by David Drake
“Right,” said Kelly as he accepted the other’s hand, “and I’m John Patrick Monaghan.” That was the cover name he’d been issued when he trained Kurdish guerrillas outside Diyarbakir in another life. He was very ready for what would come next, might as well get it over with, he’d warned them. . . .
“Doug!” said the woman very sharply. Her companion relaxed the hand he had been tensing to crush that of Tom Kelly, to prove that he was tougher than this aging cowboy whose file he had read. Doug’s handshake became just that, perfunctory and as professional as his smile or the names he had given.
Kelly grinned at the woman as he released Doug’s hand. He knew the type well enough, because a reputation like Kelly’s had made him a frequent target for boys of various ages who needed to prove their manhood. Usually there had been constraints on Kellyown response: discipline, the mission, or a sheer desire for self-preservation.
This time he’d been pretty sure he had nothing to lose. He had no doubt that the grip in his own right hand, his pistol hand, could have matched any stress Doug put on it. It wouldn’t have stopped there, however, within the civilized norms of the tennis club and the smoking room. It would have stopped when Kelly grabbed a left handful of Doug’s crotch and used the double grip to swing the bigger man face-first against the mahogany door.
Elaine smiled back at Kelly tightly, with the irritation of a woman who knew that boys would be boys but who didn’t in the least like the way such antics screwed up business. She was five four and somewhat fuller in the face than in the trim body beneath it. Her hair was short and as black as Kelly’s own, surprisingly black unless she dyed it or was much younger than the forty suggested by the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. It was hard to tell with women’s clothing, but Kelly suspected she could buy a pretty solid used car for what she had in her linen blouse, skirt, and sequined jacket.
Not that she’d even have considered buying a used car.
And the lady was smart, smart enough to defuse a situation her companion didn’t recognize and Kelly had been willing to play out just to end the waiting.
“We aren’t here because of a problem with you, Mr. Kelly,” she said in a clear contralto. There was a ring on the third finger of her right hand, a gold wedding band or something with the setting revolved toward her palm.
“Say, I’m really glad to hear that,” said Kelly in a voice louder than he had first intended. There was a catch in his throat that he had to clear with volume inappropriate save as an indicator of how wired he was. Elaine already knew that, that was obvious, and Doug’s concern seemed to be focused solely on striking a properly macho pose now that the woman had startled him out of testing the veteran.
Kelly took the VCR’s controller as the bigger man stepped back. Doug looked surprised, but he did not object as Kelly switched the unit on again and began to rewind the tape.
There was an ordinary television in the lounge area, with the refrigerator and coffeepot, but the set here in Bianci’s office had been unhooked from the building’s cable system after Kelly had come on board. Kelly’d explained how easily the set could be used to monitor conversations within the room; and, when nobody believed him, had hooked an in-line bug to the cable lead outside the office and used the TV speaker itself to pick up sounds in place of a planted microphone. The television had immediately been replaced by a VCR and screen without antenna connections. Nobody in the office questioned Kelly’s judgment about security again.
The videotape clicked to a stop and the screen’s neutral pattern coalesced to a picture as Kelly pushed the Play switch. “You’ve got the ABC version,” he said in a voice so distant in his own mind that he could not be sure he was speaking aloud. “I always thought that was the best one, too, what with the computer enhancement.”
The tape had the stutter and low resolution to be expected from an original made with a hand-held minicam from the deck of a sixty-ton torpedo boat. The ship filling the frame looked to be an ordinary cargo vessel of moderate size, unusual only in lacking the swatches of rust that stain vessels if even inches of their steel sides are flaked open to salt water. The antenna arrays were there if you knew what to look for; but even to an expert, they tended to be disguised by the multiple booms and gantries dating from the period before the USS White Plains had been converted from an attack cargo ship into a technical research ship.
The water boiled just forward of the squared superstructure amidships. Kelly had turned down the audio track, but network engineers had laid a flashing violet arrow onto the picture as they magnified and outlined in complementary yellow the gap blown in the White Plains’ hull by the torpedo launched from two hundred yards away. The man with the camera had not started filming until moments after the explosion, even as the shock waves pounded his own vessel.
The engineers isolated on another portion of what was originally a panorama shot with a short-focal-length lens. The bow, with its designator TR4, expanded grainily on the screen, flecks of random phosphor blurring the sharpness somewhat as raster lines were added in processing between those swept on the videotape original. The amidships three-inch gun installations had been stripped from the White Plains to make room for additional antennas when she was converted to her new mission, but one twin turret on the foredeck had remained.
The guns pointed skyward, their outlines slightly jagged from the computer enhancement. Somebody had told Kelly that three-inch seventy-caliber guns should always be mounted in pairs so that there might be one in operating condition when the need arose. In the case of the White Plains, both tubes had jammed at the first shots at the fighters diving to strafe the vessel. The crew had continued to traverse the weapons in a desperate attempt to bluff the attackers, however. Now a helicopter, a big Super Frelon, made a leisurely pass at mast level to fire rockets point-blank into the gun turret. Flashes of white, then orange as ammunition detonated in a secondary explosion, threw bits of men and plating skyward.
The engineers expanded the helicopter again in freeze-frame. This time the arrow and highlight were on the national insignia above the flotation and landing-gear sponson of the Super Frelon: the six-pointed star of the Israeli Air Force.
“Hard to tell,” said Tom Kelly in a voice that did not tremble the way his hands did, forcing him to hold the VCR controller against his left leg while his right palm dried itself fiercely on his slacks, “whether it was that scene that bothered people most, or . . .”
The screen flashed back to a full shot of the White Plains, listing so that the hole ripped by the torpedo was already beneath the angry surface of the water. A lifeboat, white against the smooth gray hull, was being lowered from the davits amidships. There were about a dozen sailors in it, far fewer than its capacity, but somebody had decided to launch it before the ship’s distress made that impossible.
Tom Kelly aimed the controller with a hand which no longer shook, and thumbed up the sound. The picture jumped, the cameraman flinching at the muzzle blasts of the 20-mm cannon near where he was standing. Shells from the automatic cannon burst against the flank of the White Plains, then traced from stern to amidships across the swaying lifeboat. The lifeboat’s bow plunged as the sailor there on the winch lowered abruptly in a vain attempt to avoid the gunfire. His companion on the stern winch had leaped into the sea an instant before the shells chewed his position into flying splinters and the black smoke of bursting charges.
The gunfire paused and the video camera picked up the sound of men shouting on the deck of the torpedo boat, though the words were indistinct. Then the automatic cannon opened up again, its rate of fire deliberate enough that the crack of shells bursting could be heard as counterpoint to the louder, deeper, muzzle blasts. The bow of the lifeboat exploded just as it touched the water foaming into the torpedo wound. Even without enhancement, one could see the sailor’s bare arms fling themselves wide as a white flash hid his torso.
The picture paused a moment later in a crackle of colored static: the Israeli cameraman ha
d either run out of tape or stopped recording of his own volition. The ABC engineers had not ended there, however. As Kelly dialed off the audio again, the final picture flashed back onto the screen. A glowing outline expanded and drew with it the image of the man in the bow of the tilting lifeboat, his hands bracing him upright on the lowering tackle.
In jerky slow motion, his chest exploded and his body, hurled backward, rebounded from the steel hull. At the final degree of processed magnification, nothing could be seen of the American’s face but a white blur and the blotch that was his open mouth. The hull behind him was red with the spray of all the blood in his chest cavity.
“. . . or maybe,” said Tom Kelly as he switched off the picture, “it was that one that caused most of the flap after it was shown on the evening news.”
“Which one bothered you, Mr. Kelly?” said Elaine, one of the figures in his peripheral vision, ignored by the part of Kelly’s mind that was now in control. . . . Ignored unless they moved suddenly, in which case he would kill them—in this moment he would kill them, and the release would be worth any regrets he had afterward.
“On principle,” said Kelly in a voice like a pond of melt water, still and deep and very cold, “it all bothered me. If Israel had a problem with the way we pulled out of Lebanon so sudden, that’s fine—I understand that, getting mad about being left in the lurch. But you don’t shoot up an American spy ship off your coast just because you’re pissed at people in Washington. None of the poor bastards on the White Plains were behind the bugout from Lebanon.”
Kelly tried to set the controller on top of Congressman Bianci’s desk, but his fingers slipped and the unit thumped instead to the blue-carpeted floor. The veteran’s whole body shuddered and the room sprang into focus again.
“Shouldn’t do that to me,” said Kelly as he kneaded his cheeks and forehead with both hands. “Really shouldn’t.”
His voice had changed back to its usual lilting tenor as he went on, “If you mean personally, Danny Pacheco was in the SIGINT Tank in the midships hold, right where the torpedo hit. Guess he was one of the fifty or so who drowned there before they knew what was going on. And yeah, he was a good enough friend that it bothered me. But that’s already in the file, I guess.”
“You had good reason to hate the Israelis, Mr. Kelly,” said the woman, giving a hitch to her skirt as she leaned her hips against the ceiling-height bookcase behind her. There was a tiny purse in her left hand, the gold-plated clasps an inch open. If she was smart enough to have that good a grasp of the situation, then she was smart enough to know that she had no real chance to clear the gun in her purse in a crisis—unless she planned to preempt Kelly.
The veteran laughed, briefly euphoric with the catharsis of having watched the attack on the White Plains for the first time since the slaughter came to its true climax in a military court in Jerusalem. “I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “Nobody in the world.”
“You hated them enough,” retorted Doug, “that you left your post in Turkey and spent two months tracking down that tape or something like it.”
Kelly looked at the other man, whose present splay-footed stance suggested karate training, Elaine was playing with her subject, a tense game because of Kelly’s emotional charge, but all the better thereby to flesh skeletal file data into a man. Doug, on the other hand, was genuinely belligerent instead of professionally playing the bad cop in an interrogation routine. That was fine. . . . “When I brought my boys back to Diyarbakir,” Tom Kelly said in a soft voice and with a smile that gouged, “that was the third time I’d been over the line in Iraq, officially—”
Doug said nothing, though the pause dared him to speak. The Tasking Order had specifically forbidden American citizens to accompany into Iraq the guerrillas they trained at Turkish bases.
“When I came back, I had maybe a year of leave I’d never got around to taking. If I needed some time off, then I had it coming. And—”
“That doesn’t—” started Doug.
“And don’t give me any crap about leaving my post, the way NSA pulled the plug on the Kurds as soon as Iraq kicked out its Soviet techs,” snarled Kelly in a voice like machineguns firing.
“It’s the Kurds we’re here to discuss with you, Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine, reaching out with her right hand to stroke Doug’s biceps and remind him of who and where he was. “Nobody cares that you released copies of that tape to the media three years ago.”
“The Ford Commission came to no decision as to how that tape got into the hands of the press,” Kelly corrected, rubbing his eyes and forehead again but with only his left hand, his eyes winking at the others through the gaps between his fingers.
“We’re not here to trick you into an admission,” said the woman in a sharper tone than any she had used earlier this night. “I’ve told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit,” said the veteran, the word soft and savage. He was as wired as he had been the moment he walked into the room.
They were lying to him the way they had lied so often in the past, and through the flashes and roar of that past in his memory Tom Kelly shouted, “I told ‘em I’d leave ‘em alone if they’d do the same! I wasn’t gonna talk to anybody, I wasn’t gonna claim a fucking pension, and if they thought the answer was a chemical debriefing, then the team they sent to take me better be ready to play for keeps. Are you ready? Are you ready, sonny?”
“The material at the head of that tape,” said the other man in confusion and bureaucratic concern, a turnabout so unexpected that it penetrated Kelly’s fury as the woman’s voice could not have done at this moment, “was simply to explain to third parties why we were bringing it to you, Mr. Kelly. If something happened on the way, that is. The real information’s further back on the tape.”
“Jesus,” said Tom Kelly, the rage draining from him like blood from a ruptured spleen and leaving him flaccid. “Jesus.”
“We understand that your fuse is short, Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine. “We have no intention of lighting it, none whatever.” She snapped her purse closed and set it deliberately on a bookshelf before she stepped over to the VCR.
“Nobody cares about the—incident, do they?” said Kelly, slumping back against the door and almost wishing there were a chair in arm’s reach for him to sit on. “Well, that’s a relief.”
He looked around the office, taking stock as the VCR whirred to eject the tape into Elaine’s hand. The only thing that didn’t belong was the attaché case lying on Bianci’s otherwise orderly desk. Dull black and unremarkable at first glance, the case was in fact a Halliburton—forged from T-6061 aluminum like the plating of an armored personnel carrier. The three-rotor combination lock hidden under the carrying handle was not impossible to defeat, and the sides could be opened with a cutting torch or the right saw—but anything of that sort would take time, and you could park a car on the case without even disturbing the watertight seal.
“It’s old news,” Doug was saying. “Do you care that somebody blew away the secretary of defense in Dallas in ‘63? It’s like that.”
“Like I say, glad to hear it,” the veteran said. It wasn’t that he believed Doug in any absolute sense. Public release of the White Plains footage had squeezed the US government to take action against the State of Israel in ways that the highest levels had no wish to do once immediate tempers had cooled. A matter that had subsided into legal wrangling and the bland lies of politicians on both sides exploded into popular anger, spearheaded by members of Congress and the Senate to whom the massacre of American servicemen was not to be ignored as a matter of Middle Eastern policy.
There had been an immediate cutoff of aid to Israel—the munitions which fed the war in Lebanon to which US policy had abandoned Israeli troops, and the hard currency which alone kept afloat an economy which could not support its own welfare state, much less a protracted war. The aid had been resumed only after the Israeli minister of defense had resigned and thirty-seven serving members of the armed forces were given
prison sentences ranging from two years to life after a public trial humiliating to the State which tried them.
“They buried Danny at Arlington,” said the veteran inconsequently. “Seemed to make his widow happy enough. Me, I always figured that I’d want something besides a stone if it happened to me. . . .”
There were a lot of folks in both governments and, less formally, in Shin Bet—the Israeli department of security—who weren’t in the least pleased with Tom Kelly since copies of the tape showed up in newsrooms across the US and Western Europe. There’d been one in the hands of TASS besides, just in case somebody got the idea of trying a really grandiose coverup. For sure, nothing Doug Blakeley had to say was official policy above a certain level—but the big blond wasn’t a good enough actor to be lying about his mission, his and Elaine’s.
The woman took from the Halliburton what looked like a small alien wrench and stuck it into a curved slot on the underside of the tape she had just ejected. The narrow slot didn’t, when Kelly thought about it, look like anything he’d seen on a tape cassette before. Neither did it look particularly remarkable, however, even when Elaine clicked something clearly nonstandard into a detent at the farther end of the arc, then removed the wrench.
“Now it explodes?” the veteran asked, making it a joke instead of a flat question so that the pair of them wouldn’t gain points if they chose to ignore him.
“There’s a magnet inside the cassette,” Elaine said as she reinserted the tape in the VCR. “The tape pauses at the end of the news segment. If anybody tried to play it beyond that point without locking the magnet out of the way, they’d get hash.” She poked Play, picked up the remote control which still lay on the carpet, and stepped back close to Kelly as the tape advanced with a hiss and diagonals of white static across the screen.