"Neither was I," she replied, "but if we're going to blend in, we'd better start shopping-window-shopping, at least."
They moved off to their right, toward a large display of black powder handguns.
Ham picked up an old Colt Buntline revolver and handed it to Holly. "Can you imagine wearing that thing on your hip?"
"Nope," Holly said. "Not without developing a list."
They moved slowly on, taking it all in, then Holly stopped and stared. "What the hell is that?" Holly gasped.
Before them lay a weapon a good five feet long, made of black steel, with a stock of some sort of plastic and a very large scope.
"That, my dear, is a Barrett's fifty-caliber rifle," Ham said.
"What is it for?"
"Just about anything you want it to be, I guess. I saw one used during Desert Storm. A sergeant I knew put two phosphorus-tipped shells through an Iraqi armored personnel carrier and blew it to hell. The other carriers in the column stopped, and troops started pouring out of them; they couldn't surrender fast enough." Ham reached into the display, picked up a
cartridge and handed it to her. "This is what it fires."
Holly was astonished. The cartridge was six inches long and seemed to weigh half a pound.
"They developed that ammunition for the Browning machine gun in World War One, but it didn't really get used much until World War Two. You can put one of those babies right through an inch and a half of rolled steel armorplate."
Holly set the cartridge back where it came from. "That's downright spooky," she said.
14
Holly turned to find a fit-looking man in his mid- to late forties standing behind her. His graying hair was cut short, and he was wearing a military-style jumpsuit.
"That thing is hell on wheels," he said. "I've never seen one fired in anger, but I once saw somebody put a round through a six-hundred-pound safe, and I mean all the way through." He turned to Ham. "You say you saw it fired in Iraq?"
"I sure did," Ham said.
"What was it like?"
"Awful, for the men in the carrier. I was a mile away, with the shooter. He said he could hit a playing card with it from that distance."
"A good shooter can hit a playing card from twice that distance, in no wind, if he has time to bracket," the man said.
"From two miles?" Holly asked.
"I kid you not, little lady."
Holly thought he had a lot of balls calling her that, since he wasn't quite as tall as she.
The man turned to Ham and stuck out his hand. "I'm Peck Rawlings," he said.
Ham shook his hand. "Ham Barker. This is my daughter, Holly."
Rawlings nodded at where Ham's stripes used to be. "You ex-military?"
"We both are," Ham said. "I put in thirty-eight years, and Holly did a double sawbuck."
"What kind of service?"
"I was in Special Forces for a long time, then I trained a lot of folks, and then they started pushing a lot of paper at me."
"Yeah, they'll do that," he said.