Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (7 page)

“I’ll be damned,” Kelly said. He strode to the door and opened it. A Marine E-5 in dress blues stood six feet to either side of the door. They carried bolstered .38s. The one on the left nodded to Kelly, but his companion kept his eyes trained toward the end of the hall. “I’ll be damned,” the civilian muttered again. “Well, if Pedler’s willing to play by my rules, I can’t complain if he plays by his at the same time.”

The two Communicators shook hands with Kelly as they left the room. Coleman paused a further moment in the doorway. “Why do you listen to that?” he asked, gesturing toward the radio with his chin.

The civilian shrugged. “I spent—a lot of time listening to signals that didn’t mean a whole lot, piecing things together . . . listening. I think better now if there’s somebody talking in the background, if there’s a receiver or two live.” He chuckled to hide his embarrassment. “Besides, I wind up knowing things that sort of seep in. . . . It helps, sometimes.”

When the door closed, Kelly was alone again, just himself and Albania and a case of classified documents. Sighing, he took the knife carefully from his pocket. He had replaced the round, thin handle of the short-wave receiver with a sand-finished stainless steel strap over an inch wide. A hand-tooled leather wrapper cushioned the handle. Kelly unsnapped the two fasteners on the leather and set his knife into the cut-out machined into the steel strap. He had no idea of how many airport security checks he had passed through with this radio or one of its similarly-modified predecessors. He was simply not going to be at the mercy of whatever set of crazies happened to hijack a plane he was on.

Off to work. Kelly stripped to his shorts again and opened one of the supplementary folders. It contained only a four-page Current Policy Statement, issued by the US Department of State. It was the text of a speech delivered by the Under Secretary for Security Assistance, Science and Technology, to a—for Christ’ sake!—to a national conference of editorial writers. The title, “Nuclear Power and the Third World,” was about as clear as the discussion got. The speech was the typical Foggy Bottom bumf sent around to all missions. It was intended to give the official line on how to dodge awkward questions.

The question this time was why the US was opposing the International Conference on Nuclear Power Development. The Conference—though the US did not doubt the good faith of the Algerians who were hosting it—had been politicized in a manner not conducive to world peace and harmony. Israel and South Africa had been banned by a unanimous decision of the Conference Trustees—whoever the hell they were—though in fact neither republic had expressed an interest in attending. Further, if anything but political rhetoric
should
eventuate from the Conference, it would likely be a heightened interest in nuclear weapons among the nations of the Third World. The effect of this could not help but be unfortunate at a time when all nations must band together in the service of peace, with population control and greater agricultural productivity as primary goals.

Kelly snorted and went on to the file with the Top Secret cover sheet. The Department of State building had more floor space under one roof than the Pentagon; and there were probably more damned fools per square foot there, too. At least the Department of Defense would have managed to say
something
in four pages, though it would doubtless have been a lie.

The first classified document noted that arrangements could be made for the defection of a Professor Evgeny Vlasov during the—okay—International Conference on Nuclear Power Development in Algiers. The operation would, however, resemble an armed kidnapping or a paramilitary operation rather than an ordinary defection. A scientist of Professor Vlasov’s stature would certainly be housed in the Soviet Embassy in El-Biar rather than in the Hotel Aurassi with most of the national delegations. Whenever Vlasov was outside the embassy, he would be escorted by armed KGB officers—intended to protect him, but certain to completely circumscribe his movements. Further, the KGB Residency in Algiers, already substantial, would be beefed up to take advantage of the concentration of Third World diplomats attending the conference. Even beyond that, there were an estimated 3,000 USSR military personnel operating in Algeria as advisors to the People’s National Army and to the Polisario Front. These troops normally operated in uniform, though without rank insignia. At need, they would certainly be available to provide additional manpower.

In sum, the faceless DIA analyst concluded, Professor Vlasov’s defection would require the neutralization of a minimum of four KGB/GRU officers. In addition, an indefinite number of local security personnel from the National Police and the Presidential Security Office would almost certainly become involved. The Conference would include ranking scientists and in some cases heads of state from countries which were mutually hostile: Brazil and Argentina, Iraq and Libya, Vietnam and China, among others. The Algerians would be expecting trouble and would be taking steps to minimize it through a show of overwhelming force.

The analyst had obviously determined to his own satisfaction that the proposed Operation Skyripper was impossible for both political and practical reasons. Kelly sighed. He was inclined to agree with the analyst, but it wasn’t his job to care. If the USG were bound and determined that he was going to run the operation . . . well, there were plenty of slick types in the CIA, recruited from major universities and used to working through cut-outs, go-betweens. . . . Hiring local agents to hire more local agents, so that if the operation went sour—as it usually did—the President could blandly deny that the United States had been involved. Even the Bay of Pigs, an
invasion
,
had been handled that way . . . and no wonder it came out a rat-fuck. But if they wanted deniability, they went Ivy League and Big Ten. If they really wanted results, maybe they went to a cowboy for a change. Maybe they went to Tom Kelly.

Kelly got up and ran the pitcher full of water. There was the usual pair of six-ounce water glasses beside it. He ignored the glasses, sipping from the pitcher itself as he walked back to the desk. He stared for a long time at the AWOL bag from which he had already unpacked his clothes. In the end he sat down without reaching into the bag again. He flipped the Kenwood receiver to 15 megahertz and then dialed up to the German Wave, thundering out of Wertachtal. With the selector set for wide band and the modulator damping the German pop music by 60 db, Kelly began looking at what he had in the way of assets for the job.

Besides himself.

The next document had a separate cover sheet, in some ways the most striking thing about it. It was marked “Top Secret—Dissemination ONLY by order of Director, Defense Intelligence Agency.” On a separate line, typed in red caps, was the additional warning, “NO ACCESS BY CIA PERSONNEL!” Kelly grinned. Well, it was important to know your enemies. And it certainly answered the question of whether he could expect support from the CIA station in Algiers.

The Defense Attaché’s Office in Algeria consisted of the Attaché, Commander William Posner, US Navy; and his staff, Sergeant E-6 Douglas Rowe, US Army. Rowe had an armor specialty. The two men and their predecessors had been trying to get a clerk-typist for their office, but they had been unable to justify one to the boys in budget. The only typist in the mission with a Top Secret clearance was the Ambassador’s secretary—who was actually Third Secretary for Administration, in order to get her on the Diplomatic List with all the privileges that entailed. The Defense Attaché was rather low on his Excellency’s list of priorities, so reports from Algiers were consistently late. That did not seem to bother anybody at headquarters enough to spring for a typist slot, though, probably because the reports were pretty dull reading even by the undemanding standards of the DIA. Posner spoke some French. Neither of the men on the ground had any Arabic, much less Kabyle.

And the Kabyles were the key to Skyripper, if there was a key at all.

At first Kelly thought that he had never heard of the Kabyles, but a quick reading of other background documents showed him his error: he had known them as “Berbers,” that was all. “Berber” meant just what it sounded like, “barbarian.” As with “Welsh,” ,” and “Eskimo,” it was a name affixed by foreigners and never used by the ethnics themselves when their ethnicity became important. The Kabyles were both the Barbary Pirates and the Moors who overran Spain in the name of Allah.

And they were not Arabs, any more than the Cherokees were English. The West had a tendency to equate Moslems and Arabs. That mistake was made by Arabs only when they were dreaming of Third World hegemony the same way the Russian Pan-Slavs of 1900 had dreamed of an ideal state dominated from Moscow. Every Moslem state had its Arabizers, just as British India had had its Babus. The Arabizers tended to be intellectuals with their values shaped at universities in Cairo and Beirut rather than in their native lands. In Algeria, they held virtually all the top posts in the government and army. They had done so since the French were driven out, though the bombed-out farms in the Kabyle Highlands still bore testimony to who had really done the fighting which led to that victory. There were already signs that the fighting was about to resume, and that this time the outside overlords would be Arabs and not Frenchmen.

Operational planning had started even before a courier from the DAO in Berne had caught Kelly making a sales presentation to a Volkswagen dealership in Basel. Another courier had been sent to Algiers, ordering Commander Posner to give full support to the agent or contract officer, as yet undetermined, who would be arriving soon. Further, the Attaché was ordered to alert his contacts within the Kabyle underground to a coming need for manpower and other support. The USG would pay for such support with up to one million dollars in gold or any desired currency and—Kelly whistled, clashing with the radio’s rendition of “Danke”—full US support for establishment of a Kabyle Government in Exile in Rabat, Morocco.

Kelly got up and walked to the sink, partly to refill the pitcher. Mostly he needed to move as he thought. He wondered how the button-down types in the Fudge Factory at State had taken that news. Not real well, he suspected. It meant the probable end to diplomatic relations between Algeria and the USG, whatever came of the defection attempt itself. This thing was big, it was so big it scared him. Why in
God’s
name they’d picked him to run the show. . . .

Kelly took the 750-milliliter bottle of Johnny Walker Red out of the bag. Scotch to Americans, malt to an Englishman; whiskey to the rest of the world. Kelly preferred Tennessee sour-mash whiskey, but you didn’t find that outside the States except maybe as a dusty bottle on a high shelf in big liquor stores. Scotch you could find from Iceland to Japan . . . and besides, it didn’t matter that much, Kelly had drunk peppermint schnapps when that was handiest; and if he preferred the taste of hog piss to peppermint schnapps, it had done the job just the same. He needed a drink now, needed it bad. But Kelly gulped water instead and sat down with the file. The dapper man in hunting pinks winked knowingly from the bottle’s label at the American.

Outsiders could not be expected to reach Professor Vlasov, but Dr. Hoang would certainly be able to renew his acquaintance. No eyebrows would be raised by a private conference between physicists representing two communist states allied against the Chinese between them. That left the problem of contacting Hoang; but that, given modern electronics, shouldn’t be insuperably difficult. As he continued to read through the assortment of documents, Kelly began arraying mentally the support and equipment he would request from General Pedler—and the back up he would arrange for himself. There were some things he did not intend to tell anyone in the Paris embassy. A passport, for instance. Nobody in the USG was going to know what documents Kelly was traveling under. In his years of knocking around Europe, Kelly had met people who could do the necessary job as well or better than anybody in a CIA smokeshop. Why use a false passport if you knew a Consul who would issue a real one for the right incentive?

And what if somebody talked to a girlfriend or a drinking buddy? A salesman who might be planning to run a load of hash under a squeaky-clean passport wouldn’t interest anybody around the Russian Embassy. Government ID for Tom Kelly, a French-speaker who’d been on both ends of automatic rifles in his day—that was something else. And people do talk, no matter who they are, when their pricks are hard or they’re half-seas over.

There was no way to be sure how well Commander Posner would be holding up his end, with his Level 2 French and a naval officer’s rigid disapproval of something this unconventional. Time would tell, too goddamned little time, ten days. But at least a sailor could be expected to take orders, however much he might dislike them. Kelly sighed and ran his index finger over the embossed label of the whiskey bottle. And then he went back to the file.

V

Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van Minh dropped the report back on his desk. He shook his head toward the mountains out the window. If he read between the lines correctly, it was not simply a knifing he had to deal with. The fight between two of his staff, guards at the Dalat Nuclear Facility, had occurred during an argument over the prowess of their respective regiments during the War of Liberation.

Both
men, might they rot in Kampuchea where he was transferring them, had been on the losing—Southern—side.

Colonel Nguyen sighed and loosened the collar of his uniform tunic. Bao, his predecessor as Chief of Facility Security, had been incompetent, no doubt about that. But how he had failed to do even basic background checks on these two . . . and how many other ex-Airborne and Marine personnel were
still
on the staff of this crucial part of the defense establishment? The situation no longer reflected on Bao’s honor, it reflected on Nguyen’s own.

The phone rang. Nguyen snatched it as if it were a rope out of his administrative morass. “Security,” he snapped. The colonel was his own secretary. He spoke to anyone who called . . . and they had better have
very
good reasons to call him.