by David Drake
Older BMWs did not have true keys. Rather, they had plungers with a transverse groove cut for spring detents to hold them depressed. The edges of the awl cut into the brass keyway, holding the blade down as securely as the detent could have. Three tiny indicators lighted on the speedometer face—neutral, alternator, and oil pressure. Kelly swung his leg over the seat, cracked the throttle, and mashed the starter button with his right thumb. The hot engine wheezed angrily as it spun; then it fired and Kelly kicked the bike into gear.
The agent turned the motorcycle, slipping the clutch and feeling every rut on his bruised groin. “Get aboard and hang the hell on, Professor,” he shouted as he pulled abreast of the APC. Vlasov mounted awkwardly, his legs dangling against the pipes before he locked down the rear foot pegs. Kelly gassed it, ignoring the jolts as best he could. As the bike spat gravel backward, Kelly twisted the knife to turn the headlight on.
Anything the Algerian policeman cried was lost in the whine and clatter of the bike’s long push-rods. As they twisted around the first bend on to Douera, Kelly could hear the pop-pop-pop of pistol fire. Ed McGivern would not have been a threat at that range.
Operation Skyripper was go again.
XL
The Renault Dauphine had not been a particularly well-built vehicle at the time of its introduction. The example Kelly had stolen had been deteriorating for the past twenty-five years besides. Even so, the car had been a better choice than the police motorcycle for reasons beyond the latter’s conspicuousness. BMW has an international reputation for building reliable, comfortable motorcycles. On rough roads, however, no motorcycle is comfortable—or, for that matter, particularly reliable. That was especially true in the dark, when potholes sprang out like missiles and the forks had not recovered from one jolt when the next compressed them.
This Renault had been parked behind the closed Sonatrach gas station in Douera. It had half a tank of gasoline and it had started when Kelly shorted its ignition. For the hot wire, the agent had used a piece clipped from the car’s own instrument panel; not pretty, but it worked. The Renault wallowed on the wilayet road, and when they reached National 11 it developed an alarming steering hammer at 70 kph. For all that, it was a Mercedes-class ride compared to that of the motorcycle pitching along ruts.
Professor Vlasov was still daubing at his wounds. They had both gotten through surprisingly well, the agent thought. It would be several days before he knew for certain whether his ribs had cracked or not when the ground rose up and slammed them. In a couple days, that would not matter—one way or the other. The other injuries the pair of them had received were extensive enough, Lord knew; but they were also superficial. They were the sorts of scrapes and cuts and bruises you got from high-siding a dirt bike, if you were lucky.
The pair of them. Not Commander Posner. Well, Posner had gone west with an escort. However this one ended, the Russians were not going to feel it had been cheap.
The highway bent sharply to the left, then back, to avoid the buildings of a pair of farms. The Renault’s one, dim headlight flashed red from the retinas of a goat which was peering over a stone wall. Then the road dipped toward the lights of the town below.
Kelly began squinting through the dusty windshield, trying to imagine the look of the intersection he had seen only once—and that by daylight.
“This is the Tipasa we are going to?” asked the defector. “What do we do here?”
“Hell,” Kelly said, “I never told you how we were going to get you back to the Land of the Big PX, did I? Hell, I’m sorry, I always get hacked off when people keep me in the dark. I didn’t mean to pull that on you.”
“Pardon?” said Vlasov, patiently hiding his confusion.
The agent was feeling more than a little dizzy. His ribs and his left palm were both afire. Too close now to lose it. . . . Aloud he said, “There’s a submarine waiting for us offshore. We’ve got an emergency radio beacon; they’ll be monitoring that frequency. We blip the beacon, then they blip back at ten point four one, shortwave so I can pick it up on my Kenwood and low power so that nobody else pays much attention. We inflate a rubber boat and head on out. When we’re a quarter mile or so offshore, we kick the beacon on again and leave it on till they locate us. Then it’s somebody else’s problem.”
“We must reach international waters in a rubber boat, then?” said the Russian. “Or—oh. That was very foolish, I see.”
Kelly smiled and wished he had not. Torn patches in the skin of his face had dried. The smile cracked them open again. “Yeah,’’ he said, “there’s been a lot of things worse than a violation of Algerian territorial waters lately, hasn’t there? But I tell you—there’s the goddam turn!”
Kelly swung the wheel left and his chest felt as though it were being broken on a rack. “Jesus!” the agent gasped. Then, in a tight voice that underscored the pain it tried to conceal, he said, “I tell you, Professor, the sub is the dicy part so far as the USG’s concerned, though. If they catch me, the President can stand up and swear I’m an Italian national and never got within a thousand miles of the US. Hell, he tells bigger lies than that every day, he’s a politician. . . . But if something goes wrong and the Algerians catch a State-class submarine in their back yard—well, that’s a lot bigger than the U-2 was. And it’d be bad even without a Russian defector and twenty-thirty bodies scattered all over the Algerian countryside. Hell!”
The iron-sheeted gate registered in Kelly’s mind as the Renault rolled past it. The car’s brakes were in no better shape than its lights—or Kelly’s body, for that matter. Cursing, the agent twisted to look over his shoulder. He gasped and froze on the wheel. After a moment, he backed up with his eyes on the rearview mirror. “Professor,” he said, almost too quietly to be heard over the car’s rasping idle, “do you think you could unlock the gate and open it?” Kelly took the paper-tagged keys from his pants pocket, rising a little in his seat so that his torso could remain straight. “I’d do it, but. . . .”
Professor Vlasov took the keys solemnly and ducked out of the car. He looked like death in the side-scatter of the headlight, Kelly thought, but compared to Kelly, the Russian was in good shape. Posner might yet turn out to be the lucky one of the three.
The agent used his left arm to turn the car into the opened courtyard. Even so, the pain almost made him black out. There was no choice. They were going to have to call for help.
Vlasov had locked the gate behind them before Kelly could hoist himself out of the Dauphine. The Russian hovered solicitously, willing to help but well aware that any outside torsion could make a bad situation worse. “Just unlock the door, Professor,” the agent wheezed. He held himself braced between the roof and the door of the car. “I’ll be fine. Just get the door open and see if you can hunt up a phone.”
The safe house was as cold as it was empty. Kelly stared at the collapsed boat and his radio receiver. Both sat on the bare tiles of the entrance hall. The MARS boat with its motor weighed over two hundred pounds. Hell, Kelly could not have managed half the receiver’s weight in his present condition, much less that of the boat. And launching it into surf was going to be interesting at best.
“Here is the telephone,” Professor Vlasov called from further inside.
The agent found Vlasov in a living room as empty as the hall had been. No one had told Posner to waste money on furnishings. The phone sat on a window ledge, more than ample for the purpose because the concrete walls were a foot thick. Kelly had been in bunkers less solidly constructed than an ordinary Algerian house. That was part of the reason that this one rented for the equivalent of $45,000 a year, of course. Cheap if it got Vlasov to the folks who were footing the bill.
The long-distance operator answered in Arabic, but he handled without comment Kelly’s request in French for “60-14-26 in Algiers, please.” As the phone clicked and buzzed in proof that something was going on, the agent lowered himself gingerly to the floor. The cold tiles might have felt good on his ribs. After a moment, Kelly
did lay his left palm on them.
The ringing on the other end of the line shocked Kelly out of a reverie. He was momentarily uncertain of where he was or what he was doing. He had recovered a moment later, however, when a voice answered in English, “Embassy of the United States. Can I help you, please?”
“This is Angelo Ceriani,” Kelly said in the same language. “It is absolutely critical that I speak at once with Sergeant Rowe. I need his home phone or the number of whatever other phone you think he might be near. I know this may be irregular, but I swear it’s as important as you can imagine.”
“Ah, one moment,” said the duty officer. There was a click and Rowe’s attentuated voice called, “Tom, is that you? Jesus, we’ve been sitting by the phone ever since the reports started coming in. Are you all right? Is Vlasov?”
“Ah, Doug, do we have a secure line?” the agent said. Though anybody with a tap on the embassy phone was about to get an earful, even without proper nouns. “Things could be worse,” Kelly went on, “though not for your boss. Or the car. We’re where we’re supposed to be, but I don’t think we can move the goods without help. Doug, I need you to get here as quick as you can. I’m sorry. These are my orders and they take precedence to any other orders you may have received. There’s nobody else I can trust.”
“You can trust me,” the sergeant said simply. “That’s why we’re waiting here. See you—I hope before midnight.”
“Oh, Doug,” Kelly added, “try to get a van or another wagon. The stuff’s pretty bulky, you remember.”
“We’ll be there,” Rowe said. He broke the connection before the agent could.
Kelly cradled the phone and looked up at Vlasov. The Russian was standing beside the curtained window, as erect as a hatrack. “Well, Professor,” the agent said wryly, “I suppose I ought to be doing a lot of things . . . but what I’m going to try to do is get some sleep. We ought to have some help here in a couple hours. I suppose that means you can change your mind about defecting. Wouldn’t blame you after the way I’ve bitched things up so far.”
“On the contrary,” said Vlasov, his face and tones as serious as those of a priest at a memorial service. “Everything I suspected earlier has been proven to be true. I must escape the aliens and the humans they use as tools. I must, because they strive so hard to prevent me.”
Kelly took off his coat by himself. He rolled it up as a pillow. The chill of the tile on which he carefully stretched himself seeped into his bones. The numbness it brought was a sort of relief.
After Kelly closed his eyes, the thought of Vlasov kept him some minutes awake. Vlasov, brave and brilliant and quite surely as cracked as a coot. But if Tom Kelly were damned to hell for exploiting a madman’s obsession, then he was damned for a thousand better reasons besides.
Sleep came not as a relief but as a hiatus.
XLI
“Someone is here,” a voice in Russian whispered harshly. Something was gnawing Kelly’s earlobe. He flashed awake and caught himself before a sudden lunge reknotted muscles which had relaxed somewhat while he slept. Professor Vlasov knelt beside the agent. He was pinching Kelly’s right earlobe between thumb and forefinger instead of shaking the battered body awake.
A large engine was idling nearby. Its exhaust note echoed within the courtyard walls. Doug must have kept a key to the place. “Tom,” called a low voice through the bolted door.
Kelly stood, slinging his jacket over his right forearm and the knife which had been bare in his hand all the time he slept. He walked to the door. His smile was as stiff as one painted on the face of a golliwog. Kelly unlocked the door, then drew the panel open. He hoped to see Doug Rowe, but he was perfectly willing to meet the muzzle of an AKM.
Rowe was there, a step behind Annamaria Gordon.
“My God,” Kelly whispered.
Annamaria’s face when she saw Kelly went whiter than her breasts had been in the starlight by the tomb. Then she stepped forward deliberately and kissed the agent’s bruised lips. She guided Kelly, drawing him back into the house and making room for the sergeant to enter.
In the courtyard beside the Renault stood a Chevrolet Blazer. It loomed as huge as a tank over the stolen car. The Blazer would be perfect for running the boat down to the harbor, better even than the station wagon would have been.
“I was waiting with Doug,” Annamaria said. “If you need help, then we’re here to help.”
Kelly licked his lips. “Professor Evgeny Vlasov,” he said nodding. “Annamaria Gordon, Doug Rowe.” Kelly’s left arm was around the black-haired woman’s waist. He clung as if she were a spar and he a shipwrecked sailor. “That’s bad tradecraft, I suppose, but if we’re any of us caught, we’re beyond tradecraft for help.”
The tall Russian bowed, offering his hand first to the woman and then to Sergeant Rowe. He looked at Kelly. “I know it makes no difference, sir,” he said, “but—what is your name?”
The agent blinked. “Christ on a crutch,” he said. “I’m Tom Kelly. And Professor, if we get out of this, I want to sit down with you and a case of beer some evening and swap stories. I—you aren’t what I expected. And you’re a lot of the reason we’re still golden.”
Sergeant Rowe had not followed the last of the discussion, since it was in French. After fiddling for a moment with the massive 10x70 binoculars on his neck strap, he said, “Ah, Tom—what do you need us to do?”
“Right, right,” Kelly agreed. He sheathed his knife with care before he donned his coat again. “First, we load the gear into your car and carry it down to the waterfront. We unload there and you take the car back up to the street—it’s too conspicuous right on the water. We get clear with the”—he looked from Rowe to Annamaria, then back; she had not been specifically told about the submarine—“with the sub and go out to meet it. You make sure we’ve gotten fairly away and you—both of you—you get the hell outa Dodge. Clear?”
The boat and motor were a job to maneuver over the high tailgate of the Blazer, even with the newcomers doing most of the lifting. Kelly found he was in better shape than he had expected, but that still left him far from being the dark-haired woman’s equal at the moment. Annamaria should not have come, but thank God she had.
The agent smiled as he thought of her. When they all stepped back from the car, breathing hard with the successful effort, he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. Professor Vlasov looked bemused. Sergeant Rowe stared at his hands and said nothing, though he cleared his throat.
“All right,” Kelly said, “let’s roll. It’s going to be a while before we get out far enough to meet the sub, and I want to be underwater before daybreak. It’d be nice to be out of the shallows, too, but we’ll do what we can.”
The agent sat on the passenger-side bucket seat while Rowe drove. The MARS boat was a four-and-a-half by two-foot package. It took up all the floor in back between the two facing bench seats. Annamaria rode leaning back against Kelly’s seat with her legs stretched out to the rear. Her hand reached back to clasp the agent’s between seat and door. The four-block ride to the harbor was as soothing to Kelly as his hour of comatose sleep had been.
The brief calm ended when the sergeant pulled up beside the sunken staircase. The ancient harbor was empty but not still. The wind over the rocks had a constant static hiss. Its amplitude went unremarked until one noticed that the rumbling idle of the V-8 engine was completely masked except when one stood in the lee of the vehicle itself. The waves could be heard though, a vicious, unmastered sound like zippers rasping to open the fabric of the world. Kelly checked the tuning of his short-wave receiver. He was running it now from its separate battery pack. The blue digits were correct. He faced seaward and tripped his beacon for a five-second count.
The submarine’s crew was as tight as Kelly was. Their response began to beep from the Kenwood within fifteen seconds of the moment the agent shut off his beacon.
Kelly cut the receiver power to save the batteries. “Let’s move,” he said. “One more
stop and we’re shut of this deal.”
Unloading the Blazer was fast and comparatively easy, but it seemed like a lifetime’s task to all four of those involved. Professor Vlasov was becoming increasingly nervous. Kelly could not be sure whether this was a return of the defector’s old fear of aliens or if it had a more rational cause. The sand-colored Chevy looked square and huge on the corniche. Anyone strolling about at night was apt to wander over out of curiosity. Any policeman who was out would almost certainly do so.
As soon as the gear was on the ground, Kelly said, “OK, Doug—run the car up the street and park it, then get back as quick as you can to help launch. Up there it won’t call attention to us.”
“I’ll go,” said Annamaria. “You’ll need Doug to get the boat down the steps without wrecking it.” She slipped around to the driver’s side of the Blazer without waiting for a response.
The agent glanced at her, a slim figure in a dark windbreaker. The breeze molded the nylon to her breasts like a silken sheath. The car door closed. “Right,” he said as the Blazer pulled away.
Annamaria had been correct. The stairs were perfect for concealment, but they were barely wide enough to pass two men abreast. Without Sergeant Rowe’s strength up front, the boat would have brushed the stone walls and stone steps repeatedly on its way to the beach below. The nylon was tough, but there was a lot of water out there. The stone as building material was no less able to scrape holes in the rubberized fabric than it was in its natural state in the surf beyond.
The tide had been going out for an hour or so. At the foot of the low cliff was a beach of coarse shingle. Panting and thankful, Kelly grounded his end of the boat on it. Sergeant Rowe began unfastening restraints, preparing to inflate the vessel.
