State Of War (2003) Read online

  But there were ways to get around that.

  He pulled the can of flat-white spray paint from his bag and walked toward the target. Along the way, he stooped and picked up half a dozen used shotgun shells. Some shooters always left the brass and plastic hulls, which was good for him.

  He set the falling plates up, and used the shotgun shells to lean and prop them in such a way that a light tap would knock 'em over. Then he sprayed each target with a light coat of white paint, enough so that a hit would show up as a dark splotch.

  He went back to the shooting table and pulled his earphones out, along with a box of ammo and two speedloaders. The earphones were Wolf Ears--electronic jobs that would shut off loud noises but let you hear regular sounds. He slipped those on, put the speedloaders in his jacket pockets, picked up the spray paint, then stepped away from the table and walked to where he was twenty-one feet from the targets.

  He put the paint down. Straightening, he took a deep breath, let part of it out, cleared his jacket on both sides, and fast-drew both his revolvers simultaneously. He didn't use the sights, but indexed the guns like pointing his fingers. He shot the far left target first, using the gun in that hand, squeezing the trigger twice for a double-tap. Then he shot the one on the far right with his right-hand piece, again firing twice. Even as the first two targets clanged and fell, he worked his way back and forth, alternating from left to right.

  He cooked both guns dry.

  Five seconds, twelve shots, six targets, two each, all hits.

  He holstered his left gun, thumbed the latch and shoved the cylinder out on the right one, and popped the empties out with a fast palm hit on the extractor rod. He pulled a speedloader from his pocket and reloaded the revolver, holstered it, then repeated the reload with the left piece. Both guns holstered, he took the spray paint and moved to inspect the targets.

  The hits were all close to the center and usually a couple inches apart, except for the second right-hand one, which had two gray splotches in a binocular hit, but slightly high. Not bad, though. They would have hit a man in the mouth.

  He set the targets back up, shotgun shells in place, and repainted them.

  He was using a pair of tuned Ruger SP101s, two-and-a-quarter-inch barrels, in .22 Long Rifle caliber. "Mouse guns," most serious shooters would call them. The .22 LR round was fast, but tiny. A .38 Special or 9mm bullet would be three or four times as big. According to Evan Marshall's Stopping Power Stats, the smaller .22 would only knock the fight out of a man with a torso hit maybe one time in three. Given that a hot .40 or .357 round would put that same man down and out better than nine and a half times out of ten, most shooters felt that thirty percent was pretty crappy. Sixty-six percent odds the guy would keep coming if you shot him certainly wasn't something they'd want to risk their life on.

  Junior grinned as he reached the firing line. A body shot with a mouse gun might get you killed by return fire or an angry guy swinging a tire iron, but a head shot? That was something else. If you put a forty-grain .22 round in a guy's eye, it didn't matter how tough he was.

  Junior used to like talking trash to the big-bore guys when they'd laugh at his .22s. Tell you what, he'd say, You let me have the first shot, then you can shoot me as many times as you want with your rhino killer. What you think about that, hah?

  Nobody had taken him up on it.

  Putting the paint down, he turned back to face the targets. Without a pause, he drew, pointed, and emptied both guns.

  Six for six.

  He reloaded and went to reset and repaint the targets. Yeah, the little Rugers would kill you as dead as a howitzer, if you were good enough to put the bullets where they needed to go, and they had some advantages over the hand cannons. They were small and lighter to haul around. They were quieter. They didn't have any recoil to speak of. And ammo was cheap. You could shoot all day for a few dollars.

  Best of all, when he was on the road and couldn't make it to the combat range, he could take a little drive out into the country just about anywhere, walk into some woods, shake up some cans of Coke, put 'em against a backstop, and start blasting away. He could spew fizz all whichaway and not bother anyone more than a few hundred yards away. Fire off a .357 and it sounded like an big bomb going off, ka-whoom! You would hear that sucker for miles.

  Of course, he had given himself some additional advantages. Bill Ruger's little guns were built like bank vaults. You could drop one off a tall building and it would still shoot. The SPs were also head and shoulders above an S&W or Taurus for reliability. That made 'em a little stiff right out of the box, the actions a little hard, but a couple hours with a Dremel and some polish and he had rounded the triggers and hammers. That had slicked up the actions so they each had a nice eight-pound DA pull, and broke like an icicle at just over two pounds single-action, smooth as oil on glass, no creep. New springs and spec lube, too.

  Four-inch barrels would have been better, accuracywise, but they were harder to conceal in summer clothes. The factory stocks were too small for his big hands, so he had switched to Pachmayr's hard rubber Compacs, which were the perfect size, and not going to slip if his palms were sweaty. He could have put Crimson Trace laser grips on 'em, but that was too much of an advantage, made it way too easy. He'd had a pair of custom holsters made for 'em, Kramer horsehide, as good as you could get.

  And he took care of things from the ammo end, too. He used CCI Minimags exclusively, the solids, not the hollow points. He'd buy a brick, a full five hundred rounds. Then he'd sit in front of the TV with the sports channel on and his little Dillon scale and weigh each cartridge. It turned out that seven or eight out of ten rounds weighed fifty-one grains. All the fifty-ones went into one box, the other stuff into another--he used those for his little lever-action Winchester rifle. It didn't really matter how much they weighed; it only mattered that the ones he carried all weighed the same.

  When that was done, he would use the little headspace gauge he had made. With that, he could check to make sure the bullets were all the same size and shape. Any that were deformed or a hair too long or short went into the rifle box.

  Every round he carried in his revolvers or speedloaders was as close to exactly the same size and weight as he could make them. It didn't matter if they all shot a hair high or a hair low, as long as they all went to the same place. Consistency, that was the key. An old silhouette shooter had showed him that, and it worked.

  Finally, because rimfire ammo could sometimes go bad, oil or lube seeping into them, he changed the rounds in his guns and speedloaders once a week, and the old ones went into the rifle box.

  Of course, a snub-nose revolver wasn't going to be a tack-driver at any kind of range, no matter how good a shooter you were. Still and all, it didn't have to be. All he needed to be able to do was hit somebody in the head at seven yards, which was the longest range of most gunfights. The FBI used to say, "Three shots, three feet, three seconds," was the average shoot-out.

  Out to seven yards, he could point-shoot heads all day long pretty damn quick, yeah. But just in case, when he was working on the action, he'd kept the spurs on the Rugers' hammers. That way he could cock 'em for single-action if he had to. Given just a little time to aim, he could hit that same target at twenty-five yards single-action, holding one gun two-handed, nine times out of ten. At fifty yards, the head shot simply wasn't going to happen except by luck, but he could put them all into a torso at that range. The .22s might not be a manstopper to the body, but six hits would give a man something real serious to think about. There weren't too many gunfights at fifty yards anyhow.

  Back at the firing line, he reset himself. Taking a deep breath, he drew and cooked 'em off. . . .

  Six for six.

  He smiled. Damn, he was good.

  At least, he was good when the targets weren't shooting back. He was going to have to do something about that soon, yeah, or else stop looking at himself every time he passed a mirror. Pretty soon, yeah.

  4

&nbs
p; Washington, D.C.

  Howard and Tyrone were in the den. Howard was reading the paper. Ty was in the lounger, VR goggles on his head, surfing the web.

  In the kitchen, Nadine was fixing supper. She yelled something at him, but he didn't catch it.

  "What?" he called out.

  She came into the den, a spatula in one hand, an oven mitt on the other. "I asked you if you wanted part of a beer," she said.

  They did that sometimes, split a beer while she was cooking.

  He smiled at her and shook his head. "No, thanks, babe, you go ahead." He knew she would drink half the bottle, then put the rest back in the fridge. If he didn't drink it, it would go flat. Big party animals, the Howards. Whoowhoo.

  Nadine went back into the kitchen.

  "I've been thinking about what you said," Tyrone said. He took off his goggles and laid them on his chest, but kept the chair almost fully reclined.

  Howard put the paper down. At Ty's age, when he wanted to talk, it was clear the decks and stand by or lose the opportunity. "Always a good idea, thinking," Howard said, grinning. "About anything in particular?"

  "That TANSTAAFL stuff."

  Howard nodded. He wasn't sure of the term's origin. He'd first read it in a science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein when he'd been a boy: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It referred, if he recalled correctly, to the old "Free Lunch" signs that were common a long time ago in local pubs and bars. Usually something like boiled eggs in pickle juice, or other snack-y food, given away to patrons. Well, it was free to the extent that you didn't have to pay for it as long as you were buying beers. It was actually a kind of loss-leader for the bars to get the drinkers to stop in.

  Not all that long ago, Las Vegas used to offer terrific meals at ridiculously low prices, too. They knew that if they got you into their casinos, and kept you there with free drinks, they would get your money, either at the tables or from the slot machines. At least that way, when you went home broke, you could tell everybody how good and cheap the food was. It was like cheap advertising: Yeah, I lost my butt at the tables, but I ate great, and it was only like five bucks for a salad, steak, potatoes, and dessert.

  He'd told Tyrone about the concept a while ago, trying to get the boy to see things from a different, more grown-up, perspective. "What about it?" he asked.

  "Well," Tyrone said, "according to what I've read, it's one of those capitalist things. Robber barons and industrialists didn't want anybody putting hands into their pockets in any way, shape, or form, no regulations, nothing."

  Howard nodded. "That's probably true."

  "Pure capitalism doesn't work, Dad, 'cause it screws the workers," Tyrone said. His voice was becoming louder, more passionate. "If some rich guy owns a big factory, he can hire ten-year-olds to work eighteen hours a day and pay them almost nothing."

  Howard nodded again. He thought he could see where his son was headed. "Yes, that was how it used to be, a long time ago, back at the beginning of the Industrial Age or so."

  Tyrone sat up, his goggles falling into his lap. "So all regulation isn't bad, then, is it? Without them, we'd have no unions, no Social Security, no welfare."

  "I never said all regulation was bad. I'm a Republican, not a Libertarian."

  Tyrone grinned, as if he had just won a major point. He said, "Right. So sometimes private industry needs to be held accountable, for the greater good of society."

  Howard was right. He definitely saw where this was going. He merely nodded, though. He had to give the boy points for getting his groundwork set up.

  Tyrone picked up the goggles and held them in one hand, using them to point at his father. "So if some guy, for instance, came up with a cure for cancer and he decided to sell it for a hundred thousand dollars a pop, it might be in the public interest to regulate that."

  Howard folded his paper and set it aside. "To a point, I'll agree with that."

  "But, see, Dad, that's the whole thing: If you could save ten thousand lives by giving the cure away for free, or only charging a buck or something, wouldn't that be valid?"

  Howard shook his head. "Maybe--as long as you didn't put the guy who came up with the cure out of business. We've gone over this before, Ty, but let me say it again. Suppose this guy borrowed and spent, oh, say, ten million dollars researching, developing, and producing this cure. Even if his production cost per dose is fairly low, he still has to repay those loans, and that will drive up the amount of money he needs to keep his doors open. Are you saying it's right to take the cure away from him and have him go belly up? That the people who invested their money in this guy should lose what they put in, for the greater good of society?"

  Tyrone shrugged. "If they can afford to invest beaucoup bucks somewhere, why not?"

  "What if they can't afford it? Let's say Social Security goes into the toilet--which is very possible before I get old enough to draw it--and all I've got to live on is my military pension. Let's also say I've invested my money cautiously, and this rock-solid pharmaceutical company that comes up with the cancer cure is where a big chunk of my money went. I'm golden, I can quit work at sixty and live nicely for the rest of my life. But ten years after I retire, you take the cure away from them, they go bankrupt, and there I am all of a sudden, seventy years old, sitting in a cardboard box, eating dog food because my investments got co-opted. Is that fair?"

  Tyrone shook his head. "No, of course not, Dad," he said. "But if the choice is you sitting in a box and eating dog food or someone you love dying of a disease because they couldn't afford the cure, which would you go for?"

  Howard smiled. He really was getting a lot sharper, his son.

  "Ty, in communism, which is a really unworkable philosophy, the saying is, 'From each according to his ability, to each, according to his need.' You know what that means?"

  Tyrone nodded. "Of course. It means those who can do stuff help those who can't."

  "Technically. What it means in practice is that people with ability carry everybody else. And there are a lot more people without special abilities than there are with 'em. Communism says that a guy smart enough to come up with a cure for cancer is exactly the same as somebody who digs ditches. And in the eyes of the law, that's how it should be, when it comes to getting away with murder, say. But the truth is, a guy who can invent a cure for cancer is a lot rarer than a guy who digs ditches. I personally have trouble with a baseball or basketball player making thirty or forty million dollars a year while a schoolteacher might make only a little more than minimum wage--that's skewed in a way I truly can't understand. But you have to recognize that talent and skill should be rewarded somehow, otherwise there's no reason to invent that cure except altruism. If you take away the thing a man spends his energy making and give him nothing in return, you take away his desire to do it again. And that of anybody else who looks at all the work needed and says to himself, 'Why bother? It won't help me or mine any.' "

  "Yes, but--"

  "Look at South America, Ty. Every few years, they have a revolution in one of the banana republics. Everybody in power gets tossed out and a new crew comes in. If you invested a few million in a company down there, and all of a sudden it gets nationalized and taken over for 'the good of the people,' how much do you figure you'll want to invest from that point on?"

  "But we're talking about knowledge, Dad, not hardware."

  "And I'm here to tell you that knowledge is more valuable than hardware, because without knowledge, hardware doesn't exist. Without the minds that came up with the internal combustion engine, or the steamer, or the electric motor, there wouldn't be any automobiles, or freighters, or airplanes. You have to have metal benders, yes, but without blueprints all you get is . . . bent metal."

  Tyrone frowned, but Howard wasn't finished.

  "In our society, Ty, if you do something valuable, you get recognized for it. Could be fame, could be power, could be money, sometimes it's all three, but the bottom line is, if you do the work, you are supposed
to get the credit, and all the perks that go along with it. Sometimes it doesn't work that way. Sometimes the inventor gets screwed. But that's how we want it to work. Because it is right, and on some level, people know it.

  "When you download 'free' music, or somebody's newest novel that's been pirated, scanned, and posted on the web, or the formula for a drug that somebody worked years to develop, you might as well be walking into their house and stealing it at gunpoint. Theft is theft, no matter how you spin it. And it's wrong: 'Thou shalt not steal' is recognized by every civilized society and most major religions, and for a good reason. If there are no rules to protect people, then it becomes anarchy."

  "There are exceptions," Tyrone said, his voice stubborn. "What about the aluminum companies in World War II?"

  Howard nodded. "Yes, there are exceptions. And, yes, during World War II one company was forced to give its process to the others. But a war for your country's survival is not exactly the same as some college student swiping music for his personal collection, now is it?"

  Tyrone grinned. "Well, no."

  "A great part of common law around the world is dedicated to protecting the property rights of its citizens. When you start skirting those laws, you start down the road to big trouble. If they can take that cancer cure, what's to stop them from taking that software you wrote for a new game? TANSTAAFL means that outside of real estate, pretty much everything of value in our world was, somewhere, somehow, some when, thought up, created, developed, produced, and distributed by somebody. That somebody paid for it, in blood, sweat, or tears, in time or money, for love or whatever, and that anything you think of as 'free,' isn't. You might get it free, but somebody paid for it."