The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

Colonel? How did you know that?

What did they do, put my conversation on speakers while they were eavesdropping?

“Is it?” Castillo replied and took another puff.

He looked at Franklin, who hesitated a moment and then said, “This way, Mr. Castillo.”

“Why don’t you wait here with this gentleman,” Castillo said to Otto Görner, in English. “I’ll come back and fetch you.”

Görner nodded.

The weapons locker was a gray metal two-door cabinet in a small narrow room that also held rows of gray filing cabinets, each of them securely locked with steel bars and padlocks. Castillo idly wondered how much of the obviously classified material they held would be of real intelligence value.

Franklin took the padlock from the door and swung the double doors open for Castillo.

There wasn’t much in it, and most of what was there were ordinary American weapons, ranging from M-16 rifles to an assortment of handguns, both revolvers and semiautomatics. There were some odd pistols, including two Russian Makarovs and four German Walther PPs.

Castillo was familiar with both of the Makarov semiautomatics and liked neither. The Russians had basically copied the Walther when they had replaced their Tokarev pistol. The basic difference was a larger trigger guard on the Makarov to accommodate a heavily gloved trigger finger.

The Walthers fired a 9mm Kurz cartridge, virtually unchanged since Colt had introduced it as the .380 ACP cartridge for their sort of scaled-down version of the Colt 1911 .45 ACP. The cartridge had never been successful in the United States but had enjoyed wide popularity in Europe.

The reason it had not been very successful was the reason Castillo disliked it. It didn’t have anywhere near the knockdown power of the .45 ACP.

There were a half dozen cardboard cartons on the floor of the locker, one long rather thin one and two larger thick ones. Castillo picked up the long thin one and one of the thick ones and laid them atop one of the filing cabinets. He opened the long thin one first.

It held what looked like a target

pistol, and, indeed, that’s what it had been before Special Forces armorers had worked their magic on it years before. Their version of the target pistol, chambered for the .22 Long Rifle round, was now known as the Ruger Mk II Suppressed.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” he said.

Franklin did not seem to share Castillo’s enthusiasm.

There really is no such thing as a “silenced” weapon for a number of reasons, heavy among them the fact that almost all bullets exit the barrel at greater than the speed of sound and it is impossible to silence the noise they make when they do. There are “suppressed” weapons, the best of which make no more sound than a BB gun. Of these, Castillo thought the Ruger Mk II to be among the very best.

The one before him looked brand-new, and it looked as if it was a “manufactured” weapon rather than one modified by the weapons wizards at Bragg.

Castillo examined the weapon carefully and liked what he found.

“I’ll take this,” he announced.

“Colonel…”

There goes “Colonel” again. The sonofabitch did listen.

“…I’m going to have to get authority to let you take that,” Franklin said.

“As soon as we see what else you have, we’ll get on the horn to the ambassador,” Castillo replied and then opened the larger box.

I got lucky again.

The box held a Micro Uzi submachine gun, the smallest and, as far as Castillo was concerned, the most desirable of the three variants of the Uzi.

Seeing the Uzi triggered a series of connects in his brain:

The Uzi is named after its designer, Lieutenant Colonel Uziel Gal, of the Israeli Army…CONNECT…My God, now I’m a lieutenant colonel!…CONNECT…Gal retired and lived in Philadelphia until he died a couple of years ago…CONNECT…Chief Inspector Dutch Kramer of the Philly P.D. Counterterrorism Bureau told me that…CONNECT…Betty Schneider used to work for Kramer…CONNECT…No, she worked for Captain Frank O’Brien in Intelligence and Organized Crime…CONNECT…And I didn’t call her before I came over here. Or since…

What the hell’s the matter with me?