Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The cockpit windows showed the clouds below or, through the clouds, the Mediterranean. The wall of gauges and displays in front of each flight engineer had more potential interest, at least—the possibility that boards would suddenly glow red and the sea would take on a reality beyond that of a backdrop for the hole the C-141 was punching through the sky.

  But sleep was useful, once the demands of socializing had been met. The new routing was to Torrejeon, just outside Madrid. That could change at any moment; since this Starlifter was a B model with air refueling capability in addition to a lengthened fuselage, their final touchdown could be El Paso—if the Powers That Be decided.

  Kelly dreamed of Fortress, but not as he had seen it in photographs and artists’ renderings. Now there was a trio of saucers tethered near the docking area. Their design prevented them from using the airlocks in normal fashion, but a saucer was still connected to Fortress by a thick umbilicus configured at its nether end to mate with the station in the same manner as the nose of a Space Command transporter.

  Fortress showed no sign of the struggle in which it had been captured. The outer doughnut of raw bauxite and ilmenite from the Moon, the same material that was refined and extruded in the solar furnaces with which Fortress built itself, was beginning to weather into greater uniformity under the impact of micrometeorites and hard radiation. It was not scarred by anything more major, the high-explosive or even nuclear warheads against which it gave reasonable protection.

  The close-in defense arrays visible from the north pole of the space station were empty, the spidery launching frames catching sunlight and shadowing one another at unexpected angles. Two of the launchers were missing, sheared down to their bases when their rockets gang-fired.

  The space station itself was a dumbbell rotating within the hoop of shielding material. Each lobe of the station was a short length of cylinder connected by a spoke to the spherical hub. Now the dream-viewpoint shifted, angling across the center of the doughnut toward the windows, through which mirrors deflected sunlight into the living quarters of Fortress. Polished slats repeatedly re-reflected light while filtering the radiation which would otherwise have entered through the windows as well.

  As Kelly’s mind watched, the trailing end of one of the lobes flew outward in slow motion. The aluminum panels twisted under stress but kept their general shape and even clung in part to the girders on which they had been hung. Glass-honeycomb insulation disintegrated, providing a spinning cloud which mimicked the bloom of white-hot gases to be expected from a normal explosion.

  The real blast had been only a small one—strip charges laid along the inner frame of the panel. The difference in pressure between hard vacuum and the part of the space station which had just been opened to that vacuum was sufficient to void most of the chamber’s contents, however. Flimsy furniture, sheets of paper, and over a hundred living men spewed into space along with the metal and shredded glass.

  Some of the men flapped their arms vigorously, as if they were trying to swim to the hub or the brightly-sunlit saucers docked there. In the event, when a few of them did collide with bracing wires, they spun slowly away; they had lost the ability to comprehend what might seem a hope of safety, though they still were not legally dead.

  The viewpoint narrowed on the opened chamber itself, though with none of the mechanical feeling of a camera being dollied. When a gun fires, some residues of the reaction remain aswirl in the breech. Similarly, there was a single human figure still drifting in the chamber from which his fellows had been voided. At one point he had been trying to grasp the screw latch of the airlock to one of the adjoining compartments. His grip had lost definition, though it had not wholly relaxed, and now he floated with his fingers hooked into vain claws.

  The victim had been a stocky man of medium height. His beard, moustache, and white tunic had been sprayed a brilliant red with blood when air within his body cavity expanded to ram his empty lungs out his mouth and nostrils. Kelly did not recognize the rank insignia on the tunic sleeves, but the SS runes on the collar were unmistakable.

  Kelly knew the victim, and that knowledge was not the false assurance of a dream. He could not recall the fellow’s full name, but he was known as ben Majlis, and he had been leader of a squad of Kurds while Operation Birdlike was up and running.

  The body twitched harshly, mindlessly, not quite close enough to a bulkhead or the floor for the movement to thrust against something solid. The corneas of ben Majlis’s eyes were red with ruptured capillaries, and ice crystals were already beginning to glitter on them.

  One of the hands flopped toward Kelly’s point of view, driven by the Kurd’s dying convulsions. As it did so, something touched the veteran’s shoulder in good truth. He leaped up with a cry and a look of horror that drove back the loadmaster who had just awakened Kelly to tell him that the C-141 was making its final approach to Torrejeon.

  The Starlifter’s crew greased her in, the instant of touchdown unnoticed until the thrust reversers on the big turbo-fans grabbed hold of the air and tried to pull the aircraft backwards. Skill in a fighter meant quickness; skill in a transport was a matter of being smooth, and sliding a hundred and some tons onto a concrete slab without evident shock was skill indeed.

  “What’s the drill from here?” Kelly asked the loadmaster, who now had his helmet’s long cord plugged into a console near one of the forward doors. Neither of the men in the echoing cargo bay could see anything save the aluminum walls around them, but the crewman was in touch with the flight deck through his intercom.

  The loadmaster spoke an acknowledgment into the straw-slim microphone wand and stepped closer to Kelly in order to explain without shouting, “We’re going to taxi to N-2. There’s a bird waiting there for you already.”

  He paused, then touched the intercom key of his helmet to say, “Gotcha.” To Kelly he then went on, smiling, “Seems like you’re stepping up in the world, Colonel Kelly.”

  “It used to be ‘sergeant,’ and right now it’s ‘civilian’—whatever I tell people that have more use’n I do for brass,” the veteran said with a smile of his own. “I gonna need the flight suit?” He had surprisingly little stiffness or specific pain from the battering he’d taken in the past few days, but he found when he shrugged that his whole body felt as if there were an inch of fuzz growing on it.

  “On an Airborne Command Post?” the loadmaster said. “Nossir, I don’t guess you will.”

  The big crewman paused again, this time in response to memory rather than a voice in his earphones. “Look sir, you were serious about putting a lid on this? Word is . . . word is, they’ve already pooped a nuke. If they did . . .”

  “Thing is”—Kelly frowned, as he chose words that could explain things simply—and hopefully—” ‘they’ aren’t the Reds, not yet. They’re a bunch of terrorists. And I can’t do a damn thing for what’s gone down already; but yeah, I can put a lid on it.”

  He grinned a shark’s grin. The loadmaster remembered the fight he had tried to pick when his passenger came aboard. “I can put some people,” Kelly said, “where they won’t be a problem till Judgment Day.”

  One of the three men waiting in civilian clothes atop the truck-mounted boarding steps was General Redstone. That was good because the other two had the look and the size of folks who’d be sent to take Kelly out of play.

  If they’d wanted to do that, of course—especially after what had happened at the landing site near Istanbul—there were going to be more than two guys sent.

  “Christ, that’s beautiful,” Kelly blurted as he stepped from the Starlifter onto the landing of the boarding stairs.

  “Hang on,” directed Redstone, and the two—call them attendants—each grabbed Kelly firmly with one hand while anchoring themselves to the railing with the other. “Somebody thought this’d—”

  The truck backed away from the C-141 in an arc, then braked sharply enough that Kelly gripped one of the attendants and the closest portion of the railing himself.
The big men’s touch had shocked him, but they had not tried to immobilize his hands. The truck accelerated forward, toward the open hatch of the plane that had drawn Kelly’s exclamation.

  The aircraft was a Boeing 747 which had few external modifications beyond the slight excrescence on the nose for accepting a refueling drogue, and the radome which recapitulated in miniature the bulge of the flight deck on which it rested.

  Kelly’s vision of the Strategic Air Command had been molded by the tired B-52Ds which had flown to Lebanon out of Akrotiri, painted in camouflage colors and carrying tens of tons of high-explosive bombs under the wings. But an Airborne Command Post was as close to being a showpiece as SAC had available; and in these days, when budget cutters reasonably suggested the nuclear strike mission be left wholly to Space Command and Fortress, the manned-bomber boys weren’t going to miss any opportunity for show.

  The big aircraft was painted dazzling white, with a blue accent stripe down the line of windows from nose to tail. Above the stripe, in Times Roman letters that must have been five feet high, were the words United States of America. The forward entrance hatch was swung inward, awaiting the motorized boarding stairs.

  “Geez,” Kelly muttered, “do they paint ‘em like that to make ‘em easier to target on?”

  “Maybe somebody told ‘em white’d make the damn thing more survivable in a near nuke,” responded Redstone with a grimace of his own. Red hadn’t been the smartest fellow Kelly had met in the service, but his instincts were good and he’d been willing to go to the wall for his men. How he’d made general was a wonder and a half. “Of course,” Redstone continued, “that flag on the tail’s going to burn seven red stripes right through the control surfaces.”

  “Purty, though,” Kelly observed. He was squinting. Twenty miles an hour seemed plenty fast enough when you hung onto a railing fifteen feet in the air.

  Grit was blowing across the field, along with fumes from the big turbofans of the aircraft they approached. The odor left no question but that the bird was burning JP-4 rather than kerosene-based JP-1. The gasoline propellant could be expected both to significantly increase speed and range, and to turn the aircraft into a huge bomb if it had to make a belly landing.

  Well, Kelly’s taste had always been for performance over survivability. His plans for Fortress didn’t strike him as particularly survivable, even if everything worked up to specs.

  The truck slowed. An attendant in the doorway of the 747 was talking the driver in. A flat-topped yellow fuel tanker pulled away from the other side of the aircraft which it had been topping off. Kelly wondered how long the Airborne Command Post had been idling here, ready to take off as soon as the Starlifter from Incirlik landed its cargo.

  “Something you might keep in mind, Kelly,” said General Redstone as the truck began to nestle the stairs’ padded bumpers against the 747, “is that a lot of ‘em don’t like you, and I don’t guess anybody believes everything you put in that cable—me included. But nobody knows what the fuck’s going on, either. If you keep your temper—that’s always been the problem, Kelly—and you keep saying what you say you know . . . then I guess you might get what you say you want.”

  The boarding stairs butted gently against the .aircraft. Kelly rocked slightly and the two attendants released him. “‘I say,’” he quoted with a grin. “ ‘I say.’ You know me, Red. I say what I mean.” He took the precedence the general offered with a hand and strode aboard the Airborne Command Post.

  “This way, please,” said a female attendant whose dark skirt and blazer looked like a uniform, though they had no insignia—military or civilian. Kelly followed her, keeping the figure centered in a hallway which seemed extremely dim after the sunblasted concrete of the Spanish airport outside. The corridor was enclosed by bulkheads to either side, so that none of the light from the extensive windows reached it.

  There was a muted sound from the outer hatch as it closed and sealed behind them, and all the noises external to the aircraft disappeared.

  Offhand, Kelly couldn’t think of any group of people with whom he less cared to share a miniature universe than the ones he expected to see in a moment.

  “They’re here,” said the female attendant to the pair of men outside the first open door to the right. The guards could have passed for brothers to those who had received Kelly on the boarding stairs and who now tramped down the hall behind him. The aircraft was already beginning to trundle forward,

  One of the guards turned his head into the room and murmured something. The other shifted his body slightly to block the doorway, but he focused his eyes well above Kelly’s head so that the action did not become an overt challenge.

  “Yes, of course!” snapped a male voice from within, and the guards sprang aside with the suddenness of the Symplegades parting to trap another ship. Kelly gave the one who had blocked him a wry smile as he passed. Working for folks who got off by jumping on the hired help wasn’t his idea of a real good time. By now, at least, they must realize that Tom Kelly wasn’t part of the hired help.

  The plaque of layered plastic on the door said Briefing Room, and within were thirty upholstered seats facing aft in an arc toward an offset lectern. “Good morning, Pierrard,” the veteran said to the miasma of pipe smoke which was identifiable before the man himself was, one of a score of faces turned to watch over their shoulders and seatbacks as the newcomers arrived.

  “Sit down and strap in, Kelly,” directed the white-haired man in the second of the five rows of seats. “We’re about to take off.” He pointed to the trio of jump seats now folded against the bulkhead behind the lectern.

  Kelly slid into the empty seat nearest the door instead. The upholstery and carpet were royal blue, a shade that reminded the veteran of Congressman Bianci’s office. For a moment he felt—not homesick, but nonetheless nostalgic; he didn’t really belong in that world, but it had been a good place to be.

  Redstone, whose seat the agent had probably taken, grimaced and found another one by stepping over a naval officer with enough stripes on his sleeves to be at least a captain. “It’s no sweat, Red,” Kelly called over the rumble of the four turbofans booting the 747 down the runway on full enriched thrust. “I’m cool, I just like these chairs better.”

  Everyone waited until the pilot had lifted them without wasting time, though with nothing like the abrupt intent of the Starfighter at Diyarbakir some hours before. It was still a big enough world that traveling across it took finite blocks of time. Within the atmosphere, at any rate; the orbital period of Fortress was ninety-five minutes, plus or minus a few depending on how recently the engines had been fired to correct for atmospheric friction.

  That was the maximum amount of time before any particular point on Earth became a potential target for a thermonuclear warhead on an unstoppable trajectory.

  After less than two minutes, despite what it felt like to all those in the briefing room, the big aircraft’s upward lunge reached the point at which cabin attendants on commercial flights would have begun their spiel about complimentary beverages. Kelly turned his eyes from the windows, past which rags of low cloud were tearing, and took a deep breath. He might or might not switch planes again. Either way, this room and these men—they were all men—were the last stage of the preliminaries.

  “Will somebody tell him to get up there where he belongs?” demanded someone in a peevish voice.

  “Bates,” said Pierrard in a voice whose volume and clarity suggested the anger behind it, “we’ll proceed more smoothly if only those with business choose to speak.”

  The room paused. Kelly nodded approvingly to the white-haired man, who then continued into the silence he had wrought. “How did you manage to insert your report that way, Mr. Kelly?”

  The veteran laughed. Everyone else in the room was twisted in the bolted-down chairs to see him, save for those in the last row—behind him—who had a direct view of the back of his head. He would’ve gone to the lectern as directed except that he had been d
irected; and besides, it would feel a little too much like being a duck in a shooting gallery.

  “Oh, that wasn’t me,” Kelly said, looking down. “NSA’s good, but we’re not that good. That was the aliens you sent me to find.” It had been disconcertingly natural for him to verbally put on a uniform again the way he just had.

  There was a ripple of talk, more of it directed at neighbors than at the veteran. Pierrard was giving himself time by lifting his pipe to his lips, though smoke continued to trickle from the bowl in indication that he was not drawing on it.

  Kelly rose, resting his buttocks on the seat back and curling his right foot directly beneath his hip to lock him there. “Look,” he repeated, “I couldn’t have gotten through any way I know about, not from Diyarbakir, not if I were the President.”

  The veteran’s eyes were adjusting to the light and his mind was locking down into the gears suitable for the present situation. He nodded to a man he recognized from the office of the National Security Advisor—not the Advisor himself, a political opportunist whose pronouncements always sounded as though he were still a Marine battalion commander.

  “Anyway,” Kelly continued, finding that his new perch was less stable than he had thought—the 747 was still climbing—“the important thing is dealing with the situation. I can do that with a little cooperation. A lot less cooperation than it took to put all you people together in one room, believe me.”

  Kelly’s mind was cataloguing the faces turned awkwardly over their seats toward him, and he found that he recognized a surprising number of them from his years on Capitol Hill. They were not the men who discussed crises on-camera. They—like Kelly—were the ones who did the groundwork, or the dirty work, required to solve the real problems.

  “What is the situation, in your view, Mr. Kelly?” asked a Space Command colonel named Stoddard. Kelly had been on a “Tom and Jim” basis with him for over a year, ever since Stoddard became the Command’s liaison—lobbyist—with Congress. Kelly couldn’t blame him for not making a big thing about their association just now, when the veteran’s status was at best in doubt.