Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “I—” the sergeant began.

  “Sergeant Rowe has already delivered the grenades,” said the Defense Attaché sharply.

  “Yeah, I put them in the trunk of Mustapha’s car,” Rowe said with a glance between the other two men. “He parks on the grounds when he’s on duty. That way there wasn’t anything happening except on”—his smile was wry—“diplomatic premises. Just like I cancome and help today.”

  “Tell the truth,” the agent said, facing toward the window but not seeing any of the things toward which his eyes were trained, “I thought I’d borrow one of those Smiths for the morning. Just to have in my trouser pocket.” He slapped his pants, shapeless corduroys of a blue as drab as the brown of his jacket. “Not one chance in a thousand it’d make any difference, but . . . but then, it doesn’t do any harm sitting there if it’s not needed, does it?”

  “No,” said Commander Posner. “You can’t have a pistol.”

  Kelly turned to the taller man. The first touch of conflict was clearing pathways in his brain that the night before had clogged. “I can be trusted with a revolver, Commander,” he said in a voice with a rasp in it. “I’ve never shot anybody who didn’t need shooting.”

  “You can’t be trusted with an embassy gun,” the Defense Attaché said on a rising inflection. He shook his right index and middle fingers in Kelly’s direction. The cigarette he held jerked its trail of smoke in nervous angles. “I can’t tell you you can’t go armed,” the officer continued. “It’s an act of war, you know, an act of war—but I can’t help that. What I can stop is the notion that you’ll be found with a weapon straight out of embassy stores. And if you think you can ruin me for that, then you go ahead and do it. I swear, I’ll make the whole business public!”

  “For Christ’s sake!” the agent shouted, “How the hell many Smith and Wessons do you think’ve been made, anyway? A couple million? Unless the damned USG gives the Algerians a list of serial numbers, how do you think it’s going to be traced anywhere?”

  “I said no and I meant no,” the officer repeated flatly. “You’re responsible for planning the operation, I’m well aware of that. If your plans require that you be armed from the embassy arsenal, then you should have said so in time to have it cleared by the competent authorities. What you’re suggesting is contrary to all the regulations under which those weapons are stored, ‘Defensive Purposes Only’ does not include using them for kidnapping and murder on the streets of a friendly power.”

  The veins in Kelly’s head were pounding him hard enough to make him nauseous. Sergeant Rowe put a hand on the agent’s arm and said, “Ah, Tom . . . ? I’ve still got the packing cases from those grenades in my personal car. You’ve got a minute—come down and give me a hand getting them up the incinerator, will you?”

  Kelly blinked. The sergeant’s thumb squeezed his biceps. “Yeah, I guess I can handle that,” the agent said, surprised at the apparent calm of his own words.

  Rowe gestured toward the dingy trench coat Kelly would be carrying to mark him for Professor Vlasov to home on. “Might bring that too, sir; it’s still cool.”

  The commander’s face registered only relief when the other men left.

  In an undertone as the door latched shut behind them, Kelly asked, “You want to tell me what this is all about now?”

  “When we get to the car, sir,” the sergeant whispered back.

  “Look, you weren’t just afraid I was going to deck the sanctimonious son of a bitch, were you?” the agent pressed. “I wouldn’t dirty my hands.”

  “At the car,” Rowe repeated.

  The sergeant owned a Plymouth sedan. At an appropriate charge, embassy mechanics and stores could be used to repair the personal vehicles of mission members; but that was a benefit only if the personal vehicles were similar to those of the mission fleet. Rowe unlocked his passenger door and the glove compartment while the agent waited with a frown. The white walls of the Chancery and the Villa Inshallah were glowing with the coming dawn. Details were still indistinguishable.

  “Here,” said the sergeant. He handed Kelly a box about two inches square and an inch deep.

  “Jesus,” whispered the agent, his hand accepting the unexpected density of what it had received. Across the top of the green paper tape sealing the box was the legend:

  25 CARTOUCHES DE 11,43 MM

  POUR PISTOLETS

  “Didn’t want to carry it loaded in the car,” Rowe explained as he walked around to the trunk. “And that’s all the ammo I’ve got, I’m afraid.”

  “Not that I’ll really need a gun . . .” the agent said in a low voice, his eyes scanning the barred, black windows of the flanking buildings. “I don’t know, I’ve been antsy, real antsy the past couple days. It’s not—”

  The trunk lid swung up. The sergeant tugged aside a folded blanket—“Jesus,” Kelly repeated. “Doug, I don’t want to get you in trouble. Does Posner know you’ve got this?” The agent ran the fingers of his right hand over the square, gray receiver of the silenced sub-machine gun the soldier had just displayed.

  “Oh, no,” Rowe said, “but in my last post—Qatar, when they were having the trouble, you know—I told my CO that I was worried about my wife having to be alone in the house. . . .” He smiled reminiscently. “The Colonel was a Marine. It was a different world from working with Commander Posner . . . but I told him what I wanted and he signed the paperwork, ‘Required by serviceman on active duty,’ you know the drill.”

  Kelly turned the weapon over with one hand. He was careful not to raise it above level of the trunk well or into a position that could be seen from any of the windows of the flanking buildings. It was as square and functional as a traffic sign; and like the sign, it was stamped in the main out of sheet steel. The bolt enclosed most of the barrel, so that the whole gun was only 10 1/2 inches long when its wire stock was telescoped back against the receiver.

  The silencer almost doubled the length.

  “Who made the can?” Kelly asked, touching the inch and five-eighths tube that had been Parkerized the same shade of grays as the weapon itself. “It isn’t a Sionics.”

  “Better,” said the sergeant, grinning with pride.

  The agent turned to look at Rowe directly. “If it’s better than Sionics,” he said, “it’s pretty damn good. Whose product?”

  “LARAND,” explained the sergeant through his smile. “Instead of baffles, it’s filled with thick washers woven from stainless steel wire. Mitch WerBell did a fantastic job with the Sionics, but I don’t think there’ll ever be a machine that’s perfect.” His face sobered. “You know, the gun’s one of the lot the government tried to confiscate when WerBell left MAC. I couldn’t believe the way they’ve been persecuting somebody who’s served this country as long as he has.”

  The agent tossed his coat into the trunk, then removed it with the weapon hidden securely in its folds. “It’s like Kennedy’s ghost-writer said, Doug,” Kelly remarked. “‘Ask not what your country can do for you.’ Absolutely right. The real question is what your country can do to you if somebody sitting on his ass in DC decides it’s a good idea. Somebody figured WerBell had spent long enough in clandestine ops that they wanted to be real sure he was under control . . . and framing him into a three-year fall in Atlanta seemed about as good a way as the next to take him out of circulation.” Kelly patted the sergeant’s shoulder with his free hand. “See why I’ve spent the past five years in Europe? Maybe I’m crazy, but—it still seems like it was a pretty good idea.”

  Sergeant Rowe thumped the trunk lid down. “Well,” he said toward the car, “I just don’t like to think the USG treats its people that way, I suppose.”

  “And your boss doesn’t like to think the USG treats friendly countries the way I’m about to treat this one,” Kelly agreed. “The world might be a better place if either one of you were right, I suppose.” He turned back toward the Chancery door, his arm guiding the sergeant; but before the agent actually stepped forward, he paused and sa
id, “Seriously, Doug—this could be trouble like you wouldn’t believe. Maybe—”

  “Tom, listen,” the sergeant said. He looked older and more certain of himself than Kelly had seen him look before. “The commander says I don’t have a black passport so I can’t get involved in anything illegal on Algerian soil. Like you say, he’s my boss, it’s an order. OK. But this is something you think you need and I happen to have. Don’t you come all chickenshit over me and talk about regs and trouble. It’s my decision, I’m an adult, and by God I’m a soldier in the US Army!” The corners of Rowe’s eyes crinkled again with humor. “Beside, if anybody but you and me learn about this gun today, you’re in a lot worse trouble than I am.”

  Kelly clapped the younger man on the shoulder again. His headache was almost gone. “That’s nothing to the trouble the folks on the muzzle end are in,” he said as they walked toward the door. “Now look, you tell the commander my tummy’s acting up and I’m going to be in the john for a while. And that’s God’s truth, because there isn’t any fast way to load twenty-five rounds without stripper clips that I don’t have.”

  XXVII

  With the stall door bolted and his trousers around his ankles for verisimilitude, Kelly began to load the borrowed weapon. The French ammunition had an abnormal appearance. The bullets and cartridge cases were of the same, unusually pale shade of brass. The agent wondered briefly whether the bullets might not be solid gilding metal as some French rifle loadings had been, instead of having a jacket of the harder metal over a lead core.

  Better his mind should wander that way than that it should fill with images of the Ambassador’s wife, her nipples shrunken to black spikes, beckoning toward him. . . .

  Like the Uzi’s, the Ingram’s magazine slipped into the hand-grip as if it were an ordinary autoloading pistol. That put the weight of the ammo in the best location and permitted the off-hand to find the shooting hand easily in the dark to reload. That wouldn’t matter now, the Lord knew, since Kelly had less than the full 30-round capacity of one magazine. . . . And anyway, this was just a security blanket. An eight-pound, .45 caliber, security blanket. . . .

  By the time Kelly had finished loading the magazine, the ball of his thumb hurt from pressing each round down against the follower spring. The magazine lips had rubbed into the skin in parallel grooves. Part of the cost of doing business, like crazy fears and a tendency to duck when a car backfired. . . .

  Kelly slipped the magazine into the butt well and rapped it home with the heel of his hand. Only then did he unlock the bolt by twisting the knurled knob on top of the receiver. He did not draw the knob back to cock the weapon. No safety in the world could keep a sub-machine gun’s bolt from jouncing forward if the weapon dropped the wrong way. The Ingram had no firing pin, only a raised tit on the bolt face that fired the weapon as soon as the breech slammed closed.

  Besides, Kelly was not going to need the gun, not really . . . any more than he needed Annamaria Gordon, so supple that her heels could stroke his buttocks in time with his thrusts within her. . . .

  His headache was back. Kelly methodically cut the ammunition box into quarter-inch strips, then flushed the cardboard down the toilet. Don’t make mistakes just because you feel like death warmed over, no. . . . Adjusting the coat over his right arm to conceal the weapon, Kelly stepped out of the stall just in time to catch the restroom door as someone opened it from the outside.

  Sergeant Rowe looked in. His worried expression smoothed as soon as he saw the agent had the gun covered. “Ah, the commander—” he began.

  Posner himself looked around the door jamb. “It’s getting later, Mr. Kelly,” he said, “and I thought I’d see if you were about ready to go.” He seemed inclined to be pleasant rather than gloating as a result of what he had been told was the human weakness of Kelly’s bowels.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be, Commander,” the agent said hoarsely. “And I hope to God that’s ready enough.”

  XXVIII

  “Beep,” went the receiver as its loop antenna rotated slowly. “Beep beep beepbeep-beep-bee-beebee—”

  Harry Warner turned the volume down. “Well,” he said to his two subordinates, “it works when it’s attachéd, too. I’d breathe a lot easier if we could be sure they’d be using the wagon and not one of their personal cars, though.”

  Syd Westram had a scholarly forehead which he knew was as prelude to his father’s baldness by age 40. His expression was always gloomy, and it fit the present circumstances perfectly. “They should have sent us more tracers,” he said. He glared at the receiver’s directional antenna. “We could have put one on each of their cars.”

  “You could have put one on each of their cars,” retorted Don Mayer. “Look, I can understand why we had to wait to the last minute to save the battery life. That doesn’t mean I wanted to get caught by that Kelly, planting a tracer under the bumper of his car.”

  “All right, it’s an embarrassment,” Westram said, “but the worst thing that could come of it is we lost our tracer. After all, what can Kelly do? Complain to the Ambassador?”

  The Station Chief glanced down at the red-bordered file on his desk. He had not shown its full contents to either of his subordinates. “Weil,” he said, “maybe Don’s right. This Kelly. . . .”

  As Warner’s voice trailed off, the muted tone of the tracer slowed also. Westram strode quickly to the window and peered through the gap in the blinds. “It’s the station wagon,” he reported tensely. “Kelly’s in it with Posner driving. I don’t see Rowe, but they’re the main ones.”

  “All right, boys, you’d better get moving yourselves,” said Harry Warner. “I’ll give you directions, and the second channel of these ought to buzz when you get within fifty feet or so of the tracer.” He slid the two walkie-talkies an inch closer to the edge of his desk to call attention to them. “Remember, keep these plugged into the chargers except when you’re using them—and for God’s sake, don’t walk off and leave them in your cars. They’re fifteen hundred bucks apiece. It’ll come out of your next check if you lose one, I swear.”

  The two operatives picked up the hand units with the care which the threat demanded. “Right,” Mayer said slowly. “Well, I hope you can vector us onto them with the direction finder. I never trained to follow people in a car.”

  The Station Chief nodded. “This will work,” he said, “Your own receivers are just for searching an area if they park. Call me when you’ve got their car in sight.”

  As the others started to walk out to their vehicles, Warner added, “Oh, boys?” Mayer and Westram turned. “This one is going to work,” their superior said. “The first word to Langley about what those uniformed twits are up to is going to come from this station. Understood?”

  Both men nodded. As they walked through the door, Mayer began to whistle under his breath. The tune was the first few bars of the “Dead March” from “Saul.”

  XXIX

  “It is very good of you to permit us,” the little Vietnamese colonel was saying in his accented English.

  “We are always ready to join our socialist brothers,” said Colonel Korchenko with only a perfunctory smile. “Professor Vlasov wished to spend some more time with your Doctor Tanh.” And besides, Korchenko had come with instructions from Moscow to help with security arrangements for the Vietnamese physicist. It was desirable to keep up the fiction that the nuclear devices to be emplaced on the Chinese-Vietnamese border were of indigenous Vietnamese manufacture. A Vietnam without a single known nuclear physicist would embarrass the plan.

  The tall KGB colonel glanced toward the door of the Ambassador’s residence. The physicists should already have come out by now. The circular drive was crowded with waiting men and cars. One sedan would be filled with KGB personnel. Two more would transport a mix of lower-ranking scientists and more security men. The fourth car was the Ambassador’s own armored limousine. In it would ride Professor Vlasov, under the care of Korchenko and the colonel’s personal aide and driver.


  And with them, at Vlasov’s insistence and Moscow’s prodding, would be Hoang Tanh and this absurd little colonel who stank of fish sauce.

  Even Nguyen had to bend to see into the low-slung Citröen. Schwartz and Babroi were seated in the front bucket seats. They stared back without interest. “A very beautiful car,” Nguyen said appreciatively. “Our Ambassador tells me he is trying to get a new car for the mission here, but Hanoi will not approve it.”

  Korchenko smiled patronizingly. “Yes, well,” he said. “Foreign missions always pretend they need more glitter to impress their opposite numbers.” Which, of course, explained the limousine, even though Ambassador Miuseck was not the head of the Russian mission to Algeria. In normal fashion, the chief of the KGB Residency—in this case Kalugin, the Consul—had such real authority as Moscow chose to delegate. The Ambassador was still permitted to glitter, however; and the car was useful for functions like this one, squiring around dignitaries from home.

  And what the fuck were the scientists still doing inside? Having a circle jerk?

  “You have two radios?” asked Nguyen, still bent to study the interior of the Citröen. The big pistol made the tail of the Vietnamese officer’s coat jut out absurdly.

  Colonel Korchenko glanced down. “Oh, the large one’s for communication with the other cars and the base unit here,” he said. “That other thing’s a toy of Babroi’s own—he picked it up in Tokyo last year. It’s a”—Korchenko paused to get the technical term correct—“a programmable synthesized scanner. Babroi likes to listen in on local radio traffic wherever we go. He says it keeps him alert, so that he never goes on the air himself unless the signal will be scrambled.”