by David Drake
“A small group of Nazis,” Kelly said, projecting his voice and his gaze at the men around him with consciousness of the power which knowledge gave him, “and I don’t mean Neo-Nazis; these’re the real thing, holdouts and their kids. Anyway, they’ve taken over Fortress, using trained Kurds as shock troops. I assume all the station personnel are dead. I know the Kurds have been eliminated now that their job’s done, so there’s no possibility of outsiders within Fortress being turned, even if you had a way to contact them.”
He paused, but added through the first syllables of response, “I’m your way to contact Fortress, and I’ve told you how.”
“We don’t know they’re actually Germans because they say they are,” said the shorthaired, red-faced man, whom Kelly now recognized as Bates. “Maybe they’re Russkies, maybe they’re these aliens you claim you’re right about.”
“Maybe if you had a brain in your head, Bates,” Kelly snapped, “you’d have some business here.” Almost in the same breath, he said, bending toward General Redstone, “I’m sorry, Red, I didn’t mean to do that. S’okay now.”
“Bates, for God’s sake, keep your mouth shut,” Pierrard said angrily. He followed it with a spasm of coughing from which spurted pipe smoke that he had not exhaled properly before speaking.
“Yeah, they’re for real, the Nazis,” Kelly said quietly, making amends for his outburst. “They call ‘emselves the Service, the Dienst, and I guess everybody here’s data bank’s got a megabyte of background on ‘em.”
He smiled and shook his head ruefully. “You know, they’d be just as harmless as they look, except they got outa Germany in ‘45 with a flying saucer”—he spread his hands toward his audience, recognizing the incredulity they must be feeling—“and engineers to build more of the damn things.”
“I suggest,” said Pierrard, touching the wave of his white hair with the fingers of his left hand, “that for the present we ignore the question of responsibility and move on to a discussion of Mr. Kelly’s proposal for action.”
One of the men Kelly remembered from the orderly room at Fort Meade slipped out of the Briefing Room in response to a signal the veteran had not seen Pierrard give. Checking on the Dienst, no doubt, through the Airborne Command Post’s shielded data links with every computer bank in the federal government. The question the old man said he would ignore was obviously one that had already been answered to his satisfaction.
Pierrard was a bastard, but Kelly had never assumed he was a stupid bastard. The fact that the veteran had been met by this particular aircraft and the men aboard it suggested more clearly than Redstone had that a sufficient “they” were willing to go along with, if not trust, Tom Kelly.
“I was told,” Kelly said carefully, “that the ferry pads on both coasts, and the Russian equivalent at Tyuratam, have all been nuked.”
“Who told you?” demanded a man who’d been a GS-16 in Defense when Kelly last talked with him. “No information on that subject has been released.”
“They’d know at Pirinclik!” someone else suggested excitedly. “Has he been allowed into the compound at Pirinclik?”
“Look,” Kelly shouted, exasperated by men who were stuck with their own functional areas instead of focusing their minds on the real problem. “It was the fucking aliens, I told you, the little guys like the one in the freezer at Meade—and it doesn’t matter. All it means is, unless you’ve got another way to lift me to orbit, I go up on the monocle ferry at Bliss. You got a better way, let’s hear it, because I’m just counting on enough of the bugs to be worked out that it does like it’s supposed to one time.”
“Yes, well,” said Pierrard, meeting the veteran’s eyes while his right hand played with his meerschaum pipe, “there’s also the question of who goes up in the ferry if we do choose that option. There are—”
“That’s not a question,” said Kelly. “I go.”
“There are younger men with better training both in—” Pierrard began.
“God damn it,” said the veteran, stepping forward from his perch and leaning toward Pierrard across the intervening seats and startled men. “Just one time in my life there’s going to be something I did that I point to and say I did it; good, bad or indifferent. You chose me. I’m going!”
“We didn’t choose you for this, Kelly,” said General Redstone, the only man in the room willing to argue calmly in the face of the veteran’s obvious fury.
Kelly took a deep breath. “Sure you did, Red,” he replied in a husky, low-pitched voice as he rubbed his eyes and forehead with both hands. “Sure you did, even if you didn’t know it just then.”
“I—” Pierrard said as the stocky agent paused.
“Look,” Kelly continued, loudly enough to interrupt but without the anger of a moment before. “Used to be something’d come up and I’d be told, ‘Right, but that’s not in your area any more. It’s in the hands of the people who take care of that.’ This is what you made my area, folks.” He looked grimly around the room. “This is what I’ve done for you for twenty years. Killing people.”
“Not for me, buddy,” someone unseen rumbled.
Kelly turned in that direction and smiled. No one else spoke for several seconds.
“The aliens won’t take orders from you, Mr. Kelly,” said Pierrard, using the word aliens with none of the incredulous hesitancy that had plagued others when they found they had no alternative.
“Won’t they, Pierrard?” replied Kelly, continuing to smile as he reached overhead and stretched his legs up on tiptoes besides. His fingers couldn’t touch the ceiling. This was a hell of a big plane, and as steady as a train through the skies besides. “How do you know? You can’t even speak with them.”
“Do you—” someone began.
“One moment,” snapped Pierrard, his eyes meeting Kelly’s as the veteran lowered his hands and stood arms akimbo, relaxed in the way a poker player relaxes when he has laid down a straight flush to the king.
Pierrard got his moment, got several, while smoke from his pipe wreathed him and the hand with which he stroked his hair seemed as rigid as a claw. “Mr. Kelly,” he said at last, “there are quarters provided for you, and there’s a lounge. If you’d care to—”
“My room have a shower?” the veteran interrupted.
“Yes.” The syllable Pierrard spoke held no emotion, but there was rage in his eyes to equal that of Kelly a few minutes before.
“You’ve got my address,” Kelly said with a brittle smile.
When Kelly opened the hall door, the two guards snapped to alertness. “Take this gentleman to room sixteen,” called Pierrard from behind Kelly, just before the veteran closed the door again.
One of the guards touched the key of his throat mike. “Bev, report to the Briefing Room,” came from his lips and was syncopated by the same order whispering down the corridor from a speaker forward.
“Christ, people, I can find a room number myself,” the agent said with a grimace. He had done so and was opening the door when the earnest-looking female attendant scurried past. High levels of government were the wrong places to look for women’s liberation. Generals and their civilian equivalents liked perks to remind them of their power, and chirpy girls in menial positions were high on their list of requirements.
The room wasn’t huge, though it had two windows with a nice view of clouds a hell of a long way down. The fittings were more than comfortable—chair, writing desk, and a bed which seemed a trifle longer than standard. VIPs tended to be men of above-average height, and the Strategic Air Command certainly had its share of officers who could not be comfortably fitted into fighter cockpits:
There was the promised shower, not an enormous luxury so far as space went . . . but the weight of the water to feed it and the other similar facilities was something else again. No wonder the bird in this configuration had an all-up weight of four hundred tons.
The water felt good, as it always did. Soap, dust, body oils, and dried blood curled down the drain as a
gray slurry. By adjusting the taps as hot as he could stand it, Kelly was able to knead with his fingertips the injury that seemed most bothersome: the welt across his right temple where Doug had slapped him with the submachine gun. The general pain of the hot water provided cover for him to work loose the scabs and get normal circulation flowing.
The pain had another benefit. It made Kelly think of Doug as a figure beating him . . . displacing, for the moment, at least, memory of Doug as something recently human, huddled now and forever in a pool of blood and feces because Tom Kelly had made him that way.
Kelly hadn’t locked the door, hadn’t even looked to see if there was a lock.
It was no surprise to hear the door open, and a relief but no surprise that the intruder—water sprayed toward the bed when Kelly swung open the stall’s frosted glass door without first closing the faucets—was General Redstone, rather than six or eight of the husky attendants.
“Hey, Red,” said the veteran, shutting off the water, “good to see you.” Which was true on a number of levels.
“I thought you’d, you know, hold it against me I didn’t come with you when you left,” Redstone said, settling himself in the swivel chair bolted down in front of the desk. Light gleamed from his bald scalp, and the older man had gained at least twenty pounds since he had last toured the training camp outside Diyarbakir in a set of khaki desert fatigues.
“Hell, I’d rather have a friend in court than somebody to hold my hand,” said the agent.
He hadn’t left Redstone behind as a friend, exactly. Red was the sort of guy who would sacrifice his firstborn if God in the guise of the US government demanded it. Not that he wouldn’t argue about the decision.
But Kelly also knew that Redstone wasn’t going to let one of his boys be fucked over just because that seemed like a good policy to somebody in a suit. He would spend Kelly or spend himself; but, like Kelly, only if that were required to accomplish the task.
“Well, what they going to go with, Red?” the agent asked as he spilled the cartridges onto the bunk and began to clean the revolver. “Me or nothing?”
“We’ve got a preliminary report from Istanbul,” Redstone said, looking toward the windows instead of the nude, scarred body of the man who had once served under him. “About Blakeley.”
“That mean I’m out, then?” Kelly asked in a bantering tone. His hands concentrated on feeding a corner of the towel into each of the chambers. He hadn’t had a chance to clean the weapon properly since he’d used it on Doug. . . .
“Funny world,” said Redstone idly. He looked at Kelly. “Convinced some folks you meant what you said. God knows I’d tried. Means you’re on, on your terms. Nobody had a better plan that didn’t include you, and nobody seemed to think you were going to mellow out any time soon.”
“Jesus,” said Kelly. He sat down on the bed, still holding the towel-wrapped gun but without pretending any longer that it had his attention. The cartridges rolled down the bedspread and against his right thigh. “Well, at least they got that’n right.”
“Now,” said the older man, leaning forward with his hands clasped above his knees, “are you going off and do it your way, or are you willing to listen to reason on the hardware?”
Kelly pursed his lips. “I’m willing,” he said slowly, “to talk things over with somebody who knows which end of a gun the bang comes out of . . . which”—he grinned—“is you and nobody else within about seven vertical miles.”
“Then take an Ultimax 100 instead,” the general said earnestly. “Twelve and a half pounds with the hundred-round drum, rate of fire low enough to be controllable even in light gravity, and absolutely reliable in or out of an atmosphere.”
“Sure, nice gun, Red,” said Kelly, the individual words agreeable but the implication a refusal. He resumed the task of cleaning the Smith and Wesson while the air and bedspread got on with the business of drying his body. “But all thumbs’d be mild for the way I’ll be, rigged out in a space suit. A machinegun won’t cut it.”
“Well, there’s been some talk about that . . .” said Redstone. Both men were relaxing now that the conversation had lapsed into routine and minutiae. The general locked his fingers behind his neck and stretched out his legs, demonstrating in the process that the chair back reclined. “If you blow each segment as you go through, then everybody’s on the same footing. You say they terminated the Kurds, right?”
“Sure.” Kelly held the revolver with the cylinder open so that light was reflected from the recoil plate through the barrel to his eye. “I’m probably on better’n even terms with each one of the maybe twenty Germans. Not great odds, buddy, and I can’t watch both directions at once. I need something that’ll take ‘em out section by section—fast, because it’s me that’s gotta move to get to the control room. If I wait to blow doors instead of just opening them, they’ll sure as shit get around behind and scrag me.”
“You’ll be awkward as a hog on ice, lugging all that gear, baby.” Redstone grimaced, though his relaxed posture did not change.
“I’ll be awkward as hell in a space suit anyway,” Kelly agreed with a shrug. “Red, you got anything thin enough to feed through this bore or do I tear off a bit of the sheet?”
Redstone fished in his top pocket for a handkerchief. “We can probably hunt you up a proper cleaning kit,” he grumbled. “Carry a backup, hey? Those things fuck up more ways than a seventeen-year-old kid.”
“Thought maybe a shotgun,” the veteran agreed, keeping his eyes on the gun. “Look, Red. You find a way to put a platoon in orbit fast, then we’ll do it that way. Otherwise, this is the choice, and I don’t need any shit about it. I’m right.” He glared fiercely at the older man.
“Never said you weren’t,” Redstone agreed with a shrug. Businesslike again, he went on, “I’ll call in, have ‘em cut down a Model 1100 and put a pistol grip on it.”
Kelly cocked his head. “Figured a pump gun from stores,” he said. “Why an autoloader?”
“You figure to have both hands free, Kelly?” the general replied with a grin. “Besides, it’ll function better, especially with you in a suit and likely to shortstroke the slide.” He raised his hand. “Don’t tell me it wouldn’t happen to you. It won’t happen if you let a gas valve do all the thinking the times that you’ve got other things on your plate.”
“Yeah, okay,” Kelly said. He began reloading the cylinder of his snubbie. “Suppose anybody thought to bring me a change of clothes? I didn’t think of it.”
“We’ll rustle something up,” the general said, evaluating the veteran’s body with a practiced eye. “You’re in pretty good shape, Kelly. Be nice if you were nineteen and still had your experience, but I guess the experience’s the choice.” He nodded toward the door, then started to get up. “There’s people waiting to brief you on layout and the control sequence as soon as you’re ready to hear about that.”
“Right,” said Kelly. “Find me a pair of slacks at least and send ‘em with the briefing team.”
“Right,” Redstone agreed, but big hands stayed on the back of the chair, which he swiveled in a pair of short, nervous arcs.
“Spit it out, Red,” the veteran said sharply, his eyes narrowing. “Hard to tell when you’ll get a better chance.”
“Why’d you blow her that way, Kelly?” Redstone said, each word chipped from stone. “Elaine, I mean. Why’d you fuck her over?”
“Goddam,” Kelly said in surprise. “Red, I didn’t know you knew the lady.”
“Answer the goddam question,” the general whispered.
“Roger,” said Kelly coolly. “Because she lied to me, and because she set me up. Any more questions?”
“Goddammit, she didn’t set you up!” Redstone burst out. “I heard the fucking tape! You were supposed to get the kid gloves treatment, and except for that shithead Blakeley you’d have gotten it!”
He turned toward the wall, and for a moment Kelly thought the older man was going to break a hand trying to punch a hole
in the bulkhead. He sagged instead, bracing himself with his hands flattened on either side of the doorframe.
“I’m sorry, Red,” Kelly said as calmly as he could. “If I’d known a little more, maybe some things I’d have done another way. But I’m not psychic, man.”
“Shit, Kelly, shit,” General Redstone muttered to the door. He faced the agent again. Moments before he had been flushed, but now he looked sallow and very old. “We all lie,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line, I guess.” Redstone shook his head violently from side to side, as if to clear it of something clinging. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Sorry.”
“Red.” Kelly waited until the other man met his eyes. “Somebody greased Mohammed Ayyubi in order to get me into this whole thing. I told his brother I’d even the score.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to, Red. Someday I’ll learn who gave the scratch order, and then I’ll handle it. If that’s something you need to pass on, then that’s how it is.”
“Oh, Christ, Kelly,” the general said with an operational smile that relaxed the veteran as no words could have done, “you already took care of that one. It was Blakeley, and—and it got cleared afterwards because of the other, the funny gray guy. But that was when they decided that somebody ought to be brought in over Blakeley to ride herd.”
Redstone nodded a period to his thought. Then, in a voice that could have been Tom Kelly’s in a similar case, he added, “And if you hadn’t nailed him, soldier, I would’ve done it myself after the bucket he put—a whole lotta people in.”
He turned quickly, mumbling as he opened the door, “I’ll see to your pants.”
“Damn, it’s bright out there,” said Tom Kelly as Redstone slid closed the door of the van. The latch stuck and the panting general had to bang the door again to jar loose metal covered with El Paso’s omnipresent yellow-gray grit. “I ought to eat more carrots.”
