Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (51 page)

Hell, governments being what they are, NSA was probably still paying fifteen grand for similar packages.

The little world-band radio ran either from batteries or from an AC/DC converter; but the latter caused a hum on shortwave, and batteries—unlike public power grids—were the same voltage worldwide. Sound in the background, even if it was no more than the hiss of static, was as necessary to Kelly’s study habits as something beside him to drink. He used the scanner to pick up an FM station, classical music, something he had last heard on Radio Sophia when he was a long fucking way from the United States.

Funny. Music cared less about time and nationalities than just about anything except stones. Of course, politicians were pretty similar worldwide, too. As were spies.

Tom Kelly unplugged the immersion heater. There was one final preliminary to getting comfortable. He drew the snub-nosed revolver nestled at the small of his back and set it on the desk beside the bubbling glass of coffee.

The exposed metal of the weapon had been sandblasted and anodized an unattractive dull gray about the color of phosphate-protected steel. There was a line of wear around the cylinder where the registration lug rubbed, but the weapon had actually been fired only a handful of times in the thirty-five years since its manufacture.

A patch of Velcro—hook-side—had been epoxied to the right side of the barrel just ahead of the five-shot cylinder, and there was a corresponding patch of Velcro fuzz sewn at the back of the waistband of every pair of pants Kelly owned. There were a lot of circumstances in which a holster was slower to ditch than the gun itself. The Velcro was unobtrusive, added neither bulk nor weight, and was actually more secure than the usual belt-clip holster.

Apart from its finish and the nylon hooks, the revolver looked like a standard Smith and Wesson Chiefs Special, the choice of tens of thousands of people who wanted the punch of a .38 Special cartridge in a small, reliable package. Kelly’s gun was something more than that. Though it was dimensionally identical to the ordinary version, the only steel in the weapon was the slight amount in the lockwork: frame, cylinder, and barrel had all been forged from aluminum in response to an Air Force request for the lightest possible revolver to equip pilots who came down behind enemy lines. Almost the entire run had been melted down shortly thereafter, when the decision was countermanded; but not quite all.

Tom Kelly didn’t care that the gun weighed ten ounces empty instead of the steel version’s nineteen. He cared very much that its magnetic signature was so low that it would not show up on airport magnetometers unless they were set low enough to trip on three or four dimes in a pocket as well.

The ammunition Kelly had handloaded for the revolver was also nonstandard, though the components were off-the-shelf items. He’d used commercial 148-grain wadcutter bullets, swaged from pure lead instead of being cast with an alloy to harden them, ahead of three grains of Bullseye, a powder fast enough to burn almost completely within the snubbie’s short barrel. The bullets were formed with a hollow base, a deep cavity meant to be upset against the rifling grooves by the powder gases in the manner of a Civil War minié ball. Kelly had loaded them back to front, and the deep cup had expanded the soft metal very efficiently in a gelatine target despite the relatively low velocity of the bullet on impact.

Keeping pressures within levels that a cartridge-company engineer would have found acceptable in 1920 had been the bottom line for the load. The all-aluminum revolvers had been tested by the Air Force with ordinary ammunition and with blue pills—proof loads developing forty percent greater pressure than normal. There was no reason to believe that in the ensuing thirty-five years the metal would have work-hardened into a state that made it more likely to rupture.

Still, better safe than sorry. . . . Kelly wasn’t particularly worried about being hurt if the revolver blew up—the person holding a handgun at arm’s length is the one least likely to be harmed if the chamber bursts. He was very much concerned that in a crisis so severe that he had to use the weapon, it would fail and give him one shot when he desperately counted on having five.

The master sergeant who’d sold him the gun at Wheelus had said that no government was going to put an unsafe weapon in the hands of its troops. That would have been more confidence-building if Kelly hadn’t seen the USG issue a tactical nuke, the Davy Crockett, with a fallout radius greater than the range of the launcher. Not that anybody’d explained that at the time to the Marines who were expected to fry themselves with the thing.

For the remainder of the morning, the veteran read files and made plans. He had two bars of Bendicks chocolate, the Military and Sportsmen’s blend, in his briefcase. They did little to quell the roiling of coffee and fatigue in his stomach, but the caffeine in the dose of fifty-seven percent pure chocolate did its own share of good.

The files were a maze, reports pared to the bone and beyond, filled with agent designators which could be collated with real names only through separate documents. There had been no evident attempt to censor what Kelly was being given: his own name appeared in one report as the source of a case of M14 rifles said to have been received by another Kurd who had disappeared shortly thereafter. Kelly remembered the agent from Operation Birdlike and was amused to note that the man’s present reporting officer classed him as “generally reliable.” Kelly wouldn’t have taken the fellow’s word for whether the sun rose in the east.

And that was the problem with most of the information: the three agents among the Kurdish community whom Kelly did know were venal, cowardly, and thoroughly untrustworthy. Results suggested that the remainder of the reports were from similar trash, men and women who had, at best, secondhand information on whatever Mohammed Ayyubi was involved in. Had been involved in, until somebody shot him and a monster dead on a rain-sodden street.

The files covered approximately the past year. There was nothing in them regarding aliens, and for all but the past two months they were concerned solely with the normal collection from a nationalist movement: money and arms; smuggling and training camps; foreign contacts in general and the dark suggestions of Russian involvement certain to show up in reports approved by American station chiefs.

Not that the KGB and other Russians paid to meddle in Third World problems were any less likely to be doing so than their US counterparts.

There was a change in March which was so abrupt that it must have resulted from a change in emphasis at client level—the members of the US government who received the information—rather than a watershed in what the agents themselves chose to send in. Suddenly Kurds were making UFO reports which would have been right at home in small-town papers throughout America.

There were no, thank God, conversations with little green men, although one case officer had sent a number of reports of angelic revelations before somebody further up the line had rapped his knuckles. There were airplanes that flew straight up, huge cylinders with lighted windows along their sides, and a score of other shapes and styles. Some reports referred to incidents as much as thirty years in the past, proving to a certainty that the sudden spate of reports was only a result of tasking.

In general, the only similarities between objects sighted occurred when two or more reports were made by the same agent. There was a single exception: disks twenty meters in diameter which lifted silently, wrapped in auroral splendor—from locations separated by a hundred miles, and with no duplication in the chain of data. That could mean something; and certainly there
was
something to be learned; the dead alien proved that. But even if one or all of the reports were true, they were garbage which did absolutely nothing to indicate what was really going on.

And that was all there was. No wonder Pierrard and his crew were willing to try a card as wild as Tom Kelly.

A thing with a mouth like a lamprey, and a couple dozen—maybe a few hundred—Kurds whose families thought they were going off to be armed and trained in the cause of Kurdish nationalism. Well, the connection would be obvious just as soon as Kelly learned what it was.

When the files were stacked neatly again on the top of the desk, the veteran walked to the bathroom. The toothbrush and toothpaste from his briefcase, and the hot shower that he let play over him helped but could not wholly remove the foulness throughout his system. Fear and anger and fatigue, but most especially fear, leave their hormonal spoor on a man.

Kelly looked at himself in the fogged mirror when he stepped out of the shower, but that was another mistake. His outline was intact, but the condensate on the glass turned his hundred and eighty pounds, tank-solid and scarred with experience, into a wistful ghost. He was crazy to get back into this; aliens or no, none of it would matter when he was dead.

But death would come regardless.

He lay down on the bed, his skin warm with the harsh toweling he had just given it. He’d have them book him into the Sheraton in a room facing the Golden Horn. He’d treat it as a perk—they understood perks, these folk in suits they never saw the bills for, and no eyebrows would lift because Kelly wanted a room in the most expensive hotel in Istanbul. They would understand the implied test, also, the precise instructions which they could either carry out or not—and the implications if they did not or even chose to argue.

And because they understood both those things, they would not foresee their agent’s—“their agent’s”—real reason for wanting a room just there.

He needed to talk to people after he shook free from the box Elaine would try to put around him no matter what she said. There were folks who owed him, though the good ones didn’t keep score any more than Kelly did himself. Individuals, unlike nations, were capable of keeping faith.

For now, however, what he needed most of all was sleep. He closed his eyes, and sleep came with the fireshot dreams Kelly had expected. But the dreams changed, and by the time he awakened at twilight he could remember nothing but moving figures and black walls that reached toward heaven.

Airport terminals have certain worldwide similarities, but Istanbul’s had more in common with the military portion of Beirut Airport than with any civilian structure Kelly’d walked through. Luggage from the Pan Am flight that had just landed was arrayed on a single long, low table in the center of a hangar converted for baggage examination.

Each individual claimed his or her own suitcases under the eyes of armed guards, and carried them to the examination booths—porters took the weight for some passengers, mostly foreigners, but no one else could accept the responsibility.

Beyond hand luggage Kelly had only one suitcase and that—a solid, vinyl case of Turkish manufacture—held clothing. He had no need, himself, to bring unusual hardware into Turkey, as it had turned out, because his overseas phone calls had been more successful than he had dared hope. Funny. It always surprised him when other people came through the way he would have done for them—120 percent and no questions asked that didn’t bear on the fulfillment of the request.

It would have been easy for Kelly to snatch his bag and stride ahead of the remaining passengers, and reaching an empty examination booth would have saved half an hour of waiting for civilians—nervous, belligerent, or both—to be processed through ahead of him.

But even though the stocky veteran had nothing to fear from Customs, he let his training override his instinct to go full bore and finish whatever he was doing by the most direct route possible. He kept a low profile, deliberately followed a middle-aged man with a bag in either hand and a brown Yugoslav passport held with his entry documents between two fingertips and the side of the smaller case.

The Customs agent for whom Kelly opened his bag wore khaki pants with a tie and white shirt. The uniform of the National Policeman watching him was of gray-green wool and included a Browning Hi-Power in a holster of white patent leather. Beyond the line of booths was a squad of soldiers in fatigues, smoking and occasionally adjusting the slings of the Thompson submachine guns they carried.

Prime Minister Ecevit had taken the Defense portfolio for himself, but that was cosmetic. He was also making a real attempt to control the radical violence from both sides before a military junta ousted him to cure the problem more directly. The open display of armed force seemed to concern most of the foreign passengers. Kelly himself had enough other things to worry about.

“I love Istanbul,” Kelly joked in Turkish with the Customs agent, “but do they let me stay here? Surely there must be runway sweepers to be maintained in a more lovely part of Turkey than Incidik!”

“You are a Turk?” asked the National Policeman, running a knowledgeable hand along the hinges of the suitcase instead of prodding through the shirts as he had done with the Yugoslav minutes before.

“No,” said the Customs agent, flipping from the front to the back of the artistically-worn passport, but sizing Kelly up sidelong as he stamped the entry data. The American was a hair taller than the Anatolian norm, but his stocky build was right as were the dark complexion and straight black hair. With a moustache and a few days polish on his Turkish, he could pass as a native—of the country, though not of any specific district.

He might have to do just that.

“Not, but should be,” Kelly agreed with a smile. “It’s good to be back. Even headed for Incirlik.”

“Go with God, Mr. Bradsheer,” the Customs agent said, closing the suitcase with one hand and returning Kelly’s false passport in the other. The currency declaration form went into a file beneath the examination table.

Kelly smiled, snapped the latches of the case—no time to buckle the safety straps as well—and said, “Go with God, brother,” as he walked out the rear of the canvas booth.

Elaine Tuttle was standing at the back of the building, beyond the low barrier that separated incoming passengers from those waiting to greet them.

She wore a long-sleeved blue dress today, with ruffles at wrists and throat and a belt of light gilded chain. It had been three days since Kelly last saw her, and his recognition now was not instantaneous. Partly it was the beret that covered the rich curls of her black hair, partly that Tuttle carried a large purse on a shoulder strap for the first time since he had met her. In large measure, Kelly did not recognize Elaine because the physical reality of her was so different—so much less threatening—than memory suffused with the woman’s personality.