Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “I think,” said Tom Kelly, looking at the woman who was as still as a blond caryatid, “we’d better get to Diyarbakir.”

  Gisela raised her head and nodded. “Right,” said Atwater, sucking his lips inward so that his moustache twitched. “We’ll go talk to the man, and if he’ll fly you, I’ll log it as authorized pending confirmation.” The sergeant led the way down the hall. The next room had a Dutch door, both halves closed, with the legend Messages on the top portion and a counter built out from the lower one. Kelly’s face stiffened as he strode past and he felt the weight of the tape recorder in his attaché case. “Hang on,”he said, though part of him knew he ought to wait until he was wheels-up from Istanbul. He rapped on the door.

  The upper panel was opened at once by an American airman. Behind him a partition baffled the remainder of the room from the hallway. “Look, Don,” he said, looking past Kelly to Sergeant Atwater, “it’ll go when it goes. What can I say?” There was a muted clatter of static and machinery from behind him.

  “I’ve got something to go out in clear,” Kelly said, pulling the top sheet from the memo pad on the counter before he started to write on it with one of the stub pencils there for the purpose.

  “Sir?” said the airman, raising an eyebrow.

  “He’s got authorization, Larry,” said the sergeant, before Kelly, having finished with the cable address, could take out his card case again.

  “I gather there’s some problem with encrypted material,” the veteran said, shuttling the code clerk’s eyes back to him as he set the miniature tape deck on the counter. He opened the case to display the workings of the recorder within. “I don’t want encryption anyway. For all I care, you can put this on the twenty-meter amateur band and beam it right off the tape.”

  He paused before locking his eyes with those of the young airman. “You can get it out in clear, can’t you, despite the tie-up?”

  “Yessir,” said the airman. He blinked to break eye contact so that he could look at the camouflaged recorder.

  “Output’s through what would be the battery jack,” Kelly said. “You people can handle that, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, yes sir,” the airman agreed, turning the memo slip to face him. He blinked again and said, “Jesus.”

  The veteran smiled as their eyes met again over the counter. “No sweat, buddy,” he said. “It’ll give you something to play with while the priority channels’re busy with other people’s worries.”

  “Check, sir,” agreed the airman. He managed a smile of his own. “It’s just that—I thought NSA Headquarters got even requests for furniture polish encrypted.”

  “Not this time, my friend,” said Kelly as he waved to chop the conversation, then turned away. “This time the idea’s for a whole lotta people to know what went down. The medium damn well is the message.”

  The door leaf swung closed behind him. “That’s that, sergeant,” the veteran said to Atwater’s expressionless face. “Let’s see about transportation.”

  The hall ended in a metal door that gave out onto the airfield itself. They reached it just as a Turkish Airlines 727 was lunging skyward beyond the wire-reinforced window. As Atwater knocked on the unmarked door to the right of the metal one, the roar of the commercial jet’s engines shook the building like a terrier on a rat.

  “Shine!” the sergeant called through the lessening rumble. “I got a proposition for you.”

  “Is she—” said a voice as the door opened. The speaker was a black man, five-five or-six, wearing a one-piece gray flight suit. His hair was cropped so close that he could have passed for a Marine in boot camp.

  When his brown, opaque eyes flickered past Atwater’s shoulder, the pilot paused with his mouth already shaped to speak the next word. “Well, Jesus and his saints,” he said instead, “it’s Monaghan, isn’t it, or have I died and gone to hell?”

  “We’ve been to hell, Shine,” said Kelly with a sudden recollection of tracer bullets crisscrossing the makeshift flare path and the high-wing aircraft setting down. “It didn’t kill us, did it?”

  He gave the pilot a lopsided smile. “Ready for another little jaunt? A real piece a’ cake, just a ferry run to Diyarbakir.”

  Shine cocked his head and looked at the sergeant. “He got his clearances?”

  “We’ve got that problem with the message traffic, like you know,” Atwater replied, looking at a corner of the Ready Room. A magazine lay open on the rumpled bunk from which the pilot had risen. “We’ll get through when through, but . . . Colonel here seems to think there’s a bit of a crunch.”

  “Colonel, are we?” said the pilot. “Hadn’t heard you were on quite those terms, Tommy. Guess you figure I owe you one for not going in for the rest of your team when they pulled the plug on Birdlike?”

  Kelly shrugged. “I’d walked away from that one before you did, Shine. We all do what we do.”

  The black grinned and traced a line across the side of his skull, miming the track of blood matting Kelly’s hair. “So-o-o,” Shine said, “a milk run, no flak a’tall. Till I come back and try to explain why I flew you, m’friend. There’s gonna be a lot of flak then.”

  “Look, Shine—” began Sergeant Atwater with a puzzled frown.

  Kelly touched the sergeant’s arm to silence him and said with his eyes meeting the pilot’s, “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, man.”

  “Shit, let’s fly,” the pilot said, lifting a zip-lock folder and his flight helmet from the shelf beside the door. “I figure I owe you one. Or I owe somebody and you’re closest.”

  The aircraft being rolled from a hangar to meet them, a Pilatus Turbo-Porter, was, like the pilot, on twenty-four hour standby with its preflight check already completed. Its straight wing, exceptionally long and broad for an aircraft of the size, was fitted with slotted flaps to lower the stall speed even further.

  The Porter’s undersurfaces were painted a dark blue-gray that better approximated the shade of the night sky than black would. The upper surfaces were whorls of black over brown and maroon almost as dark to keep the aircraft from having an identifiable outline from above.

  Kelly knew where the Logistics Support unit in Istanbul had been flying three years before. Now that the political situation in Greece had stabilized—or reverted, depending on your bias—he was mildly surprised that an agent-transporting aircraft was still based here. Some things had their own inertia, especially when the secrecy of the operation kept it out of normal budgetary examinations. Score one for inefficiency.

  Shine—his last name was Jacobs, Kelly thought, or at least it had been when he had been on the eastern border of Turkey supporting Kurdish operations—ducked through the port-side entry doors, springing off the step attachéd to the fuselage. The Porter was awkward to board because its fixed landing gear was mounted on long struts to take the impact of landings that closely approached vertical. Even the tail wheel was lifted by a shock absorber.

  Kelly started to hand the woman up the high step, an action as reflexive for him as was her look of scorn as she entered the cabin unaided. Hell, the veteran thought, he was the one who needed help. Walking to the hangar had brought him double vision, and the two steps to enter the aircraft rang like hammers in his skull.

  He’d been hurt worse before, plenty times; but he’d never been this old before, any more than he’d ever be this young again. If he didn’t start using common sense about the things he let his body in for, the aging problem was going to take care of itself real quick.

  A ground crewman closed the cabin door while the starter cart whirled the Porter’s turbine engine into wailing life. Shine was forward in the cockpit, and Gisela eyed the sparse furnishings of the cabin. There was a fold-down bench of aluminum tubing and canvas on the starboard bulkhead across from the doors, and individual jumpseats of similar construction to port.

  Kelly unlatched a seat, then the bench, as Shine ran the five-hundred-horse turbine up to speed. With his mouth close to Gisela’s ears, the v
eteran said, “You got any problem if I rack out on the bench?” He pointed. “I’m not . . . I mean, I think I could use a couple hours, it that’s okay.”

  Gisela smiled grimly at what both of them recognized as an admission of weakness—and an apology for treating her like a girl moments earlier. “Fine,” she said, and nodded toward the cockpit. “Do you think your friend will mind if I sit next to him?”

  Kelly glanced forward toward the back of Shine’s helmet, just visible over his seat back. The right-hand cockpit seat was empty. “Not unless he’s changed a hell of a lot since I last knew him,” the veteran said with a chuckle. “He’d screw a snake if somebody held it down. Of course, it’d have to be a girl snake.”

  The woman laughed also and patted Kelly’s shoulder as she slid her way into the empty forward seat. He could not hear the brief exchange between Gisela and the pilot a moment before the Porter began to taxi, but the dancer’s laugh trilled again above the turbine whine.

  Kelly seated himself and belted in as the aircraft waited for clearance. The belt wasn’t going to do a hell of a lot of good with a side-facing seat bolted onto the frame of a light aircraft; but it was the way he’d been trained, and his brain was running on autopilot. Christ, it felt as if each revolution of the spinning prop was shaving a little deeper through his skull.

  He’d be better for sleep. If he could sleep.

  The runway could accommodate 747s, but Shine took off within the first hundred and twenty yards of the pavement. The Porter lifted at a one-to-one ratio, gaining a foot of altitude for every foot of forward flight. In a straight-sided gulley or a clearing literally blasted in triple-canopy jungle, such a takeoff might have been necessary. Here, it was necessary only because Shine needed to prove that he and the plane could do it every time—because next time it might not be a matter of choice.

  They climbed at over a thousand feet per minute toward whatever Shine chose to call cruising altitude for this flight. It had been possible that he’d fly the entire seven hundred miles on the deck to prove his capabilities in the most bruising way possible. Probably he wanted enough height to engage the autopilot safely—and leave his hands free, since Gisela had decided to sit forward.

  Even before the Porter leveled off, Kelly had unbuckled his seat belt and stretched out on the narrow bench. A severe bank to port would fling him across the cabin lengthwise like a log to the flume, but Shine wouldn’t do that except at need. The bench, trembling with the thrust of the prop and the shudder of air past the skin of the aircraft, made a poor bed . . . but better than some, and, in the event, good enough.

  He dreamed again of ancient Amida, its black basalt walls shrugging off attack by the Romans who had raised them initially. And he dreamed of the Fortress; but in the way of dreams and nightmares, the two merged into a single, stark threat, in space arid on the empty plains of Mesopotamia.

  It was still dark when he awakened to the gentle pressure of Gisela’s hands on his shoulder blades. Shine was making his final approach to the airbase at Diyarbakir, headquarters of the Turkish Third Tactical Air Force.

  And perhaps the headquarters of the Dienst and its Plan, as well as whatever the aliens had been doing when one was shot with Mohammed. Rise and shine, Tom Kelly, there’s no rest for the wicked in this life.

  The airfield at Diyarbakir had been paved for fully-laden fighter bombers, but, as on takeoff, the pilot had his own notions of proper utilization. Kelly was scarcely buckled in across from the woman who had awakened him when the Turbo-Porter hit the ground at an angle nearly as steep as that at which they had lifted off.

  The cabin bucked and hammered in sudden turbulence as Shine reversed the blade pitch and brought the aircraft to a halt against the full snarling power of the Garrett turbine. The engine braked them to a stop within seventy feet of the point they first touched down.

  Shine throttled back. Over the keening of the turbine as it settled to forty percent power through a medley of harmonics, he shouted, “You got ground transport laid on?”

  “Ought to,” Kelly answered, nodding and finding that the motion did not hurt him nearly as much as he had expected. The nightmares he had seen and joined had wrung him out mentally, but his physical state was surprisingly close to normal. He unbuckled himself and stood up, rocking as Shine changed blade pitch to taxi and tapped on the left brake to swing the nose.

  Through the windscreen Kelly could see a control tower of dun-colored brick, with corrugated-metal additions turned a similar shade by the blowing dust. At the edge of the building was parked a Dodge pickup truck painted Air Force blue. While the pilot centered the Porter’s prop spinner on the vehicle, its door opened and the driver got out.

  Shine braked and feathered the prop again, only ten feet from the bumper of the pickup. “Door-to-door service a specialty,” he shouted.

  Kelly gestured Gisela toward the cabin door but stepped forward himself so that he could be heard, and heard privately. “Appreciate it, man,” the veteran said, shaking the pilot’s hand between the two seatbacks. “You done a good thing.”

  Shine laughed without much humor. “Yeah, well, Tommy,” he said, “you meet up with any of the types who got back anyway, the ragheads—you tell ‘em I’m sorry. There was orders, sure, but . . . you know, the longer I live, the less I regret the times I violated orders, and the less I like to remember some of the ones I obeyed. You know?”

  “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Kelly said, squeezing the pilot’s hand again before he turned to follow Gisela.

  Moments after the two passengers had stepped onto the concrete and dogged the hatch closed, the Porter rotated and lifted again—a brief hop to the fueling point a quarter mile farther down the runway—instead of taxiing properly.

  “Not exactly the least conspicuous vehicle,” Kelly muttered as he and the dancer stepped toward the truck. “But I didn’t think we’d do better through Atwater, even if I kicked and screamed for something civilian. The folks who were supposed to arrange that sorta thing for me are either dead or wish I was.”

  The man standing beside the truck was in his mid-twenties, wearing a moustache and sideburns which were within, though barely, the loose parameters of the US Air Force. “Colonel Monaghan?” he asked without saluting; neither he nor Kelly were in uniform, and there was a look in the man’s eyes that suggested he didn’t volunteer salutes anyway.

  “Yessir,” said Kelly, nodding courteously. The other man’s eyes had drifted to the dancer. “I much appreciate this. I know it’s not the sort of thing you’re here for.”

  There were only a few US liaison officers at the airbase here in Diyarbakir. This man and the vehicle had to have been requisitioned from the NSA listening post at Pirinclik, fifteen miles west of the city, where the midflight telemetry of tests from the Russian missile proving ground at Tyuratam was monitored. Pirinclik was staffed by the US Air Force; but nonetheless, Sergeant Atwater must have called in personal chips to arrange for a vehicle over a general phone line.

  “Here’s the key, sir,” the younger man said with a modicum of respect in his voice. “There’s a chain to run from the steering wheel to the foot-feed. No ignition lock, you know?”

  Kelly nodded. “Much appreciated,” he repeated as he opened the driver’s side door and handed Gisela behind the wheel. She knew where they were going, Lord willing. “Hope you’ve got a way back?” he added, suddenly struck by the fact that the airman looked very much alone against the empty background of runways on an alluvial plain. “We’re in more of a time crunch than . . .”

  “So I hear,” the younger man agreed with a tight smile. At a base like Pirinclik, there were more sources of information than the official channels. It struck Kelly that this fellow might know a lot more than he and Gisela themselves did, but there really wasn’t time to explore that possibility. “I’ll call and they’ll send a jeep. Just didn’t want to tie up two vehicles on so loose an ETA.” He nodded toward the Turbo-Porter, shrunken into a dark huddle at the
distant service point.

  Gisela cranked the engine, which caught on the second attempt, just before the airman called, “Pump once and—”

  “The gate’s off to the left,” Kelly said as he closed his own door, wondering how often he’d flown in or out of the Third TAP base. More times than he could remember, literally, because once he’d been delirious, controllable only because he was just as weak as he was crazy. . . .

  They paused for the gate, chain link on a sturdy frame, to be swung open by Turks from the sandbagged bunkers to either side. There was no identification check for people leaving in an American vehicle, though the guards showed some surprise that the driver was a blond woman. Gisela turned left on the narrow blacktop highway and accelerated jerkily while she determined the throw and engagement of the pickup’s clutch.

  “You’ve been here before,” Kelly said, noting that the woman turned without hesitation.

  She glanced aside, then back to the road. “Not here,” she said in a cool voice, aware that the American was fishing for information—and willing to give it to him even though he had not, by habit, done her the courtesy of asking directly. “Not the airfield. But of course, I’ve spent a great deal of time at our base in the city.”

  The landscape through which they drove as fast as the truck’s front-end shimmy permitted was as flat as any place Kelly had ever been. It appeared to be rolling countryside, but the scale of distance was so great that it gave shape to what would otherwise have been considered dead-level ground.

  But the plains were neither smooth nor green—at least this early in the year; Kelly knew from experience that by early summer the oats and barley planted in some of the unfenced fields would have grown high enough to hide the rocks.

  The soil of Mesopotamia had been cultivated for millennia, for virtually as long as any area of the Earth’s surface. Every time a plow bit, it sent a puff of yellow-gray dust off on the constant wind and diminished the soil by that much. The rocks, from pebbles to blocks the size of a man’s torso, remained . . . and from a slight distance, from a road, those rocks were all that remained of what had been the most fertile lands on Earth. One could still cultivate with care and hardship, however, and pasture sheep.