Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  Each individual claimed his or her own suitcases under the eyes of armed guards, and carried them to the examination booths—porters took the weight for some passengers, mostly foreigners, but no one else could accept the responsibility.

  Beyond hand luggage Kelly had only one suitcase and that—a solid, vinyl case of Turkish manufacture—held clothing. He had no need, himself, to bring unusual hardware into Turkey, as it had turned out, because his overseas phone calls had been more successful than he had dared hope. Funny. It always surprised him when other people came through the way he would have done for them—120 percent and no questions asked that didn’t bear on the fulfillment of the request.

  It would have been easy for Kelly to snatch his bag and stride ahead of the remaining passengers, and reaching an empty examination booth would have saved half an hour of waiting for civilians—nervous, belligerent, or both—to be processed through ahead of him.

  But even though the stocky veteran had nothing to fear from Customs, he let his training override his instinct to go full bore and finish whatever he was doing by the most direct route possible. He kept a low profile, deliberately followed a middle-aged man with a bag in either hand and a brown Yugoslav passport held with his entry documents between two fingertips and the side of the smaller case.

  The Customs agent for whom Kelly opened his bag wore khaki pants with a tie and white shirt. The uniform of the National Policeman watching him was of gray-green wool and included a Browning Hi-Power in a holster of white patent leather. Beyond the line of booths was a squad of soldiers in fatigues, smoking and occasionally adjusting the slings of the Thompson submachine guns they carried.

  Prime Minister Ecevit had taken the Defense portfolio for himself, but that was cosmetic. He was also making a real attempt to control the radical violence from both sides before a military junta ousted him to cure the problem more directly. The open display of armed force seemed to concern most of the foreign passengers. Kelly himself had enough other things to worry about.

  “I love Istanbul,” Kelly joked in Turkish with the Customs agent, “but do they let me stay here? Surely there must be runway sweepers to be maintained in a more lovely part of Turkey than Incidik!”

  “You are a Turk?” asked the National Policeman, running a knowledgeable hand along the hinges of the suitcase instead of prodding through the shirts as he had done with the Yugoslav minutes before.

  “No,” said the Customs agent, flipping from the front to the back of the artistically-worn passport, but sizing Kelly up sidelong as he stamped the entry data. The American was a hair taller than the Anatolian norm, but his stocky build was right as were the dark complexion and straight black hair. With a moustache and a few days polish on his Turkish, he could pass as a native—of the country, though not of any specific district.

  He might have to do just that.

  “Not, but should be,” Kelly agreed with a smile. “It’s good to be back. Even headed for Incirlik.”

  “Go with God, Mr. Bradsheer,” the Customs agent said, closing the suitcase with one hand and returning Kelly’s false passport in the other. The currency declaration form went into a file beneath the examination table.

  Kelly smiled, snapped the latches of the case—no time to buckle the safety straps as well—and said, “Go with God, brother,” as he walked out the rear of the canvas booth.

  Elaine Tuttle was standing at the back of the building, beyond the low barrier that separated incoming passengers from those waiting to greet them.

  She wore a long-sleeved blue dress today, with ruffles at wrists and throat and a belt of light gilded chain. It had been three days since Kelly last saw her, and his recognition now was not instantaneous. Partly it was the beret that covered the rich curls of her black hair, partly that Tuttle carried a large purse on a shoulder strap for the first time since he had met her. In large measure, Kelly did not recognize Elaine because the physical reality of her was so different—so much less threatening—than memory suffused with the woman’s personality.

  He did not dream about her, but he had begun to dream—and if the strange landscapes he remembered on awakening were not nightmares, they would do till worse came along.

  Kelly stopped at the barrier and rested his suitcase on it while he buckled the straps over the latches. None of the soldiers paid him any particular attention. There were enthusiastic greetings in half a dozen languages, chiefly Turkish and German—a Turkish Airways flight from Frankfurt had just disgorged its load of “guest workers” from West Germany. Kelly had to wait for a large family reunion at the nearest opening in the barrier, but he wasn’t in such a hurry that he would attract attention by scissoring his legs over it instead.

  Elaine, who had not moved while Kelly meandered through the entry building, stepped to his side as he began to walk out the door. “It’s a long way to the car,” she said, nodding toward the parking lot set off from the terminal area by barbed wire and cyclone fencing. There were more troops outside, and an armored car painted blue to match the berets of the paramilitary police. “Do you want to wait for me to bring the car around?”

  “No sweat,” said Kelly, swinging the suitcase at arm’s length in front of him to prove that he could handle the weight. He continued to saunter toward the pedestrian gate at which Elaine had gestured. “You know, I was afraid you people were going to walk me through Customs and make a fuss. I should’ve said something before. Glad you had better sense than I—gave you credit for.”

  “Given the present political climate,” Elaine said with her eyes on where they were going, “with Ecevit using America as a whipping boy for all the troubles of his administration, I don’t know that we could have done much. Not in the Istanbul District, at any rate.”

  She looked up sharply at the man beside her. “Not that you seemed to need help very badly.”

  “You wanted somebody who was comfortable in Turkey,” Kelly said. “That much you got.”

  He shifted the case from one hand to the other as she led him through a row of parked cars and, on the other side, wrapped his arm around her shoulders in a hug. “Hey, Elaine,” he said, releasing her almost before her light frame began to stiffen beneath the dress, “I’m pumped, but right for the moment I’m feelin’ good.”

  He grinned across at her as they continued to stride along, switching the suitcase back to his right hand to prove that the hug had been no more than a friendly gesture. “Look,” he explained, “going—back to work’s—my equivalent of riding the roller coaster, I guess. It’ll be a rush while it lasts, and you don’t have to worry about how I’ll get along with you so long as we’re on the same side, okay? And you handle your end the way I’d want to be able to handle it if it was my job.”

  “Rather than handle it like you, you mean?” Elaine asked with the beginning of a smile.

  “Right,” agreed Kelly with a broader one, dodging a little Ford Anadol that was being backed from its parking space with more verve than discretion. “Rather than by getting the admin types so mad that they insist on fucking with the operation, which is exactly what I’d do if anybody were silly enough to put me in that slot. I never had a lotta tact, and when things get tense for one reason’r the other—”

  He laughed, and stopped. They passed, one to either side, a dejected-looking palm tree in an island protected from cars by empty oil drums. When they rejoined on the other side, Kelly chuckled in embarrassment and said, “After all, there aren’t a lot of times it’s helpful to point a gun at your colonel’s eye and tell him he’s history if he makes a peep in the next ten minutes.”

  “You did that?” Elaine said, her tone one of amusement rather than the cool appraisal Kelly had expected.

  “Yeah,” Kelly admitted. “Seemed like a good idea at the time, and I figured we were far enough back in the boonies that he wouldn’t have to report it later to cover his own ass. Neither of us got anything in our jackets for that one, and he stopped tryin’ to be a big hero like his old man—at
least when he was in sight of me.”

  “This is the car,” Elaine said. “We’ll put your luggage behind the seats.”

  The car was a Porsche 944, new enough that the treads on both front and rear tires were almost unworn. It was painted a metallic green, the gloss overlaid by a light dusting of yellow grit from the parking lot.

  “What,” asked Kelly as Elaine unlocked the Porsche, “were you going to do if I showed up here with a steamer trunk?” An obvious answer struck him, and he looked around for a follow-car big enough to handle any possible load of baggage. Though he craned his neck and raised himself onto his toes, looking like a gigged frog because of his squat build, Kelly could see no likely vehicle nearby. “There isn’t one, Tom,” Elaine said dryly, flipping the driver’s seat forward, “but don’t worry”—she patted his left arm, whose muscles were rock solid with the weight of the suitcase they were supporting—”I’m packing.”

  “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death . . .’” quoted Kelly as he set the case into the car. It was a snug fit, but because the driver’s seat was well forward there was a fit.

  “And as for the rest,” she went on when he straightened, “if you got off with more luggage than you’d boarded with in Frankfurt, we were going to have to hire a taxi for it—yes.” She smiled.

  The veteran held both hands out in front of him, palms down, and looked at them for a moment. Then he met Elaine’s eyes and said, “Look, I know how I get. Don’t—” He swallowed. “I’ve got real problems working close with people when it gets tense, I don’t usually do that. I don’t wanna, you know, somebody get hurt because I was pissed and there wasn’t a whole lotta time.”

  Elaine touched his hands with hers, fingertips to palms and her thumbs lying gently on his scarred knuckles. “You haven’t had anyone you could trust before, Tom,” she said. “You’ve got that now.”

  Kelly grinned and squeezed hands that felt so delicate that he could have crumpled them like cellophane. “Yeah, that’s a change,” he said, stepping around the back of the car to get to the passenger side. His fingers tapped idly on the black rubber spoiler as he passed it, wondering whether there would be any chance of putting the Porsche through its paces one of these days. He was going to need some relaxation. . . .

  And he could’ve used somebody to trust as well, but he didn’t have that on this operation either. You could trust the people beneath you, sometimes, if you’d trained them and worked with them before. But your superiors in a hierarchy could never by definition be expected to do exactly what you told them to—especially if the time were too short for what they thought was proper respect. People didn’t get into positions of responsibility by abdicating responsibility.

  Elaine Tuttle would be welcome any day as a member of a team Kelly put together, for her driving and her mind if nothing else. But right now she was, at a guess, a lieutenant colonel—and he was a master sergeant in the only scheme of things that a light colonel’s mind could accept.

  It would’ve been real nice to trust her, though.

  Traffic on the long stretch of four-lane highway between the airport in Yesilköy and the city proper was heavy. Elaine, though she did not waste any time, wasn’t pushing with the little car the way she had the first night on the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike.

  “You haven’t asked me,” she said, “whether we’d gotten you the accommodations you’d asked for.”

  Kelly laughed. “Demanded, you mean,” he said. At eye level out his side window were the rear axles of a fourteen-wheel semi, just like the ones immediately before and behind the Porsche. He had no doubt that the little car was as sturdy as anything its size could be, but the low seating position emphasized vulnerability to the trucks in a way that not even a motorcycle would have. “Look, I don’t say you couldn’t have failed, you know—maybe terrorists blew the place up this morning, that sorta thing, But you weren’t going to fail and not tell me about it right off.”

  He turned to look at her profile, unexpectedly softer than any of the angles of the woman’s frame—pleasant in itself, and much more pleasant than the angle-iron bumper with a Bulgarian license plate ten feet beyond the hood. “At worst, I’m going to decide you’re a vicious bitch who’s dangling me for whoever, the Russians, to bite. You won’t ever convince me you’re stupid.”

  It was the right thing to have said, because Elaine’s reaction was wrong—to the speculation, not the flattery. The face compressed itself momentarily into the neutral expression that gave nothing away save the fact that something was hidden. She smiled so quickly that Kelly could have thought he had mistaken the reaction . . . except that long, bloody years had taught him when his instincts must be trusted and no human being could be.

  “This is the route from Europe,” she said, waving to the truck ahead of them, “traffic from as far as Sweden and England, on the way across the Hindu Kush, some of it.”

  “Rather have your company than theirs,” the veteran replied, his hand paralleling hers in a gesture toward the red airport bus ahead in the other lane. “Though mind you, the next time you pick me up, a fifty-passenger Mercedes like that one’d be a little more in keeping with the rest of the traffic than a two-seater Porsche.”

  Elaine laughed and made a pair of lane changes, cutting between bumpers more closely than she had previously that afternoon. The Porsche’s exhaust blatted at the downshift followed by swift acceleration. “That make you feel better?” she asked, nodding toward the little Anadol—a license-built version of an English Ford—now just ahead of them. “You see, your wish is my command.”

  Istanbul was an exotic city with a history that went back long before the Roman conquest, much less that of the Ottoman Turks. Along the highway from Yesilköy, however, it resembled nothing so much as Cleveland, Ohio: another major industrial city decaying beside a major body of water.

  It had ceased to be the capital in 1920, when the Allied powers had anchored warships in the Golden Horn—and had found that the only Turks they ruled were those literally within range of their guns. The Turks had been on the losing side during World War I, but their armies had defeated major attacks both at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. There was no longer an Ottoman Empire, but there was a new nation called Turkey. Other failed empires in the region—the Persians and the Greeks both came readily to mind—had their pride. The Turks had in addition an army ready to kick whoever’s butt was closest. The planners in Washington who persisted in considering Turkey a client state of the US had no one but themselves to blame for the current anti-Americanism.

  “What do you expect to do in Istanbul?” Elaine asked as they waited to cross the peripheral road surrounding the walls begun at least seven hundred years before Constantine renamed the city after himself.

  “Talk to some people,” Kelly said, shrugging. “Ahmed Ayyubi for one, Mohammed’s brother. There had to be some reason Mohammed moved to Istanbul—or stayed here, if he was just catching his breath with his brother after Birdlike came apart. . . . Look, I’m playin’ it by ear, that’s as much data as I’ve got.”

  Elaine sent the car growling across the intersection and into the Old City proper. “We can help you locate people if you need that,” she said with a nod—approval, or more likely reassurance. “As we did with Ahmed Ayyubi.”

  Kelly had asked her for a location on the dead Kurd’s brother even though he would much sooner that his present employers not know of his interest. What can’t be cured, though . . . Any damned fool would know that Kelly had to start with or near Ahmed Ayyubi; and though he could have gotten the man’s address without official help, he could not—in Istanbul—have been sure that his interest would not have leaked back anyway.

  Better to be up front about what you couldn’t hide—it disarmed the brass hats who thought they owned your soul.

  The Porsche turned left at Ataturk Boulevard, steeply uphill so that by twisting around Kelly got a good view of the Sea of Marmara. Though they had been driving p
arallel to the water for some time, the high corniche and the remains of ancient brick walls had hidden it from him.

  Elaine, driving with the intention of making the best possible time, looked at her passenger in surprise. “Is somebody behind us?” she asked, and as she spoke her eyes flickered to the mirrors and the traffic around her.

  I only get that paranoid in the boonies, thought Kelly, but that’s probably because she’s spent more time in cities than I’ve done. Aloud he said, “Oh, no problem. I just like to see something big and real now and again—to anchor me, you know?”

  Elaine nodded acceptance rather than understanding and concentrated on her driving again. Though she hadn’t any right to be pissed, Kelly knew that nobody likes to be frightened needlessly, even in innocence. Well, she could have let him take the bus and a taxi instead of picking him up at the airport.

  The Old City of Istanbul was on a finger of land projecting into the Sea of Marmara, separated from the equally-steep ridge of the Pera District by the deep gash of the Golden Horn. All of the bodies of water—the Horn, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus, which connected the latter to the Black Sea—were the results of separate fault lines as the continental plates that were Europe and Asia clashed. The earthquakes that were a certain concomitant of those faults meant that all but the most massive structures were brought down on a regular basis or were devoured by the fires that resulted.

  It was a city of apartments of concrete and yellowish brick, built in the late nineteenth century or the twentieth—not unattractive, many of them picked out by balconies or iron grillwork, but all the colors muted by the soft coal that had been the cityfuel for centuries. Only from above was there anything brighter, and that was the omnipresent red-orange of tiled roofs the shade of the rouge on a badly laid out corpse.