Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “We—concentrated here in Diyarbakir, when the Plan was developed,” Gisela said deliberately, “in part for recruitment’s sake—the Kurds.” She looked over to make sure her student was following. Kelly nodded obediently.

  “But more because it is, you see, not developed,” the woman continued, “but still there are the airbase and the tracking station. Competing jurisdictions, do you see?” The tutor looked over again.

  “So that if things should be seen that neither understands, your NSA or Turk Hava Kuvvertli”—Gisela used the indigenous words for Turkish Air Force within the English of her lecture—“both blame the other . . . but not blame, because of security.”

  She smiled toward the windshield as, downshifting the long-throw gearbox, she passed a horse-drawn wagon in a flapping roar. Communication among friendly forces was a more necessary ingredient of success than was intelligence of the enemy, but it was notable that whenever military bureaucracies set priorities, information flow came in a bad second to security. Perhaps that was a case of making a virtue of necessity, since it was almost impossible to pass data through a military bureaucracy anyway.

  “So each thinks the other responsible and says nothing, so as not to embarrass an ally and to poke into what is not their own business,” Gisela concluded. “Bad practice of security.”

  The road off to the right, past a small orchard of pistachio trees, could have been a goat track save that it meandered in double rather than single file. Gisela found the brakes were spongy and downshifted sharply to let the engine compression help slow the truck. They made the turn comfortably, though the pickup swayed on springs abused by too many rutted roads like this.

  “Reach into my right coat pocket,” the woman directed. She had crossed right arm over left to take the turnoff, and even in the moment it took her to reposition her hands afterwards, the steering wheel jibbed viciously.

  Kelly obeyed, expecting to find sunglasses or something similar. Instead there was a round-nosed cylinder that could have been a lipstick, save that it was clicking against three others like it—and a fifth, buried deeply in a corner of the lining.

  He drew out the handful of .38 Special cartridges, a full load for the cylinder of the snubbie now nestled empty against his spine. “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said the veteran softly as he drew the weapon to load it.

  The rounds were US Government issue, bearing Lake City Arsenal headstamps and 130-grain bullets with full metal jackets. They were really intended for 9-mm autoloaders and would literally rattle down the bore of most .38 Special revolvers. When fired, however, they upset enough to take the rifling.

  They weren’t a perfect load for the aluminum snubbie, but they were a hell of an improvement over an empty cylinder . . . and the fact that Gisela had procured them for him, just before he was to be introduced to her associates, was a sign more valuable than any real protection that the weapon gave him.

  “I got them from the pilot,” Gisela said needlessly. “I thought you wouldn’t ask, to call attention. So I asked, and it won’t be reported.”

  Kelly hunched forward to replace the little revolver. He’d carried it a lot of years and never used it before the previous night, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t need it again soon. Lightning was liable to keep striking the same place so long as the storm raged and the tree still stood in its path.

  The ground became broken to either side of the road, lifting in outcrops of dense rock shaded by brush instead of sere grass. Gisela downshifted again into compound low. A moment later, the hood of the truck dipped as the ruts led into a gorge notched through the plain in two stages.

  They drove down the upper, broader level; then Gisela cramped the wheels hard left to follow the track across a single-arched bridge of stone, vaulting the narrow center of the gully. There was enough water in the rivulet below to flash in the sun before the truck began climbing from the declivity with a shiver of wheelspin.

  “How old was that bridge?” asked Kelly, craning his neck to look out the back window, an effort made vain by the coating of dust over the glass.

  “Seljuk at least,” answered the woman, with a shrug which merged into a shoulder thrust as the steering fought her when they rattled out of the gully. “Maybe Byzantine, maybe Roman, maybe—who knows? There’s probably been a bridge there as long as men have lived here and farmed . . . and that is a very long time.”

  “And now you’re here,” Kelly said quietly. “The Service.”

  “Here.” Gisela’s smile was more arrogant than pleased. “And soon, everywhere. To the world’s benefit.”

  The ground dropped a few feet on the left side of the road. Gisela swung to the right around a basalt rock face and then pulled left toward the recently refurbished gate of a han, a caravanserai, ruined by time.

  The walls of basalt blocks weathered gray gleamed in the sunlight, but the shadowed gaps in the dome of the mosque which formed one corner of the enclosure were as black as a colonel’s soul. The dome was crumbling; but, though the ages had scalloped the upper edge of the wall around the courtyard, it was still solid and at no point less than eight feet high.

  The original gateway had been built between the mosque and a gatehouse, but part of the latter had been demolished when the new gate was constructed. This was steel, double-leafed and wide enough to pass a semi-trailer. The posts to which the leaves were hinged were themselves steel, eight inches in diameter and concrete-filled if they were not solid billets.

  In the far corner of the facing wall there were arrow slits, in the walls and the blockhouse. It struck Kelly that the stone edifice was proof to any modern weapons up through tank cannon, and that the embrasures could shower machinegun fire on trespassers as effectively as the arrows for which they had been intended.

  Gisela pulled up to the gate and honked imperiously. The dust cloud they had raised in their passage continued to drift forward, settling on Kelly’s right sleeve and the ledge of his open window. The back of his neck began to tingle. He shifted in his seat, unwilling to draw his revolver but certain that a premonition of danger was causing his hair to bristle.

  The woman honked again and said, “If somebody’s asleep at this time, they’ll—”

  “Jesus Christ!” shouted Kelly. He unlatched his door so hastily that his feet tangled as he got out of the cab. He did not draw his gun, any more than he would have thought to do so if he found himself in the path of a diesel locomotive.

  At first it was more like watching time-lapse photography of a building under construction, for the object was huge and silent and rising vertically in a nimbus of brilliant light. Hairs that had been prickling all over Kelly’s body now stood straight out, and when he reached for the car door to steady himself a static spark snapped six inches from the metal to numb his hand.

  It wasn’t a cylinder rising on jacks from the han courtyard: it was a disk fifty feet in diameter with a bluntly-rounded circumference and a central depth of about twelve feet.

  It was a fucking flying saucer.

  Gisela was out of the truck also, shouting and waving her clenched fist in obvious fury. The underside of the saucer was clearly visible, so it could scarcely be called an unidentified flying object. The veil of light surrounding the vehicle as it rose was pastel and of uncertain color, shifting like the aurora but bright enough to be visible now in broad daylight.

  The skin of the flying saucer was formed of riveted plates. The junctions of the plates and the individual rivet heads stood out despite the nimbus because the portion of the field emanating from those surface irregularities was of a shade which contrasted with that of the plates themselves.

  The whole aura shifted across the spectrum and, as the saucer continued to rise, faded. The craft climbed vertically. A bright line appeared from the rim to the central axis, as if the nimbus had been pleated there and trebled in thickness. The line rotated across the circular undersurface faster than the second hand on a watch dial, hissing and crackling with violent electrica
l discharges. The rate of the saucer’s rise accelerated with the sweep of the line, so that there was only a speck of dazzling corona by the time the full surface area should have been swept. Then there was nothing at all.

  “It was Dora,” said Gisela brokenly. She touched the truck’s fender with a hand for balance, looking as staggered as she had been the moment Doug had slapped her with a shot-loaded hand.

  “Have the aliens come and taken your friend?” Kelly demanded harshly in order to be understood through the woman’s dismay.

  “No, not the crabs,” Gisela said petulantly, turning so that both her palms were braced against the vehicle.

  The breeze that was too constant to be noticed made enough noise in the background that she was hard to hear, since the truck separated her from Kelly. He stepped around the front of the vehicle to join her, though he was nervous that his appearance of haste would silence her. By focusing on the details of gathering information, Tom Kelly was able to avoid boggling inertly as a result of what he had just seen.

  Whatever he had just seen.

  Gisela met his eyes and straightened. “That was Dora,” she said in a firm, emotionless voice. “The first of the Special Applications craft, the prototype which escaped to the Antarctic base from the Bavarian Alps in 1945. She must have been sent to make the final pickup. And we have missed her.”

  The blond woman’s face was as cool as that of a marble virgin, but tears had begun to well from the inner corners of her blue eyes. “We may as well go back into the city, Thomas Kelly. We’ll be able to communicate from the office there, but I’m sure no one will have time for us until everything has been accomplished.

  “They have begun to execute the Plan already, and I am not a part of it.”

  Tom Kelly took the woman’s hands in support, but only a small portion of his mind was on Gisela anymore. He was far more concerned with the fact that not all of the UFOs being sighted were under the control of aliens whose motives were at least uncertain.

  Some of the spacecraft were in the hands of Nazis whose motives were not doubtful in the slightest.

  Kelly started back to Diyarbakir with Gisela slumped as his passenger against the other door. He drove with the caution demanded by the loose steering and his own unfamiliarity with the roads.

  Besides, there was no longer any reason for haste.

  “I didn’t think they’d leave before dark,” Gisela said.

  A front wheel bucked in a rut, jolting her hard against the doorframe and recalling her to her dignity. She straightened in the seat and gave a body-length quiver like the motion of a snake casting its skin. “But of course, now it doesn’t matter—secrecy. No need for it, no chance for it either. And they left me behind.”

  The sky had darkened abruptly, as if the flying saucer had punched a hole in the stratosphere and let the storm rush in. That was what had happened, near enough in the larger sense, Kelly supposed. Not asking the question wouldn’t make the situation go away, though.

  “Exactly what is the Plan?” the veteran asked, while his hands and eyes drove the truck and left his intellect free for things he would have preferred not to think about.

  “To control the world by using your Fortress,” the dancer said, destroying with her flat voice any possibility that Kelly’s imagination might have run away with him.

  “At first we had the base in Antarctica,” Gisela continued. “My father was commander of the detachment guarding the salt mines at Kertl, in Bavaria. When British troops were within five kilometers and they could hear Russian guns in the east, so near were they, a motorcycle arrived with orders that they should leave at once for Thule Base in the Antarctic, taking all flyable Special Applications craft.”

  The woman was speaking in German, and her voice had the sing-song texture of a tale which had been repeated so many times.

  “Only Dora, the fourth prototype, could be flown,” said Gisela. “Some of those at Kertl wished to wait still further for the aircraft from Berlin Tempelhof they had been hoping would arrive. Others would have fled to the British in order to escape the Bolsheviks, but they feared to entrust themselves to a journey of twenty thousand kilometers in a craft which had thus far been the subject only of static testing.

  “But my father understood that orders must be obeyed, not questioned; and he understood that there was sometimes no path but that of ruthlessness to the accomplishment of a soldier’s duty.”

  Kelly’s hands gripped the steering wheel more fiercely than the road itself—the highway to Diyarbakir, now—demanded. The American agent had seen enough things in his own lifetime to be able to imagine that scene in the foothills of the Alps close to the time he was being born. Electrostatic charges from Dora, the prototype built so solidly that she still flew like nothing else on Earth, must have lighted up the salt mine in which the laboratory hid from Allied bombers. It would have been like living in the heart of a neon lamp while the powerplant was run up to takeoff level.

  But the machinery was only part of the drama. The rest was that of the men and women wearing laboratory smocks or laborers’ coveralls, the personnel who had decided to ignore the order from Berlin and stay behind. As Dora readied to attempt her final mission, those who were not aboard her would have begun to understand exactly what decision they had really made.

  The guard detachment of Waffen SS would have been in spatter-camouflage uniforms and carrying the revolutionary MP-44 assault rifles which could not win the war for Germany but which armed a generation of liberation movements after the Russians lightly modified the design into the AK-47. Even the pick of Germany’s fighting strength there at the end would have been a far cry from the triumphant legions of the Blitzkrieg: boys, taller and blonder, perhaps, than their classmates, but still fifteen years old; and a leavening of veterans whose eyes were too empty now to show weariness, much less mercy.

  Tom Kelly had been a man like that for too many years not to know what it would have been to have stood with those guardsmen; and how little he would have felt when Colonel Schneider gave the order to fire and the bellow of a score of automatic rifles echoed itself into thunder in the walls of the tunnel.

  “Thule Base was safe, unapproachable,” said Gisela. In her voice was a memory of ice and snow and a constant wind, with even bare rock so deep ice had to be excavated to reach it. “But it was useless save as a place to hide while we reorganized and gathered the wealth required for the task. Three U-boats of the Type XXI rendezvoused with the refugees from Dora, and there was the original complement of Thule Base . . . but still very few, you must understand?”

  A few oversized drops of rain splattered down, followed by a downpour snaking across the highway in a distinct line. The dust on the hood and windshield turned immediately to mud which the desiccated wiper blades pushed across the glass in streaks when Kelly found their switch. “Others provided aid, supplied us with connections and part of the money required,” the woman said, raising her voice over the drumbeat of raindrops as though addressing a hall of awestruck, upturned faces which hung on her words. “But there were two secrets which the Service kept: those original strugglers at Thule Base and their descendants like myself. We kept the secret of Dora. And we kept the secret of the last flight from Tempelhof, a special Arado Blitzbomber as plannednorth, to one of the Swedish islands, where those who flew in it transferred to a U-boat which would proceed to Antarctica to meet us.”

  They were getting close to the incorporated area of the city. Diyarbakir had spread to the north and west of ancient Amida. The city walls to the south loomed on an escarpment, free of modern buildings, and the eastern boundary was the steep gorge of the Tigris—now and as it had been for millennia.

  In the heavy traffic they were entering, bad brakes and the universal-tread pattern of the pickup’s tires made Kelly concentrate more on his driving than he wanted to. The rhythm of outside sounds and the greasy divorcement of the rain-slick highway were releasing Gisela’s tongue, however. They were in a microcosm o
f their own, she and Kelly; not the universe that others inhabited and one which had secrets that one must never tell.

  “We could buy equipment easily,” the woman said. “Through sympathizers, sometimes, but easily also through those who wanted drugs or wanted arms that we could supply. However, there was no place on Earth where we could safely produce what we needed for the day we knew would come, when the Service would provide thousands of craft like Dora for the legions of New Germany to sweep away Bolshevism and materialism together.”

  Brake lights turned the road ahead of them into a strand of rubies, twinkling on their windshield and on the rain spattering toward the street. A major factory, one of the few in a city almost wholly dependent on agriculture, was letting the workers out to choke the road with motorcycles, private cars, and dolmuses—minivans that followed fixed routes like buses, but on no particular schedule and with an even higher degree of overloading than was the norm for Turkish buses.

  “Turn here,” Gisela said with a note of disapproval. “You should have turned at the last cross street. We enter the Old City best by the Urfa Gate.”

  Kelly nodded obsequiously. Colonel Schneider’s—Romer’s—daughter was telling him things now, in a state divorced from reason, which she had not told even when she was convinced that he had saved her and her Plan from Israeli secret agents. Then she had been willing to take him to those whose business the explanations were—but not to overstep her own duties. Irrational snappishness when he missed the turn to a location unknown to him was a small price for the background he was hearing.

  Gisela cleared her throat with a touch of embarrassment as she ran her comment back. “I apologize,” she said in English. “Our office is to the right on the inner circumferential, facing the walls.”