Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels Read online

  LOOSE

  CANNON

  DAVID

  DRAKE

  Baen Books By David Drake

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars

  The Way to Glory

  Some Golden Harbor

  When the Tide Rises

  In the Stormy Red Sky

  What Distant Deeps

  Road of Danger (forthcoming)

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher’s Bill

  The Sharp End

  The Complete Hammer’s

  Slammers, Vol. 1 (omnibus)

  The Complete Hammer’s

  Slammers, Vol. 2 (omnibus)

  The Complete Hammer’s

  Slammers, Vol. 3 (omnibus)

  Independent Novels and Collections

  All the Way to the Gallows

  Cross the Stars

  Foreign Legions,

  ed. by David Drake

  Grimmer Than Hell

  Into the Hinterlands

  (with John Lambshead)

  Loose Cannon

  Northworld Trilogy

  Patriots

  Ranks of Bronze

  The Reaches Trilogy

  Redliners

  Seas of Venus

  Starliner

  The General Series

  Warlord with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Conqueror with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  The Chosen with S.M. Stirling

  The Reformer with S.M. Stirling

  The Tyrant with Eric Flint

  The Belisarius Series with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn (omnibus)

  Destiny’s Shield

  Fortune’s Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus)

  The Tide of Victory

  The Dance of Time

  Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  The World Turned Upside Down

  (with Jim Baen & Eric Flint)

  LOOSE CANNON

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by David Drake

  “Introduction” © 2010 by David Drake; Skyripper © 1983 by David Drake; Fortress © 1987 by David Drake.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3450-4

  Cover art by David Seeley

  First Baen printing, July 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David.

  Loose cannon / by David Drake.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3450-4 (omni trade pbk.)

  1. Cold War--Fiction. 2. Time travel--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.R196L66 2011

  813'.54--dc22

  2011009556

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Tom Kelly and Me

  In the Spring of 1981 I was in my first year as a part-time bus driver for the Town of Chapel Hill, after having spent the eight previous years as Assistant Town Attorney for the Town of Chapel Hill. I wasn’t an especially good bus driver, but I was an excellent employee: I showed up for work on time, I was courteous, and I came in on my off-days when the dispatchers needed somebody to cover a run.

  I got a call at the bus garage—this was before cell phones—from Jim Baen. Jim had bought the first stories in the Hammer’s Slammers series when he was editor of Galaxy magazine.

  When Tom Doherty became Publisher of Ace Books, he had hired Jim to run the SF line; there they published my first book, Hammer’s Slammers. Tom had left Ace to found Tor Books; Jim had joined him shortly thereafter. I had sold a linked series of stories to Tor, turning the material in on time and in accordance with specifications. Though that book (Time Safari) hadn’t come out yet, I’d convinced Tom and Jim that I could be trusted to behave in a professional fashion on a larger project.

  Which is what Jim’s phone call was about. Tom Clancy had begun to blow the socks off the marketplace with what came to be called techno thrillers. Tom and Jim wanted me to write a techno thriller for Tor and were offering me $8,000 to do so. (Parenthetically, I was earning about $4.25 cents an hour as a bus driver, up from a starting pay of $4.05; it was still better than being a lawyer.)

  The offer should have been a no-brainer, but not for the last time I demonstrated a level of boneheaded stubbornness. I wasn’t sure I could write the sort of book Jim was talking about, a reasonable concern. But also I wasn’t sure I wanted to, because I was armpit deep in writing on spec a huge, plotless historical novel involving 17th century inheritance law, pirates, and the court of Aurangzeb (in the first hundred and some thousand words, that is). Looking back on it, worrying about the historical appears perverse to the verge of insanity, but I did.

  Editors and publishers as experienced as Jim and Tom were used to dealing with screwy writers, though. They created a contract which promised heavy promotion for my unfinished historical but required that I write the thriller first. The only thing that has happened to the historical after that was that the stack of yellow pads on which I wrote with soft pencils moved with me to our new house.

  I started plotting a thriller. I had read a fair number of spy novels and intelligence memoirs over the years, but I got into the subject more deeply. I also got into the hardware side, the how-to of bugs, communications intercepts, and so on. Skyripper—which became the title of the novel—is one of the few books for which I did a great deal of book-specific research; usually I write about things that I already know in detail.

  This led to one amusing story. I continued to drive a bus; when there was a layover of a few minutes, I read a book.

  Or at any rate, I read books when the customers would permit me. Passengers don’t see many bus drivers during a day, so we were new and interesting to them. Bus drivers see a lot of passengers, and they’re not a bit interesting unless something goes wrong.

  One early morning, before the start of my run, a middle-aged woman boarded my bus in an upscale neighborhood. I was reading, but she wanted to chat. I wasn’t impolite, but I deeply didn’t want to chat with her (or anybody).

  She then asked what I was reading. I told her she didn’t want to know. She insisted that she did, so I handed her the book: How to Kill, Volume III, by John Minnery. I don’t know precisely how she felt about that, but it did shut her up.

  I had spent a couple weeks in Algeria the year before, visiting a friend in the Foreign Service. That gave me a setting which would be unfamiliar to most readers, and it also gave me some insight into the parts of embassy life which don’t ordinarily get into published accounts. (Laumer’s Retief and Durrell’s Antrobus stories, written by former low-ranking diplomats, are better guides to those realities than are any number of ambassadors’ memoirs.)

  Then I needed a viewpoint character. I did something unusual there. I was in the field in 1970 as an interrogator with the 11th ACR. Our tent was generally pitched adjacent to that of the Radio Research s
ection: that is, the National Security Agency field unit. Their job was to intercept and record enemy communications and to transmit the data back to Fort Meade.

  The Radio Research people were warrant officers and senior enlisted men, professional soldiers in all senses. They spoke multiple languages and demonstrated remarkable skills, but the job didn’t require Ivy League degrees or Savile Row suits. (One had an ear collection.)

  And they had stories. Some of them had been places most Americans had never heard of, doing things that Americans weren’t supposed to be doing. They worked for what is reputedly the most secretive spy agency in the world, but they talked to other enlisted men who sat with them in the Cambodian night and waited for something to happen—knowing that anything which happened would be bad.

  They talked to me.

  I made my viewpoint character, Tom Kelly, a former NSA field man. I made my hero a former NSA field man; nothing about the job requires a saint, but the men I knew in 1970 were heroes in ways that Homer would have recognized.

  I gave Kelly the skills and ruthlessness of the men I’d known. He drank, because men who do those things always drink.

  And I gave Kelly the anger which also comes with certain lines of work. I didn’t have to look far for that. I hadn’t been all the places the RR people had been, but I’d been to enough of them to be furiously angry—at the world, at life, and at myself.

  Writing Skyripper showed me that I was a lot angrier—still—than I had realized until then. That was useful to know, but that mindset wasn’t one I wanted to revisit in this lifetime. Skyripper sold well, but I refused to do another Tom Kelly book when Tom Doherty asked me to.

  Then Jim Baen left Tor to found Baen Books. Tom and Jim stayed reasonably friendly, but they were competing for very similar portions of the market. I remained close to both men, and I didn’t want it to appear that I had chosen one of them over the other. I therefore told both immediately after the split that I wanted to write a new contract with each of them.

  Jim wanted a Hammer novel for Baen Books. Fair enough, though I’d refused to write more in the series for him at Tor.

  Tom wanted a sequel to Skyripper. Furthermore, he wanted me to show the (proposed) Strategic Defense Initiative (the Star Wars Defense) driving off an alien invasion. I argued against this for a number of reasons, but I’d given Tom my word that I would do what he asked—so I did it under the title Fortress.

  Or at least I did as much of it as I could. I flat didn’t believe in most of the proposed technology of SDI and just couldn’t describe it working to spec. Further, even the optimists envisaged a twenty-year lead time, so rather than doing a true sequel to Skyripper, I started in 1963 in an alternate universe. (Despite my scruples, an article in the SF Encyclopedia claims that Fortress gives “quasi-fetishistic status” to the Star Wars program. Worse things happen in wartime, as we used to say.)

  I set most of Fortress in Eastern Turkey, as the result of another visit to my friend in the Foreign Service. Part of the business involves the workings of a US Congressman’s office, however. I owe that to time spent as rewrite man on Newt Gingrich’s first book. Like Vietnam, editing Window of Opportunity taught me things which I could not have learned in any other way.

  Skyripper and Fortress were written and are set in the ‘80s. The world has changed a great deal since then. Men like Tom Kelly still exist, though, as they have always existed. (Take a look at Homer.) Returning to these books reminds me more strongly than ever that I don’t want to be one of them myself.

  But it also reminds me that I could have been. There, but for the grace of God, went I.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  Skyripper

  DEDICATION

  To Mr. August Derleth, who spent more effort on helping young

  writers than we were objectively worth at the time.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Friends are people who come through when you need them.

  Many of my friends came through for me while

  I was writing this novel. I regret that I cannot for their

  own sakes acknowledge them by name; but that does not mean

  that I have forgotten or will ever forget their help.

  Prologue

  The sound of the weapon firing was as brief and vicious as the first crack of nearby lightning. There was nothing more, no thunder rolling, deafening. Banks of fluorescent lights staggered on all over the laboratory compound as the TVA grid took over again from the emergency generator. The yellow glow-lamps that had remained on during testing tripped out when the generator driving them did.

  The Secretary of State frowned in a combination of surprise and mild irritation. He had seen laser weapons tested in the past. A pale beam would lick out of the ungainly apparatus. Relays might hammer, pulsing the available power into microsecond bullets of energy that were hot enough to do realistic damage down-range. The target was ordinarily a thin sheet of titanium whose thermal conductivity was so low that it concentrated every erg it received on the point of impact. Vaporized metal would curl away like smoke from a cigarette—incidentally and inevitably scattering the beam which still attacked the target surface. At last a hole would open in the sheet, expanding as the operator shifted the beam to nibble away at the edges.

  In addition, if the laser were chemically fueled, there would be the roar and rush of fluorine and heavy hydrogen combining into an expensive form of hydrofluoric acid. The waste product cheerfully dissolved glass, platinum, and virtually everything else. Cleaning up after a test was similar to dealing with a spill of Cobalt 60, but presumably it would be all right to dump the crap straight into the upper atmosphere during service use.

  All in all, a laser demonstration could be expected to be a spectacular show. It was that, even more than his frequent assertions that a strong defense was a necessary concomitant to a strong diplomacy, which had led the Secretary of State to accept the invitation to a Top Secret briefing by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  And this had not been spectacular in the least.

  The Secretary turned away from the heavy lead-glass window of the observation room. He and his aide wore civilian clothes, but his aide would return to active duty as a lieutenant commander when he left the Secretary’s personal service. The other three men were in dress uniforms, imposing with gold braid and medal ribbons. Still, there was no question as to where the power lay during this administration. “All right,” said the Secretary of State, “what went wrong, Follett?”

  The lieutenant general in Air Force blue was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He understood his duties perfectly. His two top aides—a rear admiral and an army Brigadier general—were less experienced in testifying to hostile Congressional committees and like affairs. General Follett gave them a sweeping glance of reminder before he said, “Nothing at all went wrong, Mr. Secretary. That is”—he nodded to the observation window. Mechanical arms could be seen dollying toward the target—“This was a normal test. That’s all that happens. Overtly.”

  He paused, coughing to clear his throat and to settle the wash of fear that had leapt up when he committed himself. Normally, high-ranking observers would have been in the control room with the scientists conducting the test. If anything had gone wrong under those circumstances, General Follett would have known before he had to make a fool of himself. This time the observers had to be rigidly separated from the scientists: top secret matters much more sensitive than the hardware were about to be discussed.

  To calm himself by moving and to fill time before the opened target made him a hero or a buffoon, Follett rose from his chair. He fingered the duplicate target on its display stand. It was a missile nose cone, sectioned to split along the centerline and to display the dummy nuclear trigger within. Lead segments were individually pinned to the inner surface of a sphere the size of a soccer ball. In the original, mirror-polished wedges of plutonium would be held in place by the explosive lining itself. Follett and h
is aides had considered using a filling of flash powder or the like. In the end they had decided not to do anything that might have put their demonstration on a level with all those others which were intended only to maintain modest program funding. The DIA was going for the throat on this one. Nothing that would cheapen the effect could be permitted.

  Metal squealed in the test chamber, audible even through the thick walls. It was the first sign that the weapon had functioned properly. The mechanical arms prizing apart the halves of the target had popped a fresh weld.

  All five of the men in the observation room were staring intently through the window now. General Follett had remained standing; the others leaned forward in their chairs. The arms, controlled by the technicians invisible in the room next door, slowly rotated the dummy warhead. Floodlights especially rigged for this demonstration flashed on to illuminate the interior.

  “I’ll be damned,” said the Secretary of State. The three uniformed men shifted stance minusculy. It had worked. At least—the hardware had worked.

  The lead blocks which had been in the path of the momentary beam had slumped and twisted. Their surfaces were no longer dully metallic but rather a furry white where the lead had recrystallized after melting. Other segments only a finger’s breadth away were unchanged from their original appearance.

  “If this had been a live trigger and not a test unit,” the general said, “the implosion charge would almost certainly have been set off by the beam. Even if it had not exploded, the elements of the fission trigger have obviously”—he waved toward the window—“been damaged to the extent that the device would melt down rather than detonate when the warhead reached its target. And if the particle beam had struck the booster stage of a missile rather than the nose cone proper, the fuel and oxidizer tanks—no matter how they were hardened and protected—would have been flash-heated to the point of catastrophic explosion.”