Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  The door rolled back with the rumble of well-oiled trunnions.

  “The only thing I can’t figure,” said the veteran easily as he followed Gisela to the van, “is you working so close with the Jews and not figuring what they’d do if they got ahold of me.”

  The woman froze stock-still, then turned. “What?” she said sharply. “I do not understand.”

  Kelly blinked in false puzzlement. They were standing close; he could see her face was set like a death mask. “Well, you know about me, don’t you?” he said. “About the White Plains and—an’ all?”

  “What do you mean about the Jews?” Gisela demanded. She had reverted to German, and her tongue flicked unintentional spittle when she said “die Juden.”

  “Well, who the hell did you think Doug worked for?” Kelly responded, adding an undertone of anger, equally false, at the woman’s obtuseness. “Surely you knew.”

  Gisela was swaying. “The American Central Intelligence Agency,” she said in a distant voice, a mother begging the surgeon for the answer his face had already told her was a vain hope.

  “Christ, I thought you people were professionals,” Kelly snapped. “He’s Shin Bet, the section of Israeli intelligence that reports to their Ministry of Defense. They really did play you for suckers, didn’t they.”

  And then he caught the blond woman as she stumbled forward into his arms.

  “Easy,” the veteran said as he patted her back, pretended concern in his voice and unholy joy in his heart for having won one, having manipulated a subject into total submission. In this case, on the spur of the moment and without any significant amount of preparation. . . . “Easy,” he repeated gently. “Are you all right to drive? I just thought you knew.”

  Gisela straightened as if bracing herself to attention—shoulders back, chin out, arms stiff at her sides. “Yes,” she said, and drew a shudderingly deep breath. “Yes, of course. I’ll have to report this to the . . .”

  She turned around abruptly, perhaps to hide her expression or a tear, but she reached back for Kelly to show that she was not trying to cut herself off from him. “Come,” she said, “we must get first to the airport.” She was speaking English again and her tone, if urgent, was not panicked.

  “Right you are,” murmured Kelly.

  The doors of the van were not locked, nor did the vehicle have a lockable ignition. Gisela turned the switch on the steering column and stepped firmly on the clutch so that the back of the clutch pedal engaged the starter button beneath it on the firewall. The engine spun easily and caught at once. The woman turned on the headlights and cautiously engaged what turned out to be a sticky clutch.

  “You must understand,” she said, her face set, as she reversed to face the vehicle toward the door, “that I acted in accordance with my orders.”

  She braked, shifted gears, and went on, “We worked with the ones we thought were CIA, but it was always to further the Plan, to gain time until the day came. Not for—their purposes, though we did not know they were the Jews.”

  They drove out into the courtyard, past the parked coupe and the bullet-shattered Audi. “Soon it will not matter, but—whatever I can do to make it up to you, Thomas Monaghan, I will do.”

  “What you’re doing already is all I could ask for,” said Kelly, meeting the woman’s eyes in the dash lights. “I need friends real bad. Take me to your top folks and, if they’ll help me, I’ll do everything I can about the crabs with them. With you all.” He paused before adding, “And my real last name’s Kelly, but Tom’s just fine.”

  There was one thing more the veteran needed to do before he tried to talk his way—bluff his way, in a manner of speaking, but he was doing precisely the job he’d been tasked to do—onto a military flight at the airport. Kelly unzipped one pocket of his attaché case to remove his radio, the concealed tape deck, and the headphones. Working by the greenish light of the gas and temperature gauges, Kelly rewound the tape and set it to play back whatever it had heard in Elaine’s hotel room.

  The lengthy hash with which the tape began was, Kelly realized after a minute or two, neither jamming nor a malfunction: the maid had entered 727 and was vacuuming it. He advanced the tape and, as he was preparing to blip forward a third time, heard the wheezing vacuum replaced by a click of static and the recorded ring of a telephone.

  Click. “Go ahead,” said the voice of Elaine Tuttle, who picked up the handset before the completion of the first ring.

  Click. “Having sex, he says. It’s, I don’t know. Could be true, certainly could be.”

  Click. “Doug, lis—”

  Click. “No, just listen to me. He doesn’t have a gun right now, but he could get one very easily. We don’t want to push him, that’s not what we’re—”

  Click. “Of course we don’t trust him. I’m saying we’ve got to give him the room to do what he’s tasked to do, or there was no point in—”

  Click. “Except that wasn’t your decision or even mine,” Elaine’s voice said, each word as distinct as a blade of obsidian set in a wooden warclub. “If you want to take that up with those who made the assignment, then I’ll give you liberty right now to get on the next plane.”

  It was noticeable that though she had not raised her voice, this time she was able to finish her sentence without being cut off by the person on the other end of the line.

  Click. “All right, I’m not neglecting the long-term. Trace them, it’ll be good to cross-check Kelly as well as adding to our database on those Nazis. But don’t crowd him; he’s still as good a chance as we’ve got of coming up with the link between the Dienst, the Kurds, and the aliens.”

  Click. “All right. But be careful, sweetheart, he’s dangerous even if he doesn’t have a gun.”

  There was nothing more of interest on the tape, not even the slam of the door as Elaine went out. Twice, the toilet flushed loudly enough to trip the recorder, but there were no phone calls and no face-to-face conversations after Elaine had signed off with a warning that Doug Blakeley had chosen to ignore. She had waited in her room, ready to relay information or orders, and neither had come.

  Doug should have reported on the shooting in the Hilton parking lot. Either he’d been afraid because he was sure that his career had ended in the melee; or, more likely, he was afraid that the orders he would get would clearly debar him from the revenge he intended to take on one Tom Kelly, the working-class slob who was the cause of all the trouble . . . because there had to be a single cause for Doug’s mind to grip. Otherwise there was nothing at all to keep him from slipping into a universe with no certainties at all.

  Kelly took off his headphones and touched the Rewind switch of the recorder. Wonder if there’s anybody left to give’er a phone call, he thought, or if she’s going to read about it all in the papers. Maybe George has the number to call.

  “What?” asked Gisela Romer, over the rattle of the van’s body panels in the wind of their passage.

  If he was going to start thinking out loud, then he was an even bigger damned fool than he’d realized. “I was thinking,” Kelly said truthfully, “that if people had been less interested in fucking with me, then I’m not the only one who’d have been better off.”

  The woman looked at her passenger’s frowning profile. “You won’t regret the help you have given me—given us,” she said. “There has never been greater need for men like you, men willing to act resolutely.”

  Guess even Doug’d give me high marks for that, Kelly thought. Especially Doug.

  “He’s dead, so I guess he deserved to die,” the veteran said aloud. “That’s the only way there is to figure, just let hindsight do it.”

  “Pardon?” said the woman. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither,” said Tom Kelly. He squeezed her right thigh firmly to assure himself that it was real and the world was real. “But we’ll do what we can anyway.”

  Kelly was almost glad for the way his head hurt because when everything started to slip away it slipped tow
ard the crevasse that seemed to have been banged in his skull.

  That focused him and brought him back to awareness of the heavily-guarded terminal building.

  It still hurt like hell.

  The airmen could be distinguished from the National Police because the former wore khaki and carried automatic rifles while the police were in green with submachine guns. There were six in each party, pausing in their banter to track Kelly and the woman from the little-used portion of the parking lot to the military terminal.

  Some airports pretended to be cities of the future, with ramps and glass and cantilevered buildings. Yesilköy was by contrast an aging factory district, where the pavement was cracked and the structures had been built for function, defined by an earlier generation, rather than ambiance.

  Tom Kelly wasn’t feeling much like a man of the future himself.

  Gisela Romer did not exactly stiffen, but her stride became minutely more controlled. The veteran could almost feel her determining which persona she would don for the guards—haughty or sexy or mysterious. Most of these Turks were moonfaced and nineteenthe same stock as those who stormed through naval gunfire at Gallipoli to drive the Anzacs back into the sea at bayonet point.

  “Keep a low profile, love,” Kelly said, risking a friendly pat on the woman’s shoulder. He winked at the troops, one GI approaching some others, and all of them on fuckin’ government business. “This is exactly the sorta thing they expect if I’m doing my job, and I’ve got authorizations up the ass.”

  It just feels funny because the people I just blew away were supposed to be my support, he added silently. And of course, the general fucked-upness of trying to do anything through channels wasn’t to be overlooked as a factor.

  “No sweat,” he said jauntily.

  Kelly figured he could spot the head of the National Police contingent, but the Air Force section was under a senior lieutenant with pips and a bolstered pistol to make identification certain.

  “Sir,” said Kelly in Turkish, taking out a billfold bulging with the documentation his case officer had given him, “we have urgent business with the flight controller’s office.”

  The Turkish officer looked carefully at both sides of the card he was proffered, feeling the points of the seal impressed through the attachéd bunny-in-the-headlights photograph of Tom Kelly. The back was signed by a Turkish brigadier general from the Adana District, in his NATO capacity.

  After a pause that wouldn’t have been nerve-racking except for the fact that Kelly had put so many bodies to cool in the recent past, the Turk saluted and said, “An honor to meet you, Colonel. Do you know where you’re going, or would you like a guide?”

  Christ, he hadn’t noticed the rank she’d given him for this one. Tom Kelly couldn’t remember ever meeting a colonel with whom he’d have willingly shared a meal.

  “Is there, ah,” the veteran said aloud, “an American duty section?”

  “Of course,” said the lieutenant; and, if his tone was a trifle cooler, then Kelly was still speaking Turkish.

  Too many of the Americans who entered the terminal took the attitude that anybody understood English if you raised your voice enough, and that Turks had about enough brains to be busboys. There were no American bases in Turkey; there were many Turkish installations dedicated to NATO and manned by Americans . . . and if more Americans kept that distinction clear, a demagogue like Ecevit would have found it harder to divert attention from the corruptness of his government with anti-American rhetoric.

  “Corporal,” said the officer to one of the men with worn-looking G-3 rifles, “take Colonel O’Neill to the NATO office.”

  Kelly gestured the dancer ahead before he himself followed the sturdy-looking noncom through the terminal doors. Neither he nor the Turk had referred to Gisela, who was not specifically covered by the authorization. On the other hand, she was only a woman and as such under the colonel’s control. Much had changed since the Revolution of 1919, but the Turks were still the people who had given the word seraglio to the rest of the world.

  What was now the military terminal had presumably been built in past years for civilian uses, long outgrown. It had the feel inside of a train station, with wainscots and plaster moldings, now dingy but painted in complementary pastels. The lobby, at present empty, was equipped with backless wooden benches.

  “Are you expecting a flight any time soon?” Kelly asked, mostly to put their guide at ease.

  The corporal turned and flashed a smile that was unwilling to become involved, the look of a well-dressed pedestrian faced with a man-in-the-street reporter.

  Kelly shrugged.

  As he and Gisela followed their guide down a side hallway they saw a portly figure in khakis coming the other way and calling over his shoulder, “Well for Chrissake, Larry, get it off when you can, okay?” The fellow spoke English with a Midwestern twang and wore USAF sleeve insignia—master sergeant’s, Kelly thought, but it was always hard to tell with the multiplicity of winged rockers the Air Force affected to be different.

  The Turkish corporal gestured toward the sergeant, said “Sir,” to Kelly, and whisked himself back toward his unit with a slight rattle of his weapon’s internal parts.

  “Yes, can I help you, sir?” asked the sergeant as he paused in the doorway of an office which was lighted much better than the hall which served it.

  Kelly stepped close to the sergeant to use the light in finding the right document this time. The blue nametape over the man’s breast pocket read Atwater. His moustache was neat and pencil-slim, and despite carrying an extra forty pounds, he had the dignified presence called “military bearing” when coupled with a uniform.

  “Yes, sergeant,” said Kelly, handing over a layered plastic card with an inset hologram of the Great Seal and another bad photo of Kelly. “My companion and I need to get to Diyarbakir soonest, and we don’t have time to wait for the Turkey Trot.”

  “Ummm,” said Atwater, frowning with concern at the card as he led the others into his office. “That could be a bit of a problem, sir. . . .”

  The phone on his desk began to ring. He lifted the handset and poked the hold button without answering the call. The light began to pulse angrily. “You see,” he continued, “there’s some kinda flap on, and . . .” His voice trailed off again as he shifted the card between his thumbs and forefingers to move the seal in and out of focus.

  Atwater was not giving them a runaround; he was genuinely concentrating as he stared at the card. Kelly, though his face did not change, was chilling down inside, and it was at the last moment before the veteran exploded that Atwater stood up.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do. I don’t have any equipment on hand and the Turkey Trot—there’s not another for two days anyway.” He raised his hand. “Besides you don’t want to run that way, I know, sir.”

  Kelly nodded guardedly. Every week, a C-130 transport made a circuit of the major US-manned installations in Turkey like an aerial bus route. The delay would be a problem, but the questions and whispers of the military types and their dependents sharing the flight made that option even worse.

  “I’m going to check with the indigs, see if I can pull a favor or two,” the sergeant continued. “If it was just you, sir”—he spread his hands—“maybe we could stick you in the rear seat of something. Two of you, that’s a bit of a problem—not anything to do with you, you understand, ma’am.”

  Kelly had been sitting on the arm of one of the office chairs along the wall. Now he stood up but faced the plastic relief map of Anatolia instead of the sergeant to avoid making a threat by his posture. “Ah, look, Sergeant Atwater,” he said, getting his voice back under control after the first few syllables, “that card really means what it says, absolute priority. If that means stranding the ambassador in Kars, that’s what it means.”

  He turned carefully, thrusting his hands in his hip pockets and looking at the desk before he added, “And if there’s a Logistics Support aircraft handy, it mean
s that too.”

  Gisela had judged the conversation perfectly. She sat as still as the chair beneath her, examining her nails. Because she so perfectly mimicked a piece of furniture, the two Americans were able to hold the necessary discussion for which she should not have been present.

  “Yessir, I sorta figured that,” said Sergeant Atwater with a grimace. He rubbed his forehead and thinning hair with his palm, then returned the card to Kelly. “There’s a bird here, you bet; only, you see, I don’t dispatch ‘em, exactly.”

  The hefty noncom spread his hands again. “It’s not Logistics Support, it’s Communications Service. For this week at least. But I won’t BS you, it’s just the situation that’s the problem.”

  “Well, you’ve got the codes, haven’t you?” the veteran asked in amazement. “I know it’s got to be authorized stateside, but it has been. Just punch it in and the confirmation’ll be along soonest. This signature”—he raised the card so that the back was to Atwater— “ain’t a facsimile, friend.”

  “Right, Colonel, didn’t think it was,” the sergeant said.

  He was sweating profusely, though his manner was one of angry frustration rather than fear. Atwater was within a year of retirement and he knew that if he did his job by the rules, his ass was covered no matter how hacked off anybody got about it. But that wasn’t the way to do a job right; and, like most members of most bureaucracies, the sergeant really liked to do his job right.

  “Look, the way it is, I can’t get stateside on a protected line to check those codes,” he said, gesturing with a crooked finger at the card Kelly held. “I can’t even get Rome, which’d be good enough. All the secure lines’re locked up with priority traffic. Somebody’s really dumped manure in the blender”—he nodded to the silent Gisela and a drop of perspiration wobbled off his nose—“if you’ll pardon me, ma’am. It don’t seem to be Double-you Double-you Three from anything BBC or Armed Forces radio say, they’re talking progress in Geneva . . . but it’s a flap and no mistake.”