Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “You acted by the rules you lived by, Tom,” the woman said as she entered the room. “Rufus acted by no rules at all, his or yours or anyone’s. That makes him not a man but a bomb, ready to go off at random.” She turned and smiled, at Vlasov and past him to Kelly. “If you get random, I’ll leave you too, dear Angelo. But until then, I’ll stay if you’ll have me.”

  The agent shot the deadbolt lock. Then he reached for Annamaria. Professor Vlasov smiled and edged aside, but Kelly stopped himself anyway.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” the defector said. He looked around the room. It was plainly furnished with a desk, a pair of chairs, and two single beds with feather ticks. “I can—or there is another room, the one you have, madam?”

  “No!” Kelly snapped. He took a deep breath and forced a smile. “First things first, Professor,” he said. “You don’t leave my sight until I put you in the hands of General Pedler or somebody I’ve met on his staff. We’re not going anywhere near the Consulate-General here, either. There isn’t anybody there at night who’d be able to figure out what I was talking about. And even in the morning—well, I trust Pedler, I don’t trust a Consul General I’ve never met. Not to make decisions that might be your life and mine if they’re wrong.”

  “I thought you might go straight to Paris instead of—dodging again,” Annamaria said. “Or Rome, or—but there aren’t too many direct flights from North Africa. A friend in the Paris embassy would tell me if you were heard from there, and I—I thought I’d wait here for a few days, and then make plans if I had to.”

  “I’ve got visions of being tracked down by a world-wide network of embassy receptionists,” Kelly said with a grin. He squeezed Annamaria’s hand. “Anyhow, I’m glad that this time when I left clues, it was somebody I wanted to see who picked them up.” He stepped over to the phone, taking off his damp jacket as he did so.

  “Actually,” the woman remarked with some asperity, “it wasn’t a receptionist. In Paris, the Marines do that anyway. It was the Deputy Chief of Mission.”

  For the first time, Annamaria appeared to notice how wet both men’s clothing was. “But here,” she said in a cheerful voice again, “I really do have your suitcases in my room.” She glanced at Vlasov. The Russian had seated himself on a corner of one of the beds. “At least you can sit in something dry, Professor,” she added, “though I don’t suppose it’ll fit you any better than an outfit of mine would.”

  “Ah, take the key,” the agent said. Looking at his own outstretched hand, he added, “That was a pretty dumb thing for me to say. I’ll work on doing better.”

  Annamaria’s touch and her smile were electric. Then the door clicked shut behind her.

  Kelly dialed the desk. “Need to start the ball rolling,” he remarked to Vlasov. As he waited with the phone to his ear, the agent noticed his coat on the bed where he had tossed it. He reached into the side pocket and brought out the pistol. “Suppose I’ll have to deep-six this when you’re clear,” he said. “Tempted to keep it for a souvenir, but that wouldn’t be fair to—”

  “Yes?” said the phone.

  “Emil,” the agent said, “see if you can get the US Embassy in Paris for me—I don’t have the number either. I need the Defense Attaché’s Office, General Pedler himself if he’s around. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

  As the phone hissed, Kelly tucked the pistol back into the coat. He began to massage his scalp. “Never occurred to me I’d need to phone Pedler,” he said to the Russian, filling the empty seconds, minutes. “Figure there’ll be somebody there in the office who can raise him in an emergency. And he must have got enough word from Algiers already to know this is an emergency.”

  The defector was edging backward on the bed. His eyes flicked from the window to the door.

  “What the hell’s the matter?” Kelly demanded tensely. “Professor?”

  There was a sound in the hall. Kelly looked from Vlasov to the door, his scowl smoothing to greet Annamaria. The panel swung inward without a click from the latch. There were three men in black, filling the doorway. One held an open badge case. The other two pointed objects that looked less like guns as they stepped forward. The door swung shut behind them.

  The phone in Kelly’s hand made a sizzling sound. Then it went dead.

  “Professor Evgeny Vlasov?” said the one with the badge. He spoke in Russian with neither accent nor tone. “We are from Section T of the Bundespolizei.”

  “What is Section T?” Kelly asked, putting the handset down very carefully without cradling it. He watched the intruders. The distance to his coat, to his pistol, he measured in his mind rather than with his eyes or his poised right hand.

  It was too far.

  The intruders did not respond to Kelly, though one of them kept his—gun—trained on the agent. “You must come with us, now, Professor Evgeny Vlasov,” the middle one said.

  Without changing expression, the third man in black turned. He was already raising his weapon when the hall door burst inward.

  If the self-styled “Federal Policeman” thought his gun was a magic wand, he reckoned without Nguyen Van Tanh. The Vietnamese colonel knew he had to kill everyone in the room; he started even as the door swung. The first five shots were so fast they could have come from an automatic weapon. Two through the torso of the man facing him, two through the spine of the man who had spoken to Vlasov. The 87-grain steel bullets howled through their initial targets; one of them shattering a window pane as it exited the room. All five shots ripped out in less than a quarter second. The last of them was kidney level through the intruder covering Kelly.

  As it tore out of the body, the Tokarev bullet hit the man in black’s gun. The narrow entryway dissolved in a white flash.

  The muzzle blasts had been deafening in the confined space anyway, but even later the survivors were sure that the flash had been almost soundless. It was as dazzling as a magnesium flare, however, and it was by blind memory alone that Kelly dived for the coat and his pistol within it. He scrabbled to find the pocket.

  Nguyen, blind as his opponent, caught the blur of motion and aimed for it by instinct. His trigger finger was as much a part of his pistol’s lockwork as the firing pin itself. As it started to squeeze, Annamaria threw a jacket over Nguyen’s head and jerked him backwards.

  The Colonel’s sixth shot cracked above Kelly’s head. Kelly fired twice through the fabric of his coat. The plastic bullets smacked audibly as they hit. Nguyen thrust behind him with his left hand, weighted with a spare magazine. Annamaria caromed back into the hallway, tearing the blindfold from the Vietnamese even as Kelly shot him twice more—once in the center of mass, once behind the ear—and the Tokarev slipped from fingers which had already swung it on target one final time.

  The pistol skidded on the carpet. Its owner did not. He sprawled instead like rice pouring from a fifty-kilo sack.

  Kelly raised himself. His coat was smoldering, adding its fumes to those curling from the muzzle of his pistol. White sulphur smoke mixed in layers with the sweeter odor of nitro powder. The American stared at the fallen Tokarev. The pistol looked as worn and as deadly as a Marine sniper.

  Annamaria was getting up. Kelly stepped to her, over Nguyen’s body. “Are you all right?” the woman asked before the agent himself could speak.

  “Bastard was better than me,” said Kelly, tossing his own empty weapon to the nearer bed. Professor Vlasov had stood up also. There was an expression of hope dawning slowly over his face.

  “Good thing I wasn’t alone this time,” the agent said. He drew Annamaria up with a controlled grace that belied the adrenalin tremors shaking all his muscles. “Best thing in the world that I’m not alone any more,” he said.

  “They can be defeated,” the Professor said. “By guns, by my devices. By thousands of my devices above Earth.”

  Kelly released Annamaria. “It was the KGB,” he said loudly. “It was the KGB, and one of them dropped a grenade!”

  Doors were opening, spilling
bursts of pop music and questions in a variety of languages. Wet air through the broken window swirled the powder smoke.

  Professor Vlasov bent. The body of only one of the intruders remained after the blast, eyes staring upward. Vlasov ran the fingers of one hand over the floor. In the center of the area, the carpeting was gone and the hardwood surface beneath was charred through to the concrete base.

  Inches further from the heart of the blast, the nylon nap had melted and been drawn up in long spikes toward a momentary vortex. Annamaria knelt beside the defector.

  There was a loud gasp from the hall. Emil stood there, gaping into the room. Kelly could not be sure whether the clerk was more horrified by the dead bodies or the blast-eroded walls and floor. “Mr. Kelly!” Emil said. “Mr. Kelly!”

  Kelly nodded. “It’ll be taken care of, Emil,” he said. “You know me. It’ll be taken care of.”

  The clerk opened his mouth, but further words would not come. He turned briskly and clattered down several steps before he paused. “Oh, Mr. Kelly,” he said, a good servant even in the midst of disaster, “there was a fault with the line, somewhere; but your call has been put through now.” He bounded down the rest of the steps to his desk.

  The phone muttered. Kelly looked from Vlasov to Annamaria. The woman was running her fingers over the face of the man in black. Kelly picked up the fallen handpiece. “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello!” the phone repeated. “I said, this is Major August Nassif. You’ll have to state your business to get through to the general, I don’t care who you are, and I’m not going to hold this line much longer!”

  “This is Tom Kelly,” the agent replied. “I’m about to be waist deep in Frankfurt cops.” He looked from the living humans to the body on the floor. “I think General Pedler’s looking for me. Tell him my business is Skyripper.”

  Annamaria’s hand gripped and tugged. The face of the thing on the floor was the color of raw cinnabar. The nose was a single slit, the mouth a round hole with teeth like a lamprey’s around the inner margin. Fragments of the mask Annamaria had removed still clung to the skin like tendrils of white gauze.

  “Tell him,” Annamaria said in a clear voice, “that the business of the world is Skyripper.”

  Fortress

  DEDICATION

  To Tom Doherty,

  who published my first book also,

  and most of those in between.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Among the people who helped with bits of unclassified

  background on this one are Glenn and Helen Knight;

  Bernadette Bosky and Arthur Hlavaty; and Congressman

  Newt Gingrich and his personal assistant, Laurie James.

  Many thanks to all of them.

  Prologue

  Another 1965

  Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy’s fifth State of the Union Address—his so-called “Buck Rogers Speech”—at a firebase in the Shuf Mountains, watching Druse 122-mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the night sky.

  The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed and sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly’s cheap portable radio. Inside the high-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant could have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars worth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle carried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made almost certain.

  Shooooo . . . hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.

  “Our enemies, the enemies of freedom,” said the President, more distant from Kelly’s reality than seven time zones could imply, “have proven in Hungary, in Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealings except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe, ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least sign of weakness among the Western democracies.”

  By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for protection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscape breathed, Kelly’s left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14, knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own weapons: Mausers abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs slipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenades stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .

  “In Europe and the Middle East,” continued the President in a nasal voice further attenuated by the transmission and the radio’s tinny speaker, “in Africa and Latin America—wherever the totalitarians and their surrogates choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on behalf of the free world which will convince our enemies that we have the strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they gather on Earth itself.”

  The five tubes of howitzer battery—the sixth hog was deadlined for repair—cut loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglike dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzle brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The short-barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges. Nothing to do with the turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flat curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.

  “We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelming magnitude in the Heavens themselves,” continued Kennedy through the squeal of hydraulic rammers seating the shells of the next salvo. Clicks of static from command transmissions cut across the broadcast band, but Kelly was used to building sense from messages far more shattered and in a variety of languages beyond English. He was good at that—at languages—and his fingertips again tried to wiggle the magazine of his rifle, making sure it was locked firmly into the receiver.

  “Space is both a challenge—” said the President as Kelly’s hearing returned after the muzzle blasts of the howitzers which were more akin to physical punishment than to noise. “—Now also the unbreachable shield of freedom and the spear of retribution which cannot be blunted by treacherous attack as our land-based weapons might be.”

  The breechblock of a fifty-caliber machine gun clanged from the far side of the firebase as the weapon was charged, freezing time and Tom Kelly’s soul. Only the sounds of the howitzers reloading and traversing their turrets slightly followed, however. Nothing Kelly had seen in ninety-seven days in the field suggested the hogs were going to hit anything useful, but their thunderous discharges made waiting for an attack easier than it would have been with only the stars for company.

  “My detailed proposals . . .” said the radio before the words disintegrated into a hiss like frying bacon—louder than the voice levels had been, so it couldn’t be the French dry cells giving out. . . .

  “Fuckin’ A!” snarled Chief Warrant Officer Platt as he ducked out the rear hatch of the command vehicle. He, the intercept team’s commander, was a corpulent man who wore two fighting knives on his barracks belt and carried the ear of a Druse guerrilla tissue-wrapped in a watch case. “We’re getting jammed across all bands! What the fuck is this?”

  Something with a fluctuating glow deep in the violet and presumably ultraviolet was crossing the sky very high up and very swiftly. A word or two,—“dominance”—crept through a momentary pause in the static before the howitzers, linked by wire to the Tactical Operations Center, fired again.

  “Commie recon satellite,” Platt muttered, his eyes following Kelly’s to the bead shimmering so far above the surface of dust, buffeted by hot, gray strokes of howitzer propellant. “You know those bastards’re targeting us down to the last square meter!”

  Tom Kelly reached for the tuning dial of the radio with the hand
which was not sweating on the grip of his rifle. Anybody who could come within a hundred yards of a point target, using a bombardment rocket aimed by adjusting a homemade bipod under the front of the launching tube, ought to be running the US space program instead of a Druse artillery company. The hell with the satellite—assuming that’s what it was. If the rag-heads could jam the whole electromagnetic spectrum like that, there were worse problems than Radio Research teams becoming as useless as tits on a boar. . . .

  “—domestic front,” said the radio just as Kelly’s fingers touched it, “the curse of racial injustice calls for—”

  Tom Kelly never did hear the rest of that speech because just as normal reception resumed, a one-twenty-two howled over the berm and exploded near a tank-recovery vehicle. It was the first of the thirty-seven rockets preceding the attack of a reinforced Druse battalion.

  The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burned by the red-hot receiver of his rifle as he worked to clear a jam.

  Another 1985

  The three helicopters were orbiting slowly, as if tethered to the monocle ferry on the launchpad five hundred meters below. When the other birds rotated so that the West Texas sun caught the cameras aimed from their bays, the long lenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools with which to record a test of laser propulsion.

  The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments of the helicopters had been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubing and a view straight upward for the cameras and the men waiting for what was about to happen on the launchpad.

  Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a project scientist named Desmond, and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Army green and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that Kelly thought would have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a good deal more nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreading them, their concern was less about the test itself than about him—the staff investigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he’d spent all his life surrounded by people who were worried as hell about what he was going to do next. Occasionally, of course, people would have been smart to worry more than they did. . . .