by David Drake
Nguyen nodded in what the KGB man thought was a counterfeit of understanding. The Vietnamese did not say what he was thinking. His eyes compared the flat, off-the-shelf Japanese scanner with the bulky tube-driven transceiver which was presumably the height of indigenous Russian manufacture. “Yes, very interesting,” Nguyen said as he straightened up.
The door of the building opened. First voices, then the clot of scientists themselves spilled out. Vlasov and Hoang walked in the middle of the group. They were talking in French. All the security personnel, even Colonel Korchenko, struck a brace.
Damned well about time, the KGB officer thought. The sooner this was over, the sooner he could get back and explore just what the First Secretary’s wife had meant by her invitation. With any kind of luck, this was going to be an interesting day.
XXX
The sun over the Church of the Holy Cross was in Kelly’s eyes every time he glanced across the boulevard. It bothered him that he did look around, toward the Institute and the ambush site. It was a sign to himself of his own nervousness.
It was not, at least, out of his assumed character. Kelly was portraying a friend of the owner of a small epicerie. He lounged against the glass case of crackers and Camembert, sunglasses and the rack of fly-specked postcards. The real owner was at a wedding in Oran. He was sympathetic to the cause, but his shop would still be there after the security forces had time to catch their breath and examine what had happened. The human participants in the operation, with luck, would all be gone. The owner’s cover story would simply be that he and all his household had closed the shop to attend a family wedding 400 kilometers away. The owner would have no idea of who might have broken in during his absence.
Taking the owner’s place behind the counter was Ramdan, the heavy-set proprietor of the brassware shop. Though middle-aged, the Algerian was as wired as Kelly had ever seen an 18-year old rifleman on his first insertion. And, speaking of rifles, the agent had cringed to see Ramdan stuffing his Mauser into the cabinet below the display case. Although—if the police were going to search the place, that was not the only gun there were likely to find in the Casbah.
Kelly glanced at his own trench coat, lying folded atop the case. No, not the only gun.
A woman in a veil and black wrapper stepped in to buy a handful of hard candies for the three children she had in tow. The agent tried to talk to the eldest child, a boy of eight or so. His French pleasantries got first a blank stare, then a quick and meaningless rattle of Arabic or Kabyle. The mother herself watched for a moment as Ramdan tried to find, then weigh out, “his” wares. Suddenly the mother snapped an order and hustled out of the shop gripping the two younger children by their hands. The eldest continued for a moment to stare at Kelly. The woman turned and shouted at him with a touch of hysteria in her voice. All four of them disappeared down the mouth of a nearby alley into the heart of the Casbah.
Christ on a crutch. . . . But it was already very close to time.
Two BMW motorcycles led the motorcade up the Boulevard Abderrazak. They had their sirens wound out and their blue turn signals flashing alternately. The black Citröen DS 23 that followed mounted a blue light on the dashboard. Its headlights pulsed nervously, like the heart rhythm of a man on the point of death.
Below the counter, Ramdan’s handie-talkie babbled in excited Kabyle.
“For Christ’s sake!” Kelly snarled at the older man. ‘Turn that thing off till I tell you to transmit!” He should have disabled the sending keys of the other units before he turned them over to the Kabyles, the agent thought angrily. Their only proper purpose on this operation was to permit Kelly to order the other personnel into action. No one but Ramdan should have been talking, and Ramdan only at Kelly’s direct order.
The two bikes swung expertly at the guidance of their leather-clad National Police drivers. They halted on either side of the Institute’s main entrance, facing back toward the street with their engines throttled to a fast idle. The pair of military guards at the door braced to attention. They wore dress uniforms finished off by pistols in white-leather holsters. The soldiers in the tower above wore their dress uniforms also. Kelly had little doubt, however, that their AKM rifles would function just as well as if they were used by men in battle dress. The Algerians held their rifles slung from their right shoulders with the muzzles forward and their right hands resting on the handgrips.
“Get down behind the counter where nobody can see you with the radio,” the agent ordered Ramdan. Without waiting to see if he had been obeyed, Kelly draped his white coat carefully over his right arm and strolled back to the edge of the sidewalk in front of the shop. He resisted the impulse to grip the Ingram so tightly that his hand would cramp.
The entrance of the Institute was at one point of an extremely complex intersection. Five vehicular streets from the south met there, while the whole warren of the Casbah lay to the north. With the truck jamming the intersection proper, though, and the fork of the Victoire and the Avenue Taleb Mohammed blasted where they met the Boulevard Abderrazak—almost on top of National Police Headquarters—nothing would be driving through any time soon. For now, though. . . .
The leading Citröen swung halfway across the boulevard, just beyond the entrance. Its ready position would aid the Kabyles immeasurably when the burning truck careened down the hill and into the intersection. Three men, then a fourth, got out of the sedan, leaving the driver behind the wheel. The three doors were open. The security men were not carrying long-arms, but Kelly did not need X-ray vision to guess what was racked within the car.
The Algerians wore dark suits which tweaked an uncomfortable memory . . . but the car that had been—following him?—had not been a Citröen, whatever it was. None of these men looked anything like the three who had entered the room at the Aurassi.
The second car was a Mercedes limo. It had green diplomatic plates, though Kelly had not been in country long enough to recognize the particular mission. Three men in London-tailored suits and Arab burnooses got out of the back. As they walked toward the door of the Institute, the steel leaves opened inward. A pair of suited Algerians stepped out to bow in greeting. The Mercedes pulled carefully around the security car and turned up the Ramp des Zoaves, past the south front of the building.
The next car was not an old Fiat but rather a Volga, Russian-made and almost certainly Russian-occupied at the moment. The American tensed. He spread a meaningless smile across his whisker-stubbled face. His peripheral vision showed him that there were a number of other bystanders watching events. The escort had cut its sirens, but the procession of expensive cars was still more interesting than most of Algiers’ drab scenery. Despite the company, however, Kelly felt as obtrusive as a prisoner facing the sentencing judge.
Three men got out of the Volga. All of them were obviously low-ranking security men from their bulk and East-Bloc clothing. Rank hath the privilege of a decent tailor. . . . But that meant the next car, another Citröen limo, this one with AMB—Ambassadorthe plate was—
“Roll the truck!” Kelly shouted back over his shoulder. “Just the truck!”
The Volga sedan showed an inclination to hold its position at the intersection. One of the Algerian security men walked over to it and began talking and gesturing to the driver. The Russian car moved off slowly in the wake of the Mercedes.
The Citröen behind it pulled up under the watchful eyes of the Algerians and the three Russians who had dismounted from the Volga. The long back doors opened. From the right-side jump seat a—for God’s sake, a Vietnamese got out. Another tall European got out a moment later, also from the right side, toward the Institute. He wore an excellent suit but he was too young to be Vlasov. And from the left door, staring at Kelly even before he was out of the car, climbed another Vietnamese. Their eyes met at twenty yards distance. Kelly remembered in a series of flashes strobing between visions of Anna displaying her body that he had told Hoang that his defection would take place in Frankfurt. Since the physicist knew tha
t his flight was through Paris, he had known that he was being lied to.
The last man out of the car was Professor Vlasov. The cuff of his right sleeve was pinned against his shoulder. He followed Hoang through the left door, putting the car between himself and his escort.
“Hit it!” Kelly snapped, and the truck, howling down the Rue Debbih Cherif, unexpectedly exploded just as it came in view.
The cab of the big flat-bed dissolved in a white flash so bright that the sunlight a millisecond later seemed dim. The explosion was oddly muffled. It sounded more as if a safe had fallen onto concrete than the crackling propagation wave of high explosive in open air. Perhaps because the light was so intense, the relative silence did not seem out of place. Sensory cross-over was telling the brain that the ears as well as the eyes had been numbed. Somebody had put an anti-tank rocket into the truck, Kelly’s instincts told him. The hood and even the engine block were gone, blasted away, and the shredded front tires were letting the vehicle slow to a halt well short of where it was supposed to stop.
Because the noise was that of metal shrieking and sparking over concrete, the security personnel reacted a hair less quickly than they might have done for a true explosion. Hoang darted toward Kelly and the epicerie behind him. His escort’s smile was only beginning to slip as the Vietnamese glanced across the car to the physicist. Then both Vietnamese, like Kelly and everyone else within a block, were dumped to the ground by the explosion beneath the intersection to the north.
Part of what went flying skyward was a car, but it was omelette time and too bad about the other poor bastards who found themselves eggs. Kelly got to his feet. His left palm was bleeding from its scrape along the sidewalk as he fell. He racked back the bolt of the Ingram without noticing the pain.
Instead of a twenty-pound charge, the Kabyles must have filled the sewer pipe with explosives. Hoang Tanh was on his feet and running again. Vlasov himself still lay groggy on the pavement. A pair of the Russians from the Volga were up and staggering toward their charge. The Vietnamese security man vaulted the hood of the Citröen. He was shouting something inaudible in the aftermath of the huge explosion. A ragged disk of asphaltic concrete, six inches thick and the size of a man-hole cover, spun out of the sky. It hopped once on the roadway and took the Viet’s legs from under him as neatly as ever a bowler made a spare.
Kabyles were hurling smoke grenades as directed, the streamers gushing into parti-colored floods as the compound burned. It was a scene not of Carnival but of hell. Against specific orders, somebody opened up from the Casbah with an automatic rifle. The muzzle blasts could scarcely be heard through the ringing of the agent’s ears, but plaster and powdered stone spurted from the upper facade of the tower. The guards there went down, one of them spinning under the impact of a bullet.
Kelly was standing as upright as a reviewing officer. Both of his hands were now hidden by the folded coat he held as a beacon. Vlasov stood up. The two Russians grabbed him and threw him back for safety. They knelt above the physicist, each with one hand on their charge’s back to keep him down. Their other hands held pistols muzzle-high as they looked for targets through the wisps of smoke already swirling. Kelly cursed and killed both security men with short bursts from the Ingram.
Compactness is fine for something you have to carry, but for use it would have been nice to have a proper stock . . . or at least to have had time to extend the latch-and-wire contraption with which the sub-machine gun was fitted. Christ, it would have been nice to have a rifle and an explosives expert who would not have leveled a square block when his task was to cut a street. But you use what you got. Sights at eye level, bloody left hand gripping the suppressor tube, Kelly aimed to the left of one Russian and let recoil walk the second and third rounds into the man’s chest.
As his partner collapsed, the remaining security man screamed and fired into the rooftops from which he thought the shots were coming. This one was trickier, because the target lay squarely over the physicist’s body. The agent held higher than he should have, but one of the gleaming bullets caught the Russian at the hairline and dropped him dead as Trotsky. The two rounds that missed spalled plate-sized flakes of paint from the doors of the ambassadorial limo. They did not penetrate the armor beneath.
Hoang Tanh snatched at Kelly’s left arm, shouting for help. He was tall for a Vietnamese, scarcely less than Kelly’s own 5’9”. The physicist was a rotund man whose pleasant face was now distorted by tension and the need to be heard over gunfire.
“Get in the goddam shop!” Kelly shouted, turning the Vietnamese and shoving him toward the epicerie with the full strength of his left arm. Hoang staggered forward and almost collided with Ramdan. The Kabyle was shuffling out onto the sidewalk with his rifle at high port. “Put that away!” the American shrieked at him, but the Kabyle leveled his weapon and slammed a shot at something across the street.
By now the smoke was as thick as pond water, translucent or less beyond arm’s-length. The lighter grit and dust drifting down from the explosion site added its own camouflage and the tang of burning tar. Kelly ran forward, waving the coat like a flag in his left hand. Blended red and purple smoke roiled about the sweeping fabric. A bullet whanged off the pavement near his feet. Momentarily it was a spark, incandescent with the energy released on impact. The American had no notion of whether it was a stray round or one deliberately aimed at him.
He tripped over Vlasov. The Russian scientist had crawled free of the pair of bodies that had pinioned him and was closer than Kelly had expected. The agent sprawled. A burst of automatic fire laced across the boulevard close to where Kelly’s torso had been a moment before. The shock waves of the bullets spun curls of smoke as they cracked past.
Kelly could be sure the man he now held was Vlasov because of the pinned-up sleeve. “Come on, Professor,” he shouted in Russian, “we have to run!” He waved the raincoat, his identity signal, then tossed it onto the street to free his hand.
Vlasov did not get up. He seemed to be staring through the smoke at the suppressed Ingram. Kelly remembered too late that the defector was nuts—and what he was nuts about. The Lord knew, the gun and can did look more like something whipped up for a sci-fi film than the piece of functional, real-world ordnance that they were. Screw that, there was no time. “Go!” Kelly shouted. “I’m your contact!” He tried to tug the Professor upright by a handful of shirt front.
The black snout of a car thrust toward them through the man-made fog. Kelly dropped the scientist and hosed a burst through the windshield, just above the hood line. The car accelerated as the driver’s muscles spasmed. The vehicle missed Vlasov by inches, missed Kelly only because he leaped sideways. It was the security vehicle that had led the procession. It must have doubled back into the chaos for reasons the driver, at least, would never be able to explain.
Even in normal surroundings the suppressed weapon would have made less noise than a bottle being kicked along a hallway. Under the present circumstances, it was effectively silent. The bolt, a tool-steel clapper ringing back and forth against the breech, was overwhelmed by the ringing of the explosion in everyone’s ears. But the empty cartridge cases dancing from the ejection port were the same as those of a more standard submachine gun. Unexpectedly reassured, the Russian defector jumped to his feet as the car rolled past. “Quickly, then,” he said, his lips close to Kelly’s ear to be heard. “For they are here, I have seen them.”
There is no good way to cross a flat area raked from all sides and elevations. Running upright made as much sense as anything else. While Vlasov was evidently crazy, Kelly found no reason to question the Russian’s courage. The older man sprinted beside the agent toward what Kelly hoped was the doorway of the epicerie. The smoke swirled. Ramdan faced them over the sights of his old Mauser. Kelly struck the weapon away and screamed in useless Italian, “Back, for God’s sake, play your war out later!”
Flames were beginning to envelope the security car wrecked to the north. The draft caused a frea
k of the breeze to tug clear a lane in the smoke boiling across the boulevard. “There!” cried the Kabyle. He made a quarter-turn and fired without seating the rifle against his shoulder. He spun again as return fire gouged his thigh.
Two uniformed soldiers stood twenty feet away with pistols and a clear field of fire. Standard service handguns are man-killingly accurate at fifty yards or more, but accuracy in combat is something more than an exercise in paper-punching. Kelly had time to turn and sweep a burst across both Algerians. One of them was still trying to fire with his slide locked back on an empty magazine. They were brave men, but soldiering was a bad business for people who make mistakes . . . and they were not the first to make the mistake of shooting at Tom Kelly and missing.
“Now go!” the agent shouted again at his charges. He planted his left hand in Vlasov’s back and the Ingram’s receiver in Ramdan’s—the idiot! The Kabyle had dropped his rifle and was clutching his right thigh with both hands, but he staggered forward at Kelly’s push. Vlasov followed him into the epicerie.
“Take him out the back,” the American shouted as he tossed the sub-machine gun to the counter-top and turned. An accordion-pleated metal screen could close the front of the shop when it was unoccupied. Kelly unlatched the screen and slammed it down. He shouted curses in several languages when one side caught momentarily in its track. The only light within was the back door opening on another unlighted room. That was a gray blur to the agent’s day-adapted eyes. The Ingram met his groping hand—and so did the CS grenade which he had snuggled into a corner behind the counter.