Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (26 page)

The Station Chief nodded. “This will work,” he said, “Your own receivers are just for searching an area if they park. Call me when you’ve got their car in sight.”

As the others started to walk out to their vehicles, Warner added, “Oh, boys?” Mayer and Westram turned. “This one
is
going to work,” their superior said. “The first word to Langley about what those uniformed twits are up to
is
going to come from this station. Understood?”

Both men nodded. As they walked through the door, Mayer began to whistle under his breath. The tune was the first few bars of the “Dead March” from “Saul.”

XXIX

“It is very good of you to permit us,” the little Vietnamese colonel was saying in his accented English.

“We are always ready to join our socialist brothers,” said Colonel Korchenko with only a perfunctory smile. “Professor Vlasov wished to spend some more time with your Doctor Tanh.” And besides, Korchenko had come with instructions from Moscow to help with security arrangements for the Vietnamese physicist. It was desirable to keep up the fiction that the nuclear devices to be emplaced on the Chinese-Vietnamese border were of indigenous Vietnamese manufacture. A Vietnam without a single known nuclear physicist would embarrass the plan.

The tall KGB colonel glanced toward the door of the Ambassador’s residence. The physicists should already have come out by now. The circular drive was crowded with waiting men and cars. One sedan would be filled with KGB personnel. Two more would transport a mix of lower-ranking scientists and more security men. The fourth car was the Ambassador’s own armored limousine. In it would ride Professor Vlasov, under the care of Korchenko and the colonel’s personal aide and driver.

And with them, at Vlasov’s insistence and Moscow’s prodding, would be Hoang Tanh and this absurd little colonel who stank of fish sauce.

Even Nguyen had to bend to see into the low-slung Citröen. Schwartz and Babroi were seated in the front bucket seats. They stared back without interest. “A very beautiful car,” Nguyen said appreciatively. “Our Ambassador tells me he is trying to get a new car for the mission here, but Hanoi will not approve it.”

Korchenko smiled patronizingly. “Yes, well,” he said. “Foreign missions always pretend they need more glitter to impress their opposite numbers.” Which, of course, explained the limousine, even though Ambassador Miuseck was not the head of the Russian mission to Algeria. In normal fashion, the chief of the KGB Residency—in this case Kalugin, the Consul—had such real authority as Moscow chose to delegate. The Ambassador was still permitted to glitter, however; and the car was useful for functions like this one, squiring around dignitaries from home.

And what the
fuck
were the scientists still doing inside? Having a circle jerk?

“You have two radios?” asked Nguyen, still bent to study the interior of the Citröen. The big pistol made the tail of the Vietnamese officer’s coat jut out absurdly.

Colonel Korchenko glanced down. “Oh, the large one’s for communication with the other cars and the base unit here,” he said. “That other thing’s a toy of Babroi’s own—he picked it up in Tokyo last year. It’s a”—Korchenko paused to get the technical term correct—“a programmable synthesized scanner. Babroi likes to listen in on local radio traffic wherever we go. He says it keeps him alert, so that he never goes on the air himself unless the signal will be scrambled.”

Nguyen nodded in what the KGB man thought was a counterfeit of understanding. The Vietnamese did not say what he was thinking. His eyes compared the flat, off-the-shelf Japanese scanner with the bulky tube-driven transceiver which was presumably the height of indigenous Russian manufacture. “Yes, very interesting,” Nguyen said as he straightened up.

The door of the building opened. First voices, then the clot of scientists themselves spilled out. Vlasov and Hoang walked in the middle of the group. They were talking in French. All the security personnel, even Colonel Korchenko, struck a brace.

Damned well about time, the KGB officer thought. The sooner this was over, the sooner he could get back and explore just what the First Secretary’s wife had meant by her invitation. With any kind of luck, this was going to be an interesting day.

XXX

The sun over the Church of the Holy Cross was in Kelly’s eyes every time he glanced across the boulevard. It bothered him that he did look around, toward the Institute and the ambush site. It was a sign to himself of his own nervousness.

It was not, at least, out of his assumed character. Kelly was portraying a friend of the owner of a small epicerie. He lounged against the glass case of crackers and Camembert, sunglasses and the rack of fly-specked postcards. The real owner was at a wedding in Oran. He was sympathetic to the cause, but his shop would still be there after the security forces had time to catch their breath and examine what had happened. The human participants in the operation, with luck, would all be gone. The owner’s cover story would simply be that he and all his household had closed the shop to attend a family wedding 400 kilometers away. The owner would have no idea of who might have broken in during his absence.

Taking the owner’s place behind the counter was Ramdan, the heavy-set proprietor of the brassware shop. Though middle-aged, the Algerian was as wired as Kelly had ever seen an 18-year old rifleman on his first insertion. And, speaking of rifles, the agent had cringed to see Ramdan stuffing his Mauser into the cabinet below the display case. Although—if the police were going to search the place, that was not the only gun there were likely to find in the Casbah.

Kelly glanced at his own trench coat, lying folded atop the case. No, not the only gun.

A woman in a veil and black wrapper stepped in to buy a handful of hard candies for the three children she had in tow. The agent tried to talk to the eldest child, a boy of eight or so. His French pleasantries got first a blank stare, then a quick and meaningless rattle of Arabic or Kabyle. The mother herself watched for a moment as Ramdan tried to find, then weigh out, “his” wares. Suddenly the mother snapped an order and hustled out of the shop gripping the two younger children by their hands. The eldest continued for a moment to stare at Kelly. The woman turned and shouted at him with a touch of hysteria in her voice. All four of them disappeared down the mouth of a nearby alley into the heart of the Casbah.

Christ on a crutch. . . . But it was already very close to time.

Two BMW motorcycles led the motorcade up the Boulevard Abderrazak. They had their sirens wound out and their blue turn signals flashing alternately. The black Citröen DS 23 that followed mounted a blue light on the dashboard. Its headlights pulsed nervously, like the heart rhythm of a man on the point of death.

Below the counter, Ramdan’s handie-talkie babbled in excited Kabyle.

“For
Christ’s
sake!” Kelly snarled at the older man. ‘Turn that thing off till I tell you to transmit!” He should have disabled the sending keys of the other units before he turned them over to the Kabyles, the agent thought angrily. Their only proper purpose on this operation was to permit Kelly to order the other personnel into action. No one but Ramdan should have been talking, and Ramdan only at Kelly’s direct order.

The two bikes swung expertly at the guidance of their leather-clad National Police drivers. They halted on either side of the Institute’s main entrance, facing back toward the street with their engines throttled to a fast idle. The pair of military guards at the door braced to attention. They wore dress uniforms finished off by pistols in white-leather holsters. The soldiers in the tower above wore their dress uniforms also. Kelly had little doubt, however, that their AKM rifles would function just as well as if they were used by men in battle dress. The Algerians held their rifles slung from their right shoulders with the muzzles forward and their right hands resting on the handgrips.

“Get down behind the counter where nobody can see you with the radio,” the agent ordered Ramdan. Without waiting to see if he had been obeyed, Kelly draped his white coat carefully over his right arm and strolled back to the edge of the sidewalk in front of the shop. He resisted the impulse to grip the Ingram so tightly that his hand would cramp.

The entrance of the Institute was at one point of an extremely complex intersection. Five vehicular streets from the south met there, while the whole warren of the Casbah lay to the north. With the truck jamming the intersection proper, though, and the fork of the Victoire and the Avenue Taleb Mohammed blasted where they met the Boulevard Abderrazak—almost on top of National Police Headquarters—nothing would be driving through any time soon. For now, though. . . .

The leading Citröen swung halfway across the boulevard, just beyond the entrance. Its ready position would aid the Kabyles immeasurably when the burning truck careened down the hill and into the intersection. Three men, then a fourth, got out of the sedan, leaving the driver behind the wheel. The three doors were open. The security men were not carrying long-arms, but Kelly did not need X-ray vision to guess what was racked within the car.

The Algerians wore dark suits which tweaked an uncomfortable memory . . . but the car that had been—following him?—had not been a Citröen, whatever it was. None of these men looked anything like the three who had entered the room at the Aurassi.

The second car was a Mercedes limo. It had green diplomatic plates, though Kelly had not been in country long enough to recognize the particular mission. Three men in London-tailored suits and Arab burnooses got out of the back. As they walked toward the door of the Institute, the steel leaves opened inward. A pair of suited Algerians stepped out to bow in greeting. The Mercedes pulled carefully around the security car and turned up the Ramp des Zoaves, past the south front of the building.

The next car was not an old Fiat but rather a Volga, Russian-made and almost certainly Russian-occupied at the moment. The American tensed. He spread a meaningless smile across his whisker-stubbled face. His peripheral vision showed him that there were a number of other bystanders watching events. The escort had cut its sirens, but the procession of expensive cars was still more interesting than most of Algiers’ drab scenery. Despite the company, however, Kelly felt as obtrusive as a prisoner facing the sentencing judge.

Three men got out of the Volga. All of them were obviously low-ranking security men from their bulk and East-Bloc clothing. Rank hath the privilege of a decent tailor. . . . But that meant the next car, another Citröen limo, this one with AMB—Ambassadorthe plate was—

“Roll the truck!” Kelly shouted back over his shoulder. “
Just
the truck!”

The Volga sedan showed an inclination to hold its position at the intersection. One of the Algerian security men walked over to it and began talking and gesturing to the driver. The Russian car moved off slowly in the wake of the Mercedes.

The Citröen behind it pulled up under the watchful eyes of the Algerians and the three Russians who had dismounted from the Volga. The long back doors opened. From the right-side jump seat a—for God’s sake, a
Vietnamese
got out. Another tall European got out a moment later, also from the right side, toward the Institute. He wore an excellent suit but he was too young to be Vlasov. And from the left door, staring at Kelly even before he was out of the car, climbed another Vietnamese. Their eyes met at twenty yards distance. Kelly remembered in a series of flashes strobing between visions of Anna displaying her body that he had told Hoang that his defection would take place in Frankfurt. Since the physicist knew that his flight was through Paris, he had known that he was being lied to.

The last man out of the car was Professor Vlasov. The cuff of his right sleeve was pinned against his shoulder. He followed Hoang through the left door, putting the car between himself and his escort.

“Hit it!” Kelly snapped, and the truck, howling down the Rue Debbih Cherif, unexpectedly exploded just as it came in view.

The cab of the big flat-bed dissolved in a white flash so bright that the sunlight a millisecond later seemed dim. The explosion was oddly muffled. It sounded more as if a safe had fallen onto concrete than the crackling propagation wave of high explosive in open air. Perhaps because the light was so intense, the relative silence did not seem out of place. Sensory cross-over was telling the brain that the ears as well as the eyes had been numbed. Somebody had put an anti-tank rocket into the truck, Kelly’s instincts told him. The hood and even the engine block were gone, blasted away, and the shredded front tires were letting the vehicle slow to a halt well short of where it was supposed to stop.

Because the noise was that of metal shrieking and sparking over concrete, the security personnel reacted a hair less quickly than they might have done for a true explosion. Hoang darted toward Kelly and the epicerie behind him. His escort’s smile was only beginning to slip as the Vietnamese glanced across the car to the physicist. Then both Vietnamese, like Kelly and everyone else within a block, were dumped to the ground by the explosion beneath the intersection to the north.

Part of what went flying skyward was a car, but it was omelette time and too bad about the other poor bastards who found themselves eggs. Kelly got to his feet. His left palm was bleeding from its scrape along the sidewalk as he fell. He racked back the bolt of the Ingram without noticing the pain.

Instead of a twenty-pound charge, the Kabyles must have filled the sewer pipe with explosives. Hoang Tanh was on his feet and running again. Vlasov himself still lay groggy on the pavement. A pair of the Russians from the Volga were up and staggering toward their charge. The Vietnamese security man vaulted the hood of the Citröen. He was shouting something inaudible in the aftermath of the huge explosion. A ragged disk of asphaltic concrete, six inches thick and the size of a man-hole cover, spun out of the sky. It hopped once on the roadway and took the Viet’s legs from under him as neatly as ever a bowler made a spare.