Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “Higher,” ordered Doug, breathing heavily himself.

  Kelly didn’t think his ribs had cracked that time, but his whole chest felt as if it were swelling, bursting. He knew where he was now, being beaten by a hotshot American who had finally found a way to assert his authority—while a Third World thug waited to blow holes in him if he didn’t sit and take it.

  Stand and take it. Peter dragged Kelly fully upright and Doug punched him again.

  He aimed at the veteran’s face, but the lead-burdened fist moved slowly enough that Kelly was able to duck so that Doug hit the point of his forehead instead of the nose. Even though the blond man was wearing a sap glove, the result was more likely to break knuckles than to do Kelly serious injury.

  The veteran blinked against the jumbled dazzle of light caused by his brain bouncing within the bone. He went limp again, at least partly by volition, and his weight forced Peter back a step.

  The Beretta was short for an automatic weapon but still, at seventeen inches, much longer than an ordinary handgun. In order to point the weapon at Kelly without letting the muzzle touch him, Peter had to hold the veteran out at arm’s length with his left hand. The gunman was strong, but Kelly’s solid weight was an impossible load under those conditions.

  “Get Tomashek!” Peter growled in English.

  “Big, bad man who thinks he can shoot my people,” Doug said as he panted. He had been trying to keep his Beretta muzzle-up as he swung at Kelly with his right hand alone, but the eight-pound submachine gun pulled itself down toward the gravel as the blond man tried to catch his breath.

  Peter swore bitterly.

  The cold patch on Kelly’s forehead was probably blood cooling, but it felt as if the blow had lifted off a patch of skin. Flashes of light moved across his vision like the rotary shutter of a movie camera, but through them he could see Gisela still slumped where she had fallen. Kelly couldn’t be sure, but he thought one of the dancer’s legs flexed minutely when the blond man’s shoe brushed it.

  “Straighten him up,” Doug ordered, wiping his forehead with the back of his gloved hand.

  “Look, I said get Tomashek,” Peter said. “I’m not—”

  “Listen, you bastard!” the blond American roared. “You want to spend the rest of your life in a cell in Buca, you just give me lip once more. Lift him!”

  Peter grunted in a combination of anger and effort as he obeyed. He bent his left arm at the elbow and half knelt, then used his leg muscles to jerk the veteran into place for another punch.

  Kelly hurt in more places than the glove had touched him directly, signals scrambled when his brain jounced, but the inexpert beating had not thus far made him nonfunctional. He’d been in worse shape after a night drop into steppe country once—and that hadn’t kept him from blowing up hardware that somebody else shouldn’t have left behind and trekking out again himself.

  He wasn’t a boxer, but neither was Doug, and the fist the blond man aimed at Kelly’s face was slow and clumsy. The veteran jerked his head to the side instinctively, even though part of his mind knew that it might be better to accept the punch than to piss off Doug further by dodging it. The fist touched the lobe of Kelly’s left ear before momentum carried it into Peter’s shoulder.

  Peter blurted a curse, again in Bulgarian. Doug screamed incoherently and swung the Beretta at Kelly’s head.

  The looping sideways blow was beyond Kelly’s ability to dodge, but Peter’s own flinching reaction gave the veteran enough slack to avoid the worst of it.

  The submachine gun’s stock glanced off Kelly’s skull, just above his right temple, and the shock jarred the gun’s heavy bolt off the sear. The bolt clanged forward and fired the top round in the magazine.

  The muzzle blast of the nine-millimeter round was deafening to all three men; gas and unburned powder bloomed simultaneously from the muzzle in a yellow-orange flash, stinging Peter’s cheek as the bullet itself gouged a long slot through the wall. Sparks flew, and the howl of the unstabilized bullet cut through the echoing crash of the sheet metal.

  “You have pig shit for brains!” Peter shouted as he grabbed Doug’s weapon by the magazine and twisted until the muzzle was safely skyward. Kelly, sprawled on his back, tangled the feet of the two men who had been beating him a moment before. “Either yougoing to get more help here or you’re going to do it alone, I swear to you!”

  Kelly reached under himself as his heels and shoulders lifted the small of his back from the ground.

  The Beretta’s wire stock had flexed enough on impact to keep the veteran’s skull from cracking, but there was still a four-inch pressure cut in his scalp, and blood had begun to mat the black hair before his body hit the ground. It felt as though he had been struck by an ax, laying his brain open to the chill night air, and a part of him was quite sure that he was dying.

  “Watch—” one of the men above him shouted as Kelly lifted the aluminum snubbie and shot twice, close enough to Peter’s belly that the shirt caught fire.

  Kelly’s vision was sharp, though he had no color sense at the moment. Both submachine guns were still pointed up, but Peter had started to lower his to cover the man on the ground when the bullets hit him like punches in the solar plexus. The gunman doubled up, clamping both elbows to his wounds. The muzzle blasts had jerked the front of his shirt out of his pants, to smolder over the oval entrance holes just beneath his rib cage.

  The cup-pointed bullets had perforated the diaphragm and meandered upward through the gunman’s right kidney and lung. Neither nicked his heart, but the blood vessels they destroyed before they lodged under the skin of Peter’s upper chest were sufficient to pour his life into his body cavity in a matter of seconds.

  Hunched over and mincing because his knees were bent, Peter tried to run along the front of the warehouse to escape the glare of the car’s headlights. Doug had stumbled back a pace when his employee released the Beretta. The blond man’s mouth was open in a snarl of disapproval. Kelly, still on his back, aimed for the center of Doug’s mass and fired twice more.

  The muzzle flashes were red to the victim, bright gray to the shooter, and black swirls on the wall where the halogen beams were distorted into shadow by the balls of powder gases.

  Doug’s wire-slim belt buckle pinged as a bullet scalloped a section through its upper rim, and there was a black hole marring the mauve-gray-and-white striping of his left shirt pocket. Minusculely later, blood spurted to distort the clean outline the wadcutter had punched in the shirt fabric.

  The blond American started both to turn away and to lower the submachine gun. Gisela scissored her legs, catching Doug at the ankles, and sent the big man down in a sprawl.

  The gasp of the car’s intake manifold trying to increase flow coincided with a sideways shift of the headlights, throwing shadows along the wall in an exaggerated reciprocal of the car’s motion. Doug scrabbled on all fours toward the vehicle, splashing dark blood on the gravel every time his damaged heart pulsed. When his arms failed him, his legs continued for several seconds to thrash and hump his buttocks.

  As the car started to move, Kelly sat up and tried for the first time to aim his revolver. The short radius and tenth-inch blade sight would have made real accuracy impossible, even if the veteran himself had been up to it. He fired at the broadside of the vehicle as it turned. There was no clang or smack of glass to indicate that he had hit anything. About all Kelly gained by the shot, his last, was to learn from the flash that he was seeing in color again.

  “Here,” said the dancer. She handed Kelly the submachine gun she had wrestled from Doug during the moment that she and the wounded American had threshed together on the ground.

  The car was turning so sharply that the power steering belts rubbed and screamed. It was by European standards a large sedan, very probably another Audi 5000 Quattro, now in silhouette against the chain link fencing which its own lights illuminated. Kelly aimed, wishing that he had enough leisure to unlatch the stock and butt the weapon firmly again
st his shoulder.

  There were two push-through selectors at the top of the rear handgrip. One of them was presumably the safety, while the other selected single shots or automatic fire. Kelly had no idea what combination would permit him to fire the bursts he wanted; but the best way to tell was to align the rear notch with the hooded front blade and squeeze the trigger.

  Which gave him a three-round burst and a new respect for the Beretta because the front grip and the comfortably slow rate of fire made the weapon perfectly controllable at its rock-and-roll setting.

  There were no tracers in the magazine, but Kelly caught the spark of one bullet beyond the muzzle flashes, snapping through the air a foot above the sedan’s roofline. He had been sighting instinctively on the fence, against which he could see the post and notch, for the car merged with the gunsights in a uniformly dark mass. As the Audi fish-tailed to center itself with the gate opening, Kelly lowered the muzzle a fraction of an inch and squeezed off again. He was smiling.

  Glass flew up like early snowflakes, winking in the powder flashes and reflected headlights. The car, which had begun to straighten, went into a four-wheel drift to the left instead. Kelly gave the broadside fifty feet away a long burst. At least half the bullets appeared as red flecks on the door panels as friction heated both lead and sheet metal when the nine-millimeter rounds punched their way through the car body.

  These muzzle blasts were less shocking than the first had been. In part, that was a matter of psychology, but the earlier shots had been literally deafening, and Kelly’s back was now to the warehouse wall that had acted as a sounding board initially.

  The headlights swung across Kelly and the dancer once more; then the Audi came to a stop with the driver’s door to them. The engine had died, but bits of metal cooling at differential rates hissed and pinged.

  Kelly walked a final burst across both front and rear doors, aiming six inches above the rocker panels to catch anyone cowering on the floor. Then for a moment, nothing moved at all.

  Gisela dusted herself briskly with her palms, started for her Mercedes, and stumbled.

  “Wait,” said Kelly, and he began to walk toward the Audi, whose headlights seemed already to be yellowing as they drained the battery, though that might have been an illusion. He couldn’t hear properly. There was a high-pitched ringing in his right ear, and cocoons of white noise blurred the edges of all the ordinary sounds, his voice or the scrunch of feet on the gravel.

  Because of the pain, each step the veteran took threatened to topple him onto the ground. It wasn’t the blow to his chest, though sharp prickles warned that at best the muscles there were cramping, while at worst they were being savaged by the edges of broken ribs. The battering his head had taken, from the leaded glove and the steel tube of the receiver, was a different order of problem. The brain has no pain receptors of its own, but it has ways of making its displeasure known. Kelly’s stomach and throat contracted with transferred discomfort every time his heel touched the ground.

  Holding the Beretta by the back grip as if it were a pistol, Kelly tried to open the driver’s door. It resisted; though the door was unlocked, one of its edges had been riveted into the frame by a bullet. There was a sharp whiff of gasoline near the car which cut the sweetish, nauseating odor of nitro powders and the chemicals which coated them.

  Nothing gurgled from a punctured tank, and the smell of gas was vagrant enough to result from the way the car had stalled rather even than a clipped fuel line. Whatever the cause, thank the Lord that the Audi hadn’t ignited. They were too far from the highway for the shots to have been noticed, but twenty gallons of gasoline flaring up would arouse interest for sure.

  The courtesy light shone directly on the face of a man Kelly had never seen before. His feet were tangled with the gas and brake pedals, but his upper body lay on the floor of the passenger side. The bullet hole above his left eye could have been either an entrance or an exit wound. Its greenish edges had puckered back over the puncture. No one else was in the tonneau of the car. Kelly turned and closed the door. Gisela stood ten feet away, rubbing her jaw and waiting.

  The waiting was over for Doug Blakeley, who lay belly-down on the gravel with his limbs splayed into a broad X, The huddle beside the sheet-metal wall, twenty feet from the place shooting had started, was Peter. That one was too dangerous to have been safely forgotten, but there’d been, no time to worry about him when the worries would have been justified.

  And the poor anonymous bastard in the car, who might have reported to somebody if a jacketed bullet hadn’t churned his brain to jelly. . . .

  The veteran knelt down. Being hit on the head was making him feel nauseated.

  Bits of safety glass which had shattered into irregular prisms now glittered at Kelly amid the crushed granite. Then his stomach heaved and splashed most of its contents onto the ground. A second spasm followed, with just enough of an interval for Kelly to move the submachine gun he still held a little farther away from his stomach’s target area.

  He couldn’t say that he felt good as he panted on all fours, trying to catch his breath; but he felt a lot better.

  Gisela Romer was standing beside the Mercedes. She had taken her purse from the coupe and was rummaging in it. Kelly heard sounds from her and thought for a moment that the woman might also be vomiting. It sounded more like sobs, however. Kelly rose, spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand as he walked over to the dancer, He could feel his individual injuries separately now, even the dimples left on his knees by the rough stones while he lost his dinner. The long list of pains, however, was a lot better than the total malaise which had preceded it, and his skin was no longer swollen with what had seemed to be three degrees of fever.

  Gisela lifted something from her purse and cracked it down on the fender of the Mercedes.

  That was the side that had crumpled in the alley. The action shocked Kelly however, since the coupe was too well cared for not to be loved by its owner. “What . . . ?” the veteran said as his free hand closed over Gisela’s when she lifted it for another blow.

  The woman surrendered the object to Kelly’s grip without struggling. He’d been right about the sobs.

  “He told me it was to call for help,” she said as Kelly examined the object. “He said I should be careful, that you were very dangerous. If I needed help, I should throw that switch.”

  The object was a prism, three inches by two and about half an inch deep. The casing was dark resin, featureless except for a thumb slide on one of the narrow faces.

  Kelly reached into the car, twisting the ignition key to the auxiliary position and then walking the radio up and down the dial. There was a loud squeal at the bottom of the FM band, near 85 megahertz. Sliding the switch back and forth did not affect the signal.

  “Just a beacon,” the veteran said as he dropped the little signal generator on the ground. “The slide’s a dummy. Doesn’t look like they trusted you.”

  He brought his heel down on the center of the case. He couldn’t feel anything give, but the squealing on the coupe’s radio vanished in an angry crackle of static.

  “Wouldn’t help a lot in town,” Kelly added in an emotionless voice, “but once we got out on the road where the signal doesn’t get lost with all the buildings, it’d home ‘em right in.” He turned off the radio and the ignition.

  Gisela still said nothing.

  “Do you know where your friends’ve gone?” Kelly asked, pointing at the empty, roofless structure. “Unless Doug and his boys were who you were looking for?”

  “No!” the woman snapped. She shook her hair out, her visage relaxing slightly now that she had been able to let some of her anger loose. She went on, “There should be someone in Diyarbakir. But it will take us days . . . .”

  Kelly shrugged, “Not if we fly,” he said. “And I figure that’s a lot better idea than sticking around here.”

  He closed his eyes and pressed the palm of his free hand against the bruise in the center o
f his forehead. “They deserved it, more’r less,” he said very softly. His stomach threatened him briefly when a breeze brought him a reminder of Doug Blakeley, whose sphincter muscles had relaxed to empty his bladder and bowels as he died.

  “Might not’ve made any difference,” Kelly continued, speaking to something more shadowy than the blond woman beginning to frown at him. “Wasn’t going to be a clean way out, maybe. But maybe if they hadn’t knocked me half silly, I’d have tried harder. I can run on reflex, but it ain’t real pretty.”

  He opened his eyes to meet Gisela’s. “Is it?” he added, putting a period to words he already regretted saying.

  Gisela looked around her, at the bodies and the silent sky, before she faced Kelly again. “All right,” she said. “What do I need to do?”

  “Drive us to Yesilköy Airport,” the American replied as he gathered his attaché case from the Mercedes, “and I learn whether my authorization codes are much use there at the military terminal. If you’ve got the keys to that van”—he waved toward the vehicular door in the wall—“then it might be politic to take it. Can’t guarantee we’ve cleared up all the—road hazards—with these.”

  “All right,” the dancer repeated.

  Gisela had a key to the sliding vehicular door. As she manipulated it, Kelly searched the shadows for his aluminum Smith and Wesson. It seemed none the worse for having been fired and dropped without ceremony, though it would get a proper cleaning if Kelly had the opportunity. He had no .38 Special ammunition, so the gun was useless for the moment, as well as a dangerous link to the killings here. Peter and the driver weren’t going to be a problem: very likely they weren’t Turkish citizens, and they certainly weren’t Amcits. But Doug was another matter, one that could land Tom Kelly in shit to his hair line—on the slim chance that he survived long enough for that to matter.

  He velcroed the snubbie back in place on his waistband anyway. It’d been a friend when he needed one; and people who ditched their friends at the conclusion of present need wound up real quick with no friends.