Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The radio blatted, “Hello, are you there?” in loud, distorted Vietnamese.

  Kelly motioned a fast, unnecessary “cut” to the sergeant as he twisted back the gain with his other hand. He keyed the mike. “We’re here, Doctor,” he said in the same language. “Can you hear me all right?”

  “Not so loud, please!” the other voice hissed desperately through the receiver. “I have the bath running, but my guard is very close.”

  The agent dialed back on the transmitter’s output. “Can you hear now, Doctor?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes . . .” said the receiver, tinny but no longer a painful roar. “But go quickly, I am very nervous with this.”

  Kelly paused a moment to make sure the Vietnamese had finished speaking. “All right, Doctor,”the agent said, “listen and don’t speak until I say so. You must deliver this message to—” he paused. Did Hoang know Vlasov by the code name Kelly had been given? Hell, better discovery than misunderstanding.

  “You must deliver this message to Professor Vlasov tonight at the banquet. Tomorrow morning you are scheduled for a tour of the Institute for Nuclear Research near the Casbah. The signal will be either an explosion or a nearby traffic accident. This will be as soon as the Professor gets out of his car. A bomb or a crash, either one.” The timing on the truck shouldn’t be that close, but Kelly was afraid that the driver might get overanxious.

  He cleared his throat and continued, “At the signal, Vlasov is to run across the road, the Boulevard de la Victoire. People will probably be running or ducking under cover. There will be one man standing up across the street with a white coat over his arm. Vlasov is to make for that man as fast as possible. If he can look like he’s in a panic, so much the better.

  “Is that clear? You can speak now.”

  Briefly the only sound from the radio was the popping and hiss of the electrical sea which surrounds the planet, the archetype of the theoretical ether. Sergeant Rowe had slipped away, his leaving unnoticed in Kelly’s total concentration on the microphone in his hand. Then the speaker said, “I understand that, I will tell him. But what about me?”

  The agent blinked. “You’ll, ah—” he began. Kelly had not been interested in the arrangements already made with the Vietnamese physicist. Setting up a one-time net in Algiers had been plenty to occupy his imagination. Hoang Tanh was like the US Navy: necessary to the ultimate success of the mission, but out of Kelly’s own hands and therefore not to be worried over. Otherwise, you worked yourself into a complete and completely useless dither.

  Maybe, however, Kelly should have learned more about Hoang.

  “You’ll be handled by your regular control,” the agent said, adding with what he hoped was assurance, “The arrangements will be carried out to the letter. In fact, there’ll be a bonus for you.”

  That much Kelly could guarantee, even if it had to come out of his own pocket. Why the hell didn’t somebody warned him that Hoang would need his hand held?

  Because any control officer knows that, just like you don’t have to tell a radioman to key the mike before speaking, the back of Kelly’s brain told him. He hadn’t known it, because he didn’t have any goddam business—

  “No,” the radio was saying in southern-dialect Vietnamese. “I must come too this time. This is very big, yes? You must now give me a position in one of your universities—that is fair payment, is it not?”

  Christ on a crutch.

  Well, it probably was a fair deal; and yes, assuming Doctor Hoang had halfway reasonable credentials, the USG probably could find him a slot somewhere. . . . The Pentagon laid out a lot of grant money in the course of a year, enough to convince more credentials committees than not. But why in God’s name was Hoang springing it now?

  Or was it the first time the matter had been raised? “Ah, Doctor,” Kelly asked carefully, “what have you been told so far about provisions for you to defect?”

  “Told? Told nothing!” the voice spluttered through the atmospherics. “In good time, yes, they tell me, but stay a little longer. I have stayed long enough, I say! I have earned my reward!”

  “Yes, of course, and we’ve anticipated your request,” Kelly lied. “You will be taken out in Frankfurt, while you change planes. The German Federal Police will separate you from your, ah, bodyguard at Passport Control. You’ll be rushed straight to the American Consulate. You need do nothing—by telling me you want to come over, you’ve done everything necessary. Do you understand?”

  The agent’s grip on the microphone was tight with anger rather than tension. He forced his fingers to relax. You don’t get mad at guns that jam or cars that won’t start. It doesn’t change things, they’re just the way they are. And you don’t get mad at people who act like fools either, not unless it’s going to change things. What the hell, the plan as described might work—if Pedler and the boys back in Europe got on the stick. At least, it ought to keep Hoang happy until the snatch had been executed. Or at least attempted.

  The Vietnamese did not sound particularly happy, though, when he said, “I hear you. All right, I understand. And I will carry out my part.

  “Now I must go.”

  White noise from the speaker replaced the contact agent’s voice. Kelly shook his head wearily and cut the transmitter power. “We need to keep the tape recorder hooked to the receiver until all this is over,” he said, speaking indiscriminately toward Posner and Rowe—who must have returned. Presumably one or the other of the men could handle it. If they didn’t, the hell with it. . . .

  “No,” the agent said, aloud but to himself. Then, “Doug, got the recorder? I’ll hook it up myself.”

  The heavy reel to reel recorder fit comfortably beside the receiver on top of Posner’s desk. A length of coaxial cable bound them into a neat unit. Whenever a signal was received, the recorder would tape it and shut down again. Generally, since the pick-up was automatic, that meant that they would get a tape of the toilet flushing and perhaps the security man singing in the shower. There was an off-chance that the rig would function as a true bug and hear an important conversation; and a rather less improbable chance that Hoang would try to contact them again. The recorder made sense.

  Kelly had a splitting headache, compounded of the dry air and the smoke-filled meeting with the Kabyles the day before. Well, if it weren’t his sinuses, it might have been his prostate. . . . He turned from the recorder to the Defense Attaché. Posner’s smoking wasn’t helping a whole lot either, but it was the man’s own office. “Commander,” the agent said, “there’s a glitch with our contact—he wants to defect too.”

  Both the other men grunted in surprise. Kelly nodded. “Yeah, I about danced for joy myself when he dropped that one. I told him sure, it was already set up. The Germans’d take him away from his guard in Frankfurt, then zip, off to the States and Ivy League tenure. Or whatever the hell. Thing is—and it’s not that I’ll shoot myself if it doesn’t work out . . . but I did tell him that.”

  The agent looked from one of the military men to the other. He was embarrassed that it mattered to him that he had made what amounted to a promise. “Anyway, we need to get a cable out to Pedler to see if he can pull the deal off on pretty goddamned short notice. I’m not going to be able to handle it and check out the drop site during daylight. Can you, Commander?”

  Posner jetted smoke from both nostrils. “Yes,” he said, “yes, that’s reasonable enough.” He managed a smile at Kelly. “It’s even the sort of thing I imagined I might be doing when I transferred to the DIA. Which, God knows, very little else that’s going on is.”

  Kelly handed Posner the program disk. “Fine, sir. Here’s the code. And—ah, if you’d keep this on your person at all times, I’d appreciate it. Orders, of course.”

  As they closed the Attaché’s door behind them, the agent said, “Let’s take a look at that pouch before I forget it, Doug. Then we can haul it to the armory too.”

  The grenades in the second case were similar in size and shape to the previous
load of smoke bombs. The tops of these were painted white, however, in line with US practice for marking CS.

  Kelly drew out one of the heavy bombs and looked at it for a moment. “Got some Kleenex or a roll of toilet paper handy, Doug?” he asked.

  The sergeant shrugged and tossed over a box of tissues from his lower desk drawer.

  Carefully, the agent matted three tissues together. Then he unscrewed the fuse assembly from the grenade canister itself. The assembly was a slender tube that fit the length of the grenade’s axis. It contained the striker, fuse, and the black powder booster charge that actually ignited the filler and caused it to spew tear gas. Kelly stuffed the tissues down into the well to keep the filler where it belonged. Then, with another wad of tissue, he wiped the tube clean before dropping it into his side pocket.

  “We’ll bury this under a rose bush after dark,” he said with a grin, thumbing toward the defused canister. “Till then, let’s hope nobody knocks the thing over, or else you don’t use your office for a while. A long while. And now”—he bent over to take one end of the packing case—“let’s get this to the armory and ourselves to lovely Tipasa, resort of the best defecting physicists.”

  XXIII

  “I want you to take a look from up here,” said Sergeant Rowe, panting a little with the climb from the parking area. “Otherwise when you see the harbor itself, you’ll bitch. This isn’t much of a coast for fooling around with rubber boats, Tom.”

  “Hell, you can say that again,” Kelly muttered. “You mean this is a good area?”

  “Typical,” corrected the sergeant. “The harbor’s good, but you can’t really tell from this angle.”

  The cliff on which the Americans stood dropped eighty jagged feet to the Mediterranean. Tipasa’s Roman wall, four feet of rough stone in a concrete matrix, had ended just short of the edge from which they watched. Only the foundations remained, their massive construction belied by their state of total ruin. Over a kilometer to the west, another promontory completed the bay into which harbors had been cut ever since the Carthaginians settled here. Knowing that, and seeing the chop of the Mediterranean, Kelly appreciated how rare decent harbors were in North Africa.

  There was nothing like a beach at any point the agent could see, although the ground fell away along the southern edge of the bay and gave him a good view. Low cliffs, the corniche, alternated with jumbles of rock which stretched far out into the water. There the waves bubbled away from the ruddy stones like foam from blood-smeared teeth.

  “Now, I think this is going to work,” Rowe said. He was pleased at the impression the view had made on his companion. “But you’ve got to recognize that if you’re being extracted by boat, you’re pretty limited. Closer in there’s the beach at Chenona, but the buildings all around it are housing for government employees. And on the other side of the mountain, at Cherchell—” He pointed. A cone at least three thousand feet high stabbed abruptly from the coast just west of Tipasa. Clouds blurred its peak. “—there’s an even better beach. But there’s also an armor school, and no foreigner wants to get too close to that. So Tipasa’s pretty much the choice.”

  Kelly shook his head. “Damn,” he said, “you look at charts; and sure, there’s enough water to get a sub in close enough for a pick-up. Looking at those rocks down there, I—well, I sure hope they don’t scrape the bottom at any speed, because I’ll bet it doesn’t look any softer half a mile out than it does here.”

  “Well,” Rowe suggested cautiously, “the first thing is to get the rubber boat out half a mile, isn’t it? Let’s take a look at the harbor.”

  The modern city of Tipasa stretched somewhat farther south than had the ancient one, but its total occupied area appeared to be much smaller. Much of the area enclosed by the fallen walls was now meadow. Sergeant Rowe drove carefully back to the highway from the parking area east of the city.

  They were paralleling the foundations of the Roman wall. Kelly noticed that the grassy slope was littered with hollowed stone blocks. Each was more than five feet long and a foot in width and height. A few of the blocks still had their stone lids in place. “What the hell are they?” the agent asked. “They look like coffins.”

  “Right, sarcophagi,” the sergeant agreed as he turned onto the highway. “Nothing fancy, just the local stone squared and hollowed. Once in a while you’ll find a Chi-Rho cut on one end, but usually not even that. And they weren’t buried, just placed on the hillside outside the walls.”

  Kelly licked his lips. He did not reply. It would have made no difference to his plans if he had known the extraction point would be in the center of an arc of ancient graves.

  It did not make him like the situation any better, however.

  Just inside the ancient walls, the marked highway branched left and away from the bay. Rowe continued straight, toward the row of buildings that looked like a business district. The hundred yards of ground between the street and the sea was broken and overgrown. “Shall I drive all the way to the harbor?” the sergeant asked. “Or do you want me to park on the street for now? It’s not far to walk.”

  “No point in calling attention to ourselves,” Kelly decided. “Let’s walk.”

  Two blocks away, near the entrance to the excavated portion of ancient Tipasa, was a group of boys. One of them broke away and began running toward the two men. Rowe locked up the car and the men walked seaward. The breeze was mild.

  There was no chop to speak of here to mark the brilliant, ultramarine water. Nonetheless, frequent tongues of foam reminded Kelly that there were rocks near enough to surface to gnaw the bottom out of his boat. He leaned forward. “Christ,” he said. There was a beach of sorts after all. It was narrow and of pebbles rather than sand, but it would do . . . except that it was a good ten feet below the sharp lip of the corniche.

  The boy came running up to the Americans. “Watch your car,” he panted in English. American cars were identifiable and virtually unique to the national community here, it seemed.

  “No,” said the sergeant harshly.

  “A dinar,” said Kelly. He flipped the aluminum coin high in the air, then repocketed it with a smile.

  “Two dinars,” said the boy in pleased surprise.

  Kelly pointed to the car. “Watch it well,” he said. After only a moment’s hesitation, the boy began to saunter back to the Volare.

  Looking out over the crystalline sea, the agent said, “First, we can’t afford even the tiny chance that he’d let the air out of our tires. Second, it gets him away from us quicker than trying to ignore him. And third”—he looked at Rowe and grinned—“I sort of like kids. But don’t let word of that get out or I’ll lose my all-star bastard rating.”

  Rowe cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “well. Where we want to go is back to the east. We’ll drive it when we put the boat in the water, but for now. . . .”

  The ground just beyond the corniche was driveable, though it was not in any sense a proper road. Absinthe bushes—wormwood—must have been planted ornamentally at some time, perhaps millennia in the past. The bushes grew profusely, their white-dusted leaves shading the rust-red native stone. Ahead, foam and rocks shared a deep cavity which the sea washed but did not hold. Closer yet, there was a trench cut in the—

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Kelly said. “It’s a staircase cut down to the beach!”

  “As requested,” the sergeant agreed. “One beach, with access. And as open as all this is”—he waved his arm in a southerly arc, taking in the blocks of stone and scrub to the nearest buildings—“nobody can see you launch the boat. The cliff hides you to anyone on the road until you’re out beyond the breakwater. Okay?”

  Kelly clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “You’re the best damn travel agent I’ve ever met,” he said. “You know, I was worried that the local support I’d get would . . . leave a lot to be desired. But I was wrong, at least about you. . . . I’ll tell the world!”

  The sergeant blushed and looked away. “Well,” he
said, “glad it’s okay. We’d better take a quick look at the safe house now and stash the gear. Hope it does as well as the sea did for you.”

  Their car was visible around the edge of the nearest building. It would have been half a block shorter to cut straight to the vehicle, but the waste area was a tangle of uncertain footing. They retraced their steps along the sea front instead.

  Kelly noticed a simple shaft monument. He had ignored it before when his mind was on other things. “Just a second,” he said. There was a small bronze plaque set in the concrete face of the shaft. Translating its French inscription aloud for the sergeantbenefit, the agent read, “‘Sacred to the memory of six sailors, their names and nationalities unknown, who washed ashore here on March 6, 1942. Rest in peace.’”

  There was a small cross incised beneath the inscription. Someone had made repeated efforts to gouge away the relic of Christianity. The message had been scarred as well.

  They walked on. “Interesting,” Kelly said in a neutral voice. “There’s a political statement made with a chisel. Made by somebody who was probably illiterate, at least in French; but he knew that defacing crosses was a patriotic thing to do. . . . It doesn’t give me a lot of hope for world peace and understanding.”

  After a moment he added, “A guy in Paris convinced me I wasn’t going to be doing the same goddam thing myself. He’d better have been right.”

  The house Commander Posner had managed to rent on short notice was several blocks south of the harbor, near the present edge of town. It had a courtyard wall and a wooden gate which Kelly unlocked to pass the station wagon.

  The building was not prepossessing. The plaster had cracked from much of the facade and lay scattered in the courtyard. Patches of discoloration beneath the windows, and the areas of bare concrete elsewhere, combined to give the house the look of something in wartime camouflage. It would serve though.

  “The phone’s connected and the electricity,” Rowe said as the two men wrestled the boat out of the back of the wagon. “Other than that, it’s pretty much what you see. Concrete and dirt.” He kicked at the baked ground. It was as bare and as refractory as the walls of the building.