Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  Since he thought he saw her killed. No point in kidding himself about what the worst part of the shock had been.

  Kelly stepped to the open door of the truck and picked up the radio, shielding it from the continuing drizzle with the flap of his coat.

  “Somebody told you I was the right guy to contract out killing to, did they?” said Kelly. He was relieved enough that she was alive and he was alive—and for Chrissake, that somebody saw a way clear of a world disaster that was real clear even without the details—that the implications that he had just made overt didn’t bother him the way they usually did.

  Not that it wasn’t true. The Lord knew he’d painted his reputation in the blood of more men than Doug and his buddies . . . and women too, bombs weren’t real fussy, and he’d used bombs when they seemed the choice.

  The two of them were alone now, Kelly and the alien who talked. The other pair were jaywalking Gisela across the boulevard; safer, perhaps, than it looked because the traffic was crawling despite being bumper to bumper—but he’d let ‘em go ahead for lack of a better idea, and he wasn’t going to second-guess matters now. “Do you have a name?” he demanded, wishing that it wasn’t raining, wishing a lot of things.

  “Call me Wun, Mr. Kelly,” said the alien through the speaker beneath Kelly’s coat, and the face smiled as a fragment of headlight beam trolled across it. The “skin” surface reflected normally, even showing streaks of rain, but Kelly knew from the corpse and the videotape that the perceived features were wholly immaterial.

  “One. as in bir, digit?” Kelly asked, translating the word he understood into Turkish and raising a single index finger.

  “No, Mr. Kelly, more like the Spanish Juan,” said the other. “But just Wun. Are you not comfortable here?” He raised his arm toward the sky. “Should we go inside your vehicle?”

  Kelly chopped his hand like a blade in the direction of the ancient walls. He didn’t feel like putting himself in a metal box, no, but the basalt ramparts were shelter of a sort against both rain and the breeze. He wondered if Mohammed Ayyubi had thought the same thing the night those stones had backstopped the bullets which killed him.

  “Come on,” he said aloud. “Dunno that I’m ever going to be comfortable, but we can get outa some of the rain.”

  “The Dienst has taken over your Fortress,” Wun said as they walked together, man and not-man, toward walls that were a stone patchwork of more than a thousand years. “They think to rule the Earth, at least to their satisfaction, because they are invulnerable and have the power to destroy whatever targets they may choose.”

  No sign of bullet pocks on the hard stone, no certain sign in this light at any rate: The rubble and concrete foundations were Roman; the sections of large ashlars which sprawled across the fabric like birthmarks were probably Byzantine repairs; and the Turks, both Seljuk and Osmanli, had rebuilt the upper levels, perhaps many times, with squared stones of smaller and less regular size. The presence of the massive edifice gave Kelly a feeling of protection which he knew was specious, but anything to calm his subconscious was worthwhile so long as it let his intellect get on with what it needed to do.

  “All right, then,” the veteran said, focusing his mind by planting his right palm against the wet stone, “it’s government level now and I’m tactical. So hell, it’s in somebody else’s court, and I don’t know that Gisela and her buddies are much crazier than some of the folk who’ve had their fingers on the button officially.”

  “It is your business, Mr. Kelly,” said Wun. His dark-coated body was almost invisible, close to the basalt and farther from the light flickering from the circumferential. Kelly thought the alien was shivering, however.

  “Don’t tell me my business,” the American snapped. “Look, I walked into this, and if I’d been in time I’d’ve done something about it, sure. I don’t need to be tasked before I’ll blow my nose. But it’s gone, fucked—and that’s not my problem.”

  “The Soviets will not believe the space station has changed hands, Mr. Kelly,” Wun said with inhumanly-precise enunciation. “They are convinced that the events of the past hours, including the nuclear destruction of the shuttle launching facilities at Luke and Kennedy Space Command bases, are all part of American policy. When the Dienst presses its demands on Russia by attacking major cities in addition to the space launching facilities which have already been destroyed, the Soviets will react against those they believe to be the true aggressors. Your world will survive the result, Mr. Kelly; but your civilization will not, and your race may not.”

  Kelly’s mouth opened to repeat that there was nothing he could do about it. Before he spoke the words, he heard them in his mind, being spoken by everyone he’d heard say them in the past, every cowardly shit who wouldn’t act and wouldn’t let Tom Kelly act when something really had to be done.

  “Christ,” said the veteran, and he took a deep breath. “All right, what is it that I can do?”

  “You must enter Fortress and destroy it,” replied Wun as calmly as if he had not considered that Kelly might make any other answer. “We can bring you from orbit to the structure, but we cannot enter a solid object, and we will not help you further in a work of death.”

  “Christ, you’re sweethearts!” Kelly said. “You oughta run for Congress, you’d fit right fuckin’ in with the clean-hands crowd.”

  “We do not have to ask you to understand principles, Mr. Kelly,” the alien said. “You have principles yourself. They differ from ours; and yours will permit you to save your world from consequences which could never occur to our race. We will not kill.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” the American said, turning his eyes toward the stone, tracing the irregular courses upward till they blended with the sky and the rain washed the embarrassment from his face. They might be crazy, Wun and his buddies, but they were crazy in a better way than most anybody else Kelly knew. You had to draw lines, and no damn body else in the world had a right to complain about lines you drew and chose to live by.

  “‘Fortress’ isn’t a public relations gag,” he said aloud. “If those Nazis’ve really taken it over, then its going to be a bitch to get close without getting blown into dust clouds.”

  “We can get you to the satellite unnoticed, Thomas Kelly,” said Wun. “We can do no more.”

  “Guess that oughta be enough,” said Kelly, stretching his arms overhead and pulling the wet fingers of one hand against those of the other. He had to think that way; he’d have gone off in a shivering funk years ago if he hadn’t believed at bottom that he could do any job he was willing to undertake.

  The movement of Kelly’s body worked the slick metal of the revolver against the base of his spine. “Why me?” he demanded flatly, fixing the alien with his eyes as firmly as he could in the half-light. Now that he’d made his decision, he had to have the background information that anyone with good sense would’ve demanded earlier.

  “Because of the physical contact,” the alien said. His hand mimed a face-rubbing gesture, and Kelly recalled the way he had touched the corpse of the alien that night on Fort Meade. He’d done that to prove to the Suits that he wasn’t afraid—and to himself, that he could do whatever he had to do, even if he was scared shitless. . . .

  “We could find you then, Mr. Kelly,” Wun was saying, “and even before we found you, we could begin to speak to you, through your mind. You felt us, surely? We are not expert on your race’s psychology. Though we have observed you for a century, it is only in the past three years, since you achieved stardrive, that we have been permitted to interact with you. We still have much to learn.”

  “Stardrive,” the American repeated, filing the remainder of the statement to be considered at some other time.

  “Wun, space travel’s something I’m paid to know about. We’re still talking chemical rockets here, unless you mean the monocle ferry—and that’s a low-orbit system, pure and simple.”

  “The researchers at Cambridge University who are responsible for the disc
overy,” Wun replied, “still think they are working with time travel. We know better, however, and that is sufficient for those to whom we must report on the progress of our oversight. Without that, Mr. Kelly, we could not have attempted to immobilize the members of the Service; and I could not now be talking to you.”

  “Okay,” said Kelly, pressing his hands firmly against his face, fingertips to forehead. The tight skin over his nose and cheekbones crinkled and lost some of the numbness that the tension and cool rain had brought. His coat was soaked across the back. “Okay. But you’ll have to get me there, all the way. I doubt I can get outa Diyarbakir the way things are. There’d be too many people to convince. Christ, there’s like as not a scratch order out on me right now. And my chances of even getting a message out, much less listened to, when I’m in West Bumfuck and there’s been nukes going off in ConUS—zip, zed, zero.”

  He pointed toward the dark sky. “If you need me, Wun, you carry me all the way in your ship.”

  “Our ships are not on Earth. We cannot carry you to them as we are carried, because you—were not there already, Thomas Kelly,” the alien said.

  Wun was shivering, though his seeming face and bare hands were motionless. Wun’s arms and torso quaked beneath the dark overcoat, however. “Whatever message you need to pass, we can pass for you—to anyone, anywhere. For now, you must move yourself on your own world and from it.”

  “You did leave a message on my tape,” Kelly said “Told me you had to see me or like that. It wasn’t in my head; I was really hearing it through the earphones?”

  Wun nodded. “Yes,” he said, “of course. We dared not leave a longer message for you then until you had seen us in person.”

  Kelly laughed. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking there was no way you’d be able to get into the Tank . . . and maybe there isn’t. But if you can punch my message through to the heart of the Pentagon, then it’s going to save a whole lot of time. Because even if they don’t believe me—which they won’t, not after some of what’s gone down lately—they’ll damn well hop to meet whoever can play games that way with their codes.

  “Come on,” he added, striding back toward the truck. “You may not need this written out, but I need paper to compose it. There’ll be a destination sheet and a clipboard in the pickup, and we’ll just use the back of that.”

  The funny thing was, Kelly thought, that he felt pretty good. Oh, he’d been in better physical shape than he was now—but hell, he was functional, and that was a long sight better than he’d felt in the recent past. Hurt didn’t matter; he’d been hurt before.

  And he was in the middle of something that was either going to work or it wasn’t—but it wouldn’t fry its circuits just because the folks he depended on for support made a policy decision to do something else. He trusted Wun in a way that he had never trusted a human in a suit or an officer’s uniform. Partly, that was crazy; and a gut reaction was, by definition, irrational.

  But he could find reason to justify the way he felt. They’d come a very long way to lie to Tom Kelly, if they were lying, and what Wun had just told him about Fortress was exactly what the veteran had extrapolated from Gisela’s words.

  The aliens didn’t have to be altruists—they could want Earth for themselves, for any damn reason you cared to name. If they managed to save the place from a bunch of Nazis with H-bombs, then what else they wanted could be dealt with in its own good time.

  And if Tom Kelly could do something to help with the problem, then it was about the first time in twenty years he’d been tasked to do something he really believed in.

  It occurred to Kelly that he might simply get lost in the sprawling airbase.

  Third TAF was one of the two combat divisions of the Turkish Air Force, and the bureaucracy at its Diyarbakir headquarters was both extensive and unfamiliar to the American. If all went well, someone in Washington would shortly be sending a message about Tom Kelly to someone in Diyarbakir Air Division. Who the recipient was going to be, and through what combination of Turkish, NATO, and American channels the message would be delivered, were both questions at whose answer Kelly could not even guess; and that meant that he hadn’t the faintest notion as to where on the base he ought to be waiting to be noticed when the time came.

  The veteran smiled as he approached the main gate of the airbase again, visualizing the end of the world in nuclear cataclysm while Turks sped through the halls and grounds of the great airbase, too intent on what they understood were their own duties to pay any attention to the American screaming himself hoarse,

  Like a lot of things, it didn’t cost any more to laugh.

  In the hours since Kelly had driven the borrowed pickup out the main gate, there had been some subtle changes. Instead of a squad on duty to check IDs, there was a platoon—and the earlier relaxed atmosphere was gone. A barrier of concertina wire on a tube-steel frame had been swung across the road, and behind it waited an open-topped Cadillac-Gage armored car with an airman ready at the pair of pintle-mounted machineguns.

  The guards must have recognized the truck’s markings, and a few of them probably recalled Kelly himself driving away in the vehicle. Whatever word was out regarding the world situation—nothing on local civilian radio, Kelly knew from sweeping the shortwave and AM band with his portable—it had sure convinced Third TAF to raise its state of readiness.

  Three airmen and a lieutenant with automatic rifles were waiting outside the barrier. They ran to the truck from both sides as soon as Kelly stopped, and the way their guns pointed caused him to get out and remove his card case with slow, nonthreatening motions.

  It made his decision as to where to wait relatively easy, however.

  While two airmen peered at the—empty—bed of the pickup to make sure that it was not packed with explosives and acetylene tanks, Kelly handed his Turkish ID to the lieutenant.

  “Sir,” the American said in the officer’s own language, “sometime in the next—I don’t know, it might be a day”—it might be never, but there was no point in thinking that—“there are going to be orders sent regarding me. Then things will have to move very fast. For now, I think it’s best that I remain here at the gate, outside if you prefer. But it is absolutely critical that the Officer of the Day and the head of base security both be informed immediately that I am here, and that I’ll stay right here until sent for.”

  He paused, but before the Turk could frame a reply, Kelly added, “In addition to the name on this card, they may come looking for Thomas Kelly.”

  Elaine would very likely have been furious had she known Kelly was carrying his own North Carolina driver’s license with him, but there were times you simply had to have real ID. The Lord only knew which of Kelly’s various cover names the Pentagon would reference him under—assuming the message had gotten through—but at bottom, they would probably include the real name.

  Kelly gave the driver’s license to the officer; if it saved only five minutes in the course of the next twenty-four hours, then five minutes could be real important.

  “One moment, please,” the lieutenant said. His lips pursed and he frowned as he looked at the cards, practicing the unfamiliar names under his breath. Then he walked back to the regular guard post, stepping through the narrow gap left between the gate post and the barbed wire barricade.

  “Any notion of what’s going on?” Kelly said to the airmen, primarily to make conversation; people don’t let their guns point at folks with whom they’re holding a friendly conversation.

  “It’s a full alert, sir,” one of the Turks responded. “They’re fueling and arming everything that’ll fly.”

  The lieutenant, watching Kelly through the glass of the guardpost, hung up the phone and barked an unheard order. Six airmen trotted past the officer as he strode toward Kelly. They grabbed crossbars extending from the concertina wire and began to drag the barricade to one side.

  “You may come in, sir,” the lieutenant said, a little less dourly hostile than he had seeme
d before. Perhaps he had just been afraid of being chewed out by his superiors for reporting something nonstandard. Now he handed back the two identification cards. “Your pass permits that, and for the rest—it will be as God wills. The Officer of the Day says he will report your presence to General Tergut, as you requested.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” the American said as he got back into the truck. The rain had stopped by the time he made it out of the walled city, but the vehicle’s heater had not even begun to dry his soaked clothing. He sneezed as he put the pickup in gear, wondering whether after everything he had gone through he wasn’t going to wind up a casualty from pneumonia. Inshallah—as God wills it.

  That was about as good a philosophy for a soldier as any Kelly had heard. And right now, it might be as much as you could say for the world itself.

  Kelly saw the lights at the same time the phone rang in the guard post beside which he was parked. There were two vehicles speeding toward the gate from the heart of the installation, both of them flashing blue lights and crying out the hearts of their European-style warning hooters. The road was asphalt-surfaced, but the vehicles raised plumes of surface dust to reflect the headlights of the follow-car and the rotating blue party hats of both.

  It hadn’t been a long wait, but Kelly found as he stepped out of the truck that his muscles had stiffened. The Turkish lieutenant ran to him, leaving his rifle behind this time. “Sir!” he shouted to Kelly, “they’re sending a car for you!”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” the veteran said as he twisted some of the rigidity out of his torso, “I thought that”—he nodded toward the oncoming flashers—“might be me being paged.”

  Wun was on top of things for sure, Kelly thought as the vehicles—a van followed by a gun jeep, both of them blue and marked HP for Air Police—skidded to a halt with their hooters still blaring.