Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The agent scrambled back up the stairs for his Kenwood. He was feeling a dreamy lightness after his exertion. It did not keep him from being aware of the pain in his torso, but it allowed him to perceive the pain as something happening to another person. Kelly stumbled on the last step as he returned with the radio, but neither of the other men seemed to notice.

  The defector was rigid, but his eyes moved with the quick jerks of a mouse looking for a bolthole. He was as patently fearful as he had been when the shooting first started in front of the Institute. At that time, Kelly had taken the panic as a normal enough reaction to a firefight. Now that he had witnessed the Professor’s calm under shellfire and worse, Kelly realized that there was something else going on.

  Time enough to worry about that later, he decided. Doug Rowe was ready to inflate the MARS boat. “Just a second,” the agent said. “Let’s make sure I’m still on frequency.” He pushed the receiver’s power switch.

  The noise blasting from the speaker was as unexpected as a bomb. It seemed for an instant to be as loud. Kelly twisted the attentuator dial by reflex. Even damping at 60 dB—each decibel a log-3 diminution in intensity—made no discernible difference in the beeps. The agent punched the power button again. He stared at Rowe in amazement.

  “What the hell are they thinking of?” Kelly said. “They’re putting out enough signal to rattle china. That’s bound to bring somebody down on them—on us!”

  Rowe had been shaken as well by the unexpected blast of noise. He shook his head. “Maybe it’s not the sub,” he said. Raising his glasses toward the horizon, he added, “Something’s up there now, a plane. Maybe it’s broadcasting.”

  Lights were coursing over the waves at low altitude, only a half mile out. Kelly was sure they had not been there when the Blazer was being unloaded. Now, when he listened carefully, he could hear the breeze-pulsed whine of a jet engine. “Doug,” he said, “you don’t understand.” He was squinting toward the intruder, wishing he had the glasses. “That signal’s like tuning to Die Deutsche Welle when you’re in Wertachtal. It’s nothing you could transmit from a plane, a signal like that. Christ, I’m surprised they’ve got that kind of power in the sub!”

  “They have come for me again,” said Vlasov in Russian. “They are broadcasting to thwart us.”

  A white spotlight glittered at sea. It disappeared as the aircraft banked abruptly. The plane’s new course brought it shoreward. It was no more than twenty meters over the water. “What is it, a helicopter?” Kelly said, though even he could clearly see that the red and green lights were outboard on wing tips.

  “No,” said the sergeant in an odd voice, “but it can hover like one. It’s a Yak-36. Tom, we’re in trouble.”

  “Great,” said Kelly, “those idiots have called the Algerian Air Force down on us now. These Yaks are armed, I suppose? If they’re not, maybe we can run for it in the boat after all.”

  “It’s not Algerian,” Rowe said. His voice was barely loud enough to be heard. “The Russians have kept all of these for themselves. The Mediterranean Squadron’s holding maneuvers off the coast, you know. This one must have flown off the Novorossik. It might have some underwing stores of its own, but I’d say she was dragging a MAD package at the moment. I guess there’ll be a couple frigates along soon for the heavy work.”

  There was a scuffing of shoes down the passage behind them. Both Americans turned. Kelly had palmed his knife again. “Is everything all right?” Annamaria asked as she rejoined them.

  Rowe lowered the glasses. “The sub can’t go deep,” he said, “not anywhere near this coast. Maybe they can run for it—it depends on just where the Russian ships are. But if the Algerians give them the go-ahead to use their anti-sub missiles—well, they don’t have to be very close to drop an SSN-14 in, not with that Yak overhead to guide them.”

  “I don’t understand.” the black-haired woman said. She put a hand on Kelly’s forearm, feeling the concern but without knowledge of the cause.

  “Okay,” said Kelly, “we pack up and run. The boat and motor are US Marine issue and I don’t want to leave them if there’s a choice. We’ll—”

  “Tom, there’s a hundred and fifty men out there going to surrender or be killed!” shouted the sergeant.

  “I didn’t tell them to signal that strong!” the agent shouted back. “Come on, let’s move!” He tried to reconnect the ends of a turnbuckle that would hold the boat in a tight package. The metal slipped in his hands. “Besides,” he added in a voice as weak as a child’s, “I told them I’d only consider using a sub in these waters if they’d promise to give it air cover. I can’t make them—not have lied to me. But when I get back, I’m going to—”

  The sky flashed dazzlingly red. The four of them on the beach looked up.

  “Well,” said Kelly in a changed voice. “I don’t have to kill anybody in Paris after all. But we do need to move.”

  Where the Yak had been quartering the sea with its magnetic anomaly detector, there was an expanding cloud that rained fragments of burning metal. Before the explosion itself rocked houses, the crack of a sonic boom reached the shore at the tangent of a line of flattened waves. Spewed jet fuel began to dance and burn on the water.

  “But what happened?” Annamaria said. “Did it just blow up? I don’t see another airplane.”

  Sergeant Rowe connected the strap Kelly was struggling with, then a second one. The MARS boat was tacked into a manageable package again. “They credit Phoenix missiles with a 60-mile range,” the soldier said as he worked. “I hear it’s about twice that. And I think you just watched the first field test of a Phoenix.”

  “The first was off the coast of Libya in ‘79,” Kelly said. He was smiling with relief. The extraction had been blown, he wasn’t sure how; but they were alive and he’d find another way out. “I couldn’t have found a better time for an encore, Lord knows I couldn’t!”

  Several lights had gone on in houses along the street, Kelly noted as they staggered back up the stairs. The Yak was a dying glow out at sea. Doug Rowe supported the upper end of the boat again. He set it down beyond the last step. “I’ll bring the car around,” he called to Kelly and Annamaria across the burden. He began striding across the broken terrain toward the Blazer parked a block away.

  “Come on up, Professor,” Kelly called over his shoulder. “We’ll get out of this one yet.” It felt good to have Annamaria’s arm around him and her scent in his nostrils. He gave her a peck on the cheek, but when she turned to respond, he patted her away. He sat carefully down on the boat, watching activity in the town.

  Doug Rowe was just getting into the Blazer. The courtesy light winked on, then off as the door thumped closed. Spies were not supposed to have cars with dome lights, Kelly thought. Well, maybe none of the batch of them were much in the way of spies. Stick to selling typewriters in the—

  The flash that ate the Blazer was as bright as that of the exploding Yak.

  The forty-gallon fuel tank spread orange flames the width of the street. The initial flash had been blindingly white. It left imprinted on Kelly’s retinas the image of the hood and tailgate of the car collapsing inward because the steel body between them was gone.

  “Professor, come on!” Kelly shouted down the black pit of the stairs. Behind him, the fire leapt and roared. “Come on!”

  “Where’s Doug?” Annamaria cried.

  Kelly swung his legs over the boat, ignoring the woman’s question as he struggled to get to the defector. Annamaria began running toward the flames.

  “They are here to kill me,” said the Professor, standing at the foot of the passage. His voice rasped.

  “Then we’ll have to kill them first, won’t we?” the agent snarled. “Move! This beach is suicide if they come looking for us!” He clenched his left fist around the fabric of the taller man’s lapels, guiding and dragging him up the steps. The knife in Kelly’s hand was pure silver in the moonlight, but the blazing gasoline touched it with hellfire as they dodged thr
ough the jumbled rocks.

  “Where are we going?” panted Vlasov when they had scrambled to the road a block from the fire. The uncertainty that had momentarily frozen him was gone. “Where are the others?”

  No one had menaced them as they stumbled away from the corniche. With every step Kelly had expected a shot. He was moving on his nerves now, his nerves and a killing fury. It would drive him until he found an outlet for it or found his death first. “The KGB didn’t have us,” he said as he led Vlasov across the road at a clumsy trot. First south, then east to the safe house and the stolen car. “They didn’t have us, then they did again. Maybe you’re doubling, maybe the embassy’s tapped or bugged. . . . Nothing I can do about that.”

  They were walking now, leaning forward as if to speed progress that their weary legs could not maintain. A mercury-vapor lamp on a street corner distorted their shadows into blotches on a pale blue field. “Nobody connected with the embassy’s going to hear a goddam word about this from here on out.”

  “You still think it’s humans, don’t you?” remarked the Russian wearily. “Well, in the long run I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “You’re right,” said Kelly harshly. “It doesn’t matter at all!” But his waist was cold for lack of the arm that had encircled it.

  The safe house was quiet, the gate locked as they had left it an hour before. Kelly pulled the gate open and then unlatched the Renault’s engine compartment. “Stand back, Professor,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” the defector asked as he watched Kelly probe at the shadowed engine block.

  “Wasting my time in the dark,” the agent responded. He lay down on the gravel, wincing as he tried to see the underside of the engine. “Don’t have a light, though, and we don’t have time to get one. So. . . .” Kelly stood up again and slammed the engine cover. He wished that he had found something, a bomb, something. . . . If he had disarmed a bomb, he could have felt that much more confident that he was going to survive the next few seconds.

  He got in on the driver’s side. Vlasov started to open the other door. The agent snapped, “Get clear, goddammit!” He began fumbling with the hot wire.

  If there had been a key to turn instead of a pair of bare leads to twist together, Kelly would not have noticed it. Now his fingers brushed against something beneath the ignition lock which had not been there when he stole the car.

  The agent bent over. He could see nothing because of the darkness and the sudden rush of dizzying pain. The object was no bigger than a button. From the way it slipped as he applied pressure it was magnetized. Holding his breath unconsciously, Kelly pried the thing loose from the lock. A twitch of resistance suggested that a hair-fine wire had parted after the magnet released. Even trying to silhouette the object against the streetlight showed nothing but a thin disk.

  Without speaking, Kelly got out of the car. He hurled the button over the wall to the street. The tiny tick of metal on cold asphalt could not be heard above the breeze. There was no other response.

  “Come on, Professor,” the agent said as he got into the car again.

  “But what was that?” Vlasov asked.

  “A bug, I guess,” said Kelly as the motor fired raggedly. “And I hope it was the only thing somebody decided to leave this car with.”

  As they turned east toward Algiers again, the mirror showed that the sky over the center of Tipasa was aglow. If Kelly lived, that fire would not be the only monument to Staff Sergeant Douglas Rowe, 23, husband and father . . . and a better man, perhaps, then some of those he had just died for.

  XLII

  The door had a spring latch and a draw bolt in the center of the panel. There seemed to be a second draw bolt just above the threshold. Kelly kicked the keyplate squarely with the heel of his boot. The blow tore the bolt from its seat in the jamb and left the lock sagging on half-stripped screws. The panel was only half-inch plywood.

  “Brace me,” the agent muttered to Professor Vlasov. He kicked again, angling his heel toward the lower bolt. It gave and the spring latch fell off as well.

  “I never figured,” Kelly said as he pushed the panel out of the way, “how anybody managed to knock a door down with his shoulder. Or why anybody’d want to try.”

  Moonlight through the doorway let the agent find the cord to the desk lamp. He tugged it on, reaching past Vlasov to push the door closed now that they were inside. The office of the brass shop looked larger than it had with nine people filling it during the meeting. “Ramdan!” Kelly shouted. “Ramdan! Come down, we’re friends!”

  “This is a friend’s house but you smash in the door?” questioned the defector.

  “This isn’t the time to be standing in the street shouting,” Kelly said grimly. “Besides, I don’t think he’d have opened up for us.”

  The alcove behind the paneling where the Mauser had been hidden was now empty. The agent had seen the rifle abandoned during the fire-fight outside the Institute, but it would have been nice if there were something remaining there now. A gun might change their negotiating posture somewhat for the better. Or again—perhaps this was just as well.

  There were muted sounds from the living quarters above. They changed abruptly to footsteps on the stairs. Heavy steps, shuffling; and a lighter pair behind them as nervous as a mosquito readying to land.

  Vlasov seated himself on the swivel chair and fiddled with the dark tie he still wore. As the steps neared, the Russian stood and took a half step toward the door. The agent stopped him with a shake of his head. “No,” he said, in French lest the Kabyles think something was being hidden from them. “We’ll wait here real quiet and not take a chance that anyone gets startled.” Kelly’s own hands were empty and in plain sight in front of him. They itched to at least palm his sheath knife.

  Ramdan jerked open the door from the shop. He had lost weight, and the flesh of his face seemed to have been replaced by sagging gray wax. It was less than eighteen hours since the gunfight, but fear and his leg wound had aged the Kabyle a decade in that time. “What are you doing here?” Ramdan demanded in a voice as haunted as his eyes.

  Behind the shop owner was the boy who had been in the front of the place during the meeting. His eyelids flickered but the pupils did not move a micron. They did not even tremble, as did the hand holding the Enfield revolver. The muzzle of the old gun wavered in an arc that covered Kelly and Ramdan’s kidneys about equally. The elder Kabyle was nuts, thought the agent, to allow the boy behind him with a gun. The kid was wired like a carnival wheel.

  “We need a little help, Ramdan,” Kelly said aloud. His hands were still, his voice reasonable. “Everything’s fine. Just a little help, and that we’ll pay for.”

  “Help,” Ramdan repeated. His tongue hissed on the French syllables. The shop owner took a further step into the office itself. He supported his weight on the right side with a crutch-headed cane. His slippered feet glided over the floor, rasping in the grit. “Three of us already have died—perhaps more! My leg, it could have been my head! They say ‘Flee!,’ but my leg . . . and who would look after my wares? And you want help!”

  The boy behind the shop owner had not moved. His eyes glittered above the older man’s shoulder.

  Kelly shrugged. “You wanted to make a battle out of it,” he said. “Me, I’d already seen as much shooting as I thought I needed to. . . .” He held Ramdan’s eyes, the cold certainty of his gaze quenching the Kabyle’s anger. “You’ve got channels across the border, Morocco or Tunisia, right? I want you to smuggle us out.”

  “Madman!” Ramdan shouted. “Get out of here!” The Kabyle raised his stick to gesture or threaten. Weight shifting onto his right thigh seared him like a fresh wound. His mouth gaped soundlessly. The cane wavered, its ferrule flicking back to the floor and skidding. The heavy man started to fall.

  Kelly did not move. The boy, startled back into reality, tried to catch the older man. The angle was wrong. The Enfield clubbed at Ramdan’s back as the boy grabbed reflexively. The agent st
epped forward then and took the shop owner’s weight on his own shoulder and flexed knees.

  Professor Vlasov stood and pulled out the chair. Kelly guided the older Kabyle into the seat as gently as if he held an equal weight of electronic gear. When the agent straightened, he plucked the revolver from the boy’s hand without looking around to give warning.

  “We want you to smuggle us out,” Kelly repeated in a voice from which his control kept the need to pant with exertion. He thumbed the Enfield’s latch and dumped the six fat cartridges into his left palm. He laid the empty revolver on the desk top; the ammunition tumbled into the pocket of the agent’s shirt.

  The boy snatched up the weapon again.

  “How do you know we could get you out if we wanted to?” Ramdan asked in a sick, weary voice. His words were an affirmation of what had been no more than an assumption in Kelly’s mind until then.

  “Hell, are we little children?” the agent sneered. He deliberately turned his back on the others and sauntered toward the alley door. His thumbs were hooked in his belt. “You need to raise money, to talk to journalists . . . to buy guns and ammo, for Christ’s sake! Don’t you?”

  Kelly spun more abruptly than he would have done if the .38 S&W cartridges were not a shifting weight in his pocket. “And I don’t suppose your couriers get their visas stamped every week at the border, do they?” he continued, hectoring the injured man. need a quick trip out and we’ll pay for it, like I said. And I don’t mean some Swiss cloud-cuckoo land, either—green dollars, five thousand of them, cash in hand when you’ve earned it.”

  Both of the Kabyles were watching Kelly with a different sort of interest. The boy had cradled the Enfield to his chest as if it were a kitten. Now, the fingers of his left hand paused in stroking the empty cylinder.

  The agent unbuckled his heavy belt. His face wore a sneer as professional as a rock star’s. He slid the belt through the pants’ loops, stepping past Ramdan to use the desk front as a support. The belt was thin leather, folded lengthwise in three overlapping layers. Kelly raised the top layer.