“That is the case, I have noticed, with much of the equipment borne by Andries Rhoodie and his colleagues,” Lee said, remembering a tasty tin of desiccated stew. “Carry on.”
“From the general to the particular.” Gorgas reached into a desk drawer, took out a couple of rounds for the AK-47. He passed them over to Lee. “You will observe that the bullets are not simply lead.”
“Yes, I had seen that,” Lee agreed, putting on his glasses for a clearer look at the ammunition. The cartridges were surely brass. As for the bullets—”Are they copper an the way through?”
“No, sir. They have a lead interior, sheathed with copper. We might be able to match that, though it is expensive, and we are short of enough copper even now to be commandeering coils from whiskey cookers’ stills. Then again, unsheathed lead might serve at need. But do you see the cleverness of this ammunition? It all but eliminates lead fouling of the barrel.”
“Less need for Williams bullets, then,” Lee said. The Williams bullet had a zinc washer at the base of the lead slug, which served to scour away fouling from the inside of a rifle barrel when it was fired. Lee went on, “But would a copper-sheathed bullet not be too hard to take rifling well? And would it not wear away the interior grooves in short order?”
“With any normal barrel, the answer to both those questions would be yes.” Gorgas ticked off another point. “The steel—or whatever alloy it may be—in the barrel of this weapon, however, Is hard enough to lessen the difficulties. Again, I doubt we could produce its like, let alone work it once manufactured.”
“They seem to manage in Rivington,” Lee said.
“I know they do, sir. But—I—don’t—know—how.” The colonel ground out the words one by one through clenched teeth. He was a man of sanguine temperament and great resource, as he had to be to keep the Confederacy supplied with armaments in the face of an ever-tightening Federal blockade and its own inadequate factories. When he said, “I am thwarted; I admit it,” it was as if he threw down his sword to surrender to superior force.
“Tell me what else you do know,” Lee urged, not liking to see such a capable officer so downhearted.
“Very well, sir. You mentioned the Williams bullet. As you must know, the chief fouling problem it is designed to alleviate comes not from the lead of the Minié ball but rather from the powder which propels it. Whatever powder is in these AK-47 cartridges, it produces far less fouling than even the finest gunpowder with which I was previously familiar.”
“Has that a connection with the lack of smoke from this powder upon discharge?” Lee asked.
“Exactly: fouling consists of smoke and tiny bits of unburned powder that congeal, so to speak, on the inside of a gun barrel. With this powder, there is next to no smoke and, thus, next to no fouling.”
“I have sent a good deal of ammunition down to Colonel George Rains at the powder works in Augusta, Georgia,” Lee said. “With his knowledge of chemistry in general and gunpowder in particular, I thought him the man best suited to penetrate the mystery of these rounds, if anyone can.”
“If anyone can,” Gorgas echoed gloomily. But after a moment, he brightened a little.” As you say, if anyone can, Colonel Rains is the man. Without his expertise, we should be much the poorer for powder.”
“There I quite agree with you, Colonel. Chemical knowledge is too uncommon in the Confederacy. Of course, the same also obtains among the Federals.” Lee smiled at a memory. “When I administered West Point a few years ago, I had to dismiss from the academy a cadet who informed his instructor and fellow chemistry students that silicon was a gas. Do you know, Colonel, were silicon truly a gas, that lad would likely be a Federal general today.”
As Lee had hoped, Gorgas also smiled at the story. His amusement, though, soon faded. He said,” And now, General, I come to the particular most baffling of all, and when I speak of this weapon, that is no small claim. Do you know, sir, what these Rivington men charge the Ordnance Bureau for each AK-47 carbine? Fifty dollars, sir.”
“It hardly seems excessive. A Henry rifle goes for a similar price in the North, I understand, and this weapon is surely far superior to a Henry. Of course, the Treasury Department will doubtless be anguished at the prospect of discovering sufficient specie to purchase the number of carbines we require, but—what is it, Colonel?”
Gorgas had lifted his hand, as if he wanted to speak. Now he said, “You misapprehend, General, not that I can blame you for it. The asking price is fifty dollars Confederate paper per carbine.”
“You must be mistaken,” Lee said. Gorgas shook his head. Lee saw he knew whereof he spoke. “But how is that possible? While I love our country, I am not blind to our financial straits. Fifty dollars of Confederate paper will not buy two gold dollars.”
“Nor much of anything else,” Gorgas said. “Save these AK-47s. The asking price for their ammunition is similarly, ah, reasonable.”
Lee frowned ferociously, as if facing foes in the field. “You are correct, Colonel; the cost of an AK-47 is even more perplexing than any of its mechanical aspects, extraordinary as those are.”
“Yes, sir. The only thing I thought of was ‘that these Rivington men are such strong patriots that they insist on our dollar’s equality to that of the North. But no one is that patriotic, sir.”
“Nor should anyone be, with the manifest untruth of the proposition demonstrated every day of the year,” Lee said. “Yet the Rivington men, despite the money they surely lose on every repeater they sell us, seem to have plenty of it. When they came to Rivington, they paid gold for homes and warehouses and slaves, and I am given to understand they have also put down gold here in Richmond for offices across from Mechanic’s Hall.”
“I’d heard that, too,” Gorgas said. “Even the rumor of gold, let alone the sight of it, will set tongues wagging here. What are we to make of it, though? That they have so much money, they care nothing for how much these carbines bring them? The notion is logical but not reasonable, if you take my distinction, sir.”
“I do indeed, Colonel.” Lee started to rise, then paused and sat Down again. “May I please have a pen and a scrap of paper?” Gorgas passed him pen and inkwell. He sketched rapidly, gave his drawing to the ordnance chief.” Are you by any chance familiar with this emblem that Rhoodie and his comrades use?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it. Funny you should ask, for it interested me. Not long after I first made Rhoodie’s acquaintance, I made a copy of it and showed it to a friend of mine who knows something of heraldry. He said it reminded him of the arms of the Isle of Man, save that those show three bent legs—don’t ask me for the proper terms, please, sir—instead of mere lines.”
“The Isle of Man, you say? Most interesting. Manxmen have a distinctive way of speaking, do they not? Perhaps that is the accent Rhoodie and his comrades bear. It might form a useful basis from which to begin inquiries, at any rate.”
“So it might.” Gorgas smiled ruefully. “A pity to have to think about investigating men who are helping us so greatly, but they do seem rather too good to be true.”
“You are not the first to use those very words about them, Colonel, and when something seems too good to be true, it is all too apt to be so. Well, now I have spent enough of your time this morning; with all my fretting about our benefactors, you will no doubt be thinking of me as Granny Lee—a nickname I assure you I was not sorry to lose after the first year of the war.”
“I don’t blame you for that, sir,” Gorgas said, “nor for the other. Too many peculiar things hover about Rhoodie and his carbine for me to be easy with them, no matter how useful the gun may prove.”
“That is exactly my view.” Lee really stood this time. Through the window in Gorgas’s office, he saw the white frame buildings of the Confederate laboratory on Brown’s Island, separated from the mainland by a thin stretch of the James. Pointing across to them, he said, “I trust everyone at the cartridge loading works is busily engaged.”