Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (74 page)

“Thing is”—Kelly frowned, as he chose words that could explain things simply—and hopefully—” ‘they’ aren’t the Reds, not yet. They’re a bunch of terrorists. And I can’t do a damn thing for what’s gone down already; but yeah, I can put a lid on it.”

He grinned a shark’s grin. The loadmaster remembered the fight he had tried to pick when his passenger came aboard. “I can put some people,” Kelly said, “where they won’t be a problem till Judgment Day.”

One of the three men waiting in civilian clothes atop the truck-mounted boarding steps was General Redstone. That was good because the other two had the look and the size of folks who’d be sent to take Kelly out of play.

If they’d wanted to do that, of course—especially after what had happened at the landing site near Istanbul—there were going to be more than two guys sent.

“Christ, that’s
beautiful
,”
Kelly blurted as he stepped from the Starlifter onto the landing of the boarding stairs.

“Hang on,” directed Redstone, and the two—call them attendants—each grabbed Kelly firmly with one hand while anchoring themselves to the railing with the other. “Somebody thought this’d—”

The truck backed away from the C-141 in an arc, then braked sharply enough that Kelly gripped one of the attendants and the closest portion of the railing himself. The big men’s touch had shocked him, but they had not tried to immobilize his hands. The truck accelerated forward, toward the open hatch of the plane that had drawn Kelly’s exclamation.

The aircraft was a Boeing 747 which had few external modifications beyond the slight excrescence on the nose for accepting a refueling drogue, and the radome which recapitulated in miniature the bulge of the flight deck on which it rested.

Kelly’s vision of the Strategic Air Command had been molded by the tired B-52Ds which had flown to Lebanon out of Akrotiri, painted in camouflage colors and carrying tens of tons of high-explosive bombs under the wings. But an Airborne Command Post was as close to being a showpiece as SAC had available; and in these days, when budget cutters reasonably suggested the nuclear strike mission be left wholly to Space Command and Fortress, the manned-bomber boys weren’t going to miss any opportunity for show.

The big aircraft was painted dazzling white, with a blue accent stripe down the line of windows from nose to tail. Above the stripe, in Times Roman letters that must have been five feet high, were the words
United States of America
.
The forward entrance hatch was swung inward, awaiting the motorized boarding stairs.

“Geez,” Kelly muttered, “do they paint ‘em like that to make ‘em easier to target on?”

“Maybe somebody told ‘em white’d make the damn thing more survivable in a near nuke,” responded Redstone with a grimace of his own. Red hadn’t been the smartest fellow Kelly had met in the service, but his instincts were good and he’d been willing to go to the wall for his men. How he’d made general was a wonder and a half. “Of course,” Redstone continued, “that flag on the tail’s going to burn seven red stripes right through the control surfaces.”

“Purty, though,” Kelly observed. He was squinting. Twenty miles an hour seemed plenty fast enough when you hung onto a railing fifteen feet in the air.

Grit was blowing across the field, along with fumes from the big turbofans of the aircraft they approached. The odor left no question but that the bird was burning JP-4 rather than kerosene-based JP-1. The gasoline propellant could be expected both to significantly increase speed and range, and to turn the aircraft into a huge bomb if it had to make a belly landing.

Well, Kelly’s taste had always been for performance over survivability. His plans for Fortress didn’t strike him as particularly survivable, even if everything worked up to specs.

The truck slowed. An attendant in the doorway of the 747 was talking the driver in. A flat-topped yellow fuel tanker pulled away from the other side of the aircraft which it had been topping off. Kelly wondered how long the Airborne Command Post had been idling here, ready to take off as soon as the Starlifter from Incirlik landed its cargo.

“Something you might keep in mind, Kelly,” said General Redstone as the truck began to nestle the stairs’ padded bumpers against the 747, “is that a lot of ‘em don’t like you, and I don’t guess anybody believes
everything
you put in that cable—me included. But nobody knows what the fuck’s going on, either. If you keep your temper—that’s
always
been the problem, Kelly—and you keep saying what you say you know . . . then I guess you might get what you say you want.”

The boarding stairs butted gently against the .aircraft. Kelly rocked slightly and the two attendants released him. “‘I say,’” he quoted with a grin. “ ‘I
say
.’
You know me, Red. I say what I mean.” He took the precedence the general offered with a hand and strode aboard the Airborne Command Post.

“This way, please,” said a female attendant whose dark skirt and blazer looked like a uniform, though they had no insignia—military or civilian. Kelly followed her, keeping the figure centered in a hallway which seemed extremely dim after the sunblasted concrete of the Spanish airport outside. The corridor was enclosed by bulkheads to either side, so that none of the light from the extensive windows reached it.

There was a muted sound from the outer hatch as it closed and sealed behind them, and all the noises external to the aircraft disappeared.

Offhand, Kelly couldn’t think of any group of people with whom he less cared to share a miniature universe than the ones he expected to see in a moment.

“They’re here,” said the female attendant to the pair of men outside the first open door to the right. The guards could have passed for brothers to those who had received Kelly on the boarding stairs and who now tramped down the hall behind him. The aircraft was already beginning to trundle forward,

One of the guards turned his head into the room and murmured something. The other shifted his body slightly to block the doorway, but he focused his eyes well above Kelly’s head so that the action did not become an overt challenge.

“Yes, of course!” snapped a male voice from within, and the guards sprang aside with the suddenness of the Symplegades parting to trap another ship. Kelly gave the one who had blocked him a wry smile as he passed. Working for folks who got off by jumping on the hired help wasn’t his idea of a real good time. By now, at least, they must realize that Tom Kelly wasn’t part of the hired help.

The plaque of layered plastic on the door said Briefing Room, and within were thirty upholstered seats facing aft in an arc toward an offset lectern. “
Good
morning, Pierrard,” the veteran said to the miasma of pipe smoke which was identifiable before the man himself was, one of a score of faces turned to watch over their shoulders and seatbacks as the newcomers arrived.

“Sit down and strap in, Kelly,” directed the white-haired man in the second of the five rows of seats. “We’re about to take off.” He pointed to the trio of jump seats now folded against the bulkhead behind the lectern.

Kelly slid into the empty seat nearest the door instead. The upholstery and carpet were royal blue, a shade that reminded the veteran of Congressman Bianci’s office. For a moment he felt—not homesick, but nonetheless nostalgic; he didn’t really belong in that world, but it had been a good place to be.

Redstone, whose seat the agent had probably taken, grimaced and found another one by stepping over a naval officer with enough stripes on his sleeves to be at least a captain. “It’s no sweat, Red,” Kelly called over the rumble of the four turbofans booting the 747 down the runway on full enriched thrust. “I’m cool, I just like these chairs better.”

Everyone waited until the pilot had lifted them without wasting time, though with nothing like the abrupt intent of the Starfighter at Diyarbakir some hours before. It was still a big enough world that traveling across it took finite blocks of time. Within the atmosphere, at any rate; the orbital period of Fortress was ninety-five minutes, plus or minus a few depending on how recently the engines had been fired to correct for atmospheric friction.

That was the maximum amount of time before any particular point on Earth became a potential target for a thermonuclear warhead on an unstoppable trajectory.

After less than two minutes, despite what it felt like to all those in the briefing room, the big aircraft’s upward lunge reached the point at which cabin attendants on commercial flights would have begun their spiel about complimentary beverages. Kelly turned his eyes from the windows, past which rags of low cloud were tearing, and took a deep breath. He might or might not switch planes again. Either way, this room and these men—they were all men—were the last stage of the preliminaries.

“Will somebody tell him to get up there where he belongs?” demanded someone in a peevish voice.

“Bates,” said Pierrard in a voice whose volume and clarity suggested the anger behind it, “we’ll proceed more smoothly if only those with business choose to speak.”

The room paused. Kelly nodded approvingly to the white-haired man, who then continued into the silence he had wrought. “How
did
you manage to insert your report that way, Mr. Kelly?”

The veteran laughed. Everyone else in the room was twisted in the bolted-down chairs to see him, save for those in the last row—behind him—who had a direct view of the back of his head. He would’ve gone to the lectern as directed except that he
had
been directed; and besides, it would feel a little too much like being a duck in a shooting gallery.

“Oh, that wasn’t me,” Kelly said, looking down. “NSA’s good, but we’re not
that
good. That was the aliens you sent me to find.” It had been disconcertingly natural for him to verbally put on a uniform again the way he just had.

There was a ripple of talk, more of it directed at neighbors than at the veteran. Pierrard was giving himself time by lifting his pipe to his lips, though smoke continued to trickle from the bowl in indication that he was not drawing on it.

Kelly rose, resting his buttocks on the seat back and curling his right foot directly beneath his hip to lock him there. “Look,” he repeated, “I
couldn’t
have gotten through any way I know about, not from Diyarbakir, not if I were the
President
.”

The veteran’s eyes were adjusting to the light and his mind was locking down into the gears suitable for the present situation. He nodded to a man he recognized from the office of the National Security Advisor—not the Advisor himself, a political opportunist whose pronouncements always sounded as though he were still a Marine battalion commander.

“Anyway,” Kelly continued, finding that his new perch was less stable than he had thought—the 747 was still climbing—“the important thing is dealing with the situation. I can do that with a little cooperation. A lot less cooperation than it took to put all you people together in one room, believe me.”

Kelly’s mind was cataloguing the faces turned awkwardly over their seats toward him, and he found that he recognized a surprising number of them from his years on Capitol Hill. They were not the men who discussed crises on-camera. They—like Kelly—were the ones who did the groundwork, or the dirty work, required to solve the real problems.

“What
is
the situation, in your view, Mr. Kelly?” asked a Space Command colonel named Stoddard. Kelly had been on a “Tom and Jim” basis with him for over a year, ever since Stoddard became the Command’s liaison—lobbyist—with Congress. Kelly couldn’t blame him for not making a big thing about their association just now, when the veteran’s status was at best in doubt.

“A small group of Nazis,” Kelly said, projecting his voice and his gaze at the men around him with consciousness of the power which knowledge gave him, “and I don’t mean Neo-Nazis; these’re the real thing, holdouts and their kids. Anyway, they’ve taken over Fortress, using trained Kurds as shock troops. I assume all the station personnel are dead. I
know
the Kurds have been eliminated now that their job’s done, so there’s no possibility of outsiders within Fortress being turned, even if you had a way to contact them.”

He paused, but added through the first syllables of response, “
I’m
your way to contact Fortress, and I’ve told you how.”

“We don’t know they’re actually Germans because they say they are,” said the shorthaired, red-faced man, whom Kelly now recognized as Bates. “Maybe they’re Russkies, maybe they’re these aliens you claim you’re right about.”

“Maybe if you had a brain in your
head,
Bates,” Kelly snapped, “you’d have some business here.” Almost in the same breath, he said, bending toward General Redstone, “I’m sorry, Red, I didn’t mean to do that. S’okay now.”

“Bates,
for God’s
sake, keep your mouth shut,” Pierrard said angrily. He followed it with a spasm of coughing from which spurted pipe smoke that he had not exhaled properly before speaking.

“Yeah, they’re for real, the Nazis,” Kelly said quietly, making amends for his outburst. “They call ‘emselves the Service, the Dienst, and I guess everybody here’s data bank’s got a megabyte of background on ‘em.”

He smiled and shook his head ruefully. “You know, they’d be just as harmless as they look, except they got outa Germany in ‘45 with a flying saucer”—he spread his hands toward his audience, recognizing the incredulity they must be feeling—“and engineers to build more of the damn things.”

“I suggest,” said Pierrard, touching the wave of his white hair with the fingers of his left hand, “that for the present we ignore the question of responsibility and move on to a discussion of Mr. Kelly’s proposal for action.”

One of the men Kelly remembered from the orderly room at Fort Meade slipped out of the Briefing Room in response to a signal the veteran had not seen Pierrard give. Checking on the Dienst, no doubt, through the Airborne Command Post’s shielded data links with every computer bank in the federal government. The question the old man said he would ignore was obviously one that had already been answered to his satisfaction.