Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (6 page)

“Well?”

“He, ah . . . it appears that when Kelly was in Vietnam he used to accompany troops on field operations as a matter of course,” the captain said. He flipped pages up over the binder clasp until he found the correct one, though the report was too clear in his own mind for any real need for reference. “Kelly’s duties, his assigned tasks at the time—this was 1968—did not require him to leave the base camps, of course.”

“So he did things he didn’t have to do,” the general said with a snort. “Probably did a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to do, too. That’s water over the dam—and besides, it’s just that sort of thing that gave him the background he needs for Skyripper.”

“No doubt, sir,” said Laidlaw acidly. “I’m sure there must have been
some
reason to decide that Mr. Kelly was qualified. In this case, however, Staff Sergeant Kelly—as he then was, accompanied a ten-man ambush patrol under a Lieutenant Schaydin. They dug shallow trenches and set up Claymores—directional mines—”

“I know a Claymore just as well as you do, Captain. We used them for perimeter defense ourselves.”

Laidlaw looked up. “Yes. They set up Claymore mines about 25 yards in front of their position. During the night, a sound was heard to the front. Lieutenant Schaydin raised his head just over the lip of his trench and detonated a Claymore. The mine had been turned to face the friendly positions. It sprayed its charge of steel pellets straight back in Schaydin’s face, killing him instantly.”

Pedler shrugged. “All right,” he said, “the dinks had the ambush spotted and reversed the mines. Not the only time it happened.”

“No doubt,” the naval officer repeated. “But one of the men reported to a chaplain that before the patrol set out, Sergeant Kelly had warned each man individually to stay flat if there was any report of movement to the front. It had been on the man’s conscience ever since.”

“Give me that file,” said General Pedler, reaching across the desk with a scowl. He scanned the report, a Xerox copy of a fussy carbon. “hell, this report wasn’t filed till three years later,” he said brusquely. “I wouldn’t hang a dog on evidence like that.”

“Nobody
did
hang Mr. Kelly,” Laidlaw pointed out. “I just think you ought to know about it. Since there may still be time to . . . bring the matter to the attention of the Pentagon.”

“Well, for God’s sake, it’s the Pentagon who sent us the file, isn’t it?” the general snapped. He was continuing to read, however. His anger was the more real for being directed against a subordinate who was, after all, right. “For God’s sake!” Pedler slapped the file closed. “It says Schaydin had gotten three men killed by a friendly mine when he took his platoon through an area before checking whether it’d been cleared.” He thrust the folder back at Laidlaw. “Well?”

The captain stood up. “I’ll return this material to the vault if you have no further need for it, then, General,” he said. He walked toward the door.

“He wouldn’t be much use on an operation like this if he weren’t willing to kill! Would he, Laidlaw?” Pedler demanded.

The Naval Attaché turned. “Personally,” he said, “I don’t believe
anything
would be much use to an operation which depends on a known drunk and probable murderer,” he said. “But I’ll continue to carry out the orders of my superiors to the best of my ability. If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

He slammed the door behind him.

III

“Our contact agent is a Vietnamese national named Hoang Tanh,” said the major with the toothbrush moustache. The patch on his right sleeve was the sword-and-lightnings insignia of the Special Forces. The silver and blue Combat Infantry badge glittered over the left breast pocket of his uniform. Kelly had disliked Major Nassif on sight. “He’s a physicist, was involved with the Dalat Nuclear Facility before the Communist takeover. The Defense Attaché’s Office recruited Tanh as a stay-behind agent.”

“Hoang,” the civilian said.

“What?” asked the major.

“His family name would be Hoang, the first name in the series, not the last,” Kelly explained. “Same with most Oriental languages.”

“To return to something significant,” the soldier snapped, “this slopehead became of some importance during the past year when the Vietnamese government began to explore reactivation of the Dalat facility—it was disabled in 1975, of course—as a counterweight to Chinese pressure. Even if they couldn’t build bombs, the option of sowing the border between the two countries with radioactive material might deter another incursion by the Chinks.” The major fixed Kelly with what they probably said at West Point was a look of command. Maybe at West Point it
was
a look of command. “The Russians are always looking for chances to stab their former comrades in the back, of course. It’s not surprising that they provided fuel and technical support to the gooks. And that’s where our man made contact with”—he looked down at the briefing file— “this Professor Evgeny Vlasov. The target.” Nassif paused. “Code named Mackerel.”

“Christ on a crutch,” said Kelly as he stood up. “What’s my code name? Turkey?” He paced sullenly toward one of the spotless desks. Not everybody followed the Defense Attaché’s own sloppy security practices. Though—having met General Pedler, Kelly was willing to believe that he dumped the clutter from his desk by armloads into his Mosler safe every day before he left for home. “What’s the hold we’ve got on Hoang?” Kelly asked abruptly.

“Sergeant, if you’ll sit your ass down where it belongs,” said Major Nassif, “we’ll get through this a lot quicker.” He rapped the desk in front of Kelly’s empty chair with his index finger.

Head-height, sound-deadening panels divided Room 302 into three alcoves. Everyone had been moved out for the briefing, but the walls and the hallway door were something short of code-vault secure. With that in mind, and the fact that he genuinely did not like to lose his temper openly, Kelly said in a normal voice, “Look, Major, if I’m going to trust my life to this bird, I’ve got to have
some
reason to hope I’m not being set up. There wasn’t a whole lot in the way we left Nam, in ‘75 to make somebody who stayed put want to risk his neck for us, was there? We lied to the Reds and we lied to Congress . . . but mostly we lied to the South Vietnamese themselves. And weren’t they cute to keep right on believing we wouldn’t
really
let ’em go down the tubes? Dr. Hoang sounds like the closest thing the new regime has to a homegrown nuclear physicist. That makes him valuable enough to coddle, even if he is from the South. Why should he work for us?”

The major glanced back at his folder, then up at the civilian again. “Sit down, Sergeant,” he said. “You’ll be told as much about the sources and methods involved in setting up this operation as you have a personal need to know. As for Mackerel’s bonafides, they’ve been checked by the people whose job it is to check such things. That’ll have to be sufficient, I’m afraid.”

Kelly sat down, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. He was watching through his fingers, though. When Nassif opened his mouth to continue, the civilian said, “Shut up for a minute, Major. I’ve got a story to tell you, and then a suggestion.”

“Serg—”

“And if you call me ‘sergeant’ once more, I’ll feed you your teeth!” Kelly shouted. His voice was as raw as a shotgun blast, and for the moment as disconcerting. Major Nassif started up, but he locked angry eyes with the squat man and subsided again.

“This is a Special Forces story, so you’ll be able to appreciate it,” Kelly continued quietly, hoarsely. He nodded toward the losing-unit patch on the major’s right shoulder. “I was young, then, and I took orders better. . . .” Kelly coughed, trying to smooth the roughness from his voice. “I was with the Five-Oh-First Radio Research Detachment. We’d go out in the field with ground combat units and set up one hell of a beautiful communications intercept system. We’d pick up everything Charlie was saying on the air, whether it was out at the treeline with a handie-talkie or a divisional command near Hanoi. Everything was taped and flown back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade . . . but we were language-trained, too, you see. That way we knew to tag anything really hot for cable from Saigon.”

Kelly sucked his lower lip under his teeth. He was hunched over as if the rain were driving at his back. “One afternoon we picked up calls from an NVA forward artillery observer. He was handing out targets to a mortar company getting ready to do a number on a Special Forces camp about thirty clicks away. The way we knew exactly what he was doing is he was using an Army Map Service sheet to give grid coordinates. A US map!

“So we sent a query to Theater HQ in Long Binh requesting permission to release the intercept to the camp. I mean,
they
didn’t even know they were going to be hit.
We
knew exactly what targets, what order, how many rounds—and the exact time. We knew everything the dink battery commander did”—the civilian raised his voice and his angry eyes—“and our receivers were enough better than his that we got every coordinate the first time while the dink had to ask for repeats on a couple of them.”

Kelly stood up and paced, his hands locked behind his back. The thick, blunt fingers wound together. “Long Binh wouldn’t clear it. They shot it on to Maryland, though, in case somebody there would authorize release. We got word back three hours later, about an hour after the bombardment had ended. Fort Meade wouldn’t clear it either.” Kelly swallowed. “Compromise of NSA sources and methods was more important than the purposes to be served by such a compromise. Permission refused.” The civilian slammed his right fist into the table. “I never did learn how many people got killed by that bullshit. They weren’t any of them in NSA headquarters, though, and that was all that mattered to the top brass. But it wasn’t all that mattered to me.”

“Umm, well,” said Major Nassif, as if he had understood the point of the story. They hadn’t warned him that he would be briefing a psycho. . . . “Well, to continue,” the major said.

“Sorry, Major, just one more thing,” Kelly said tiredly. “I said I had a suggestion. I’m going back over to my room in the ETAP—” he thumbed toward the blank north wall of the office. “I suggest you check with whoever it takes, General Pedler, I suppose, and then drop the file off with me there.”

Nassif started to rise in protest. “I said check, didn’t I?” Kelly overrode him. “And the whole file, too—the file and every other scrap of data there is in this embassy, anything that
might
have something to do with it.” The civilian opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Turning, he added, “If the ETAP isn’t secure, you’re
really
up a creek.”

Major Nassif plucked at his moustache. Suddenly he glanced from the open door to the open file in his hand. He slapped the file shut, but it was another minute before he actually stood up.

IV

Tom Kelly heard the knock the second time and padded to the door. The fisheye lens in the panel distorted the figures of two men in shirt sleeves. Each wore his hair shorter than civilian standard. “A moment,” Kelly called. He set down the short, double-edged knife and pulled on his slacks. When he opened the door, his right hand again held the knife out of sight along his thigh. Hadn’t even started, Kelly thought, might
not
start, and already he was getting paranoid again. Bad as he’d been five years before in Venice, when he went to work wearing a uniform. . . .

“Mr. Kelly,” said the visitor carrying the briefcase, “General Pedler directed us to bring some material to you. I’m Sergeant Wooley; this is Sergeant Coleman.” His black companion, apparently bemused by Kelly’s state of undress, blinked and nodded.

“Sure, come on in,” the civilian said, stepping back out of the way. Already embarrassed, he slipped the knife hilt down into his side pocket as unobtrusively as possible. “Expected Major Nassif, you know,” he said. He looked carefully at the two sergeants. “You fellows wouldn’t have Crypto clearances, would you?” he asked.

Sergeant Wooley closed the hall door. Coleman had moved over to the writing desk on which the radio sat, crackling with the odd inflections of an Albanian news-reader. The younger men looked at each other. “Yes, sir,” the first said slowly, “we’re Communicators, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m sorry, sit down,” Kelly said, waving toward the upholstered chairs as he seated himself on the bed again. He flicked a hand across his own bare chest. “Just sitting here thinking,” he said in what was meant for explanation. “When it wasn’t that jackass Nassif, I figured they’d sent couriers. But I guess somebody over there”—he waved toward the embassy, beyond the heavy drapes and the other buildings —“got the notion that I might be prejudiced against officers.” He smiled. “Might just be right, too. Want a drink? The refrigerator’s stocked with one of everything, and I brought a bottle of my—”

“I think we’d better just turn these over, sir,” Wooley said. He opened the case. It contained the briefing file which Kelly had already seen in Nassif’s hands, plus two other, slimmer, folders and a clipboard with a receipt. The sergeant held out the clipboard and a pen to Kelly. “If you’ll sign here, sir,” he said.

“43 documents classified Top Secret,” the civilian read aloud. “Well, that’s enough to the point.” He signed his name with a flourish and handed the receipt back to Wooley. “If the count’s short, I know where to find you.”

“What is this?” asked Sergeant Coleman, pointing to the short-wave receiver. “I mean—the station. Is it Voice of America?”

All three men paused to listen to the strident news-reader. He was attacking the Italian Communist Party with a passion that, combined with his accent, made the fact that he was speaking in English hard to ascertain. “Radio Albania,” Kelly explained as Wooley’s pen scratched his confirming signature. “The Sixth Fleet’s about to hold exercises in the West Med, and the running-dog poltroons—don’t think I’d ever heard the word spoken before—of the CPI did nothing to prevent this example of bourgeois imperialism. You’d think they’d be screaming about us”—he smiled again—“but with the Albanians, it doesn’t seem to work that way.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Wooley, folding the receipt into his pocket. He left the rest of the material on the desk. “When you’re ready to return this, or if you have to leave this room for any reason, will you please check with the Marine guards in the hallway. They’ll escort you or call an authorized person from the embassy to watch the documents during your absence.”