‘And this,’ said Ben. He was pointing to an old Vector line. The RPD had two additions to a basic AK-47: a hundred-round drumfeed that could be slotted underneath the weapon, and a simple bi-pod that could be used to rest it on. Together they turned the weapon into a very simple machine gun, the bullets feeding out of the drum, whilst the bi-pod held it in position. In a tight corner, it would give you the firepower of five or six men, allowing a couple of blokes to provide as much cover as a whole platoon.
‘Two of those as well,’ nodded Dan.
Next they needed pistols. After looking at the range of thirty handguns that Ben kept in stock they eventually decided on a set of replica Uzi machine pistols. Machine pistols take their name from the German word Maschinenpistole, meaning sub-machine gun, and they’d been widely used in the German Army from the First World War onwards. A machine pistol had an automatic cartridge, making it the natural weapon for sustained blasts of close-quarters fire. The Uzi had been designed by Uziel Gal, a German Jew who was born in the Weimer Republic, and had moved first to England and then to Palestine to escape the Nazis. His brutally simple weapons combined the best of the German and later the Israeli armament industries. The Uzi had been adopted by the Israeli special forces, and there were few better adverts for a weapon than that. Over the next two decades, the Uzi had been put into service by the German Army as well as by the US Secret Service. After President Reagan was shot, it was Uzi machine pistols the Secret Service pulled out to provide covering fire whilst the President was evacuated.
‘If it’s good enough for Reagan, it will do for us,’ said Ian.
They took a dozen, plus ammo.
For the next half-hour, they picked out knives, webbing, boots, socks, compasses and helmets. They took three RPGs plus a box of twenty-four missiles, and a box of C-4, the British-made plastic explosive that was standard issue for armies around the world.
‘We used to nick this stuff from your boys all the time,’ said Ian. ‘And a bloody good bang it makes as well.’
Next, they looked at the hunting rifles. As Chris pointed out, the chances were they were going to be finding themselves out in some wild country. ‘And that means wild animals as well,’ he said. ‘We might be able to stop a patrol, but an angry rhino is something else, man.’
The Holland & Holland - the British-made .375 Magnum hunting rifle - was a classic big-game weapon. Designed in 1912, it had been imitated plenty of times over the next century, but had never been bettered. Its massive bullets weighed up to seventeen grams, with enough punch to bring down a elephant. It was the classic African safari shotgun, tested over the generations by big-game hunters.
‘We’ll take two,’ said Chris, aware of the size of the bill they were running up. ‘If we meet anything with a skin thicker than Ian’s, then these will be the guys we want on our side. I know they’re expensive, but when you are going one on one with a rhino you don’t want to be counting the pennies.’
Neither of the H&H’s Ben Bull had in stock were new. One was ten years old, sold at auction by one of the safari parks; the other had been in a farming family for a couple of generations. That was fine with Steve. After ten years, an H&H was just starting to get oiled in. Like a Bentley, these were machines that were built to last. A new one would just need a lot of breaking in before you could be certain it was shooting true.
Chris had one more item on his shopping list.
A KPV.
Ben smiled. He took them through to a back room, then pulled off the dust-sheet. The Russian-built KPV was one of the big beasts of any battlefield. A heavy machine gun, it had first been developed in the late 1940s but had been radically modified since then. In truth, it didn’t need much updating. Its job was to spit out big bullets at a terrifying rate and it already did that effectively enough. The Krupnokaliberniy Pulemyot Vladimorova, to give it its full military name, had two substantial wheels, armour-plating to protect its operator, and a big 1.3 metre barrel that on automatic could spray bullets from its ammo belt up to 500 metres at a rate of 550 rounds a minute. The Russians had originally designed it as an infantry weapon - like many Russian weapons it was named after its designer, Semjon Vladimirow - to be used as the Red Army advanced on Western Europe, but it was terrorists who’d learned its real strengths. Hamas, for instance, had turned it into a brutally effective anti-helicopter weapon. Its .57 calibre bullets were among the most powerful in the world. Even the Israeli pilots were nervous of it and, as Ian pointed out, not much frightened that country’s armed forces. Out in Iraq, the insurgents had used it for roadside ambushes: even the American armour wasn’t strong enough to shield their vehicles from its murderous fire.