Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (72 page)

He paused, but before the Turk could frame a reply, Kelly added, “In addition to the name on this card, they may come looking for Thomas Kelly.”

Elaine would very likely have been furious had she known Kelly was carrying his own North Carolina driver’s license with him, but there were times you simply had to have real ID. The Lord only knew which of Kelly’s various cover names the Pentagon would reference him under—assuming the message had gotten through—but at bottom, they would probably include the real name.

Kelly gave the driver’s license to the officer; if it saved only five minutes in the course of the next twenty-four hours, then five minutes could be real important.

“One moment, please,” the lieutenant said. His lips pursed and he frowned as he looked at the cards, practicing the unfamiliar names under his breath. Then he walked back to the regular guard post, stepping through the narrow gap left between the gate post and the barbed wire barricade.

“Any notion of what’s going on?” Kelly said to the airmen, primarily to make conversation; people don’t let their guns point at folks with whom they’re holding a friendly conversation.

“It’s a full alert, sir,” one of the Turks responded. “They’re fueling and arming everything that’ll fly.”

The lieutenant, watching Kelly through the glass of the guardpost, hung up the phone and barked an unheard order. Six airmen trotted past the officer as he strode toward Kelly. They grabbed crossbars extending from the concertina wire and began to drag the barricade to one side.

“You may come in, sir,” the lieutenant said, a little less dourly hostile than he had seemed before. Perhaps he had just been afraid of being chewed out by his superiors for reporting something nonstandard. Now he handed back the two identification cards. “Your pass permits that, and for the rest—it will be as God wills. The Officer of the Day says he will report your presence to General Tergut, as you requested.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the American said as he got back into the truck. The rain had stopped by the time he made it out of the walled city, but the vehicle’s heater had not even begun to dry his soaked clothing. He sneezed as he put the pickup in gear, wondering whether after everything he had gone through he wasn’t going to wind up a casualty from pneumonia. Inshallah—as God wills it.

That was about as good a philosophy for a soldier as any Kelly had heard. And right now, it might be as much as you could say for the world itself.

Kelly saw the lights at the same time the phone rang in the guard post beside which he was parked. There were two vehicles speeding toward the gate from the heart of the installation, both of them flashing blue lights and crying out the hearts of their European-style warning hooters. The road was asphalt-surfaced, but the vehicles raised plumes of surface dust to reflect the headlights of the follow-car and the rotating blue party hats of both.

It hadn’t been a long wait, but Kelly found as he stepped out of the truck that his muscles had stiffened. The Turkish lieutenant ran to him, leaving his rifle behind this time. “Sir!” he shouted to Kelly, “they’re sending a car for you!”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the veteran said as he twisted some of the rigidity out of his torso, “I thought that”—he nodded toward the oncoming flashers—“might be me being paged.”

Wun was on top of things for sure, Kelly thought as the vehicles—a van followed by a gun jeep, both of them blue and marked HP for Air Police—skidded to a halt with their hooters still blaring.

Of course, it was just conceivable that this was a result of the shootings in Istanbul and hadn’t a damn thing to do with Fortress.

Kelly jogged to the passenger side of the van even before the doors unlatched. There was an empty seat in the jeep, but he had no intention of being carried any distance in it if there were an alternative. A short wheelbase and four-wheel independent suspension made jeeps marvelously handy; but that also made them flip and kill hell outa everybody on board when the driver turned sharply at speed. There was nothing about the way the Hava Polis driver had approached the guard post to make Kelly trust his judgment.

The man who jumped from the van was heavyset and wore a US Air Force uniform with rosettes on the epaulets. In the colored light of the flashers, Kelly could not be certain whether the rank insignia were the gold of a major or a lieutenant-colonel’s silver.

“Thomas Kelly?” the Air Force Officer shouted through the chest-cramping racket of the hooters. He thumbed toward the doors at the back of the van being opened by a Turkish airman. “Hop in, we’ve got a flight for you to Incirlik.”

“
Colonel
Kelly,” said the veteran. “And
you
can ride in back if you need to come along, Major Snipes.” The name tag over the officer’s pocket was clearly visible, and he obeyed Kelly without objection.

“Yes?” said the Turkish driver when Kelly slid in beside him. The back door banged and latched.

“Take me where we’re going,” Kelly replied in Turkish, giving the airman a lopsided smile.

Grinning back, the Turk hauled the van around in a tight, accelerating turn that must have spilled the occupants of the side benches in the back onto the floor and into one another’s arms. Kelly, bracing his right palm against the dashboard, smiled broadly.

To the veteran’s surprise, the two-vehicle entourage did not halt at one of the administration buildings. Instead they sped along access roads to the flight line, passing fuel tankers and flrefighting vehicles. Men bustled over each of the aircraft in open-topped revetments which would be of limited protection against parafrags or cluster bombs sown by low-flying attackers.

Or, of course, the nukes that Nazis in orbit could unload here in the event they decided it was a good idea.

But that made him think about Gisela, and the blond dancer was one of the last things Tom Kelly wanted on his mind right now.

The van’s right brakes grabbed as the driver stepped on them hard, making the vehicle shimmy against the simultaneous twist on the steering wheel to swing them into a revetment. There was already a car there, a Plymouth, and the men waiting included some in Turkish and American dress uniforms besides those in coveralls servicing a razor-winged TF-104G.

“This one’s Kelly!” called Major Snipes, throwing open the back of the van before Kelly himself was sure that they had come to a final stop.

He opened his own door and got out. Two Turkish airmen, followed by a captain, ran up to him with a helmet and a pressure suit, the latter looking too large by half. “Who gave us the size?” the captain demanded. “Come on, we’ll take him back and outfit him properly.”

“Wait a minute,” an American bird colonel said as he grabbed Major Snipes by the coat sleeve, “how do we
know
this is the right guy?”

“Look I’ll pull it on over my clothes,” said Kelly, taking the suit from the now-hesitant airman. “So long as the helmet’s not too small, we’re golden.”

“Well, he had ID—”

“No, the suit’s no good if it doesn’t fit,” insisted the Turkish captain.

“
Any
body could have ID—”

“What the
fuck
do you expect me to do, Colonel?” Kelly roared as he thrust his right leg into the pressure suit, rotating a half step on the other foot to forestall the captain, who seemed willing to snatch the garment away from him. “Sit around for a fingerprint check? How the hell would I know to pretend to be me if I wasn’t?”

“He is not the man you wish?” asked a Turk with a huge moustache and what Kelly thought were general’s insignia. His English was labored rather than hesitant, suggestive of bricklaying with words.

“Robbie,” said Snipes to the colonel, “it’s all copacetic. The fat’s in the fire now, and the last thing we need is for a review board to decide it was all the fault of US liaison at Diyarbakir.”

“Colonel,” Kelly put in more calmly as he checked for torso fasteners, “I’m the man they’re looking for. It’s not the usual sort of deal”—he tried on the helmet which, for a wonder, fitted perfectly—”but it’s the deal we’ve been handed this time.”

He started walking toward the plane that had obviously been readied for him, hopeful that the colonel wouldn’t decide to shoot him in the back. Sometimes Kelly found it useful to remember that during the disasters of Ishandhlwana and of Pearl Harbor, armorers had refused to issue ammunition to the troops because the proper chits had not been signed. The military collected a lot of people to whom order was more important than anything else on Earth. Trouble was, the times you really
needed
the military, the only thing you could bank on was disorder.

No bullets. No shouts, in fact, though squabbling in Turkish and English continued behind him as he strode away.

The TF-104G was a thing of beauty, the two-seat conversion trainer modification of the aircraft which had seduced the top fighter jocks of the fifties and sixties and had killed literally hundreds of their less-skilled brethren. The F-104 was fast, quick, and maneuverable. It also had the glide angle of a brick and offered its crew no desirable options when the single J-79 turbojet failed on takeoff.

But this was also a situation in which a fast ride was preferable to a safe one. For that matter, the Turks—one of the last major users of the F-104 in several variants—hadn’t had nearly the problem with crashes that others, particularly the Luftwaffe, had experienced. West German maintenance was notoriously slipshod, and the F-104 simply didn’t tolerate mistakes.

That wasn’t an attitude Kelly could object to, even in a piece of hardware; and anyway, like he’d told the colonel behind him, it was the deal he’d been handed this time.

Turkish ground crewmen helped Kelly up the narrow steps to the rear seat in the cockpit. They grinned and gestured to point out the warning arrows setting off the jet intake. The rushing whine of air to the turbine would have overwhelmed human speech.

Kelly dumped himself into the seat behind the pilot. He flew enough that he sometimes thought he’d spent five years of his life in airplanes; but he was strictly a passenger, with neither knowledge nor interest in the sort of thing that happened in the cockpit. That included, he began to realize, matters like where to put his feet, and how to buckle himself into the ejection seat, which he supposed included a parachute.

The pilot—Turkish or American?—didn’t care any more about Kelly’s problems than Kelly would have had their positions been reversed. As soon as the passenger dropped into the cockpit, the TF-I04G’s brakes released with a jerk and the aircraft slid out of its revetment on the narrow undercarriage splaying from its fuselage. The wings were too thin to conceal a tire.

The cockpit canopy closed smoothly, bringing blessed relief from the howl of the jet being reflected from the berm. Kelly found the oxygen mask and fitted it while the right brake and the delicate, steerable nosewheel aligned the aircraft with the runway. There had been a minimum of rollout; this was a combat installation, not a commercial operation handcuffed by the need to serve thousands of passengers.

There was probably a connection for the radio leads dangling from his helmet, the veteran thought while the turbojet shrieked and shuddered as the pilot wound it out. Then acceleration punched him back into a seat which seemed remarkably uncomfortable.

The hell with the radio, Kelly thought as the needle nose lifted and the Earth fell away so sharply that he had nothing with which to compare the sight.

It occurred to him, however, that this was only a foretaste of what awaited him in El Paso if things worked out the way he had planned.

He also found himself thinking that the F-104, even at its worst, had never approached the hundred-percent failure rate that the monocle ferry held to date.

Knowing that he was still in Turkey, Kelly could have told from the air that they were over Incirlik Airbase by the planes deployed on the ground; C-141 Starlifters and a flight of F-15’s. Incirlik had no home squadron of its own, but it was American-staffed and trained, in rotation, all the US tactical wings based in Europe. Turkey herself could afford neither the big cargo aircraft nor state-of-the-art fighters like the F-15. Despite that, the performance of Kelly’s pilot and his aging F-104, without notice and on a nontasked mission, suggested that the Turkish Air Force would hold up its end just fine if it came to a crunch.

They touched down firmly, jarring off knots, and the thump and shock that lifted their nose again startled Kelly until he realized that a drag chute was deploying behind them. The F-104 slowed abruptly. Presumably in response to instructions from the tower, the pilot braked to a near stop and turned onto a taxiway.

As the cockpit canopies began to rise again, the veteran looked to the side and saw that a car was driving parallel with them, a midsize American station wagon. Well, he couldn’t complain that he wasn’t getting the full treatment. Not red carpet, of course, but he didn’t
want
red carpet, he wanted functional. If they decided to parachute him out over Fort Bliss instead of landing, he couldn’t rightly complain.

Though as long as it’d been since he last jumped, he’d probably wind up cratering the mesquite.

The TF-104 halted in the middle of the taxiway. An American, carefully donning his saucer hat as he stepped out of the back door of the car, waved to Kelly and shouted something not quite audible. The man’s upturned face looked anxious in the aircraft’s clearance lights,

Kelly started to get out and was pulled up short by the feed of his oxygen mask. He unhooked it and swung himself out of the cockpit. He felt as if someone had conducted a search and destroy mission in his sinuses. He could not find the last of the miniature toeholds in the aircraft’s polished skin. Grimacing, the veteran let himself drop. The officer who had just gotten out of the car gave a squawk when Kelly sprawled at his feet, but there was no harm done.

“Mr. Kelly,” said the officer, gripping the veteran by both forearms and lifting, “we have a flight waiting for you. They’ve just been cleared.”

Kelly wasn’t in any shape to object to the manhandling. He ended it the quickest, simplest way by entering the car as if it were a burrow and he a fox going to ground. The greeting officer, another captain, hesitated a moment before he ran around to the far door. The driver, watching them in the mirror, had the car rolling even before the door closed.