The Specialist Series Box Set by John Cutter

Author:John Cutter [Cutter, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-03-18T22:00:00+00:00

7 - Weapons on the Bed, and In It

She stood on one side of the hotel room’s bed, Sullivan stood on the other, both of them looking down at the weapons spread out on the coverlet.

More than once he glanced up, meeting her eyes, and an almost visible sexual electricity crackled between them before he forced himself to look away. Suddenly they both knew they would be in that bed together soon. It was a visceral realization, beyond argument. They both had mixed feelings about it.

All this had passed between them in those glances — with not a word spoken about it.

Meanwhile Malta rapped on. He stood at the foot of the bed, extolling the virtues of the various automatic weapons laid out side by side on the white wool bedspread: the grenades, the rocket launcher, and his favourite, the RAW.

The RAW was an armour and masonry-penetrating rocket-propelled projectile. RAW: rifleman’s assault weapon.

“I am very proud of this item, Jack,” Malta was saying. “I don’t think there’s another mercenary who’s got one. It was developed chiefly for use in urban firefight settings. Perfect for this operation. We’ve got two — that’s all I can find now. Basically, it works like this…”

The RAW unit attaches to a rifle as easily as fixing a bayonet. The shell itself is spherical, attaches to a launching frame on the underside of the barrel. The rifleman attaches the unit, pulls out the safety pin, sights in, fires a bullet. The bullet leaving the muzzle carries with it expanding gas which flows down the launcher-tube hole and through the bracket connecting with the projectile. The gas forces down the projectile’s firing pin, driving it into a primer in the rear of the shell and starting a rocket motor. Gas expelled from the rocket is directed through two right-angled tubes, causing the main tube and projectile to spin sixty revolutions per second. (At launch, the gases are diverted away from the shooter.) The spinning of the RAW gives it gyroscopic stability as it flies, with the sphere’s axis inclined several degrees to provide level flight for two hundred meters.

“Suppose I want to launch from an enclosure,” Sullivan asked, turning the ten-inch unit over in his hands. The whole thing was army green, in three interlocking pieces.

“There’s no backblast from the RAW,” Malta said. “Safe to shoot from indoors.” He took it from Sullivan and fitted its launcher support, atop the globular projectile, onto the muzzle of an AR-15 assault rifle.

Bonnie gaped. “You mean…that thing is fired from a rifle? A big shell like that?”

Sullivan nodded. “Bigger explosive charge than a bazooka shell, from the looks of it. But lighter, much easier to use. A missile built onto a gun.” The Army had written “ROCKET, HE 140 MM XM-RAW” in black stencilled letters across the face of the spherical shell.

Sullivan didn’t ask Malta where he’d gotten it.

Malta laid the RAW and the automatic rifle back in the crate beside the bed. He turned to a long black weapon equipped with heavy-gauge sights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.