Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels Read online

  “My support for this project,” the Secretary repeated, “let the chips fall where they may. And yes, I’ll take care of the President. . . . But Genera”—he scowled at the trio of uniforms—“all of you! You’d better get him out. If you’ve made me a party to another Bay of Pigs, believe me—you won’t have careers. You won’t have heads.”

  The Secretary spun on his heel. “Come on, Chuckie,” he snapped, “we’re getting out of here. And I only pray I shouldn’t have left an hour ago.”

  The door banged behind the two men from State.

  “Well, that’s settled,” said Follett in relief.

  “Whether it was or not, I think we had to go ahead with the operation,” said Rear Admiral Wayne somberly. “You know how much I dislike the methods we have to use on this one, but the alternative is”—he shook his head—“just what the Secretary said it was. Surrender to the Russians now. I just hope that this man Kelly doesn’t let us down.”

  General Redstone was rubbing his hands together. “Tom Kelly?” he said. “Oh, he’ll come through. And what a punch in the eye for those bastards down in Langley!”

  I

  “Mr. Kelly?” called the lieutenant in dress greens. “Mr. Kelly? Over here—I’m here to pick you up.”

  Tom Kelly scowled across the security barrier at the green uniform, showing more distaste than he actually felt for the man inside the cloth. Of course, he didn’t know the lieutenant from Adam; and he knew the uniform very well indeed. “In a second,” he called back in English. Moving to the side so as not to block the flow of disembarking passengers, Kelly relaxed and watched the show that Orly Airport and the Russian Embassy were combining to stage.

  Six men as soft and pasty-looking as maximum-security prisoners were being passed through the magnetic detector arch. None of them had hand luggage to be fluoroscoped. It was enough of a break in routine that the women and lone gendarme in charge of the barrier were more alert than usual. That was nothing compared to the attentiveness of the four bulky men escorting the others, however.

  Two of the escorts had stepped around the barrier ahead of their charges. They had displayed diplomatic passports and a note to avoid the detector. Otherwise the alarm would have clanged at the pistols they wore holstered under dark suits. The suits were in themselves so ill-fitting as to be virtually a uniform for low-ranking Russians. The escorts watched the six pale men with angry determination. In general, the passengers bustling through the barrier in either direction ignored the scene, lost in their own meetings and farewells. If the crowd seemed to be edging someone too close to the men under escort, one of the guards would interpose with as little ceremony as a linebacker going for the ball. Squawks of protest from buffeted travelers were ignored with flat-eyed disdain.

  The last of the six charges passed through the arch. The steel zipper in one’s trouser fly had set off the alarm; there had been no other incident. The two escorts in the rear shouldered past the barrier in turn, waving passports without bothering to speak to or even look at the attendants.

  The whole group tramped down the hallway toward the Aeroflot gates. Even a note from the Russian Ambassador would not have gotten armed men around the security check had they not been traveling on their own national airline. The charges shambled in a column of twos, with their escorts half a pace out at each corner. One of the latter gave Kelly a hard look as he passed. The American smiled back and nodded. Not a real bright thing to do, but he wasn’t a surveillance agent. The Lord knew he wasn’t that.

  Tom Kelly was five-foot nine and stocky. In bad light he could have been any age; in the combination of sunlight and the fluorescents over the security barrier, he looked all of his 38 years. His face was broad and tan and deeply wrinkled. Black hair was beginning to thin over his pate. Though he was clean-shaven, an overnight growth of whiskers gave him a seedy look that his rumpled blazer did nothing to dispel. Sighing, he picked up his AWOL bag and his radio, then walked to the impatient lieutenant across the barrier.

  “The general is, ah, anxious to see you, sir,” the lieutenant said. “If you don’t mind, we’ll leave your luggage to be claimed later. There’s need for haste.”

  “Here, carry my clothes, then,” Kelly said, thrusting his AWOL bag at the officer. “Well, don’t look so surprised. For Christ’s sake, I was just over in Basel. Train would have made a lot more sense than buying me a ticket on Swissair.”

  “Er,” said the lieutenant. “Well, we have a car and driver waiting at the front entrance.” He began striding off through the concourse, glancing back over his shoulder at Kelly. The civilian paced him, moving with an ease surprising in a man so squat. He held his short-wave receiver out in front of him nonchalantly enough to belie its twelve-pound weight.

  The car was there, all right, though the driver with Spec 5 chevrons on his greens was arguing with a pair of airport security men and a gendarme. “That’s all right,” the lieutenant called in English. He tossed Kelly’s bag on the hood of the sedan and fumbled out—for Christ’s sake!—his own black passport which he waved in the policeman’s face. Must be great to work in an airport the dips use a lot, Kelly thought. He opened the door of the sedan and flipped the seat down.

  The lieutenant swung back to the car, but he hesitated when he saw that Kelly was gesturing him into the back seat. “Go ahead,” the civilian said. He peered at the lieutenant’s name-plate. “Morley. I figure if I rate a chauffeured limousine”—it was an AMC Concord, olive drab, with motor pool registration numbers stenciled on the doors—“I can choose where I sit in it.”

  Lieutenant Morley ducked into the back. Kelly retrieved his AWOL bag from the hood and handed it ceremoniously in to the lieutenant. Only then did he set his radio on the seat beside the driver and get in himself. “The Embassy, as fast as you can make it,” Morley muttered.

  “Which is probably less fast than a local taxi would get us there,” Kelly said, watching traffic as the driver eased into the stream of vehicles. “But then, it’s still probably a lot faster than we really need to get there. Unless the Army has changed one hell of a lot in the past few years.”

  The lieutenant did not respond. The pink enamel of his Military Intelligence lapel insignia clashed with the green uniform. The insignia was a dagger, covered by a rose to “symbolize the sub rosa mission of the organization.” Christ, if brains were dynamite, there still wouldn’t be any need to tiptoe in the Military Heraldry Office.

  Or in any MI unit Tom Kelly had ever been around. “Do you know what you were seeing in the airport?” he said aloud, leaning his back against the door to be able to watch Morley’s expression. “The KGB types and all?”

  “What?” the lieutenant said, sitting up abruptly enough to skew his saucer hat on the car’s headliner.

  Kelly rocked also as the sedan shifted to the right, around a wheezing stake-bed truck. For as long as it took to pass the truck, they were in a slot between a pair of buses who were moving as fast as traffic on the A6 permitted. Kelly could see no higher than the bumper of the second bus when he glanced into the rear-view mirror. “Right, KGB,” he continued. “Four of them, big fellows guarding those other”—the car snapped left again, barely clearing the truck’s radiator, but without danger since they were accelerating away—“Russians.”

  “Phillips, my God!” Morley said to the driver. Then he swallowed angrily and took off his hat. “I didn’t . . .” he said to the civilian. “That is—I saw them, but I didn’t know that’s who they were. Good God, do you mean those hunched up little men were prisoners? What was that?”

  Kelly smiled, leaning a trifle away from the door. The sedan was riding hard, transmitting the road shocks through the frame unpleasantly. “Oh, no,” he said, “they were all free citizens of Mother Russia. Thing is, they were the embassy’s code and communications staff, the folks who’ve been handling and encrypting all the message traffic for the past couple years.”

  The sedan braked heavily in the congestion of the approaching Boulev
ard Peripherique. Kelly braced his foot on the firewall and laid his left hand on the top of his radio to anchor it. “They come in the same way, under escort from the moment they leave the plane to the time the embassy gate shuts behind them. They spend the next two years in the embassy compound, working shift and shift—and generally stay in the same building that whole time besides. And when their tour’s up, they’re guarded back to the door of the plane. What they see of Paris is right out there—” he waved at the building fronts of the Citie Internationale they were passing. The sedan was accelerating at its sluggish best.

  “You don’t have to kill us, you know, Phillips,” the lieutenant protested.

  “No sir,” agreed the driver. He crossed the Boulevard Brune on what the cross traffic thought was a green light for them. Brakes and horns protested.

  Morley swallowed again but did not comment. The green shade of the Pare de Monsouris swept past the windows at speed. “You know,” the lieutenant said at last, “that’s really what sets the Free World off from the Reds. It’s not economics, the way they like to pretend; it’s the way each side treats human beings. What you’ve just described is quite simply inhuman.”

  Kelly shrugged. “Well, you do what you’ve got to do,” he said. “They don’t have many code clerks defect, for damn sure.” He paused. The tires were drumming heavily over the pavement of the Boulevard Raspail. “Besides,” he continued, “I saw a lot of Cambodia about the same way. Something short of a leisurely tour, you might say. And Laos, for that matter.”

  “You were in Laos?” Morley asked. He was keeping his eyes fixed on the civilian, apparently so that he would not have to be visually aware of what the sedan was doing.

  “Off and on,” Kelly agreed. “Hunting elephants, of all things.”

  “Oh,” the lieutenant said. “Oh.” He laughed awkwardly. “You see, I thought you meant while you were, ah, in service.”

  The civilian smiled back. “Right the first time,” he said. “We were machine-gunning them from slicks—ah, from UH1 helicopters—”

  “I know what a slick is,” Morley objected stiffly.

  “Good, good—shooting them from slicks at night, using starlight scopes. Somebody’d decided that the dinks were using the elephants to pack supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We were supposed to be destroying hostile transport by blasting Dumbos.”

  The lieutenant’s lips worked. “That’s—that’s. . . . I mean, elephants are an endangered species, and to just massacre them from the air. . . .”

  “Don’t expect me to argue with you,” Kelly said with another shrug. “But we were getting some secondary explosions when we hit the beggars, too. So I suppose the folks in Washington were right, at least on the Intelligence side.”

  As they swung from the Quai Anatole France onto the approaches of the Pont de la Concorde, the sedan took the line in front of a Mercedes. Metal rang as the cars stopped. Traffic began to move again, and Phillips eased the sedan along with it. A plump man in a three-piece suit rolled down the passenger window of the Mercedes and began shouting curses in French. Kelly rolled down his own window and leaned out. He did not speak. The Mercedes window closed again. Its liveried chauffeur braked to permit a Fiat to slip between the two bigger cars.

  Morley scowled into his clenched hands, but he said nothing aloud.

  Kelly, on the outside of the sedan as it rounded the Place de la Concorde, could see only the base of the obelisk in the center. Perversely, he watched that nonetheless, rather than the Neoclassical magnificence of Louix XV’s own time for which the obelisk was to be only the neutral hub. 220 tons of polished and incised granite, 75 feet high even without its 18th Century base, the obelisk was Kelly’s own answer to Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Indeed, look on that work and despair. Like its slightly smaller sister—Cleopatra’s Needle—and the both of them well over a millennium old before Cleopatra was conceived—it had remained effectively unchanged as empire followed empire, as monarchs and nations fought and built and died. The stone remained, though no one knew the name of the men who had fashioned it, and few enough that of the Pharaoh—Thutmose III—who had commissioned its erection. Men, even men whom their age thought great, would pass utterly away. But with determination, a man might leave behind him an achievement that could be his personal—though anonymous—beacon to history.

  In front of the American Embassy on the Rue Gabriel strolled a pair of French police carrying submachine guns. Kelly touched his tongue to his lips, a sign of momentary tension to anyone who knew him well enough. He had carried a gun like that, an MAT 49, in the field for several months, after he took it from an NVA officer killed by Claymore mines. In the field, in War Zone C . . . Khu Vuc C . . . and that gun had been rebarreled to chamber East Bloc 7.62-mm ammo, but the sight of the gendarmes took him back regardless.

  And it seemed that the Pentagon wanted him back in those jungles of his mind. It was the only reason he could imagine for a terse summons five years after they had decided Tom Kelly was too erratic to keep on the government payroll.

  At the embassy gate, the driver brought his sedan to a halt that did not squeal the tires but did rock both passengers forward from deceleration stresses. A uniformed Marine saluted from the guard post to the right. The gate slid back, allowing the sedan to accelerate through. Across the driveway, the statue of Franklin scowled. Kelly wondered whether his own expression mimicked the statue’s—and the thought broke his heavy face into a genuine smile.

  The car stopped in front of the entrance. “As ordered, sir,” Phillips said. He opened his door.

  Kelly got out without waiting for the driver to walk around the car. They met at the front fender while Lieutenant Morley straggled out of the back seat. The civilian kicked the tire and smiled. “Keep about forty pounds in there?” he asked.

  The driver smiled back. “Thirty-six all round, sir,” he said. “She’s still a cow, but it helps a bit on the corners.”

  “Mr. Kelly, if you’ll come with me,” the lieutenant said at Kelly’s elbow.

  “Sure I will—if you’ll get off my back for a minute,” the civilian said. He pointed toward the building’s steps. “There—go stand there for a minute, will you, Lieutenant?”

  “But—” Morley began. He thought better of whatever he had planned to say. Nodding, he stepped a few paces away from the other men.

  “Look,” Kelly said quietly, “I apologize for what I said. I was wrong, and there wasn’t any call to say it anyway.” He consciously raised his eyes to meet the driver’s.

  The driver grinned. “No sweat, sir,” he said. “Just remember there’s a few of us around who still give a shit about the way our work gets done.” The grin faded, then flashed back again full strength. “You know, he’ll probably have my stripes for that—but I’d do it again.”

  Kelly stuck out his left hand—he held the radio in his right—and shook awkwardly with the enlisted man. “Maybe so, maybe not,” he said. After ducking back into the sedan to get the AWOL bag which Morley had left on the seat, Kelly rejoined the lieutenant.

  II

  “Do you have any notion of what they want me for?” Kelly asked as they strode down a linoleum hallway. His crepe soles squelched in marked contrast to the clack of the soldier’s low quarters.

  “Not here!” the lieutenant muttered.

  “I didn’t ask what,” Kelly said. “I asked whether.”

  “Here we are,” Morley said, turning into the suite at the end of the hallway. “Oanh,” he said to the Oriental secretary at the front desk, “General Pedler wants to see Mr. Kelly here as soon as possible.”

  The secretary nodded and touched an intercom button, speaking softly. In Vietnamese, Kelly said, “Good morning, Madame Oanh. Is it well with you?”

  “Oh my God!” said the girl, jumping upright in her seat. Her accent was distinctly Northern. Though she was too young to have been part of the original resettlement in 1954, Oanh could of course have been born in a village of such refugees. They h
ad tended to stay aloof from the original population of what became South Vietnam. At any rate, she was clutching at a crucifix. “Oh, I’m so sorry, you startled me,” she rattled on. “It’s so good to—I mean, my husband doesn’t speak Vietnamese, and he—we’re afraid of how it would look, with his job, you know, if I spent time with. . . .” Her voice trailed off. The intercom was answering her.

  “I suppose there are a lot of members of the community here in Paris who aren’t—exiles the way you are,” Kelly sympathized. “Your husband is—”

  The intercom crackled again. The woman stood up. “Oh, you must go in now, sir. Perhaps when you come back . . .” She scurried over to the inner door, clad in a prim white blouse and a navy skirt. How much more attractive she would have been in an ao dai, thought Tom Kelly; though as a well brought up Catholic girl, she might never have worn the flowing, paneled dress in her life.

  An Air Force major general was standing behind a desk of massive teak. It clashed with the curves and delicacy, both real and reproduction, with which most of the embassy was furnished. On the other hand, the desk looked a great deal more comfortable under its mass of strewn papers than its Directoire equivalent would have been; and it matched Wallace Pedler’s own bearlike solidity very well.

  “Kelly?” the Defense Attaché demanded. “Come on in. Oanh, where the hell is Mark, I told you to buzz him, didn’t I?” The secretary bobbed her head twice and disappeared back to her console. “And what in hell are those?” Pedler continued, staring at the bag and radio Kelly was carrying.

  “My clothes,” said the squat civilian, sitting down carefully on a cushioned chair, “and my radio. Want to listen to Radio Moscow? Take me a moment to rig the antenna. . . .” He took a coil of light wire, perhaps fifteen feet of it, from a coat pocket and began unwinding it as if oblivious of the general’s burgeoning amazement.

  There was a bustle at the door. A naval captain, no doubt the Naval Attaché and the second-ranking officer in a post this size, stepped past Lieutenant Morley. He was carrying a set of file folders, their contents attachéd to the manila covers by hole clips. “Glad you could make it, Mark,” General Pedler said caustically. “Mr. Kelly, Captain Laidlaw. Morley, what the hell are you doing here? Close the door behind you.”