Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (69 page)

“It was Dora,” said Gisela brokenly. She touched the truck’s fender with a hand for balance, looking as staggered as she had been the moment Doug had slapped her with a shot-loaded hand.

“Have the aliens come and taken your friend?” Kelly demanded harshly in order to be understood through the woman’s dismay.

“No, not the crabs,” Gisela said petulantly, turning so that both her palms were braced against the vehicle.

The breeze that was too constant to be noticed made enough noise in the background that she was hard to hear, since the truck separated her from Kelly. He stepped around the front of the vehicle to join her, though he was nervous that his appearance of haste would silence her. By focusing on the details of gathering information, Tom Kelly was able to avoid boggling inertly as a result of what he had just seen.

Whatever
he had just seen.

Gisela met his eyes and straightened. “That was Dora,” she said in a firm, emotionless voice. “The first of the Special Applications craft, the prototype which escaped to the Antarctic base from the Bavarian Alps in 1945. She must have been sent to make the final pickup. And we have missed her.”

The blond woman’s face was as cool as that of a marble virgin, but tears had begun to well from the inner corners of her blue eyes. “We may as well go back into the city, Thomas Kelly. We’ll be able to communicate from the office there, but I’m sure no one will have time for us until everything has been accomplished.

“They have begun to execute the Plan already, and I am not a part of it.”

Tom Kelly took the woman’s hands in support, but only a small portion of his mind was on Gisela anymore. He was far more concerned with the fact that not all of the UFOs being sighted were under the control of aliens whose motives were at least uncertain.

Some of the spacecraft were in the hands of Nazis whose motives were not doubtful in the slightest.

Kelly started back to Diyarbakir with Gisela slumped as his passenger against the other door. He drove with the caution demanded by the loose steering and his own unfamiliarity with the roads.

Besides, there was no longer any reason for haste.

“I didn’t think they’d leave before dark,” Gisela said.

A front wheel bucked in a rut, jolting her hard against the doorframe and recalling her to her dignity. She straightened in the seat and gave a body-length quiver like the motion of a snake casting its skin. “But of course, now it doesn’t matter—secrecy. No need for it, no chance for it either. And they left me behind.”

The sky had darkened abruptly, as if the flying saucer had punched a hole in the stratosphere and let the storm rush in. That was what had happened, near enough in the larger sense, Kelly supposed. Not asking the question wouldn’t make the situation go away, though.

“Exactly what
is
the Plan?” the veteran asked, while his hands and eyes drove the truck and left his intellect free for things he would have preferred not to think about.

“To control the world by using your Fortress,” the dancer said, destroying with her flat voice any possibility that Kelly’s imagination might have run away with him.

“At first we had the base in Antarctica,” Gisela continued. “My father was commander of the detachment guarding the salt mines at Kertl, in Bavaria. When British troops were within five kilometers and they could hear Russian guns in the east, so near were they, a motorcycle arrived with orders that they should leave at once for Thule Base in the Antarctic, taking all flyable Special Applications craft.”

The woman was speaking in German, and her voice had the sing-song texture of a tale which had been repeated so many times.

“Only Dora, the fourth prototype, could be flown,” said Gisela. “Some of those at Kertl wished to wait still further for the aircraft from Berlin Tempelhof they had been hoping would arrive. Others would have fled to the British in order to escape the Bolsheviks, but they feared to entrust themselves to a journey of twenty thousand kilometers in a craft which had thus far been the subject only of static testing.

“But my father understood that orders must be obeyed, not questioned; and he understood that there was sometimes no path but that of ruthlessness to the accomplishment of a soldier’s duty.”

Kelly’s hands gripped the steering wheel more fiercely than the road itself—the highway to Diyarbakir, now—demanded. The American agent had seen enough things in his own lifetime to be able to imagine that scene in the foothills of the Alps close to the time he was being born. Electrostatic charges from Dora, the prototype built so solidly that she still flew like nothing else on Earth, must have lighted up the salt mine in which the laboratory hid from Allied bombers. It would have been like living in the heart of a neon lamp while the powerplant was run up to takeoff level.

But the machinery was only part of the drama. The rest was that of the men and women wearing laboratory smocks or laborers’ coveralls, the personnel who had decided to ignore the order from Berlin and stay behind. As Dora readied to attempt her final mission, those who were not aboard her would have begun to understand exactly what decision they had
really
made.

The guard detachment of Waffen SS would have been in spatter-camouflage uniforms and carrying the revolutionary MP-44 assault rifles which could not win the war for Germany but which armed a generation of liberation movements after the Russians lightly modified the design into the AK-47. Even the pick of Germany’s fighting strength there at the end would have been a far cry from the triumphant legions of the Blitzkrieg: boys, taller and blonder, perhaps, than their classmates, but still fifteen years old; and a leavening of veterans whose eyes were too empty now to show weariness, much less mercy.

Tom Kelly had been a man like that for too many years not to know what it would have been to have stood with those guardsmen; and how little he would have felt when Colonel Schneider gave the order to fire and the bellow of a score of automatic rifles echoed itself into thunder in the walls of the tunnel.

“Thule Base was safe, unapproachable,” said Gisela. In her voice was a memory of ice and snow and a constant wind, with even bare rock so deep ice had to be excavated to reach it. “But it was useless save as a place to hide while we reorganized and gathered the wealth required for the task. Three U-boats of the Type XXI rendezvoused with the refugees from Dora, and there was the original complement of Thule Base . . . but still very few, you must understand?”

A few oversized drops of rain splattered down, followed by a downpour snaking across the highway in a distinct line. The dust on the hood and windshield turned immediately to mud which the desiccated wiper blades pushed across the glass in streaks when Kelly found their switch. “Others provided aid, supplied us with connections and part of the money required,” the woman said, raising her voice over the drumbeat of raindrops as though addressing a hall of awestruck, upturned faces which hung on her words. “But there were two secrets which the Service kept: those original strugglers at Thule Base and their descendants like myself. We kept the secret of Dora. And we kept the secret of the last flight from Tempelhof, a special Arado Blitzbomber as plannednorth, to one of the Swedish islands, where those who flew in it transferred to a U-boat which would proceed to Antarctica to meet us.”

They were getting close to the incorporated area of the city. Diyarbakir had spread to the north and west of ancient Amida. The city walls to the south loomed on an escarpment, free of modern buildings, and the eastern boundary was the steep gorge of the Tigris—now and as it had been for millennia.

In the heavy traffic they were entering, bad brakes and the universal-tread pattern of the pickup’s tires made Kelly concentrate more on his driving than he wanted to. The rhythm of outside sounds and the greasy divorcement of the rain-slick highway were releasing Gisela’s tongue, however. They were in a microcosm of their own, she and Kelly; not the universe that others inhabited and one which had secrets that one must never tell.

“We could buy equipment easily,” the woman said. “Through sympathizers, sometimes, but easily also through those who wanted drugs or wanted arms that we could supply. However, there was no place on Earth where we could safely produce what we needed for the day we knew would come, when the Service would provide thousands of craft like Dora for the legions of New Germany to sweep away Bolshevism and materialism together.”

Brake lights turned the road ahead of them into a strand of rubies, twinkling on their windshield and on the rain spattering toward the street. A major factory, one of the few in a city almost wholly dependent on agriculture, was letting the workers out to choke the road with motorcycles, private cars, and dolmuses—minivans that followed fixed routes like buses, but on no particular schedule and with an even higher degree of overloading than was the norm for Turkish buses.

“Turn here,” Gisela said with a note of disapproval. “You should have turned at the last cross street. We enter the Old City best by the Urfa Gate.”

Kelly nodded obsequiously. Colonel Schneider’s—Romer’s—daughter was telling him things now, in a state divorced from reason, which she had not told even when she was convinced that he had saved her and her Plan from Israeli secret agents. Then she had been willing to take him to those whose business the explanations were—but not to overstep her own duties. Irrational snappishness when he missed the turn to a location unknown to him was a small price for the background he was hearing.

Gisela cleared her throat with a touch of embarrassment as she ran her comment back. “I apologize,” she said in English. “Our office is to the right on the inner circumferential, facing the walls.”

“No problem,” the veteran answered in German. He inched forward, thankful for the rain-swept traffic that kept them from what might be the terminus of their conversation. “How did you get over the problem with fabrication, then?”

“By putting the assembly plant on the Moon,” said Gisela calmly.

Kelly, shifting from first into neutral, lost the selector in the sloppy linkages of third and fourth when his arm twitched forward. “Okay,” he said when he thought his voice would be calm. “I guess I thought maybe you had a satellite of your own. Like Fortress.”

“It was easier to armor against vacuum than it was the winds and convection cooling at Thule Base,” said the woman. “And the Moon had what neither Antarctica nor an orbiting platform could provide: ores. Raw material to be formed into aluminum for the skin and girders of the fleet. Dora had been built of impervium, chromium-vanadium alloy; but that was not necessary, the scientists who escaped with my father decided.

“The instruments and the drive units, the great electromagnetic engines that draw their power from the auras surrounding the Earth and Sun, had to be constructed here; but that was easy to arrange, since the pieces divulged little of their purpose. They are shipped as freight to our warehouse at Iskenderun and there loaded on a motorship which the Service owns through a Greek holding company. It sails with only our own personnel in the crew and, hundreds of miles from the coast, the cargo is transferred to Dora or one of her newer sisters.”

Traffic surged forward like a clot releasing in a blood vessel. The wall above the Urfa Gate was whole and fifty feet high, with semicircular towers flanking the treble entrances and rising even higher. Only the arched central gateway, tall enough and wide enough to pass the heaviest military equipment of Byzantine times, was used for vehicular traffic. It constricted the modern two-lane road; Kelly swore under his breath as he watched the cars ahead of them slither on the pavement, threatening traffic in the other lane and stone walls that had survived at least fifteen centuries of collisions.

“And then you Americans started to build your nuclear Fortress, and we knew that fate was on our side, despite the disasters of the war and the hardships that we underwent while the Service huddled in Antarctica and—and after.”

There was a tendency, in Kelly as surely as in other people, to assume that what somebody did in the course of his job—or her job—was what he liked to do. It made him mad every time somebody read his file and looked at him with face muscles stiffening as if that would armor the person against the monster calling itself Tom Kelly.

But he did the same thing, even knowing better; even knowing that there were worse things in the life of Gisela Romer than years spent on the Antarctic ice, but you did what had to be done. . . .

There had been a pitiable attempt to landscape the approach to the Urfa Gate with trees. Those which still survived at twenty-meter intervals along the boulevard were trees like those found throughout the inhabited Middle East: stunted, the major branches a yard or so long from the point they forked, and a burst of first-year twigs splaying from the cut ends like the hair of a drowned woman. Firewood was at a premium, and each year these trees would be pruned back secretly by those whose only choice was to freeze.

And sometimes the long-term choices people made for themselves and for mankind weren’t a whole lot prettier; that was all.

Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk within the circumferential, bent and squinting as though they could shut themselves off from the battering rain. The hooped iron barrier which separated them from the vehicular way gleamed silver in the lights of cars turning into the Old City, providing a touch of fairyland for a scene otherwise harsh and squalid. The girdered tower holding a transformer substation just within the walls could as well have been the guard post of a concentration camp. Life is not exotic while it is being lived. The walls which made Diyarbakir an archeological treasure were proof of a past reality as cruel as anything that put Fortress in orbit above the Earth today.

Kelly knew now why he had been dreaming about ancient Amida and her walls, past which he now drove a pickup truck, turned against their builders. He had a pretty good idea of who—of what—had caused him to have those dreams.

But he was damned if he knew what he’d been supposed to do about the situation.