Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (68 page)

Through the windscreen Kelly could see a control tower of dun-colored brick, with corrugated-metal additions turned a similar shade by the blowing dust. At the edge of the building was parked a Dodge pickup truck painted Air Force blue. While the pilot centered the Porter’s prop spinner on the vehicle, its door opened and the driver got out.

Shine braked and feathered the prop again, only ten feet from the bumper of the pickup. “Door-to-door service a specialty,” he shouted.

Kelly gestured Gisela toward the cabin door but stepped forward himself so that he could be heard, and heard privately. “Appreciate it, man,” the veteran said, shaking the pilot’s hand between the two seatbacks. “You done a good thing.”

Shine laughed without much humor. “Yeah, well, Tommy,” he said, “you meet up with any of the types who got back anyway, the ragheads—you tell ‘em I’m sorry. There was orders, sure, but . . . you know, the longer I live, the less I regret the times I violated orders, and the less I like to remember some of the ones I obeyed. You know?”

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Kelly said, squeezing the pilot’s hand again before he turned to follow Gisela.

Moments after the two passengers had stepped onto the concrete and dogged the hatch closed, the Porter rotated and lifted again—a brief hop to the fueling point a quarter mile farther down the runway—instead of taxiing properly.

“Not exactly the least conspicuous vehicle,” Kelly muttered as he and the dancer stepped toward the truck. “But I didn’t think we’d do better through Atwater, even if I kicked and screamed for something civilian. The folks who were supposed to arrange that sorta thing for me are either dead or wish I was.”

The man standing beside the truck was in his mid-twenties, wearing a moustache and sideburns which were within, though barely, the loose parameters of the US Air Force. “Colonel Monaghan?” he asked without saluting; neither he nor Kelly were in uniform, and there was a look in the man’s eyes that suggested he didn’t volunteer salutes anyway.

“Yessir,” said Kelly, nodding courteously. The other man’s eyes had drifted to the dancer. “I much appreciate this. I know it’s not the sort of thing you’re here for.”

There were only a few US liaison officers at the airbase here in Diyarbakir. This man and the vehicle had to have been requisitioned from the NSA listening post at Pirinclik, fifteen miles west of the city, where the midflight telemetry of tests from the Russian missile proving ground at Tyuratam was monitored. Pirinclik was staffed by the US Air Force; but nonetheless, Sergeant Atwater must have called in personal chips to arrange for a vehicle over a general phone line.

“Here’s the key, sir,” the younger man said with a modicum of respect in his voice. “There’s a chain to run from the steering wheel to the foot-feed. No ignition lock, you know?”

Kelly nodded. “Much appreciated,” he repeated as he opened the driver’s side door and handed Gisela behind the wheel. She knew where they were going, Lord willing. “Hope you’ve got a way back?” he added, suddenly struck by the fact that the airman looked very much alone against the empty background of runways on an alluvial plain. “We’re in more of a time crunch than . . .”

“So I hear,” the younger man agreed with a tight smile. At a base like Pirinclik, there were more sources of information than the official channels. It struck Kelly that this fellow might know a lot more than he and Gisela themselves did, but there really
wasn’t
time to explore that possibility. “I’ll call and they’ll send a jeep. Just didn’t want to tie up two vehicles on so loose an ETA.” He nodded toward the Turbo-Porter, shrunken into a dark huddle at the distant service point.

Gisela cranked the engine, which caught on the second attempt, just before the airman called, “Pump once and—”

“The gate’s off to the left,” Kelly said as he closed his own door, wondering how often he’d flown in or out of the Third TAP base. More times than he could remember, literally, because once he’d been delirious, controllable only because he was just as weak as he was crazy. . . .

They paused for the gate, chain link on a sturdy frame, to be swung open by Turks from the sandbagged bunkers to either side. There was no identification check for people leaving in an American vehicle, though the guards showed some surprise that the driver was a blond woman. Gisela turned left on the narrow blacktop highway and accelerated jerkily while she determined the throw and engagement of the pickup’s clutch.

“You’ve been here before,” Kelly said, noting that the woman turned without hesitation.

She glanced aside, then back to the road. “Not here,” she said in a cool voice, aware that the American was fishing for information—and willing to give it to him even though he had not, by habit, done her the courtesy of asking directly. “Not the airfield. But of course, I’ve spent a great deal of time at our base in the city.”

The landscape through which they drove as fast as the truck’s front-end shimmy permitted was as flat as any place Kelly had ever been. It appeared to be rolling countryside, but the scale of distance was so great that it gave shape to what would otherwise have been considered dead-level ground.

But the plains were neither smooth nor green—at least this early in the year; Kelly knew from experience that by early summer the oats and barley planted in some of the unfenced fields would have grown high enough to hide the rocks.

The soil of Mesopotamia had been cultivated for millennia, for virtually as long as any area of the Earth’s surface. Every time a plow bit, it sent a puff of yellow-gray dust off on the constant wind and diminished the soil by that much. The rocks, from pebbles to blocks the size of a man’s torso, remained . . . and from a slight distance, from a road, those rocks were
all
that remained of what had been the most fertile lands on Earth. One could still cultivate with care and hardship, however, and pasture sheep.

“We—concentrated here in Diyarbakir, when the Plan was developed,” Gisela said deliberately, “in part for recruitment’s sake—the Kurds.” She looked over to make sure her student was following. Kelly nodded obediently.

“But more because it is, you see, not developed,” the woman continued, “but still there are the airbase and the tracking station. Competing jurisdictions, do you see?” The tutor looked over again.

“So that if things should be seen that neither understands, your NSA or Turk Hava Kuvvertli”—Gisela used the indigenous words for Turkish Air Force within the English of her lecture—“both blame the other . . . but not
blame
, because of security.”

She smiled toward the windshield as, downshifting the long-throw gearbox, she passed a horse-drawn wagon in a flapping roar. Communication among friendly forces was a more necessary ingredient of success than was intelligence of the enemy, but it was notable that whenever military bureaucracies set priorities, information flow came in a bad second to security. Perhaps that was a case of making a virtue of necessity, since it was almost impossible to pass data through a military bureaucracy anyway.

“So each thinks the other responsible and says nothing, so as not to embarrass an ally and to poke into what is not their own business,” Gisela concluded. “Bad practice of security.”

The road off to the right, past a small orchard of pistachio trees, could have been a goat track save that it meandered in double rather than single file. Gisela found the brakes were spongy and downshifted sharply to let the engine compression help slow the truck. They made the turn comfortably, though the pickup swayed on springs abused by too many rutted roads like this.

“Reach into my right coat pocket,” the woman directed. She had crossed right arm over left to take the turnoff, and even in the moment it took her to reposition her hands afterwards, the steering wheel jibbed viciously.

Kelly obeyed, expecting to find sunglasses or something similar. Instead there was a round-nosed cylinder that could have been a lipstick, save that it was clicking against three others like it—and a fifth, buried deeply in a corner of the lining.

He drew out the handful of .38 Special cartridges, a full load for the cylinder of the snubbie now nestled empty against his spine. “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said the veteran softly as he drew the weapon to load it.

The rounds were US Government issue, bearing Lake City Arsenal headstamps and 130-grain bullets with full metal jackets. They were really intended for 9-mm autoloaders and would literally rattle down the bore of most .38 Special revolvers. When fired, however, they upset enough to take the rifling.

They weren’t a perfect load for the aluminum snubbie, but they were a hell of an improvement over an empty cylinder . . . and the fact that Gisela had procured them for him, just before he was to be introduced to her associates, was a sign more valuable than any real protection that the weapon gave him.

“I got them from the pilot,” Gisela said needlessly. “I thought you wouldn’t ask, to call attention. So I asked, and it won’t be reported.”

Kelly hunched forward to replace the little revolver. He’d carried it a lot of years and never used it before the previous night, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t need it again soon. Lightning was liable to keep striking the same place so long as the storm raged and the tree still stood in its path.

The ground became broken to either side of the road, lifting in outcrops of dense rock shaded by brush instead of sere grass. Gisela downshifted again into compound low. A moment later, the hood of the truck dipped as the ruts led into a gorge notched through the plain in two stages.

They drove down the upper, broader level; then Gisela cramped the wheels hard left to follow the track across a single-arched bridge of stone, vaulting the narrow center of the gully. There was enough water in the rivulet below to flash in the sun before the truck began climbing from the declivity with a shiver of wheelspin.

“How old was that bridge?” asked Kelly, craning his neck to look out the back window, an effort made vain by the coating of dust over the glass.

“Seljuk at least,” answered the woman, with a shrug which merged into a shoulder thrust as the steering fought her when they rattled out of the gully. “Maybe Byzantine, maybe Roman, maybe—who knows? There’s probably been a bridge there as long as men have lived here and farmed . . . and that is a very long time.”

“And now you’re here,” Kelly said quietly. “The Service.”

“Here.” Gisela’s smile was more arrogant than pleased. “And soon, everywhere. To the world’s benefit.”

The ground dropped a few feet on the left side of the road. Gisela swung to the right around a basalt rock face and then pulled left toward the recently refurbished gate of a han, a caravanserai, ruined by time.

The walls of basalt blocks weathered gray gleamed in the sunlight, but the shadowed gaps in the dome of the mosque which formed one corner of the enclosure were as black as a colonel’s soul. The dome was crumbling; but, though the ages had scalloped the upper edge of the wall around the courtyard, it was still solid and at no point less than eight feet high.

The original gateway had been built between the mosque and a gatehouse, but part of the latter had been demolished when the new gate was constructed. This was steel, double-leafed and wide enough to pass a semi-trailer. The posts to which the leaves were hinged were themselves steel, eight inches in diameter and concrete-filled if they were not solid billets.

In the far corner of the facing wall there were arrow slits, in the walls and the blockhouse. It struck Kelly that the stone edifice was proof to any modern weapons up through tank cannon, and that the embrasures could shower machinegun fire on trespassers as effectively as the arrows for which they had been intended.

Gisela pulled up to the gate and honked imperiously. The dust cloud they had raised in their passage continued to drift forward, settling on Kelly’s right sleeve and the ledge of his open window. The back of his neck began to tingle. He shifted in his seat, unwilling to draw his revolver but certain that a premonition of danger was causing his hair to bristle.

The woman honked again and said, “If somebody’s asleep at
this
time, they’ll—”

“Jesus
Christ
!” shouted Kelly. He unlatched his door so hastily that his feet tangled as he got out of the cab. He did not draw his gun, any more than he would have thought to do so if he found himself in the path of a diesel locomotive.

At first it was more like watching time-lapse photography of a building under construction, for the object was huge and silent and rising vertically in a nimbus of brilliant light. Hairs that had been prickling all over Kelly’s body now stood straight out, and when he reached for the car door to steady himself a static spark snapped six inches from the metal to numb his hand.

It wasn’t a cylinder rising on jacks from the han courtyard: it was a disk fifty feet in diameter with a bluntly-rounded circumference and a central depth of about twelve feet.

It was a fucking flying saucer.

Gisela was out of the truck also, shouting and waving her clenched fist in obvious fury. The underside of the saucer was clearly visible, so it could scarcely be called an unidentified flying object. The veil of light surrounding the vehicle as it rose was pastel and of uncertain color, shifting like the aurora but bright enough to be visible now in broad daylight.

The skin of the flying saucer was formed of riveted plates. The junctions of the plates and the individual rivet heads stood out despite the nimbus because the portion of the field emanating from those surface irregularities was of a shade which contrasted with that of the plates themselves.

The whole aura shifted across the spectrum and, as the saucer continued to rise, faded. The craft climbed vertically. A bright line appeared from the rim to the central axis, as if the nimbus had been pleated there and trebled in thickness. The line rotated across the circular undersurface faster than the second hand on a watch dial, hissing and crackling with violent electrical discharges. The rate of the saucer’s rise accelerated with the sweep of the line, so that there was only a speck of dazzling corona by the time the full surface area should have been swept. Then there was nothing at all.