Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (31 page)

One of the last rounds smashed the rearview mirror out through the windshield. Kelly struck at the crazed, opaque glass in front of him with the palm of his right hand. He tore loose a hole through which he could again see enough of the road to drive whatever the gunfire had left him. At last the road dipped, cutting the two shattered vehicles off from one another.

XXXVI

Colonel Nguyen raised the muzzle of the AKM as he pushed himself upright again. The rifle’s wooden foregrip was already hot with the thirty rounds he had fired.

Babroi had staggered out of the wrecked Citröen just in time to see the distant American car spin as well. “You hit it!” the Russian shouted. The station wagon was under control again, pulling out of sight. “You hit it!”

“While our car was moving, I could not shoot,” said the Vietnamese. “When we stopped—well, a target going straight away from you is not difficult, surely? Have you never used a rifle yourself?”

The aide jerked back, but after a moment he decided that the comment had been only naive. Korchenko, glancing up from the microphone, was not so sure. The Vietnamese was the member of an inferior race, the representative of a nation which would not exist at all without aid from the USSR. Nonetheless, the KGB colonel had the impression that Nguyen’s bland face and bland words cloaked raw scorn for his Russian counterparts.

The Vietnamese knelt. He massaged his left thigh where the block of pavement had spun him down. As the radio answered Korchenko, Nguyen asked the aide quietly, “Is there more ammunition for the rifles? I emptied my magazine.”

Korchenko cursed, but there was an undercurrent of satisfaction in his voice as he said, “Well, we know where
your
charge is, Nguyen. The Algerians have found part of his body in the Casbah. Witnesses say the Americans—the people in the big car—blew him up before they drove off.”

The Russian began to speak into his radio again. Nguyen frowned and pulled himself erect. He used the edge of the back door as a handhold and the automatic rifle as a crutch in order to manage unassisted. Babroi and Schwartz were struggling to pry open the hood. It was obvious that the Citröen was beyond any repairs they could make in the field.

Korchenko flung down the microphone with a curse. “Junk!” he shouted, “junk! Now they’re saying that they can’t hear me!”

The Vietnamese officer did not speak Russian, but he had enough experience with the language and with problems in the field to add them up this time. “With the engine dead,” he said in English, “the battery does not have the power to transmit from here to Algiers very long. Especially a tube radio, so much is lost in heat.”

The look Korchenko gave him would have killed if the KGB man could have arranged it. “Very fine!” the Russian spat. “An explanation for every failure. No doubt you will explain to your superiors why there is so little of Doctor Tanh to ship home?” The colonel’s venom was punctuated by squealing metal. Babroi and Schwartz had finally wrenched apart the warped hood and fenders.

“I do not understand that,” Nguyen responded, as if to a question and not a gibe. “Why should they kidnap Hoang first and then kill him at once? Perhaps it was an accident. There was too much shooting, too much smoke. . . .” He smiled, and Korchenko wondered that he had ever thought the little man was bland. “It reminded me of Hue in ‘68,” Nguyen concluded. “Yes.”

Colonel Korchenko opened his door and got out. He towered over the Vietnamese officer. That gave back some of his confidence. “There’s a group of military vehicles being diverted to us,” he said. “We’ll go back to Algiers in one of them while the rest track down the—Americans.” He had almost blurted, “defector,” a word that must not be used outside KGB circles if Korchenko were to have even a prayer of a career remaining.

Nguyen stripped the empty magazine from the AKM, wincing as the motion put weight on his right leg again. “Is there more ammunition?” he repeated. “I will accompany the troops. I want to—catch—the men who killed Doctor Hoang.”

“Little fool!” Korchenko shouted. “Shall I leave you here, is that what you want?
I
shall be in charge of the operation from my base in the embassy. But the capture shall be the responsibility of the army alone, the
Red
Army! Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand perfectly,” said the Vietnamese officer in a soft voice. His nod could have been mistaken for obsequiousness. “I hope we will be informed of your success,” he added. “From government to government, if you think it would be improper to exchange such information between ourselves.”

Behind his still face, Nguyen was balancing possibilities. The Algerian government had a stake in the day’s events which the Russians seemed willing to overlook. Nguyen had made only a courtesy call on the Algerian responsible for Conference security, a Captain Malek; but that should be sufficient entree under the circumstances. With the manpower and records of the local authorities, and the skills that had sometimes made Nguyen’s own superiors look askance at him, it should be possible to get a quick break in the affair. The Vietnamese officer was quite sure that Korchenko was not the man to defeat the one the radio had called “Kelly.” The man orchestrating things from the American—was it really American?—side was very good.

“It shouldn’t be too difficult,” the KGB colonel was remarking. “Their vehicle is unmistakable—and very likely damaged as well.” He gave Nguyen a patronizing nod. “And most important, the fact they didn’t answer our fire . . . well, it’s obvious that they don’t have guns or shells any more. Didn’t want to compromise a diplomatic vehicle, I’ll bet—the fools!”

Korchenko chuckled. “No,” he repeated, “it really shouldn’t be too difficult.”

XXXVII

“Professor, are you all right?” Kelly asked. He dared not stop yet. A quick glance to the side showed him only that his two passengers were sprawled across the seat.

Vlasov straightened up slowly. He had been pressing his ear against the Defense Attaché’s chest. “Yes,” he said quietly in Russian, “but your friend, I am afraid, is dead. I am very sorry.”

Kelly slammed his hand against the padded dash as he had hit the wall of the tomb the night before. “Shit,” he whispered. He had not cared for Posner, an officious turkey who let his illusions get in the way of doing the job . . . but he had lived by those illusions, and now he seemed to have died by them. “The world,” muttered the agent, “just might be a better place if everybody was a Posner and there weren’t any Tom Kellys to fuck things up.”

“Eh?”

“I’m going to pull over and change tires,” Kelly said aloud. “This wasn’t autostrada even with four tires.”

They were three quarters of a mile beyond the Citröen, and there were a number of twists and turns besides. In theory, that was a matter of only some minutes’ run for a trained man. It was still an adequate safety margin with this surface, this sun, and with the probable burden of fifteen pounds of automatic rifle if somebody really was determined to run after them.

Vlasov had tried to straighten the commander’s body against the seat back. The bullet that ripped through the top of Posner’s chest had already been tumbling. Death might have taken a few minutes, but consciousness must have spilled out instantly with the hemorrhage through the fist-sized exit hole.

“Shit,” Kelly repeated as he swung open his door.

The smell of raw gasoline warned him. Besides the
ping
of hot metal finding new tolerances, there was a muted gurgle at the back of the car. Kelly swore and flopped on the ground. One hole was round and neat and could have been plugged; but it was already above the level of the gas remaining. The other hole was the work of a ricochet, skipping up from the road metal and doing a job that could not have been bettered with a cold chisel. The bullet had spun through the bottom of the gas tank in a long line.

The left rear tire was dead flat and the right rear was noticeably slumping, but there was no time now to worry about them. By the time Kelly had changed a tire, there would be no fuel left to drive away on. The agent jumped back into the car and put it in gear.

“Where are we going now?” Professor Vlasov asked. In the interval, the Russian had struggled one-handed to lay the Attaché’s body out in the back seat.

“As far as we can this way,” Kelly said dourly, “which won’t be very goddam far, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Somebody back there is good with a rifle. He managed to hit us ten, maybe fifteen times out of a thirty-round box—if it was even full when he got the gun. I’d like to meet him again sometime, when I’ve got more than a steering wheel to hold myself.”

“There is something up on the next hill,” Vlasov noted. He pointed forward. The best speed they could manage with the road and tires as they were was under 20 mph. It was slow enough that the lack of windshield was not a handicap.

“Given what the gas tank looks like,” Kelly said, “I wouldn’t bet the farm that we were going to make it that far. It’s a mile and a half, and it’s uphill, which is worse.” But at least it was a better goal than anything else on the immediate, dingy landscape.

The object was a square, flat-roofed tower on a hilltop overlooking the road and many miles of countryside. At its base, the tower was surrounded by a low wall. “It’s a granary,” Kelly explained aloud. “Kabyles’ve been building them like that to store grain for a couple thousand years, my background stuff said.”

Vlasov frowned, then looked at the American. He smiled. “You are joking of course. That is a fort.”

Kelly flashed a grin back at the defector. “You could make a case for that, couldn’t you, Professor? Well, all I know is what I read . . . but it just might be that it wasn’t only long droughts that families built places to protect their grain from.”

The top of the tower was notched with embrasures. Below them, on what was presumably the second floor, there was a single slit window per side. The slits flared outward to give a rifleman within the broadest possible field of fire while only his gun muzzle was exposed to the shots of his opponents. The tower itself was plastered, but the core was almost certainly stone like the fabric of the wall around the tower’s base. If the stones were as thick as their length and breadth suggested, more than light artillery would be required to blast them aside.

“Professor,” the agent said, “if we’ve got a chance to stay clear for the next couple hours, it’s up there. I . . . if I hadn’t screwed up, you wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s not much consolation, I know . . . but I’m as sorry as I can be.”

Vlasov smiled at the American sadly. “It is not you,” he said. “Perhaps there is nothing that human beings could have done against—these others.”

Kelly’s face worked in disgust. He did not like being whipped by the KGB. Coming in second to non-existent aliens turned the thought of defeat into insult.

The slant-six engine continued to chug away happily until they crested the hump in the road beneath the granary. The Volare rode like a sled in the summer, but that was as much as could have been hoped under the circumstances. Kelly grinned. Perhaps he should have been thankful that the ricochet had only ripped the tank and had not ignited it. And then again, maybe he ought to wish he was dead in the back seat instead of Posner. Kelly had been in the business long enough to know that there are worse things than death, especially if the other side has questions they need answers to.

When the nose of the Volare pointed down at a noticeable angle, Kelly shut off the engine. None of the remaining gasoline would drain out, at least, though he was sure that the car would not carry them much further. “Professor,” he said, “we’re going to walk up there and I’ll try to talk to the people. Hope to God they speak French. . . . If we’re lucky, they’ll give us a drink of water before they shoo us out the door. And if we’re real lucky”—he fumbled beneath the passenger seat and came out with the empty sub-machine gun —“if we’re real lucky, they just might have some .45 ammo. Who knows?”

XXXVIII

There was no path from the road to the granary. The soil was friable, a mixture of baked dirt and soft stone. It was spattered with close-cropped plants that seemed each to defend a barren territory a foot or more in diameter. Vlasov and Kelly proceeded slowly. The ascent was over 30°, and the soil rolled and crumbled from beneath their shoes. Both men dabbed a hand down repeatedly, the touch of the grit taking just enough weight to give them traction again.

At first, Kelly could see only the surrounding wall and the tower when he paused and looked up from the ground before him. As the agent drew nearer, however, the design became more clear. It was as much a dwelling as a place of refuge. The wall around the base of the tower proper was of ashlar-cut stones laid in courses and mortared into place. This wall had been extended forty feet to one side by a wall of much cruder construction in which stones of varied shapes and sizes were fitted to one another dry. Within the courtyard thus created could be seen the roof of either a house or a stable.

There was a wooden gate in the newer wall. Standing ten feet from the gate and in plain view of whoever was moving behind the gun slit in the second floor of the tower, Kelly called, “Friends, we are travelers in need. For your souls’ sake, aid us!” He held the Ingram in his right hand, muzzle down and with the stock extended. In his left hand, Kelly waved the empty magazine.

After a long time, the gate creaked back. An old man walked out and dragged the gate panel to behind him. He wore a dun-colored robe and a burnoose. The old man did not hold a weapon, but someone still watched from above.

“Father,” the agent said, “we have run far, but our enemies still pursue. Grant us water before we go on.”

The old man’s face rumpled in disdain. He gestured toward the sub-machine gun and said in cracked French, “Do peaceful travelers come calling with guns in their hands, then? Go on about your business.”

Kelly swallowed on a dry throat, “Father, our business was with the Association of Kabyles. In Algiers this day we have struck down some of the tyrants who would forbid the Kabyle language, who would prevent grandfathers from speaking to their children’s children who have gone to the city. We do not ask for shelter; that would be your death. But God will reward those who offer water to the thirsty.”