Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 35

Chapter 22

Like Mateo, Richard was now attired in gray fatigues and a matching military shirt and cap. They both sat at a dark, dirty workbench in a corner of one of the Sonoran rurales’ black powder factories. A former warehouse with thirty-foot-high ceilings, its hundred-foot-by-fifty-foot concrete floor was now covered with other filthy benches and worktables as well. Men and women sat at the tables grinding wet gunpowder.

“We have a fairly elaborate gunpowder industry in Sonora,” Mateo said. “We’ve been battling Sinaloa and Chihuahua for so long we always need industrial quantities of the stuff.”

“Fine,” Richard said, “but you have a couple of problems with all this black powder. It’s not potent enough to power your artillery pieces, and it’s so dirty it quickly fouls all your pieces, especially your Gatling guns. You need a cleaner, better explosive if you want to stop a broad-front offensive by two combined armies, which is what your intelligence says you’re about to confront.”

“What do you suggest?” Mateo asked.

“Do you keep a tally of all your military equipment?”

Mateo nodded.

“I want to see your lists,” Richard said, “including all the equipment you currently have in storage but have considered useless. I want anything and everything you have related to the manufacturing of guns—all kinds of guns—and I don’t care how old the ordnance and the component parts are. This is arid country. Those things won’t corrode quickly. They’re probably in good shape. Maybe you have old, forgotten factories that once manufactured components and ammunition.”

Mateo stared at him, curious.

“Here in Sonora can you get me nitric acid?” Richard asked.

“That is one thing we have not figured out how to make.”

“Sulfuric acid?”

“We have that.”

“We’re also going to need other things—a lot of brass shell casings, as many as we can locate. I know you have percussion caps for your black powder cartridges. We’re going to need a hell of a lot of those.”

“May I ask why?” Mateo said.

“You told me your forces are so depleted they cannot repel another all-out Sinaloan-Chihuahuan combined attack without adequate weapons. I intend to get them for you.”

“How?”

“We’re going to deploy land mines and Gatlings.”

“Didn’t anyone tell you our black powder jams our Gatlings? It’s too dirty. It clogs the breech, barrel, and auto-feeders. Our weapons jam almost immediately.”

“So I’ll make you powder that won’t foul their feed-loading mechanisms.”

“How?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“But I do worry.”

“You got no problem.” Richard gave Mateo a hard, ebullient slap on the back. “You and I are going into the war business.”