Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

He looked to Kocian for direction.

"I'm really too old to be climbing ladders," Kocian said, then climbed nimbly up it.

Muller gestured for Castillo to go up the ladder. He did so and found himself in something he realized with chagrin he had never even suspected existed. The area was as large as the apartment beneath. The roof was so steeply pitched, however, that there was room for only three men standing abreast in the center.

Against each side of the room were six olive-drab oblong metal boxes on wooden horses, just far enough toward the center so that their lids could be raised.

On each box--on the top, the sides, and the front--was a stenciled legend, the paint a faded yellow. Castillo squatted to get a look.

STIELHANDGRANATE 24

20 STUCK

BOHMISCHE WAFFENFABRIK A. G. PRAG

It was a moment before he remembered that under the Nazis, Czechoslovakia had been the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" and that the "Bohemian Weapons Factory" in Prague was the Czech factory that the Germans had taken over.

Kocian saw him looking.

"Hand grenades aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you hear 'Bohemia, ' are they, Karlchen?"

"No," Castillo replied simply.

Delchamps came off the ladder, saw the boxes, read the labeling, and said, "I was really hoping for something a little less noisy than potato mashers."

Castillo and Kocian both chuckled.

Kocian went to one of the boxes and opened it with an ease that suggested this wasn't the first time he'd opened a crate of hand grenades.

What the hell. Why not? He was a corporal in Stalingrad when he was eighteen. He's probably opened several hundred ammo boxes like these.

Otto Gorner, wheezing a little, came off the ladder.

"Ach, mein Gott," he said softly when he saw the ammunition boxes.

Kocian took something wrapped in a cloth from the box and extended it to Castillo.

"I considered giving you this when you finished West Point. But I thought you would either lose it or shoot yourself in the foot with it."

Castillo unwrapped the small package. It held a well-worn Luger pistol, two magazines, and what looked like twenty-odd loose cartridges.

"You know what it is, presumably?" Kocian asked.

West Point--or maybe Camp Mackall--came on automatically. Castillo picked up the pistol with his thumb and index finger on the grip, worked the action to ensure it was unloaded, then examined it carefully before reciting in English: "Pistol 08, Parabellum. Often referred to as the Luger. This one--made by Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, Berlin, in 1913--is 9 by 19 millimeters. Also called 9mm-NATO."

Castillo looked at Kocian.

"It was the Herr Oberst's," Kocian said. "He had that with him at Stalingrad. And before that, the Herr Oberst's father, your great-grandfather, carried it in France."

"Jesus!" Castillo said.

"It is now yours, Oberstleutnant Castillo," Kocian said with emotion in his voice, and not a hint of his usual sarcasm.

"How the hell did it survive the war?" Castillo asked.

By then, without thinking about it, he had stuck his finger in the action and was moving it so that light would be reflected off his fingernail and into the barrel for his inspection.

"It's been used, but there's no pitting."