Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (27 page)

Kabyles were hurling smoke grenades as directed, the streamers gushing into parti-colored floods as the compound burned. It was a scene not of Carnival but of hell. Against specific orders, somebody opened up from the Casbah with an automatic rifle. The muzzle blasts could scarcely be heard through the ringing of the agent’s ears, but plaster and powdered stone spurted from the upper facade of the tower. The guards there went down, one of them spinning under the impact of a bullet.

Kelly was standing as upright as a reviewing officer. Both of his hands were now hidden by the folded coat he held as a beacon. Vlasov stood up. The two Russians grabbed him and threw him back for safety. They knelt above the physicist, each with one hand on their charge’s back to keep him down. Their other hands held pistols muzzle-high as they looked for targets through the wisps of smoke already swirling. Kelly cursed and killed both security men with short bursts from the Ingram.

Compactness is fine for something you have to carry, but for use it would have been nice to have a proper stock . . . or at least to have had time to extend the latch-and-wire contraption with which the sub-machine gun was fitted. Christ, it would have been nice to have a rifle and an explosives expert who would not have leveled a square block when his task was to cut a street. But you use what you got. Sights at eye level, bloody left hand gripping the suppressor tube, Kelly aimed to the left of one Russian and let recoil walk the second and third rounds into the man’s chest.

As his partner collapsed, the remaining security man screamed and fired into the rooftops from which he thought the shots were coming. This one was trickier, because the target lay squarely over the physicist’s body. The agent held higher than he should have, but one of the gleaming bullets caught the Russian at the hairline and dropped him dead as Trotsky. The two rounds that missed spalled plate-sized flakes of paint from the doors of the ambassadorial limo. They did not penetrate the armor beneath.

Hoang Tanh snatched at Kelly’s left arm, shouting for help. He was tall for a Vietnamese, scarcely less than Kelly’s own 5’9”. The physicist was a rotund man whose pleasant face was now distorted by tension and the need to be heard over gunfire.

“Get in the goddam shop!” Kelly shouted, turning the Vietnamese and shoving him toward the epicerie with the full strength of his left arm. Hoang staggered forward and almost collided with Ramdan. The Kabyle was shuffling out onto the sidewalk with his rifle at high port. “Put that away!” the American shrieked at him, but the Kabyle leveled his weapon and slammed a shot at something across the street.

By now the smoke was as thick as pond water, translucent or less beyond arm’s-length. The lighter grit and dust drifting down from the explosion site added its own camouflage and the tang of burning tar. Kelly ran forward, waving the coat like a flag in his left hand. Blended red and purple smoke roiled about the sweeping fabric. A bullet whanged off the pavement near his feet. Momentarily it was a spark, incandescent with the energy released on impact. The American had no notion of whether it was a stray round or one deliberately aimed at him.

He tripped over Vlasov. The Russian scientist had crawled free of the pair of bodies that had pinioned him and was closer than Kelly had expected. The agent sprawled. A burst of automatic fire laced across the boulevard close to where Kelly’s torso had been a moment before. The shock waves of the bullets spun curls of smoke as they cracked past.

Kelly could be sure the man he now held was Vlasov because of the pinned-up sleeve. “Come on, Professor,” he shouted in Russian, “we have to run!” He waved the raincoat, his identity signal, then tossed it onto the street to free his hand.

Vlasov did not get up. He seemed to be staring through the smoke at the suppressed Ingram. Kelly remembered too late that the defector was nuts—and what he was nuts about. The Lord knew, the gun and can did look more like something whipped up for a sci-fi film than the piece of functional, real-world ordnance that they were. Screw that, there was no time. “Go!” Kelly shouted. “I’m your contact!” He tried to tug the Professor upright by a handful of shirt front.

The black snout of a car thrust toward them through the man-made fog. Kelly dropped the scientist and hosed a burst through the windshield, just above the hood line. The car accelerated as the driver’s muscles spasmed. The vehicle missed Vlasov by inches, missed Kelly only because he leaped sideways. It was the security vehicle that had led the procession. It must have doubled back into the chaos for reasons the driver, at least, would never be able to explain.

Even in normal surroundings the suppressed weapon would have made less noise than a bottle being kicked along a hallway. Under the present circumstances, it was effectively silent. The bolt, a tool-steel clapper ringing back and forth against the breech, was overwhelmed by the ringing of the explosion in everyone’s ears. But the empty cartridge cases dancing from the ejection port were the same as those of a more standard submachine gun. Unexpectedly reassured, the Russian defector jumped to his feet as the car rolled past. “Quickly, then,” he said, his lips close to Kelly’s ear to be heard. “For they are here, I have seen them.”

There is no good way to cross a flat area raked from all sides and elevations. Running upright made as much sense as anything else. While Vlasov was evidently crazy, Kelly found no reason to question the Russian’s courage. The older man sprinted beside the agent toward what Kelly hoped was the doorway of the epicerie. The smoke swirled. Ramdan faced them over the sights of his old Mauser. Kelly struck the weapon away and screamed in useless Italian, “Back, for God’s sake, play your war out later!”

Flames were beginning to envelope the security car wrecked to the north. The draft caused a freak of the breeze to tug clear a lane in the smoke boiling across the boulevard. “There!” cried the Kabyle. He made a quarter-turn and fired without seating the rifle against his shoulder. He spun again as return fire gouged his thigh.

Two uniformed soldiers stood twenty feet away with pistols and a clear field of fire. Standard service handguns are man-killingly accurate at fifty yards or more, but accuracy in combat is something more than an exercise in paper-punching. Kelly had time to turn and sweep a burst across both Algerians. One of them was still trying to fire with his slide locked back on an empty magazine. They were brave men, but soldiering was a bad business for people who make mistakes . . . and they were not the first to make the mistake of shooting at Tom Kelly and missing.

“Now go!” the agent shouted again at his charges. He planted his left hand in Vlasov’s back and the Ingram’s receiver in Ramdan’s—the
idiot
! The Kabyle had dropped his rifle and was clutching his right thigh with both hands, but he staggered forward at Kelly’s push. Vlasov followed him into the epicerie.

“Take him out the back,” the American shouted as he tossed the sub-machine gun to the counter-top and turned. An accordion-pleated metal screen could close the front of the shop when it was unoccupied. Kelly unlatched the screen and slammed it down. He shouted curses in several languages when one side caught momentarily in its track. The only light within was the back door opening on another unlighted room. That was a gray blur to the agent’s day-adapted eyes. The Ingram met his groping hand—and so did the CS grenade which he had snuggled into a corner behind the counter.

Kelly pulled the pin with his right thumb and stumbled through the back door. He tossed the grenade into the shop as he closed the door behind him. It was a piss-poor thing to do to a supporter’s property, but there were other people out there catching bullets. It had to be done. The Casbah was a maze. Closing the entrance to the track the fugitives were taking would, with luck, delay pursuit until there was no longer a trail to follow.

With luck.

XXXI

The back room was furnished as living quarters. Vlasov waited uncertainly at the door in the far end. Ramdan was doubled up on the rug, moaning and clutching again at his wounded thigh. “Come on, Professor,” Kelly said in Russian, opening the second door for the defector.

Beyond was an alley less than a meter wide—Alexandria Street, if you wanted to believe a French map-maker to whom there was no such thing as
terra incognita
, even if the cognition were in the map-maker’s office alone. A Kabyle with a Kalashnikov half-hidden in the folds of his robe beckoned them urgently from the top of a pole-supported staircase a few meters away. Kelly gestured Vlasov toward the stairs, then called over his shoulder in French, “If you don’t roust, you’ll be there when they come looking—that’ll hurt worse’n now, believe me.”

No one ran toward them down the alley from the killing ground on the Boulevard de la Victoire. Vlasov mounted the steep, unrailed stairs with as much agility as could be expected of a scientist in his mid-60s.

Kelly risked a glance down at the Ingram. His left palm was throbbing and beginning to swell. Long bursts had heated the suppressor tube enough to make the air above it dance. It had seared the abraded flesh of the hand that gripped it. Like the gas-filled epicerie, that came with the turf. Kelly tried to extend the sub-machine gun’s stock, but he found that he could not figure how to lock the folding butt-plate into position in the instants he was willing to spare. It was more important to spot the people coming down the alley whom he might have to kill.

Vlasov squeezed by the guard at the narrow landing. The American pounded up the stairs himself. The guard ducked inside behind Kelly and slammed the blue-painted door panel.

An entire family waited inside the room. There was a grandfather, parents, and four wide-eyed children spaced from six to the infant in the woman’s arms. The rugs that provided bedding were rolled up against the wall. A table holding a plastic bucket of water completed the furnishings. The family might be related to someone taking an active part in the operation . . . or it might not. No matter. In all likelihood, the father had been a babe in arms when similar scenes were played out in the struggle against the French; and his father had not talked, either.

At the end of the room, where a hanging blanket filled the place of a door, stood Hoang Tanh. “You did not tell us about him,” said the rifleman accusingly to Kelly.

The agent nodded curtly. “Let’s go,” he said. No point in trying to explain. The Kabyle, after all, did not have the real problem of trying to get the stupid son of a bitch out of the country.

It would have been faster to run to the Rue Amar Ali down the Rue Porte Neuve. The latter was one of the few pedestrian ways in the Casbah that deserved the name of street. It would be faster for the security forces too, if they blew their way past the gunmen who were supposed to lie in ambush at its head. To the Kabyles, a room to room, central courtyard to stairs route had the advantage of involving large numbers of people who therefore had excellent reason to fear the police and army. In for a penny, in for a pound. . . . Kelly himself had spent enough time in another kind of jungle to have learned that you did not follow established trails if you wanted to go back to the World under your own power. It did not occur to him to question the technique as the Kabyles applied it.

They reached the Amar Ali through a hammam, a Turkish bath, which they had entered by a trap door from the cellar where the oven was. In the cellar, dampness was a thing you could touch. Kelly had shrugged his jacket off. He carried it slung over the Ingram as he had the trench coat when the morning began. With his dark complexion and his cheap, styleless clothing, the American agent was not worth a second glance from the bath attendants and their early customers.

The two defectors were another matter. Hoang had generalized Oriental features. There must have been Chinese or even Korean in the physicist’s ancestry. Conceivably, he might have gone unremarked in the dim light. Professor Vlasov, on the other hand, stood out like a pregnant bride. He was six-foot-three, and his forebears had certainly included many a blond “Rus,” as the natives called the Viking “rowers” who had founded Novgorod and the Grand Duchy of Kiev before the Mongols swept across the Siberian plains. But no one looked at Vlasov, either, proof that the would-be rebels had done their homework—even if their aggressiveness had put Kelly and the operation in jeopardy.

At the entrance of the hammam, the plain, cream tile of the hallway gave way to a mosaic of intricate knots on a golden background. Kelly blinked at the sunlight of the open street beyond. Their original guide had been replaced by an older man whose right hand never left the side pocket of his coat. “Quickly, get out,” he hissed to Kelly. The agent still hesitated. ‘This was all our arrangement.”

The Volare wagon waited across the street. Commander Posner was drumming on the steering wheel, his eyes trying to look in all directions. The Attaché’s nerves were screwed as tight as the breech of a cannon. Ordinary traffic noises had given way to sirens from all directions. In the open air again, the thump of gunfire could be heard.

The car parked three spaces behind the Volare was a Volkswagen Beetle. Presumably the Defense Attaché had not noticed it pulling in. The driver was Mayer, one of the CIA personnel Kelly had met in the snack bar.

“I’ll go first,” Kelly said in French. His right arm crawled with a sweaty desire to put a burst through the Beetle’s door. If those bastards thought they were going to get in his way, they’d better be ready to die. . . .

He started across the street with the quick, nervous stride of a man dodging traffic on any busy artery. Kelly’s eyes darted around him at street level and above, trying to anticipate the shot that would pay him back for the many mistakes of others on which he had capitalized. There was no shot, though a van missed him by less than the small part of his mind devoted to traffic had calculated. The Company man saw Kelly before Commander Posner did. His eyes widened and he raised a walkie-talkie enough for Kelly to see it.

“Start the goddam engine!” Kelly shouted to Posner through the open window. His anger was flashing out at the closest victim, not the cause. Face black as thunder, the agent waved curtly across to the hammam entrance.