“Put your new plastic gun away, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
Hail and Kara removed the magazines, pulled back their respective slides and visually checked the breaches to ensure the guns were empty. Hail placed his 1911 into a zippered pouch, and Kara stuck her new Glock into a shoulder holster sitting on a bench behind them. Kara threw the strap over her shoulder following Hail as he opened the thick metal door leading to the outer corridor.
Kara followed Hail through a maze of stairs and right-angled turns. They continued to walk through the ship until Marshall stopped in front of the door that had the word ARMORY stenciled in bold black letters on its white painted surface.
Hail flashed his prox card in front of the reader and waited for the door to unlock. Once the bolt had been withdrawn from the inside, Hail opened the door, and the two stepped inside. Dozens of LCD lights snapped on and illuminated a long narrow room.
“Wow!” Kara said. “Every time I think that nothing else on this ship will amaze me, you show me something like this.”
Lining the walls of the room were hundreds of rifles of all types and sizes. One wall appeared to hold nothing but assault rifles. The profile of the M4 Carbine-style DPMS AP4 was easy to spot. Kara thought that at least fifty of those weapons were seated vertically into gun slots cut from wood and then mounted to the iron wall of the ship. Where the M4s stopped, fifty or more Remington R-15 VTR Predator Carbines began, all painted in a jungle matte finish. Farther into the room, Kara recognized more weapons of death, such as the Barrett REC 7, the Wilson Combat UT-15 and the Bushmaster DCM-XR A3.
“Damn!” Kara exclaimed. “You have enough guns to start your own war.”
Hail waved off her comment and said, “This isn’t what I wanted to show you.” He then began walking through the room, heading deeper into the ship’s armory.
As they walked, Kara’s head kept snapping from the left to the right, trying to take it all in. They had now reached what could only be described as the handgun section of the armory. Kara estimated that a thousand handguns had been placed into wooden slots, nothing but their butt ends sticking out. Yet, for every hundred handguns, a solitary gun had been placed above them on a peg; apparently a representation of what guns were stored below. The first handguns they passed were smaller in caliber and size, but the weapons grew larger as they moved deeper into the room. A few pocket-sized guns were .22s. Kara saw a Walther P22, a Smith & Wesson Model 22A, and a Beretta 21A Bobcat. Then the guns jumped from .22 caliber directly to 9mm. Firearms from Glock, Beretta, Sig Sauer, Walther, and Heckler & Koch were represented. Then the calibers went up again to the .45s,
and so on, until they reached the very largest of the large, the Smith and Wesson 500 and the crazy big Desert Eagle .50 caliber semi-automatic. Kara stopped and removed a massive Desert Eagle from its peg above its slotted twins. It was solid chrome and looked comically large in her small hand.
“Do you know how much ammo costs for one of these things?” Kara asked Hail.
Hail laughed and said, “Hell, I don’t even know if I have health insurance, so you’re asking the wrong person. I pay people to worry about all that stuff.”
Kara put the gun back on the peg, and they continued walking.
When the handgun display ended, Hail stopped in front of another iron door. He swiped his badge in front of the scanner, and the door’s lock clanked open. Hail pulled the door open and told Kara, “You’ll like this. It’s pretty cool.”
Kara stepped up and over the bulkhead separating the rooms, and Hail flipped on the lights.
The wood that had been cut and slotted for the weapons in the outer room was relatively inexpensive compared to what she was looking at now. The wooden walls of the inner room were cut from mahogany. They had been stained dark brown and gleamed from several layers of clear varnish. The gun displays had been laid out by someone who had experience with such designs. Hundreds of unique guns had been mounted on the dazzling wood.
“This was my father’s gun collection,” Hail told Kara.
“Holy moly,” came out of Kara’s mouth, but she wasn’t even aware she had said anything. Her eyes were darting all around the room, looking at the weapons like they were candy and she had a sweet tooth.
The guns to her left were very old: flintlock rifles and matchlock rifles. Each rifle was mounted on the wall with a small wooden bracket that appeared to be custom-made to fit each rifle’s contours. A small engraved plaque was screwed into the wood under each rifle.
Kara stopped and read one of the plaques. “Janissary Corp of the Ottoman Army matchlock musket. 1440AD”
Hail told her, “That is the oldest known matchlock musket in the world. My father was very proud of that weapon.” Hail’s tone sounded somewhat depressed, as if talking about his father brought up some painful memories. On several occasions, Hail had shared with her he and his father did not get along. His father had wanted a son to follow in his footsteps and become a military man. Hail had opted to go to MIT instead. Oh, and he had also won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
That achievement still had not impressed his father. Hence, the taciturn distance between the two had continued.
Kara said, “I had no idea that guns were invented that long ago.”
Kara then read the plaque under a matchlock musket below the 1440AD model. “The lord of the Japanese island, Tanegashima Tokitaka (1528–1579). Musket 1 of 2.”
It meant nothing to her and Hail didn’t expound, so Kara kept walking down the row, reading to herself. The matchlock rifles mutated into flintlock rifles, which ran the gambit of early European models to those used in the American Civil War. Many models of the “Pennsylvania Rifle" or "Kentucky Rifle” were represented. Some were restored, but many others were left rusty and weathered perched on their shiny wooden brackets. Like the outer room of the armory, after the muskets and rifles ended, the handguns began. But this display of handguns was so much more interesting than the slew of modern guns in the other room. Many of these unique handguns were matching sets.
Hail stopped in front of an old black handgun that had been given a little larger space on the wall than the other handguns. Hail took the gun off the wall and handed it to Kara.
Hail placed his hand over the little plaque, where the gun had hung, and asked Kara. “Any guesses about this gun?”
Kara played around with the revolver a little, popping open its chamber and spinning it around. She made a perplexed face and said, “I give up.”
Hail smiled and told her, “This is Jack Ruby’s Colt Cobra Revolver used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald.”
The CIA agent was taken aback before she looked at the gun with renewed interest. “Man, how did your father ever get his hands on this?”
Hail shrugged and said, “I have no idea. It wasn’t as though he was rich, but he was powerful. We never discussed how he went about acquiring all these guns. As you know, my father and I were not very close. After he passed away, it was a complete shock this collection was the only thing he left me in his will.”
“Well, it’s a wonderful gun collection.”
“Yeah, but I was never allowed to touch any of these guns when I was growing up. I wasn’t even allowed to go into the room where he had them on display.”
Kara handed the gun back to Hail and said, “Considering the rarity of these guns, I’m sure he was very protective.”
Hail dropped the gun on the metal floor, watching it bounce only to come to a rest on its side. He bent down to pick it up. He then hung the gun back on its mount.
He said a little angrily, “But they are just guns. It’s not like if you drop them, they’ll break. He was simply a selfish man. And, to tell you the truth, I truly believe that he loved these guns more than he loved me and probably more than my mom.”