled the magazine from beneath the large rifle, handing it to him for examination. “The clip holds ten rounds. It fires the Browning fifty-calibre machine gun round that we’ve discovered the German’s are also using a direct copy of — although they classify it as a ‘nominal’ calibre of thirteen-millimetres.”
“Which makes the supply of ammunition no problem, regardless of where I might be,” Kransky observed without emotion, turning the heavy magazine loaded with cartridges over in his hands. “How’s the recoil?”