‘There’s nothing to screw here,’ said the armourer, ‘just press it on to the ends of the rods.’
The Englishman fitted the end of each steel rod into the appropriate hole and smacked the butt home. The rifle now, when seen in profile, looked more normal, with a trigger and a complete stock sketched in outline by the upper and lower strut and the base plate. The Jackal lifted the butt-plate into his shoulder, left hand gripping the underside of the barrel, right forefinger round the trigger, left eye closed and right eye squinting down the barrel. He aimed at the far wall and s
queezed the trigger. There was a soft click from inside the breech.
He turned to the Belgian, who held what looked like a ten-inch long black tube in each hand.
‘Silencer,’ said the Englishman. He took the proffered tube and studied the end of the rifle barrel. It had been finely ‘tapped’ or threaded. He slipped the wider end of the silencer over the barrel and wound it quickly round and round until it would go no more. The silencer protruded off the end of the barrel like a long sausage. He held his hand out from his side and M. Goossens slipped the telescopic sight into it.
Along the top of the barrel were a series of pairs of grooves gouged into the metal. Into these the sprung clips on the underside of the telescope fitted, ensuring the telescopic sight and the barrel were exactly parallel. On the right hand side and on the top of the telescope were tiny grub screws for adjusting the crossed hairs inside the sight. Again the Englishman held up the rifle and squinted as he took aim. For a casual glance he might have been an elegant check-suited English gentleman in a Piccadilly gunshop trying out a new sporting gun. But what had been ten minutes before a handful of odd-looking components was no sporting gun any more; it was a high-velocity, long-range, fully-silenced assassin’s rifle. The Jackal put it down. He turned to the Belgian and nodded, satisfied.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good. I congratulate you. A beautiful piece of work.’
M. Goossens beamed.
‘There still remains the question of zeroing the sights and firing some practice shots. Do you have any shells?’
The Belgian reached into the drawer of the desk and pulled out a box of a hundred bullets. The seals of the packet had been broken, and six shells were missing.
‘These are for practice,’ said the armourer. ‘I have taken six others out for converting them to explosive tips.’
The Jackal poured a handful of the shells into his hand and looked at them. They seemed terribly small for the job one of them would have to do, but he noticed they were the extra-long type of that calibre, the extra explosive charge giving the bullet a very high velocity, and consequently increased accuracy and killing power. The tips too were pointed, where most hunting bullets are snub-nosed, and where hunting bullets have a dull leaden head, these were tipped with cupro-nickel. They were competition rifle bullets of the same calibre as the hunting gun he held.
‘Where are the real shells?’ asked the assassin.
M. Goossens went to the desk again and produced a screw of tissue paper.
‘Normally, of course, I keep these in a very safe place,’ he explained, ‘but since I knew you were coming, I got them out.’
He undid the screw of paper and poured the contents out on to the white blotter. At first glance the bullets looked the same as those the Englishman was pouring from his cupped hand back into the cardboard box. When he had finished he took one of the bullets off the blotter and examined it closely.
From a small area around the extreme tip of the bullet the cupro-nickel had been finely sanded away to expose the lead inside. The sharp tip of the bullet had been slightly blunted, and into the nose a tiny hole had been drilled down the length of the nose-cap for a quarter of an inch. Into this aperture a droplet of mercury was poured, then the hole was tamped with a drop of liquid lead. After the lead had hardened, it too was filed and papered until the original pointed shape of the bullet tip had been exactly re-created.
The Jackal knew about these bullets, although he had never had occasion to use one. Far too complex to be used en masse except if factory-produced, banned by the Geneva Convention, more vicious than the simple dum-dum, the explosive bullet would go off like a small grenade when it hit the human body. On firing, the droplet of mercury would be slammed back in its cavity by the forward rush of the bullet, as when a car passenger is pressed into his seat by a violent acceleration. As soon as the bullet struck flesh, gristle or bone, it would experience a sudden deceleration.
The effect on the mercury would be to hurl the droplet forwards towards the plugged front of the bullet. Here its onward rush would rip away the tip of the slug, splaying the lead outwards like the fingers of an open hand or the petals of a blossoming flower. In this shape the leaden projectile would tear through nerve and tissue, ripping, cutting, slicing, leaving fragments of itself over an area the size of a tea-saucer. Hitting the head, such a bullet would not emerge, but would demolish everything inside the cranium, forcing the bone-shell to fragment from the terrible pressure energy released inside.
The assassin put the bullet carefully back on the tissue paper. Beside him the mild little man who had designed it was looking up at him quizzically.
‘They look all right to me. You are evidently a craftsman, M. Goossens. What then is the problem?’
‘It is the other, monsieur. The tubes. These have been more difficult to fabricate than I had imagined. First I used aluminium as you suggested. But please understand I acquired and perfected the gun first. That is why I only got around to doing the other things a few days ago. I had hoped it would be relatively simple, with my skill and the machinery I have in my workshop.
‘But in order to keep the tubes as narrow as possible, I bought very thin metal. It was too thin. When threaded on my machine for later assembly piece by piece, it was like tissue paper. It bent when the slightest pressure was put upon it. In order to keep the inside measurement big enough to accommodate the breech of the rifle at its widest part, and yet get thicker-metalled tubes, I had to produce something that simply would not have looked natural. So I decided on stainless steel.
‘It was the only thing. It looks just like aluminium, but slightly heavier. Being stronger, it can be thinner. It can take the thread and still be tough enough not to bend. Of course, it is a harder metal to work, and it takes time. I began yesterday …’
‘All right. What you say is logical. The point is, I need it, and I need it perfect. When?’
The Belgian shrugged. ‘It is difficult to say. I have all the basic components, unless other problems crop up. Which I doubt. I am certain the last technical problems are licked. Five days, six days. A week perhaps …’
The Englishman showed no signs of his annoyance. The face remained impassive, studying the Belgian as he completed his explanations. When he had finished, the other was still thinking.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘It will mean an alteration of my travelling plans. But perhaps not as serious as I thought the last time I was here. That depends to a certain degree on the results of a telephone call I shall have to make. In any event, it will be necessary for me to acclimatise myself to the gun, and that may as well be done in Belgium as anywhere else. But I shall need the gun and the undoctored shells, plus one of the doctored ones. Also, I shall need some peace and quiet in which to practise. Where would one pick in this country to test a new rifle in conditions of complete secrecy? Over a hundred and thirty to a hundred and fifty metres in the open air?’
M. Goossens thought for a moment. ‘In the forest of the Ardennes,’ he said at length. ‘There are great reaches of forest there where a man may be alone for several hours. You could be there and back in a day. Today is Thursday, the weekend starts tomorrow and the woods might be too full of people picnicking. I would suggest Monday the 5th. By Tuesday or Wednesday I hope to have the rest of the job finished.’
The Englishman nodded, satisfied.