Free Undeclared War by Dennis Chalker Page A

critical eye at the blade lying on a bed of red velvet in the long, polished wood case, but could see no flaws in it. “I made it real, not a toy. It’ll be something that can stay with him forever if he wants, maybe better than his old man did.”
    â€œThings haven’t improved between you and Mary?” Deckert asked quietly.
    â€œNo,” Reaper said with a note of sadness in his voice. “And I’m not sure they ever will. But I have to make certain that Ricky knows it isn’t his fault and that I still love him. So I made this for him, something from my own hands.”
    â€œWell, it’s a little big for him now,” Deckert said. “But I’m pretty sure he’ll grow into it. You’ll have to get him fencing lessons so he knows how to swing one.”
    â€œYou don’t learn how to wave one of these around in classical fencing,” Reaper said. “He’s getting into something called the Society for Creative Anachronism, SCA they call it. Bunch of kids, some adults, too, get together and re-create the knights of old. They stage sword fights with padded fake blades and other weapons.”
    â€œUh-huh,” Deckert said, “sounds weird as hell. But at least it doesn’t seem like something that would keep him sitting in front of a computer all day.”
    Reaper closed the lid on the long wooden case and secured it in place with two brass latches. Picking it up by the leather handle, he turned to the nearby door that led into the house.
    â€œNope,” Reaper said, “the boy does like his activities. Gets out and moves around, better than a lot of kids today. He’s smart enough to like getting on his computer and playing games with his friends. Buthe doesn’t spend all day sitting in front of a computer or game console.”
    â€œSitting down all the time isn’t necessarily all bad,” Deckert said as he pushed a control and his wheelchair started to slowly collapse back into a sitting configuration. Chuckling at his friend’s mild embarrassment at what he had said, Deckert turned to the doorway and started to roll toward it.
    â€œSo, you hear that news out of Canada?” Deckert said, to let his friend off the hook and change the subject.
    â€œWhat news?” Reaper said. “I’ve mostly been in the grinding room the last few days and the noise level isn’t the best for listening to the radio.”
    â€œThere’s these great new inventions called headsets,” Deckert said as he rolled through the door Reaper was holding open. “You should look into them. At any rate, seems that Canadian customs up in Toronto found some container ship with a bunch of guns and ammunition on it. At least they found one container with a load of hardware hidden in the walls—you know how the news exaggerates these kinds of things.”
    â€œYeah,” said Reaper following Deckert out of the shop and into the house. “They find a couple of boxes of shells and two weapons in a takedown and the guy had an arsenal of guns and ammunition. So what did they find really? Did you hear?”
    â€œSeems it really was a bunch of small arms,” Deckert said. “Real bad-guy stuff. Military AK-47s, RPG-7s, ammunition, even grenades and explosives.”
    â€œShit,” Reaper said surprised. “Sounds like theybusted a supply run for some terrorist cell. Did they get any leads on where the stuff was going?”
    â€œNot that I heard,” Deckert said. “According to the news, they didn’t know if the stuff had arrived for some Canadian group or was headed somewhere else. It was close enough that it could have been heading here to Michigan, Chicago, or maybe that big ship terminal down in Toledo. The Canadians made a great big deal of finding the stuff, not a hell of a lot of guns in the Great White North.”
    â€œThey would have made a big deal of finding that kind of stash even here