Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (42 page)

“Now, there
may
be a critical limit to grain size,” Dr. Desmond was saying, “below which none of the aluminum will form hot-spots on the mirror surface, but at these energy levels it won’t take more than a few
molecules
to—”

“Go,” said the control center, and the landscape changed in intensity.

The beams from the six chemical laser lift stations in orbit above the launch site were in the near infrared at a wavelength of 1.8 microns. Not only was light of that frequency invisible to the human eye, it was absorbed by the cornea instead of being focused by the lens to the potential injury of the retina. The wavelength was a relatively inefficient one for transmitting power, especially through an atmosphere which would have passed a much higher percentage of the ultraviolet. The five megajoules of energy involved in the test, however, meant that even the least amount of reflection raised an unacceptable risk of blindness and worse if the operation were in the visible spectrum or shorter.

“Go-o-o . . .” whispered Desmond, probably unaware that he had spoken aloud. Tom Kelly leaned outward, bringing his shoulder and helmet into the dry, twenty-knot airstream.

The six-ton saucer quivered as it drank laser energy through the dozen windows of segmented corundum which ringed its upper surface like the eyes of a monstrous insect. The central hub of the ferry contained the one-man cockpit, empty now except for instrumentation, which did not rotate as the blast chambers around the saucer’s rim began to expel air flash-heated within them by laser pulses.

Dust, as much a part of West Texas as it was of the hills above Beirut, rippled in a huge, expanding doughnut from the concrete pad. It formed a translucent bed for the ferry, a mirage landscape on which the saucer seemed to rest instead of lifting as planned. Then the dust was gone, a yellow-gray curtain across distant clumps of Spanish bayonet, and the ferry itself was a lens rather than a disk as it shot past the helicopters circling at five hundred meters.

“All
right
!”
blurted Kelly, jerking his eyes upward to track the monocle through the frame members and shimmering helicopter rotors against a sky made amber by his goggles.

“Twenty-two g’s!” babbled the project scientist happily. “Almost from the point of liftoff! There’s no way Space Command’s ground-lift barges can match that—or
any
chemically-fueled launcher.”

The chopper rocked between paired sonic booms, a severe one followed by an impact of lesser intensity. The monocle ferry had gone supersonic even before it reached the altitude of the helicopters, buffeting them with a shock wave reflected from the ground as well as the pulse streaming directly from the vehicle’s surface. The roar of the ferry’s exhaust followed a moment later, attenuating rapidly like that of an aircraft making a low-level pass.

“All
right
,”
Kelly repeated, disregarding the colonels, who he knew would be beaming at his enthusiasm. There was a hell of a lot more to this “air defense” program than the mere question of how well the hardware worked; but hardware that
did
work gave Kelly a glow of satisfaction with the human race, and he didn’t give a hoot in hell about who knew it. It was their lookout if they thought he was dumb enough to base his recommendations on that alone.

Their helicopter and the other two essed out of their slow starboard orbits, banking a little to port to make it easier for the cameras and observers to follow an object high enough above them to be effectively vertical. There were supposed to be chase planes, T-38 trainers with more cameras, but Kelly could see no sign of them at the moment. The ferry itself was no more than a sunstruck bead of amber.

“Normally,” Dr. Desmond explained, “we’d continue in air-breathing mode to thirty kilometers before switching to internal fuel. For the purpose of his test, however, we’ll convert to hydrogen very shortly in order to—”

“God almighty!” cried Boardman, the Air Force flack, so far forgetting himself that he started to lurch to his feet against the motion of the helicopter. “For the
demonstration
you do this?”

“We’re modifying the test sequence in response to earlier results, of course,” the scientist said, glancing over at the military man.

Kelly continued to look upward, squinting by habit, though the goggles made that unnecessary. Boardman didn’t matter. He was typical of people, not necessarily stupid ones, who cling to a view of reality against available evidence and their own presumable benefit. In this case, the public affairs officer was obviously so certain that the ferry would blow up that he preferred the test do nothing to advance the project rather than have Bianci’s man watch a catastrophic failure.

The bead of light which had almost disappeared detonated into a fireball whose color the goggles shifted into the green.

The cameraman had been only a nervous spectator while his unit’s servos tracked the ferry with inhuman skill. Now he squeezed the override trigger in the right grip and began to manually follow the shower of fragments picked out by the sun as they tumbled and danced. His left hand made minute adjustments to the focal length of his lens, shortening it to keep as nearly as possible the whole drifting mass within his field of view.

“God damn it to hell,” said Dr. Desmond very distinctly before he lowered his head, took off his commo helmet, and slammed the helmet as hard as he could against the aluminum deck of the helicopter. It bounced, but the length of communications cord kept it from flying out the open hatch as it tried to do. The two officers straightened their backs against the bulkhead with expressions of disapproval and concern.

Kelly slid his goggles back up on the brow of his helmet, sneezing at the shock of direct sunlight again. He put a hand on the scientist’s nearer shoulder, squeezing hard enough to be noticed but without trying to raise Desmond’s head from where it was buried in his hands. “ ‘Sokay,” the ex-soldier muttered, part of him aware that the scientist couldn’t possibly hear him and another part equally sure that it
wasn’t
okay, that even future success would not expunge this memory of something which mattered very much vaporizing itself in the Texas sky.

“It’s okay,” Kelly said, repeating words he’d had to use too often before, the words a lieutenant had spoken to him the fire-shot evening when Kelly held the torso of a friend who no longer had a head.

“Maybe switching to straight calcium carbonate’ll do the trick,” Kelly’s lips whispered while the PR men grimaced at the undirected fury in the veteran’s eyes.

“Oh, good evening, Mr. Kelly,” said the young woman at the front desk—a second-year student out of Emory, if Kelly remembered correctly. She looked flustered as usual when she spoke to the veteran. She wasn’t the receptionist, just an intern with a political science major getting some hands-on experience; but the hour was late, and service to the public—to possible constituents—was absolutely the first staff priority in all of Representative Bianci’s offices.

“Marcelle, Marcelle,” said Tom Kelly, stretching so that his overcoat gaped widely and the attaché case in his left hand lifted toward the ceiling. His blazer veed to either side of the button still fastening it, baring most of the shirt and tie beneath but continuing to hide the back of Kelly’s waistband.

He’d been on planes that anybody with a bottle of gasoline could hijack to God knew where; he’d been walking on Capitol Hill at night, a place as dangerous as parts of Beirut that he’d patrolled in past years with flak jacket and automatic rifle; and anyway, he was a little paranoid, a little crazy, he’d never denied that. . . . It was no problem him going armed unless others learned about it . . . and with care, that would happen only when Tom Kelly was still standing and somebody else wasn’t.

Kelly grinned at the little intern, broadly, as he had learned to do because the scar tissue above the left corner of his mouth turned a lesser smile into a snarling grimace. “It you don’t start calling me Tom, m’dear, I’m going to have to get formal with you. I won’t be mistered by a first name, I’ve seen too much of that . . . and I don’t
like
‘mister.’ Okay?”

All true; and besides, he was terrible on names, fucking terrible, and remembering them had been for the past three years the hardest part of doing a good job for an elected official. But Marcelle, heaven knew what her last name was, colored and said, “I’m sorry, Tom, I’ll really remember the next time.”

Filing cabinets and free-standing mahogany bookshelves split the rear of the large room into a number of desk alcoves, many of them now equipped with terminals to the mainframe computer in the side office to the right. Another of the staff members, a pale man named Duerning, with a mind as sharp as Kelly’s own—and as different from the veteran’s as Brooklyn is from Beirut—was leaning over a desk, supporting himself with a palm on the paper-strewn wood. It was not until Carlo Bianci stood up beside Duerning, however, that Kelly realized that his boss was here rather than in the private office to the left where the closed door had seemed to advertise his presence. Never assume. . . .

“That’s all for tonight, Murray,” said Representative Bianci, clapping his aide on the shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie as natural as it was useful to a politician. He stepped toward Kelly as Duerning, nodding his head, shifted papers into a briefcase.

Carlo Bianci was Kelly’s height and of the same squat build, though the representative was further from an ideal training weight than his aide and the difference was more than the decade’s gap between their ages. Nonetheless, Bianci’s thick gray hair was the only sign that the man might be fifty, and he was in damned good shape for anyone in an office job. Kelly suspected that Bianci’s paunch was really a reservoir like a camel’s hump, enabling the man to survive under the strain of constant eighteen-hour days for the decade he had been in Congress.

At the moment Bianci was wearing a blue jogging suit, which meant it was not expectation of a roll-call vote which kept him in his office at ten pm, and something was sticking worry lines around the smile of greeting which accompanied his handshake for Kelly. “Wasn’t sure you’d be in tonight, Tom,” he said, and there was an undercurrent below those ordinary words. “Thought you’d maybe want to get some rest.”

“Well, don’t count on me opening the office tomorrow morning,” Kelly said, expecting to be led toward the door of the congressman’s private office. Instead, Bianci guided him with a finger of his left hand into what was basically the workroom of the suite in the Old House Office Building, a bull pen where the mainframe, the coffeepot, and a crowd of desks and files would not normally be seen by constituents. “I’m on El Paso time and anyway, I always need to wind down awhile after I get off a plane. Figured I’d key in my report if you weren’t around for a verbal debrief tonight.”

“Well, how was the demonstration?” Bianci asked. He leaned back against a desk whose legs squealed slightly on the hardwood as they accepted the thrust.

“It really
was
a test,” Kelly said, frowning as he made the final decisions about what to present to his employer, “and I guess the short answer is that there’s bits of graphite composite and synthetic sapphire scattered all over West Texas and New Mexico.”

“Sounds like I was right six months ago,” said the congressman, with a nod. “Overripe for the ax,
exactly
the sort of boondoggle that weakens the country in the name of defending it.”

“That’s the hell of it, sir,” Kelly said with a deeper frown, the honorific given by habitual courtesy to a man he felt deserved it. “Like you say, typical interservice wrangling. And you bet, the ferry went off like a bomb, she did that. But—” He shrugged out of his overcoat, his eyes concentrating on that for a moment while his mind raced with the real problem. When he looked up again, it was to say, “Damned if I don’t think they’ve got something useful there. Maybe useful, at any rate.”

“‘Hard-nosed Investigator Suckered by Military’?” said Bianci, quotes in his voice and enough smile on his lips to make the words a joke rather than a serious question.

“Yeah,” said Kelly, sitting straddled on a chair across the narrow aisle from his employer, the wooden chair back a pattern of bars before him, “it bothers the
hell
outa me to believe anything I hear from the Air Force. I remember—”

He looked up grinning, because it hadn’t happened to him and this long after the fact it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. “I remember,” he said, rubbing his scalp with a broad hand whose back was itself covered with curling black hair, “the Skybolt missile that was gonna make Russki air defense obsolete. Hang ‘em under the wings of B-52s and launch from maybe a thousand miles out beyond the interceptors and the surface to air missiles. . . .”

He was tired and wired and there were too many memories whispering through his brain. “B-52” had called up transparent images, unwanted as all of that breed were unwanted except in the very blackest moods. The Anti-Lebanon Mountains were lighting up thirty clicks to the east with a quivering brilliance, white to almost blue and hard as an assassin’s eyes: seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs, over a thousand of them, dropping out of the stratosphere in a pattern a kilometer wide and as long as the highway from Kelly’s family home to the nearest town. The flashes could be seen for half a minute before the shock waves began to be heard at Kelly’s firebase; but even at that distance, the blasts were too loud to speak over.

“Damn, that was a
long
time back,” Kelly muttered aloud, shaking his head to clear it, and Representative Bianci nodded in agreement with what he thought he had heard, part of a story about a failed missile. “Early sixties, yes?” he said aloud, again giving Kelly the impression that he was being softened up for something on an agenda the congressman had not yet broached.

“Oh, right,” the younger man said with an engaging smile to cover an embarrassment known only to him. He couldn’t lose it with Carlo, couldn’t have his mind ricocheting off on its own paths in front of his boss. Kelly and Representative Bianci were as close to being friends as either’s temperament allowed, and his support—what he told Kelly he had done, and what the aide knew from the result he
must
have done—had saved the veteran from the very bad time he’d earned by the method of his separation from the National Security Agency. But Carlo couldn’t afford to associate with a psycho, a four-plus crazy like some people already said Tom Kelly was.