Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “No problem,” the veteran answered in German. He inched forward, thankful for the rain-swept traffic that kept them from what might be the terminus of their conversation. “How did you get over the problem with fabrication, then?”

  “By putting the assembly plant on the Moon,” said Gisela calmly.

  Kelly, shifting from first into neutral, lost the selector in the sloppy linkages of third and fourth when his arm twitched forward. “Okay,” he said when he thought his voice would be calm. “I guess I thought maybe you had a satellite of your own. Like Fortress.”

  “It was easier to armor against vacuum than it was the winds and convection cooling at Thule Base,” said the woman. “And the Moon had what neither Antarctica nor an orbiting platform could provide: ores. Raw material to be formed into aluminum for the skin and girders of the fleet. Dora had been built of impervium, chromium-vanadium alloy; but that was not necessary, the scientists who escaped with my father decided.

  “The instruments and the drive units, the great electromagnetic engines that draw their power from the auras surrounding the Earth and Sun, had to be constructed here; but that was easy to arrange, since the pieces divulged little of their purpose. They are shipped as freight to our warehouse at Iskenderun and there loaded on a motorship which the Service owns through a Greek holding company. It sails with only our own personnel in the crew and, hundreds of miles from the coast, the cargo is transferred to Dora or one of her newer sisters.”

  Traffic surged forward like a clot releasing in a blood vessel. The wall above the Urfa Gate was whole and fifty feet high, with semicircular towers flanking the treble entrances and rising even higher. Only the arched central gateway, tall enough and wide enough to pass the heaviest military equipment of Byzantine times, was used for vehicular traffic. It constricted the modern two-lane road; Kelly swore under his breath as he watched the cars ahead of them slither on the pavement, threatening traffic in the other lane and stone walls that had survived at least fifteen centuries of collisions.

  “And then you Americans started to build your nuclear Fortress, and we knew that fate was on our side, despite the disasters of the war and the hardships that we underwent while the Service huddled in Antarctica and—and after.”

  There was a tendency, in Kelly as surely as in other people, to assume that what somebody did in the course of his job—or her job—was what he liked to do. It made him mad every time somebody read his file and looked at him with face muscles stiffening as if that would armor the person against the monster calling itself Tom Kelly.

  But he did the same thing, even knowing better; even knowing that there were worse things in the life of Gisela Romer than years spent on the Antarctic ice, but you did what had to be done. . . .

  There had been a pitiable attempt to landscape the approach to the Urfa Gate with trees. Those which still survived at twenty-meter intervals along the boulevard were trees like those found throughout the inhabited Middle East: stunted, the major branches a yard or so long from the point they forked, and a burst of first-year twigs splaying from the cut ends like the hair of a drowned woman. Firewood was at a premium, and each year these trees would be pruned back secretly by those whose only choice was to freeze.

  And sometimes the long-term choices people made for themselves and for mankind weren’t a whole lot prettier; that was all.

  Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk within the circumferential, bent and squinting as though they could shut themselves off from the battering rain. The hooped iron barrier which separated them from the vehicular way gleamed silver in the lights of cars turning into the Old City, providing a touch of fairyland for a scene otherwise harsh and squalid. The girdered tower holding a transformer substation just within the walls could as well have been the guard post of a concentration camp. Life is not exotic while it is being lived. The walls which made Diyarbakir an archeological treasure were proof of a past reality as cruel as anything that put Fortress in orbit above the Earth today.

  Kelly knew now why he had been dreaming about ancient Amida and her walls, past which he now drove a pickup truck, turned against their builders. He had a pretty good idea of who—of what—had caused him to have those dreams.

  But he was damned if he knew what he’d been supposed to do about the situation.

  “What was the message you sent out from Istanbul?” Gisela asked unexpectedly. She had talked her way through her shock at being left behind at the crucial juncture. She had reason to ask the question, and Kelly had no reason at all to lie in his answer.

  “I was set up last night,” he said, leaning forward for a better angle through the windshield. At least it had been raining hard enough to wash the dust from the glass. Presumably he would get further directions when it was time for them.

  “We were set up,” Kelly went on, amending his initial words. “I got a tape of it, back at my room. What we picked up before heading for the airport, too late for it to do us any good right then.”

  The woman grinned as the same memory struck both of them simultaneously. She ran her fingertips up Kelly’s right thigh, then cupped his groin firmly. “There will be more of that, you and I,” she promised with a wink.

  Kelly laughed. “There isn’t a bad time to think about sex,” he said. But there were more important things to think about which were very bad indeed.

  “Set up by my own people,” the American continued because Gisela expected him to. “I—” He paused, then went on, “Assuming I get through this in one piece, I’m going to be deep in shit for blowing away the people I did.”

  The woman nodded. “Yes,” she said seriously, “we know how closely your country works with the Jews. That is why it was so, of so much importance to us to find someone like you who had access to your intelligence community but who could be trusted not to be a puppet of the Jews.”

  Yep, thought Kelly, that’s exactly why they handed me to you, Elaine and her bosses. Tom Kelly’s a fuckin’ Nazi, he’ll get along just fine with these other Nazis, and maybe we’ll learn what kinda games the Service’s been playin’ with the funny-looking gray guys in the flying saucers.

  The hell of it was, things had worked out just about the way Pierrard would’ve wanted them to—except maybe in detail, though Suits didn’t like being bothered with details about who’d been killed and where and how many. The thing Pierrard really wouldn’t like was the fact that he’d been so slow off the mark that the information was probably getting to him through the evening news.

  Knowing the type, the delay was going to turn out to be the fault of some subordinate—very possibly the fault of Tom Kelly. Officers called that “delegation of responsibility.”

  “So,” the veteran continued, “I figured that the tape of that conversation sent clear text so there’s no way in hell they could be sure who’d heard it, all over the world—that’d give ‘em another bone to gnaw instead of me.”

  His tongue touched his lips again. “Besides,” he added so softly that his passenger could not have been sure of the words, “they gotta learn: If they stick it to me, I stick it right back. Whoever they are.”

  “We can either park here,” Gisela said, “or you can go left at Gazi Boulevard and left again at once in the alley, unless somebody’s blocking it.”

  She had the same trick he did, Kelly noticed, of giving directions without raising her voice unless they were very goddam important. Him driving around in the rain because he was too dumb to listen to a normal voice wouldn’t have been that important; and he wasn’t too dumb to listen.

  “Here” was an area within an angle of the walls, set off from the occupied portion of the city by law and the circumferential road. The big circular tower at the apex of the angle was a famous one, the Married Tower, though Kelly couldn’t remember the reason for that name if he ever had known. The clear area would have been a park if it were landscaped. At the moment, it was a wasteland whose dust had been wetted to mud by the rain—too unusual a circumstance for grass to
have secured a foothold.

  There were bushes planted at the edge of the circumferential, but the hard conditions had opened several gaps in the attempted hedge through which the truck could drive without doing further damage. The truck with US Air Force plates could sit undisturbed there, and, in this downpour, more or less unnoticed. The buildings across the circumferential were raised on common walls, and the alley behind them would have been laid out when donkeys were the sole form of transportation.

  Kelly shifted down into the granny gear, standing on the brake pedal as he did so to warn the driver behind him. He pulled hard right, and the truck bumped over the curb with less commotion than it had negotiated the road to the han where Dora hid.

  The shock of recognition which Kelly felt was real enough to send a tingle up his arm from the finger which was switching off the headlights. He swore softly as the rain-streaked glow faded in his memory.

  Not that it should have been a surprise.

  “This is where Mohammed Ayyubi bought it,” Kelly said, gesturing with his chin toward the walls thirty feet away. The rain paused, then sent a fierce lash of droplets across the hood and windshield. The stark battlements were hidden beyond the rain and glass, but Kelly’s mind superimposed the videotaped scene in Congressman Bianci’s office on the image his headlights had just shown: the same wall, the same dripping illumination. . . . Bodies only in what the camera had recorded; at least so far.

  “Yes, Mohammed made the initial approach and screening for the Kurds we recruited for the Field Force,” Gisela agreed. “We couldn’t recruit in Europe, not safely. And besides, Europeans—even the Aryans—have grown soft.”

  The woman shrugged; the act gave her the look of a person rising from catastrophe. “He was coming to meet me at the office here. There were the shots and many vehicles. We scattered, of course, though there was no attempt to make arrests . . . and afterwards, who can say? The crabs, we thought once, but they do not use guns—though one was killed there. A colonel of police was full of tales of the thing that the Americans had bundled away from the site.”

  Her eyes had been on the inner curve of the windshield, on her reflection or her memory. Now she turned to the American agent and said, “He spoke of you often, you know, Tom Kelly. I think now perhaps it was the Jews who killed him.”

  “Something like that,” said Kelly as he opened his door and felt water drip on the bare skin of his wrist. “Could well be.”

  There was no street lighting, and the lights of the traffic hid rather than illuminated Kelly’s surroundings by levering shadows through the sparse hedge in a counterfeit of nearby motion. The courtesy light in the cab winked as Gisela got out on her side. The vehicle neatly plugged the gap through which Kelly had driven. He stepped around the front of the pickup, toward the woman and another opening in the hedge.

  “Thomas Kelly,” said a voice that he recognized, “we must speak with you. It may be that there still is time to save your world.”

  There were three of them again, one on either side of the pickup and the third facing the vehicle’s hood and the two humans. The pair on the flanks were utterly motionless, but white noise surrounded them in a palpable cloak. The words were coming from the little radio in Kelly’s attaché case, though its power was turned off. The rain that fell with fitful intensity was disintegrating away from the standing figures, without the fiery enthusiasm of bullets the night before but with an accompaniment of sound.

  Gisela, arm’s length from the American, made a grab for the gun beneath his waistband.

  She was lithe and very strong; but not so strong as Kelly, nor as quick. He caught her right wrist in his right hand and, with the other, tried to grip her about the waist. “Wait!” he cried.

  One of the frozen-seeming pair of strangers changed appearance. He—it—remained motionless, but the frosting and sizzle of rain that did not quite touch the form now wetted it normally. “Wait!” Kelly screamed again, this time to the figures who stood like wooden carvings of humanity.

  Kelly was not willing to hurt the dancer, and she was willing to do whatever was necessary to escape. During the preceding day he had twice saved her life—so she thought at any rate—and gained such intellectual trust as a person like Gisela Romer had to offer. But her fear and hatred of the aliens were matters ingrained for years and redoubled by the fate of her father.

  Her muscles flexed against Kelly’s grip by habit, sure from experience that she could tear herself free from any man before he realized her strength. Kelly held her like a band of iron. The point of her shoulder jarred his forehead hard enough for pain to explode in sheets of light across his optic nerves. Even then the veteran’s grip did not loosen, but his eyes missed the motion of her free hand.

  He knew what she’d done surely enough when her knuckles slammed him in the groin.

  On a conscious level Kelly thought he was still winning, still in control. He could block the pain while he reached for Gisela’s left hand also and his lips ordered her to—

  His lips passed only a rattle like that of a strangled rabbit. His belly muscles had drawn up so tightly that he could not breathe, much less speak. And the will was there, but the strength had poured from his muscles like blood from the throat of a stuck pig. Gisela lunged back and away from him. Kelly still did not feel the pain he knew must be wracking him, but he could not feel anything at all between his knees and his shoulders.

  Christ, that woman could break rocks with her bare hands.

  He toppled as she twisted aside and froze, a splendid Valkyrie, in a dazzle of light as sharp and sudden as a static spark. Neither of the man-looking figures Kelly could see as his shoulder hit the ground had moved, though the one to the truck’s side began to hiss and shimmer again at the touch of raindrops. One or both must have shot the woman, but Kelly could only deduce that from the result. He reached back toward the Smith and Wesson he had refused to draw a moment before.

  “Please, Mr. Kelly,” begged the radio voice. “She is not harmed. Please, we must speak with you while there may be time.”

  “Christ,” muttered Tom Kelly as mottlings of shadow and light from the roadway quivered across the fully-human face of one of the strangers. The rain on his own face and forehead felt good because it both cooled and dampened skin which felt as though it had been parching in an oven. He had feeling throughout his body again, an ache radiating from his groin in steady pulses with random flashes of pain to add piquancy.

  Gisela’d done her usual professional job. If this trio didn’t want to shoot him the way they had her, they’d have plenty of time to stomp Kelly down into the muddy gravel before he, in his present state, could clear the snubbie.

  Hell, he’d needed to talk with ‘em anyway. And if Gisela was as dead as her boneless sprawl implied—there’d be a time to fix that, the only way a man like Tom Kelly knew to fix things. . . .

  “The neuroreceptors of her brain are blocked,” said the voice of the stranger, who/which might either be reading Kelly’s mind in good truth or making a shrewd estimate on the basis of file data. They must have files, or they wouldn’t have found reason to track him across Anatolia; though the Lord knew what those reasons might be.

  “She will be well in half an hour,” the central stranger continued as Kelly rose carefully to his feet. The other two figures in dark overcoats, darkening further as the rain wet them, minced in slowly from either side. “You must believe me, Thomas Kelly, that we will not kill even to save a world. Even to save your world from itself.”

  “Keep away from her,” Kelly grunted to the silent figures as they began to kneel beside Gisela. He stepped to her, steady enough, though the muscles in his thighs trembled as if with extreme fatigue.

  The stranger across from him paused, looking up at the veteran with a bland face that almost certainly emanated from the medallion on the figure’s chest. Kelly shouldered the other one aside. He could feel the give of bones and joints that were as inhuman as the corpse in the freezer back on
Fort Meade.

  “Alive, is she?” Kelly said as he, himself, knelt, and touched the woman’s throat. The carotid pulse was as strong and steady as Kelly’s own.

  “Oh, boy,” the veteran said. He rocked back on his haunches and exhaled the breath which he had not realized he was holding. Gisela’s throat felt warm, not hot, and that reminded him that his own bare skin was chilled by the rain. The woman needed to be under shelter, or her final state would be the same as if the—hell, the aliens—had used .45s.

  “Look—” Kelly began.

  The two silent aliens knelt again, reaching for the woman, and the radio’s speaker said, “We will carry her within the office of her organization.” The central alien pointed with his whole arm past the hedge and road to the two- and three-story building facing the walls.

  “There is no one there now,” the alien voice continued as the figure refolded his arm against his chest with a motion which was grossly wrong for what he appeared to be. “But she will be warm and dry and recover quickly.”

  Kelly frowned, but he stepped back to allow the other pair to lift Gisela. They were lighter than men and Kelly had assumed they were frail, but they handled the dancer’s solid form as easily as two humans of the veteran’s own build could have done.

  “Another time,” the alien voice said as his companions walked the woman through a gap in the hedge like men with a friend who had drunk herself insensible, “we would have held her as we hold others of her organization, so that they could not execute their Plan. But we did not hold enough of them. Now it is too late for prevention, Thomas Kelly, and the cure is something that we cannot do for you.

  “We cannot kill, even to save a world.”

  Tom Kelly stretched his arms out stiffly behind him and bent forward, then back, from the waist. His head spun in slow circles when he lowered it, and the throb radiating from his groin picked up its tempo when the motion of his torso thrust his hips out. For all that, he felt better for the exercise; felt human at any rate, and that was an improvement over the way he’d felt since Gisela punched him in the balls.