Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (35 page)

The brief calm ended when the sergeant pulled up beside the sunken staircase. The ancient harbor was empty but not still. The wind over the rocks had a constant static hiss. Its amplitude went unremarked until one noticed that the rumbling idle of the V-8 engine was completely masked except when one stood in the lee of the vehicle itself. The waves could be heard though, a vicious, unmastered sound like zippers rasping to open the fabric of the world. Kelly checked the tuning of his short-wave receiver. He was running it now from its separate battery pack. The blue digits were correct. He faced seaward and tripped his beacon for a five-second count.

The submarine’s crew was as tight as Kelly was. Their response began to beep from the Kenwood within fifteen seconds of the moment the agent shut off his beacon.

Kelly cut the receiver power to save the batteries. “Let’s move,” he said. “One more stop and we’re shut of this deal.”

Unloading the Blazer was fast and comparatively easy, but it seemed like a lifetime’s task to all four of those involved. Professor Vlasov was becoming increasingly nervous. Kelly could not be sure whether this was a return of the defector’s old fear of aliens or if it had a more rational cause. The sand-colored Chevy looked square and huge on the corniche. Anyone strolling about at night was apt to wander over out of curiosity. Any policeman who was out would almost certainly do so.

As soon as the gear was on the ground, Kelly said, “OK, Doug—run the car up the street and park it, then get back as quick as you can to help launch. Up there it won’t call attention to us.”

“I’ll go,” said Annamaria. “You’ll need Doug to get the boat down the steps without wrecking it.” She slipped around to the driver’s side of the Blazer without waiting for a response.

The agent glanced at her, a slim figure in a dark windbreaker. The breeze molded the nylon to her breasts like a silken sheath. The car door closed. “Right,” he said as the Blazer pulled away.

Annamaria had been correct. The stairs were perfect for concealment, but they were barely wide enough to pass two men abreast. Without Sergeant Rowe’s strength up front, the boat would have brushed the stone walls and stone steps repeatedly on its way to the beach below. The nylon was tough, but there was a lot of water out there. The stone as building material was no less able to scrape holes in the rubberized fabric than it was in its natural state in the surf beyond.

The tide had been going out for an hour or so. At the foot of the low cliff was a beach of coarse shingle. Panting and thankful, Kelly grounded his end of the boat on it. Sergeant Rowe began unfastening restraints, preparing to inflate the vessel.

The agent scrambled back up the stairs for his Kenwood. He was feeling a dreamy lightness after his exertion. It did not keep him from being aware of the pain in his torso, but it allowed him to perceive the pain as something happening to another person. Kelly stumbled on the last step as he returned with the radio, but neither of the other men seemed to notice.

The defector was rigid, but his eyes moved with the quick jerks of a mouse looking for a bolthole. He was as patently fearful as he had been when the shooting first started in front of the Institute. At that time, Kelly had taken the panic as a normal enough reaction to a firefight. Now that he had witnessed the Professor’s calm under shellfire and worse, Kelly realized that there was something else going on.

Time enough to worry about that later, he decided. Doug Rowe was ready to inflate the MARS boat. “Just a second,” the agent said. “Let’s make sure I’m still on frequency.” He pushed the receiver’s power switch.

The noise blasting from the speaker was as unexpected as a bomb. It seemed for an instant to be as loud. Kelly twisted the attentuator dial by reflex. Even damping at 60 dB—each decibel a log-3 diminution in intensity—made no discernible difference in the beeps. The agent punched the power button again. He stared at Rowe in amazement.

“What the hell are they thinking of?” Kelly said. “They’re putting out enough signal to rattle china. That’s
bound
to bring somebody down on them—on us!”

Rowe had been shaken as well by the unexpected blast of noise. He shook his head. “Maybe it’s not the sub,” he said. Raising his glasses toward the horizon, he added, “Something’s up there now, a plane. Maybe it’s broadcasting.”

Lights were coursing over the waves at low altitude, only a half mile out. Kelly was sure they had not been there when the Blazer was being unloaded. Now, when he listened carefully, he could hear the breeze-pulsed whine of a jet engine. “Doug,” he said, “you don’t understand.” He was squinting toward the intruder, wishing he had the glasses. “That signal’s like tuning to Die Deutsche Welle when you’re in Wertachtal. It’s nothing you could transmit from a plane, a signal like that. Christ, I’m surprised they’ve got that kind of power in the sub!”

“They have come for me again,” said Vlasov in Russian. “They are broadcasting to thwart us.”

A white spotlight glittered at sea. It disappeared as the aircraft banked abruptly. The plane’s new course brought it shoreward. It was no more than twenty meters over the water. “What is it, a helicopter?” Kelly said, though even he could clearly see that the red and green lights were outboard on wing tips.

“No,” said the sergeant in an odd voice, “but it can hover like one. It’s a Yak-36. Tom, we’re in trouble.”

“Great,” said Kelly, “those idiots have called the Algerian Air Force down on us now. These Yaks are armed, I suppose? If they’re not, maybe we can run for it in the boat after all.”

“It’s not Algerian,” Rowe said. His voice was barely loud enough to be heard. “The Russians have kept all of these for themselves. The Mediterranean Squadron’s holding maneuvers off the coast, you know. This one must have flown off the
Novorossik.
It might have some underwing stores of its own, but I’d say she was dragging a MAD package at the moment. I guess there’ll be a couple frigates along soon for the heavy work.”

There was a scuffing of shoes down the passage behind them. Both Americans turned. Kelly had palmed his knife again. “Is everything all right?” Annamaria asked as she rejoined them.

Rowe lowered the glasses. “The sub can’t go deep,” he said, “not anywhere near this coast. Maybe they can run for it—it depends on just where the Russian ships are. But if the Algerians give them the go-ahead to use their anti-sub missiles—well, they don’t have to be very close to drop an SSN-14 in, not with that Yak overhead to guide them.”

“I don’t understand.” the black-haired woman said. She put a hand on Kelly’s forearm, feeling the concern but without knowledge of the cause.

“Okay,” said Kelly, “we pack up and run. The boat and motor are US Marine issue and I don’t want to leave them if there’s a choice. We’ll—”

“Tom, there’s a hundred and fifty men out there going to surrender or be killed!” shouted the sergeant.

“
I
didn’t tell them to signal that strong!” the agent shouted back. “Come on, let’s move!” He tried to reconnect the ends of a turnbuckle that would hold the boat in a tight package. The metal slipped in his hands. “Besides,” he added in a voice as weak as a child’s, “I told them I’d only consider using a sub in these waters if they’d promise to give it air cover. I can’t make them—not have lied to me. But when I get back, I’m going to—”

The sky flashed dazzlingly red. The four of them on the beach looked up.

“Well,” said Kelly in a changed voice. “I don’t have to kill anybody in Paris after all. But we do need to move.”

Where the Yak had been quartering the sea with its magnetic anomaly detector, there was an expanding cloud that rained fragments of burning metal. Before the explosion itself rocked houses, the crack of a sonic boom reached the shore at the tangent of a line of flattened waves. Spewed jet fuel began to dance and burn on the water.

“But what happened?” Annamaria said. “Did it just blow up? I don’t see another airplane.”

Sergeant Rowe connected the strap Kelly was struggling with, then a second one. The MARS boat was tacked into a manageable package again. “They credit Phoenix missiles with a 60-mile range,” the soldier said as he worked. “I hear it’s about twice that. And I think you just watched the first field test of a Phoenix.”

“The first was off the coast of Libya in ‘79,” Kelly said. He was smiling with relief. The extraction had been blown, he wasn’t sure how; but they were alive and he’d find another way out. “I couldn’t have found a better time for an encore, Lord
knows
I couldn’t!”

Several lights had gone on in houses along the street, Kelly noted as they staggered back up the stairs. The Yak was a dying glow out at sea. Doug Rowe supported the upper end of the boat again. He set it down beyond the last step. “I’ll bring the car around,” he called to Kelly and Annamaria across the burden. He began striding across the broken terrain toward the Blazer parked a block away.

“Come on up, Professor,” Kelly called over his shoulder. “We’ll get out of this one yet.” It felt good to have Annamaria’s arm around him and her scent in his nostrils. He gave her a peck on the cheek, but when she turned to respond, he patted her away. He sat carefully down on the boat, watching activity in the town.

Doug Rowe was just getting into the Blazer. The courtesy light winked on, then off as the door thumped closed. Spies were not supposed to have cars with dome lights, Kelly thought. Well, maybe none of the batch of them were much in the way of spies. Stick to selling typewriters in the—

The flash that ate the Blazer was as bright as that of the exploding Yak.

The forty-gallon fuel tank spread orange flames the width of the street. The initial flash had been blindingly white. It left imprinted on Kelly’s retinas the image of the hood and tailgate of the car collapsing inward because the steel body between them was gone.

“Professor, come on!” Kelly shouted down the black pit of the stairs. Behind him, the fire leapt and roared. “
Come
on!”

“Where’s Doug?” Annamaria cried.

Kelly swung his legs over the boat, ignoring the woman’s question as he struggled to get to the defector. Annamaria began running toward the flames.

“They are here to kill me,” said the Professor, standing at the foot of the passage. His voice rasped.

“Then we’ll have to kill them first, won’t we?” the agent snarled. “Move! This beach is suicide if they come looking for us!” He clenched his left fist around the fabric of the taller man’s lapels, guiding and dragging him up the steps. The knife in Kelly’s hand was pure silver in the moonlight, but the blazing gasoline touched it with hellfire as they dodged through the jumbled rocks.

“Where are we going?” panted Vlasov when they had scrambled to the road a block from the fire. The uncertainty that had momentarily frozen him was gone. “Where are the others?”

No one had menaced them as they stumbled away from the corniche. With every step Kelly had expected a shot. He was moving on his nerves now, his nerves and a killing fury. It would drive him until he found an outlet for it or found his death first. “The KGB didn’t have us,” he said as he led Vlasov across the road at a clumsy trot. First south, then east to the safe house and the stolen car. “They didn’t have us, then they did again. Maybe you’re doubling, maybe the embassy’s tapped or bugged. . . . Nothing I can do about that.”

They were walking now, leaning forward as if to speed progress that their weary legs could not maintain. A mercury-vapor lamp on a street corner distorted their shadows into blotches on a pale blue field. “Nobody connected with the embassy’s going to hear a goddam word about this from here on out.”

“You still think it’s humans, don’t you?” remarked the Russian wearily. “Well, in the long run I don’t suppose it matters.”

“You’re right,” said Kelly harshly. “It doesn’t matter at all!” But his waist was cold for lack of the arm that had encircled it.

The safe house was quiet, the gate locked as they had left it an hour before. Kelly pulled the gate open and then unlatched the Renault’s engine compartment. “Stand back, Professor,” he said.

“What are you doing?” the defector asked as he watched Kelly probe at the shadowed engine block.

“Wasting my time in the dark,” the agent responded. He lay down on the gravel, wincing as he tried to see the underside of the engine. “Don’t have a light, though, and we don’t have time to get one. So. . . .” Kelly stood up again and slammed the engine cover. He wished that he had found something, a bomb,
something
. . . . If he had disarmed a bomb, he could have felt that much more confident that he was going to survive the next few seconds.

He got in on the driver’s side. Vlasov started to open the other door. The agent snapped, “Get clear, goddammit!” He began fumbling with the hot wire.

If there had been a key to turn instead of a pair of bare leads to twist together, Kelly would not have noticed it. Now his fingers brushed against something beneath the ignition lock which had not been there when he stole the car.

The agent bent over. He could see nothing because of the darkness and the sudden rush of dizzying pain. The object was no bigger than a button. From the way it slipped as he applied pressure it was magnetized. Holding his breath unconsciously, Kelly pried the thing loose from the lock. A twitch of resistance suggested that a hair-fine wire had parted after the magnet released. Even trying to silhouette the object against the streetlight showed nothing but a thin disk.

Without speaking, Kelly got out of the car. He hurled the button over the wall to the street. The tiny tick of metal on cold asphalt could not be heard above the breeze. There was no other response.

“Come on, Professor,” the agent said as he got into the car again.

“But what was that?” Vlasov asked.

“A bug, I guess,” said Kelly as the motor fired raggedly. “And I hope it was the only thing somebody decided to leave this car with.”

As they turned east toward Algiers again, the mirror showed that the sky over the center of Tipasa was aglow. If Kelly lived, that fire would not be the only monument to Staff Sergeant Douglas Rowe, 23, husband and father . . . and a better man, perhaps, then some of those he had just died for.