Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (32 page)

“Come in, then,” the old man said abruptly. “Mind the hens.” Stepping back, he called to someone inside in what must have been Kabyle.

The chickens running loose in the courtyard were white and scrawny and berserk at the sight of strangers. There was the usual farm odor of dung, though no animals larger than the chickens were evident at the moment, such as the sheep and perhaps goats would be penned here during the night. Now they were presumably at pasture, doing whatever further damage they could to the already barren hillsides nearby.

There were four humans besides the old man lined up in front of the low, beige-plastered house. Three were children, none of them more than six years old. The last was a black-robed woman as old as the man. She had not bothered to veil for strangers: these were Kabyles, not Arabs. There were no men of—military age, that covered it. They would be off with the flocks.

And there was no woman young enough to be mother to the children. Kelly did not need the crawling between his shoulder blades to guess where the mother was or what she held in her hands.

Still, what the
old
woman offered was a copper cup and a ewer of water. She filled the cup first for Vlasov as the elder of the guests. The Russian drank and passed the cup to Kelly, for whom the woman refilled it in turn. The agent nodded and passed the cup back to Vlasov. He took the empty magazine from the waist-band of his trousers where he had thrust it to free his hand. “Father,” he said to the old man again, “men cannot reward men for the gift of water which is the gift of life; but God will reward you and your house. There is a thing, now, that I would ask without offending you—though it involves laws that are strict and would be enforced with rigor.”

The Kabyle chewed the inside of his lip. “Ask,” he said. “This is not the City, that every man must beg permission to shit.”

Kelly nodded in solemn agreement. “While it is well known that the government of the City”—he had not been five years in sales without learning to pick up a cue—“forbids men to own guns today—though it was those same men and guns that drove out the French—if it could be that you knew someone with 11.43-mm pistol ammunition . . . ? Or it may be called .45 ACP, as for the Colt pistol and the tommy gun . . . that would serve a great need of ours. We are men, we fight our own battles; but without ammunition for our gun, we are unarmed.”

The old Kabyle took the magazine Kelly handed him. He studied it at length while the American drank another cup of water. The others in the courtyard were spectators as silent as the woman in the tower. At last the old man fumbled in a pocket somewhere beneath his robe and brought out a loaded pistol cartridge. It winked as he compared it with the magazine lips. It was patently too small, either a .380 or the short 9-mm Makarov round on which the Russians had decided to standardize their sidearms.

The Kabyle shook his head sadly. Kelly nodded glum agreement. “Father,” he said in decision, handing the Ingram to the old man, “to us, this would be only a burden. Take it and use it in the cause of freedom as a man should.” He tapped the LARAND suppressor. “With this attachéd, the gun will make less noise than you would believe possible. Out here”—he waved toward the miles of empty sky—“that is a little thing. But the day will come that you and your sons may have to go to the City to make your will known. . . . This will serve you well, there.”

The old man took the sub-machine gun and turned it over in his hands. Kelly touched Vlasov on the shoulder. “Come on, Professor,” he said wearily, “we’ll drive as far as we can and then hoof it. Until they catch up again.” He turned.

“Wait,” the Kabyle said. Carrying the Ingram, the old man strode through the door at the base of the tower. Voices echoed from the building. They were muffled by the thick walls but still loud enough to be intelligible had they been in French. The old woman gave the strangers another hard look, then darted through the doorway herself.

“Do you suppose he is going to give us the ammunition after all?” asked Professor Vlasov. He spoke in Russian. He might be crazy, but Kelly had no reason to think the defector was stupid.

“What I’m hoping,” said the agent, “is that they’ve got an old pistol in there that they’ll part with. Even a .380’s better than nothing.” He shook his head. “Didn’t like giving away Doug’s gun that way, but it made a hell of an impressive gift. If I get back, I can get him another one.”

First the old woman, then the man, and finally a woman in her twenties spilled back into the courtyard from the tower. The younger woman carried a Garand rifle at the balance. She held the weapon easily despite its size and her slight frame. There were a lot of Garands knocking about the world, and you could still make a case for it being the finest weapon ever issued to American troops.

What the old man had brought out with him was considerably more interesting, however.

The magazine well was in the top of the receiver, and for a moment Kelly thought he was being handed a Bren gun. The double trigger—front for single shots, rear for full auto—corrected him even before he took the weapon from the Kabyle. It was a Chatellerault, the French copy of the BAR, and an excellent automatic rifle for all its weight and complexity. The bipod had been stripped from this one some time in the past, but even so the rifle had an empty weight of at least 18 pounds.

Weight made a gun difficult to carry, but it also meant that you could control bursts of the powerful cartridge for which it was chambered. At this point, that looked like a good trade-off.

The old man gave Kelly a long, straight magazine. Apologetically, he said, “We do not have much ammunition for it—only seventeen shots. But—if Allah wills, it may help you.”

Kelly locked the magazine home. That freed his hand to take the Kabyle’s. The old man’s palm was dry and rough and as solid as a tree root. “If Allah loves warriors,” the agent said sincerely, “we two shall meet again in Paradise. Go with God.”

In brusquer Russian he added to Vlasov, “Well, Professor, let’s see if we’ve got any gas left.”

Kabyle voices resumed their argument behind the two men as they skidded down the hill to their car.

XXXIX

The Volare started and bumped off along the road. The right rear tire was by now as flat as the left. Kelly was no longer interested in getting somewhere. Rather, he was hoping to put at least a mile between himself and the Kabyles. It was the least he could do for people who had helped strangers at such obvious risk to themselves. Folks with guns in their homes were often willing to make their own decisions. That was a fact that had not escaped many governments.

The car made it about the hoped-for mile before the road began to struggle upward again. The engine sputtered only once before quitting for good.

“Well, Professor . . .” Kelly said. He took a last look at the road map before he stuffed it into his hip pocket. “If we’re where we seem to be, Douera’s that way a few miles.” He gestured up the road. “Farther than I’d like, and I figure word’ll have traveled there faster than we could anyway. But I don’t know a better way.”

“There is a helicopter,” Vlasov said.

In the stillness after the Volare died, the chop and even the turbine whine of the bird should have been obvious to the agent before it was called to his attention. Kelly cursed and stuck his head out the window. Nothing was visible. The aircraft must be flying very low and slow. The sound of its passage was echoing off the rocks ahead of it. “Quick, Professor,” the agent said, “out your side and under cover fast. They may strafe the car.”

Even as he spoke, the American was rolling out his own door and darting toward a bush twenty yards away up the low hill. Its foliage was sparse, but the shadow itself would go a long way toward hiding the outline of a man and an automatic rifle.

The station wagon was beige. Kelly had planned to shove it to the side of the road. With a little luck and the long shadows that would be on the hills in half an hour, the car might have been hidden from observation from above. No hope of that now. The helicopter was searching the length of the road from a hundred feet in the air. It was no chance overflight but a searcher summoned by either the KGB or the Algerian authorities themselves. Or by the little green men, of course, but this was not the time to mock Professor Vlasov. He had proven as cool as a paramedic in circumstances that would have reduced most civilians to mewling incapacity.

If there was one good thing about the helicopter, it was the fact that it was not a gunship as Kelly had initially feared. The agent squinted at the aircraft through the warped branches of the stunted fig that hid him. As soon as the pilot saw his presumed quarry, the bird lifted. The maneuver would have given Kelly a criminally easy shot had he wished to advertise the fact that he was armed again. He did not dare do that until he was sure of his opposition.

The twin-turbine helicopter was much the same size and shape as a Bell Iroquois, though the two designs could be quickly told apart by the fact that this one had tricycle landing gear in place of skids. This was an Mi-2. Though its fuselage and rudder bore the Algerian star and crescent on a green and white field, Kelly knew the crew was likely to be as Russian as the aircraft’s designer. At any rate, all the pursuit to this point had been Russian.

The helicopter rose vertically to a thousand feet. It began circling slowly. The pilot had either been told to take no chances after he located the car, or he had made that decision himself. “Professor,” Kelly called, “can you hear me?”

“Yes, of course,” Vlasov’s voice responded, slightly attentuated by the wind. “What shall we do now?”

Kelly could not see the Professor, though they were probably level with one another on opposite sides of the Volare. “Without transport, we’re screwed,” the agent said. “That bird’s bringing somebody, sure as hell. Could be that there’s more coming than we can handle, but right now I’m looking to hijack a Russian car as the best ticket out of these rocks. Thing is, Professor, it’ll work a lot better if you’re willing to draw their attention. Can you run up the hill when I say to?”

“Of course,” responded Professor Vlasov. “We are all soldiers now against the coming invasion. We all must do our part.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, hit the dirt if they start shooting,” Kelly called. He would not have minded having Vlasov guard his back in Cambodia, the agent thought. Except that Vlasov would have been on the other side there. . . .

The sound of two vehicles long preceded the machines themselves. The road kinked a hundred yards short of where the Volare lay. Kelly could hear engines roaring beyond it as the vehicles backed and filled in the narrow road. Then the blunt steel prow of an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier lurched around the corner.

All the APC’s hatches were buttoned up. Gun barrels projected from the three rifle slits on the side of the troop compartment which Kelly could see. There was a small turret forward. It seemed to hold an automatic grenade launcher in place of the more usual 14.5 mm machine gun. The vehicle paused while its turret scanned the rocky slopes to either side of the road. The grenade launcher twitched as if it were the whiskery muzzle of a mouse. Neither Vlasov nor Kelly moved. They were practically invisible at this time of evening, especially to men who were handicapped by searching through prisms of armored glass.

The armored vehicle began to roll forward again. Its separately-sprung wheels lifted and fell in individual rhythm as it presented its left side to Kelly. The APC stopped again. The American heard a hatch open on the other side. A moment later, a soldier in mustardy-green fatigues swung around the vehicle. He ran to the Volare in a crouch. The soldier carried a folding-stock AK ready for action, and his eyes flashed around in all directions. He moved too abruptly, too nervously, to notice the waiting fugitives. Though the man wore no rank or unit insignia, his uniform marked him as Russian as surely as if he had been covered with red stars.

The soldier peered into the car, then snatched open the back door. With his rifle advanced in his right, the Russian reached in with his left hand and touched the Attaché’s body for reassurance. After a quick look around the car’s riddled interior, the soldier ran back to the APC and banged on the bow slope.

The turret hatch opened. Another Russian with steel-gray hair and an aura of command raised himself far enough out to see the trooper. The scout and the vehicle commander talked, neither’s voice fully audible to Kelly. At last the commander dropped back out of sight. The soldier scurried to the side hatch.

An open-topped Land Rover drove around the corner a moment later. It carried two more men in unmarked Russian uniforms. The plump passenger still held a radio handset. The vehicles had apparently switched position when they neared potential trouble. The officer had proceeded only after the scout had signaled that the Volare was abandoned to the dead. Overhead, the chopper dropped again to about two hundred feet. The officer in the 4x4 glanced upward at it as he continued talking on the radio.

“Now, Professor!” Kelly shouted in French.

The noise of the helicopter and the engines of the two ground vehicles pulsed within the shallow bowl. Professor Vlasov heard the command, however, and he responded like a veteran paratrooper getting the green light. The defector scrambled from the base of an artemisium bush and began bounding uphill with an agility that belied his age. The Land Rover’s driver saw Vlasov before anyone else did. He pointed, shouting. Kelly’s signal had either been ignored in the ambient noise or forgotten in the new excitement.

The Russian officer shouted into his handset. The Mi-2 dipped and rotated 30° while the APC commander popped out of his turret for a clear view. With everyone’s attention on the running defector, Kelly began killing people.

Off-set to the left of the Chatellerault’s magazine was a tangent rear sight. It was screwed all the way down for point-blank fire. Using the front trigger, Kelly put single shots through the chests of both the men seated in the Land Rover. Echoes from the sharp reports rang among the rocks like a long burst from a machine gun. The officer flung the handset in the air as he died. The body of his driver flopped over him.