by David Drake
Gisela braked hard and the Mercedes slewed again, scraping the curb with the edge and sidewall of the front tire as the Fiat that had continued to race them for the slot in traffic shot ahead in a Dopplered howl of alarm. Three more subcompact sedans swerved outward from the coupe’s blazing brake lights, honking and cursing but without real animus. Gisela’s present maneuvering was not greatly out of the ordinary for the streets of the densely-built old city.
Kelly let the inertia of the door swing it open against the coupe’s breaking effort, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He immediately tumbled, balling his head and limbs against his torso to save himself serious injury from the unintended somersaults. Only to the agent’s speeded-up senses had the car stopped. It and he were still moving at about ten miles an hour when his foot hit the concrete, and the small contact patch provided by his right heel could not possibly bring to a halt his hundred-and-eighty-pound mass as he intended.
The 280 SL accelerated away, surely enough to save the door’s hinges though not to latch it firmly again. Kelly skidded to a stop on his back, the suit coat bunched beneath his shoulders. He rolled to his feet and stood, looking back toward the alley they had left.
Men in sweaters or baggy suits who had run to help him up scattered when they saw the big pistol in Kelly’s hand. There was holster wear at the muzzle and the squared-off edges of the slide, and the external bar that was part of the trigger mechanism had polished a patch of bluing from the frame. That only meant that the P-38 had been used, however, and guns were meant to be used.
Horns and tires competed in cacophony behind Kelly, with the insistent note of rubber skidding on concrete probably the winner of the contest. He spun, bracing his left palm against the blistered paint of a light pole. He had expected the Audi which was their immediate pursuit to exit the alley momentarily; headlights already blazed from its mouth across the intersecting street.
But another of the German sedans had expertly circled the whole warren of alleys on Sport Street—named because of the stadium—and had been speeding north on Macka Street past the Technical School when the driver caught sight of Gisela heading in the other direction.
The way the Audi changed front and scrubbed off velocity in an all-wheel drift was testimony both to the driver’s skill and the fact that the sedan had four-wheel drive. Otherwise, the weight shift during braking would have unloaded the rear wheels and thrown the vehicle into an uncontrollable spin as the driver tried to change direction.
Gisela had made room for herself in the southbound lane by bluff and audacity. The Audi sedan was a 5000, heavy and as close to a full-sized car as anything made in Europe save for six-door limousines. It simply brushed aside a Skoda pickup which crashed to a halt against the barred front of an apothecary’s shop twenty feet south of the agent.
A man Kelly did not recognize from behind was hanging out of the passenger-side window as the Audi regained forward momentum in its new direction. The P-38’s thin front sightblade and its U-notch rear were almost useless in the bad lighting, but the Walther pointed like his own finger as Kelly squeezed the trigger through its first long double-action pull. The muzzle blast of the 9-mm, even from a relatively long barrel, was a deafening crash more painful than that of larger and more powerful cartridges operating at lower levels of pressure.
Handgun recoil was always more a matter of perception than physical punishment, and the P-38’s was mild by reasonable standards in any case. The barrel had a right-hand twist, giving the gun a torque opposite to what a shooter expected as it recoiled and returned to battery, but neither that nor the lift of the light barrel kept Kelly from putting out a second aimed shot within a fraction of a second of the first. Ears ringing and his retinas flooded by purple afterimages of the huge flashes from the muzzle of his weapon, Kelly rotated back to the Audi which he had intended for his initial target when he jumped from the coupe.
Kelly had aimed not at the passenger, though the man presumably had a submachine gun, but rather at the side window behind him. Reflection from the smooth glass made the empty rectangle a good aiming point, and Kelly’s quartering angle on the sedan meant that the bullets would snap across the tonneau and the space most likely to be occupied by the driver’s head.
The Audi spun broadside as the driver’s hands flung the wheel away and his foot came off the gas before he had quite compensated for the momentum of the vehicle’s drift. An oncoming bus smashed into the right side of the Audi just as an Anadol hit the sedan from what would have been behind a fraction of a second earlier. The man leaning from the right-hand window rebounded twice between the door and window posts before sprawling, as limp as an official explanation, against the door.
It hadn’t mattered to Kelly—and probably not to the driver bouncing inside the crumpling sedan—whether or not he actually hit the man at the wheel. The 9-mm bullets were supersonic. Their ballistic crack within inches at most of the driver’s ears and the way the windshield exploded into webbed opacity as they exited were enough to throw the best wheelman in the world into a disastrous error in this traffic.
The people in the second Audi had seen enough of what happened to target Kelly even as he turned back to face them. The passenger opened up with an automatic weapon as the sedan, its side streaked surreally by the battering it had taken in the alley, pulled halfway up on the curb with a snarl of low-end power as it came toward Kelly.
God himself couldn’t count on hitting anything from a moving car. That was why Kelly had jumped from the Mercedes when it became obvious that they were not going to shake the pursuit. The Audi gunner’s long burst lifted the muzzle so that bullets spalled concrete from the sidewalk halfway between weapon and target, riddled the neon tobacconist’s sign above Kelly’s head, and sparked from a rooftop flagpole halfway down the block.
One ricochet gouged ten inches of fabric from the left tail of Kelly’s coat unnoticed, and the spray of hot glass from above made him flinch and send an unintended third shot after the two he aimed at the Audi’s windshield, at the place where the gunnertorso should be if his head was behind the blinding muzzle flashes of the submachinegun.
If the windshield was bulletproof, Kelly was shit outa luck—but surely no one could drive at night with the skill these men had shown if there was a thick plate of Lexan between their eyes and the road.
The submachine gun fell, banging off one more round as it hit the concrete and skittered. The gunner slumped back, his right forearm flopping against the outside of the door. The two bullets through the windshield had crazed most of it into a milky smear.
Kelly had stepped away from the light pole when he switched targets. The halogen headlights of the sedan bearing down on him flamed the plate glass of shop windows into dazzling facets and threw shadows like curtains over the door alcoves the lights did not penetrate.
The quartz-iodide lights did not blind Kelly as he shifted his left foot a half step to swing his gun and rigid arm. He fired pistols one-handed, not because he thought it was better than modern two-hand grips but because it was the way he had first learned—and thus was better for him. The car, twenty feet away and jouncing closer, was too near for the lights to interfere with his sight line toward the driver.
The Audi slammed to a stop so abrupt that the nose dipped and the undamaged portion of the windshield reflected flashes of advertising signs like a heliograph. The car lurched into reverse and, with its right front wheel still on the sidewalk, crunched again to a halt against some unfortunate econobox in the traffic lane.
Kelly held his fire, shielding his eyes now with his free left hand. The sedan was cocked upward, lights on and motor racing as the driver leaped out.
“No!” he screamed to Kelly, throwing his own hands out before him in unintended mimicry. It was the first time Kelly had actually seen one of the men from the Audis.
It was George, the balding member of Elaine’s team, who apparently handled driving chores as well as sweeping for bugs. Christ on a crutch.
Kelly fired, aiming between the Audi’s headlights, the clanging of his high-velocity bullet against metal an instant counterpoint to the muzzle blast. George leaped as though he had been hit and ran across the street, regardless of the cars trying to extricate themselves from the chaos of multiple collisions.
Maybe the ricochet or flecks of metal ripped from the bullet and the car had hit him. More likely it had been pure terror, an emotion Kelly could well appreciate. His own thighs were wet with something, probably sweat or blood and lymph where the fall from the car had scraped him. But he could’ve shit himself; it happened more often’n anybody who hadn’t been there’d believe.
And “there” was a place Tom Kelly was back to this night for sure.
The right 9-mm loads had penetration up the ass, so it was possible that the bullet had holed the aluminum engine block. The steam that gushed from the sedan’s grill proved that Kelly had taken out at least the radiator, which made the car undrivable even if somebody shut off the motor before it melted itself down. There was still one car not accounted for, but Kelly intended to limit further pursuit as completely as he could.
Without killing additional friendlies. More or less friendly.
Gunfire had cleared the sidewalks almost as thoroughly as if all the pedestrians had been shot. Cars still moved or tried to, and the windows of apartments on upper floors were thrown open by curious occupants.
Kelly was trying to look down the street, shielding his eyes from the Audi’s halogen glare with his left forearm, when what had been the shadowed side of the pilastered wall before him brightened with light from a new direction. He spun.
The indicator pin told him there was still a cartridge in the chamber; but he couldn’t remember how many shots he had fired, nor did he know whether the piece had originally been loaded to its full nine-round capacity. The snubbie was still where Kelly had dropped it on clearing the Walther, in the side pocket of his coat—and thank the dear Lord that he hadn’t found time to refix it at the base of his spine before skidding down the sidewalk on his back. The short-barreled revolver was as bad a choice for shooting at vehicles as the P-38 was a good one.
A car was driving up the sidewalk toward him, opposite to the flow of traffic which the nearer lane would have had if George’s Audi had not blocked it. A net bag full of soccer balls, dropped by some shopper or peddler to the sidewalk, burst and spewed its contents in all directions as the car neared at twenty miles an hour.
The car had only one headlight, the left one. Gisela had come back to fetch him, despite the tangle and the bloody violence that anybody with sense would’ve driven like hell to avoid. One thing about having the shit hit the fan: it taught you who you wanted to keep among the people you knew.
Kelly stepped off the curb to let the Mercedes by and flung open the door of the coupe that squealed to a halt beside him.
“There’s another one out there,” Kelly said, meaning the Audi and too wired to wonder whether or not he was understood. He flopped onto the low seat and pulled the door closed after him. “Hope to God it doesn’t find us.”
The dancer pulled around the tangled Audi and the car it had backed into, then cramped her wheel hard and bumped off the curb again with a clang from the low undercarriage. The vehicle immediately behind the cars paired by the collision had begun to back clear to skirt the obstacle. Gisela accelerated through the momentary gap, ignoring both the screamed curses and the clack as she smashed off her outside mirror against the fender of the higher car.
“I’m taking you to the pickup point,” she said in German. They had spoken in English before, but stress had thrown the dancer back to her birth language. Kelly was fluent enough in German that the change didn’t matter to him, but the fact of it was a datum to file. “We—we’ve needed somebody like you, for the people you know. This has proven how little time there is.”
Kelly started to say, “Wait,” although waiting was the last thing he really wanted to do in this confusion with its chance of fire and explosion and its certainty of heavily-armed patrols descending at any moment. Instead, as Gisela negotiated the acute turn onto Tesfikige Street, bumping over the curb again to clear the van stalled in the intersection, Kelly said, “Gisela, run me back to the Sheraton. There’s something I need in my room there.”
“Are you sick in the head?” she demanded, sparing him a glance.
“Didn’t say it was a great idea,” the American said as he met her eyes. “But I’ve never volunteered for a suicide mission, and that’s what tonight’ll have been if I don’t have some way to cover my ass.” He grimaced and looked away. “Yeah, and get a change of clothes, too. These”—he felt the back of his coat with his free left hand— “haven’t come through the night much better than I have.”
“But you’ll come,” the woman said. She was driving normally. The traffic now was Istanbul’s normal dense matrix, and there was no reason to call attention to themselves by attempting to break out of it. There was no particularly good way to get from one place to another in the ancient streets laid out by donkey-drivers, so their present course was not a bad one from Kelly’s standpoint.
“I’m with you as soon as we’re outa my hotel,” the agent agreed, sliding forward in his seat so that he could replace the little revolver at the back of his waistband. He didn’t want it to clank against the Walther he intended to carry in his trouser pocket, screened by the coattail, when he got out of the car. “I go up to the room, grab my stuff like I’m just changing clothes to party some more, and I think anybody listening’s going to leave me alone until they’ve got a better notion of what’s going on tonight. Better’n I do, anyway.”
Why in the hell had they shot at him, George and whoever had been with George or at least issuing his orders? Confusion rather than deliberate purpose, perhaps, but you don’t issue somebody a gun in a civilized venue unless you trust him not to shoot first and ask questions later.
Except that to Doug and his ilk in their English suits and Italian shoes, Turkey wasn’t civilized; it was part of the great brown mass of Wog-land, where a white man could do anything he pleased if he had money and the US government behind him.
So they might have thought there were—use the word—aliens in the Mercedes, and they might have thought it was Kelly about to pull something unstructured on his own. Either way, somebody had made the decision to stop the car at any cost.
They just hadn’t realized who would be paying most of that cost.
“Got another magazine for this?” Kelly asked, tapping the slide of the P-38. His eyes searched traffic for anything his trigger reflexes needed to know.
“No,” said Gisela. She had switched back to English, but the shake of her head was a bit too abrupt to have been without emotional undertones. “It was . . . it was my father’s before they killed him. The crabs. They took even his body away.”
“It’ll do,” said Kelly, unwilling to remove the magazine and check the load on the off chance that he’d need the weapon fully functional during those few seconds. “Why did they murder your father?”
Nothing in the files Elaine had showed him said anything about direct contact between the aliens and the Dienst. More important, nothing in the conversation Kelly had bugged suggested that his case officer and her chief subordinate had any inkling of the connection. Maybe there was more in Kelly’s meeting with Gisela Romer than a way of gaming his employers. . . .
“I don’t know,” she said miserably, reacting to the concern in her passenger’s voice. It was genuine enough, concern that a human being had been killed by monsters; but Kelly displayed his feeling because it was politic to do so, the way it would have been politic to display affection if he were trying to get into the woman’s pants . . . which might come yet, the aftermath of the adrenaline rush of the firefight accentuating his lust.
“We’ve known about them for three years,” Gisela went on. She forced her way in a blare of horns onto Besiktas Street, through a light that had already changed.
None of her memories were keeping her from being as aggressive a driver as Istanbul traffic required. “Ever since the—they made the Plan—my father and the other Old Fighters—the crabs, the aliens, have been attacking us one by one, all over Earth.”
“Which plan was that?” asked Kelly mildly, to give the impression that he was just making conversation.
“You’ll have to learn,” said Gisela. A sudden distance in her tone implied the question had not been delicate enough. “But not from me, it is not my place.”
Three truckloads of Paramilitary Police passed at speed with their two-note hooters blasting as Gisela turned past the open-air stadium on the Bosphorus side of the huge Taksim Park. Kelly kept his left hand over the pistol in his lap, knowing that the blue-bereted policemen hanging off the sides of their trucks might catch a glimpse into the interior of the low coupe. On a terrorist alert like this, a burst of automatic rifle fire through the Mercedes was a very possible response.
Perhaps because of a similar thought, the woman glanced at Kelly and said, “You saved my life, didn’t you? Was it your job to do that?”
Wonder what Elaine’s answer would be, Kelly thought, but he didn’t wonder at all. Aloud he said, “Look, dammit, maybe I needed a driver.”
It bothered him to be thanked for what he thought of as acts of simple humanity, getting somebody out of the line of fire, getting somebody to a dust-off bird. . . . It meant that either Kelly’s vision of humanity was skewed, or that other people’s perceptions of Kelly himself were very different from his own.
Two taxis and a BMW sedan were picking up passengers under the marquee of the Sheraton. Gisela pulled ahead of them and as far up onto the sidewalk as permitted by the posts set to prevent that behavior. “I’ll be quick,” Kelly said as he got out.
