Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “We know a little, but we’re not scientists. Professor,” Kelly said with a smile that had time now to be sad. There was no time to reflect when your life depended on keeping the muzzle down and killing the other bastard first.

  Vlasov studied the agent with more interest and a touch of respect. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I have seen that. I too was not always a scientist, you know, Mr. American.”

  Kelly looked the defector in the face. “All I know about your present work,” he said, “is that I’m told you’re respected by the front rank of scientists. Well and good . . . but Professor, I can see your empty sleeve myself, and I need no briefing book to tell me why you are to be respected for that.”

  The Russian smiled broadly. “Come,” he said, “I have already defected. You do not need to stroke me any more.” He looked out the windshield again. The landscape was undistinguished. Even plants in the gardens near the road looked dusty. They had driven through the initial ridge of the Atlas Range which pinned Algiers against its gulf. The reverse slopes now rose abruptly to the right as they followed the highway west.

  “You want to know why they pursue me, these aliens that you do not believe in, eh?” continued the Professor. “I think because they will be coming to Earth in great numbers soon, they plan. And if Earth is protected by weapons that kill fifty targets with a single shot, then their fleet, their Armada”—he smiled at the Spanish word —“will come no closer to Earth than we, its inhabitants, choose.” Vlasov’s smile slumped like wax in a fire. “No closer than you, the inhabitants of Earth who are Americans, choose . . . but I had no choice, my own, my fellow children of my Russian soil, can not turn my formulae into weapons. Not quickly enough.” The defector swallowed. He looked at neither of the men flanking him. “I pray that we are in enough time now. There is very little grace remaining, I am afraid.”

  The notion intrigued Kelly enough to cause him to treat it seriously. He asked, “Aren’t these, ah, weapons pretty vulnerable themselves, Professor? I mean, as I understand it, you’re just hanging a bomb up in orbit with a lot of electronics around it. Or do you plan to armor them or whatever?”

  Vlasov seemed to have forgotten that he was on the verge of certain death. “Vulnerable, you say?” he responded. “Yes, in the sense that any object in space would be equally vulnerable to another. These beams, these particle beams have no limiting range, you see, not if the focus if tight enough—as it can be. They command the Solar System; and beyond, even, if targets could be found for them. So our satellites could be destroyed by the fleets that are coming, to be sure. But the risk is equal, attacker and satellite. And here, not light-years away from our bases, we can replace our pawns indefinitely. The aliens must spend the very heart of their invasion at every attempt. If they were not threatened by my research, they would not have bothered about me . . . as they have. And they are concerned as well to keep their dealings on Earth secret, for what I could do, another might equal.”

  “So we’re fine so long as we can keep building rockets, hey?” Kelly joked. He immediately regretted his flippancy. This was not a bull session with everybody half looped, this was a very bright boy who happened also to be nuts in one area—and who had better stay happy until he was delivered to the submarine. Then he became somebody else’s problem.

  Vlasov chose to respond to the agent’s question as if it were real. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Rockets? Why bother? These are small packages, I tell you. Shoot them into orbit. Twenty years ago, you and the Canadians were doing this, two battleship cannon end to end. . . . How could the aliens invade when the Earth is ready to fire scores of new defensive satellites into orbit in a few hours?”

  The road signs did not help since they were in Arabic alone. Kelly had been watching the odometer, however. A cluster of one-story houses had been a crossroads village. It would soon be dwarfed by the apartment block under construction on the near outskirts. “Commander,” the agent said in English, his foot off the gas, “is this where the Vilayat road goes straight and the National bends more to the south?”

  The Attaché bent over a Michelin map, unprepared for the question. “Yes, yes; I guess it does,” he said after longer than Kelly’s temper cared to wait. “It seems to be called Four Roads—the village. But I’m sure Route 1 would be faster.”

  “That may not be all we have to worry about,” the agent said grimly. He pulled through the controlled intersection at speed, avoiding a southbound Mercedes tour bus by less than its driver or his own passengers could believe. Kelly had his foot to the floor again. He had been looking in the rear-view mirror as he spoke to Posner.

  “You—” the commander cried, but as his eyes turned to the agent, they took in the blank rigidity of Kelly’s face. Posner had seen that look before, when the agent was hauling them through Algiers with death on their bumper. Posner and Vlasov both turned to stare out the back window.

  “You thought me mad,” said the defector with flat certainty. “They could not get the Kommission to kill me, so they are coming to do it themselves.”

  The square back end of the station wagon had sucked a layer of road dust over the window like frosting. Vlasov turned around after only a glance, satisfied that any and all possible threats were his aliens. Commander Posner continued to lean over the seat back, squinting. The local road was narrower and significantly less smooth that the National route had been. All that the dust and hammering left certain was that there was a car approaching.

  It was approaching very fast, despite anything Kelly could coax out of the Plymouth. This was not an underpowered Volga. . . .

  Ten feet from the American car’s rear bumper, the pursuing vehicle slowed to match speeds as perfectly as the road surface would allow. “AMB-51,” Commander Posner was saying. “Why—I believe that’s the Russian Ambassador’s car! Surely—”

  “Get your head down, Professor,” Kelly interrupted, his thick wrists trembling as they fought to hold the wheel steady. The Volare was rapidly overtaking a truck which filled more than half the roadway.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the defector replied gloomily. He was staring at the approaching car. “You saw what their weapons did to Hoang at the—”

  “Get your fucking head outa the mirror!”

  “Kelly!” cried the Attaché. His voice was as sharp and sudden as the bullet that snapped between the passengers and out through the windshield.

  Kelly braked, half in hope that the pursing vehicle would overrun them. Its driver, however, was very possibly as good as Kelly himself was. The limousine’s four-wheel disk brakes scrubbed off speed in a straight line while the Volare wallowed across the road. A long crack staggered the width of the windshield from the starred, milky area around the bullet hole. There, only the interior layer of gum held the two shattered layers of safety glass together.

  Kelly let up on the brake and steered right in the same instant. He threw the Volare into a sweeping turn that took the near corner and the far edge of the dirt track he had seen as the truck rolled on.

  Vlasov was hunched over, deferring to Kelly’s wishes if not his beliefs. In the rear view mirror, the agent saw the pursuing vehicle spin on the asphalt as it overran the turn-off. It was not, Kelly realized, out of control. Rather, the driver had used a controlled drift as the fastest way of reversing, much as Kelly himself had done on the Rue Morris. The bastard was good, all right.

  Kelly recognized the car now that he had caught a broadside glimpse of it. It was the limo that had brought Vlasov and Hoang to the Institute, a Citröen SM Sedan. With four doors, jump seats, and the armor that stray shots had displayed that morning, the sedan version was slower off the line than the 1,500 kilogram coupe with which it shared an engine and drive train. That did not mean that its 260 kph speedometer was for show. Powered by a Maserati V-6 with six Weber carbs and a 6,500-rpm red-line, the Citröen was definitely the class of this race.

  Kelly had turned into a track meant for 4x4s—or perhaps for camels alone. Th
e Plymouth jounced. Its oil pan rang on something solid. All three occupants bounced in their seats. “That bastard’ll just dial up the air suspension and clear these ruts!” Kelly shouted pointlessly. Vlasov was as tense as a martyr at the stake. Commander Posner had the wide-eyed disbelief of a skydiver whose reserve chute had just streamed.

  Unlike the others, Kelly had something to do. That fact kept him out of the utter despair which circumstances made reasonable. He could hear the shots being fired as the limousine closed again. The guns were less of a threat now than they had been on the highway, however. The Citröen was being hammered despite its high clearance. The KGB men within could not lean out of the windows for fear of being cut in half by the coaming on a particularly bad bounce. They were thrusting their weapons in the general direction of their quarry, a pistol from the right front and an automatic rifle from behind the driver. None of a dozen shots had been close enough to ring from the Volare’s sheet metal. Still, if the Russians fired long enough, they were going to get lucky . . . and if Kelly ever bogged his car in a sand-swept hollow. . . .

  The Citröen had moved up within a few meters again. Its driver began to ease it into a line to the right of the one Kelly was taking. Either the Russian planned to pass or he was giving the rifleman a clearer field of fire. The cars were climbing a slight rise, the road straight within reasonable parameters of the term. “Hang on!” Kelly cried. He took his foot off the gas and dropped the gear selector into second, tramping the throttle simultaneously.

  The wagon trembled in an incipient fish-tail. The skittering induced by the road surface masked the change. 45 mph was as fast as the agent could hold the car to. The feedback to the wheel even through the power steering mechanism was brutal on his flayed left hand. The Citröen moved up another two feet. Its glazed front slope grinned above its bumper like a demon’s smile. Two of five bullets ripped the Volare right to left, entering through the side window a few inches from Commander Posner’s face.

  Kelly stamped on the emergency brake as his right foot came off the gas.

  The Russian driver was good, but the Volare’s mechanical brake was not connected to the stop light. The first warning any of those in the Citröen had was sight of the blunt wedge of the Volare’s left rear fender swinging toward them as the tires broke away. The collision anchored the station wagon’s rear end and kept it from continuing around in an uncontrollable spin on the loose road surface. Glass from the Citröen’s leading edge exploded back toward the windshield like a charge of langridge. Kelly flipped the brake release and tried to accelerate smoothly away.

  The closing impact had been less than 15 miles per hour. With tons of metal on either side of the equation, however, the kinetic energy involved was awesome. The Volare’s frame was buckled, but there was none of the steel-on-rubber howl which Kelly had dreaded would announce the incipient blow-out of their left rear tire.

  The Citröen had gone into a wild skid, but the Russian driver recovered with the skill which Kelly had learned to fear and respect. Without losing the car into the shallow ditches to either side, the Russian straightened out and came on again. The Citröen’s notched leading edge snarled like a boxer with his bridgework out. The AK’s muzzle was already beginning to poke out of the back window again.

  The Volare cleared the top of the rise and hung with all four wheels momentarily airborne. The shock when the car hit would have tested the suspension of a Baja Unlimited. The station wagon rang like an ingot dropped on stone.

  “P-professor—” Kelly tried to say.

  The Citröen topped the hill behind them. It spun in a huge explosion of dust and gravel as the engine locked up. All fourteen quarts of coolant lay in a black splash at the crash site where the Volare’s fender had ripped the core out of the horizontal radiator. The alloy block of the Maserati conducted heat splendidly, but it had nothing like the latent heat capacity of a cast iron unit. When the coolant went under stress, the engine welded itself into a 6-cylinder brake in less than a quarter mile.

  “Jesus!” Kelly cried in delight as figures spilled out of their hopelessly wrecked pursuer. “If this road just goes somewhere and we don’t have to turn around and go past them a—”

  Steel bullets on sheet metal slapped like traps closing on the Volare. Two, three more. Posner grunted and the windshield starred to either side of the hole already there. More impacts, a thump as something hit a back tire and then the whang! and explosive decompression of a round through the wheel itself. Unlike punctured tires, the track drilled through the steel would not pucker closed and let the car run on a slow leak.

  The Volare spun, trading ends twice. That may have been a blessing, because during the seconds that Kelly was fighting for control nothing else hit them. There was nowhere to go but forward, away from the gunner. When the bullets had started sleeting in on them, Kelly had already assumed they were a safe distance from the fellow bracing an AKM against the roof of the Citröen. Bad guess, real bad guess.

  One of the last rounds smashed the rearview mirror out through the windshield. Kelly struck at the crazed, opaque glass in front of him with the palm of his right hand. He tore loose a hole through which he could again see enough of the road to drive whatever the gunfire had left him. At last the road dipped, cutting the two shattered vehicles off from one another.

  XXXVI

  Colonel Nguyen raised the muzzle of the AKM as he pushed himself upright again. The rifle’s wooden foregrip was already hot with the thirty rounds he had fired.

  Babroi had staggered out of the wrecked Citröen just in time to see the distant American car spin as well. “You hit it!” the Russian shouted. The station wagon was under control again, pulling out of sight. “You hit it!”

  “While our car was moving, I could not shoot,” said the Vietnamese. “When we stopped—well, a target going straight away from you is not difficult, surely? Have you never used a rifle yourself?”

  The aide jerked back, but after a moment he decided that the comment had been only naive. Korchenko, glancing up from the microphone, was not so sure. The Vietnamese was the member of an inferior race, the representative of a nation which would not exist at all without aid from the USSR. Nonetheless, the KGB colonel had the impression that Nguyen’s bland face and bland words cloaked raw scorn for his Russian counterparts.

  The Vietnamese knelt. He massaged his left thigh where the block of pavement had spun him down. As the radio answered Korchenko, Nguyen asked the aide quietly, “Is there more ammunition for the rifles? I emptied my magazine.”

  Korchenko cursed, but there was an undercurrent of satisfaction in his voice as he said, “Well, we know where your charge is, Nguyen. The Algerians have found part of his body in the Casbah. Witnesses say the Americans—the people in the big car—blew him up before they drove off.”

  The Russian began to speak into his radio again. Nguyen frowned and pulled himself erect. He used the edge of the back door as a handhold and the automatic rifle as a crutch in order to manage unassisted. Babroi and Schwartz were struggling to pry open the hood. It was obvious that the Citröen was beyond any repairs they could make in the field.

  Korchenko flung down the microphone with a curse. “Junk!” he shouted, “junk! Now they’re saying that they can’t hear me!”

  The Vietnamese officer did not speak Russian, but he had enough experience with the language and with problems in the field to add them up this time. “With the engine dead,” he said in English, “the battery does not have the power to transmit from here to Algiers very long. Especially a tube radio, so much is lost in heat.”

  The look Korchenko gave him would have killed if the KGB man could have arranged it. “Very fine!” the Russian spat. “An explanation for every failure. No doubt you will explain to your superiors why there is so little of Doctor Tanh to ship home?” The colonel’s venom was punctuated by squealing metal. Babroi and Schwartz had finally wrenched apart the warped hood and fenders.

  “I do not understand that,”
Nguyen responded, as if to a question and not a gibe. “Why should they kidnap Hoang first and then kill him at once? Perhaps it was an accident. There was too much shooting, too much smoke. . . .” He smiled, and Korchenko wondered that he had ever thought the little man was bland. “It reminded me of Hue in ‘68,” Nguyen concluded. “Yes.”

  Colonel Korchenko opened his door and got out. He towered over the Vietnamese officer. That gave back some of his confidence. “There’s a group of military vehicles being diverted to us,” he said. “We’ll go back to Algiers in one of them while the rest track down the—Americans.” He had almost blurted, “defector,” a word that must not be used outside KGB circles if Korchenko were to have even a prayer of a career remaining.

  Nguyen stripped the empty magazine from the AKM, wincing as the motion put weight on his right leg again. “Is there more ammunition?” he repeated. “I will accompany the troops. I want to—catch—the men who killed Doctor Hoang.”

  “Little fool!” Korchenko shouted. “Shall I leave you here, is that what you want? I shall be in charge of the operation from my base in the embassy. But the capture shall be the responsibility of the army alone, the Red Army! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand perfectly,” said the Vietnamese officer in a soft voice. His nod could have been mistaken for obsequiousness. “I hope we will be informed of your success,” he added. “From government to government, if you think it would be improper to exchange such information between ourselves.”

  Behind his still face, Nguyen was balancing possibilities. The Algerian government had a stake in the day’s events which the Russians seemed willing to overlook. Nguyen had made only a courtesy call on the Algerian responsible for Conference security, a Captain Malek; but that should be sufficient entree under the circumstances. With the manpower and records of the local authorities, and the skills that had sometimes made Nguyen’s own superiors look askance at him, it should be possible to get a quick break in the affair. The Vietnamese officer was quite sure that Korchenko was not the man to defeat the one the radio had called “Kelly.” The man orchestrating things from the American—was it really American?—side was very good.