Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (41 page)

The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed and sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly’s cheap portable radio. Inside the high-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant could have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars worth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle carried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made almost certain.

Shooooo . . .
hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.

“Our enemies, the enemies of freedom,” said the President, more distant from Kelly’s reality than seven time zones could imply, “have proven in Hungary, in Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealings except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe, ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least sign of weakness among the Western democracies.”

By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for protection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscape breathed, Kelly’s left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14, knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own weapons: Mausers abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs slipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenades stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .

“In Europe and the Middle East,” continued the President in a nasal voice further attenuated by the transmission and the radio’s tinny speaker, “in Africa and Latin America—wherever the totalitarians and their surrogates choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on behalf of the free world which will convince our enemies that we have the strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they gather on Earth itself.”

The five tubes of howitzer battery—the sixth hog was deadlined for repair—cut loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglike dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzle brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The short-barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges. Nothing to do with the turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flat curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.

“We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelming magnitude in the Heavens themselves,” continued Kennedy through the squeal of hydraulic rammers seating the shells of the next salvo. Clicks of static from command transmissions cut across the broadcast band, but Kelly was used to building sense from messages far more shattered and in a variety of languages beyond English. He was good at that—at languages—and his fingertips again tried to wiggle the magazine of his rifle, making sure it was locked firmly into the receiver.

“Space is both a challenge—” said the President as Kelly’s hearing returned after the muzzle blasts of the howitzers which were more akin to physical punishment than to noise. “—Now also the unbreachable shield of freedom and the spear of retribution which cannot be blunted by treacherous attack as our land-based weapons might be.”

The breechblock of a fifty-caliber machine gun clanged from the far side of the firebase as the weapon was charged, freezing time and Tom Kelly’s soul. Only the sounds of the howitzers reloading and traversing their turrets slightly followed, however. Nothing Kelly had seen in ninety-seven days in the field suggested the hogs were going to hit anything useful, but their thunderous discharges made waiting for an attack easier than it would have been with only the stars for company.

“My detailed proposals . . .” said the radio before the words disintegrated into a hiss like frying bacon—louder than the voice levels had been, so it couldn’t be the French dry cells giving out. . . .

“Fuckin’ A!” snarled Chief Warrant Officer Platt as he ducked out the rear hatch of the command vehicle. He, the intercept team’s commander, was a corpulent man who wore two fighting knives on his barracks belt and carried the ear of a Druse guerrilla tissue-wrapped in a watch case. “We’re getting jammed across all bands! What the fuck
is
this?”

Something with a fluctuating glow deep in the violet and presumably ultraviolet was crossing the sky very high up and very swiftly. A word or two,—“dominance”—crept through a momentary pause in the static before the howitzers, linked by wire to the Tactical Operations Center, fired again.

“Commie recon satellite,” Platt muttered, his eyes following Kelly’s to the bead shimmering so far above the surface of dust, buffeted by hot, gray strokes of howitzer propellant. “You know those bastards’re targeting us down to the last square meter!”

Tom Kelly reached for the tuning dial of the radio with the hand which was not sweating on the grip of his rifle. Anybody who could come within a hundred yards of a point target, using a bombardment rocket aimed by adjusting a homemade bipod under the front of the launching tube, ought to be running the US space program instead of a Druse artillery company. The hell with the satellite—assuming that’s what it was. If the rag-heads could jam the whole electromagnetic spectrum like that, there were worse problems than Radio Research teams becoming as useless as tits on a boar. . . .

“—domestic front,” said the radio just as Kelly’s fingers touched it, “the curse of racial injustice calls for—”

Tom Kelly never did hear the rest of that speech because just as normal reception resumed, a one-twenty-two howled over the berm and exploded near a tank-recovery vehicle. It was the first of the thirty-seven rockets preceding the attack of a reinforced Druse battalion.

The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burned by the red-hot receiver of his rifle as he worked to clear a jam.

Another 1985

The three helicopters were orbiting slowly, as if tethered to the monocle ferry on the launchpad five hundred meters below. When the other birds rotated so that the West Texas sun caught the cameras aimed from their bays, the long lenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools with which to record a test of laser propulsion.

The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments of the helicopters had been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubing and a view straight upward for the cameras and the men waiting for what was about to happen on the launchpad.

Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a project scientist named Desmond, and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Army green and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that Kelly thought would have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a good deal more nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreading them, their concern was less about the test itself than about him—the staff investigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he’d spent all his life surrounded by people who were worried as hell about what he was going to do next. Occasionally, of course, people would have been smart to worry more than they did. . . .

The communications helmet Kelly had been issued for the test had a three-position switch beneath the left earpiece, but only one channel on it was live. He could not hear either the chatter of the Army pilots in the cockpit or the muttered discussions of the two officers in the passenger bay with him, though the latter could speak to him when they chose to throw their own helmet switches forward. The clop of the blades overhead was more a fact than an impediment to normal speech, but the intake rush of the twin-turbine power plant created an ambiance through which Kelly could hear nothing but what the officers chose to direct to him through the intercom circuitry.

“Someday,” Kelly said aloud, “people are going to learn that the less they try to hide, the less problem they have explaining things. But I don’t expect the notion to take hold in the military any time soon.”

“Pardon?” asked Desmond, the first syllable minutely clipped by his voice-activated microphone. The scientist was Kelly’s age or a few years younger, a short-bearded man who slung a pen-caddy from one side of his belt and a worn-looking calculator from the other. It was probably his normal working garb—as were the dress uniforms of the public-affairs colonels, flacks of the type which Kelly would have found his natural enemy even if they hadn’t been military.

“I’d been meaning to ask you, Dr. Desmond,” said Kelly, rubbing from his eyes the prickliness of staring into the desert of the huge Fort Bliss reservation, “just why you think the initial field test failed?”

“Ah, I think it’s important to recall, Mr. Kelly,” interjected one of the colonels—it was uncertain which through the headphones— “that the test was by no means a failure. The test vehicle performed perfectly throughout eighty-three percent of the spectrum planned—”

“Well good
God,
Boardman,” snapped the project scientist, “it blew
up,
didn’t it? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” Desmond continued, snapping his head around from the officers across the bay to Kelly seated on the portion of the bench closest to the fully-opened starboard hatch. “I certainly don’t consider that, that
fireworks
display a success.”

Kelly smiled, the expression only incidentally directed toward the colonels. “Though I gather many of the systems
did
work as planned, Doctor?” he said, playing the scientist now that he had enough of a personality sample from which to work. Even among the project’s civilians, there were familiar—and not wholly exclusive—categories of scientists and scientific politicians. Desmond had seemed to be in the former category, but Kelly had found no opportunity to speak to him alone.

The public affairs officers were probably intended to smother honest discussion within the spotting helicopter the same way the administrators had done on the ground. That plan was being frustrated by what was more than a personality quirk: Desmond could not imagine that anything the military officers said or wished was of any concern to him. It was not a matter of their rank or anyone’s position in a formal organizational chart: Colonels Boardman and Johnson were simply of another species.

“Yes, absolutely,” agreed the project scientist as he shook his head in quick chops. “Nothing went wrong during air-breathing mode, nothing we could see in the telemetry, of course—it’d have been nice to get the
hardware
back for a hands-on.”

“I think you’d better get your goggles in place now, Mr. Kelly,” said the Air Force officer, sliding his own protective eye wear into place. The functional thermoplastic communications helmets looked even sillier atop dress uniforms than they did over the civilian clothes Desmond, and Kelly himself, wore. “For safety’s sake, you know.”

Kelly was anchored to a roof strap with his left hand by habit that freed his right for the rifle he did not carry here, not on this mission or in this world where “cut-throat” meant somebody might lose a job or a contract. . . . He looked at the PR flacks, missing part of what Desmond was saying because his mind was on things that were not the job of the Special Assistant to Representative Bianci.

The colonels straightened, one of them with a grimace of repulsion, and neither of them tried again to break in as the project scientist continued, “—plating by the aluminum oxide particles we inject with the on-board hydrogen to provide detonation nuclei during that portion of the pulsejet phase. Chui-lin insists the plasma itself scavenges the chambers and that the fault must be the multilayer mirrors themselves despite the sapphire coating.”

“But there’s just as much likelihood of blast damage when you’re expelling atmosphere as when you’re running on internal fuel, isn’t there?” said Kelly, who had done his homework on this one as he did on any task set him by Representative Bianci; and as he had done in the past, when others tasked him.

“Exactly,
exactly
,” Desmond agreed, chopping his head. “Just a time factor, says Chui-lin, but there’s
no
sign of overheating until we switch modes, and I don’t think dropping the grain size as we’ve done will be—”

“Fifteen seconds,” boomed a voice from the control center on the ground, and this time Kelly and the scientist did slide the goggles down over their eyes. The cameraman hunched behind the long shroud of his viewing screen. A guidance mechanism as sophisticated as anything in the latest generation of air-to-air missiles should center the lens on the test vehicle, despite any maneuvers the target or the helicopter itself carried out. Machinery could fail, however, and the backup cameraman was determined that he would not fail—because he was
good
,
not because he was worried about his next efficiency report.

The monocle ferry was a disk only eighteen feet in diameter, and at its present slant distance of almost half a mile from the helicopters it would have been easy to ignore were it not so nearly alone on a barren yellow landscape. With Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral irrevocably surrendered to the US Space Command when it was formed in 1971, the Army and Air Force had chosen Fort Bliss as the site for their joint attempt to circumvent their new rival’s control of space weaponry.

Not only was the huge military reservation empty enough to make a catastrophic failure harmless, but its historical background as the center of Army Air Defense Training lent a slight color to the services’ claim that they were not trying to develop a “space weapon” of their own in competition with the Space Command.

Not that that would help them if Carlo Bianci decided the program should be axed. The congressman from the Sixth District of Georgia had made a career—a religion, some critics claimed—of space defense, and it wasn’t the sort of thing he permitted interservice squabbling to screw up.