August 12 "Alex, we've figured out your mystery weapon," the forensic man said with a hint of triumph in his tired voice. It was 3:50 a.m., and he and his crew had been up for thirty-three hours. "Come here." He led Neumann to a table where there were several stereo microscopes. Another man stood nearby.

"This bullet," he said, handing Alex Neumann one of the projectiles recovered from Henry Bowman's quarry, "was made in 1939." Neumann scowled as he examined the solid steel projectile with the radius ogive that came to a sharp point.

"I don't understand."

"Tell him, George," the forensic chief instructed.

"That's out of a German 20xl38B Armor Piercing round used during WWII," the ordnance tech explained. "Here's the loaded cartridge," he added, handing Neumann a complete round of ammunition. The 20x138B was substantially longer than the U.S. 20mm Vulcan shell he was used to looking at. "Several guns used it," the ordnance man continued, "probably the best-known was the FLAK 30, which was a full-auto antiaircraft cannon that was towed behind vehicles. That wasn't what fired this one, though.

"In addition to the Germans, the Finns also made weapons that fired this cartridge. There were other 20mm rounds in use during the late '30s, but the 20x138 had the largest capacity and the most power. A little more than our own current Vulcan round," he added.

"There were two man-portable weapons which fired this cartridge," the ordnance tech explained. "Two that I know of," he amended. "The first was the German Solothurn S18-1000, which was made in Switzerland because of the restrictions on Germany laid out in the Treaty of Versailles. It's a ten-shot semiautomatic rifle weighing about a hundred ten pounds, fired off either a bipod or a wheeled mount. The second gun is a Finnish Lahti Model 39, which is similar in size to the Solothurn, also a semiauto, and fires off of either a bipod or short skis.

"The barrels of the Solothurn and the Lahti have slightly different interior dimensions than our current weapons which fire the Vulcan round. The groove diameter is about eight thousandths smaller than the Vulcan, although the bore diameter is almost identical. The Lahti and Solothurn use conventional rifling, not gain twist, like more modern 20mms used around the world.

"These bullets," he said, pointing to two small piles of 1939 German projectiles to the right of his microscope, "came from Lahtis and Solothurns. The bullets in the left pile were fired out of Lahtis. The bullets in the right pile were shot out of Solothurns."

"How many different guns?"

"Who knows? Could be one of each, could be fifty. Both weapons are very high quality with almost no dimensional differences between examples. Throw in the fact that the bores wear as you shoot the guns more, one gun could give you a bunch of different samples over time. Plus the barrel could have been replaced. You know all that."

"Yeah. Sorry. I guess I was starting to believe TV for a minute." The technician laughed at Neumann's comment and walked over to a table with two much larger piles of projectiles on it.

"Now we get to the interesting part. These bullets here are U.S. practice rounds. They don't blow up, or anything, but they were made for the Vulcan. However, all of them were also fired out of Lahti and Solothurn barrels, just like the German rounds." He handed one to Alex Neumann. It was like the one he had found on Agent Polvecki's desk.

"Somebody chucked it up in a lathe and cut the copper drive band down eight thousandths, then loaded it in a 20x138 case."

"Could you do that with High Explosive or Incendiary bullets from the Vulcan?"

"Absolutely. I'd want to be damned careful with the spin-armed ones in a lathe, though."

"Why would someone go to all that trouble with the solid steel practice bullets?" Neumann asked, staring at the huge pile of fired projectiles.

"So he could shoot his guns. Original ammo from WWII is almost nonexistent, but our government sells brand-new Vulcan practice bullets for scrap. It's obvious that somebody likes to shoot," he said, waving his arm at the 400 pounds of bullets on the table.

"These aren't all the bullets that were down there, either," the head of Forensics interjected. "Not by a long shot. Divers only covered part of the quarry pit."

"You've done a hell of a job," Neumann said, obviously impressed. "Can you tell me more about these Lahti and Solothurn guns?" he asked the ordnance man.

"Sure. A bunch of them came into the States in the '50s and '60s, and got sold mailorder. The Lahtis were a hundred bucks, if I remember correctly. You had to register them with the IRS in '68, with a tax stamp, 'cause they got reclassified. Sixty-eight was a few years before ATF took over that stuff. Only a few people did, of course. Registered them, I mean."

"How is it you know so much about these two guns?" Neumann asked curiously. The ordnance man smiled.

"Had a Lahti when I was in high school. We had it in the rec room in our basement, on the skis. My little brother and sister would use it as a teeter-totter. Dad took the barrel off it when he saw that law was coming."

"Did you ever shoot it?"

"Oh yeah. I shot up all the ammo that came with it, and then Dad got one more crate, but it was pretty expensive. Seventy cents a round, I think it was. A lot of money back in '67."

"Could you have hit a flying helicopter with it?"

"You mean like one of the traffic copters flying around over the city? That'd be a real trick. Main problem would be elevating the gun enough. On the bipod or skis, you can only shoot five or ten degrees off of level."

"What about if the helicopter was setting up to land?"

"Then you could do it. Although you'd be better off with a good hunting rifle, I think. The Lahti was pretty accurate, but not like a good scoped bolt action; a 250-grain Silvertip out of a .338 Winchester would be how I'd take down a chopper. And the sights on the Lahti were pretty crude, as I remember. You could fix that, though. Dad was talking about mounting a scope on ours, but then that law came along."

"If you had to guess which weapon a man would use to shoot a helicopter out of the air at long range, which would it be, the Lahti or the Solothurn?" The ordnance tech looked pensive.

"The Solothurn has an integral optic sight-a scope-and that would be a great help, but like I said, you could put a scope on the Lahti, no problem. Anyone who shoots a Lahti this much," he said, indicating the piles of converted bullets, "would probably want a scope. The Solothurn is recoil-operated and the barrel slides back, whereas the Lahti is gas-operated and the barrel's fixed. The Lahti should be more accurate, but the reports I've heard, the Solothurn was pretty good, too.

"It could be either one," the ordnance man said finally, "unless the shooter had to get out of there in a hurry and didn't want to leave his gun. Then it would be the Solothurn, no question."

"Why's that?"

"The Solothurn has a quick-change barrel. You can take it off and break the gun down into two fifty-pound, four-foot-long pieces in fifteen seconds. The Lahti is an eight-foot-long, hundred-pound boat anchor."

"I guess I'll head over to the ATF office and see if I can check their registrations of Lahtis and Solothurns." "Ah, sir? Are you sure you want to do that?" the ordnance man asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, ah...NFA records are tax records, sir. NFA isn't supposed to release them to other departments for non-tax reasons. Like if you just call up the IRS and want to know how much money a guy made last year "cause you think it might help your investigation out-they won't do it. That's a felony. A woman prosecutor up in Detroit is in all kinds of trouble for just that reason, blabbing about a gun dealer's NFA records.

"But on top of that, sir, what would be the point? Hundreds of those guns came in the country, but only a few people papered them in '68. If you find a guy with a gun, maybe you can nail him if it's not papered, but why go to NFA now? To see if the guy who owns the quarry has a 20mm cannon? That seems pretty obvious, doesn't it?" he said, nodding towards the piles of projectiles. "To find out which gun he owns, and match a bullet to it? Like I said before, we can't do that, even if you had an intact slug from one of the choppers, which you don't."

"I see your point," Alex said softly. "Thank you for your work. You've done quite a job." "No problem," the ordnance man said cheerfully. "Hey, and when you catch this guy, ask him why he didn't use a .338 or a .375 instead of a big clumsy 20mm. That'd be something to know."

"I'm not supposed to do this," the sleepy NFA branch Senior Examiner said as she unlocked the door and let Alex Neumann into the office on 650 Massachusetts Avenue. She had never been there at 7:00 a.m. before. "What you're about to learn didn't come from me."

"I keep my promises," Neumann said irritably as he watched her turn on her computer. I'm only doing this so the President can't ask me why I neglected to he reminded himself. A moment later the video screen lit up.

"Henry Bowman, Rural Route One, that the one you want?" the examiner said as the information scrolled across the monitor. "Whooo-eee, he's got a lot of stuff."

"We're looking for a Solothurn S18-1000."

"Got a serial number?"

"No."

"Then it'll take a little longer. You know if he's had this gun for a while?"

"Yes, I think so," Neumann said, thinking of the pile of bullets and how long it would take to shoot them all.

"Then I'll put the guns in the order they were registered," she said, tapping more keys. "Well. Got some Amnesty stuff." Five entries listed 1968 as the year that the NFA weapons had been registered to Henry Bowman.

"No Lahti, either," Neumann said after he had scanned the list. He and the examiner spent twenty minutes looking through each one of Henry Bowman's registrations, but there was no 20mm destructive device of any type listed. Henry had in fact registered his Lahti during the 1968 Amnesty, but ATF had inadvertently lost the record of this twelve years later, along with his Amnesty-registered Thompson. Henry's copy of each registration was currently sitting in one of his safes.

"It's not there," Alex Neumann said finally.

"Ah, sir," the woman said, "you got to realize that from 1934 up through about 1981, all this stuff was on one Rolodex, not a computer. Lot of these records been lost over the last fifty, sixty years. Our best guess is maybe a third of them are gone. This man could easily have the guns you're looking for. It's just not in our records."

"Well then, how would you know?"

"If there was ever a problem, he'd just show us his papers, and we'd put the gun into the computer." "What if he's lost his papers, too?"

"It's not up to me what they do, then."

"Wouldn't the gun have shown up during a compliance inspection sometime since '68, and have been put on the computer system?"

"No, because if it was an amnesty registration, it wouldn't be part of his dealer inventory. It would be registered to him personally, like these others, on a Form 4."

"So he might have one, but you have no way of knowing, because the records might have been lost out of the Rolodex twenty years ago."

"Or somebody we let go deleted or changed a bunch of stuff in the computer. We get that all the time, when we got to fire someone." Jesus Neumann said to himself. And I thought the Bureau was bad sometimes. "Thank you very much. You've been most helpful."

"With luck, it should all be over tonight," the President said gravely as he finished describing what he had planned for the State of the Union address that evening. The members of the task force sat silently, considering the implications of what the President had told them. Congressman Jon Bane of Ohio was the first to speak.

"Maybe Blair or whoever it is will stick to their end of the bargain and call off the dogs, but this thing is beyond that, now. I mean, it's not just guns anymore. EPA officials and people who work for the FAA are being killed, too, all across the country. And the legislators who supported them," he added forcefully. It was obvious that it was this last fact which Bane found by far the most disturbing.

"I talked to him about that, Jon. Mr. Jones said that while he had no direct control over the people involved in those killings, he believed that they would stop, along with the others, because of the terms I agreed to. I think he's right."

"Why wouldn't they just start up again?" Bane demanded. The President looked pained, and Harrison Potter chose to step in and answer the question.

"Congressman Bane, implicit in Mr. Jones' prediction was the assumption that the legislators in question use the recent events as a productive learning experience." Bane stared at the retired Chief Justice, then closed his mouth and sat back in his chair.

"The families of the murdered agents will want your head, Mr. President," Secretary of the Treasury Mills said softly. "Especially the ones where a suspect's in custody."

"I know that, Lawrence. It goes with the territory."

"Mr. President-"