Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (73 page)

“Where am I cleared to this time?” Kelly asked, enunciating carefully. He straightened himself in the seat as precisely as if he were a diplomat arriving at a major conference. He wasn’t so wrecked that he couldn’t act for a few minutes like the VIP these people had been led to expect. He didn’t know of any reason why he
had
to put on a front, but it was cheaper to do so than to learn later that he should have.

“Sir, I really don’t have that information,” the captain replied. “From, ah—from rumor, I’m not sure that the flight crew does. This flight was originally headed for Rome, but that’s maybe been changed along with the—the cargo.”

They were speeding toward one of the C-141s, whose white-painted upper surfaces drew a palette of colors from the rising sun and made the gray lower curves almost disappear. The wings, mounted high so that the main spar did not cut the cabin in half, now drooped under the weight of four big turbofans, but in flight they would flex upward as they lifted the huge mass of the aircraft and cargo.

Kelly was thoroughly familiar with C-141s, the logistics workhorse of the Lebanon Involvement. They were aluminum cylinders which hauled cargo very well and very efficiently, so this one was of particular interest to him only because he was apparently making the next stage of his journey on it.

The scene on the pad was a great deal more unusual.

Separated from the aircraft by thirty yards and what looked like a platoon of Air Police was a huge clot of civilians, women and children. The driver had to swing wide around them in order to approach the plane’s lowered tail ramp. As he did so, a number of civilians darted from the larger group and blocked the vehicle’s path.

The driver swore softly and slammed the transmission into reverse.

A woman struggled up to Kelly’s window. Her rage-distorted face might have been cute under other circumstances, and the amazing puffiness of her torso was surely because she was wearing at least six outfits on top of one another. A child of perhaps three, similarly overdressed, tugged at the tail of the long cloth coat on top; and because she held an infant in her left arm, she had to drop her suitcase in order to hammer on the window while she screamed, “You bastard! You’ve got to let Dawn and Jeffie aboard! What kind of—”

An airman wearing a helmet instead of a cap caught the woman from behind by wrist and shoulder, dragging her back as the car reversed in a quick arc. More grim-faced police spread themselves in a loose barricade against the would-be refugees while the driver accelerated toward the ramp.

“My God,” said the captain, “I’ve never seen anything
like
that.”

“Goddam,” said Kelly, trying to mop his forehead and finding that he still wore the flight helmet.

There were no additional officers waiting for Kelly at the ramp of the C-141. The captain who had greeted him at the TF-104 now shepherded him onto the ramp alone. “Good luck, sir,” he said, and offered his hand.

Offhand, Kelly couldn’t remember anybody saying that—and sounding like he meant it—since this business began.

“I appreciate that,” the veteran said as they shook hands. “And—folks pretty high up”—which described the aliens as well as anything could—“tell me it’ll all be fine if I do my job. Which I do.”

“Door’s lifting,” said the loadmaster at the cargo bay’s rear control panel, but his hand did not actually hit the lifter switch until the captain had sprung back down the ramp. As the ramp started to rise, the loadmaster called a terse report on his commo helmet, glanced at Kelly, and then looked down the nearly empty cargo bay.

The benches were folded down and locked in place along both windowless sides of the fuselage. During the Starlifter’s usual “passenger” operation as a troop transport, the broad central aisleway would have been loaded with munitions and heavy equipment. It was empty now. Beneath one of the benches, however, was a child’s suitcase of pink vinyl.

The loadmaster strode over to the piece of miniature luggage, jerked it from its partial concealment, and hurled it underhand toward the tail. The suitcase bounced from the ramp and out the narrowing gap to the concrete.

The C-141 was already moving, rotating outward in a manner disconcerting because nothing outside the cargo bay was visible. Kelly took off the helmet; he would not need it on this flight. The curving sides and roofline gave him the feeling of being trapped in a subway tunnel which echoed to the roar of an oncoming train.

“Well, that kid’ll need it more’n we will, won’t she?” the loadmaster demanded loudly as he walked over to the veteran. He was a burly man, unaffected by the motion of the aircraft through long familiarity.

“Got a problem, friend?” asked Kelly as he sat down on the bench. If anything
did
start, the bulkhead anchoring him would be better than a fair trade-off for the height advantage that he surrendered.

“You really rate, doncha?” the crewman continued. “Had ‘em all aboard, over two hundred dependents. Another three minutes and we’d have been wheels-up for Rome. Then, bingo! Off-load everybody and prepare to take on a special passenger. Not, ‘a special passenger
and
the dependents.’ Oh, no. And the ones who don’t
move
quick enough, there’s nightsticks to move ‘em along. So my wife and kids are out there on the fuckin’
pad,
and you’ve got the plane to yourself, buddy.”

“Think Rome’s going to be a great place if they nuke it?” Kelly asked in a tone of cool curiosity. His right hand gripped the strap of the helmet, ready to use it as a club if things worked out that way,

“I’d be with them, at least,” the loadmaster said harshly.

“There’s people who think if I get back to the World quick enough, there won’t be any more nukes,” Kelly snapped in a voice that could have been heard over gunfire. He stood, dropping the helmet because it wasn’t going to be needed. “Who the
fuck
do you think I am, Sergeant? Some politician running home from a junket? Don’t you
want
this shit to stop?”

The loadmaster blinked and backed a step. “Oh,” he said. “Ah . . .”

“Christ, I’m sorry, buddy,” Kelly said, looking down as if he were embarrassed. “Look, I’m really tight. I left some people behind too, and—” He raised his eyes and met the crewman’s in false candor. “—Wasn’t a great place, you know? Even if this other crap quiets down.”

“Ah. . . .” said the crewman. “Aw, hell, we’re all jumpy. You know how it is.” He tried out a rather careful smile. “Want to go forward before we lift?”

“Lemme strip this suit off,” the veteran answered with an equally abashed smile, textured for the use. “After we get the wheels up, I’ll go say ‘hi’ . . . but this is the part of the plane I’m used to.”

He grinned, this time genuinely—not that the difference was noticeable. “Only thing is, it’s a
lot
bigger’n the ones I’ve had to jump out.”

“You bet your ass,” the crewman agreed proudly, then reported on his commo helmet as he settled himself in a seat by the tail ramp.

The flight was uneventful. It would have seemed uneventful even if Kelly had not spent much of the air time asleep. The crew had a job to do, and they were cruising at twenty knots above normal speed; even with the agreed need for haste, there was no reasonable way to wring more out of a big bird optimized to move cargo.

The cockpit windows showed the clouds below or, through the clouds, the Mediterranean. The wall of gauges and displays in front of each flight engineer had more potential interest, at least—the possibility that boards would suddenly glow red and the sea would take on a reality beyond that of a backdrop for the hole the C-141 was punching through the sky.

But sleep was useful, once the demands of socializing had been met. The new routing was to Torrejeon, just outside Madrid. That could change at any moment; since this Starlifter was a B model with air refueling capability in addition to a lengthened fuselage, their final touchdown could be El Paso—if the Powers That Be decided.

Kelly dreamed of Fortress, but not as he had seen it in photographs and artists’ renderings. Now there was a trio of saucers tethered near the docking area. Their design prevented them from using the airlocks in normal fashion, but a saucer was still connected to Fortress by a thick umbilicus configured at its nether end to mate with the station in the same manner as the nose of a Space Command transporter.

Fortress showed no sign of the struggle in which it had been captured. The outer doughnut of raw bauxite and ilmenite from the Moon, the same material that was refined and extruded in the solar furnaces with which Fortress built itself, was beginning to weather into greater uniformity under the impact of micrometeorites and hard radiation. It was not scarred by anything more major, the high-explosive or even nuclear warheads against which it gave reasonable protection.

The close-in defense arrays visible from the north pole of the space station were empty, the spidery launching frames catching sunlight and shadowing one another at unexpected angles. Two of the launchers were missing, sheared down to their bases when their rockets gang-fired.

The space station itself was a dumbbell rotating within the hoop of shielding material. Each lobe of the station was a short length of cylinder connected by a spoke to the spherical hub. Now the dream-viewpoint shifted, angling across the center of the doughnut toward the windows, through which mirrors deflected sunlight into the living quarters of Fortress. Polished slats repeatedly re-reflected light while filtering the radiation which would otherwise have entered through the windows as well.

As Kelly’s mind watched, the trailing end of one of the lobes flew outward in slow motion. The aluminum panels twisted under stress but kept their general shape and even clung in part to the girders on which they had been hung. Glass-honeycomb insulation disintegrated, providing a spinning cloud which mimicked the bloom of white-hot gases to be expected from a normal explosion.

The real blast had been only a small one—strip charges laid along the inner frame of the panel. The difference in pressure between hard vacuum and the part of the space station which had just been opened to that vacuum was sufficient to void most of the chamber’s contents, however. Flimsy furniture, sheets of paper, and over a hundred living men spewed into space along with the metal and shredded glass.

Some of the men flapped their arms vigorously, as if they were trying to swim to the hub or the brightly-sunlit saucers docked there. In the event, when a few of them did collide with bracing wires, they spun slowly away; they had lost the ability to comprehend what might seem a hope of safety, though they still were not legally dead.

The viewpoint narrowed on the opened chamber itself, though with none of the mechanical feeling of a camera being dollied. When a gun fires, some residues of the reaction remain aswirl in the breech. Similarly, there was a single human figure still drifting in the chamber from which his fellows had been voided. At one point he had been trying to grasp the screw latch of the airlock to one of the adjoining compartments. His grip had lost definition, though it had not wholly relaxed, and now he floated with his fingers hooked into vain claws.

The victim had been a stocky man of medium height. His beard, moustache, and white tunic had been sprayed a brilliant red with blood when air within his body cavity expanded to ram his empty lungs out his mouth and nostrils. Kelly did not recognize the rank insignia on the tunic sleeves, but the SS runes on the collar were unmistakable.

Kelly knew the victim, and that knowledge was not the false assurance of a dream. He could not recall the fellow’s full name, but he was known as ben Majlis, and he had been leader of a squad of Kurds while Operation Birdlike was up and running.

The body twitched harshly, mindlessly, not quite close enough to a bulkhead or the floor for the movement to thrust against something solid. The corneas of ben Majlis’s eyes were red with ruptured capillaries, and ice crystals were already beginning to glitter on them.

One of the hands flopped toward Kelly’s point of view, driven by the Kurd’s dying convulsions. As it did so, something touched the veteran’s shoulder in good truth. He leaped up with a cry and a look of horror that drove back the loadmaster who had just awakened Kelly to tell him that the C-141 was making its final approach to Torrejeon.

The Starlifter’s crew greased her in, the instant of touchdown unnoticed until the thrust reversers on the big turbo-fans grabbed hold of the air and tried to pull the aircraft backwards. Skill in a fighter meant quickness; skill in a transport was a matter of being smooth, and sliding a hundred and some tons onto a concrete slab without evident shock was skill indeed.

“What’s the drill from here?” Kelly asked the loadmaster, who now had his helmet’s long cord plugged into a console near one of the forward doors. Neither of the men in the echoing cargo bay could see anything save the aluminum walls around them, but the crewman was in touch with the flight deck through his intercom.

The loadmaster spoke an acknowledgment into the straw-slim microphone wand and stepped closer to Kelly in order to explain without shouting, “We’re going to taxi to N-2. There’s a bird waiting there for you already.”

He paused, then touched the intercom key of his helmet to say, “Gotcha.” To Kelly he then went on, smiling, “Seems like you’re stepping up in the world, Colonel Kelly.”

“It used to be ‘sergeant,’ and right now it’s ‘civilian’—whatever I tell people that have more use’n I do for brass,” the veteran said with a smile of his own. “I gonna need the flight suit?” He had surprisingly little stiffness or specific pain from the battering he’d taken in the past few days, but he found when he shrugged that his whole body felt as if there were an inch of fuzz growing on it.

“On an Airborne Command Post?” the loadmaster said. “Nossir, I don’t guess you will.”

The big crewman paused again, this time in response to memory rather than a voice in his earphones. “Look sir, you were serious about putting a lid on this? Word is . . . word is, they’ve already pooped a nuke. If they did . . .”