Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (38 page)

Nguyen set his paraphernalia on the ledge of the display window where it was directly in front of Ramdan. Most of the objects were not threatening. There was the bowl of water, the plate . . . a roll of adhesive tape from the office and a pad made by folding a strip of the velvet which had covered the platform. The incongruousness of the objects was itself disconcerting.

“You know,” said Nguyen, working a bit of plastic explosive off the block, “I could understand if you were doing this to save your friends. But I’m not interested in your friends, you see, only in the foreigners. Who they are, what their plans are . . . where I might find them, yes. . . . That’s all.”

The explosive was white, with the consistency of grainy modeling clay. The piece Nguyen’s thumbnails had cut from the block was no bigger than the last joint of a man’s little finger. The Vietnamese officer rolled it into a ball, set it on the glass plate, and began to repeat the process. “Yes, I’m really sorry that you’re doing this to yourself, Ramdan,” the Vietnamese went on. “The only people who deserve to be punished are the foreigners who used you and your friends as pawns in their own games. But if you insist. . . .”

Nguyen set down the second bead of explosive—on the ledge rather than the plate. Both Ramdan and the remaining policeman were watching him with a similar mixture of curiosity and repulsion. “Did you know,” the Vietnamese said cheerfully, “that
plastique
will burn without exploding? You mustn’t step on it then, but otherwise it just burns. Very, very, hot.”

Nguyen took a disposable lighter from his pocket. Smiling once more at his subject, he thumbed the flame to life and began to play it over the explosive on the glass dish. The bead of
plastique
quivered. A thread of black smoke wobbled up, and the point at which the lighter touched looked momentarily green. Then the explosive ignited.

The flame was sword-thin and a foot high. It twisted like the blade of a kris. Nguyen dropped his lighter and picked up the bowl of water. He gripped the metal through the velvet pad as he held the bowl over the flame.

“Isn’t it an interesting color?” the Vietnamese remarked. “The way it seems to be pure white, but its light makes other things show a green tinge?” He did not raise his voice. The hiss of the fire and the hiss of air being driven out of the water overlay his words.

“How hot, do you wonder?” Nguyen asked. The last of the explosive was burning from the puddle it had made on the dish. The heavy glass exploded at the direct touch of a 1200° flame.

“
How hot
?”
the Vietnamese repeated in a shout, and he flung the water boiling in the bowl across Ramdan’s chest.

The Kabyle’s screams took almost a minute to die away. He strained at the ropes holding him. The heavy platform rocked and thumped on the floor. The skin of the prisoner’s chest blushed a bright scarlet and began to puff up.

“Now you see what I mean,” Nguyen said reasonably when he could be heard again. He was using a shard of glass from the shattered plate to cut a length of tape from the roll. “
You
don’t deserve to be punished. It’s the foreigners, Vlasov and the American. . . . They’re the ones who are at fault. Where are they now, do you suppose?”

Ramdan was blubbering now, but he still would not speak. Fresh blood was again leaking from the bullet wound in his thigh.

“Well, if we must, we must,” murmured the interrogator. He spoke barely loud enough to be heard. He set the second bead of plastic explosive on the edge of the strip of tape. “Perhaps you think,” he continued, “that I plan only to scald you with water? No, no . . . that was only a demonstration. I thought it only fair that you learn how hot the
plastique
burns. Learn indirectly, that is, before you learn. . . .” Nguyen stepped forward with a sad smile.

Ramdan began to scream again before the Vietnamese officer had even touched him. His body thrashed to the narrow limits of the ropes. They threw him back against the wood of the platform each time. Nguyen waited for the moment of exhaustion. The policeman was staring in horrified fascination.

Ramdan paused, gasping for breath. Nguyen’s hands darted for the Kabyle’s groin. He wrapped the ends of the tape around Ramdan’s genitals before the subject could even scream. The bead of
plastique
poked out from beneath the tape. It was clearly visible against the dark skin of Ramdan’s penis beneath it.

“What a monster that American is to put you through this,” said Nguyen sympathetically. He clicked his lighter. The flame was turned high, wavering.

“No,” begged Ramdan. “No!
No—”
He tried to jerk back and the jet of butane singed hair from his scrotum.
“No-no-no
—Allah
I’lltellyouI’lltellI’lltellI’lltellI’lltell
. . . .”

Nguyen stepped back. The subject’s voice had sunk into bubbling sobs. “Ramdan, my friend?” the Vietnamese said quietly.

The room stank with the feces that the shop owner had evacuated. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his eyes. The bonds stopped him. “I’ll talk,” he said dully. “Only before Allah, take the tape away. . . .”

“As soon as you have told us what you know,” the interrogator promised. “As soon as you’ve helped us punish the foreigners who did this to you.”

The remaining Algerian policeman suddenly bolted for the stairs, retching. Effective interrogation requires a particular mind set.

XLVII

“American Embassy,” said the bored voice through the crackling of the Tunisian phone system.

“Don Marshal, please,” replied Kelly in English. There was no pay phone in the restaurant, but the proprietor had no objections to Kelly making an important business call with the phone beside the cash register. No objections when he had assured himself that the American hundred dollar-bill was real, at any rate.

The agent could have used the phone in the office, as a matter of fact, but this way he could keep an eye on his three companions. The French tourists were at a booth in back of the Western-style restaurant. The waiter had already arrived. Lucie, the black-haired woman, was ordering for Kelly as well as herself. The American smiled. Lucie waved a reply. The other couple, the Clochimonts, looked askance at her.

The Clochimonts had slept all night in the hotel’s small bathroom. A string tied from the knob to Kelly’s wrist would have awakened him if the door had been opened. Lucie, though, had spent much of the night talking to the agent. Whatever she might believe about Kelly’s real mission, she and the agent were no longer on terms of mutual mistrust.

“Two-one-two,” said the phone.

“‘Working,’ you mean, don’t you, snake?” Kelly replied, dropping into the past with the tremble of an anchor through deep waters.

“Who the hell?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “This is extension two-one—”

“Think way back,” the agent continued. “Nineteen and sixty-eight. A buck sergeant with black hair, one-sixty . . . I wore a bandanna for a sweatband back then—”

“
God almighty!
Carried a Swedish K? Sergeant Tom Kelly! God almighty, man, I thought I’d never see you again!”

Bingo. “Tell the truth, snake,” Kelly continued, “I wasn’t just sure I’d
ever see you again either, the way you looked when they started slapping IVs in your arms.”

“Hell, yes,” agreed Marshal more soberly. “I was conscious there for a while, you know, before the morphine got to me. I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell if you hadn’t packed me back to the bird, man. And I know it.” The speaker paused. “Ah, what brings you to Tunis, Tom? Or are you even here?”

“Well, a friend and me’ll be getting in tomorrow morning,” Kelly said. The cashier met his eyes occasionally, but there was no harm done even if the Tunisian did understand English. “That’s sort of what I needed to talk to you about. You see, I’ve been selling office machines for a few years, but right now I’m back with the old firm again.”

“Oh?” said the other man carefully.

“And I hear you never left the, ah, company you were with back in ‘68. In Cambodia. I need help, snake, and you’re the only one I know who can give it.”

Marshal’s voice was more distant than the breadth of Tunisia accounted for. “I’m not sure what kind of a mistake—” he began.

“Listen, man,” Kelly cut in harshly. “I didn’t call to embarrass you, I didn’t call to put you in a bind. I’m telling you, I
need
you and our Uncle needs you bad, worse’n you’ll ever know. If I go through channels, I’m dead and everybody’s dead, just as dead as you’d have been if there hadn’t been somebody to carry you back to the slick under fire. Now, you can turn your back on that and on me—or you can take my word for it that there’s no other way that’ll work for Uncle. And snake? This doesn’t go in my report. I’ve got other stories I don’t tell besides this one.”

After a long pause, the other man said, “What do you need, then?”

“Well, my friend and I thought you might meet us for a drink at the airport tomorrow before we fly out. Got a pencil?” Marshal grunted.

“Six-three, one-eighty, age 61 . . . white hair, blue eyes. And five-nine, one-sixty, age 38, black and brown. Europeans, I think . . . or hell, US is okay, this is a one-shot anyhow.”

There was another brief pause. Then the other man asked, “How good are you expecting these to be, then?”

“Man,” Kelly explained, “if they’re looking for us, we’re shit outa luck anyway. But it’d be a real pisser to have the deal blow up because somebody forgot there should’ve been an entry stamp for Tunisia, hey?”

“All right,” Marshal said. “Noon in the airport lobby. I’ll see what I can do. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“Because it’s your job,” the agent said softly. “Oh—and snake? One more thing.”

“What the hell now?” But Marshal’s voice too was soft.

“Could be I need that Swedish K again, but it wouldn’t do me much good what with metal detectors and all,” Kelly said. His eyes were on the booth and the French tourists. The food had come. Lucie beckoned him with an impish smile. “I hear you boys got involved in some of the off-shoots of the Sky Marshal program. If anything like that was lying around—it’d come in handy. I’m not going to beg you, man . . . but I need it worse than anybody who’s ever carried one so far.”

“Tomorrow at noon,” Marshal said. The phone clicked dead.

In 1968, Don Marshal had been CIA liason to the Special Operations Group. Most of Marshal’s peers had left the heavy work to Special Forces and indig—Hmoung—troops. Marshal, however, had gone on an operation into Cambodia. That had earned him a line of bullets across the abdomen and a ride on Kelly’s back to the extraction chopper.

At the time, Kelly had thought the Company man had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But after getting out of the hospital, Marshal had been reassigned to the Middle Eastern section. He had risen there—and he had missed the post-Nam RIF that had caught hundreds of his former colleagues. Kelly had heard in a bar in Rome about Marshal’s later history. The information had not been of any importance when he first heard it, but it got filed in Kelly’s brain for future need.

The future had arrived when the agent began developing his private contingency plans, to get out in a hurry and without using channels that anyone knew he had open to him.

“Excellent, excellent,” Kelly said as he walked back to the booth and the chicken dish which awaited him. “Madame—”

“Lucie.” She pouted, patting the seat beside her.

“Lucie, your taste is excellent,” Kelly continued. His left hand felt as if a truck had run over it, but he forced himself to use it to unfold his napkin. He smiled at the woman, then the Clochimonts. “You have all been very kind in the hour of your country’s need. It will be with regret that I leave you tomorrow. But I will leave you with hope that your vacation has not been too badly disarranged.”

Lucie snickered. “Poor Jacques,” she said. “Back in Tebessa worrying himself silly. We’ll have to phone him at once.” She looked at Kelly in concern. “As soon as you say we may, Angelo.”

“I am a luckier man than your friend,” the agent said after a mouthful, “for having had the pleasure of your company for a day.”

And
that
was a goddam lie, thought the agent as he ate: but at least Tom Kelly was a damned sight luckier than he might have been. The morning would tell.

XLVIII

A Boeing 737 was landing with a whine and a roar as Kelly walked to the terminal building. The plane bore the blue and yellow livery of Cub Scouts and Lufthansa . . . and Christ Jesus! he’d better not start free-associating at passport control or he’d blow this one yet.

Jacques Blondin’s suit fit Kelly rather well, though the agent doubted that he looked much like a Second Secretary of the French mission to Tunisia. He was not going to use Blondin’s passport anyway, not unless it became absolutely necessary.

He wished he could have treated the tourists a little better at the end. He had dumped them afoot on the outskirts of Tunis and doubled back to reach the airport without their knowing his destination. Their car was now abandoned in the airport lot. With luck it would be days or a week before it was located there. And of course they had all been more or less terrorized, while Blondin himself had been left across the border with no passport and no way of knowing what was happening to his friends and mistress.

Lucie had not been all that terrorized, come to think.

They had been civilians, and that was a damned shame . . . but it did not seem so very long ago that Kelly had been wrapping a poncho around what was left of a 14 year old boy. The kid had been driving his water buffalo down a trail before dawn. The Claymores of the automatic ambush had put between fifty and a hundred steel pellets through his body. This was a war, baby; and if you doubted it, ask the ghost of that Yak-36 pilot.

Carthage-Tunis was a tourist airport; but it was also the port through which hundreds of Tunisians came and went to jobs in France. The locals and their families stood in voluble clots within the terminal. They were more colorful than the modern pastel mosaics on the walls of the lobby. Kelly walked among coherent groups, watching carefully for Professor Vlasov. A man nine inches taller than the average of the crowd should not be able to—