He shrugged. “No thanks required. You put it on the line for me, bro.”
“Me?”
“With Scanlon, I mean. You vouched for me.”
“That? That’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing, Jason,” he said. “It’s not nothing.”
“Well, happy to do it. So what kind of war trophies do you have?”
He got up and opened the door to what looked like a spare bedroom. It smelled of gunpowder and other things, acrid and musty at the same time. Arranged on a long bench in neat rows were some strange-looking weapons. He picked up an old rifle with a smooth wooden stock. “Check this out. A World-War-II-vintage Mauser K98. Standard-issue infantry weapon in the Wehrmacht. Bought it off an Iraqi farmer who claimed he shot down one of our Apache helicopters with it.” He chuckled. “Chopper didn’t have a scratch.”
“Does it work?”
“No idea. I wouldn’t want to try it.” He picked up a pistol, showed it to me. He seemed to want me to handle it, but I just looked. “Looks like a Beretta Model 1934, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said with a straight face. “No question.”
“But check out the slide markings.” He held it close to me. “Made in Pakistan, see? In the hand workshops of Darra Adam Khel.”
“Who?”
“That’s a town between Peshawar and Kohat. Famous for making exact replicas of every gun in the world. Armourers to the Pashtun-the Taliban warriors in Stan.”
“Stan?”
“What we called Afghanistan. You can tell it’s a Darra special from how poorly the slide stamping is aligned. See?”
“It’s a fake?”
“Amazing what you can do with unlimited time, a box of files, and nine sons. And check this out.” He showed me a black rectangle with a bullet hole in the middle of it. “This is a SAPI plate. Small arms protection insert.”
“Either it’s used or it’s defective.”
“Saved my life. I’m standing in a tank turret on Highway One in Iraq, and suddenly I’m thrown forward. Sniper got me. Luckily I’d put this in my flak vest. You can see how the bullet pierced it. Even cut through my clothes. Gave me a nasty bruise. Missed my spine, though.”
“You were allowed to take all this stuff back with you?”
“Lot of guys did.”
“Legally?”
He gave a throaty laugh.
“Any of it work?”
“Most of them are replicas. Fakes. Not reliable. You wouldn’t want to use them. They could blow up in your face.”
I noticed a tray of tubes, like artist’s oil paints. I picked one of the tubes up. It was labeled LIQUID METAL EMBRITTLEMENT AGENT (LME)-MERCURY/INDIUM AMALGAM. It said UNITED STATES ARMY on it. I was about to ask him what it was when he said, “You know how to use a gun?”
“Point and shoot, right?”
“Uh, not exactly. Snipers study for years.”
“Morons who live in trailers married to their cousins seem to be able to use them without much training.”
“You know about recoil?”
“Sure. The gun bucks back. I’ve seen Bad Boys like twenty times. Everything I know I learned at the movies.”
“You want to learn how to shoot a gun? I know a guy, owns a firing range not too far.”
“Not my thing.”
“You should, you know. Every guy should learn how to use a gun. This day and age. You’ve got a wife to protect.”
“When the terrorists come for us, I’ll call you.”
“Seriously.”
“No, thanks. Not interested. I’m kinda scared of guns. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Why do I get a feeling you miss being in the Special Forces?”
“Changed my life, bro.”
“How so?”
“Lousy home life.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Grand Rapids. Michigan.”
“Nice town. I’ve done business with Steelcase.”
“Not the nice part of Grand Rapids. Wrong side of the tracks.”
“Sounds like my neighborhood in Worcester.”
He nodded. “But I was always in some kind of trouble. Never thought I’d amount to anything. Even when I got drafted by the Tigers, I figured I’d never make the majors. Not good enough. Then I joined the army, and I’m finally good at something. Lot of guys volunteer for Special Forces, but most don’t make it through. When I passed the Q Course, I knew I was hot shit. Two-thirds of our class didn’t make it.”
“The what course?”
“Q Course. Qualification Course. It’s all about weeding guys out-it’s constant torture, twenty-four hours a day. They let you have an hour of sleep, and then they wake you up at 2:00 A.M. to go to the hand-to-hand combat pit. Every time a guy quits, they play ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ on the loudspeakers, no matter what time of day or night.”
“I think I know where Gordy gets his management techniques.”
“You have no idea, man. The last part of the course is called Robin Sage, where they throw you into the middle of five thousand square miles of North Carolina forest to do land nav-land navigation. Not allowed to go on roads. You got to live off nuts and berries, and at the beginning they throw you some animal-a rabbit or a chicken-and that’s your protein. At the end of the week, you’ve got to hand in the hind legs. The guys who make it to the end are the ones who just don’t give up. That’s me.”
“Sounds like Outward Bound.”
He made a pfft sound. “Then if you’re lucky, you get to go to one of the real assholes of the universe like Afghanistan or Iraq. If you’re really lucky, like me, both.”
“Fun.”
“Yep. You’re in Iraq, in the middle of a sandstorm that just won’t end, the desert’s frickin’ cold at night, which you’d never expect, your hands are so numb you can’t make coffee. Your rations have been cut to one meal a day. There’s not enough water to bathe or shave. Or you’re in some damned camp in Basra, with sand fleas crawling all over you and biting, and there’s mosquitoes carrying malaria, and you’re getting red welts all over, and no matter how much insecticide you spray on yourself and in the air it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.”
I nodded, silent for a while. “Man,” I finally said. “You’re going to find your job kind of boring.”
He shrugged. “Hey, it’s nice to have a real job, finally. Make some money. I can buy a car now. Scanlon wants me to get one, for client meetings and all that. Might even get a new Harley. Save up to buy a house. And maybe someday I’ll meet some chick and decide to get married again.”
“Didn’t work out last time, huh?”
“Didn’t even last a year. Not sure I’m cut out for marriage. Most of the guys in SF are divorced. You want a family, Special Forces isn’t for you. So what do you want?”
“What do I want?”
“I mean, in life. At work.”
“Red Sox season tickets. Peace on earth.”
“You want kids?”
“Sure.”
“When?”
I shrugged, half smiled. “We’ll see.”
“Ah,” he said. “Big issue for you.”
“Not an issue.”
“Yeah, it is. You and your wife are struggling with it. Or you’re trying, and it’s not happening. I can tell from your face.”
“You got a crystal ball in that room too?”
“Seriously. You don’t want to talk about it-that’s cool-but I can read it in your face. You know what a ‘tell’ is?”
“Poker, right? Little signals that tell you if someone’s bluffing.”
“Exactly. Most people aren’t comfortable with lying. So when they’re bluffing, they smile. Or they get stone-faced. Or they scratch their noses. Some of us in SF took classes in facial expression and threat assessment with this famous psychologist. To learn how to detect deception. Sometimes you want to know if a guy’s going for his gun or just pulling out a stick of Wrigley’s.”
“I can always tell when Gordy’s lying,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep. He moves his lips.”