Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  Of course, it was just conceivable that this was a result of the shootings in Istanbul and hadn’t a damn thing to do with Fortress.

  Kelly jogged to the passenger side of the van even before the doors unlatched. There was an empty seat in the jeep, but he had no intention of being carried any distance in it if there were an alternative. A short wheelbase and four-wheel independent suspension made jeeps marvelously handy; but that also made them flip and kill hell outa everybody on board when the driver turned sharply at speed. There was nothing about the way the Hava Polis driver had approached the guard post to make Kelly trust his judgment.

  The man who jumped from the van was heavyset and wore a US Air Force uniform with rosettes on the epaulets. In the colored light of the flashers, Kelly could not be certain whether the rank insignia were the gold of a major or a lieutenant-colonel’s silver.

  “Thomas Kelly?” the Air Force Officer shouted through the chest-cramping racket of the hooters. He thumbed toward the doors at the back of the van being opened by a Turkish airman. “Hop in, we’ve got a flight for you to Incirlik.”

  “Colonel Kelly,” said the veteran. “And you can ride in back if you need to come along, Major Snipes.” The name tag over the officer’s pocket was clearly visible, and he obeyed Kelly without objection.

  “Yes?” said the Turkish driver when Kelly slid in beside him. The back door banged and latched.

  “Take me where we’re going,” Kelly replied in Turkish, giving the airman a lopsided smile.

  Grinning back, the Turk hauled the van around in a tight, accelerating turn that must have spilled the occupants of the side benches in the back onto the floor and into one another’s arms. Kelly, bracing his right palm against the dashboard, smiled broadly.

  To the veteran’s surprise, the two-vehicle entourage did not halt at one of the administration buildings. Instead they sped along access roads to the flight line, passing fuel tankers and flrefighting vehicles. Men bustled over each of the aircraft in open-topped revetments which would be of limited protection against parafrags or cluster bombs sown by low-flying attackers.

  Or, of course, the nukes that Nazis in orbit could unload here in the event they decided it was a good idea.

  But that made him think about Gisela, and the blond dancer was one of the last things Tom Kelly wanted on his mind right now.

  The van’s right brakes grabbed as the driver stepped on them hard, making the vehicle shimmy against the simultaneous twist on the steering wheel to swing them into a revetment. There was already a car there, a Plymouth, and the men waiting included some in Turkish and American dress uniforms besides those in coveralls servicing a razor-winged TF-104G.

  “This one’s Kelly!” called Major Snipes, throwing open the back of the van before Kelly himself was sure that they had come to a final stop.

  He opened his own door and got out. Two Turkish airmen, followed by a captain, ran up to him with a helmet and a pressure suit, the latter looking too large by half. “Who gave us the size?” the captain demanded. “Come on, we’ll take him back and outfit him properly.”

  “Wait a minute,” an American bird colonel said as he grabbed Major Snipes by the coat sleeve, “how do we know this is the right guy?”

  “Look I’ll pull it on over my clothes,” said Kelly, taking the suit from the now-hesitant airman. “So long as the helmet’s not too small, we’re golden.”

  “Well, he had ID—”

  “No, the suit’s no good if it doesn’t fit,” insisted the Turkish captain.

  “Any body could have ID—”

  “What the fuck do you expect me to do, Colonel?” Kelly roared as he thrust his right leg into the pressure suit, rotating a half step on the other foot to forestall the captain, who seemed willing to snatch the garment away from him. “Sit around for a fingerprint check? How the hell would I know to pretend to be me if I wasn’t?”

  “He is not the man you wish?” asked a Turk with a huge moustache and what Kelly thought were general’s insignia. His English was labored rather than hesitant, suggestive of bricklaying with words.

  “Robbie,” said Snipes to the colonel, “it’s all copacetic. The fat’s in the fire now, and the last thing we need is for a review board to decide it was all the fault of US liaison at Diyarbakir.”

  “Colonel,” Kelly put in more calmly as he checked for torso fasteners, “I’m the man they’re looking for. It’s not the usual sort of deal”—he tried on the helmet which, for a wonder, fitted perfectly—”but it’s the deal we’ve been handed this time.”

  He started walking toward the plane that had obviously been readied for him, hopeful that the colonel wouldn’t decide to shoot him in the back. Sometimes Kelly found it useful to remember that during the disasters of Ishandhlwana and of Pearl Harbor, armorers had refused to issue ammunition to the troops because the proper chits had not been signed. The military collected a lot of people to whom order was more important than anything else on Earth. Trouble was, the times you really needed the military, the only thing you could bank on was disorder.

  No bullets. No shouts, in fact, though squabbling in Turkish and English continued behind him as he strode away.

  The TF-104G was a thing of beauty, the two-seat conversion trainer modification of the aircraft which had seduced the top fighter jocks of the fifties and sixties and had killed literally hundreds of their less-skilled brethren. The F-104 was fast, quick, and maneuverable. It also had the glide angle of a brick and offered its crew no desirable options when the single J-79 turbojet failed on takeoff.

  But this was also a situation in which a fast ride was preferable to a safe one. For that matter, the Turks—one of the last major users of the F-104 in several variants—hadn’t had nearly the problem with crashes that others, particularly the Luftwaffe, had experienced. West German maintenance was notoriously slipshod, and the F-104 simply didn’t tolerate mistakes.

  That wasn’t an attitude Kelly could object to, even in a piece of hardware; and anyway, like he’d told the colonel behind him, it was the deal he’d been handed this time.

  Turkish ground crewmen helped Kelly up the narrow steps to the rear seat in the cockpit. They grinned and gestured to point out the warning arrows setting off the jet intake. The rushing whine of air to the turbine would have overwhelmed human speech.

  Kelly dumped himself into the seat behind the pilot. He flew enough that he sometimes thought he’d spent five years of his life in airplanes; but he was strictly a passenger, with neither knowledge nor interest in the sort of thing that happened in the cockpit. That included, he began to realize, matters like where to put his feet, and how to buckle himself into the ejection seat, which he supposed included a parachute.

  The pilot—Turkish or American?—didn’t care any more about Kelly’s problems than Kelly would have had their positions been reversed. As soon as the passenger dropped into the cockpit, the TF-I04G’s brakes released with a jerk and the aircraft slid out of its revetment on the narrow undercarriage splaying from its fuselage. The wings were too thin to conceal a tire.

  The cockpit canopy closed smoothly, bringing blessed relief from the howl of the jet being reflected from the berm. Kelly found the oxygen mask and fitted it while the right brake and the delicate, steerable nosewheel aligned the aircraft with the runway. There had been a minimum of rollout; this was a combat installation, not a commercial operation handcuffed by the need to serve thousands of passengers.

  There was probably a connection for the radio leads dangling from his helmet, the veteran thought while the turbojet shrieked and shuddered as the pilot wound it out. Then acceleration punched him back into a seat which seemed remarkably uncomfortable.

  The hell with the radio, Kelly thought as the needle nose lifted and the Earth fell away so sharply that he had nothing with which to compare the sight.

  It occurred to him, however, that this was only a foretaste of what awaited him in El Paso if things worked out the way he had planned.

>   He also found himself thinking that the F-104, even at its worst, had never approached the hundred-percent failure rate that the monocle ferry held to date.

  Knowing that he was still in Turkey, Kelly could have told from the air that they were over Incirlik Airbase by the planes deployed on the ground; C-141 Starlifters and a flight of F-15’s. Incirlik had no home squadron of its own, but it was American-staffed and trained, in rotation, all the US tactical wings based in Europe. Turkey herself could afford neither the big cargo aircraft nor state-of-the-art fighters like the F-15. Despite that, the performance of Kelly’s pilot and his aging F-104, without notice and on a nontasked mission, suggested that the Turkish Air Force would hold up its end just fine if it came to a crunch.

  They touched down firmly, jarring off knots, and the thump and shock that lifted their nose again startled Kelly until he realized that a drag chute was deploying behind them. The F-104 slowed abruptly. Presumably in response to instructions from the tower, the pilot braked to a near stop and turned onto a taxiway.

  As the cockpit canopies began to rise again, the veteran looked to the side and saw that a car was driving parallel with them, a midsize American station wagon. Well, he couldn’t complain that he wasn’t getting the full treatment. Not red carpet, of course, but he didn’t want red carpet, he wanted functional. If they decided to parachute him out over Fort Bliss instead of landing, he couldn’t rightly complain.

  Though as long as it’d been since he last jumped, he’d probably wind up cratering the mesquite.

  The TF-104 halted in the middle of the taxiway. An American, carefully donning his saucer hat as he stepped out of the back door of the car, waved to Kelly and shouted something not quite audible. The man’s upturned face looked anxious in the aircraft’s clearance lights,

  Kelly started to get out and was pulled up short by the feed of his oxygen mask. He unhooked it and swung himself out of the cockpit. He felt as if someone had conducted a search and destroy mission in his sinuses. He could not find the last of the miniature toeholds in the aircraft’s polished skin. Grimacing, the veteran let himself drop. The officer who had just gotten out of the car gave a squawk when Kelly sprawled at his feet, but there was no harm done.

  “Mr. Kelly,” said the officer, gripping the veteran by both forearms and lifting, “we have a flight waiting for you. They’ve just been cleared.”

  Kelly wasn’t in any shape to object to the manhandling. He ended it the quickest, simplest way by entering the car as if it were a burrow and he a fox going to ground. The greeting officer, another captain, hesitated a moment before he ran around to the far door. The driver, watching them in the mirror, had the car rolling even before the door closed.

  “Where am I cleared to this time?” Kelly asked, enunciating carefully. He straightened himself in the seat as precisely as if he were a diplomat arriving at a major conference. He wasn’t so wrecked that he couldn’t act for a few minutes like the VIP these people had been led to expect. He didn’t know of any reason why he had to put on a front, but it was cheaper to do so than to learn later that he should have.

  “Sir, I really don’t have that information,” the captain replied. “From, ah—from rumor, I’m not sure that the flight crew does. This flight was originally headed for Rome, but that’s maybe been changed along with the—the cargo.”

  They were speeding toward one of the C-141s, whose white-painted upper surfaces drew a palette of colors from the rising sun and made the gray lower curves almost disappear. The wings, mounted high so that the main spar did not cut the cabin in half, now drooped under the weight of four big turbofans, but in flight they would flex upward as they lifted the huge mass of the aircraft and cargo.

  Kelly was thoroughly familiar with C-141s, the logistics workhorse of the Lebanon Involvement. They were aluminum cylinders which hauled cargo very well and very efficiently, so this one was of particular interest to him only because he was apparently making the next stage of his journey on it.

  The scene on the pad was a great deal more unusual.

  Separated from the aircraft by thirty yards and what looked like a platoon of Air Police was a huge clot of civilians, women and children. The driver had to swing wide around them in order to approach the plane’s lowered tail ramp. As he did so, a number of civilians darted from the larger group and blocked the vehicle’s path.

  The driver swore softly and slammed the transmission into reverse.

  A woman struggled up to Kelly’s window. Her rage-distorted face might have been cute under other circumstances, and the amazing puffiness of her torso was surely because she was wearing at least six outfits on top of one another. A child of perhaps three, similarly overdressed, tugged at the tail of the long cloth coat on top; and because she held an infant in her left arm, she had to drop her suitcase in order to hammer on the window while she screamed, “You bastard! You’ve got to let Dawn and Jeffie aboard! What kind of—”

  An airman wearing a helmet instead of a cap caught the woman from behind by wrist and shoulder, dragging her back as the car reversed in a quick arc. More grim-faced police spread themselves in a loose barricade against the would-be refugees while the driver accelerated toward the ramp.

  “My God,” said the captain, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Goddam,” said Kelly, trying to mop his forehead and finding that he still wore the flight helmet.

  There were no additional officers waiting for Kelly at the ramp of the C-141. The captain who had greeted him at the TF-104 now shepherded him onto the ramp alone. “Good luck, sir,” he said, and offered his hand.

  Offhand, Kelly couldn’t remember anybody saying that—and sounding like he meant it—since this business began.

  “I appreciate that,” the veteran said as they shook hands. “And—folks pretty high up”—which described the aliens as well as anything could—“tell me it’ll all be fine if I do my job. Which I do.”

  “Door’s lifting,” said the loadmaster at the cargo bay’s rear control panel, but his hand did not actually hit the lifter switch until the captain had sprung back down the ramp. As the ramp started to rise, the loadmaster called a terse report on his commo helmet, glanced at Kelly, and then looked down the nearly empty cargo bay.

  The benches were folded down and locked in place along both windowless sides of the fuselage. During the Starlifter’s usual “passenger” operation as a troop transport, the broad central aisleway would have been loaded with munitions and heavy equipment. It was empty now. Beneath one of the benches, however, was a child’s suitcase of pink vinyl.

  The loadmaster strode over to the piece of miniature luggage, jerked it from its partial concealment, and hurled it underhand toward the tail. The suitcase bounced from the ramp and out the narrowing gap to the concrete.

  The C-141 was already moving, rotating outward in a manner disconcerting because nothing outside the cargo bay was visible. Kelly took off the helmet; he would not need it on this flight. The curving sides and roofline gave him the feeling of being trapped in a subway tunnel which echoed to the roar of an oncoming train.

  “Well, that kid’ll need it more’n we will, won’t she?” the loadmaster demanded loudly as he walked over to the veteran. He was a burly man, unaffected by the motion of the aircraft through long familiarity.

  “Got a problem, friend?” asked Kelly as he sat down on the bench. If anything did start, the bulkhead anchoring him would be better than a fair trade-off for the height advantage that he surrendered.

  “You really rate, doncha?” the crewman continued. “Had ‘em all aboard, over two hundred dependents. Another three minutes and we’d have been wheels-up for Rome. Then, bingo! Off-load everybody and prepare to take on a special passenger. Not, ‘a special passenger and the dependents.’ Oh, no. And the ones who don’t move quick enough, there’s nightsticks to move ‘em along. So my wife and kids are out there on the fuckin’ pad, and you’ve got the plane to yourself, buddy.”

  �
�Think Rome’s going to be a great place if they nuke it?” Kelly asked in a tone of cool curiosity. His right hand gripped the strap of the helmet, ready to use it as a club if things worked out that way,

  “I’d be with them, at least,” the loadmaster said harshly.

  “There’s people who think if I get back to the World quick enough, there won’t be any more nukes,” Kelly snapped in a voice that could have been heard over gunfire. He stood, dropping the helmet because it wasn’t going to be needed. “Who the fuck do you think I am, Sergeant? Some politician running home from a junket? Don’t you want this shit to stop?”

  The loadmaster blinked and backed a step. “Oh,” he said. “Ah . . .”

  “Christ, I’m sorry, buddy,” Kelly said, looking down as if he were embarrassed. “Look, I’m really tight. I left some people behind too, and—” He raised his eyes and met the crewman’s in false candor. “—Wasn’t a great place, you know? Even if this other crap quiets down.”

  “Ah. . . .” said the crewman. “Aw, hell, we’re all jumpy. You know how it is.” He tried out a rather careful smile. “Want to go forward before we lift?”

  “Lemme strip this suit off,” the veteran answered with an equally abashed smile, textured for the use. “After we get the wheels up, I’ll go say ‘hi’ . . . but this is the part of the plane I’m used to.”

  He grinned, this time genuinely—not that the difference was noticeable. “Only thing is, it’s a lot bigger’n the ones I’ve had to jump out.”

  “You bet your ass,” the crewman agreed proudly, then reported on his commo helmet as he settled himself in a seat by the tail ramp.

  The flight was uneventful. It would have seemed uneventful even if Kelly had not spent much of the air time asleep. The crew had a job to do, and they were cruising at twenty knots above normal speed; even with the agreed need for haste, there was no reasonable way to wring more out of a big bird optimized to move cargo.