Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  Gisela paid, then accelerated through the mass of other vehicles merging into the three eastbound lanes. There was no need for special haste, but the challenge had brought out the competitiveness never far beneath the surface of the dancer’s mind. She flicked her passenger a glance, saw him facing forward, smiling and as relaxed as a sensible man ever is with his hand on a gun butt, and downshifted again to surge into a slot in the traffic.

  “You don’t like the way I drive,” Gisela said flatly as they settled into a steady pace.

  “I love it,” said Kelly, patting her thigh with his left hand. “When I drive, I push when I don’t need to and get all tied up in knots.” He grinned.

  “Yes, well,” she said as her hand squeezed Kelly a little closer to her, “someone must lead and someone must follow, that is so. That it should be we who follow—the minutes do not matter, but that does matter, perhaps.”

  Kelly should have felt nakedly open on the bridge, with a two-hundred-foot drop to the water beneath them and a major sea to either side of the long channel over which they passed. There were people looking for him, and there were things that weren’t people—he didn’t need Gisela’s warning to tell him that. They wanted something from him, but the Dienst might be able to tell him what that was. Maybe not the best way to learn, asking somebody’s enemy what the first party intended, but it had the advantage of involving fewer unknowns than the direct approach.

  There were some real unknowns in this one.

  The lighting created a box around the huge bridge and the vehicles on it, separating them from sea, sky, and the feeling of openness. The illumination curtained even the city behind them, much less anyone searching the bridge with binoculars from the surrounding high ground. Someone could be following them, since there was no need of a close tail on a vehicle forced to a single direction and speed. Nonetheless, Kelly felt better for the blanket of light that hid his enemies from him. To the extent there was a justification for that emotional response, it was that when there was really nothing you could do, you might as well relax.

  The contrast of the highway to Kisikli and Ankara beyond, lighted only by the heavy traffic, brought the American again to full wariness, though his left hand continued to rest on Gisela’s thigh. Camlica and the heights which gave a panorama of the whole city, its blemishes cloaked by darkness, led off on a branching road.

  Just beyond that, but before they reached the cloverleaf that merged the Istanbul Bypass with the major routes through Anatolia, Gisela turned off. After a hundred yards on a frontage road serving a number of repair shops, closed and grated, the Mercedes turned again past the side of the last cinder-block structure in the row.

  The roar of traffic dissipated behind them as the coupe proceeded, fast for rutted gravel and a single headlight, down a road marked by Turkish No Trespassing signs. There was brush and scrub pine, but no hardwoods and very little grass along the route. The one-lane road itself seemed to have been bulldozed from the side of the hill to the right and the rushes to the other side suggested at least a temporary watercourse. The possibility that a car was following the Mercedes had disappeared at the moment they turned to the frontage road.

  “How far—” Kelly started to say as the coupe twisted again with the road and a ten-foot chain link fence webbed the road in the beam of their headlight. The red-lettered sign on the vehicle gate was again in Turkish, stating that this was the Palace Gravel Quarry, with no admittance to unauthorized personnel. There was a gatehouse within, unlighted, and no response at all to Gisela’s blip on the horn.

  Kelly got out, closing the door quickly behind him to shut off the courtesy light. He walked a few steps sideways, knowing that the galvanized fencing still reflected well enough to make him a target in silhouette to a marksman behind him. Dust from the road drifted around him, swirling before the car as it settled, and the only sound in the night was a fast idle of the 280 SL’s warm engine.

  “It’s chained,” he said loudly enough to be heard within the car, through the window he had left open. He held the P-38 muzzle-down along his pants leg, as inconspicuous and nonthreatening as it could be and still remain instantly available.

  Gisela switched off the headlights and called, “There should be someone. Take this key and be very careful.”

  Her hand was white and warm when Kelly took the circular-warded key from her. A high overcast hid the stars and the lights of a jet making an internal hop to Ankara, but the sound of its turbines rumbled down regardless. If there was a gun in Gisela’s purse, she had left it there.

  At the loop-chained gate, Kelly loosed the heavy padlock and swung inward the well-balanced portal. There was still no sound but that of the car and of the plane diminishing with distance and altitude. He walked into a graveled courtyard, sidling to the right enough to take him out of the path of the coupe. He waved Gisela in with his free hand, the one which was not gripping the big Walther.

  Subconsciously, Kelly had thought that the grunt of the Mercedes’ engine and the crunch of stones beneath its tires would cause something to happen. Gisela circled the car in a broad sweep in front of the building which the fence enclosed, a metal prefab painted beige where it was not washed with rusty speckles from rivet heads and the eaves. The headlight and the willing little motor shut off when Gisela faced the car out the open gateway again, and the night returned to its own sounds.

  Gisela’s door closing and her footsteps were muted, not so much cautious as precise applications of muscular effort by a woman whose physical self-control was as nearly complete as was possible for a human being.

  “Who are we looking for?” Kelly asked softly as the woman paused at arm’s length.

  “I’ll try the building,” she responded, with enough tremor in her voice to indicate that she was as taut and puzzled as the American—which, perversely, was a comfort to him.

  They walked toward the warehouse door, Kelly a pace behind and to the side. The weight of the pistol aligned with his pants leg made him feel silly, but he was willing neither to point the weapon without a real target nor to pocket it when the next moment might bring instant need. It would have been nice if he had known what the hell was happening, but as usual he didn’t—it wasn’t a line of work in which you could expect to understand “the big picture.”

  Unless you wore a suit, in which case you probably didn’t understand anything, whatever you might think.

  The warehouse had a vehicular door, made to slide sideways on top and bottom rails, and next to it a door for people. There was also a four-panel window, covered on the outside by a steel grating and on the inside by something that blacked out the interior.

  Kelly expected the warehouse to be pitch dark. He stepped close to the hinge side of the door as Gisela opened it, so that he would not be silhouetted against the sky glow to anyone waiting within.

  The big square interior was as well-illuminated as the courtyard, and as open to sky; what appeared from the ground to be a flat-roofed warehouse was four walls with no roof, only bracing posts along the hundred-foot sides. It held a vehicle backed against one corner of the structure, a van like the one which Gisela’s attendants had been entering when the shooting started. Apart from that, the interior seemed as empty as the courtyard.

  “Come,” snapped Gisela, motioning Kelly peremptorily within and closing the door behind him, a precaution the American could not understand until the woman switched on a flashlight she had taken from a hook on the wall.

  “What—” began Kelly, unable to see anything worth the exercise in the flickering beam of the light.

  ‘“Nothing, nothing, nothing!” the dancer said, her inflection rising into spluttering fury. She strode fiercely toward the van, the tight beam of the flashlight bobbling up and down on the windshield like the laser sighting dot of a moving tank. “They could’ve left a note, surely?”

  The floor of the warehouse was gravel, marked in unexpected ways. There were the usual lines and blotches of motor oil and other vehic
ular fluids inevitable in any parking space. The drips, however, were absent from the center of the enclosed structure, so far as Kelly could tell. Why wall so large an area if only the edges were to be used?

  Gisela jerked open the van’s door. The courtesy light went on but had to compete with the beam of the flashlight which the dancer had angrily twisted to wide aperture. “Nothing,” she repeated in a voice like Kelly’s the day they told him what had happened to Pacheco and another hundred of the White Plains’ complement.

  “This is the one your—” the American began, touching the side panel of the van.

  “Yes, Franz and Dietrich,” Gisela snapped as she straightened to slam the door of the vehicle closed. “They must have come back from the hotel, told them I’d been”—her hands writhed in a gesture that aimed the light skyward until she thumbed it off, plunging them back into darkness—“whatever, killed, captured. And they went off and left me!”

  “They could get a job with some of my former employers,” the American said, briefly thinking of his own Kurdish guerrillas. “But look,” he added with a frown, “I saw your people go down. There was a flash and they went over when the whatevers were trading shots with ‘em.”

  “That doesn’t mean they were dead,” the dancer said bitterly as she walked back toward the door through which they had entered. She couldn’t see any better than Kelly could, but she knew there was nothing in the way. “We’ve had it happen before, people they’ve shot but not taken away as they usually do, the crabs. They’ll come around again, in half an hour or so, and have headaches for a week—but live.”

  “It doesn’t sound like your crabs,” Kelly said, frowning, as the woman opened the door and stepped out, “are quite as hard-nosed about what they’re doing as maybe I’d—”

  “Tom,” the woman said.

  It was too late to matter because Kelly was half through the doorway already and the hand-held spotlight that switched on was as blinding to him as it was suitable for sighting whatever guns were arrayed behind it. For a moment he thought of the P-38, but a voice from behind the screen of light said, “Try it, fucker.”

  It was Doug Blakeley’s voice, and Kelly was in no doubt as to what would happen in a fraction of a second if his pistol didn’t drop on the gravel.

  As the Walther slipped from Kelly’s fingers, an automobile engine spun to life with a whine and a rumble. There was nothing sinister in the noise—but every unexpected sound was a blast of gunshots to Kelly’s imagination, and he almost dived after the pistol in an instinctive desire to die with his teeth in a throat.

  “Assume the position, Tommy-boy,” called Doug in a hectoring voice. Rectangular headlights replaced the spotlight even more dazzlingly. Doug and whoever he’d brought along had driven through the open gate and poised there, waiting for their quarry to exit. Now they were using the car’s lights for illumination, the way somebody in Diyarbakir had lighted Mustapha and the alien the night they were gunned down.

  Kelly turned to the “warehouse” wall and gingerly permitted it to take some of his weight through his arms. The structure was less stable than it appeared—a roof contributed more to strength than any amount of bracing in the plane of the walls could do. To judge from the amount of weathering, however, this construct had survived at least a decade of wind and storms, and the wall only creaked when the veteran leaned against it.

  Chances were that Doug Blakeley had gotten everything he knew about body searches from cop shows or watching other people do the work. Kelly took a minor chance, spreading his legs and angling his body—but not so much that he could not spin upright by thrusting himself off with his hands. The P-38 lay at his right foot, throwing its own flat shadow across the gravel to the base of the wall.

  How many were there behind the lights? If Doug were alone, this was going to end real quick no matter where Gisela decided to stand in the business.

  Which was an open question in Kelly’s mind right now, because the woman had sidled a few steps from his and was shielding her eyes with an uplifted forearm. She looked disconcerted, but not nearly as shocked by this as she had been by the fact that her friends had gone off and left her.

  The situation made reasonable sense to Kelly, waiting for a frisk or a gunshot, if Doug Blakeley was one of the dancer’s friends.

  The asthmatic wheeze of a turbocharged engine at low rpms masked but did not hide the sound of footsteps. Kelly’s eyes were adjusting to the glare. Without shifting the position of his limbs or body, he turned his head and squinted over his shoulder.

  There were two of them approaching, one from either side, their shadows distorted by the corrugations of the metal wall. The man to Kelly’s left said, “Peter here told me I should shoot you right off, Tom-lad. Blink wrong and we do just that.” It was Doug.

  Kelly snapped his head around to center it between the lines of his shoulder blades. Peter has good sense, motherfucker, he thought, but not so good that he doesn’t take orders from you.

  Gisela moved unexpectedly closer to the American. “I hadn’t thought you would arrive like this,” she said pleasantly, in English.

  Peter, the bull-necked professional to the right, knelt and picked up the Walther without removing his gaze or the muzzle of his weapon from Kelly’s chest. He and Doug both carried compact submachineguns—Beretta Model 12s whose wire stocks were folded along the receivers. Beretta 12s were easily distinguished from similar weapons by the fact that they had handgrips both before and behind the magazine well. Given his choice of wraparound bolt submachine guns, Kelly would have picked an Uzi or an Ingram, where the magazine in the handgrip facilitated reloading in a tight spot.

  But given his choice, Kelly would have held the gun instead of being at the muzzle-end of two goons who were at least willing to blow him away.

  Peter handed the P-38 to Doug, the shadow of the transfer warping itself across the beige metal wall. Both men carried their submachineguns in what was to Kelly the outside hand: he could probably grab either of his captors, but not both, and he could not grab either of the guns.

  The engine of the car suddenly speeded up. It was an automatic response triggered either by the headlights’ load on the alternator or the block’s need for greater cooling than the fan could provide at a low idle. Peter snarled something in Bulgarian toward the vehicle, however, indicating both that he was jumpy—as Kelly would have been, forced to hold a gun on Peter—and that there was at least a third member of Doug’s present team.

  Elaine might possibly speak Bulgarian, but it wouldn’t be the gunman’s choice of a language in which to address her, even at the present tense moment.

  “He didn’t have a gun,” said Doug, “and then he’s got this to use on us. How do you suppose that happened?”

  Kelly was so focused on himself and his own problems that he did not realize he was the subject of the sentence, not the question, until Gisela said, “He took—” and Doug slapped her alongside the jaw with the butt of the pistol.

  Had the weapon fired, it would have punched a nine-millimeter hole down through Doug’s belly, pelvis, and buttocks, a good start on what the fellow needed. . . . But Walthers, save for those churned out with bad steel and no care in the last days of the Nazis, were about as safe as handguns could be. The wooden grips cracked loudly on Gisela’s jawbone, and the wall rang as the blow threw her head against it.

  The veteran turned a few degrees to the left, enough to give him a direct view of what was happening without providing an excuse for Peter who had backed a step away.

  Doug flung the P-38 toward the darkness. The fencing, thirty yards away, rattled angrily when the pistol struck it. “Oh, ‘I just made a mistake’?” shouted the blond American as he hit the woman again with his open hand. The blow had a solid, meaty sound to it, and this time Gisela collapsed as her legs splayed. The black gloves which Doug was wearing probably had pockets of lead shot sewn into the palm and knuckles, giving his hand the inertia of a blackjack.

  “Did you ex
pect to get away with that shit?” he screamed to the woman who toppled onto her face, away from the wall, when her hips struck the ground.

  Facing the wall squarely so that nothing in his stance would spark anger, Kelly said, “Look, Mr. Blakeley, maybe we all oughta sit down with Elaine and see about—”

  Doug hit him, and the question of whether the blow was backhand or with clenched fist was beyond the veteran’s calculation. The blond American wasn’t just big—he had real muscle under that fine tailoring, and he put plenty of it into the blow.

  The roar to which Kelly awakened was real, not his blood; Peter was shouting something in anger to his employer. Kelly knelt on the gravel, his palms and forehead against the painted steel wall. All his senses were covered by a screen that trembled through white and red, attenuating the sights and sounds of the world. His skin was hot, sticky hot, with the exception of his left cheek and jaw where something cold had gnawed all the flesh away.

  Kelly had blacked out for only a fraction of a second, but for moments longer he had no idea of where he was or what was happening. “Don’t point that thing at me!” Doug shouted over Kelly’s head. “You hold him like I tell you!”

  “I—” Kelly found as he tried to look up at Doug that his neck hurt and his tongue was thick and fiery. A hand gripped his left shoulder from behind, grabbed a handful of fabric and lifted. Doug punched him in the ribs.

  Kelly’s breath sprayed out with blood from the tongue and cheek, cut against his teeth by the previous blow. The veteran sagged back, his knees brushing the ground, but Peter’s strength was enough to hold him.