"Not bad, Grampa," Sam Gregory said. From a standing position, he raised his rifle and squeezed off six rapid shots. The last six bottles shattered.

When he turned to look at his grandfather, the old man had a strange look on his face.

"I guess you're ready for those Indians and that Mafia now," the old man said softly. Even as he spoke, his face was turning a pained pasty white. His rifle dropped from the crook of his arm. He tried to raise both hands to his chest, but before he could, the old man fell backward off the tree stump. He was dead.

Back at the munitions plant, Sam continued working on the fragmentation bullets, altering and modifying them for a large range of guns from rifles to pistols. Then he devised a new type of handgun, built for the fragmentation shells, and coupled with a new scope of his own design. The telescopic sight contained a series of lenses, mounted in such a way that the gun could be used at arm's length, and the intensified-light image on the scope would be as clear as watching a picture on a miniature television receiver. On the scope's ground glass, around the image of the target, were a series of rings that corresponded to the approximate distance from the target. At 100 yards, if the target was somewhere in the center ring, the frag shell was certain to bring it down. At fifty yards, the target object could be anywhere within the two center rings and the shooter would be certain of hitting it. At twenty-five yards, the target could be anywhere in the scope, and the fragmentation bullets, now redesigned out of a softer metal that did more damage on impact, would be guaranteed to kill.

It was literally a gun that could not miss, and when Gregory had refined the design, he did two things. First, he resigned from the weapons company. Second, he patented the scope and the bullets and the handgun.

Soon after, he sent specifications of it to the Pentagon. Four months later, after signing a twenty-million-dollar contract to produce the guns for the Army, Sam Gregory was a rich man.

And, he realized increasingly as time went on, a bored one.

At his estate in Elberon, New Jersey, he tinkered with the design of other weapons, but his mind was not really on it.

He thought often of those days in the woods with his grandfather. Even at the end, he had not been able to beat the old man honestly in a shooting match. Was there anything else? The old man had often talked about doing good in the world, and that was the way he had tried to live his life. Maybe, just maybe, Sam Gregory thought, he might just be able to do more good than his grandfather had done.

One day, coming back from New York where he had seen his tax lawyer, he ran into a monumental traffic tie-up coming out of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. To avoid the traffic, he had turned off the highway, and found himself wandering along the streets of Bay City.

All Sam Gregory knew about Bay City was that it was a waterfront town that had fallen on hard times. In the old days, his munitions plant often had delivered goods to dockside for shipment to Army posts overseas, but all that business in Bay City had stopped years before.

Trying to get through the town, he made a wrong turn and found himself on River Street, the long thoroughfare that fronted the city's old decaying piers. Up ahead of him, near the curb, he saw a black chauffeured limousine. That surprised him. Bay City was not the kind of community for chauffeured limousines. He saw a man get out of the back seat of the car, flanked by two ugly-looking bodyguards.

"A greaseball," he said to himself and pulled to the curb to watch. The man was Mafia. He knew it. He could tell.

And down the block he saw another. And around the corner, another.

Sam Gregory's mind was clicking as he drove through the town and when he saw the small office of the Bay City Bugle, he went inside and bought copies of each paper for the last six months.

When he took them home and read them, he realized what had happened.

Somehow, an outsider, Rocco Nobile, had come into the town, gotten himself installed as mayor and was now turning the city over to the Mafia.

Suddenly, Sam Gregory wasn't bored anymore. His grandfather had told him so often to do good, and he now had found the good thing to do, the thing that would give his life meaning and purpose.

He would drive the Mafia from Bay City.

A touch of asthma, a sinus condition and a generally runny nose had kept Sam Gregory out of the Army, but even without military experience he knew that he needed a battle plan and soldiers to carry it out if he were to win his war against the Mafia.

It took him two weeks to get his army together.

There was Mark Tolan. He was a brooding, muscular, dark-haired man who had been court-martialed in Vietnam for proving the no-miss capability of the Gregory Sur-Shot handgun, primarily against women and children. He had tried to call Gregory as a defense witness at his court-martial, apparently on the unique legal theory that if he could prove how easy it was to kill with that gun, the court-martial board would understand why he had plugged two dozen women and children. Gregory had appeared, but Tolan, a career sergeant, was still thrown out of service. He had been working for the last four years in a drive-in restaurant.

The second member of the team was Al Baker whom Gregory had met one night in a New York restaurant. Baker had told him that he was a member of the Mafia who had fled the organization and lived, and offered to organize Gregory's weapons factory if he had any union problems. He had given Gregory his card which Gregory had saved, but had never known why. He remembered his grandfather's worries about the Mafia and would never have anything to do with anyone in the mob. But now... now that he was fighting the mob, a man with Baker's connections and knowledge would be a definite asset, particularly since he had long ago left the mob. He did not know that Al Baker was a small time numbers runner whose closest connection with the Mafia had been seeing The Godfather twenty-three times and thereafter practicing talking like Marlon Brando.

The final member of the team was a former actor who had taken to writing Gregory a lot of letters after an article about the gun designer had appeared in a national magazine. The letters had quoted Shakespeare a lot and praised Gregory's inventions and prayed, forsooth, that the weapons would only be used on the scum of the world which deserved that kind of end. Gregory liked the writer's literary style — it was the fanciest thing he had ever seen — and had started to correspond with him. The actor's name was Nicholas Lizzard. He was an emaciated six-foot-five. He carried a doctor's leather bag with him, in which he carried makeup for disguises. His skill was such that, fully made up, he could mask his height and look barely six-feet-four.

All four men now sat around poolside at Sam Gregory's Elberon estate.

Gregory was drawing a chart. He listed himself as the commander in a big pencil-drawn box. Below that he had three other smaller pencil-drawn boxes. In them he put the army's names: Mark Tolan, Al Baker, Nicholas Lizzard. He drew ones connecting all the boxes.

"This is our table of organization," he said. He looked around the table. Nicholas Lizzard was pouring a refill of iced Vodka into a tall water glass. Mark Tolan was sighting down the barrel of an unloaded Gregory Sur-Shot at a concrete duck on the far side of the swimming pool. Only Al Baker was looking at the chart. He was rubbing his hands together nervously.

"Nice table of organization," he said. "Like we had in the Mafia, when I was a soldier, before I managed to escape with my life. Want me to tell you about it?"

"Not right now," Gregory said. He turned toward Mark Tolan. "Stop that," he said. Tolan was staring down the sights of the Gregory Sur-Shot at a point halfway between Sam Gregory's eyes, squeezing the trigger. Behind the butt of the gun and his hand, his face was impassive, darkly brooding. He gave no sign that he had heard Gregory, but he turned quietly in his chair and began to draw a bead on birds flying overhead. Under his breath, Gregory could hear him saying softly, "Bang. Bang."