Read Online Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels by David Drake - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Drake
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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
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
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