Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  But before the colonel’s anger could find words, the speaker of the two-way radio bleated, “We see them! We’ve got them for sure!”

  XXXIII

  Islam’s day ends at sundown Friday. The downtown traffic was therefore roughly what was to be expected in an American city on Saturday morning. Many of the cars were filled with shoppers and families headed out of town for the weekend. The paved square surrounding the tawny, Romanesque pile of the Ketchouan Mosque was thick with pedestrians, many of them foreigners. Kelly was momentarily more concerned with the pedestrians than with vehicles, so only the squeal of tires warned him that a Volga sedan on an intercepting course from the Rue Bab el Oued was trying to ram them.

  With one hand, Kelly slammed the gear selector into low, cursing the car for having a slush box instead of a standard transmission. His left hand was spinning the wheel to the right. The agent did not brake. His tires had limited traction. At this point, he needed cornering force a lot worse than he did braking. Broadsiding around an acute corner scrubbed off enough speed anyway.

  They might not have made it, but the lighter Russian vehicle brushed the rear of the Volare. It hit with enough force to crumple sheet metal and keep the back end of the station wagon from breaking away as it had started to do. Vlasov jolted forward. Posner’s head rapped against the side window. The man in the back seat of the Volga was jolted badly enough that only Kelly realized that the Plymouth was being fired at.

  The agent kept his foot in it, winding the sluggish engine to five grand in low before he let it shift. They were barreling up the center of the Rue Aboulker, past the only Protestant church in downtown Algiers. Twice Kelly used the Volare’s bulk to muscle a lighter car into the curb. As they blasted through the Place Touri, between the National Theatre and the Square Port Said, a city bus took their right headlight out in a glancing blow.

  Kelly was pretty sure that the Volga just behind them now was not the car they had bumped. It would have taken longer than that to get the first car backed off the sidewalk into which it had spun with the impact. But that meant that there were at least two cars in immediate pursuit, the reasons did not matter now, and Kelly had to shake them goddam fast or it was a question only of who tortured him to death. The KGB might hand him over to the National Police, or they might keep him and do the job themselves.

  “Posner,” the agent said, “you’ve got some weapons here, right?” He did not look away from the road.

  The Defense Attaché’s forehead was swelling under the pressure cut it had taken when he bounced against the window. “Of course I don’t, you idiot,” he said, squinting as he tried to squeeze the pain away with his palm. “What in God’s name is going on?”

  “The aliens are going to kill me,” Professor Vlasov muttered. It must have been coincidence, because he could not have understood the question in English.

  The Volare’s mill was no hemi, but they still had a better power to weight ratio than Volgas loaded with three or four big men. What was keeping the Russians in the race, and indeed on their bumper, was the fact that the American car cleared a path through obstacles like a Rome Plow in brush.

  Something had to change suddenly or it was going to change for the worse.

  “Hang on!” Kelly shouted. Instead of speeding through the Place Emir Abdel Kader, he slewed to the right, then counter-steered to bring the Volare out at right angles to its original course. They were squealing down the Rue Morris, using all of the sidewalk on the left side of the street to do it without exceeding a 15° turn—all the soft tires would allow.

  The four corners of the square between the central and circumferential vehicle ways were grassed and set off from the pavement by curbs and slack chains. The driver of the leading Volga tried to follow Kelly. He had less time to react and an even lower threshold of control. The Russian exceeded that threshold, trying to hurl his overloaded car into a corner that it could not have negotiated empty at the speed it was traveling. In panic, the driver touched his brakes. Their limits exceeded, traction and cornering force dropped instantly to zero.

  The Volga slid off the pavement. It maintained exactly the angle and attitude it had when the brakes were applied. When the left-side wheels hit the curb around the green space, the tires stripped off and the car overturned sideways. It rolled three times before coming to rest on its side, against a utility pole. Gas, oil, and radiator fluid pooled in the street. There was no fire until one of the Russians tried to kick open his door with a steel-shod boot.

  Two more black Volgas skidded across the far end of the Rue Morris, four hundred feet away and no cross streets between.

  They had probably come from the Palais du Gouvernment, less than a block away. That mattered, because it meant they would not be stuffed with armed security men. Kelly kicked down the emergency brake with his left foot, locking the rear wheels. He cramped the power steering hard left. The back end broke away and the station wagon swapped ends with a suddenness that cracked Posner against the window a second time. Vlasov’s considerable weight slid against the Attaché’s hips.

  The Volare had been at less than 30 mph when the Russian cars appeared in front of them. Now Kelly was braking to a dead stop, using a steady pressure that laid rubber on the street but kept the tires rotating enough to preserve traction. The air in the Volare stank with their own burning tires and brake pads.

  The driver of one of the blocking cars reacted with an initiative that would have been commendable had it turned out better. When the Russian saw the Volare had turned in its own traffic lane and was about to speed off in the direction from which it had come, he turned his own wheel to follow. The Volga accelerated out of the crosswise blocking position.

  The bootlegger turn had slammed all three men in the American car against their seat back. When the car momentarily stopped, Kelly reached away from the steering wheel with both hands. His right slid the selector back into low range while his left popped the emergency brake release. The agent tweaked the wheel just enough to keep the tires off the streaks of slick, fresh rubber they had laid on the pavement in stopping.

  A Volga with a crumpled fender, the car that had made the initial pass at them near the Ketchouan Mosque, turned onto the Rue Morris. The gouting pyre of the leading Russian vehicle marked the intersection for its consort. A man with eyebrows that met in a black bar was leaning out of the passenger side. He fired a pistol at the Volare. Kelly cursed and steered directly toward the Russian car.

  There was nothing of the kamikaze in the agent’s action, nothing of patriotic sacrifice and noble self-immolation. It was berserk bloodlust, pure and simple, the rage that had sent the Kellys of a thousand years before across the beach at Clontarf, as naked as the axes in their hands. As the armored Vikings broke that day in bloody ruin, so the KGB driver, neither coward nor incompetent, violated training and orders. He snapped his car to the right, out of the path of the great square grill. The Russian tires squealed but the driver had not lost control, not really, until his car slammed head-on into the Volga that had begun to pursue from its blocking position.

  At the moment, Kelly did not particularly care what might be going on behind him. The latest brush with a Russian car had stripped chrome from the Volare’s left side and replaced it with smudged black paint. None of the tires were rubbing and there were no other immediate mechanical problems.

  Ammunition was exploding within the first wrecked Volga. It was harmless enough without a gun barrel to channel the energy, just bits of metal spitting and whining like bees and no more dangerous.

  The smoke rending the clear sky in whorls from the flame tips was as black as what spewed from the ovens at Dachau.

  “What’s the fastest route to Tipasa from here?” Kelly asked. He turned onto the Rue Larbi again. He swung as widely around the balefire as the street’s width allowed.

  XXXIV

  When the Citröen’s windows were rolled down, the wail of sirens made it difficult to speak in a normal voice and still be he
ard. Babroi had locked the scanner onto the channel the Americans were using. Otherwise the car would have been flooded by the sudden torrent of emergency traffic in Arabic which none of the four occupants understood.

  A squad of troops in red berets diverted the limousine a block west of the Place Emir Abdel Kader. The pall of smoke beyond was the visual counterpart of the sirens. Before the radio in Car Four went permanently silent, it had transmitted the sound of rending metal.

  Schwartz turned left in obedience to the directions waved by the muzzle of an automatic rifle. Korchenko cursed under his breath but said nothing. “Pull up here,” suggested Babroi. “I’ll run over on foot and see what happened.”

  The driver glanced uncertainly at his superior. “Yes, that’s a good idea,” the colonel said abruptly. His face became fractionally less grim. “Who knows—maybe they collided with the American car and all of them are dead.”

  “Syd,” said the scanner. “I’m getting a clear direction.” The occupants of the limousine held their breath. “They’re heading south and pretty fast, from the way I’m having to turn the antenna to keep it on them. What’s your location?”

  Colonel Korchenko put a hand over the back of his seat needlessly to keep his aide from getting out of the car. All of them, even Schwartz who did not speak English, waited like snipers.

  “Look, I’m down by the train station, Harry,” said the American with the mobile unit. “But what do you mean by south? There’s a whole desert out there.”

  “Dammit, Syd, you know I can’t give you more than a direction from here,” said the voice of “Harry,” “Turn south and we’ll trust to luck.”

  “Harry, this isn’t going to work,” Syd’s voice responded. “Look, I think I’d better go find Don. He may be in real trouble.”

  “God dammit, Westram, this is a direct order! The car we want is going south and you’re as far north as you can get without falling into the harbor! Now, get off your duff and head south!”

  “Acknowledged.” The voice from the scanner was cold and formal. “Proceeding south to the Malika and then south on it until ordered otherwise. Mobile One, out.”

  “From here they must be intending to take National One,” said a voice. Again it was an instant before Korchenko realized the Vietnamese behind him was speaking. Again also, the colonel’s flash of anger was quenched by the reasonableness of Nguyen’s plan and the fact that he at least had some plan. Like the puzzled CIA operative, Korchenko could only think that the Sahara was a big place.

  “We’ll follow,” Nguyen continued. “Tell your driver to turn right, then right again at the Rue Mellan Ali, that seems as good a way as any. If we do not catch up with them before they reach National 38, we’ll turn right anyway. They were trying to go west originally, before we headed them off. Likely they will try to go west again when they are out of the city.” He paused. “It is some chance; and if you will just bring in the Algerian authorities, a very good chance.”

  Korchenko gave his orders in crisp, commanding Russian. Schwartz slid the Citröen back into traffic like a shark joining a school of mackerel. The colonel picked up the two-way radio again. He had no intention of bringing in the locals. In the end, that would require explanations at the ministerial level. The colonel’s superiors were not going to be pleased with events in Algiers. They would be even less pleased if the matter were not somehow kept in the family.

  But at Blida, there was a training cadre of three hundred Soviet troops. They had both ground vehicles and helicopters available from stores being supplied to the Polisarios. Those troops could be fanned across possible escape routes, looking for an American station wagon. With luck, they would be able to strike a more direct blow for the safety of Mother Russia than anyone had expected.

  Korchenko began giving instructions to the operator on the base unit in the embassy. The troops would find Vlasov again, that was almost certain. The Americans with the Professor clearly did not know their own personnel had put a tracer on them.

  But the colonel very much hoped all those involved would be captured without injury. He wanted to conduct their interrogations himself, and he wanted them to be in good physical condition.

  When he began.

  XXXV

  On the outskirts of Birkhadem, ten kilometers from the center of Algiers, construction vehicles had blocked one lane of a bridge. Traffic on National Highway 1 stopped abruptly, then resumed in fits and starts. A flagman using a T-shirt on a pole directed clumps of cars in alternating directions like beads on an asphalt wire. Two National Policemen leaned against a house wall close enough to the road that Commander Posner could have touched them as the Volare halted for the third time. Posner was unlikely to do so. He sat so rigidly in his seat that his front-facing eyes seemed not to blink.

  Kelly put the transmission in neutral so that the radiator fan would run. The water temperature was already higher than he liked to see it at idle. He leaned past his companions for a glimpse of the Algerian policemen. The roof of the car still hid their faces. The black leather suits must have been warm, but only one of the men had even bothered to unzip his tunic as far as the belt that slashed across it. The cross-belt supported his pistol holster and mounted his star-burst badge. The agent could hear only enough of the Algerians’ conversation to be sure that they were not speaking a language he knew. From their gestures and cheerful volubility, though, Kelly was pretty sure that they were laughing at the condition of the American car.

  The flagman waved, a circular gesture in time with the beat of the transistor radio in his left hand. Kelly put the car in gear and followed the vehicles ahead of him around the back of a truck loaded with sections of concrete culvert. “You know,” he said in French, “I’d really like to know how the KGB had us spotted but the Algerians themselves could care less.”

  “This is all insane,” the Defense Attaché muttered with his eyes closed. “To die for my country, well, I swore my oath. But to die only to harm and humiliate the United States”—he faced Kelly to glare at him past the disinterested Russian—“I should never have come, I should have resigned.”

  “We’re not dead yet,” the agent remarked mildly.

  “Those aren’t KGB,” Professor Vlasov said. “They’re the aliens who want to kill me.” He sounded more impersonal than was to be expected from a man contemplating his imminent murder.

  “Professor,” Kelly snapped, sick to death of the counterpoint of disaster from his passengers, “I can’t swear what language the people after us were talking, but the cars they drove were made in Smolensk, not Mars. And I’ll need a hell of a good reason before I believe this”—he fumbled between his seat and the side panel—“was done by a ray gun and not a Makarov.” Kelly found what he was after, the left wing mirror which he had wrenched off as they sped south from the Place Emir Abdel Kader, Angrily, he dropped the mirror in Vlasov’s lap.

  All the bullet had left was the chromed shield, and even that with a puckered hole in it. The glass and the thin metal that backed it lay in shards somewhere on the Rue Morris. From the direction of the impact, the shot had been fired in the instants that Kelly and the Russian sedan were headed straight toward one another.

  Less emotionally, his eyes still on his driving, the agent said, “I’m not worried about dents in the sheet metal, not the way traffic is in Algiers. . . . But I sure hope we didn’t pick up any more bullet holes besides this one. I’d hate to have had to explain that to the police.”

  The Russian turned the mirror shell in his hand, closing the bullet hole momentarily with the tip of one finger. As Kelly had said, it was about the right size for a jacketed 9-mm bullet to have made in light metal; though there was no real way to deduce a brand of weapon from a bullet hole. “Ah, well,” Vlasov said tiredly, “you think I am mad also, do you? Well, I have gotten used to that from my colleagues, from the officials I have tried to talk to. I say, ‘My conversations are being listened to, I’m being followed.’ And of course they think me mad, becaus
e the KGB follows everyone, listens to everyone, doesn’t it?” He waved his hand parenthetically, adding, “Everyone like me, who knows things that our enemies would wish to learn.”

  Commander Posner looked at Vlasov with more interest than approval. “You mean ex-enemies,” he said.

  Kelly could not see Vlasov’s eyes when the Russian turned to stare at the Attaché. No one, however, could mistake the chill in Vlasov’s voice as he repeated, “Enemies!” More gently, the older man went on, “But human enemies, you see. We have known many of these, we Russians, from East and West. We will deal with you as we dealt with Hitler, with Napoleon, with the Khans. Time and courage . . . we will deal with you. But these others, who can say?”

  Kelly knew he had to defuse the conversation fast. Though he had no desire to hear a nut expound on the subject of his nuttiness, he said, “Ah, why do you think these aliens are after you, Professor Vlasov?”

  The Russian turned around. “Oh,” he said, “for the same reason everyone else is after me—you, the Kommission, yes. . . .” He juggled the mirror in his palm so that light danced on the chrome. “Unscientific, was I not? To assign causes without inspecting the data . . . but still, I am sure that they must have informed the KGB, they like to work through humans, I believe, it keeps their true role hidden. . . .”

  “Go on, what purpose, then?” Posner interrupted needlessly. At least he wasn’t trying to rake the scientist over the coals for inadequate US patriotism. They had too many miles yet to go to spend them wrangling.

  “Why, the beam device,” Vlasov said in genuine surprise. “The focusing lens, really, the principle. They did not tell you, your people?”