Fortress 

David Drake 

Editorial Reviews 

IngramFortress is America's guarantor of freedom, an orbiting arsenal of laserweapons and nuclear missiles. It was considered impregnable--until now. FormerCIA officer Tom Kelley is sent to learn the secrets surrounding a dead alienfound in Turkey and discovers a maze of lies and treachery that couldtransform America's shield into an engine of global terror. HC: Tor. 

From the Publisher 
"One of the most gifted users of historical and military raw material at worktoday in science fiction." --Chicago Sun-Times"Lots of action, a well worked out plot, and a suitably exciting conclusion."
--Science Fiction Chronicle 

Prologue: - Another 1965 

Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy's fifth State of the UnionAddress - his so-called "Buck Rogers Speech" - at a firebase in the ShufMountains, watching Druse 122 mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the nightsky.
The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissedand sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly's cheap portable radio. Inside thehigh-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant couldhave gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollarsworth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehiclecarried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty andwaiting 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 fromKelly's reality than seven time zones could imply, "have proven in Hungary, inCuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealingsexcept strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe,
ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the leastsign of weakness among the Western democracies."
By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase forprotection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock ofthe hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscapebreathed. 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 Kalashnikovsslipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenadesstamped in Russian or Chinese . . .
"In Europe and the Middle East," continued the President in a nasal voicefurther attenuated by the transmission and the radio's tinny speaker, "inAfrica and Latin America - wherever the totalitarians and their surrogateschoose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies andgentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative onbehalf 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 Earthitself. 
The five tubes of howitzer battery - the sixth hog was deadlined for repair cut 
loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglikedazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzlebrakes 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 nothingto do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flatcurves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.
"We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelmingmagnitude in the heavens themselves," continued Kennedy through the squeal ofhydraulic rammers seating the shells of the next salvo. Clicks of static fromcommand transmissions cut across the broadcast band, but Kelly was used tobuilding sense from messages far more shattered and in a variety of languagesbeyond English. He was good at that - at languages - and his fingertips againtried to wiggle the magazine of his rifle, making sure it was locked firmlyinto the receiver. 
"Space is both a challenge - " said the President as Kelly's hearing returnedafter the muzzle blasts of the howitzers which were more akin to physicalpunishment than to noise. " - Now also the unbreachable shield of freedom andthe spear of retribution which cannot be blunted by treacherous attack as ourland-based weapons might be."
The breechblock of a fifty-caliber machinegun clanged from the far side of thefirebase as the weapon was charged, freezing time and Tom Kelly's soul. Onlythe sounds of the howitzers reloading and traversing their turrets slightlyfollowed, however. Nothing Kelly had seen in ninety-seven days in the fieldsuggested the hogs were going to hit anything useful, but their thunderousdischarges made waiting for an attack easier than it would have been with onlythe stars for company.
"My detailed proposals ..." said the radio before the words disintegrated intoa hiss like frying bacon - louder than the voice levels had been, so itcouldn'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 acorpulent man who wore two fighting knives on his barracks belt and carriedthe ear of a Druse guerrilla tissue-wrapped in a watch case. "We're gettingjammed across all bands! What the fuck is this?"
Something with a fluctuating glow deep in the violet and presumablyultraviolet was crossing the sky very high up and very swiftly. A word or two,
" - dominance -- " crept through a momentary pause in the static before thehowitzers, linked by wire to the Tactical Operations Center, fired again.
"Commie recon satellite," Platt muttered, his eyes following Kelly's to thebead shimmering so far above the surface of dust, buffeted by hot, graystrokes of howitzer propellant. "You know those bastards're targeting us downto the last square meter!"
Tom Kelly reached for the tuning dial of the radio with the hand which was notsweating 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 ahomemade bipod under the front of the launching tube, ought to be running theUS space program instead of a Druse artillery company. The hell with thesatellite - assuming that's what it was. If the rag-heads could jam the wholeelectromagnetic spectrum like that, there were worse problems than RadioResearch teams becoming as useless as tits on a boar. . . .
" - domestic front," said the radio just as Kelly's fingers touched it, "thecurse of racial injustice calls for - "
Tom Kelly never did hear the rest of that speech because just as normalreception resumed, a one-twenty-two howled over the berm and exploded near atank-recovery vehicle. It was the first of the thirty-seven rockets precedingthe attack of a reinforced Druse battalion. 
The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burnedby 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 monocleferry on the launchpad five hundred meters below. When the other birds rotatedso that the West Texas sun caught the cameras aimed from their bays, the longlenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools withwhich to record a test of laser propulsion.
The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments ofthe helicopters had been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubingand a view straight upward for the cameras and the men waiting for what wasabout to happen on the launchpad.
Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a projectscientist named Desmond, and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Armygreen and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that Kelly thoughtwould have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a gooddeal more nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreadingthem, their concern was less about the test itself than about him - the staffinvestigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the HouseSubcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he'd spentall his life surrounded by people who were worried as hell about what he wasgoing to do next. Occasionally, of course, people would have been smart toworry 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 waslive. He could not hear either the chatter of the Army pilots in the cockpitor 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 helmetswitches forward. The clop of the blades overhead was more a fact than animpediment to normal speech, but the intake rush of the twin-turbine powerplant created an ambiance through which Kelly could hear nothing but what theofficers chose to direct to him through the intercom circuitry.
"Someday," Kelly said aloud, "people are going to learn that the less they tryto hide, the less problem they have explaining things. But I don't expect thenotion 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, ashort-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 typewhich Kelly would have found his natural enemy even if they hadn't beenmilitary. 


"I'd been meaning to ask you, Dr. Desmond," said Kelly, rubbing from his eyesthe 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 thecolonels - it was uncertain which through the headphones - "that the test wasby 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'tit? That's what you mean, isn't it?" Desmond continued, snapping his headaround from the officers across the bay to Kelly seated on the portion of thebench closest to the fully-opened starboard hatch. "I certainly don't considerthat, 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 fromwhich to work. Even among the project's civilians, there were familiar - andnot wholly exclusive - categories of scientists and scientific politicians.
Desmond had seemed to be in the former category, but Kelly had found noopportunity to speak to him alone.
The public affairs officers were probably intended to smother honestdiscussion within the spotting helicopter the same way the administrators haddone on the ground. That plan was being frustrated by what was more than apersonality quirk: Desmond could not imagine that anything the militaryofficers said or wished was of any concern to him. It was not a matter oftheir rank or anyone's position in a formal organizational chart: ColonelsBoardman and Johnson were simply of another species.
"Yes, absolutely," agreed the project scientist as he shook his head in quickchops. "Nothing went wrong during air-breathing mode, nothing we could see inthe telemetry, of course - it'd have been nice to get the hardware back for ahands-on." 
"I think you'd better get your goggles in place now, Mr. Kelly," said the AirForce officer, sliding his own protective eyewear into place. The functionalthermoplastic communications helmets looked even sillier atop dress uniformsthan they did over the civilian clothes Desmond, and Kelly himself, wore. "Forsafety's sake, you know."
Kelly was anchored to a roof strap with his left hand by habit that freed hisright for the rifle he did not carry here, not on this mission or in thisworld where 'cut-throat' meant somebody might lose a job or a contract. ... Helooked at the PR flacks, missing part of what Desmond was saying because hismind was on things that were not the job of the Special Assistant toRepresentative Bianci.
The colonels straightened, one of them with a grimace of repulsion, andneither of them tried again to break in as the project scientist continued, "

-plating by the aluminum oxide particles we inject with the on-board hydrogento provide detonation nuclei during that portion of the pulsejet phase. Chuilin 
insists the plasma itself scavenges the chambers and that the fault mustbe the multilayer mirrors themselves despite the sapphire coating."
"But there's just as much likelihood of blast damage when you're expellingatmosphere 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 byRepresentative 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 Idon't think dropping the grain size as we've done will be - "
"Fifteen seconds," boomed a voice from the control center on the ground, andthis 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-airmissiles should center the lens on the test vehicle, despite any maneuvers thetarget or the helicopter itself carried out. Machinery could fail, however,
and the backup cameraman was determined that he would not fail - because hewas good, not because he was worried about his next efficiency report.
The monocle ferry was a disk only eighteen feet in diameter, and at itspresent slant distance of almost half a mile from the helicopters it wouldhave been easy to ignore were it not so nearly alone on a barren yellowlandscape. With Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral irrevocably surrendered to theUS Space Command when it was formed in 1971, the Army and Air Force had chosenFort Bliss as the site for their joint attempt to circumvent their new rival'scontrol of space weaponry.
Not only was the huge military reservation empty enough to make a catastrophicfailure harmless, but its historical background as the center of Army AirDefense Training lent a slight color to the services' claim that they were nottrying to develop a 'space weapon' of their own in competition with the SpaceCommand. 
Not that that would help them if Carlo Bianci decided the program should beaxed. The congressman from the Sixth District of Georgia had made a career - areligion, some critics claimed - of space defense, and it wasn't the sort ofthing he permitted interservice squabbling to screw up.
"Now, there may be a critical limit to grain size," Dr. Desmond was saying,
"below which none of the aluminum will form hot-spots on the mirror surface,
but at these energy levels it won't take more than a few molecules to - "
"Go," said the control center, and the landscape changed in intensity.
The beams from the six chemical laser lift stations in orbit above the launch 
site 'were in the near infrared at a wavelength of 1.8 microns. Not only waslight of that frequency invisible to the human eye, it was absorbed by thecornea instead of being focused by the lens to the potential injury of theretina. The wavelength was a relalively inefficient one for transmittingpower, especially through an atmosphere which would have passed a much higherpercentage of the ultraviolet. The five megajoules of energy involved in thetest, however, meant that even the least amount of reflection raised anunacceptable risk of blindness and worse if the operation were in the visiblespectrum or shorter.
"Go-o-o ..." whispered Desmond, probably unaware that he had spoken aloud. TomKelly leaned outward, bringing his shoulder and helmet into the dry, twenty-
knot airstream. 
The six-ton saucer quivered as it drank laser energy through the dozen windowsof segmented corundum which ringed its upper surface like the eyes of amonstrous insect. The central hub of the ferry contained the one-man cockpit,
empty now except for instrumentation, which did not rotate as the blastchambers around the saucer's rim began to expel air flash-heated within themby laser pulses.
Dust, as much a part of West Texas as it was of the hills above Beirut,
rippled in a huge, expanding doughnut from the concrete pad. It formed atranslucent bed for the ferry, a mirage landscape on which the saucer seemedto rest instead of lifting as planned. Then the dust was gone, a yellow-graycurtain across distant clumps of Spanish bayonet, and the ferry itself was alens rather than a disk as it shot past the helicopters circling at fivehundred meters. 
"All right!" blurted Kelly, jerking his eyes upward to track the monoclethrough the frame members and shimmering helicopter rotors against a sky madeamber by his goggles.
"Twenty-two g's!" babbled the project scientist happily. "Almost from thepoint of liftoff! There's no way Space Command's ground-lift barges can matchthat - or any chemically-fueled launcher." 


The chopper rocked between paired sonic booms, a severe one followed by animpact of lesser intensity. The monocle ferry had gone supersonic even beforeit reached the altitude of the helicopters, buffeting them with a shock wavereflected from the ground as well as the pulse streaming directly from thevehicle's surface. The roar of the ferry's exhaust followed a moment later,
attenuating rapidly like that of an aircraft making a low-level pass.
"All right," Kelly repeated, disregarding the colonels, who he knew would bebeaming at his enthusiasm. There was a hell of a lot more to this 'airdefense' program than the mere question of how well the hardware worked; buthardware that did work gave Kelly a glow of satisfaction with the human race,
and he didn't give a hoot in hell about who knew it. It was their lookout ifthey thought he was dumb enough to base his recommendations on that alone.
Their helicopter and the other two essed out of their slow starboard orbits,
banking a little to port to make it easier for the cameras and observers tofollow an object high enough above them to be effectively vertical. There weresupposed to be chase planes, T-38 trainers with more cameras, but Kelly couldsee no sign of them at the moment. The ferry itself was no more than asunstruck bead of amber. 
"Normally," Dr. Desmond explained, "we'd continue in air-breathing mode tothirty kilometers before switching to internal fuel. For the purpose of histest, however, we'll convert to hydrogen very shortly in order to - "
"God almighty!" cried Boardman, the Air Force flack, so far forgetting himselfthat he started to lurch to his feet against the motion of the helicopter.
"For the demonstration you do this?"
"We're modifying the test sequence in response to earlier results, of course,"
the scientist said, glancing over at the military man.
Kelly continued to look upward, squinting by habit, though the goggles madethat unnecessary. Boardman didn't matter. He was typical of people, notnecessarily stupid ones, who cling to a view of reality against availableevidence and their own presumable benefit. In this case, the public affairsofficer was obviously so certain that the ferry would blow up that hepreferred the test do nothing to advance the project rather than have Bianci'sman watch a catastrophic failure.
The bead of light which had almost disappeared detonated into a fireball whosecolor the goggles shifted into the green.
The cameraman had been only a nervous spectator while his unit's servostracked the ferry with inhuman skill. Now he squeezed the override trigger inthe right grip and began to manually follow the shower of fragments picked outby the sun as they tumbled and danced. His left hand made minute adjustmentsto the focal length of his lens, shortening it to keep as nearly as possiblethe whole drifting mass within his field of view.
"God damn it to hell," said Dr. Desmond very distinctly before he lowered hishead, took off his commo helmet, and slammed the helmet as hard as he couldagainst the aluminum deck of the helicopter. It bounced, but the length ofcommunications cord kept it from flying out the open hatch as it tried to do.
The two officers straightened their backs against the bulkhead withexpressions of disapproval and concern.
Kelly slid his goggles back up on the brow of his helmet, sneezing at theshock of direct sunlight again. He put a hand on the scientist's nearershoulder, squeezing hard enough to be noticed but without trying to raiseDesmond's head from where it was buried in his hands. " 'Sokay," the ex-
soldier muttered, part of him aware that the scientist couldn't possibly hearhim and another part equally sure that it wasn't okay, that even futuresuccess would not expunge this memory of something which mattered very muchvaporizing itself in the Texas sky.
"It's okay," Kelly said, repeating words he'd had to use too often before, thewords a lieutenant had spoken to him the fire-shot evening when Kelly held the 


torso of a friend who no longer had a head.
"Maybe switching to straight calcium carbonate'll do the trick," Kelly's lipswhispered while the PR men grimaced at the undirected fury in the veteran'seyes.
"Oh, good evening, Mr. Kelly," said the young woman at the front desk - asecond-year student out of Emory, if Kelly remembered correctly. She lookedflustered as usual when she spoke to the veteran. She wasn't the receptionist,
just an intern with a political science major getting some hands-onexperience; but the hour was late, and service to the public - to possibleconstituents - was absolutely the first staff priority in all ofRepresentative Bianci's offices.
"Marcelle, Marcelle," said Tom Kelly, stretching so that his overcoat gapedwidely and the attache case in his left hand lifted toward the ceiling. Hisblazer veed to either side of the button still fastening it, baring most ofthe shirt and tie beneath but continuing to hide the back of Kelly'swaistband. 
He'd been on planes that anybody with a bottle of gasoline could hijack to godknew where; he'd been walking on Capitol Hill at night, a place as dangerousas parts of Beirut that he'd patrolled in past years with flak jacket andautomatic rifle; and anyway, he was a little paranoid, a little crazy, he'dnever denied that. ... It was no problem him going armed unless others learnedabout it ... and with care, that would happen only when Tom Kelly was stillstanding and somebody else wasn't.
Kelly grinned at the little intern, broadly, as he had learned to do becausethe scar tissue above the left corner of his mouth turned a lesser smile into 
a snarling grimace. "If you don't start calling me Tom, m'dear, I'm going tohave to get formal with you. I won't be mistered by a first name, I've seentoo much of that . . . and I don't like 'mister.' Okay?"
All true; and besides, he was terrible on names, fucking terrible, andremembering them had been for the past three years the hardest part of doing agood job for an elected official. But Marcelle, heaven knew what her last namewas, colored and said, "I'm sorry, Tom, I'll really remember the next time."
Filing cabinets and free-standing mahogany bookshelves split the rear of thelarge room into a number of desk alcoves, many of them now equipped withterminals to the mainframe computer in the side office to the right. Anotherof the staff members, a pale man named Duerning, with a mind as sharp asKelly's own - and as different from the veteran's as Brooklyn is from Beirut was 
leaning over a desk, supporting himself with a palm on the paper-strewnwood. It was not until Carlo Bianci stood up beside Duerning, however, thatKelly realized that his boss was here rather than in the private office to theleft where the closed door had seemed to advertise his presence. Never assume.
. . . 
"That's all for tonight, Murray," said Representative Bianci, clapping hisaide on the shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie as natural as it was usefulto a politician. He stepped toward Kelly as Duerning, nodding his head,
shifted papers into a briefcase.
Carlo Bianci was Kelly's height and of the same squat build, though therepresentative was further from an ideal training weight than his aide and thedifference was more than the decade's gap between their ages. Nonetheless,
Bianci's thick gray hair was the only sign that the man might be fifty, and hewas in damned good shape for anyone in an office job. Kelly suspected thatBianci's paunch was really a reservoir like a camel's hump, enabling the manto survive under the strain of constant eighteen-hour days for the decade hehad been in Congress.
At the moment Bianci was wearing a blue jogging suit, which meant it was notexpectation of a roll-call vote which kept him in his office at ten PM, andsomething was sticking worry lines around the smile of greeting which 


accompanied his handshake for Kelly. "Wasn't sure you'd be in tonight, Tom,"
he said, and there was an undercurrent below those ordinary words. "Thoughtyou'd maybe want to get some rest."
"Well, don't count on me opening the office tomorrow morning," Kelly said,
expecting to be led toward the door of the congressman's private office.
Instead, Bianci guided him with a finger of his left hand into what wasbasically the workroom of the suite in the Old House Office Building, a bullpen where the mainframe, the coffeepot, and a crowd of desks and files wouldnot normally be seen by constituents. "I'm on El Paso time and anyway, Ialways need to wind down awhile after I get off a plane. Figured I'd key in myreport if you weren't around for a verbal debrief tonight."
"Well, how was the demonstration?" Bianci asked. He leaned back against a deskwhose legs squealed slightly on the hardwood as they accepted the thrust.
"It really was a test," Kelly said, frowning as he made the final decisionsabout what to present to his employer, "and I guess the short answer is thatthere's bits of graphite composite and synthetic sapphire scattered all overWest Texas and New Mexico." 
"Sounds like I was right six months ago," said the congressman, with a nod.
"Overripe for the ax, exactly the sort of boondoggle that weakens the countryin the name of defending it."
"That's the hell of it, sir," Kelly said with a deeper frown, the honorificgiven by habitual courtesy to a man he felt deserved it. "Like you say,
typical interservice wrangling. And you bet, the ferry went off like a bomb,
she did that. But - " He shrugged out of his overcoat, his eyes concentratingon that for a moment while his mind raced with the real problem. When helooked up again, it was to say, "Damned if I don't think they've got somethinguseful there. Maybe useful, at any rate."
" 'Hard-nosed Investigator Suckered by Military'?" said Bianci, quotes in hisvoice and enough smile on his lips to make the words a joke rather than aserious question.
"Yeah," said Kelly, sitting straddled on a chair across the narrow aisle fromhis employer, the wooden chair back a pattern of bars before him, "it bothersthe hell outa me to believe anything I hear from the Air Force. I remember - "
He looked up grinning, because it hadn't happened to him and this long afterthe fact it wouldn't have mattered anyway. "I remember," he said, rubbing hisscalp with a broad hand whose back was itself covered with curling black hair,
"the Skybolt missile that was gonna make Russki air defense obsolete. Hang 'emunder the wings of B-52's and launch from maybe a thousand miles out, beyondthe interceptors and the surface to air missiles. ..."
He was tired and wired and there were too many memories whispering through hisbrain. 'B-52' had called up transparent images, unwanted as all of that breedwere unwanted except in the very blackest moods. The Anti-Lebanon Mountainswere lighting up thirty clicks to the east with a quivering brilliance, whiteto almost blue and hard as an assassin's eyes: seven-hundred-and-fifty-poundbombs, over a thousand of them, dropping out of the stratosphere in a patterna kilometer wide and-as long as the highway from Kelly's family home to thenearest town. The flashes could be seen for half a minute before the shock 
waves began to be heard at Kelly's firebase; but even at that distance, theblasts were too loud to speak over.
"Damn, that was a long time back," Kelly muttered aloud, shaking his head toclear it, and Representative Bianci nodded in agreement with what he thoughthe had heard, part of a story about a failed missile. "Early sixties, yes?" hesaid aloud, again giving Kelly the impression that he was being softened upfor something on an agenda the congressman had not yet broached.
"Oh, right," the younger man said with an engaging smile to cover anembarrassment known only to him. He couldn't lose it with Carlo, couldn't havehis mind ricocheting off on its own paths in front of his boss. Kelly and 


Representative Bianci were as close to being friends as either's temperamentallowed, and his support - what he told Kelly he had done, and what the aideknew from the result he must have done - had saved the veteran from the verybad time he'd earned by the method of his separation from the NationalSecurity Agency. But Carlo couldn't afford to associate with a psycho, a four-
plus crazy like some people already said Tom Kelly was.
"Right, they tested Skybolt and they tested it, the Air Force did," the aidecontinued. "Kept reporting successes and partial successes - to the Brits,
too, mind, the British government was basing its whole defense policy onSkybolt - right down to the time the Air Force canceled the program becausethey never once had gotten the thing to work right."
Kelly leaned back, flexing his big arms against the wood of the chair theygripped. "Turned out on one of those 'partial successes,' they'd detached themissile from the bomber carrying it, and it hadn't ignited, hadn't doneanything but drop a couple miles and put a new crater in the desert. S'far asanybody could tell, the only thing the fly boys had tested successfully wasthe law of gravity, and that continued to perform up to specs."
"Which is why you're on my staff, Tom," said Bianci after an easy chuckle.
"But you don't think the monocle ferry's another Skybolt?"
Kelly sighed and knuckled his eyes, relaxed again now that he was back in thepresent. "Well, Hughes isn't prime contractor," he said, "that's one thing tothe good."
He opened his eyes and looked up to meet the congressman's. Kelly was calm,
now, and his subconscious had organized his data into a personal version oftruth, the most he had ever tried to achieve. "Look, sir," he said, "they'vegot a glitch in the hydrogen pulsejet mode they need from a hundred thousandfeet to, say, thirty miles. Probably soluble, but on this sort of thing youwon't get guarantees from anybody you'd trust to tell the truth about theweather outside." 
The aide spread his hands, palms down to either side of the chair, forming abase layer for the next edifice of facts. Bianci's eyes blinked unwilled fromKelly's face to the pinkish burn scars on both wrists. The man himself hadwhen asked muttered, "Just a kerosene fire, price of bein' young and dumb,"
but the file Bianci had read carefully before he'd hired Tom Kelly spoke alsoof the helicopter and the three men dragged from the wreckage by Sergeant E-5Kelly, who had ignored the facts that one of the men was dead already and thatthe ruptured fuel tank was likely to blow at any instant.
"If they do get that one cured," Kelly continued, absorbed in what he wassaying, "then sure, there's a thousand other things that can go unfixablywrong, all along the line - but that's technology, not this project alone, andthe one guy out there in El Paso willing to talk gave me a good feeling. Don'tthink he'd be workin' on a boondoggle. And okay, that's my gut and I'm not inthe insurance business either." 
He looked at the print on the wall before him, then added, "But I think itmight work. And I think it might be nice to have an alternative to Fortress."
"Which works very well," said the congressman. The only sign that his ownemotional temperature had risen was the way his fingers, playing with themodem beside him on the desk, stilled. Belief in space-based defense, asembodied in Fortress, had more than any other single factor brought CarloBianci into politics.
The framed print on the wall behind Bianci was from the original designstudies on Fortress. The artist had chosen to make the doughnut of shieldingmaterial look smooth and metallic. In fact the visible outer surface was lumpyand irregular, chunks of slag spit into Earth orbit by the mass driver at theAmerican lunar base and fused there into armor for Fortress. 
The space station itself was a dumbbell spinning within the doughnut. Livingquarters for the crews were in the lobes, where centrifugal force 


counterfeited gravity, but the real work of Fortress was done in themotionless spherical hub. A great-winged ferry, launched like an aircraft froma Space Command base in Florida or California, was shown docking at the'north' pole - the axis from which the station's direction of rotation wascounterclockwise. 
The array of nuclear weapons depending from the south pole had been left outof the painting. Three thousand H-bombs, each with its separate reentryvehicle, would have been too nightmarish for even the most hawkish of voters.
That was often the case with the truth. 
Mounted on the shielding were multi-tube rocket batteries intended to smashany warhead that came close enough to Fortress to do harm. The primarydefenses were out of the scale of the picture, however, the constellation ofX-ray lasers which orbited with the space station. Each was a small nuclearweapon which, when triggered, sent in the moment of its dissolution up to ahundred and forty-four simultaneous pulses, each capable of destroying anymissile or warhead which had risen above the blanket of the atmosphere.
"It's everything President Kennedy dreamed of," Kelly agreed, aware of what hewas saying and too tired to more than wonder why he was now voicing an opinionthat could cost him a job he needed. "An orbital arsenal defended by X-raylasers and armored with lunar slag that can stop the beam weapons which thelasers can't." 
Bianci nodded, both because he agreed and because he wanted to be able toagree with his aide on a matter of such emotional importance to him. "A pointin vacuum," he said in a voice that carried a touch of courtliness with nosign of accent from his Italian grandparents, "that can be defended as regionssmothered in an atmosphere can't be. No matter how many missiles the Russiansbuild, no matter how accurate they become, they can't pierce the defenses ofFortress and knock out our retaliatory capability - as they could with missilesilos on Earth." 
"And could with submarine launchers," Kelly said, nodding in the same rhythmas his employer, "if they can find the subs - which we can't prove they won'tbe able to do tomorrow with hardware no more unlikely than radar would'veseemed fifty years ago."
"Then what's the problem with Fortress?" said Bianci, relaxing.
"Fortress is the ultimate offensive weapon," Kelly said softly, straighteninghis fingers and looking at the backs of his hands. Philosophy wasn't somethinghe really got upset about, and that's all they were discussing here. If spaceweaponry ever became more than a matter of philosophy, all the survivors weregoing to get real upset. . . . "Well, nothing's ultimate, say the 'here-andnow 
maximum' offensive weapon."
"Defensive weapon in our hands, of course," the representative said, more incorrection than as part of an expected argument. His buttocks shifted enoughthat the desk scraped beneath him.
"Boss," said Tom Kelly, standing and swinging the solid chair to the siderather than stepping around it, "it's defensive because the Reds - or whoeverthe hell - know that if they attack us, Fortress'll blast 'em back to theNeolithic - with bone cancer. You think nobody'd do that, not a risk but aguarantee. ..."
The squat aide had taken two absentminded steps deeper into the bull pen. Nowhe turned and smiled as he faced his employer. "And I 'spect you're right,
Carlo, for the politicians. But I've met folks who weren't going to back offwhatever happened to them or behind 'em." He sighed, then added, "Hell, boss.
On bad days I've been that sorta folks."
Congressman Bianci looked at his subordinate and, as if he had no inkling ofwhat had just been admitted, said, "Then we can agree that we're safe so longas the politicians control the Kremlin - as they have at least since Rasputindied" - Kelly chuckled - "and that was true even under Stalin." 


"Oh, hell, yes, Carlo," agreed Kelly easily and honestly. "Fortress is themost practical road to peace - bottom line peace - that anybody's come up withyet." He grinned in a way that would have been boyish except for the lines inand on his face. "There's just a certain beauty to a fleet of mirrors upthere" - he gestured toward the ceiling and beyond with his trigger finger "
reflecting laser beams into however many warheads're coming over."
"We'll think about it," said Bianci, straightening onto his feet again.
"Specifically, you'll have me a report in sixty days on the probable result ofmoving the project to Space Command. If we do decide to save it, there's nopoint in making a 'logical' change that results in a balls-up."
Well, he was still on the payroll, thought Tom Kelly as he nodded and said,
"Yeah, like transferring ground-support aviation from the Army that needs itto the Air Force that isn't interested in anything yucky like mud and Russiantanks." 
The veteran stretched, figuring that tomorrow was time aplenty for him towrite up the report since he'd given Carlo the core of it verbally. "Well,
boss," he said And 
Representative Bianci said, toward a far corner of the room, "There aretwo people who said they'd like to talk to you today, Tom."
"My goodness, two of 'em?" Kelly straightened deliberately from his back-
arched posture and swept the room with his eyes: nobody but the two of them.
He'd have heard breathing or motion if a team were hidden behind filingcabinets and privacy panels. . . . "What'd they want to talk about, Carlo?"
Bianci was not deceived by his aide's voice, though it was as smooth as thelockwork of a fine revolver slipping to full cock. For all that, nothing inthe congressman's own background permitted him to translate data from Kelly'sfile into the shock and flame of reality. "Not Fortress, I believe, Tom," saidBianci. "Not - " He looked up with the appearance of candor, a politician'slook, but possibly real this time. "This appears to be a new development ofsome sort on which they think you can be of some help."
Everything Tom Kelly saw or heard stood out from its background for the lengthof time he focused on it. Representative Bianci was a figure with only a blurbehind him - unless something should have moved in the periphery of Kelly'svision - as he licked his lips and continued, "This isn't in the purview ofyour employment with me, Tom. But it would be a personal favor to me if youagreed to talk to them."
"Sure, boss, I understand," said Kelly, and he did understand. Bianci had beentoo smart to give him an order regarding a subject on which Kelly took ordersfrom no one; and the kind of pressure that could be exerted on an electedofficial, even a powerful one, even an honorable man like Carlo Bianci, whoseeyes had been pretty well open when he hired a man who'd been training Kurdishguerrillas for the National Security Agency before he separated on very badterms indeed. . . . "Where do they want to see me? Langley? Meade?"
"I told them," said the congressman with the stumbling ennuciation of a manthinking of the result of what he was saying rather than the specific wordshis tongue tried to form, "that I'd relay their message, and that they werewelcome to wait in my private office, though I had no reason to expect you intonight." Bianci smiled. "I gather they had a better notion of your schedulethan I did." 
"Better'n both of us, I guess," Kelly said, unbuttoning his sportcoat andstretching again, bending forward at the waist and raising his hands lockedbehind his back. It was the position of a man being lifted to the ceiling inthe cheap medieval substitute for the rack. The position loosened the greatmuscles of his shoulders - tension had locked them as tight as the cableswinching in a whale for flensing.
If you watch a man carefully over a period of time, you do know him betterthan he knows himself, because the habitual activities that never reach his 


conscious mind stand out as statistical peaks in the summary of his behavior.
Of course Tom Kelly would check in at Bianci's office, because he always didafter a tour - though there was no necessity to do so, and though Kellyhimself thought he was flipping a mental coin in the airport to determinewhether he went to his Arlington apartment or the office in the LongworthBuilding.
"Well," said Kelly, massaging first his left hand with his right, thenreversing the activity, "if they've been waiting this long, I guess it's onlypolite to look in on 'em."
"You don't have to, you know." The congressman stood up faster than he hadintended, his muscles reacting sharply to the charged atmosphere. "Believe me,
Tom, that wasn't an order."
The veteran clapped Bianci on the shoulder with his left hand while the rightclenched and unclenched in its own set of unconscious loosening exercises. "Nosweat, boss," Kelly said. "You're a good enough friend to ask me a biggerfavor'n that." He grinned; and though he saw his employer cringe away from theexpression, Kelly didn't broaden the grin into something that might have beensocially acceptable.
The two men walked into the front office, moving with tight, precise steps andresolutely looking at desks instead of each other. The door to the privateoffice was covered in dark blue leather tacked down by brass studs corroded toa dull similarity. The chemicals used to tan leather were hard on brass, soyou should never keep cartridges in leather belt loops for any length of time. 
... 
Wrong thing to think about.
"Carlo," said Tom Kelly as they stepped around the receptionist's desk.
Everyone was gone from the office but the pair of them and whoever was beyondthe blue door. "I can lock up. Probably just as well if you went home and gotsome sleep yourself."
"I can go in with you, you know," Bianci said, pausing and touching Kelly tobring the younger man's eyes to meet his.
There was sound of a sort, maybe voices, coming from the inner office. Kellylaughed, a barking sound because of the circumstances, but a gesture of realamusement nonetheless. "With all due respect, boss," he said, "I doubt you'recleared for whatever it is. Of course" - the feral grin came back and allhumor fled - "the last time I checked, I had a negative security clearance, soit's hard to tell. ..." 
He gripped the congressman by both shoulders, continuing to hold their eyeslocked. "Go on home, Carlo; it can't be too heavy if they only came with twoof 'em," Kelly said. A part of him hated the operative portion of his mind forthe care with which it examined Bianci's face, looking for a reaction to "onlytwo of them" that would imply there was a full team behind the leather door.
Nothing of the sort. "Right, Tom," said Representative Bianci as he strode outof his office. He added over his shoulder, "And thanks. You know I appreciateit." 
Everybody's got a handle, thought Kelly as he closed and locked the outer doorbehind his employer. Carlo had fewer than most; but everybody's got thingsthey don't want to lose if somebody thinks it's worthwhile to dig and to push.
Kelly shrugged again to loosen the cling of his jacket. Then he opened thedoor to the private office, using his left hand.
The sound within the office came from the television monitor facing Kellyabove the desk, rather than the man and woman kitty-corner to it at the farend of the room. Gunfire, flattened and compressed by the signal, rasped fromthe set for a moment before the waiting man touched the remote control of thevideocassette recorder. Sound and picture faded almost instantly, but TomKelly's mind was bright with echoes and afterimages.
The man strode forward with his hand out and a professional smile on his face. 


He was a good-looking fellow in his early thirties, too young for hisbeefiness to become real fat. The dark blond hair was nicely styled, and thecotton shirt beneath his pin-striped three-piece suit had probably cost asmuch as Kelly had spent on his own sportcoat. The fellow stood six feet threeinches, with shoulders to match - which made them as broad as Kelly's. "Gladto see you at last, Mr. Kelly," he said. "I'm Doug Blakeley, and this isElaine Tuttle." 
"Right," said Kelly as he accepted the other's hand, "and I'm John PatrickMonaghan." That was the cover name he'd been issued when he trained Kurdishguerrillas outside Diyarbakir in another life. He was very ready for whatwould come next, might as well get it over with, he'd warned them. . . .
"Doug!" said the woman very sharply. Her companion relaxed the hand he hadbeen tensing to crush that of Tom Kelly, to prove that he was tougher thanthis aging cowboy whose file he had read. Doug's handshake became just that,
perfunctory and as professional as his smile or the names he had given.
Kelly grinned at the woman as he released Doug's hand. He knew the type wellenough, because a reputation like Kelly's had made him a frequent target forboys of various ages who needed to prove their manhood. Usually there had beenconstraints on Kelly's own response: discipline, the mission, or a sheerdesire for self-preservation.
This time he'd been pretty sure he had nothing to lose. He had no doubt thatthe grip in his own right hand, his pistol hand, could have matched any stressDoug put on it. It wouldn't have stopped there, however, within the civilizednorms of the tennis club and the smoking room. It would have stopped whenKelly grabbed a left handful of Doug's crotch and used the double grip toswing the bigger man face-first against the mahogany door.
Elaine smiled back at Kelly tightly, with the irritation of a woman who knewthat boys would be boys but who didn't in the least like the way such anticsscrewed up business. She was five four and somewhat fuller in the face than inthe trim body beneath it. Her hair was short and as black as Kelly's own,
surprisingly black'unless she dyed it or was much younger than the fortysuggested by the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes. It was hard to tellwith women's clothing, but Kelly suspected she could buy a pretty solid usedcar for what she had in her linen blouse, skirt, and sequined jacket.
Not that she'd even have considered buying a used car.
And the lady was smart, smart enough to defuse a situation her companiondidn't recognize and Kelly had been willing to play out just to end thewaiting.
"We aren't here because of a problem with you, Mr. Kelly," she said in a clearcontralto. There was a ring on the third finger of her right hand, a goldwedding band or something with the setting revolved toward her palm.
"Say, I'm really glad to hear that," said Kelly in a voice louder than he hadfirst intended. There was a catch in his throat that he had to clear with 
volume inappropriate save as an indicator of how wired he was. Elaine alreadyknew that, that was obvious, and Doug's concern seemed to be focused solely onstriking a properly macho pose now that the woman had startled him out oftesting the veteran.
Kelly took the VCR's controller as the bigger man stepped back. Doug lookedsurprised, but he did not object as Kelly switched the unit on again and beganto rewind the tape.
There was an ordinary television in the lounge area, with the refrigerator andcoffeepot, but the set here in Bianci's office had been unhooked from thebuilding's cable system after Kelly had come on board. Kelly'd explained howeasily the set could be used to monitor conversations within the room; and,
when nobody believed him, had hooked an in-line bug to the cable lead outsidethe office and used the TV speaker itself to pick up sounds in place of aplanted microphone. The television had immediately been replaced by a VCR and 


screen without antenna connections. Nobody in the office questioned Kelly'sjudgment about security again.
The videotape clicked to a stop and the screen's neutral pattern coalesced toa picture as Kelly pushed the Play switch. "You've got the ABC version," hesaid in a voice so distant in his own mind that he could not be sure he was 
speaking aloud. "I always thought that was the best one, too, what with thecomputer enhancement."
The tape had the stutter and low resolution to be expected from an originalmade with a hand-held minicam from the deck of a sixty-ton torpedo boat. Theship filling the frame looked to be an ordinary cargo vessel of moderate size,
unusual only in lacking the swatches of rust that stain vessels if even inchesof their steel sides are flaked open to salt water. The antenna arrays werethere if you knew what to look for; but even to an expert, they tended to bedisguised by the multiple booms and gantries dating from the period before theUSS White Plains had been converted from an attack cargo ship into a technicalresearch ship.
The water boiled just forward of the squared superstructure amidships. Kellyhad turned down the audio track, but network engineers had laid a flashingviolet arrow onto the picture as they magnified and outlined in complementaryyellow the gap blown in the White Plains' hull by the torpedo launched fromtwo hundred yards away. The man with the camera had not started filming untilmoments after the explosion, even as the shock waves pounded his own vessel.
The engineers isolated on another portion of what was originally a panoramashot with a short-focal-length lens. The bow, with its designator TR4,
expanded grainily on the screen, flecks of random phosphor blurring thesharpness somewhat as raster lines were added in processing between thoseswept on the videotape original. The amidships three-inch gun installationshad been stripped from the White Plains to make room for additional antennaswhen she was converted to her new mission, but one twin turret on the foredeckhad remained. 
The guns pointed skyward, their outlines slightly jagged from the computerenhancement. Somebody had told Kelly that three-inch seventy-caliber gunsshould always be mounted in pairs so that there might be one in operatingcondition when the need arose. In the case of the White Plains, both tubes hadjammed at the first shots at the fighters diving to strafe the vessel. Thecrew had continued to traverse the weapons in a desperate attempt to bluff theattackers, however. Now a helicopter, a big Super Frelon. made a leisurelypass at mast level to fire rockets point-blank into the gun turret. Flashes ofwhite, then orange as ammunition detonated in a secondary explosion, threwbits of men and plating skyward.
The engineers expanded the helicopter again in freeze-frame. This time thearrow and highlight were on the national insignia above the flotation andlanding-gear spon-son of the Super Frelon: the six-pointed star of the IsraeliAir Force. 
"Hard to tell," said Tom Kelly in a voice that did not tremble the way hishands did, forcing him to hold the VCR controller against his left leg whilehis right palm dried itself fiercely on his slacks, "whether it was that scenethat bothered people most, or . . ."
The screen flashed back to a full shot of the White Plains, listing so thatthe hole ripped by the torpedo was already beneath the angry surface of thewater. A lifeboat, white against the smooth gray hull, was being lowered fromthe davits amidships. There were about a dozen sailors in it, far fewer thanits capacity, but somebody had decided to launch it before the ship's distressmade that impossible.
Tom Kelly aimed the controller with a hand which no longer shook, and thumbedup the sound. The picture jumped, the cameraman flinching at the muzzle blastsof the 20 mm cannon near where he was standing. Shells from the automatic 


cannon burst against the flank of the White Plains, then traced from stern toamidships across the swaying lifeboat. The lifeboat's bow plunged as thesailor there on the winch lowered abruptly in a vain attempt to avoid thegunfire. His companion on the stern winch had leaped into the sea an instantbefore the shells chewed his position into flying splinters and the blacksmoke of bursting charges.
The gunfire paused and the video camera picked up the sound of men shouting onthe deck of the torpedo boat, though the words were indistinct. Then theautomatic cannon opened up again, its rate of fire deliberate enough that thecrack of shells bursting could be heard as counterpoint to the louder, deeper,
muzzle blasts. The bow of the lifeboat exploded just as it touched the waterfoaming into the torpedo wound. Even without enhancement, one could see thesailor's bare arms fling themselves wide as a white flash hid his torso.
The picture paused a moment later in a crackle of colored static: the Israelicameraman had either run out of tape or stopped recording of his own volition.
The ABC engineers had not ended there, however. As Kelly dialed off the audioagain, the final picture flashed back onto the screen. A glowing outlineexpanded and drew with it the image of the man in the bow of the tiltinglifeboat, his hands bracing him upright on the lowering tackle.
In jerky slow motion, his chest exploded and his body, hurled backward,
rebounded from the steel hull. At the final degree of processed magnification,
nothing could be seen of the American's face but a white blur and the blotchthat was his open mouth. The hull behind him was red with the spray of all theblood in his chest cavity.
". . . or maybe," said Tom Kelly as he switched off the picture, "it was thatone that caused most of the flap after it was shown on the evening news."
"Which one bothered you, Mr. Kelly?" said Elaine, one of the figures in hisperipheral vision, ignored by the part of Kelly's mind that was now incontrol. . . . Ignored unless they moved suddenly, in which case he would killthem - in this moment he would kill them, and the release would be worth anyregrets he had afterward.
"On principle," said Kelly in a voice like a pond of melt water, still anddeep and very cold, "it all bothered me. If Israel had a problem with the waywe pulled out of the Lebanon so sudden, that's fine - I understand that,
getting mad about being left in the lurch. But you don't shoot up an Americanspy ship off your coast just because you're pissed at people in Washington.
None of the poor bastards on the White Plains were behind the bugout fromLebanon." 
Kelly tried to set the controller on top of Congressman Bianci's desk, but hisfingers slipped and the unit thumped instead to the blue-carpeted floor. Theveteran's whole body shuddered and the room sprang into focus again.
"Shouldn't do that to me," said Kelly as he kneaded his cheeks and foreheadwith both hands. "Really shouldn't."
His voice had changed back to its usual lilting tenor as he went on, "If youmean personally, Danny Pacheco was in the SIGINT Tank in the midships hold,
right where the torpedo hit. Guess he was one of the fifty or so who drownedthere before they knew what was going on. And yeah, he was a good enoughfriend that it bothered me. But that's already in the file, I guess."
"You had good reason to hate the Israelis, Mr. Kelly," said the woman, givinga hitch to her skirt as she leaned her hips against the ceiling-heightbookcase behind her. There was a tiny purse in her left hand, the gold-platedclasps an inch open. If she was smart enough to have that good a grasp of thesituation, then she was smart enough to know that she had no real chance toclear the gun in her purse in a crisis - unless she planned to preempt Kelly.
The veteran laughed, briefly euphoric with the catharsis of having watched theattack on the White Plains for the first time since the slaughter came to itstrue climax in a military court in Jerusalem. "I don't hate anybody," he said. 


"Nobody in the world."
"You hated them enough," retorted Doug, "that you left your post in Turkey andspent two months tracking down that tape or something like it."
Kelly looked at the other man, whose present splay-footed stance suggeste'dkarate training. Elaine was playing with her subject, a tense game because ofKelly's emotional charge, but all the better thereby to flesh skeletal filedata into a man. Doug, on the other hand, was genuinely belligerent instead ofprofessionally playing the bad cop in an interrogation routine. That was fine.
. . . 
"When I brought my boys back to Diyarbakir," Tom Kelly said in a soft voiceand with a smile that gouged, "that was the third time I'd been over the linein Iraq, officially - "
Doug said nothing, though the pause dared him to speak. The Tasking Order hadspecifically forbidden American citizens to accompany into Iraq the guerrillasthey trained at Turkish bases.
"When I came back, I had maybe a year of leave I'd never got around to taking.
If I needed some time off, then I had it coming. And - "
"That doesn't - " started Doug.
"And don't give me any crap about leaving my post, the way NSA pulled the plugon the Kurds as soon as Iraq kicked out its Soviet techs," snarled Kelly in avoice like machineguns firing.
"It's the Kurds we're here to discuss with you, Mr. Kelly," said Elaine,
reaching out with her right hand to stroke Doug's biceps and remind him of whoand where he was. "Nobody cares that you released copies of that tape to themedia three years ago."
"The Ford Commission came to no decision as to how that tape got into thehands of the press," Kelly corrected, rubbing his eyes and forehead again butwith only his left hand, his eyes winking at the others through the gapsbetween his fingers.
"We're not here to trick you into an admission," said the woman in a sharpertone than any she had used earlier this night. "I've told you, it doesn'tmatter." 
"Bullshit," said the veteran, the word soft and savage.
He was as wired as he had been the moment he walked into the room. 
They were lying to him the way they had lied so often in the past, and throughthe flashes and roar of that past in his memory Tom Kelly shouted, "I told 'emI'd leave 'em alone if they'd do the same! I wasn't gonna talk to anybody, Iwasn't gonna claim a fucking pension, and if they thought the answer was achemical debriefing, then the team they sent to take me better be ready toplay for keeps. Are you ready? Are you ready, sonny?"
"The material at the head of that tape," said the other man in confusion andbureaucratic concern, a turnabout so unexpected that it penetrated Kelly'sfury as the woman's voice could not have done at this moment, "was simply toexplain to third parties why we were bringing it to you, Mr. Kelly. Ifsomething happened on the way, that is. The real information's further back onthe tape."
"Jesus," said Tom Kelly, the rage draining from him like blood from a rupturedspleen and leaving him flaccid. "Jesus."
"We understand that your fuse is short, Mr. Kelly," said Elaine. "We have nointention of lighting it, none whatever." She snapped her purse closed and setit deliberately on a bookshelf before she stepped over to the VCR.
"Nobody cares about the - incident, do they?" said Kelly, slumping backagainst the door and almost wishing there were a chair in arm's reach for himto sit on. "Well, that's a relief."
He looked around the office, taking stock as the VCR whirred to eject the tapeinto Elaine's hand. The only thing that didn't belong was the attache caselying on Bianci's otherwise orderly desk. Dull black and unremarkable at first 


glance, the case was in fact a Halliburton - forged from T-6061 aluminum likethe plating of an armored personnel carrier. The three-rotor combination lockhidden under the carrying handle was not impossible to defeat, and the sidescould be opened with a cutting torch or the right saw - but anything of thatsort would take time, and you could park a car on the case without evendisturbing the watertight seal.
"It's old news," Doug was saying. "Do you care that somebody blew away thesecretary of defense in Dallas in '63? It's like that."
"Like I say, glad to hear it," the veteran said.
It wasn't that he believed Doug in any absolute sense. Public release of theWhite Plains footage had squeezed the US government to take action against theState of Israel in ways that the highest levels had no wish to do onceimmediate tempers had cooled. A matter that had subsided into legal wranglingand the bland lies of politicians on both sides exploded into popular anger,
spearheaded by members of Congress and the Senate to whom the massacre ofAmerican servicemen was not to be ignored as a matter of Middle Easternpolicy.
There had been an immediate cutoff of aid to Israel - the munitions which fed 
the war in Lebanon to which US policy had abandoned Israeli troops, and thehard currency which alone kept afloat an economy which could not support itsown welfare state, much less a protracted war. The aid had been resumed onlyafter the Israeli minister of defense had resigned and thirty-seven servingmembers of the armed forces were given prison sentences ranging from two yearsto life after a public trial humiliating to the State which tried them.
"They buried Danny at Arlington," said the veteran inconsequently. "Seemed tomake his widow happy enough. Me, I always figured that I'd want somethingbesides a stone if it happened to me. ..."
There were a lot of folks in both governments and, less formally, in Shin Bet

-the Israeli department of security - who weren't in the least pleased withTom Kelly since copies of the tape showed up in newsrooms across the US andWestern Europe. There'd been one in the hands of TASS besides, just in casesomebody got the idea of trying a really grandiose coverup. For sure, nothingDoug Blakeley had to say was official policy above a certain level - but thebig blond wasn't a good enough actor to be lying about his mission, his andElaine's. 
The woman took from the Halliburton what looked like a small alien wrench and 
stuck it into a curved slot on the underside of the tape she had just ejected.
The narrow slot didn't, when Kelly thought about it, look like anything he'dseen on a tape cassette before. Neither did it look particularly remarkable,
however, even when Elaine clicked something clearly nonstandard into a detentat the farther end of the arc, then removed the wrench.
"Now it explodes?" the veteran asked, making it a joke instead of a flatquestion so that the pair of them wouldn't gain points if they chose to ignorehim. 
"There's a magnet inside the cassette," Elaine said as she reinserted the tapein the VCR. "The tape pauses at the end of the news segment. If anybody triedto play it beyond that point without locking the magnet out of the way, they'dget hash." She poked Play, picked up the remote control which still lay on thecarpet, and stepped back close to Kelly as the tape advanced with a hiss anddiagonals of white static across the screen.
"Look, you ought to understand," said Kelly with his eyes on the television,
"the people in Israeli service who - got that tape to the guy who released it.
It wasn't just personal payoffs, and it wasn't in-house politics alone,
either. There were some people who thought shooting allies in lifeboats was abad idea . . . and thought getting away with it once was an even worse one."
"That really doesn't concern us, Mr. Kelly," Elaine said flatly, and themurmur of empty tape gave way to a segment recorded without an audio track. 

"Sonoabitch," muttered Kelly, for the location was unmistakable to him despitethe poor quality of the picture. The segment had been shot with a hand-heldminicam, like the footage of the White Plains before, but the earlier portionhad at least been exposed in the bright sunlight of a Mediterranean afternoon.
This scene had been recorded at night in the angle of massive wallsilluminated by car headlights, while drizzle flicked the beams and wobbledacross the lens itself. 
But there was no other stretch of fortification comparable to that on thescreen save for the Great Wall of China. Kelly had trained Kurds for two yearsat Diyarbakir. He could recognize the walls of the great Roman fortress evenat a glance.
"Corner by where the Turistik meets Gazi Street," the veteran said aloud, aguess rather than an identification - the sort of thing he did to keep peopleoff-balance about what he knew or might know; the sort of thing he did when hewas nervous and off-balance himself. 
The walls of black basalt were gleaming and lightstruck where their wet lowersurfaces were illuminated; the twenty feet above the quivering headlights wasonly a dark mass indistinguishable from the rain-sodden sky as the cameramanwalked forward and jiggled the point of view.
Close to the wall was a clump of figures in dark overcoats, who shifted awayabruptly, backs turned to the approaching camera.
"Who filmed this?" asked Kelly, looking up at the woman who watched him whileher companion seemed mesmerized by the television itself. "And when?"
"It was taken three days ago," Elaine said, nodding toward the screen toreturn the subject's attention to where it belonged. "And officially, everyoneat the site is a member of Turkish Military Intelligence."
There were two bodies on the ground near where the men in overcoats had beenstanding. The wall sloped upward at a noticeable angle, providing a broad baseof support for the eight-foot thick battlements at the top.
"Didn't think relations between us and MIT had been so close since Ecevit was 
elected Prime Minister," the veteran said, pumping them because it had alwaysbeen his job to gather information.
"Watch the screen, please," the woman said as Doug snorted and said, "Noproblem. Third Army Command, old buddy. No problem at all."
Elaine paused the tape and gave her companion a hard look. Kelly faced thetelevision and grinned, amused at the two others and amused at himself - forgathering data on a situation that didn't concern him and which he wouldn'tallow to concern him, no matter what.
The tape resumed. One of the cars must have been driven forward as thecameraman walked up to the bodies, because his shadow and those of some otherswho had scurried out of the scene were thrown crazily across the basalt wall.
The point of view moved even closer, shifting out of focus, then sharpeningagain as the cameraman adjusted.
The screen steadied on a head-and-torso view of a man facedown in a puddlewith one arm flung forward. He wore a dark blue coat and a leather cap whichhad skewed when he hit the ground. A gloved hand on an arm in a blacktrenchcoat reached from out of frame, removing the cap and lifting thedripping, bearded face into full view of the camera.
"Son of a bitch," Kelly repeated, softly but very distinctly this time.
"Mohammed Ayyubi. He was one of my section leaders back, back when I wasworkin' there and points south. ... He was from the district himself."
"Ayyubi has been living in Istanbul for the past three years," Elaine saidcoolly, watching the screen to keep Kelly's attention on it. "Recently hebegan to travel extensively in Central Europe."
The hand holding the Kurd to the camera dropped him, letting his face splashback onto the puddled stone. It didn't matter to Mohammed, whose eyes wouldnever blink again until somebody thumbed the lids down over the glazed pupils; 


but Kelly's own body grew very still for an instant.
"He had a brother in Istanbul," the veteran said softly. "Think I met himthere once. ..." When the brother came to see Mohammed in a base hospital soexpertly staffed that all but one of the Kurd's fingers had been saved despitethe ten days since they were mangled.
"Ahmed, yes," said the woman as the cameraman walked his point of view over tothe other body. The same hand and arm reached into the frame to angle thevictim's face toward the headlights.
Kelly glanced from the arm's wristwatch, a momentary black smear on the screenbefore the cuff of the overcoat hid it again, to the Omega which Doug wore.
The quality of the data proved nothing but possibility, and the possibilitieswere endless. ... "I don't know that one," said Kelly to the television.
"No, you sure don't," said Doug, and there was more in his voice than mereagreement.
The cameraman had panned the second body only incidentally in maneuvering fora head shot. The figure appeared to be of average height, perhaps a littleshorter if American rather than Anatolian males were the standard of 
comparison. Its clothing was ordinary, trousers of a shade darker than thecoat - both of them brown or taupe - and a cloth cap that lay beside the head.
The features were regular and unusual only in having no facial hair. InTurkey, where a moustache was as much a part of a man's accoutrements as apack of cigarettes, that was mildly remarkable.
There was a silvery chain and a medallion of some sort high up on the figure'sneck. The hand and overcoat sleeve entered the field of view to touch the 
bauble. 
The camera jumped a moment later, the lens panning a crazy arc of the wallsand night sky as the cameraman's heels slipped on the pavement. Doug's righthand gripped his left as fiercely as if it belonged to someone else and washolding a weapon. Elaine was taut, watching Kelly until the veteran glanced ather. 
Kelly was affected only at a conscious level, touched by wonderment at theemotional reaction of the others to what was, after all, a fraud. TV trickery,
makeup, and muddy camerawork to make the gimmickry less instantly patent. Butit couldn't frighten an adult, not somebody like Tom Kelly who knew that thereal face of horror was human. . . . 
The camera steadied again, though it was six feet farther from the subjectthan before, and it was some moments before the cameraman thought to adjusthis focus. Not makeup at all, thought Kelly, squinting. The 'head' above thenecklace was smaller than that of any human beyond the age of six, so whoeverwas responsible had used a dummy. . . . "Roll back and freeze it where hetouches the necklace," Kelly said.
He expected the woman either to make excuses or ignore him. To his surprise,
she reached over with the remote control unit and said, "Go ahead, Mr. Kelly.
Freeze any part of the film you choose to."
The veteran cued the tape back in three jerky stages, angry that he had notbeen paying enough attention to get to the point he wanted in two tries atworst. Neither Elaine's stillness nor Doug's outthrust chin disguised the factthat the pair was nervous; and this time the cause was not the very real oneof Tom Kelly's anger.
The bland, human face, only partly hidden by the gloved hand reaching for themedallion. Then the hand jerked back and, in the instant before the startledcameraman jumped away also, Kelly was able to pause the VCR into as close anequivalent of freeze-frame as a television's raster scanning could achieve.
Somebody was pretty good. Kelly couldn't see any sign of the transition, butwhat filled the screen now was nothing close to human.
Not only was the head the size of a grapefruit, it had no apparent eyes. Therewas a mouth, though, a blue-lipped circular pit lined with teeth hooked like 


blackberry thorns. The nose was a gash like that of a man Kelly had met in avillage near Erzerum, his limbs and appendages eaten away by the final stagesof leprosy. Either water droplets were creating an odd effect, or the surfaceof the dummy was scaly, and the scales divided at the midline of the face in arow of bony scutes.
Kelly thumbed the Pause button and let the tape roll forward. When the cameraachieved focus and steadiness again there was a somewhat clearer view of thealien visage, but nothing beyond what Kelly had already seen. "All right," hesaid, "what happens next? The mothership comes down and vaporizes Diyarbakir?
You know, I'd miss the place."
"There's nothing more on the tape," Elaine said shortly. The screen dissolvedinto diagonal static again as if it were ruled by her voice.
Kelly tried to switch off the VCR. When his thumb touched the Eject button onthe controller as well, the tape whirred and cycled itself halfway out of thefeed slot. The veteran's anger flared, though no one in the world but he knewthe act was nervous clumsiness instead of deliberation. He was allowinghimself to be spooked!
"We need a Kurdish speaker," Doug said with a toss of his head that seemed toclear a dark aura from his soul, "and we may need someone who was involvedwith Operation Birdlike - assuming Ayyubi wasn't the only member of that groupwho's gotten involved in this new business."
"Go home." Kelly spoke flatly as he shook himself and set the remote unit backon Bianci's desk. "Go home so I can lock up behind you and go home myself." Herubbed his eyes with his left forearm. "Been a long day, been a long threeyears. I'm just not in a mood for government-issue bullshit any more."
"It's not bullshit, Mr. Kelly." the woman said as she watched him with theinscrutable eyes of a cat viewing a bird too big to be prey. "Earth has beenvisited by aliens - is being visited, we think. Men who you know have been incontact with them." 
"Don't you think," Doug Blakeley interjected, "that it's time the USG gotinvolved instead of leaving things to barbs whose only link to the twentiethcentury is a machinegun?"
Kelly turned toward the other man, prey indeed if he chose - as he did not.
Doug was trash, the discussion was trash, and Elaine Elaine 
stepped between the two men, close enough to Kelly that she had to tilther face to meet his eyes. "He doesn't matter, Mr. Kelly," the black-hairedwoman said as if she had read the veteran's mind. "This matters very much, ifit's true. You know it does." 
"And you know a videotape doesn't prove jack shit!" Kelly shouted, as if todrive her back by the violence of his reaction.
"Then come look at the body itself, Kelly," Elaine said with an acidprecision. "If you're man enough."
She would not back away from him and he would not face her glare, so Kellyspun on his heel to stare out at the reception area. "Figured you'd tell methat, 'Gee, the Turkish police had it' - or maybe the plane bringing it backto the World had flown into a mountain." Even five years after the last tourin the Lebanon, Kelly had the veterans' trick of referring to the continentalUnited States as 'the World.' " 
"The evidence - the body - is at Fort Meade," said the woman behind him. "Wehave a car. We can have you there in forty minutes to examine it yourself."
"Are you doing a job on me, honey?" Kelly said as he turned again to face her.
"Is this all a way to get me behind walls with no fuss 'r bother?"
"Oh, come now, Kelly," said the blond man standing behind Elaine, arms akimbo.
"Don't you think you're being overly dramatic?"
There were only two things in the office which were not Congressman Bianci's or 
alive. Kelly stepped toward the VCR. Elaine, who thought he was trying toclose with her companion, sidestepped quickly to block the veteran. She was 


wearing sequined flats rather than the high heels to be expected with theformality of her suit. The sensible footgear saved her from falling whenKelly's shoulder slammed her back as remorselessly as a hundred and eightypounds of brick in motion.
Doug shouted something that began as a warning and ended in a squawk as hishands by reflex clasped the stumbling woman. Kelly bent, his back to thecouple momentarily as he took the videotape from the VCR. The cassette wascool, its upper edge rough beneath his fingers. As Elaine's hands touchedDoug's, in part for balance's sake but also to restrain her companion as bothstared at Kelly, the veteran pivoted and smashed the tape down on the aluminumattache case. 
The impact did not scar the anodized surface of the Halliburton, but thepolystyrene videocassette shattered with a sound like the spiral fracture of ashin bone. 
"Hey!" Doug shouted. Elaine's hands clamped in earnest on those of the manbehind her. 
Kelly slammed the cassette down again. The lower half of it disintegrated likea window breaking, spilling coils of half-inch tape along with the take-upsprocket. The veteran raised his right hand and opened it, letting theremainder of the cassette fall to the floor. Bits of black plastic clung tothe sweat of his palm, and an inch-long shard had dug a bloody gouge into hisflesh. 
Kelly grinned at the others with his hand still lifted like a caricature of awooden Indian. "You know," he said in a voice so light that only his eyessuggested what he was saying was the baldest truth, "I figured when I walkedin here it was fair odds I'd kill you both. Guess I'll go back to Meade withyou instead - but no more jokes about me acting crazy, okay?"
"You can call Representative Bianci and tell him where you're going," thewoman said, twisting sinuously out of Doug's arms and stepping to the side,
her fingertips smoothing the lines of her skirt.
"I'm doing this to me," Kelly replied, dusting his palms together like acymbals player to clear them. Sweat stung the open gash, and he felt like adamned fool; overdramatic just like the blond meathead had said. "I don't wantCarlo getting involved if it's me being too dumb to keep my head down."
Doug massaged each wrist with the opposite hand, then knelt and begangathering up the tape and the larger bits of the cassette as well. Elainesaid, "It might reassure him, you know."
"He'll be happy enough if he doesn't get a call from Housekeeping about theblood on 'is upholstery," the veteran said with a savage laugh. "Look, let'sget this over, okay? I said I was going, didn't I?"
The attache case contained no files or papers of any sort, not even a manilaenvelope into which Doug could pour the remnants of the tape cassette, so theyhad to lie loose on the nylon-covered polyurethane foam instead. There was,
however, a compact two-way radio in a fitted niche. The radio had no nameplateor manufacturer's information on it, but neither was the unit a piece ofgovernment-issue hardware that Kelly recognized. Well, he'd been out - way out

-for three years, and equipment was the least of what might change.
The stub of the coiled whip antenna bobbled as Doug spoke into the radio,
glaring unconsciously at Kelly as he did so. All data was useful somewhere, insome intelligence paradise - you couldn't spend a big chunk of your life inCollection and not think so. But it was only reflex that made Kelly's mindfocus on the chance of hearing a one-time-only code word, and that no morethan the means of summoning a car. Doug's bridling was an empty reflex as well
-and both reactions were complicated by the fact that each of the men hadbeen top dog for a long time, in ways that had nothing to do with chains ofcommand. 
Kelly was just loose enough at the moment to both recognize the situation and 

find it amusing. "Hey, junior," he said to Doug as the radio crackled a muted,
unintelligible reply, "I think you lost your place in the pecking order."
"Let's go," said Elaine in a neutral voice, waving Doug out the door ahead ofher and falling in behind him - separating the men since she knew thatBianci's aide must be last out of the office to lock up.
The guard tonight at the side entrance of the Longworth Building was a heavyblack woman. Kelly had seen and smiled at her a hundred times over the yearsas she rummaged harmlessly through whatever briefcase he happened to becarrying. It wasn't an effective way to defeat a serious attempt to blow upthe building, but it didn't hurt Kelly - who, even when he was on active duty,
had not traveled with documents he minded other people inspecting.
Today the guard drew back as she saw the trio approaching her post from downthe corridor. "Good night, Ethel," Kelly called, never too tired - or wired to 
be pleasant to anybody with a dismal job like guard, refuse collector, orcode clerk. 
This time Ethel only nodded back, her concentration preoccupied by Doug andthe Halliburton he had carefully locked. There was no reason in the world notto have opened the case like a citizen when he entered the building. Instead,
Doug had obviously flashed credentials that had piqued the curiosity of even aguard who saw the stream of visitors to members of the House ofRepresentatives. It was the same sort of bass-ackwardness that caused CIAofficers operating under embassy cover in foreign venues to be issued non-
American cars. They could therefore be separated with eighty percent certaintyfrom the real State Department personnel by anyone who bothered to checktraffic through the embassy gates.
"By the way," Kelly goaded in a voice that echoed on the marble, "who do youwork for? SAVE? Or are you Joint Chiefs Support Activity?"
"You stupid bastard," Doug snarled, twisting in midmotion to glare at theother man, his palm thumping on the door's glass panel instead of the pushbar. 
"Mr. Kelly." said Elaine as she reached past her companion to thrust the dooropen, "you might consider whether in a worst-case scenario you wish to haveinvolved a number of outsiders in this matter." Her voice was clear but not 
loud, losing itself in the rush of outside air chilled by the shower that hadbeen threatening all day.
Two cars pulled up at the curb outside just as the trio exited the LongworthBuilding. The follow-car was a gray Buick with a black vinyl roof, but thevehicle its lights illuminated was a bright green Volvo sedan. The Volvo'sdriver got out quickly, leaving his door open, and trotted around to the curbside. 
Elaine muttered a curse at the weather and hunched herself in her linen 
jacket. Doug strode forward as if there were no rain, the attache case in hisleft hand swinging as if it weighed no more than a normal leather satchel.
"Sorry 'bout that," Kelly said as he and the woman hesitated under the roofoverhang. "Shouldn't let my temper go when I'm around innocent bystanders. Notfor silly shit, especially."
"Let's go," the woman said, darting across the wide sidewalk as a gust of windlashed raindrops curving like a snake track across the pools already on theconcrete. 
The driver had opened both curbside doors for them. The veteran pauseddeliberately to see whether or not Elaine would get in before he did. She slidquickly into the back seat, showing a length of thigh that amused Kellybecause it really did affect him. There were people who thought that sex wassomething physical. Damn fools.
"You can sit anywhere you please, Mr. Kelly," the woman called from the carwith a trace of exasperation. "All the doors work normally."
The front seats were buckets, so they really hadn't planned to sandwich him 


between the two of them - or more likely, between the former driver and Doug,
-who was now behind the wheel of the Volvo adjusting the angle of thebackrest. "Right," said Kelly, feeling a little foolish as he got into thefront for the sake of the legroom. The man who had brought the Volvo to themclosed both doors and scurried back to the follow-car. 
Doug did not wait for the former driver to be picked up before goosing theVolvo's throttle hard enough to spin the drive wheels on the wet pavement. Theright rear tire scraped the edge of the curb before the sedan angled abruptlyinto the traffic lane and off through the night.
"If these're the radials I'd guess they were," said Kelly, angling sideways inthe pocket of the seat, "then that's a pretty good way to spend twenty minutesin the rain, changing the tire with a ripped sidewall."
Doug glanced at his passenger, but then merely grunted and switched theheadlights to bright. Raindrops appeared to curve toward them as the caraccelerated. 
Doug's face had a greenish cast from the instrument lights. Kelly glimpsed thewoman between the hollow headrests, her features illuminated in long pulses bythe oncoming cars. The black frame of Elaine's hair made her face a distinctoval even during intervals of darkness.
You couldn't really see into a head like that, thought Kelly as the hammer oftires on bad pavement buzzed him into a sort of drifting reverie. Not in goodlight, not under stress. Sometimes you could predict the words the mind withinwould offer its audience; but you'd never know for sure the process by whichthe words were chosen, the switches and reconsiderations at levels ofperceived side-effects which a man like Kelly never wanted to reach.
The veteran straightened so that his shoulder blade was no longer against thewindow ledge. He was physically tired, and the meeting in Bianci's office hadbeen as stressful and disorienting as a firefight. If he didn't watch it, he'dput himself into a state more suggestible than anything an interrogation teamcould achieve with hypnotic drugs. Even the thought of that made Kelly's skincrawl in a hot, prickling wave which spread downward from the peak of hisskull. 
"Which of you's in charge?" he asked. The hostility implicit in the questionwas another goad to keep him alert.
"You'll meet some of the people in charge tonight, if you care to," the womansaid, her face as expressionless in the lights of an oncoming truck as it wasa moment later when backlit by the follow-car.
"No," Kelly said. "I mean which of you two has the rank. When it comes down tocases, who says 'jump' and who says 'how high?' "
Doug turned with a fierceness which their speed and the turnpike traffic madeunwise, snapping, "For somebody who claims he doesn't intend to talk toanybody, you show a real inability to know when to shut the fuck up!"
Kelly grinned. The woman in the back seat said to his profile, "Would you takea direct order from either one of us, Mr. Kelly?"
The veteran looked at her directly and laughed. "No," he said. "No, I don'tguess I would."
"Then our ranks don't matter," she said coolly, and Kelly decided that wasn'tmuch of a lie in comparison to other things he'd heard tonight.
And would hear later. 
"Oh, Christ on a crutch," Kelly muttered, locking his fingers behind his neckand arching his shoulders back as fiercely as he could in the crampedconfines. "You know," he said while he held the position, headlights flickingred patterns of blood to his retinas behind closed eyelids, "This's going tobe a first for me. I worked eighteen years for NSA, more'r less, and I neverset foot in the building."
He opened his eyes, relaxed, and as he stared through the windshield towardthe future added, "Can't say I much wanted to." 


Kelly hadn't intended to draw a reaction from Doug, but the driver half-turned

-realized that the woman was sitting directly behind him, out of his sight nomatter how sharply he craned his neck - and then tried to catch her eye in therearview mirror. 
"Mr. Kelly," Elaine said, and Kelly surmised that she was speaking withgreater circumspection than usual, "I don't want you to be startled bysomething you misunderstood. We won't be going to NSA headquarters or anyportion of Fort Meade dedicated to the National Security Agency. Some disusedbarracks within the. reservation were - taken over for present purposes. Youshouldn't be concerned that we enter at a gate different from the one you mayhave expected."
Kelly laughed. "Well, that explains the big question I still had."
Doug glanced at him, but the veteran had been pausing for breath, not aresponse. "Couldn't figure," he went on, "how you'd gotten NSA to cooperatewith any damn body else - which you are, even though I don't much care who,
not really."
Headlights picked out a tiny smile at the corners of Elaine's lips as shesaid, "We're government employees, Mr. Kelly. As you were, and as you are now
-through Congressman Bianci."
The Volvo and the Buick behind it had cloverleafed from the Baltimore-
Washington Turnpike onto the cracked pavement of Highway 1. Dingy motels andbusinesses lined both sides of its four undivided lanes. There was very littletraffic in comparison to the turnpike, and Doug made only rolling stops at thesignal lights, presumably counting on his ID to get him past a late-cruisingMaryland cop.
'If you've got it, flaunt it' had always been the motto of the intelligencecommunity. It wasn't a great way to do business, but it attracted to theprofession bright, aggressive people who might otherwise have done somethingsocially useful with their lives.
Christ, Kelly thought, he was too tired for this crap. Too tired in every way.
The gates in the chain link fence encircling Fort Meade were open, but therewas a guard post and a red and white crossbar, which a GI lifted after aglance at Doug's identification. As the car accelerated again, Kelly got aglimpse of the unit patch on the left shoulder of the trooper's fatigues: ahorse and bend dexter worked in gold embroidery on a shield-shaped blue field.
"Goddam," the veteran muttered as the car swept by, "Twelfth Cav, wasn't it?"
"You were assigned to them, weren't you?" said the woman, finding in a mismemory 
of Kelly's file a safe topic for an interval of increasing tension.
"During operations in the Anti-Lebanon?"
Kelly laughed, glad himself of the release. He got antsy nowadays arounduniforms, even when he was just mixing with brass at a Washington cocktailparty or visiting a research installation far too sensitive to be compromisedby an attempt to hold Thomas James Kelly for questioning.
The only sensible explanation for tonight's affair was that it was anoperation intended for just that end: to close the doors around Tom Kellyunless and until folks in DC and Jerusalem decided they should be openedagain. But he was going along with it, he'd said he would, and he was in favorof anything that took his mind off the barracks they drove past and theirinsulation from what civilians thought was the real world.
"That was a different armored cavalry regiment," Kelly said, lifting himselfby his left shoulder and feet so that he could hitch up his trousers. TheVolvo had leather upholstery, and he was sweating enough to stick slightly tothe seat cushion. "Close, but no cigar. These guys - " They were coming toanother checkpoint, and this time the gates were shut. The fencing gleamed inthe headlights as the car paused for a soldier with a small flashlight tocheck Doug's ID. The earth raked smooth around the postholes had a raw,
unweathered look. 

"These guys are a public relations unit," Kelly said, trying to control hisvoice the way he would clean a bad signal on tape - trimming out everythingbut what communicated data, as if there were no such things as static, bleed-
over, or fear. "The President needs troops for a parade, visiting brass wantsto review something - you know the drill - the Twelfth takes care of it.
Nicely painted tanks and APCs, troops in strack uniforms - you know. They evenpaint the roadwheels of the tanks. Rots the rubber, but it sho' do look blackfrom the reviewing stands."
"You may pass, sir," said the guard, and as the gate opened he saluted.
There was a second chain link barrier twelve feet within the first, with itsgate inset further to permit a car to stand between the checkpoints while bothgates were closed. The inner fencing was covered with taupe fiberglass panels,
translucent and sufficient protection against anyone trying to observe thecompound from ground level. The soldiers manning the inner guard post worefatigues and carried automatic rifles with a degree of assurance verydifferent from that of the Twelfth Cav guards with pistols in patent leatherholsters. 
The man who examined the credentials this time stooped to look at all threeoccupants of the car. He wore neither a unit patch nor rank insignia, butthere were chevrons and rockers in his eyes when he met Kelly's.
There but for the grace of God, the veteran thought, if his gift for languageswas really a manifestation of grace rather than a curse. Being able to processintercept data in real time had put Tom Kelly farther up the sharp end than heever would have gone if he knew only how to sight a cal fifty and handletwenty-ounce blocks of plastique. He'd spent a lot of years in places wherediscipline was something you had yourself because there was nobody around toimpose it on you.
When the people who thought in hierarchies realized that Platoon SergeantThomas J. Kelly was both willing and able to make a major policy decision forthe United States government, it made him very frightening.
"Christ, I'm scared," Kelly said with a lilt and a bright smile to make a jokeof it as the guard stepped away.
The woman in the back seat smiled with the precision of a gunlock. "I've readyour file, Mr. Kelly," she said as the gate squealed open. "If I had any doubtabout the purpose of this exercise, I promise I wouldn't be the person nearestby when you learned the truth."
Doug glanced up at the rearview mirror again as he drove forward, hisexpression unreadable.
Within the second enclosure were four frame buildings, a number of cars Continentals 
and a Mercedes, all with opera windows - and more armed men inunmarked fatigues. Incandescent area lights were placed within the fencing ontemporary poles, throwing hard shadows and displaying every flaw in thepeeling, mustard-colored paint on the buildings. They had probably beenconstructed during the Second World War as temporary barracks, and hadsurvived simply because military bureaucracy misfiled a great deal more thanit discarded. 
Well, Kelly had once been very glad for a case of Sten guns hidden againstneed, decades before, in a warehouse in Horns. It wasn't the sort of wastethat bothered him. 
Three of the buildings were two-story, but the fourth was one floor with acrawl space, like the shotgun houses built in rural areas at about the sameperiod. It would have been a company headquarters and orderly room; now it wasthe prize which the troops billeted in the other three buildings wereguarding.
Drivers stood by their limousines, one of them polishing a fender with hischamois, as they watched the newcomers. Instead of parking along the fencelinewith the other cars, Doug pulled up to an entrance at one end of the low 


building and shut off the engine. Kelly reached across his own body to openhis door left-handed. The latch snicked normally, permitting Kelly to step outof the car while he tried both to observe everything around him and to lookrelaxed. 
Neither attempt was possible under the circumstances. When Kelly met Elaine'seyes across the roof of the Volvo he laughed as he would have done at sight ofhis own face in a mirror. 
"Hell," he said to the woman, "when I was a kid there was a lotta peoplethought I'd be hanged before I was old enough to vote. I beat that by justabout twenty years, didn't I?" He followed them inside.
There were no guards within the building, no women besides Elaine, and onlyone uniform - Major Redstone when Kelly served under him in the Shuf, and now,
from the star on each shoulder, a brigadier general. He was one of the six menwaiting in what had been the orderly room, the east half of the structure. Theothers wore not uniforms but suits, and suits - in this sort of setting tended 
to blur together in Kelly's mind. Fight-or-flight reflexes pumpedhormones into his bloodstream. It wasn't the sort of situation he handled verywell. 
"Hey, Red," the veteran said with a nod. "Hadn't heard you were gonna behere." 
"Hi, Kelly," said the general. "Glad you could make it." Even as he spoke,
Redstone's eyes were checking the faces of the men to either side of him. Anyintention he might have had to say more was lost in whatever he saw in thosefaces. 
They had prepared for this business by moving into the orderly room a massivewooden table, scarred and as old as the building, and a complement ofarmchairs whose varnish was ribbed and blackened by long storage. No one wasseated when Kelly entered the room, and if they expected him to lock himselfbetween a heavy chair and a heavy table, they were out of their collectivemind. 
The men, the Suits, ranged in age from one in his late twenties - younger thanDoug - to another who could have been anywhere from sixty to eighty and witheyes much older than that. That one's motions were smooth enough to put him onthe lower end of the age range, but the liver spots on his gnarled hands werealmost the same color as the fabric of his three-piece suit. "Tuttle?" he saidwith a glance at the woman.
"Mr. Kelly has agreed to look at the physical evidence, Mr. Pierrard," Elainesaid in her most careful voice. "He has his own life to live, and he certainlywon't become involved in the present matter unless he's convinced it is of the

-highest order of significance."
"Well, does he think we'd be here?" Pierrard snapped. He stared up and downKelly with a look not of contempt but superiority - the look a breeder givesto someone else's thoroughbred. "Do you, Kelly?"
The veteran had instinctively frozen into a formal 'at ease' posture: feetspread to shoulder width and angled 45° from midline; shoulders back, spinestraight, hands clasped behind his back - and the hard feel of the weaponthere was no comfort now. He was furious with himself and with everyone aroundhim because the simple answer hadn't been right: they hadn't brought him hereto arrest him. 
Reflex wanted to say, "No sir." Very distinctly, Tom Kelly said, "Why don'tyou get to fucking business and show me this thing?"
"Take him in," Pierrard said curtly, with an upward lift of the chin whichDoug and Elaine took as a direction to them.
"This way, Mr. Kelly," Elaine said without looking back at him. She walkedtoward the room to the side, which had been an office for either the companycommander or the first sergeant. She took a deep breath, and Doug echoed thesound hissingly as he followed the others. Perhaps it was the smell in the 

smaller room, but Kelly did not think so.
There was a white-enameled cooling case in the office, purring with anormality belied only by its present location. Condensate on the slantedglass-and-chrome top hid the contents until Doug threw a switch. Floodlightsmounted on the ceiling illuminated the case starkly, and the odor which hadbeen present even through the tobacco smoke in the orderly room became sooverpowering now that its source could not be denied.
The creature under glass was the same as whatever Kelly had seen on tape, andit stank like the aftermath of an electrical fire in a spice warehouse.
Neither the chemical nor the organic components of the odor were particularlyunpleasant, and even the combination could have been accepted in anothercontext. Somebody in the other room swore.
"Didn't look this big," said Kelly as he walked over to the case and theflaccid gray thing within. "This tall."
Without clothes, the creature - or construct - but the men in the other roomwouldn't be playing games with a little scut like Tom Kelly - looked veryfrail; but the height should have been more than six feet. When the veteranbent over the case his shadow cut the direct reflection from the glass andgave him an even clearer vision of the creature. The arrangement of torso andappendages was that of a human being, but the limbs had the appearance offlat-wire antenna lead rather than the more nearly circular cross section of aman's. 
Of the limbs of an animal that belonged on Earth.
Elaine lifted the center section of glass; the cooler really was an ordinarygrocery case. "It's a refrigerator, not a freezer," she said while Dougmuttered something unintelligible in the background. "Freezing would havebroken down the cell walls. Of course, it can't be kept this way forever. Whenthey've completed the autopsy, they'll . . ."
The torso had been laid open in a long curving incision, but the flap of fine-
scaled integument had been pinned back in place when the pathologists pausedin their examination. Doctors tended to be self-ruled men in whom arrogancewas a certain concomitant of ability if not proof of that ability. Kellywondered who was handling the autopsy, whether the men in the other room hadchosen to go with the best pathologists available or rather to use doctorswhom they knew they could control.
They were trying to deal Tom Kelly in on this business. That gave him a notionof where their heads were. 
Christ on a crutch. It really was what it seemed to be.
Kelly's left hand reached into the case, his fingers tracing but not touchingthe surface of one of the arms. The hand had four fingers and no thumb, but itlooked as though the two halves could be folded over one another along thecentral axis. 
"There're surgical gloves, if you want," the woman said. She was looking atKelly while she held the lid open. Only the flare of her nostrils implied thather eyes were on him to excuse them from having to view the alien. "It doesn'thave knee and elbow joints the way we do. Each arm is a double column of boneslike paired spinal columns, and they're connected only by muscle."
"You can close it," the veteran said, jerking his hand out of the cooler andflexing it repeatedly to work off the damp miasma that clung to the skin. Thelid thumped behind him as he turned, and he thought he heard a grateful sigh.
"How did it die?" he asked, facing Doug. "Did Mohammed kill it?"
Men waiting in the other room either glanced away when Kelly caught their eyesor matched his with stares of their own. Pierrard nodded coolly as he tamped atiny meerschaum with a pipe tool shaped like a pistol cartridge.
Doug shrugged, his expression less nonchalant when it remained fixed eventhough the rest of his body moved.
"They were both killed by nine-millimeter bullets," Elaine said as she walked 


into the veteran's field of view again. "Turkish service ammunition lots,
though of course that indicates nothing. We'd had reports that bullets didn't

-affect them, fired at very close range. Those reports appear to be inerror." 
The palm of Kelly's right hand stung where he had gouged it, partly from hissweat and partly from the aura of burned pepper and phenolic resin whichemanated from the thing in the cooler. "You can't be too close to miss whatyou're aiming at," Kelly said. "Take my word for it, honey."
He walked back into the larger room, again facing the men whom he'd neverwanted to see and who didn't see him even now that he stood in front of them. 
Except for maybe Redstone, Kelly was no more human to the eyes sliding overhim like water over a statue than was the dead thing in the cooler behind him.
Not officer material, that was god damned sure, and both sides would feelthankful for that. . . . 
"Where's his clothes?" Kelly asked Pierrard in a harsh, hectoring tone. "Andthe necklace he had on? Was that all?" 
Pierrard took a deep pull on his pipe. Its bowl was discolored almost to theshade and patterning of briar.
The youngest Suit said, "The clothes were probably of Turkish manufacture handwork, 
no labels, but local manufacture. The shoes were Turkish, made inAnkara. The legs must have twisted to form an ankle joint, the sockets in theleg and arm columns are offset enough to do that."
Kelly stepped closer to Pierrard, so that he was wrapped in coils of pipesmoke whose bitterness underlay the cloying surface odor. "Where's thehardware, Pierrard?" he demanded. "If this isn't all phony, then that damnedthing had a gadget to make him look like a man, not a lamprey. Where is it?"
Pierrard's lips quirked as he lowered his pipestem. He blew a careful smokering toward the low ceiling.
"There were six items of equipment which couldn't be identified," said theyoung Suit, who was too beefy to be really aristocratic and whose forehead nowglistened with sweat. Redstone knuckled his jaw and grimaced, but nobody elseKelly could see appeared to be breathing.
"None of them were larger than a cigarette case, and none of them did anythingnoticeable when they were tested. We think that when - " The young Suitglanced up and beyond Kelly. " - We think that when the medallion was firsttouched, all of the equipment shut down. The units we've sectioned aftertesting appear to have melted internally, but we can't be sure what theylooked like before they came into our hands."
"Shit!" Kelly said, and turned abruptly. He slapped the doorjamb, shaking thepartition wall and making the overhead light jounce. Doug jumped aside, thoughthis time the veteran's anger was directed against the situation rather thanany human.
Any human except himself and the fact that he didn't seem able to walk away that 
he had buttons that cynical bastards in suits could still push.
"Kelly," said General Redstone from the far side of the room, "we need you onthis one. It's no time to fuck around." 
"Yessir," said Kelly, slowly facing around and taking a breath that lifted hiseyes back into contact with those of the others in the room. "What did youthink you could get me to do? Give you names?"
"Because members or at least a member of the Kurdish separatist community hadcontact with the aliens," said Pierrard, "we need a knowledgeable person inplace in that community at the earliest possible moment." His lengthenedvowels had probably been natural for him before they were popularized by theKennedy and Culver presidencies.
"You've got other Kurdish speakers." Kelly walked over to a window and staredout at the lighted fence with his hands on the sash. "Hell, you've got agents,
CIA's got agents, every damn body in the world's got Kurdish agents." 

"We've had no reports regarding - alien presences," said a voice Kelly hadn'theard before, a Suit of his own age with more gut and less hair. "It may bethat depending on foreign nationals in this venue cannot guaranteesatisfactory results."
"We aren't looking for a translator, Kelly," said General Redstone as theveteran turned to face them again. "We don't need somebody to man an interceptreceiver. To get on this as fast as we've got to, there's got to be somebodythe sources'll trust - and somebody who can go to them. There's some othertraining officers - paramilitary types - but they don't speak Kurdish, notreally. You were the only real NSA staffer in Birdlike, the only one with areal language specialty. Otherwise the operation was slotted there just tokeep clear of the Freedom of Information Act."
"Got a problem with Kurds not trusting the USG all of a sudden, hey?" Kellysaid, his voice struggling against the leash his conscious mind was trying tokeep on it. Pierrard's face was the only thing in the room which was notreceding from focus. "Couldn't be because of the way Operation Birdlike waswrapped up with all the finesse of a hand grenade, d'ye suppose?"
"Yes, of course that had something to do with it," the old man agreedunemotionally as he lifted his pipe again.
"There were people in fucking Iraq waiting for the C-130 to duck in with thepallet of supplies, you bastard!" Kelly shouted. "And instead folks areshaking hands in some air-conditioned hotel and there's not a problem anymore.
There was a fucking big problem for the men on the ground, believe me! And thesecretary of state tells the Senate, 'You must remember, internationaldiplomacy isn't Boy Scouting,' and gee whiz, how foolish those Kurds were tohave believed the word of the United States government. It was all right,
though, because they weren't 'pro-Western freedom fighters' anymore - theywere just an Iraqi internal problem."
"They never were pro-Western freedom fighters," said the middle-aged Suit whohad spoken before.
Kelly stared at him. "They were men," he said in a voice that quivered likethe blade of a hacksaw. "That's more'n I see in this room." 
"Are you always this offensive, Mr. Kelly?" said Elaine, as clear and hard asdiamond. 
The world collapsed back to normalcy, a room too warm and far too smoky,
filled with men who didn't like Tom Kelly any better than he liked them.
Nothing to get worked up about, just the way the world generally was.
"Only when I'm drunk or scared shitless, Miz Tuttle," Kelly said as he heavedhimself away from the sash against which he had been braced. "And I couldreally use a drink right about now."
He walked past Doug and Elaine, flanking the side door to the office. One ofthe Suits muttered, "Where's he going?" but only the woman fell in behindKelly as he approached the grocery cooler for the second time.
The handle was cool and smooth, vibrating with the purr of the refrigeratormotor in the base of the cabinet. Kelly raised the lid and reached toward thealien's face. The floodlights had been switched off, but the analytical partof Kelly's mind doubted that he would be able to see much anyway in hispresent emotional state.
"There are gloves," Elaine said sharply.
"You can't not do things because you're afraid," Kelly said in a crooning,
gentle voice, more to himself than to the woman beside him. "I can't not goback in because I'm scared of international flights and dark alleys . . . andbecause this thing scares me, scares the livin' crap outa me. . . ."
He placed his stinging right palm on the head of the creature, the portionthat would have been the forehead if the thing were instead human. The tips ofthe scales were lifted enough to give the surface the feel of somethingcovered with hairs too fine to be seen. With firmer pressure there were 


differences in the way the alien flesh and bone resisted the weight of Kelly'shand, but the texture of the covering was the same over hand and head. Helifted his hand away and let the lid thump closed.
"You're not afraid of it anymore?" said Doug, standing hipshot in the doorwaylike a gunslinger ready to go into action.
The veteran dusted his palms together. The electric tingle in his right handhad spread to his throat and chest. It was probably psychological rather thana physical reaction to the alien's chemistry; and either way to be ignored.
"Sure I'm scared," Kelly said, looking at the big man and thinking how youngthe fellow was - and biological age had little to do with that. "That'snothing to do with the price of eggs, is all."
Pierrard stepped into the doorway. He touched Doug on the shoulder with anindex finger, removing the younger man from his path abruptly. "Have youreached a decision, then, Kelly?" Pierrard asked. His mouth trembled withwisps of pipe smoke.
"I'll make a deal with you," Kelly said to Elaine. "You call me Tom from hereon out, I call you Elaine."
"With a proviso." The dark-haired woman met his eyes with enough of a smile toindicate her amusement at the operational necessity of ignoring Pierrard forthe moment. "If you ever 'honey' me again, you can expect to be 'SergeantKelly' for the duration. I think I'd prefer the honesty of being called 'youdumb twat' if you can't remember my name."
"We'll work on it," Kelly muttered with an embarrassment he had not thought hewas still capable of feeling. To the old man in the doorway, he said, "Can shebrief me?" 
Pierrard rotated his pipestem in a short arc. "If you wish." Kelly could seeothers in the orderly room staring at the old man rather than the couple inthe office beyond.
"Okay, that'll work," the veteran said, half his mind already considering thepeople to whom he was going to have to excuse himself if this went the way itlooked to. Meetings to cancel, phone messages to be taken and ranked foraction. . . . "Some place that isn't here to sit down at - "
Pierrard gestured. "Of course," he murmured.
" - and Dougie goes home or to his kennel'r whatever. I don't need theaggravation, I really don't."
"All right," said Pierrard with no more expression than before, and Elainelooked down at her fingers, which had begun to fold a pleat in her skirt.
"Sir, I don't think - " came Doug's voice from behind the partition wall, outof Kelly's sight. Pierrard turned his head just enough that Blakeley wouldhave been in the corner of his vision. Doug's words stopped.
"Let's roll." Kelly took a shudderingly deep breath before stepping toward thedoorway. "Elaine?"
Nobody came out of the building after them. Kelly reached for the driver'sside door to open it for the dark-haired woman. The door was locked, andElaine brushed Kelly's hand away from the latch before she inserted the keyinto a slot in the doorpost, then unlocked the door itself.
"Very gallant, M - Tom," she said with a smile to dull the sting of the wordsand the situation. "But on this car, the alarm is set automatically when it'slocked, and the last thing we need right now is for everybody in three blocksto lock and load before they come looking for the problem." She smiledbrightly at the nearest of the uniformed gunmen. Dazzled, the soldier smiledback. 
Kelly walked around to his side of the car. The lock button had risen when thekey was turned on the driver's side. Well, the world had never had much realuse for chivalry.
He sat down again, finding the seat a great deal more comfortable now than ithad been before. Heading toward the meeting, his body had been a collection of 


bits and pieces as rigid as the parts of a marionette. He could bend at allthe normal joints, but tension had kept the muscles taut as guy wires exceptwhen they were being consciously relaxed. "Bad as an insertion," Kellymuttered to himself, knowing that the back deck of a tank would have given himas good a ride as the leather upholstery had on the way to Meade.
Elaine was still struggling with her seat, repositioning it from where thelong-legged Doug had left it. "It adjusts on four axes," she snapped, knowingthat Kelly was smiling, "which gives you the theoretical possibility offinding the perfect solution, and the high likelihood that every acceptablesolution'll be lost in the maze of other alternatives." 
She sat back, grimaced, and started the car anyway. "It's a lot like theinformation business, isn't it?" she added, and her wry smile mirroredKelly's.
It had stopped raining, and the overcast had broken patchily to let a fewstars glitter down. The air was so clear that lights reflected like jewelsfrom all the wet surfaces around them. "The Buick going to be tagging alongagain?" Kelly asked, nodding at the follow-car as the inner gate opened. Thebigger vehicle's engine was running and its park lights were on while itwaited outside the enclosure. 
Elaine pulled through the second gate and clutched, looking over at theveteran. "Unless you don't want it to," she said in a voice whose surfacebrightness Kelly had already learned to associate with a mind nervously inoverdrive. 
"No problem." He chopped his left hand down the road as if the woman were asquad he was sending forward. "Dougie-boy got on my nerves, that was all. ButI really don't bite, I promise."
"Sure, Kelly." Elaine gassed the car and shifted directly from first to thirdafter revving smoothly to the top of the powerband. "And one of these daysI'll get a job instead of living off my daddy's money." After a moment sheadded, "But I know what you mean. Thanks."
There was no bar for traffic outbound from the fort, but the woman slowed andwaved toward the guard post. This time she accelerated away fast, keeping theback tires just beneath the limit of traction throughout the radius of theturn and beyond as she straightened onto the highway.
"You didn't get the keys from Doug before you came out," Kelly said while theywaited at what he remembered as the last of the traffic lights, if they wereheaded back into the District as they seemed to be.
"I'd given him my spare set," the woman said, coming off the light as if shewere dropping the hammer at a drag strip. "I'll pick them up tomorrow."
Eyes on the entrance ramp and the possible traffic on the turnpike into whichthey were merging, she added, "Blakeley doesn't get only on your nerves, Tom.
But let me keep my mind on what I'm doing right now, okay?"
They were heading south for the skyglow above the capital much faster thanDoug had brought them to Meade, though there was no similarity between thestyles of the two drivers. Doug had a heavy foot for brake and accelerator,
and a muffled curse for other vehicles which did not behave in the manner he 
wished them to. 
Elaine dabbed, sliding diagonally through interstices in traffic with a vervewhich Kelly had thought only a motorcycle could achieve. She was anticipatingnot only the cars nearest in front and beside them, but the next tier ofvehicles as well, so that the drive had the feel of a chess game. Most of thetime she kept the Volvo's engine snarling in third gear or fourth. Only on therare stretches of really empty pavement did she shift up into the overdrivefifth, trading acceleration for the car's absolute top end.
"Motor's to European specs," she called in satisfaction over the engine noteat one of the fifth-gear upshifts. "And the suspension's had a little work."
The team in the follow-car must be royally pissed, thought Kelly as he relaxed 


against the seat cushions, but they had a destination and might even be usedto this sort of run if they were assigned regularly to Elaine. She wasn't in ahurry, particularly, and she wasn't trying to prove her competence - ormanhood, though it was a joke to think about it that way - to Kelly.
Driving on the edge of control - and control was what was important, not speed

-was a hell of a good way to burn away hormones and emotions which had to bebottled up in social situations. If you understood what was going on, youcould achieve catharsis without acting as if you were furious with everyoneelse on the road at the same time. Elaine knew that very well, and she drovewith a razorlike acuity not muffled by the need for false emotions to justifyit. 
"You know," said the veteran as they halted at the first traffic light indowntown Washington, "you could fool me into thinking that you don't like thepeople you work for a whole lot better than I do."
"You had an escape valve in that meeting." Elaine proceeded through theintersection sedately. The sodium-vapor street lights emphasized the colorraised on her cheeks by the high-intensity drive. "You could always decide youwere going to try to kill everybody else in the room. I didn't have thatluxury."
Kelly turned sharply to stare at her profile. Her hair had fluffed during thedrive, shading her cheeks, but she cocked her head enough toward the veteranto let him see her grin.
He smiled as well, releasing the catch of his seatbelt in order to shift theweapon in the hollow of his back. "I wouldn't have, no sweat," he said. "Butyeah, sometimes it's nice to know that endgame's your choice, not some otherbastard's." 
Kelly was wondering idly at the facades of Central Washington buildings, lowerand more interestingly variegated than those of most comparable cities, whenthe Volvo cut smoothly toward the curb. The veteran glanced from Elaine,
thumbing the trunk-latch button on the console, and back with new interest tothe hotel at which they had stopped. The ground level expanse was of curtainedglass and glass doors printed with "The Madison' as tastefully as gold leafcan ever be. Despite the hour, a uniformed attendant was coming out almostsimultaneously with the muffled pop of the trunk.
Elaine had her door open and was stepping into the street before Kelly couldeven start around the car to hand her out. "They're gonna confiscate myshining armor, lady," he called plaintively over the green roof.
"Get the case, Tom," she replied as she pointed out the keys still in theignition to the attendant, who slid behind the wheel.
The sound from above was unmistakable, but it was so unexpected in the presentcontext that Kelly could not fully believe what he was hearing even after hepaused to stare up into the darkness. "What the hell?" he said as Elainewalked back to him and glanced upward as well. "There's a helicopter orbitingup there."
The clop of rotor blades was syncopated by echoes from building fronts and thebroad streets, but the whine of the turbine waxed and waned purely as a resultof the attitude of the aircraft to the listeners below. 
"Get the case," Elaine repeated calmly. "It's not us - not that they told me."
She shrugged and pursed her lips in a moue. "The President of Venezuela's intown. He's probably staying here."
Kelly hefted out the black Halliburton in the trunk. The attache case was notso much heavy in the abstract as it was disconcertingly heavier than the normfor things that looked like it. "I congratulate you on the excellence of yourexpense accounts, ah - " he said as he slammed the trunk, "Elaine."
He followed the woman at a half step and to the side as they strode throughthe lobby, heeling really, as if he were a well-trained dog. Which was trueenough, very true indeed, though he wasn't sure just whose dog he was right at 

the moment. Not NSA's, certainly not that of the bastards he'd just met atMeade, whatever their acronym turned out to be for the moment.
The hell of it was, the hell of it was, Tom Kelly probably still belonged toan abstraction called America which existed only in his mind. It didn't bearmuch similarity to the US government; but he guessed that was as close as youcame in the real world. 

Fuckin' A. 
Elaine had fished a key from her purse as they walked between a quietly-
comfortable lobby and the reception desk. She ignored the clerk as she strodetoward the elevators, but Kelly noticed the man turned and spun his hand idlyin the box that would have held messages for room 618. Kelly winked, and theclerk waved back with a broad grin.
The graveyard shift was boring as hell, even if you were pretty sure the otherside had you targeted for a night assault.
Kelly entered the brass-doored elevator at the woman's side and pushed thebutton for the sixth floor before she lifted her hand. "This isn't the 
briefcase you had earlier?" he said, staring at his poker-faced reflection inthe polished metal.
"No, it's the one that stayed under guard in the car until we knew we'd wantit," Elaine said, eyeing the veteran sidelong with an expression resemblingthat of a squirrel in hunting season.
Keep 'em off balance, Kelly thought as his expression of wide-eyed innocencelooked back at him. Especially when you don't know which end is up yourself.
Room 618 had a king-sized bed, a window that would show a fair swath of thecity by daylight, and a Persian carpet which didn't look like anything nearthe money Kelly knew its equivalent would cost in the shop in the lobby.
There was also a small refrigerator in one corner.
Kelly set the attache case down on the writing desk and knelt beside therefrigerator. "Gimme the key," he said, holding out his left hand behind him.
When nothing slapped his palm, he turned and seated himself on one buttock onthe edge of the desk.
Elaine stood with the thumb and index finger of either hand on the keys, thelarger one for the door and the small one that unlocked the refrigerator whichformed the room's private bar. Her face was as blank as it would have been ifconstruction workers had whistled at her from across a street. 
"You've got no right to judge me, woman," Kelly said. His right leg wasflexed, and his hand gripped the raised knee in a pattern of tendons andveins. "No fucking right!" he shouted as if volume could release the pressureinside him or crack the marble calm of the woman who met his eyes.
"I have the job of judging you, Tom," she said with no emphasis as she bentand handed the paired keys to him. "Shall I get a bucket of ice?"
"Naw, I'm not warm," the veteran said, his throat clogged with residues of theemotion he hated himself for having let out. "Thanks." He fitted the key intothe lock and opened the little door. "I'm not warm, just thirsty. Anything foryou?"
"Orange juice," Elaine said as she rotated the three-dial combination of theattache case. "Grapefruit, something citrus."
At least, and for a wonder, it wasn't Perrier - which Kelly had always foundto taste like water from a well contaminated with acetylene. And at least shedid not stare at what Kelly brought out for himself, a minibottle of JackDaniel's and a can of Löwenbräu. 
"There's a really good Pilsener beer in Turkey," he said as he twisted a chairso that he could see both the woman and the files that she was beginning toplace on the desk. "I got to like it." He twisted the cap off the bottle ofwhiskey, took a sip, and washed the liquor down with a swallow of beer.
When Elaine still said nothing, the veteran prodded, "You've got a dead Kurd 


and a dead alien. And you've got me, until I drink myself into a stupor, hey?
So why don't we get to it?"
"I don't like self-destructive people," the woman said as she set the emptiedcase to the floor and sat at the other chair by the desk. "I like it even lesswhen an exceptionally able person I have to work with seems bent on destroyinghimself. But I don't like it when an airline manages to lose my luggage,
either, and I've learned to live with that."
Kelly finished the whiskey, his eyes meeting the woman's. "My work gets done,"
he said, wishing that his tone did not sound so defensive.
"And it'll continue to get done," Elaine responded coolly, "until one day itdoesn't. Which may mean that people get dead, or worse. But since it's likethe weather, something that can't be helped, then we don't need to talk aboutit any more."
She wasn't particularly tall, Kelly thought, but she looked just as frail asher black linen jacket, through which light showed every time the fabricfluffed away from her body. He felt like a pit bull facing a chihuahua whichwas smart enough to be afraid, but wasn't for all that about to back down.
He got up, carrying the can of beer, and walked toward the bathroom. "What isit you think I can do for you?" he called over his shoulder, the phrasingcarefully ambiguous. He poured the rest of his beer down the sink and ranwater into the aluminum can. 
Elaine, still seated, twisted to face him when he returned from the bathroom.
"Your personal contacts with the Kurds are more likely to get you informationabout what's going on than the formal information nets are. The fact thatwe've heard so little about something so major proves that there's a problem."
"What do you have?" Kelly asked, stretching himself out on his back on thecarpet between the bed and the window. He set the can of water down beside himand cupped his hands beneath his skull as a pillow.
"Reports of men going off for military training," the woman said. "Many ofthem men we'd had on the payroll ourselves during Birdlike."
"Mohammed Ayyubi one of them?" Kelly asked from the floor. Rather thanrelaxing, he was bearing his weight on shoulders and heels with his bellymuscles tensed in a flat arch. Elaine could not tell whether his eyes wereclosed or just slitted, watching her, and the effect was similar to that ofbeing stalked in the darkness.
"No," she said, "but he'd been closely associated with some of the people whodisappeared. He was living in Istanbul, living well and without a job, youknow? He'd make trips east and we think probably to Europe, though we werenever able to trace him out of Turkey. Or even far in-country, except afterthe fact. Somebody would tell us that somebody's wife had a lot of money, now,
and her husband had gone off with Mohammed Ayyubi, in a new struggle for FreeKurdistan. That sort of thing."
Kelly rolled onto his side, facing Elaine, and took a deep draft of water fromhis can. "Haven't found much use for hotel glasses but to stick yourtoothbrush in," he said with a disarming grin. "The .22 Shorts of thecontainer world." Without changing expression, he went on, "What do they saywhen they come back, Elaine? Who's training them?"
"Russia, we thought," the woman said. She shifted on her chair, crossing herright thigh over the left and angrily aware that there was no normal etiquettefor discussions with a man who lay at one's feet. "Now, of course, we're notsure. And none of the - recruits we've targeted seem to have come back, onleave or whatever, though their families get sizable remittances in hardcurrency, not lire."
"You've tried to get people close to Mohammed before now," Kelly said, hisflat tone begging the question. "I don't think money'd do much to turn hishead if he's - he was - convinced somebody was offering a real chance forKurdish independence ... but you people'd think money was the ticket, wouldn't 


you? What'd he say?"
There was nothing lithe about the man sprawled on the carpet, Elaine thought.
He was as close-coupled as a brick, built like a male lion - and with all thearrogance of the male lion's strength and willingness to kill his own kind.
"We don't know," she said carefully. "There was a car bomb explosion - inDiyarbakir - the day before the shooting. Three people were killed, two ofthem as they came out of the hotel in which they were to have met Ayyubi. Wedon't know whether they did or not, or what was said."
"Hardball, aren't we?" said the veteran in a very soft voice to the beer can.
He held it between thumb and middle finger, at the top where the braced crimpin the cylinder would have made it impossible for even Godzilla to crush thecan with two fingers. The mottled skin and the way the tendons stood outproved that Kelly was trying, though, or at least spending in isometrics anemotional charge that would otherwise have broken something. "Amcits, Isuppose?"
"Our personnel were American citizens, yes," Elaine said. "They were assignedTDY to the missile tracking station at Pirinclik, just out of town."
"NSA's being cooperative after all." Kelly put the can down again. His eyes,
as calm as they ever had been, were back on hers. Elaine had read enoughbetween the lines of the psych profiles in the veteran's file to know that hereally didn't have as short a fuse as he projected under stress. The anger wasthere, but there was a level of control that could handle almost anything.
The flip side of that, and the thing that made him so much more dangerous thana man who simply lost his temper, was that Kelly did not go out of controlwhen he chose to act. 
People were entering the room next door, jostling and cursing as more than onehusky man tried to get through a narrow hotel doorway at the same time. Kellygrinned and thumbed toward the common wall. "The cavalry's arrived," he said.
"You can breathe normally again."
Elaine scowled, realizing that she was just as tense as the words implied not 
that the arrival of the team from the follow-car would change anything toher benefit if the shit really hit the fan. She stretched in her chair,
twining her fingers behind her neck and, elbows flared, arching her chestforward. 
Nothing in the file indicated whether Kelly was a leg man or a breast man.
"You know," he was saying, "you're a hell of a driver."
She relaxed her body and said, "For a girl."
"Goddam," said Kelly as he twisted to his feet and walked toward the bathroomwith the can emptied now of water. "You know, I hadn't noticed that."
His delivery was so deadpan that the woman's mouth opened in shocked amazement

-replaced by a flush by the time he returned with more water and a broadsmile at how effectively he had gotten through her professional facade.
"They're not going to talk to me either, you know?" the stocky man said as heseated himself normally on the chair beside Elaine's. "Some folks I workedwith might remember me, sure. But I was US, just as sure as the boys who gotblown away the other day. Free Kurdistan is a lot more important to - tosomebody like Mohammed - than any personal chips I could call in."
"Word of how you terminated from the service got around very quickly when youdidn't return from leave," Elaine said. Her voice had never lost its eventenor, and her mind was fully back to business as well. "Around the personnelof Operation Birdlike. Even though there was an attempt to stop it or at leastreplace the" - she smiled - "truth with rumors less embarrassing to the USG.
"Since the indigs - the Kurds - were Muslims and strongly religious, the factthat you'd dynamited the government of Israel did you no harm with the menyou'd been training. And they're quite convinced that you aren't - won't everbe again - an agent of the United States."
Elaine paused. Then she added, "Besides, I think you underestimate the level 

of personal loyalty that some of your troops felt toward you. It was a matterof some concern during the interval between the time you - terminated andBirdlike was wrapped up."
"You wouldn't believe," said Kelly to his hands flat on the desk, "how manypeople'd follow you to hell if you're willing to lead 'em there. We gotthirty-seven MiGs in their revetments at Tekret the one night."
He looked up and his voice trembled with remembered emotion. "The whole skywas orange from ten klicks away. Just like fuckin' sunrise. .
Kelly stood abruptly and turned away. "Shit," he snarled. "Don't fuckin' dothis to me, okay?"
"The only reason," Elaine said softly, "that we'd ask you to use the peopleyou know is that it might take too long to reopen normal channels. We don'tknow how long we have before the - apparent hostiles - execute whatever planthey have in progress."
"Don't bullshit me, Elaine," he said as his hands clenched and the muscles ofhis shoulders hunched up like a weight lifter's. He faced her again and wenton deliberately, "You wouldn't be where you are if you had a problem withasking your grandma to penetrate massage parlors. You sure as hell don't havea problem with askin' me to burn people who trust me."
"I've got a problem with wasting my time," she said calmly, leaning back tolook up at the angry man. She uncrossed her legs. "I wouldn't waste timeasking you to do something you wouldn't do with a gun to your head. This one'snecessary, you know it is - and you know that whatever your friends may think,
nobody's coming to Earth from another planet to set up an independentKurdistan! Don't you?"
"Well, there's that," Kelly agreed with a sigh. He sat down again on a cornerof the bed. "How many recruits are we talking about? Kurds, I mean." He wasstudying the backs of his hands with a frowning interest that would have beenjustified for a fat envelope with a Dublin postmark.
"About twenty that we're pretty sure of," Elaine said, genuinely relaxingagain. She gestured toward the files with red-bordered cover sheets, which shehad spread on the desk. "It's here, what we have. Certainly we've got only thetip of the iceberg - but at worst we're not talking about - " She smiled; itmade a different person of her, emphasizing the pleasant fullness of hercheeks and adding a touch of naughtiness to features which otherwise suggestedwickedness of a thoroughly professional kind.
" - a land war in Asia," she concluded.
"I'm not subtle, you know," Kelly said. "If I go in, I'll make a lotta waves.
If I think it's the best way to learn what's going on, I'll tell people everygoddam thing I know. And if it gets rough, it's likely to get real rough."
"Slash and burn data collection," the woman said with a grimace, though not aparticularly angry one. She shrugged. "The more waves you make," she went on,
"the more likely it is that the wheels come off before you - or we - learnanything useful. But there isn't a lot of time, and the people who picked youfor this operation had seen your profiles too."
"Goddam, goddam, goddam," the veteran said without heat as he lay back on thewhite bedspread and began to knuckle his eyes. His feet were still flat on thefloor. "It's going to take me a while to get my own stuff on track. Maybe aweek. Couple three days at least."
"You won't need a cover identity," Elaine said. Because Kelly's eyes wereclosed, it was only in his mind that he saw her face blank into an expressionof professional neutrality. "Your job with Congressman Bianci has taken youout of the country in the past, and - "
"No," Kelly said. He neither snapped nor raised his voice, but there wasnothing in the way he spoke that admitted of argument. "Carlo doesn't getinvolved in this." 
"The congressman will agree without question, Tom," Elaine said in a 


reasonable tone. "I don't mean we'd put pressure on him - you can clear itwith him yourself. He's a, well, a patriot, and if you tell him you'reconvinced yourself that it's a matter of national security then - "
"Stop," said Kelly. He had taken his hands away from his eyes, but hecontinued to look at the ceiling, and it was toward the ceiling that he spokein a voice as cold and flat as the work-face of a broadax: "Carlo hired me to 
keep him out of shit. He doesn't get into this bucket if he swears on a stacka' Bibles he wants to." 
Kelly paused, for breath rather than for rhetorical effect. "I'll go in as acivilian tech advisor, Boeing or RCA, that sorta thing. There must be a couplethousand Amcits like that. Pick one with the right build who's rotating homeand make me up a passport. God knows you can square it with Boeing. I may becarrying some electronics, so make that reasonable enough for Customs."
Elaine did not even consider arguing the Bianci matter again. "Check," shesaid. "Though there's no need for you to carry things in country yourself."
"There's no need for me to carry a lucky charm," said Kelly, shifting hisweight a little, though the mattress was too soft to make more than a milddiscomfort of the weapon in the hollow of his spine, "but if it ain't broke,
you don't fix it."
"Besides ..." As he spoke the planes of his face changed, tiny musclesreacting to mental tension. "I want to keep clear of whatever you've got onthe ground already. I for damn sure don't want to be showing up at the USMission to collect my mail."
"If you need something in a hurry and it isn't pre-positioned," the womanwarned, "the chances are it'll have to come in by pouch."
"If I ask you for something, it's my lookout," the veteran said as he sat upand met Elaine's eyes. "But don't hold your breath, because, because I'drather call in favors of my own than trust - " The woman smiled, and perhapsfor that reason Kelly softened the remainder of his sentence to, " - peoplewho don't owe me." 
He stood up again, stretched his arms behind him as the woman watched insilence, and went on. "What I want from you people is to be tasked and leftthe fuck alone. Don't ask me for sitreps, don't try to help, and for god'ssake, don't get in my way."
"You expect too much," Elaine said calmly.
"I expect to be fucked around to the point I can't work," Kelly answered in aharsh whisper, "and then I expect to pack up and go home. That's what Iexpect."
"You'll have a case officer," Elaine replied as if there had been no threat.
"Me, unless you prefer otherwise. And there'll be support available incountry. If you don't need it, that's fine, but throwing a tantrum doesn'tgive you the right to flout common sense. Mine. But nobody's going to hamperyour activities, Tom."
Kelly smiled broadly and rubbed the heavy black stubble on his chin. "Well,
that's something for the relationship," he said mildly. "You tell the lies yougotta, but it seems you stop there. Hell, maybe this thing's going to work."
He stepped over to the desk and riffled one of the files there. "Look," hesaid, "go off to your friends or wherever" - he gestured toward the partitionwall behind him - "for however long it takes me to read in. It'll go quickerif I'm alone in the room." He didn't bother to add that he wasn't going to tryto leave. 
Elaine nodded, stood up, and walked toward the door. She paused just short ofit and said, with her back toward Kelly and the well-stocked refrigerator,
"Would you like some coffee from room service before you start?"
"Don't press your luck, Elaine," the veteran said in the glass-edged whisperagain.
She turned, wearing her professional smile again. "And don't press yours, 


Tom," she said. "Don't pretend, even to yourself, that you can walk out onthis now that you're in."
Kelly laughed. "Hey," he said with a cheerful lilt, "who greased Mohammed?"
"We presume," Elaine replied in a neutral voice from a neutral face, "that thecar bomb and the shootings were the work of the same parties. Either thealiens or their agents made an error, or there are third parties alreadyinvolved in the matter. 
"Good night, Tom."
The brass bolt and wards clacked with finality as Kelly's case officer drewthe door shut behind her. 
It had been a long night. Around the edges of the rubber-backed outer drapes,
saffron dawn was heralding what would probably be a long day. The veteransighed, set the chain bolt behind Elaine Turtle, and got to work.
There was a telephone on the bedside table and another extension, weatherizedlike a pay phone, on the wall of the bathroom. Kelly unplugged the modularjack from the base unit of each phone. He was too tired to trust his judgment,
though his intellect floated in something approaching a dream state,
functioning with effortless precision in collating information. By allowinghabit to take over, Kelly could for the time avoid the errors of judgment hewas sure to make if he tried to think things out.
There were a lot of ways to bug a room. Some of the simplest involvedmodifying the telephone to act at need as a listening device. A fix for theproblem was a small, battery-powered fluorescent light. When it was turned onand set near the phone, the radio-frequency hash which its oscillators made inraising the voltage to necessary levels completely flooded the circuitry ofmost bugs. Unplugging the phone was even more effective, though no one couldcall in or out while the unit was disconnected. Kelly didn't need the phone,
so that didn't matter. 
Of course, no sound he was going to make in room 618 mattered either - but itwas habit, and it wasn't going to hurt either.
Kelly unplugged the television set next to the refrigerator and then wiggledloose the bayonet connector of the coax to the hotel's common antenna. Lord!
how people worried about bugging - some of them with more reason than others and 
how rarely any of them hesitated to have cable TV installed. There is aperfect reciprocity in many aspects of electricity and magnetism: if youreverse cause and effect, the system still works. As a practical matter here,
that meant that the television speaker also acted as a microphone monitoringevery sound in the hotel room - and that the data was available for pick-offthrough the antenna connection or, with more difficulty, through the hotel'spower circuitry.
"If they want to know what I'm doing, they can damn well ask me," the veteransaid as he straightened.
The key ring clinked against the face of the refrigerator as his knee bumpedit. Kelly looked down. For a moment, the unobtrusive appliance was the onlything in his mind or in the universe. It had been a long time since thewhiskey, a bloody long time.
"You're too goddam smart for your own good, woman," Kelly muttered; his palmswere sweating. "Too smart for mine for sure."
The hell of it was, she didn't think he couldn't stop drinking, she thought hecould. She was right, of course; Tom Kelly could do any goddam thing he sethis mind to ... but why he cared about disappointing some bitch he'd just met,
some hard-edged pro who'd spend him like a bullet, that part of his mind wasbeyond his own understanding.
Coffee'd do for now. 
Kelly tossed his jacket on the bed, then went over to his own zippered, limp-
leather briefcase to remove the small jar of instant coffee and the immersionheater. He looked at the beer can and grimaced. He could cut the top off to 


insert the heater, but that would leave a jagged edge, and a thin aluminum canwasn't a sensible man's choice for drinking hot liquids.
A few ounces of coffee at a time was better than none. He needed fluids to sipwhile he worked, and if coffee was the choice this time - there were fourglasses in the bathroom; he filled them all, brought them to the writing deskwhere he dusted them with instant coffee, and inserted the immersion heater inthe first. 
Next, from his briefcase, Kelly took a radio rather smaller than a hardcoverbook. It was an off-the-shelf Sony 2002, and for less than $300 it would pickup AM, FM, and short wave signals with an efficiency NSA would have spent$15,000 a copy to duplicate a few years before.
Hell, governments being what they are, NSA was probably still paying fifteengrand for similar packages.
The little world-band radio ran either from batteries or from an AC/DCconverter; but the latter caused a hum on shortwave, and batteries - unlikepublic power grids - were the same voltage worldwide. Sound in the background,
even if it was no more than the hiss of static, was as necessary to Kelly'sstudy habits as something beside him to drink. He used the scanner to pick upan FM station, classical music, something he had last heard on Radio Sophiawhen he was a long fucking way from the United States.
Funny. Music cared less about time and nationalities than just about anythingexcept stones. Of course, politicians were pretty similar worldwide, too. Aswere spies.
Tom Kelly unplugged the immersion heater. There was one final preliminary togetting comfortable. He drew the snub-nosed revolver nestled at the small ofhis back and set it on the desk beside the bubbling glass of coffee.
The exposed metal of the weapon had been sandblasted and anodized anunattractive dull gray about the color of phosphate-protected steel. There wasa line of wear around the cylinder where the registration lug rubbed, but theweapon had actually been fired only a handful of times in the thirty-fiveyears since its manufacture.
A patch of Velcro - hook-side - had been epoxied to the right side of thebarrel just ahead of the five-shot cylinder, and there was a correspondingpatch of Velcro fuzz sewn at the back of the waistband of every pair of pantsKelly owned. There were a lot of circumstances in which a holster was slowerto ditch than the gun itself. The Velcro was unobtrusive, added neither bulknor weight, and was actually more secure than the usual belt-clip holster.
Apart from its finish and the nylon hooks, the revolver looked like a standardSmith and Wesson Chief's Special, the choice of tens of thousands of peoplewho wanted the punch of a .38 Special cartridge in a small, reliable package.
Kelly's gun was something more than that. Though it was dimensionallyidentical to the ordinary version, the only steel in the weapon was the slightamount in the lockwork: frame, cylinder, and barrel had all been forged fromaluminum in response to an Air Force request for the lightest possiblerevolver to equip pilots who came down behind enemy lines. Almost the entirerun had been melted down shortly thereafter, when the decision wascountermanded; but not quite all.
Tom Kelly didn't care that the gun weighed ten ounces empty instead of thesteel version's nineteen. He cared very much that its magnetic signature wasso low that it would not show up on airport magnetometers unless they were setlow enough to trip on three or four dimes in a pocket as well.
The ammunition Kelly had handloaded for the revolver was also nonstandard,
though the components were off-the-shelf items. He'd used commercial 148-grainwadcutter bullets, swaged from pure lead instead of being cast with an alloyto harden them, ahead of three grains of Bullseye, a powder fast enough toburn almost completely within the snubbie's short barrel. The bullets wereformed with a hollow base, a deep cavity meant to be upset against the rifling 


grooves by the powder gases in the manner of a Civil War minie ball. Kelly hadloaded them back to front, and the deep cup had expanded the soft metal veryefficiently in a gelatine target despite the relatively low velocity of thebullet on impact.
Keeping pressures within levels that a cartridge-company engineer would havefound acceptable in 1920 had been the bottom line for the load. The all-
aluminum revolvers had been tested by the Air Force with ordinary ammunitionand with blue pills - proof loads developing forty percent greater pressurethan normal. There was no reason to believe that in the ensuing thirty-fiveyears the metal would have work-hardened into a state that made it more likelyto rupture.
Still, better safe than sorry. . . . Kelly wasn't particularly worried aboutbeing hurt if the revolver blew up - the person holding a handgun at arm'slength is the one least likely to be harmed if the chamber bursts. He was verymuch concerned that in a crisis so severe that he had to use the weapon, itwould fail and give him one shot when he desperately counted on having five.
The master sergeant who'd sold him the gun at Wheelus had said that nogovernment was going to put an unsafe weapon in the hands of its troops. Thatwould have been more confidence-building if Kelly hadn't seen the USG issue atactical nuke, the Davy Crockett, with a fallout radius greater than the rangeof the launcher. Not that anybody'd explained that at the time to the Marineswho were expected to fry themselves with the thing.
For the remainder of the morning, the veteran read files and made plans. Hehad two bars of Bendicks chocolate, the Military and Sportsmen's blend, in hisbriefcase. They did little to quell the roiling of coffee and fatigue in hisstomach, but the caffeine in the dose of fifty-seven percent pure chocolatedid its own share of good.
The files were a maze, reports pared to the bone and beyond, filled with agentdesignators which could be collated with real names only through separatedocuments. There had been no evident attempt to censor what Kelly was beinggiven: his own name appeared in one report as the source of a case of M14rifles said to have been received by another Kurd who had disappeared shortlythereafter. Kelly remembered the agent from Operation Birdlike and was amusedto note that the man's present reporting officer classed him as "generallyreliable." Kelly wouldn't have taken the fellow's word for whether the sunrose in the east. 
And that was the problem with most of the information: the three agents amongthe Kurdish community whom Kelly did know were venal, cowardly, and thoroughlyuntrustworthy. Results suggested that the remainder of the reports were fromsimilar trash, men and women who had, at best, secondhand information onwhatever Mohammed Ayyubi was involved in. Had been involved in, until somebodyshot him and a monster dead on a rain-sodden street. 
The files covered approximately the past year. There was nothing in themregarding aliens, and for all but the past two months they were concernedsolely with the normal collection from a nationalist movement: money and arms;
smuggling and training camps; foreign contacts in general and the darksuggestions of Russian involvement certain to show up in reports approved byAmerican station chiefs. 
Not that the KGB and other Russians paid to meddle in Third World problemswere any less likely to be doing so than their US counterparts.
There was a change in March which was so abrupt that it must have resultedfrom a change in emphasis at client level - the members of the US governmentwho received the information - rather than a watershed in what the agentsthemselves chose to send in. Suddenly Kurds were making UFO reports whichwould have been right at home in small-town papers throughout America.
There were no, thank god, conversations with little green men, although onecase officer had sent a number of reports of angelic revelations before 


somebody further up the line had rapped his knuckles. There were airplanesthat flew straight up, huge cylinders with lighted windows along their sides,
and a score of other shapes and styles. Some reports referred to incidents asmuch as thirty years in the past, proving to a certainty that the sudden spateof reports was only a result of tasking.
In general, the only similarities between objects sighted occurred when two ormore reports were made by the same agent. There was a single exception: diskstwenty meters in diameter which lifted silently, wrapped in auroral splendor from 
locations separated by a hundred miles, and with no duplication in thechain of data. That could mean something; and certainly there was something tobe learned; the dead alien proved that. But even if one or all of the reportswere true, they were garbage which did absolutely nothing to indicate what wasreally going on.
And that was all there was. No wonder Pierrard and his crew were willing totry a card as wild as Tom Kelly.
A thing with a mouth like a lamprey, and a couple dozen - maybe a few hundred

-Kurds whose families thought they were going off to be armed and trained inthe cause of Kurdish nationalism. Well, the connection would be obvious justas soon as Kelly learned what it was.
When the files were stacked neatly again on the top of the desk, the veteranwalked to the bathroom. The toothbrush and toothpaste from his briefcase, andthe hot shower that he let play over him helped but could not wholly removethe foulness throughout his system. Fear and anger and fatigue, but mostespecially fear, leave their hormonal spoor on a man.
Kelly looked at himself in the fogged mirror when he stepped out of theshower, but that was another mistake. His outline was intact, but thecondensate on the glass turned his hundred and eighty pounds, tank-solid andscarred with experience, into a wistful ghost. He was crazy to get back intothis; aliens or no, none of it would matter when he was dead.
But death would come regardless.
He lay down on the bed, his skin warm with the harsh toweling he had justgiven it. He'd have them book him into the Sheraton in a room facing theGolden Horn. He'd treat it as a perk - they understood perks, these folk insuits they never saw the bills for, and no eyebrows would lift because Kellywanted a room in the most expensive hotel in Istanbul. They would understandthe implied test, also, the precise instructions which they could either carryout or not - and the implications if they did not or even chose to argue.
And because they understood both those things, they would not foresee theiragent's - 'their agent's' - real reason for wanting a room just there.
He needed to talk to people after he shook free from the box Elaine would tryto put around him no matter what she said. There were folks who owed him,
though the good ones didn't keep score any more than Kelly did himself.
Individuals, unlike nations, were capable of keeping faith.
For now, however, what he needed most of all was sleep. He closed his eyes,
and sleep came with the fireshot dreams Kelly had expected. But the dreamschanged, and by the time he awakened at twilight he could remember nothing butmoving figures and black walls that reached toward heaven.
Airport terminals have certain worldwide similarities, but Istanbul's had morein common with the military portion of Beirut Airport than with any civilianstructure Kelly'd walked through. Luggage from the Pan Am flight that had justlanded was arrayed on a single long, low table in the center of a hangarconverted for baggage examination.
Each individual claimed his or her own suitcases under the eyes of armedguards, and carried them to the examination booths - porters took the weightfor some passengers, mostly foreigners, but no one else could accept theresponsibility.
Beyond hand luggage Kelly had only one suitcase and that - a solid, vinyl case 

of Turkish manufacture - held clothing. He had no need, himself, to bringunusual hardware into Turkey, as it had turned out, because his overseas phonecalls had been more successful than he had dared hope. Funny. It alwayssurprised him when other people came through the way he would have done forthem - 120 percent and no questions asked that didn't bear on the fulfillmentof the request.
It would have been easy for Kelly to snatch his bag and stride ahead of theremaining passengers, and reaching an empty examination booth would have savedhalf an hour of waiting for civilians - nervous, belligerent, or both - to beprocessed through ahead of him.
But even though the stocky veteran had nothing to fear from Customs, he lethis training override his instinct to go full bore and finish whatever he wasdoing by the most direct route possible. He kept a low profile, deliberatelyfollowed a middle-aged man with a bag in either hand and a brown Yugoslavpassport held with his entry documents between two fingertips and the side ofthe smaller case. 
The Customs agent for whom Kelly opened his bag wore khaki pants with a tieand white shirt. The uniform of the National Policeman watching him was ofgray-green wool and included a Browning Hi-Power in a holster of white patentleather. Beyond the line of booths was a squad of soldiers in fatigues,
smoking and occasionally adjusting the slings of the Thompson submachinegunsthey carried.
Prime Minister Ecevit had taken the Defense portfolio for himself, but thatwas cosmetic. He was also making a real attempt to control the radicalviolence from both sides before a military junta ousted him to cure theproblem more directly. The open display of armed force seemed to concern mostof the foreign passengers. Kelly himself had enough other things to worryabout. 
"I love Istanbul," Kelly joked in Turkish with the Customs agent, "but do theylet me stay here? Surely there must be runway sweepers to be maintained in amore lovely part of Turkey than Incirlik!"
"You are a Turk?" asked the National Policeman, running a knowledgeable handalong the hinges of the suitcase instead of prodding through the shirts as hehad done with the Yugoslav minutes before.
"No," said the Customs agent, flipping from the front to the back of theartistically-worn passport, but sizing Kelly up sidelong as he stamped theentry data. The American was a hair taller than the Anatolian norm, but hisstocky build was right as were the dark complexion and straight black hair.
With a moustache and a few days polish on his Turkish, he could pass as anative - of the country, though not of any specific district.
He might have to do just that.
"Not, but should be," Kelly agreed with a smile. "It's good to be back. Evenheaded for Incirlik." 
"Go with God, Mr. Bradsheer," the Customs agent said, closing the suitcasewith one hand and returning Kelly's false passport in the other. The currencydeclaration form went into a file beneath the examination table. 
Kelly smiled, snapped the latches of the case - no time to buckle the safetystraps as well - and said, "Go with God, brother," as he walked out the rearof the canvas booth. 
Elaine Turtle was standing at the back of the building, beyond the low barrierthat separated incoming passengers from those waiting to greet them.
She wore a long-sleeved blue dress today, with ruffles at wrists and throatand a belt of light gilded chain. It had been three days since Kelly last sawher, and his recognition now was not instantaneous. Partly it was the beretthat covered the rich curls of her black hair, partly that Tuttle carried alarge purse on a shoulder strap for the first time since he had met her. Inlarge measure, Kelly did not recognize Elaine because the physical reality of 


her was so different - so much less threatening - than memory suffused withthe woman's personality.
He did not dream, about her, but he had begun to dream - and if the strangelandscapes he remembered on awakening were not nightmares, they would do tillworse came along.
Kelly stopped at the barrier and rested his suitcase on it while he buckledthe straps over the latches. None of the soldiers paid him any particularattention. There were enthusiastic greetings in half a dozen languages,
chiefly Turkish and German - a Turkish Airways flight from Frankfurt had justdisgorged its load of 'guest workers' from West Germany. Kelly had to wait fora large family reunion at the nearest opening in the barrier, but he wasn't insuch a hurry that he would attract attention by scissoring his legs over itinstead. 
Elaine, who had not moved while Kelly meandered through the entry building,
stepped to his side as he began to walk out the door. "It's a long way to thecar," she said, nodding toward the parking lot set off from the terminal areaby barbed wire and cyclone fencing. There were more troops outside, and anarmored car painted blue to match the berets of the paramilitary police. "Doyou want to wait for me to bring the car around?"
"No sweat," said Kelly, swinging the suitcase at arm's length in front of himto prove that he could handle the weight. He continued to saunter toward thepedestrian gate at which Elaine had gestured. "You know, I was afraid youpeople were going to walk me through Customs and make a fuss. I should've saidsomething before. Glad you had better sense than I - gave you credit for."'
"Given the present political climate," Elaine said with her eyes on where theywere going, "with Ecevit using America as a whipping boy for all the troublesof his administration, I don't know that we could have done much. Not in theIstanbul District, at any rate."
She looked up sharply at the man beside her. "Not that you seemed to need helpvery badly."
"You wanted somebody who was comfortable in Turkey," Kelly said. "That muchyou got."
He shifted the case from one hand to the other as she led him through a row ofparked cars and, on the other side, wrapped his arm around her shoulders in ahug. "Hey, Elaine," he said, releasing her almost before her light frame beganto stiffen beneath the dress, "I'm pumped, but right for the moment I'mfeelin' good."
He grinned across at her as they continued to stride along, switching thesuitcase back to his right hand to prove that the hug had been no more than afriendly gesture. "Look," he explained, "going - back to work's - myequivalent of riding the roller coaster, I guess. It'll be a rush while itlasts, and you don't have to worry about how I'll get along with you so longas we're on the same side, okay? And you handle your end the way I'd want tobe able to handle it if it was my job."
"Rather than handle it like you, you mean?" Elaine asked with the beginning ofa smile. 
"Right," agreed Kelly with a broader one, dodging a little Ford Anadol thatwas being backed from its parking space with more verve than discretion.
"Rather than by getting the admin types so mad that they insist on fuckingwith the operation, which is exactly what I'd do if anybody were silly enoughto put me in that slot. I never had a lotta tact, and when things get tensefor one reason'r the other - " 
He laughed, and stopped. They passed, one to either side, a dejected-lookingpalm tree in an island protected from cars by empty oil drums. When theyrejoined on the other side, Kelly chuckled in embarrassment and said, "Afterall, there aren't a lot of times it's helpful to point a gun at your colonel'seye and tell him he's history if he makes a peep in the next ten minutes." 


"You did that?" Elaine said, her tone one of amusement rather than the coolappraisal Kelly had expected.
"Yeah," Kelly admitted. "Seemed like a good idea at the time, and I figured wewere far enough back in the boonies that he wouldn't have to report it laterto cover his own ass. Neither of us got anything in our jackets for that one,
and he stopped tryin' to be a big hero like his old man - at least when he wasin sight of me."
"This is the car," Elaine said. "We'll put your luggage behind the seats."
The car was a Porsche 944, new enough that the treads on both front and reartires were almost unworn. It was painted a metallic green, the gloss overlaidby a light dusting of yellow grit from the parking lot.
"What," asked Kelly as Elaine unlocked the Porsche, "were you going to do if Ishowed up here with a steamer trunk?" An obvious answer struck him, and helooked around for a follow-car big enough to handle any possible load ofbaggage. Though he craned his neck and raised himself onto his toes, lookinglike a gigged frog because of his squat build, Kelly could see no likelyvehicle nearby.
"There isn't one, Tom," Elaine said dryly, flipping the dirver's seat forward,
"but don't worry" - she patted his left arm, whose muscles were rock solidwith the weight of the suitcase they were supporting - "I'm packing."
" 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death . . .' "
quoted Kelly as he set the case into the car. It was a snug fit, but becausethe driver's seat was well forward there was a fit. 
"And as for the rest," she went on when he straightened, "if you got off withmore luggage than you'd boarded with in Frankfurt, we were going to have tohire a taxi for it - yes." She smiled.
The veteran held both hands out in front of him, palms down, and looked atthem for a moment. Then he met Elaine's eyes and said, "Look, I know how Iget. Don't - " He swallowed. "I've got real problems working close with peoplewhen it gets tense, I don't usually do that. I don't wanna, you know, somebodyget hurt because I was pissed and there wasn't a whole lotta time."
Elaine touched his hands with hers, fingertips to palms and her thumbs lyinggently on his scarred knuckles. "You haven't had anyone you could trustbefore, Tom," she said. "You've got that now."
Kelly grinned and squeezed hands that felt so delicate that he could havecrumpled them like cellophane. "Yeah, that's a change," he said, steppingaround the back of the car to get to the passenger side. His fingers tappedidly on the black rubber spoiler as he passed it, wondering whether therewould be any chance of putting the Porsche through its paces one of thesedays. He was going to need some relaxation. . . .
And he could've used somebody to trust as well, but he didn't have that onthis operation either. You could trust the people beneath you, sometimes, ifyou'd trained them and worked with them before. But your superiors in ahierarchy could never by definition be expected to do exactly what you toldthem to - especially if the time were too short for what they thought wasproper respect. People didn't get into positions of responsibility byabdicating responsibility.
Elaine Tuttle would be welcome any day as a member of a team Kelly puttogether, for her driving and her mind if nothing else. But right now she was,
at a guess, a lieutenant colonel - and he was a master sergeant in the onlyscheme of things that a light colonel's mind could accept.
It would've been real nice to trust her, though.
Traffic on the long stretch of four-lane highway between the airport inYesilköy and the city proper was heavy. Elaine, though she did not waste anytime, wasn't pushing with the little car the way she had the first night onthe Baltimore-Washington Turnpike.
"You haven't asked me," she said, "whether we'd gotten you the accommodations 


you'd asked for."
Kelly laughed. "Demanded, you mean," he said. At eye level out his side windowwere the rear axles of a fourteen-wheel semi, just like the ones immediatelybefore and behind the Porsche. He had no doubt that the little car was as 
sturdy as anything its size could be, but the low seating position emphasizedvulnerability to the trucks in a way that not even a motorcycle would have.
"Look, I don't say you couldn't have failed, you know - maybe terrorists blewthe place up this morning, that sorta thing. But you weren't going to fail andnot tell me about it right off."
He turned to look at her profile, unexpectedly softer than any of the anglesof the woman's frame - pleasant in itself, and much more pleasant than theangle-iron bumper with a Bulgarian license plate ten feet beyond the hood. "Atworst, I'm going to decide you're a vicious bitch who's dangling me forwhoever, the Russians, to bite. You won't ever convince me you're stupid."
It was the right thing to have said, because Elaine's reaction was wrong - tothe speculation, not the flattery. The face compressed itself momentarily intothe neutral expression that gave nothing away save the fact that something washidden. She smiled so quickly that Kelly could have thought he had mistakenthe reaction . . . except that long, bloody years had taught him when hisinstincts must be trusted and no human being could be.
"This is the route from Europe," she said, waving to the truck ahead of them,
"traffic from as far as Sweden and England, on the way across the Hindu Kush,
some of it." 
"Rather have your company than theirs," the veteran replied, his handparalleling hers in a gesture toward the red airport bus ahead in the otherlane. "Though mind you, the next time you pick me up, a fifty-passengerMercedes like that one'd be a little more in keeping with the rest of thetraffic than a two-seater Porsche." 
Elaine laughed and made a pair of lane changes, cutting between bumpers moreclosely than she had previously that afternoon. The Porsche's exhaust blattedat the downshift followed by swift acceleration. "That make you feel better?"
she asked, nodding toward the little Anadol - a license-built version of anEnglish Ford - now just ahead of them. "You see, your wish is my command."
Istanbul was an exotic city with a history that went back long before theRoman conquest, much less that of the Ottoman Turks. Along the highway fromYesilköy, however, it resembled nothing so much as Cleveland, Ohio: anothermajor industrial city decaying beside a major body of water.
It had ceased to be the capital in 1920, when the Allied powers had anchoredwarships in the Golden Horn - and had found that the only Turks they ruledwere those literally within range of their guns. The Turks had been on thelosing side during World War I, but their armies had defeated major attacksboth at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. There was no longer an Ottoman Empire,
but there was a new nation called Turkey. Other failed empires in the region the 
Persians and the Greeks both came readily to mind - had their pride. TheTurks had in addition an army ready to kick whoever's butt was closest. Theplanners in Washington who persisted in considering Turkey a client state ofthe US had no one but themselves to blame for the current anti-Americanism. 
"What do you expect to do in Istanbul?" Elaine asked as they waited to crossthe peripheral road surrounding the walls begun at least seven hundred yearsbefore Constantine renamed the city after himself.
"Talk to some people," Kelly said, shrugging. "Ahmed Ayyubi for one,
Mohammed's brother. There had to be some reason Mohammed moved to Istanbul or 
stayed here, if he was just 'catching his breath with his brother afterBirdlike came apart. . . . Look, I'm playin' it by ear, that's as much data asI've got."
Elaine sent the car growling across the intersection and into the Old Cityproper. "We can help you locate people if you need that," she said with a nod 


-approval, or more likely reassurance. "As we did with Ahmed Ayyubi."
Kelly had asked her for a location on the dead Kurd's brother even though hewould much sooner that his present employers not know of his interest. Whatcan't be cured, though . . . Any damned fool would know that Kelly had tostart with or near Ahmed Ayyubi; and though he could have gotten the man'saddress without official help, he could not - in Istanbul - have been surethat his interest would not have leaked back anyway.
Better to be up front about what you couldn't hide - it disarmed the brasshats who thought they owned your soul.
The Porsche turned left at Ataturk Boulevard, steeply uphill so that bytwisting around Kelly got a good view of the Sea of Marmara. Though they hadbeen driving parallel to the water for some time, the high corniche and theremains of ancient brick walls had hidden it from him. 
Elaine, driving with the intention of making the best possible time, looked ather passenger in surprise. "Is somebody behind us?" she asked, and as shespoke her eyes flickered to the mirrors and the traffic around her.
I only get that paranoid in the boonies, thought Kelly, but that's probablybecause she's spent more time in cities than I've done. Aloud he said, "Oh, noproblem. I just like to see something big and real now and again - to anchorme, you know?"
Elaine nodded acceptance rather than understanding and concentrated on herdriving again. Though she hadn't any right to be pissed, Kelly knew thatnobody likes to be frightened needlessly, even in innocence. Well, she couldhave let him take the bus and a taxi instead of picking him up at the airport.
The Old City of Istanbul was on a finger of land projecting into the Sea ofMarmara, separated from the equally-steep ridge of the Pera District by thedeep gash of the Golden Horn. All of the bodies of water - the Horn, the Seaof Marmara, and the Bosphorus, which connected the latter to the Black Sea were 
the results of separate fault lines as the continental plates that wereEurope and Asia clashed. The earthquakes that were a certain concomitant ofthose faults meant that all but the most massive structures were brought downon a regular basis or were devoured by the fires that resulted.
It was a city of apartments of concrete and yellowish brick, built in the latenineteenth century or the twentieth - not unattractive, many of them pickedout by balconies or iron grillwork, but all the colors muted by the soft coalthat had been the city's fuel for centuries. Only from above was thereanything brighter, and that was the omnipresent red-orange of tiled roofs theshade of the rouge on a badly laid out corpse.
They crossed the Golden Horn on the Ataturk Bridge, early enough to miss theworst of the northbound traffic - tourists returning to the big luxury hotelsin the Pera, and returning with them many of the personnel who had beencatering to them among the ancient beauties of the Old City. Istanbul stillhad heavy industries, but there had been virtually no new development heresince World War II. Only the tourists offered to preserve the city fromsinking back into the state of somnolent ruin to which it had been reduced bythe time the Ottoman Turks conquered it in 1453.
Elaine hadn't used the long drive to pump him, which was just as well sincethe Porsche was too small a box for the hostility that would have resulted.
Such of his plans as she didn't know were things he hoped she wouldn't learn,
and the reality of what he was to do faded as the time for executionapproached. It was hard to believe that he was really back in Turkey; and thenotion that he was here to track down aliens with too many bones and far toomany teeth in their circular mouths was as absurd as it would have been theday before he saw the dead thing.
"Doesn't really matter if I believe any of it, does it?" Kelly said as Elaineswung the car around the rank of cabs waiting to load at the entrance of theSheraton. "Just so long as I do my job." 

He had spoken as much to himself as to Elaine, but the woman raised an eyebrowover her smile and replied, "Are you going to have difficulty working underthose conditions?" 
Before Kelly answered, she stopped the Porsche and handed the keys to theattendant, who had scurried in a failed attempt to open the door for her. "Itmight be as well," she said over her shoulder as Kelly too got out of the car,
"if you carried the suitcase yourself. There'll be people waiting in theroom." 
"There's no difficulty," the veteran said as he tugged out the big case. "Ispent years without thinking any of the people giving me orders knew what thehell they were doing. Doubting that I do's something of a pleasant change."
They took the elevators from the ground-floor service area. Kelly noted withamusement that Elaine waited a moment, watching him from the corner of hereye, before she touched the button for the seventh floor. Kelly grinnedbroadly at her, letting her wonder whether or not he knew which floor theirrooms were on this time. 
He didn't want to talk business with Elaine, and he didn't have anything butbusiness - one way or the other - to talk with her. Unless - and he lookedtoward the ceiling of the elevator - he asked the question to which his mindkept returning, whether or not she ever wore a bra. His smile, carefullydirected away from anything human, became innocence. A question like thatstruck him as a pretty good way to get his hand bitten off to the elbow, whichwould complicate his job a lot. . . .
"A penny for your thoughts," Elaine said, her voice more guarded than thewords. 
Kelly shrugged and faced her, the bulk of the suitcase on the floor betweenthem. "Just thinking that maybe my first priority was to get my ashes hauled,"
he said, "so it doesn't get in the way."
She laughed as the elevator cage quivered to a halt. "Are you asking for alist of addresses," she said, "or would you just like the equipment deliveredto your room?" She pointed down the hall, her arm a shadow within the puffytranslucence of her sleeve. "Seven-twenty-five."
"Naw, no problem," the stocky man said. He wasn't embarrassed - cribs in theAnti-Lebanon had been ponchos pegged into three-sided windbreaks, which prettywell blasted the notion of sex being a private affair. It was useful to notethat his case officer wasn't embarrassed either. 
"Well, it wouldn't be a problem, you know," Elaine said cheerfully as she, apace ahead of Kelly, stopped at a door and tapped on it. "All part of theunobtrusive luxury service you've been promised."
"Unobtrusive will do just fine," Kelly replied. Doug Blakeley opened the doorwith a frozen scowl on his face. There were two other men within the room 
carrying radio-detection equipment. One of them was smoking a cigarette.
"You've met Doug," Elaine said as she entered 725, moving Blakeley back awayfrom the door by stepping unnecessarily close to him - giving Kelly and thesuitcase room without need for the macho games of which both men were capable.
"George" - she pointed to the fat, balding man with the tone generator - "andChristophe," she indicated the pale, almost tubercular smoker who woreheadphones connected to the wide-band receiver slung from his right shoulder.
"Christophe, put the cigarette out in the toilet and flush it," Elainecontinued. She kept her voice as neutral as if she were commenting on theview, being very careful not to raise the emotional temperature. "And where'sPeter?" 
"What's the matter with the cigarette?" demanded Christophe, taking the half-
smoked cylinder out of his mouth to examine it rather than to obey. HisEnglish was accented, but it appeared to be German - Flemish? - rather thanthe French Kelly had expected. 


"He's next door in your room," Doug was saying. "I thought we'd sweep hisfirst, before we did yours."
The tone generator which George carried put out a known signal which wouldtrip sound-activated bugs and cause them to broadcast. Christophe swept up anddown as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as his receiver covered, unlessand until he picked up the tone signal in his earphones. At that point, Georgecould lower the intensity of the generator and move it around the room untilthe bug was physically located.
If the bugging device was combined directly with a tape recorder, then therewas no signal to pick up on the receiver - but that sort of installationrequired that someone enter the room at regular intervals to change tapes, andit very considerably increased the bulk of the bugging unit. Similarly, ahardwired bug was possible but impractical in a hotel room like this becauseof the holes that had to be drilled through walls between the bug and thelistening post. No sweep could be perfect, but this team appeared to know whatit was doing - especially if the piece of hardware in a separate case by thedoor was the spectrum analyzer Kelly assumed it was.
"Christophe, when you get an order from me you do it," Elaine said in a deadlyvoice to the man at least a foot taller than she was. 
Kelly walked over to the window, smiling, leaving behind him the suitcase andthe incident developing in the room.
There was more to the woman's reaction than her authority, though there wasthat too. She'd picked up on the way Kelly felt about cigarette smoke - surelythat wasn't in his psychiatric profile - and she had a not unreasonableconcern that the veteran would use that as the excuse to void his grudgingacquiescence to the wishes of a government he hated.
Hell, nobody'd twisted Kelly's arm; he was a big boy. He'd go through with thedeal, whatever that meant and whatever roadblocks his superiors threw in hisway.
But it didn't hurt to keep 'em nervous.
The window had a nice view of Taksim Square and the Monument of the Republic.
The square served for major ceremonies and public gatherings because there wasnothing of suitable size in the Old City. The Golden Horn, to the south, wasinvisible beyond the buildings of the Pera District, and the skyline wasdominated by the twenty-story tower of a nearby hotel - the ETAP Marmar, thecity's tallest building. Rooms on this side of the Sheraton were considerablycheaper than those with a view of the Bosphorus, but Kelly did find itpleasant to look out at the trees of Taksim Park - probably the only place inIstanbul that contained so much greenery.
Not that his choice of a room had anything to do with that aspect of the view.
Kelly turned. The exchange between Elaine and now both members of the sweepteam had continued. Christophe's cigarette had burned almost to his fingersand scattered a lump of ash as he gestured with it.
"Goddammit, Christophe," Doug said sharply with his arms akimbo. "Put out thecigarette!"
The man with his headphones now loosely clasping his neck scurried to comply.
Kelly could afford to smile sardonically at Elaine's slim, tense back. Andthese were Europeans, not Arabs or even Moslems. Female officers must have areally great time working with locally-recruited teams. . . .
"Tell you what," said Kelly, "let's all just go next door, shall we?" Heoffered a clown's broad smile, keeping his lips tight. "That way the boys cando whatever they need to do there. And from now on, just for fun, let's notyou or anybody you know come into 725, unless I invite him, huh?"
Doug started to bridle, but before he could reply Elaine said tiredly, "Yeah,
that sounds like a good idea to me too." She looked at Christophe returningfrom the bathroom, and added, "And when they've swept my room, Doug, I don'twant to see them again myself till you're told different." 


Nobody moved for a moment. Then Doug snapped, "Well, why aren't you packingyour gear, dammit?" George and Christophe eyed one another as they obeyed, butthey obeyed the blond man without question.
There was no door through the partition wall between rooms 725 and 727, butneither was there anyone in the hall to watch the four men and the woman forming 
almost as many subgroups as there were individuals - traipse from oneroom to the other. The gray fiberglass cases holding the debugging equipmentwere not standard luggage, but neither did they hint that they contained morethan expensive cameras.
George tapped on the door of 727. As Peter opened it, Elaine said to Doug,
"Give him his own room key now."
"Eh?" 
Peter was black haired and heavily moustached, a very solid-looking man andyounger than the sweep team. Kelly gave him a cautious once-over. There was noobvious reason why, but Kelly's gut wouldn't have let him keep Peter in a unithe commanded. Now he gave the man a friendly smile as they passed in thedoorway.
"Give Tom the key to seven-two-five, I said," Elaine snapped.
Doug reached into the side pocket of his suitcoat, which sagged, Kelly hadguessed, with the weight of a spare magazine. That guess had been wrong: thekey which Doug handed him was attached to a brass bar rather than a tag orthin plate. Guests were intended to leave their room keys at the desk whenthey went out, and the management did what it could to make that easy toremember. 
The sweep team was already unpacking its equipment, though Christophe pausedto light another cigarette first. George got out what was indeed a spectrumanalyzer and began walking around the room with it, staring at the peaks andvalleys on its cathode ray tube display. His partner waited to rezero his ownequipment because the oscillators in Christophe's wide-band receiver wouldthemselves affect the electromagnetic spectrum within the room.
The view from Elaine's window was practically the same as that of Kelly's,
something the veteran had counted on without being able to influence. So far,
so good. Both rooms were of luxury hotel standards common across the portionsof the world which served tourists. The spread of the double bed was a brocadeof rich blue which clashed badly with the dress Elaine was wearing but matchedthe upholstery of the love seat facing the window.
Kelly sat down on the love seat and spread his arms across the back, his bigscarred hands dangling to either side. Peter watched him with a flatexpression that Kelly recognized: the look that said the mind behind it wasconsidering endgame in the most final and physical sense of the term, just tobe ready when the time came.
"We have a car for you," Elaine said. The light through the window behind hersilhouetted her body against a sky that otherwise held from Kelly'sperspective only the upper stories of the ETAP Marmar.
"I don't need a car," the veteran said. "What I need is a cup of coffee,
black; and I think it'd be real nice if you sent Peter down to get it" - henodded toward the younger man, so nearly a physical double for Kelly himself "
instead of waiting for room service to bring it up."
The woman looked sharply at Kelly. Then she turned her head slightly inPeter's direction and said, "Yes, all right, get it. Get two. Anyone else?"
"Yeah, for god's sake, bring up six coffees and be done with it," said Doug tohis subordinate. Then, proving that he had better judgment than Kelly wouldhave credited him before, Doug added, "And don't argue about it, just do likeyou're paid to, take orders."
Peter frowned, but he left the room without the objection that would havereally lit Elaine's fuse.
When the door closed she went on, "This is a Ford Anadol, like a million 


others in Turkey, Tom. You'll need transportation."
"I'll take taxis," he replied. He gestured to the door. "You know," he wenton, "that one, your Peter, he could really get on my nerves in a hurry. I'mnot gonna shout and scream about this, but if I see him again after he bringsup the coffee, I go home. This time it's no shit."
Doug looked from Elaine to Kelly in genuine puzzlement. Elaine nodded andsaid, "All right, we'll see what we can do." She cleared her throat. "It'sabsurd for you to trust taxis to be where you need them. We can give you adriver, if you like."
It'd be absurd to accept a car with the array of tracking beacons thatanything she'd provide would have, Kelly thought. Aloud he said, "I'm atourist, I take cabs. When I change my mind, I'll let you know."
The sweep team had moved into the bathroom. The receiver in the spectrumanalyzer was of lower sensitivity than the one Christophe used to listen forthe tone they would generate in a few minutes. In order to pick up a hump onthe display, which was the low-powered signal of a bug, the unit needed to befairly close to the transmitter. "What's the band width on that thing?" Kellyasked, nodding toward the bathroom.
"What?" said Doug. Elaine decided not to argue further about the car. Both ofthem followed Kelly's nod toward the bathroom.
Kelly slipped the cavity resonator, a three-inch metal tube with a nine-inchantenna of flexible wire, between the back and the cushion of the love seat.
"I mean, what range in megahertz does the display cover? Eighty to threehundred? More?" 
"I can't imagine, but you can look for yourself if you feel you must," thewoman said in exasperation.
"That all we need to cover?" Kelly said, no more relaxed than he had been amoment before. "The car, I mean? Because if it -" 
"There's money," Elaine said, lifting a Halliburton from the floor to the bedand opening it, "though you can always say you don't need that either."
"I don't," the veteran agreed, "but I'll take what's going." Hard to tellwhether the asperity in Elaine's voice was fatigue, the difficulty in gettingsubordinates to take orders from a woman, or simply Kelly's own arrogance.
Probably a combination of the three; and probably things weren't going toimprove for the duration, because none of those factors were likely to changefor the better. 
Elaine tossed a fat, banded packet of Turkish lire onto Kelly's lap. They wereused bills, bearing, as did all denominations of Turkish currency, the face ofKemal Atatürk, the republic's founder. "That's a hundred thousand," she said,
closing the attache case. Doug, literally and figuratively the odd man out,
looked with his hands clasped from Elaine to the sweep team, which wasbeginning to make its circuit with the tone generator and receiver.
"It'd seem like a lot more," said Kelly as he stripped off the banding, "if Ihadn't checked the exchange rate in the terminal. Do I sign for it?"
"It's over a thousand dollars, Kelly," said the woman, "which ought to behandy - unless you plan to pay your bloody taxi fares with credit cards.
There's more if you need it" - she spun the lock dials of her Halliburton withgrim determination - "and if you need large sums, we'll talk.
"And the answer is no, I signed for it," she concluded with her eyes fierce.
Kelly wondered if she'd shoot him if he asked if she were on the rag just now.
Probably not: she wasn't the type who ever really lost it, any more than Kellyhimself did. "I appreciate the way you're covering for me," the veteran saidcalmly as he rose.
He slipped half the lire - pounds, from the Latin, just like the Italianequivalent and the British symbol for currency - into the breast pocket of hisjacket, and the other half, folded, into the right side pocket of his slacks.
"I suppose I get this way because I figure the best way to be left alone is to 


make you'all" - he smiled around the room - "want to keep clear. But I dounderstand that you're keeping your side of the bargain. And that it can't beeasy for somebody in your position."
He walked toward the door. Behind him, Doug called, "The coffee hasn't comeyet."
"No," agreed Kelly as he stepped out into the hallway, "but Peter left, whichwas all I had in mind." 
Room 725 had a pleasant feeling for Kelly as he shot the deadbolt lock behindhim; not home, but a bunker. Bunkers were a lot more useful than homes.
A glance out the window at the sun told him that he had time to put his gearin order and still catch Ahmed Ayyubi at work. Before starting to unpack, hesat his little Sony radio up on the window ledge and scanned the FM band untilhe found a station - probably Greek, but that didn't matter one way or theother - playing music. There was a good deal of static, and the red diode thatindicated tuning strength fluctuated feebly - which mattered even less to earstrained like Kelly's in the hard school of communications intercept.
He had not brought a great deal of clothing, and his choices emphasizedvariety rather than several versions of the same garb. He stripped off thesportcoat, hung it up with the slacks he had taken from the suitcase, andtossed the long-sleeved polyester shirt he was wearing on the bed. In itsplace he donned a checked wool shirt and a nylon windbreaker, both of themwell-worn and of Turkish manufacture, as was the short-brimmed cloth cap heput on. He'd look a little strange to the lobby personnel at the Sheraton, butthat was a cheap trade-off for avoiding comment when he talked to Ayyubi. Themoney in the sportcoat could stay there for the time being.
The last thing Kelly did before leaving his room was to walk over to the Sonyreceiver and poke number seven of the ten station preset buttons. The apparenteffect was the same as if he had pushed the Off button: the sound clicked off,
the LED went dark, and the liquid crystal display of the tuning readout wentcompletely blank as if the power were off also.
What actually happened to the receiver, which a stateside acquaintance ofKelly's had hastily modified, was a good deal more complex. Preset seven tunedthe unit to 88.35 megahertz, squarely in the midst of the upper sidelobe ofIstanbul's sixty-kilowatt commercial FM station. The hump which a spectrumanalyzer would show there was exactly what was to be expected, and a separatetransmitter would have to be very powerful indeed to affect the appearance ofthe band on the display.
The Sony's output when operating on that preset was not to the speaker as anaudible signal but rather through a shunt into the case intended for anexternal battery pack holding four C cells. It now contained a miniature taperecorder with a voice-activated switch. The false battery pack could beexposed by anyone who cared to open it; but Kelly had deliberately left anunmodified Sony and its accoutrements unattended at his apartment in Arlingtonduring the week he was preparing for the mission, giving anyone who wascurious ample opportunity to be reassured about its innocence.
It would be nice to learn that he didn't have to spy on the folks with whom hewas working just now. But given Pierrard, he was going to be very surprised ifElaine and her friends were playing straight.
The breeze from the Bosphorus was cool enough to be bracing now. A few hoursafter sundown it was going to be damned cold, but that itself would be a helpin returning Kelly's mind to operational status, like the process of scalingrust from armor plate. Working for Carlo Bianci, he had been able to stay warmenough all the time. That wasn't something you counted on in the field.
The lead taxi in the rank was a Fiat, older than the driver, who cheerfullyhaggled in Turkish on a price to the Mosque of Sinan. It made a reasonabledestination for Kelly, due east of the Sheraton and close to the Bosphorus -as 
well as being within two narrow, winding blocks of the agent's real 


destination, a neighborhood mosque in an alley off Maskular Street.
The neighborhood mosque was named for Sidi Iskender - Saint Alexander - andKelly wondered fleetingly whether Alexander the Great himself might not havebeen sanctified in the myths of Turkish tribesmen riding westward through theland which the Macedonian had conquered centuries before. The west side of thecourtyard looked as if it had sustained battle damage, but that was the resultof ongoing refurbishment: the wall had been knocked down and was in earlystages of replacement by a portico of four column-supported barrel vaults.
Precast concrete arches leaned against the side of the neighboring commercialbuilding, but the stones of the square pillars were being fitted on-site fromthe pile of rough limestone ashlars delivered from the quarry. Twostonecutters and the half dozen short-haired boys kibitzing sat in a waste ofrock-chips and yellow dust from the stone.
The older of the stonecutters stood straddling the column which he was forminginto a hexagonal pilaster. His partner wore a cloth cap like Kelly's, a tansweater pulled over a dark blue shirt, and baggy black trousers almost hiddenby rock dust and the one-by-one-by-two-foot stone prism behind which hesquatted with an adze. He was in his late thirties, clearly the elder Ayyubibrother, for his broad, dark face was a near double of that Kelly had lastseen videotaped on a rainswept street in Diyarbakir.
Ahmed Ayyubi glanced up at the man approaching and struck the stone again witha blow deceptively light. Rock exploded, and the adze stopped half an inchbeyond the point of impact.
"You," said Ahmed Ayyubi as he rose. The arm holding the adze fell to hisside, but the tendons of the hand on the haft stood out with the fierceness ofthe Kurd's grip.
"We need to talk, Ahmed," Kelly said as he walked closer. He was trying toappear calm, but he stumbled on the rock chips - some of them the size of aclenched fist - covering the ground. Danger had made a tunnel of hisviewpoint, and the peripheral vision that guides the feet had vanished understress. The boys continued to chatter for a moment, but the other stonecutterpaused with his own tool resting on the work face.
"Get out of here," Ayyubi said in Kurdish, and in a voice so guttural thatKelly could not have understood the words had they not been the ones heexpected.
One more step put the American agent as close to the workpiece as Ayyubi was,
well within reach of the adze. "We need to talk," Kelly said. Tiny bits ofstone floated in the sweat that sprang out suddenly from Ayyubi's brow.
"Otherwise Mohammed's killing will be unavenged."
"You're responsible for his death, you know," the Kurd snarled.
Kelly reached out and touched the back of the stonecutter's right hand whilehe held eye contact. "Whatever responsibility I have for Mohammed's death, Iwill wash away in the blood of his killers. But you must help me find them."
And only when he felt Ayyubi's hand relax on the adze helve did Kelly realizethat he had succeeded. 
The stonecutter grimaced and set his tool on the work-piece. "Come," he said,
gesturing beyond a pile of finished blocks toward the street. A couple of theboys jumped up to follow. "You go away!" Ayyubi said. "This is man'sbusiness." Though there was love in his gruffness, the hand he batted at thenearest lad would have flung the boy across the rubble if the blow had landed.
Traffic noise on Maskular and the adjoining streets was a white ambiance thatmay have been what Ayyubi was seeking. More probably the Kurd had needed timeand the movement to clear his thoughts of limestone and his sudden fury atseeing Kelly again.
"I don't know what Mohammed was doing," Ayyubi said abruptly. Standing, he wasthree inches shorter than Kelly, but his neck and shoulders made even thestocky American look slight by contrast. "I wanted him to get into decent 


work, come in with me and Gulersoy" - his calloused thumb indicated the olderstonecutter - "but he'd gotten the taste for being a hero, for getting richwithout working. You did that to him."
"Yes, easy money," Kelly murmured. His right hand caressed the jacket over hisleft elbow. There was a four-inch scar there, where the skin had been laidopen by the same bomb blast which had knocked him silly. Mohammed Ayyubi hadcarried him to safety a hundred and fifty feet up the sides of a ravine that agoat would have thought was sheer.
But soldier ants probably can't explain what they do to the workers in thecolony, either. It was that sort of world, is all.
"This I know, and all I know is this," the stonecutter continued, proddingtoward Kelly's chest with a thumb-thick finger. "He met a blond whore, adancer, and let her get him into this. As you got him into the other."
"I didn't get Mohammed into anything I didn't get him out of," Kelly saidsoftly, with his eyes on the middle distance and his mind on memories that hadnothing to do with the business at hand. His body shuddered, and his eyesfocused on Ayyubi again. "Tell me about the dancer. Is she a Turk?"
"No, a foreigner," the other man said. Something in Kelly's expression amoment before caused Ayyubi to frown, not in fear but with a differentawareness of the situation and the man who questioned him. "I know nothingabout her, only the name - Gee-soo-lah. A belly dancer, very expensive. Dancesat the best clubs and parties of the very rich because she's blond, you see,
and foreign."
"Right ..." Kelly said. "Know where she's at just now?"
Ayyubi shook his head emphatically. "Sometimes here, sometimes she travels.
Not with Mohammed, I think, but I know she was responsible." He paused andadded, "Mohammed showed me a billboard once, but that was months ago. I neversaw her, and I never let him talk to me about freeing Kurdistan and the bigmoney he was making."
The stonecutter spat into the street. Some of the cars had their lights on bynow. "Big money. It helped the family bury him."
"I'll let you know how things work out," Kelly said, wondering if anybody waswatching him just now. Pierrard's people or others, not necessarily people.
"Thank you, Ahmed."
"Wait," the Kurd said, touching Kelly's arm as the agent started to turn away.
When their eyes met again in the dusk, Ayyubi said, "I thought it was friendsof yours who killed him. Americans. They came to talk with me the week beforeMohammed was shot, and I didn't know where he was to warn him. My brother."
Kelly clasped the other man's hand against him. "Ahmed," he said, "nobody whokills one of my people is a friend of mine." He squeezed the Kurd fiercely,
then strode back toward the Mosque of Sinan and the hope of finding anothertaxi. 
There was nothing particularly difficult about what came next, but the firstthree hours of it were simply preparation. He had to lose whoever might betagging him on Pierrard's behalf or Elaine's - if there was a difference.
A properly trained team of at least a dozen agents could keep tabs on justabout anybody in an urban environment, but that was a lot of personnel foranyone but the local security forces. Among US intelligence organizations inIstanbul, the Drug Enforcement Administration could probably put together sucha team, and very possibly CIA could as well.
Pierrard, whoever he was and whatever funds he could disburse on specialoperations, had an insolubly different problem. You can't bring a trackingunit into a city where the street patterns and the language are bothunfamiliar, not and expect the team to function. Money alone won't do it. Andthe most practical answer, to borrow trained personnel from friendlyintelligence organizations, was also the least probable. There were nofriendly intelligence services to people like Pierrard, least of all the other 


services employed by the US government.
Pierrard's attitude, of course, was fully supported by that of his CIA and DEAcolleagues, who would have been delighted to get their fingers into a rival'sturf. 
For the moment, Kelly could be pretty sure that he could be being followed byonly Doug and the three foreign nationals he had met at the Sheraton, perhapswith an equal number of Turkish drivers and the like. The Covered Bazaar - theKapali Carsi in the center of the Old City - was the perfect place to dump anysuch tail. 
There were eighteen entrances to the Bazaar and sixty-five separate streetswithin it, all covered by plastered brick arches with internal iron bracing.
Kelly entered the three-acre maze of shops and pedestrians on Fuad PashaStreet across from the campus of the University of Istanbul. He ducked outagain fifteen minutes later on Yeniceri Boulevard, spending no longer in thestreetlights than he needed to hop into a brightly-painted Skoda taxi.
The trip back across the Golden Horn to the apartment on Carik Street in theBeyoglu District, not far from Taksim Square, was complicated by the fact thatKelly changed cabs twice more. The friend who was arranging this pickup owedKelly less than he was risking by going up against Pierrard. The least Kellyintended to do was to prevent fallout in that direction.
The apartment was one of a series of six-to-ten-story new constructionsfilling the block. The street level held a branch bank whose steel grating hadbeen rolled down for the night, a jewelry store, and a rug shop with a silkenHerike on display beneath concealed spotlights. There was a guard in the smallelevator lobby, chatting with a policeman who probably found it worth his timeto spend his entire shift right there.
Both men shifted to their feet with interest and hostile concern when Kellystepped into the lobby. "I'm to pick up a case from Miss Ozel on the sixthfloor," Kelly said in Turkish. "For Nureddin."
Mollified but still cautious, the civilian guard pressed buzzer six on thewall beneath the intercom grating while the policeman studied the taxi waitingoutside. 
"Yes?" a voice responded, its sex uncertain due to the distortion of theintercom. 
"Lady, a man to pick up a package for Nureddin," the guard explained.
"Oh - thank you. Could you send him up yourself, as a favor to me?"
The guard nodded obsequiously to the speaker grating, causing the policeman tolaugh and wink at Kelly.
"Of course, lady," the civilian said. He unlocked the elevator call button andgestured Kelly into the cage. Theoretically, someone from the apartment itselfshould have come down to accompany the visitor to the proper floor; but thosewho could pay for security like this could be expected to circumvent thoseaspects which caused inconvenience to themselves.
The sixth floor was a single suite. Its door was already ajar when theelevator stopped, and the woman waiting in the opening motioned Kelly within.
"Robert - could not be here," she said in fair English. "He say - he say thatthis is what you look for."
What Kelly could see of the apartment was opulent with brassware and wallhangings, but a little overdone for his taste. The same could be said for thewoman in a house-dress of multilayered red gauze over an opaque base. She hada fleshy Turkish beauty, with lustrous hair to her waist and breasts thatwould have been impressive on a much heavier woman ... but there are noabsolutes of taste, and only her smile was greatly to the taste of Tom Kelly.
"Thank you," the American said, stepping to the travel-trunk set in theentranceway to await him. "And more than thanks to Bob. It - it's just as wellhe's not here now, but - tell him I'll see him again. And I won't forget."
Kelly had met Bob's wife, a slim blond of aristocratic beauty whose ancestry 


went back several centuries in Virginia. Very cool, very intelligent, verynearly perfect . . . and thinking of that as he reached for the case, Kellycould understand Miss Ozel more easily.
"It's heavy," warned the woman. "I can get - "
"Thank you," Kelly repeated, lifting the trunk by the central strap as if itwere an ordinary suitcase. Bob could be depended on to make sure the load wasbalanced. 
Danny Pacheco, who had died below decks on the White Plains, had been a friendof his as of Kelly.
"I guess I need a key to get down, too," the American said apologetically. Theweight of the case forced him into a counter lean as if he were thrustingagainst a gale.
The room beyond the entrance hall was furnished like that of a wealthy Kurdishchieftain of the past century: the floor not carpeted but overlaid by runnersa meter wide and five meters long. Little but the edge of any single carpetshowed beyond the edge of the next above; and so on, across the room, whilestacked pillows turned the juncture of floor and walls into a continuouscouch. 
Ozel glanced toward the inner room, then took an elevator key from a pockethidden in her housedress. Unexpectedly she gripped Kelly's free arm and,
staring fiercely into his eyes, said, "This won't hurt Robert. Will it?"
She shouldn't know there was anything different about this one than there wasabout anything Bob did for his employer, NSA. He certainly hadn't told her.
Kelly blinked, reassessing the mind behind those cowlike eyes. She would havegotten physical signals from Bob, but she had to be able to think to processthe data. 
"No," Kelly said in Kurdish. "Not if I'm alive to keep it from hurting him."
He squeezed her hand in reassurance and led her by it to the elevator switch.
Bob had done a rather better job the second time around, Kelly thought as thecage descended. Or maybe he really needed both women, needed the balance.
And what did Tom Kelly need? Nothing he'd found in forty years, that was sure.
And not some of the things he'd never had; the love of a good woman, for amajor instance.
Though the love of the right bad woman might be just the sort of stress afellow like him needed to keep out of the really life-threatening forms ofexcitement. 
Like the current one. 
The ETAP Marmar was the tallest building in Istanbul, and from his sixteenth-
floor room in that hotel, Kelly could easily look down on the room Elaine hadbooked for him in the Sheraton. 
More to the point, his ETAP window looked down on Elaine's own room andpermitted him to aim the microwave transmitter he had picked up from Ozeltoward the cavity resonator he had earlier planted in the love seat. The factthat the woman's rubber-backed drapes were drawn did not affect the microwaveswith which Kelly now painted 727.
The trunk acted as both carrying case for the transmitter and the camouflagenecessary for an unattended installation like this one in a room that would beentered for daily cleaning. Five sides of the Turkish-made trunk were standardsheet metal over light wood, with corner reinforcements, but the metalsheathing had been removed from one end and replaced by dull black paint. Thechange was noticeable but unremarkable and it was through that end that theparabolic antenna spewed a tight beam of microwaves.
Kelly rested his elbows on the ledge of the window and scanned the south faceof the Sheraton with binoculars, a tiny pair of Zeiss roof-prism 10 x 20's. Hehad left his own drapes open in the Sheraton, and the Sony radio on the ledgethere provided the certainty of location which he could not have achievedsimply by counting windows. The window to the left of his own was the target. 


. . . 
This room in the ETAP Mannar had been booked for Kelly by a woman who had leftBianci's staff a year before to join an Atlanta travel agency. The onlyquestion she had asked about the false name and the cash payment was how itaffected Carlo. Kelly's word, that it didn't, had been good enough for her. Anorth-facing room high on the ETAP was certain to overlook a room in theSheraton with a view of Taksim Square. While there had been no certainty thatElaine would book her own room beside the one Kelly had demanded, there hadbeen a high probability of it.
And after all, there was no certainty in life.
The veteran gave final touches to the antenna alignment, switched on thepower, and closed and locked the case sitting on the coffee table beside thewindow. The unit ran on wall current, so it was possible that a maid wouldunplug it despite the note in Turkish: Air Freshener Within - Please Do NotUnplug - left with a thousand lire bill atop the trunk. Its weight, primarilythat of the transformers, made it unlikely that anyone would move it. Short ofhiring someone to watch the room, there was no better way to set things up.
Whistling, Tom Kelly locked the door and the purring transmitter behind him.
He figured he'd walk back to the Sheraton, but by the long way around thepark.
He felt pretty good. He had his ass covered from his own side, more or less,
and he could now get on with the job they had asked him to do.
Kelly expected somebody to be waiting for him in the lobby, but George wasinstead at the further end of the first-floor coffee shop where he was lessobtrusive and had a full, if narrow, view of the front door. The Americannodded to him cheerfully. No problem. He needed to get some informationthrough Elaine, and he'd just as soon that she was expecting him.
With his own key in his pocket, Kelly tapped on the door of 727 - 'shave' withhis index finger, 'and a haircut' with the middle finger, he was feeling good

-and the door opened before the veteran could rap 'two bits' with bothfingers together. Elaine, alone in the room as she gestured him inside, waswearing a beige dress that could have been silk-look polyester but probablywas not. 
"Glad to have you back, Tom," the woman said without emphasis. "Learn anythinguseful?" 
"Learned I could get my watch wound with no help from the USG," Kelly repliedwith a chuckle, flopping down on the love seat and spreading his arms as hehad before when he set the cavity resonator. Somewhere up there beyond thecurtains was a microwave transmitter aimed right at his breastbone, godwilling.
Elaine grimaced involuntarily, but there was no sign that she wasn't takingthe lie at face value. Not that it was a lie, exactly: Tom Kelly damned wellcould get laid without government assistance. The statement covered both thetime he'd been gone and the new buoyance with which he returned. The hair onhis chest tickled, but that was psychosomatic rather than a real effect of themicrowaves. If, worst come to worst, his visit to Miss Ozel was traced, itexplained that too.
"Perhaps we can get to business some time soon," the woman said, with no moreemotional loading than was necessary.
"Had dinner?" Kelly asked brightly.
"We can call room service." The grimace, a momentary tic, was back. Maybe shethought he was drunk too.
He hadn't drunk alcohol since that boilermaker in the Madison. . . . 
"Get me full poop on a blond belly dancer named - and this is phonetic,
through Kurdish - Gee-soo-lah," Kelly said. "Claimed to be a foreign national,
claimed to be a top act. Probably in somebody's files even if the computerdoesn't kick her up for some other reason." 

Elaine raised an eyebrow. "Excellent," she said, "but it'll take some time."
"Right," agreed Kelly as he stood with the smooth caution of a powerful manwith too many scars to move unrestrained except at need. "And I don't guessyou'll be burning off copies of the file yourself, will you?"
"I don't suppose so, no," the woman said guardedly.
"So why don't I," Kelly said with a grin as he walked past her to the door,
"go take a shower while you make the arrangements? And then we'll go todinner." 
He paused with his hand on the knob. "For which you're rather overdressed,
m'lady, but that's your business."
"Oh-kay," Elaine was saying as the door closed behind Kelly, her voice asquizzical as the expression on her face.
Istanbul had the nighttime beauty of any large city, its dirt and dilapidationcloaked by darkness and only shapes and the jewels of its illumination to beseen. The view from Kelly's window had the additional exoticism of an easterncity in which street lighting was too sparse to overwhelm the varicoloredrichness of neon shop-signs. The minarets of a large mosque in the distancewere illuminated from within their parapets, so the shafts stood out aroundthe dome like rockets being prepared for night lift-off.
Kelly sighed and walked into the bathroom to shower as he had said. Heundressed carefully and set his trousers on the seat of the toilet. He wouldwear the same outfit for the rest of the evening . . . and that arrangementput the snubbie near his hand in the shower without displaying it to theunlikely possibility of optical surveillance devices planted within the hotelroom. It was as easy to be careful, that was all.
When Elaine tapped on the door of 725 a few minutes after he had gottendressed, Kelly had a twinge of concern that his comment regarding clothingwould cause her to change into slacks. Istanbul was as cosmopolitan as London,
in one sense, but the underlying culture was Sunni Muslim. Smart visitors toLondon didn't slaughter sheep in the street there, and women didn't go aroundin pants here without insulting a proportion of the people who saw them. Thatwould be true even if she were a foreigner wearing some $200 Paris equivalentof blue jeans with a couturier's tag on the fly.
He needn't have worried. Elaine wore a high-throated black dress with a long-
sleeved cotton jacket over it. Hell, she was smarter than he was and at leastas well-traveled. Kelly nodded approvingly and joined her in the hall insteadof inviting her into the room.
"Want to tell me what comes next?" Elaine asked as they strode toward theelevators, "or is the surprise an important part?"
"Well, you know ..." Kelly said, poking the call button. Damn! but she seemedtiny when she stood beside him; the full cheeks were so deceptive. . . . "Youcan get any kind of food in the world in Istanbul - though if you're big onpork, you're limited to places like this one."
He circled his hand in a gesture that indicated the Sheraton itself and itsfive-star equivalents on Taksim Square. "But I thought we'd be exotic and eatat a Turkish diner. You can find that too in the tourist hotels, with tablesand the waitresses tricked out like they were on loan from the Arabian Nights... but I don't much feel like that." 
The elevator arrived, empty. "Lead on, faithful guide," Elaine said as shestepped into the cage. When the door shut she added in a voice barely audibleover the whine of the hydraulics, "The dancer is Gisela Romer, a Turkishcitizen but part of an expatriate German community that settled here afterWorld War II. There should be an extensive file in Ankara. I've put a firstpriority on it, so something ought to be delivered by courier as soon as it'sprinted out here."
"Nice work," said Kelly.
"I'm glad you're giving us a chance to help you, Tom," Elaine said seriously. 


"That's all that we're here for." 
"I wonder if - " he started to say, timing the words carefully so that theelevator chugged to a stop at the lobby before he could complete the sentence.
Elaine's face blanked, and she said nothing more until they had dropped offtheir keys and left the hotel.
Kelly did not see George or any other of her subordinates.
"I think we'll walk," he said, with a wave to the doorman and the leading cabof the rank beneath the hotel's bright facade. As they walked beyond the bandof light, Kelly went on in a low voice, "You know, I wonder if you could findme a pistol if I needed one. I don't mean I do, I mean if."
"I'd have thought you had sources of your own, Tom," Elaine said. Her smileasked more than the words themselves did. 
"Yeah, needs must," agreed the veteran with false frustration. "I mean, itwasn't a turndown. But things're tight now, real tight, with Ecevit trying toget a grip on things. Somebody could take a real hard fall if, you know,
something went wrong and the piece got traced back."
"What do you want?"
"I don't want anything," Kelly insisted, "but you know - if I do, somethingstandard, a forty-five auto, a nine millimeter. And it'll just be a securityblanket, if I turn out not to have enough guts to stay on an even keel withoutsomething to wrap my hand around."
"Doesn't sound like a problem," the woman said, nonchalance adding weight tothe words. "Doesn't seem to me either that you need to feel you're going offthe deep end if you choose to carry a personal sidearm under the - presentcircumstances." 
They were walking -down Independence Boulevard, which was flooded with trafficnoise and the sound of music, mostly Turkish, from the open doors of many ofthe shops. A triple-tier Philips sign over an electronics store threw goldenhighlights over Elaine's short hair. Kelly bent closer to her to say, "I usedto carry a piece all the time I was in uniform, a snubbie that wasn't good fora damn thing but to blow my brains out if things got too tough. Just as soonnot get into that headset again, you know?"
Elaine nodded; and Kelly, his task of misinforming his case officer complete,
focused on finding a place to eat.
A few doors down a sidestreet shone the internal lighting of a red and bluePepsi-Cola sign with, lettered below, the name Doner California. "There wego," Kelly said, pointing with his offside arm to direct Elaine.
"Authentic Turkish, right," the woman said in mock scorn as she obeyed. "Dothey have a quartet lip-synching the Beach Boys?"
"I'll eat every surfboard on the walls," Kelly promised as he pushed open theglass-paneled door and handed her within. "Watch the little step."
The floor of the diner was of ceramic tiles with a coarse brown glaze. Therewere half a dozen white-enameled tables, several of them occupied by men orgroups of men dressed much as Kelly was. The sides and top of the counter werecovered with green tile, similar to that of the floor in everything but color;
but there was a decorative band just below the countertop, tiles mixing thebrown and green glazes in an eight-pointed rosette against a white background.
Elaine was the only woman in the restaurant.
Though the evening was beginning to chill fog from air saturated by theBosphorus, warmth puffed aggressively from the diner, heated as it was by avertical gas grill behind the counter. A large piece of meat rotated on a spitbefore the mesh-fronted grill that glowed orange and blue as it hissed.
All eyes turned to the newcomers - particularly to Elaine - as they entered.
The owner, behind the counter in an apron, made a guess at what variety ofEuropeans they were, and called, "Willkommen!"
"God be with you," Kelly responded, in Turkish rather than German.
Elaine slid onto a stool at the counter instead of a hoop-backed chair at one 


of the empty tables. "If we're going to do this," she replied to the veteran'squizzical glance, "we may as well do it right. And you were right about thesurfboards." 
A ten-year-old boy with the owner's features and the skull-cap haircutuniversal among prepubescent Turkish males set out two glasses of water with abig smile.
"You hungry?" Kelly asked.
Elaine set her palm across the top of Kelly's glass and held his eyes. "Thewater's almost certainly okay," she said. "Worst case is you'll do anything weneed you for before you're disabled by amoebiasis. Your choice." She slid theglass toward him and removed her hand.
Kelly hesitated. "Look," he said, "I've drunk - "
"And if you were in the field," Elaine interrupted calmly, "you might have tonow. Your choice." 
"Two Pepsis," Kelly said, smiling back at the boy. "And two dinners withdouble helpings of doner kebab, please," he added to the father.
"Turkish for shish kebab?" Elaine asked as the boy opened small bottles withthe familiar logo.
"Shish kebab is Turkish," said Kelly, "and you can get it anywhere in theworld. Doner's pretty localized by contrast, so I'm making you a better personby offering you a new experience. Not necessarily better than the familiar,
but different." 
The woman's body tensed into her 'neutral' status while she attempted tofollow the ramifications of what Kelly had just said. Her legs crossedinstinctively, then uncrossed and anchored themselves firmly to the footrailof the stool when she realized what she was doing.
Kelly, grinning broadly, turned to watch the owner slice doner while his sonreadied the plates with cooked carrots, cooked greens, and ladlesful of rice.
The meat rotating before the gas flame was not the roast or boned leg ofmutton it at first appeared. It was in fact a large loaf of ground mutton,
recompressed into a slab in the ovine equivalent of hamburger, homogenous andbroiling evenly on the vertical spit.
As the Americans watched, the man behind the counter swung out the spit andthe integral driptray onto which juices spluttered with a sound that wouldhave started Kelly's saliva flowing even if he had not gone most of a daywithout food. With a knife the length of his forearm, the Turk sliced away astrip of mutton so thin that it was translucent as it fell onto his cookingfork. The man pretended that he was not aware of the foreigners watching him,
but his boy chortled with glee at the excellence of the job.
Rotating the spit with his fork - the motor drive shut off when the spit wasremoved from the fire - the owner stripped another portion of the loaf'ssurface. 
"Aren't many useful things you can do with a knife sharp enough to shavewith," said Kelly approvingly, "but this is sure one of them."
"You don't believe in sharp knives?" Elaine asked in surprise.
"I don't believe in - work knives," Kelly replied with a grin, "so sharp thatthe edge turns when you hit, let's say, a bone."
The meal was everything Kelly had hoped, hot and good and profoundly real inan existence that was increasingly removed from what he had known and done inthe past. If incongruity were the essence of humor, then what Tom Kelly wasdoing with and to Pierrard's little playmates ought to be the laugh of alifetime. 
He sipped his Pepsi, put on a serious expression, and said, "I can neverremember: should I have ordered lemon sodas instead with mutton?" 
Elaine laughed, relaxed again. "We could ask the maitre d', I suppose," shesaid with a nod toward the owner beaming beside his grill.
"Who would tell us," Kelly said, slumping a little, "Efes Pilsen - like 


everybody else." His eyes swept the tables of other customers, crowded withthe fat brown bottles of Pilsener beer. "And he'd be right, it's great stuff,
but I don't suppose ..."
Elaine touched the back of his fingers. "Tom," she said, "you've got moreballs than anybody I ever met in my life. And it isn't because you act likeyou could tell the world to take a flying leap."
"Which it damned well can," Kelly grumbled. He was pleased nonetheless at theflattery, even though he knew that the woman was a professional and would havesaid the equivalent no matter what she really thought.
"I'm so very glad you're using me the way I'm here to be used," Elainecontinued without taking her hand away from Kelly's. "We both want the samething."
Except that one of us would really like Tom Kelly to survive the next coupleweeks, the veteran thought as he turned over his hand and briefly squeezed herfingers. And the other cares more about what the weather in Washington'll belike when she gets back. But nobody was holding a gun to his head just now.
"Let's go see," he said, rising with a broad smile for the owner and everyoneelse in the restaurant, "just how efficient a team we're all gonna be."
Elaine checked the clasp of her little purse as they approached the door of

727. Kelly caught the angry red wink of a light emitting diode and the woman
stutter-stepped, not quite a stumble, before halting.
"Problems?" the veteran said, unaware of the growling catch in his voice as he
stepped to the hinge side of the door.
"No, we were expecting a courier, weren't we?" Elaine mumbled back, but she
tapped on the door panel instead of inserting her key.
Doug opened the door. The LED warning went off. "I've been waiting here with
the file," the blond man said.
"Very tricky," said Kelly with an approving nod toward the intrusion
indicator. 
"Not in the goddam hallway," snapped Elaine, using the purse as a pointer to
thrust her big subordinate back in the room.
Kelly closed the door behind them. "The light wouldn't come on if somebody
hadn't opened the door?" he asked.
"Amber if the door hadn't been breached, no light at all if the transmitter
had been tampered with," said Elaine absently. She kicked off her shoes.
"Doug, thank you for bringing the file. You can leave us to it now."
She looked at Kelly. "Unless you want to be alone with this, Tom?" she asked,
gesturing with the red-bordered folder Doug had just handed her from his
Halliburton. 
"We'll take a look together," the veteran said, seating himself at the desk.
He felt momentarily dizzy and, squeezing his temples with both hands, brought
the world he saw back into color and focus. 
"Are you all right?" the woman asked. "Doug, wait a minute."
"No problem," said Kelly. "Haven't slept in, you know, the whole flight. And
with food in my belly, the brain isn't getting all the blood supply it'd like
to have. 
But no sweat, we'll run through this and get a jump on what we need."
"Blow?" Doug offered.
"You wouldn't like me on coke," Kelly said with a grin that widened like that
of a wolf launching itself toward prey. "I wouldn't like me on coke."
He opened the folder and let his face smooth. "Quicker we get to work," he
said, speaking into the frozen silence, "the quicker I get to sleep."
Elaine gestured Doug through the door, but he was already moving that way of
his own accord. 
"Well, what've we got here," Kelly murmured, not a question, as Elaine set a
straight-backed chair against the doorknob to jam the panel if anyone tried to
power through it from the hallway. She damned well was more paranoid than the 

agent she was running. . . .
What they had was a sheaf of gatefold paper, the sheets still articulated,
printed on a teletype or something with an equally unattractive typeface. Eachpage was headed with an alphanumeric folio line, but beneath that the firstpage was headed: Romer, Gisela Marie Hroswith. Good enough.
Kelly began to read, tearing each sheet off when he finished with it andlaying it facedown on the desk. The woman, sitting on the bed, leaned forwardand took the pages as Kelly laid them down. Neither spoke.
Gisela Romer was thirty-one, an inch taller than Kelly, and weighed a hundredand forty pounds. At five-ten, that didn't make her willowy by Westernstandards, but it was as exotic a touch as her blond hair in a Turkish culturewhere a beautiful woman five feet tall would weigh as much. The telecopiednewspaper photograph appended to the file was indistinct enough to have beenJackie Kennedy, but the high, prominent cheekbones came through.
As Elaine had said in the elevator, Gisela Romer was a Turkish citizen; buther father and mother were part of a sizable contingent of Germans who hadsurfaced in Turkey in the late forties, carrying South American and SouthAfrican passports that might not have borne the most careful scrutiny. By thattime, Berlin was under Soviet blockade and the Strategic Air Command was veryinterested in flight paths north from the Turkish bases they wereconstructing. Nobody was going to worry too much about, say, a Waffen-SSOberfuehrer named Schneider who might now call himself Romer.
Information on Gisela was sparse through the mid sixties - no place ofresidence and no record of schooling, though her father was reaching a levelof prominence as a power in what was variously called the Service League orsimply the Service - der Dienst.
"Is there an annex on the Dienst?" Kelly muttered when he got to the referencein Gisela Romer's bio. 
"You've got the file," Elaine noted simply. "I can give you a bare bones nowif there isn't. An import-export cooperative for certain expatriate families.
Almost certainly drug involvement, probably arms as well in the otherdirection." 
"There's an annex," Kelly said as he thumbed forward from the back of theclumsy document.
The printout on the Dienst was obviously a synopsis. The organization had beenpenetrated decades before, possibly from the very date of its inception. Thefile was less circumspect than Elaine had been about drug and armstrafficking. CIA used the Dienst as one of the conduits by which it increasedits unreported operating budget through worldwide drug dealing. Drugs werenot, by the agency's charter, its problem; and morality became a CIA problemonly when one of its officers became moral and went public with the details ofwhat he had been doing while on the agency payroll.
Clients for the Dienst's gunrunning were a more catholic gathering, thoughvarious facets of the US government were prominent among them. A briefnotation brought to Kelly's mind the shipment of automatic rifles withColumbian proof markings which he had issued to his Kurds. It was useful generally 
- to carry out policy through channels which permitted bureaucratsto deny government involvement. The Dienst was indeed a service organization,
and not merely on behalf of the war criminals it had smuggled out of Germany.
"These guys are a bunch of Nazis," Kelly said wonderingly as he tossed theannex on the desk and returned to the main file. 
"They appear to have no political ends, here or in Germany," his case officerreplied. "There is - and it may not be here" - she tapped the paper with anindex finger - "an involvement in espionage, with us and probably with theRussians. Perhaps just another way of buying safety by becoming useful to bothsides." 
'Which is where," Kelly said as he resumed reading, "Gisela Romer and her line 


of work come in, I presume."
Ahmed Ayyubi had called Romer "the blond whore," but there was nothing tosuggest that the statement was literally true. The woman had been dancingprofessionally since she was fourteen. Her background and appearance wouldhave gained her a following in any Moslem country, but her skill level wasapparently equal to that of any competitor in Turkey. At over a hundredthousand lire per performance, her legitimate earnings approximated those ofan international soccer star. 
So the men she slept with were chosen for position rather than wealth: highpolice and military officials; bank presidents and airline officials, peoplewho could facilitate movements of one sort or another; and members of thediplomatic community in both Istanbul and Ankara.
"Why the hell would she pick up Mohammed Ayyubi?" Kelly demanded as he flappeddown the last page of the printout. "He's not in her league." He laughed.
"Figuratively, I mean. Literally, hell, maybe he was."
"Does it say that there?" Elaine asked, picking up the sheet Kelly had justfinished. 
"Mohammed's brother says it," Kelly muttered, "more'r less. God, I'm tired.
And what in blazes do either one of 'em have to do with that - thing in thefreezer." 
"Ayyubi isn't around to ask," the woman said dryly. "But if you want to meetGisela Romer, that can be arranged."
Kelly stood up and stretched. Elaine waited tensely for her agent's face totake on an expression or for him to say something. The muscles of Kelly'sshoulders bunched beneath his jacket and his eyes gave her the feeling thatshe was being watched over a gunsight.
"When. Where. How," the veteran said at last. The syllables were without tone,
not even of interrogation.
"She'll be performing at a Turkish-American Friendship Society meetingtomorrow night. The file indicates her technique." Elaine fanned the sheaf ofpapers again. "If you attend with the US assistant military attache" here,
she'll be interested." 
The woman paused. Kelly gestured with one hand, palm upward. "Drop the othershoe." 
"If we drop word of who you really are," Elaine continued calmly, "she'll hiton you for sure to learn what you're doing in Turkey again. And that could bethe opening you need."
"Fucking brilliant," Kelly snorted. "And who else picks me up? I'm a bit of atarget, don't you think, for what happened three years back?"
"That's not a problem with the Dienst," the woman said. "Quite the contrary.
Nor with the Turkish government, which keeps the Israelis in line; you're notworth dynamiting the only diplomatic relations Israel has with an Islamicstate. And we'll keep the USG off your back, now and from now on."
She bent forward, though that meant she had to look up more steeply to meetthe eyes of the standing man. "We're already doing that, Tom. That's thepayment we're giving you that you couldn't buy with money."
"Convey my thanks to Pierrard and his budget officers," Kelly said with anironic bow. They'd sell him to Shin Bet or for cats' meat - which might cometo about the same thing - the moment it suited their purposes.
"All right," he continued, with a note of resignation, "she's the best handleI see just now." He held his fist out in front of him and stared at it as heraised his fingers one at a time. "I don't see very much, that's sure. Whattime's the party?"
"Seven-thirty," Elaine said, relaxing minusculely. "It's in the casino in theHilton, five minutes walk, so that's not a problem. Probably better to haveCommander Posner call for you here, though, so you arrive together."
"All right," said Kelly as he started for the door. 


"What will you do till then?"
"Sleep," said the agent. "And probably nothin' else."
Which wasn't very much of a lie.
Kelly locked the door of 725 and turned on the shower.
He was taking a chance by deciding to review the tape as soon as he got backto his room, because the system could not record additional material while hewas listening to what it had collected to date. A second tape recorder wouldhave permitted both ... but additional gear meant a greater chance ofdiscovery, and anyway - he was Tom Kelly, no longer NSA, and there was onlyone of him. 
So although there was a fair likelihood that Elaine was about to have aconversation Kelly would like to know about, he opened the false battery packattached to the Sony and rewound the miniature metal tape. The shower was notto cover the sound of the tape - it played back through earphones attached tothe radio - but rather as an explanation, if anyone were listening to thenoises within his darkened room and wondering at the fact that he was notasleep.
The taping system worked. You never knew, when components had to be arrangedseparately and not tested until they were in place. And this installation hadbeen trickier than most because the cavity resonator Kelly had planted in hiscase officer's room was nothing but a closed metal tube with a short antennaattached. One end of the tube was a thin diaphragm which vibrated with thespeech of people in the room. There was no internal power source, nocircuitry, nothing but the section of wave guide. The microwaves directed atit from the ETAP were modulated by the diaphragm, and the whole wasrebroadcast on the FM band at a frequency determined by the resonance of themicrowave signal, the wave guide, and the length of the antenna.
The recorder was voice-activated so the first syllable of any string wasclipped, and there was the usual urban trash overlaying a weak signal. Kellyhad been trained to gather content from as little as thirty percent of a vocalmessage, however, and he had no problem following the recording.
The first of it was the phone ringing followed by Elaine's voice, noncommittalbut recognizable, saying, "All right, good. Stay down there." George reportingfrom the coffee shop that Kelly had returned to the Sheraton. That, andKelly's own discussion with Elaine in her room, were of interest purely as atest of the system.
The next conversation was the case officer's side of an outbound telephonecall which had to have been made while Kelly showered before they went out todinner. 
Click. "All right, he's eye-deed Gisela Romer and wants her file. We're goingout to dinner, so have it waiting. I don't think it'll surprise him. Heexpects us to be efficient, and there isn't much time to fuck around."
Click. "He says he was getting laid. . . . Maybe, maybe. I can't tell withhim, he's spooky. . . . What - ?"
Click. "No, for god's sake run off a fresh copy. How are we going to explainphotocopies of a dog-eared original? . . . I don't -. . . God damn it Doug,
get somebody there who can run the printer, even if it means dragging theConsul out of bed." 
Click. "All right. Oh - and tell Romer we'll try to have Kelly at the dinnertomorrow night. She's to make contact with him there."
Click. "She's not paid to like it, she's paid to take orders. We've got tohave a check on what Kelly's doing, and if it works out - he's perverse enoughthat he's just apt to trust her. At any rate, they can talk politics withoutgetting into arguments. . . . Right."
The clunk of the handset returning to its cradle ended the conversation. Therewere several identifiable sounds - door opening and closing, someone mutteringunintelligibly - probably Doug entering with the requested files. The 


discussion, the three of them and then the occasional muttered comments ofKelly and the woman as he read and she pretended to read the flimsies.
Compression of the silences made the tape jar against Kelly's memory, butthere was nothing really different about the conversation.
All but the auditory center of his brain was concerned with what he had justheard, anyway.
It wasn't quite as bad as he'd feared; they weren't setting him up for a longdrop, not yet anyway. But they wanted to make sure they had him on a leash,
even if that meant identifying him to a gang of Nazi criminals without hissay-so.
. . . they can talk politics without getting into arguments. Christ! didn'tanybody realize that ideology, religious or political, didn't matter a damn toTom Kelly? The only things worth killing for - or dying for - were personal .
. . and if Kelly had personally kicked the whole state of Israel in the balls,
that didn't make him a Nazi. Given cause and opportunity, he would have donethe same to Britain or any political group in the US of A.
And the other thing they didn't seem to realize is that you don't ownideologues just because they take your money. Intelligence operatives,
effective ones, cannot make decisions on political bases any more than theycan for personal reasons. They tend, as a result, to devalue both. PerhapsGisela Romer was simply venal, in which case she would take anyone else'smoney as quickly as she did Pierrard's. The personality Kelly had gleaned fromthe file, however, was that of a woman who would take US money for the samereason that she gave head to the KGB resident in Istanbul: the Dienst, theService, required it.
In neither case was she going to jump through a hoop simply because ElaineTuttle told her to. 
Kelly sighed. The tape wound through several seconds of silence afterrecording the door closing as he left 727 for his own room. He reached for theRewind switch, planning to reset the unit to record. A clear voice where thereshould have been only blank tape said, "Mr. Kelly, we must speak with you. Youneed fear no harm. We need you to save yourselves."
There was no click or other recording artifact before or after the voice. Itsvolume level was higher than that of the recording previously, and there wasno background of white noise as had clung to the sounds broadcast by thecavity resonator.
Kelly backed the tape and listened again. The end of his conversation withElaine, the door closing, and nothing. Nothing again.
The voice he had heard was gone, except for what now stuck in his mind like adrug-induced nightmare.
He rerigged the camouflaged recorder by rote. Kelly's hands could do that orstrip a firearm with almost no support from his conscious mind; and just now,
there was very little support available in that quarter. As he let himselfdown on the bed, he remembered the shower was running. It took an effort ofwill to get him to his feet again to turn off the tap, and that only becausehe had spent too long in arid landscapes to let water waste itself down thesewers now. 
Short men in dark overcoats lurked at the corners of his eyes as he moved, butthere was no one with him in the room and no light to have seen them by in anycase. 
Kelly dreamed while he slept, and his body flushed itself of the residues oftension and fatigue. There were no creatures with multijointed limbs, only menin tunics building and battling over a city on a river. Other rivers mighthave the sharp bank the swift-moving Tigris had cut through the soil ofMesopotamia, but there could be no doubt about the black basalt fortification:
he was dreaming of Diyarbakir, or rather, of Amida - the city's name when itwas part of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. 


The walls rose and were ringed by Persian armies in glittering armor, a dreammontage drawn from guidebook scraps Kelly had assimilated out of curiositywhen he trained guerrillas nearby ... but more than that as well, banners andequipment that he did not know, that very likely nobody knew at this distancefrom the event. 
The besiegers raised a mound of earth and fascines, stripping the countrysideof timber for miles. "No . . . ," Kelly muttered in his sleep, because he knewwhat came next, and he had himself soldiered through in the wreck of otherpeople's disastrously bad ideas. The wall of Amida rose regardless, proppedand piled and jury-rigged to overmatch the encircling threat.
It was not a normal dream. It had the cohesiveness and inevitability not ofnightmare, where fear makes its own reality for the duration of sleep, butrather of history. Kelly was an observer, and the frustration of watchingrather than participating - even in a certain disaster - caused him to drenchwith sweat the bedspread on which he lay.
And the wall of Amida, thrown higher than reason to make the fortressimpregnable, crashed of its own weight toward the Persian lines. The rubble ofit lay in a broad entrance ramp, giving the besiegers a gentle slope up whichthey scrambled into the heart of the city, crying slaughter and the glory oftheir bloody monarch Shapur.
Kelly thought he would prefer anything to the rape and butchery his mindshowed him in the same omniscient detail as it had the preliminaries. But whatclosed the dream at last was a nuclear fireball, expanding and devouring itsway across not Amida but a thousand modern cities, each of them as clear inKelly's brain as the screams of the first woman he had shot at close range.
He awoke standing, legs splayed and the snubbie in his right hand searchingfor a target in the dim light. He thought it must be dawn, but the digitalclock in his little radio said that it was seven PM. 
There was no one else in the room. 
Kelly felt foolish as he put the revolver down, but coming alert with a gunready had been a survival reflex for a lot of years. Hell, it probably wasagain. And if nothing was waiting for him in the room at the moment, then thatcertainly didn't mean that everything was normal.
He'd never had a dream like that in his life; and it seemed likely enough thatwhatever it was he'd just - imagined - it wasn't a dream.
The phone rang. Kelly jumped, cursed, and started to pick up the handset. Hisright palm and fingers tingled oddly, and not from his grip on the snubbie,
that was too familiar a stress for him to notice its effect. Flexing his righthand, Kelly picked up the phone with his left and said, "Shoot."
"Thought I'd check in, Tom," Elaine said through a buzz of static morereasonable for a call from Lagos than from the next room over. "CommanderPosner expects to meet you in the lobby in twenty minutes."
"No problem," said Kelly. "I was just getting dressed."
"Then I'll leave you to it. Good luck," the woman said and rang off.
She sounded cheerful enough, Kelly thought. Wonder if she'd be cheerful if sheknew as much about the bug as the bug had told Kelly about her.
He should have been wrung out by the nightmare, but in fact he'd awakenedfeeling as good as he had in years. The length of time he'd slept didn't makesense, either. He'd needed eighteen hours of rest, but there was no way hismind should have let him get it. It didn't work that way when you were onedge. Catnaps maybe, but not uninterrupted sleep that genuinely refreshed youinstead of just backing a notch or two off your tension.
The tingling in his right hand persisted for some minutes, finally wearingaway at about the time he shrugged into the coat of his gray wool suit. Ithadn't been anything serious, nothing that kept him from tying his shoes orwould have kept him from putting all five rounds from the snubbie into a shirtpocket at fifteen yards. 


But the feeling had been in the portions of his hand which had brushed thesurface of the alien corpse in Maryland, and it could be that that meantsomething very serious indeed.
"I don't like this," said Commander Posner for the third time, lighting afresh cigarette from the butt of the one he had just smoked through.
"Associating me with you and whatever you're doing is a public provocation tothe host country, and it'll do a great deal of harm in the long run."
Posner was in civilian clothes tonight, a fact that surprised Kelly as didnothing else about the assistant military attache. Military attachés - of allnations - have an advantage over other intelligence officers in that there isno dichotomy in what they are doing. They are, openly and by reciprocaltreaty, spies in foreign countries. Not spies thinly masquerading as newsmen,
AID officers, or vice-consuls, just spies. Their status makes it difficult forthem to achieve results more remarkable than photographs of military parades,
but it also permits them to believe that the world is as ordered a place asthe bridge of an aircraft carrier in peacetime.
Posner's wife, a slim woman whose smile seemed no more likely to slip thanthat of the Mona Lisa, bent close to her husband's ear and whispered. He sworeunder his breath, glared at the cigarette, and ground it out in the cleanashtray with which a waiter had just replaced the overflowing one.
Mrs. Posner smiled at Kelly.
"I know," said Kelly with a nod of false condolence to the naval officer.
"It's terrible to work for people as ruthless and clumsy as high militaryofficers, ready to force the most ridiculous orders down the chain ofcommand." 
Commander Posner sat up sharply, blinking as if he thought he had misheard thestatement. 
As perhaps he had, because the noise in the big room was even greater than wasto be expected by Western standards. A significant sample of the Americanofficial community was at the party, and, Kelly noticed, a high proportion ofthe Turkish nationals was not in fact ethnic Turks. Men - almost all the women 
in the room were the wives of Americans - of the Levantine, Kurdish, EastEuropean, and even Jewish communities in Istanbul predominated here. They werethe folk who, rightly or wrongly, felt they might need outside protection inor from what was basically an Osmanli - Ottoman Turkish - nation state.
The US was unlikely to supply that help, should it ever come down to cases;
but when you're nervous, a bad chance is better than no chance at all. TomKelly knew the feeling right enough.
There was a rattle of cymbals from the far doorway. A man in evening dress onthe low podium in the center of the hall cried, his voice echoing through theill-balanced sound system, "I give you Gisela!" in both English and Turkish.
Turkish music began at the far end of the hall. A man as tall as Doug Blakeleycame in, carrying a large, chrome-glittering ghetto blaster, and stood by thedoorway.
With a clash of finger cymbals, Gisela Romer appeared there. She was of aheight with her assistant, though part of that was the pumps she wore.
Nothing in the file, photograph included, had prepared Kelly for the fact thatthe woman came as close to his ideal of beauty as anyone he had ever met inhis life. Her shoulder-length hair was not the ash blond he had expected, butrather a richer color like that of polished brass or amber that has paledduring long exposure to sunlight. Her choker, bra, and briefs were of thosematerials, brass and amber, and the gauze 'skirt' depending from the briefs ather flanks and midline was silk dyed a yellow of low saturation.
The dancer moved down the hall toward the podium with a lithe grace and asmuch speed as comported with the need to make an entrance. Her arms reachedabove her head and twined at the wrists momentarily. Then, clashing the fingercymbals, she advanced, spinning with alternate hip jerks - each carrying her 


the length of a long leg closer to her goal. The man with the tape decktrailed her, accompanied by a shorter man playing what looked like a smallacoustic guitar.
"I've never understood the attraction of Oriental dancing," said Mrs. Posnerdistantly, using the technical term not from concern for anyone's feelings butrather from a distaste for the word belly.
"Muscle control," Kelly said. He watched intently as the blond mounted thepodium and went into a formal routine, rotating slowly around the semicircleof the audience. "I've never seen a dancer with muscle control that good.
Well, once before."
Gisela's hips shimmied and threw the gauze draperies outward, drawing the eyesof most in the room. Kelly watched instead what the actual belly muscles weredoing and was flabbergasted. The blond woman was taut-bodied and no morefleshy than the veteran himself was, so the horizontal folds which ascendedone after another from briefs to rib cage were not accented into crevices byfolds of subcutaneous fat. They were impressive nonetheless, and the precisionwith which they marched upward like the static arcs of a Jacob's ladder wasnothing short of remarkable when combined with the flashier portions of theroutine. 
"Who was that?" someone asked. 
Kelly glanced around him. Mrs. Posner waited, an eyebrow raised ininterrogation, for the veteran's answer.
"Bev," said her husband with a grimace.
"A go-go dancer in Sydney," Kelly said, turning again toward Gisela as hespoke, "tucked six Ping-Pong balls up her snatch with the mouth of a beerbottle. While she danced" - from the corner of his eye he noted that Mrs.
Posner's hand had lifted to cover her gaping mouth - "she spit 'em out intothe audience again. I mean, she could really aim, and some of 'em landed inthe third rank of tables." 
The woman made a choking sound but did not say anything further. Kelly thoughtthere was the least hint of a smile on Commander Posner's face. 
The music thinned to a background of sharply-tapped drums, which Giselacounterpointed with her finger cymbals as she went into a long series of hiprolls, shifting position again with each thrust to make the whole audiencepart of the performance. Her face was not bored nor disfigured by slit-eyed,
open-mouthed mimings of lust. Rather, she was alive and aware both of heraudience and the fact that she was very damned good at what she was doing.
Gisela ran a full set on the podium before she began to work the room. Herstunning hair remained surprisingly still as her body, hidden from most anglesin the narrow aisleways, shimmied and jerked.
Belly dancing was a form of gymnastics and, like other gymnastic routines, anacquired taste. The detailed muscle work, which distinguished this performancefrom that in a Sirkeci nightclub, was subtler than similar skill demonstratedon the parallel bars. As a result, the attention of most Westerners lapsed even 
that of the men, who could see more flesh in cocktail bars in whatevercity they called home.
But Christ! thought Tom Kelly, not flesh like that - unless they were datinggymnasts. And the Turkish citizens were noisily delighted, their enthusiasmmaking up for any lack of spirit among the foreigners present. Men at eachtable held up bills as the dancer swung close. In general Gisela smiled andshot a pelvis toward them, holding the pose long enough for them to tuck themoney under the strap of her briefs.
The two music men accompanied her on her rounds, providing music - by Turkishdefinitions, rhythm by any - and a level not so much of protection as ofpresence, to keep matters from getting out of hand. Neither man was as youngas Kelly, and the bigger one, for all that he looked fit, was closer to sixtythan fifty. At intervals, as Gisela shifted her attention from table to table, 


the smaller fellow with the guitar plucked sweaty lire from the dancer'swaistband and stuffed them into the side pockets of his jacket. Even grantingthat most of the bills would be hundreds - something over a US dollar - Giselawas making a respectable haul.
And there were exceptions. One table held a quartet of fat, balding men withfeatures similar enough to make them brothers. They had been drinking raki,
Turkey's water-clear national liquor that clouded over ice. Its licoriceflavor disguised its ability to lift the scalp of an incautious drinker.
Though these four were not inexperienced, the volume of their intake tonighthad loosened them considerably.
"Ho!" cried the nearest one as Gisela did a shoulder shimmy before him. Heraised a bill over his head and flapped it. Kelly could not see what it was,
but somebody at a nearby table hooted and clapped.
The blond woman responded with a belly roll that progressed to an amazingshimmy, a rattle of finger cymbals that overrode the drum taps from the boombox, and finally a forward thrust of her chest that brought her breasts withinan inch of the man's face. A bangle, either a large topaz or tawny paste,
joined the two bra cups. It was beneath that that the man thrust his bill.
There was a cheer and general applause from the surrounding tables.
The brother to whom Gisela now directed herself already had a bank note ready,
but instead of waving it he shouted, "Wait!" in Kurdish to the hip-swayingwoman and fumbled again in his wallet. The two others at the table who had notyet joined the performance were doing the same, bumping empty glasses in theirhaste to get out more money.
The second target - 'victim' would be a misstatement; he was paying for thehonor of momentarily starring before an audience of his peers and powerfulforeigners - came out with a second bill, raised one in either hand, and wasrewarded with a hip thrust, front and center, and a kiss on the foreheadwhich, not coincidentally, shot Gisela's crotch away from him as soon as hehad inserted the money between the briefs and her pubic hair. You could get alot more sex for a couple hundred dollars, but it would be hard to beat whatGisela had just provided the man in the way of thrills and public recognition.
When the dancer swayed from that table, her bra cups, pubic wedge, and thecrack of her buttocks had all spouted 10,000 lire bills. The engraved visageof Kemal Atatiirk waved against the sweat-glistening flesh, and Kelly doubtedthat the hard-drinking old hero disapproved. Gisela left the crotch and tailpieces in place as encouragement for later tables as she continued her rounds.
The attendant with the recorder had swapped sides on his ninety-minute tape,
and the blond dancer had been in motion from the time she entered the room. 
Kelly unconsciously caught a roll of flesh above his own beltline betweenthumb and forefinger. It wasn't flab, but it sure as hellwasn't muscle tonelike that which Gisela was demonstrating. He hadn't been in shape like thatwhen he was nineteen and humping nearly a hundred pounds of gear, rations, andammo across a series of thirty-klick days. . . .
The woman swayed closer. The table Kelly shared with the Posners was, bychance or intent, almost the last on her circuit of the room. Commander Posnerreached toward his breast pocket. His wife straightened with an expression ofblank horror that would have suited her own impalement.
"Well, I don't know what the etiquette is," the naval officer muttered with anervous smile. "This is the wrong sort of entertainment for a - for adiplomatic gathering, you see."
"Don't worry, sir," said Kelly dryly. "I'll sacrifice myself to uphold thehonor of the flag."
He had two bank notes ready: thousands. The amount was a compromise betweenavoiding notoriety for a huge offering and the need to make reasonable thequery on the scrap of paper between the two bills: Later? The three sheetswere fanned slightly so that the note's white edge was visible between the 


engraved expanses of currency.
Gisela hip-jerked to the table, turning a full 360 degrees as she left theguests she had just milked and - by switching her pivot foot - striding sixfeet without appearing to have abandoned them. Those men would not feelplucked and foolish when they went home tonight. It was nice watching a prowork, thought Kelly; and it was not only the woman's dancing which was ofprofessional quality.
She swung around, facing first toward Commander Posner, and did a slow bellyroll with her arms twined above her. Posner clapped lightly in embarrassmentbut did not reach again for his wallet.
Close up, the two attendents looked as out of place as Kelly himself wouldhave felt doing their jobs. There was quite a lot of similarity between whathe saw behind their eyes and what he felt behind his own. . . . Both men couldwell be Germans, though the smaller one was as swarthy as Kelly and the tallerone had certainly not been a 'Nordic blond' before his hair went gray. Theywere armed - there were flat bulges beneath cither's left armpit.
Gisela blew a kiss at Posner, tinkled her finger cymbals toward Mrs. Posner(who winced) and switched to Kelly.
She was tired, the veteran could see, and her midriff glittered where sweatjeweled the tiny blond hairs which would otherwise have been invisible. Shebegan a hip sway; and, as the taped music quickened to an accompaniment ofchords clashed on the guitar, the sway sped into a shimmy.
"My wife could have done that," Kelly said in German, enunciating precisely sothat he did not have to shout to be understood. "But belly muscles like yoursI have never seen, fraulein."
The look on the woman's face had been one of wariness masked by fatigue.
Gisela tossed her heavy hair in its blond net and, with a smile as real andwicked as Kelly's own as he watched her, went into a belly roll that speededto the point that the movement but not the individual folds were visible.
"Ha!" she shouted after what seemed to have been a minute of frantic motion. 
She stamped her right foot and shifted back into a gentle hip sway as if acontrol had been thrown to a lower speed.
Gisela's pelvis was prominent above the line of her spangled briefs. Kellyreached toward the point of her left hip with the currency and question.
Rather than thrusting her flank toward him, Gisela bent and jerked hershoulders back so that the tassles on her left bra-cup flicked out against thebills. 
"There," she directed in a Platt-Deutsch accent, "for the thought. And I cando other things your wife never thought of, too."
Her breast was warm; but then, so were Kelly's fingers and everything else inthe big room.
There was a louder cheer than expected from local tables, because very few ofthe Americans had gotten into the spirit of the affair as Kelly seemed to havedone. Gisela strode and swayed liquidly to the podium to finish her act there.
Kelly had fanned the note briefly to show the dancer it was there, but as shemoved away from him he noticed that her fingers brushed the three pieces ofpaper into a thin sheaf so that the query was not visible amid the currency.
They were both actors, going through motions choreographed by others; neitherable to admit to the other what their real purposes and intentions were, orwhat they knew of the other party's. It was human society in microcosm, Kellysupposed.
Within moments of the time Gisela sprang from the room with a series of leggybounds and double-handed kisses toward the guests to either side of her path,
chairs and a speaker's stand were set up on the podium by members of the hotelstaff. 
"We really ought to stay for the speeches," Posner said apologetically inresponse to a whisper from his wife. 


"They'll be in Turkish," Mrs. Posner replied, and in a tone that suggested shehad been asked to go mud-wrestling.
Kelly looked at her, amazed. She seemed to think that after-dinner speeches atan affair like this were likely to be more boring in a language you didn'tunderstand than they would be in one that you did.
A waiter approached, so soon after the dancer had left that Kelly assumed hewas changing the defense attache's ashtray once again. Instead, the waiteroffered a folded note to Kelly himself with a smirk. It was the paper he hadslipped between the thousand lire bills, and beneath his own Later? waswritten in a loose, jerky hand, Why don't we talk about it at the door to theparking lot?
Well, that was fast. Kelly rose, setting his chair back with one hand while hebalanced the weight of his torso over the table with the other. "Mrs. Posner,"
he said as he leaned toward the couple, "Commander, I appreciate your company,
but I think I've found my own ride home." Or somewhere.
Mrs. Posner nodded distantly. Her husband, frowning, said, "Mr. Bradsheer take 
care." 
"Thank you, Commander." Kelly shook the naval officer's hand, then walkedtoward the exit. 
The cooler, less smoky air of the hallway as he went to the elevators did notseem at first to clear Kelly's sinuses. Rather, motion and oxygen brought withthem a pounding headache as smoke-constricted capillaries tried to adjust tothe new demands. 
The parking lot north of the big hotel was actually off the basement ratherthan on a level with the front entrance to the ground-floor lobby. A hotelhere, where almost all the guests would arrive in and use taxis instead oftheir own cars, had less need for parking than a similar 450-room unit inWashington, but that meant there would probably be a great deal of congestiontonight. Kelly shrugged as he got off the elevator, loosening his coat and hismuscles, trying to be prepared for anything at all.
Gisela Romer was, quite literally, waiting at the far end of the hall, besidethe glazed outside door. The shorter of her two attendants was visible throughthe panel, glancing in through the door and out again toward the crowdedparking lot with the wariness of a point man on patrol.
The woman wore a long cloth coat, belted and not buttoned. Kelly wonderedmomentarily whether she had simply thrown it on over her costume, but thebeige frill of a blouse showed at the cuff when she waved at him. "Are you thesort of man a girl can trust in a wicked world, Mr. Monaghan?" she called. Itwas Kelly's war name from the time he trained Kurds rather than what was onhis present ID as a Boeing Services employee.
"Well, you know," Kelly said as he strolled to her side. The man outsidestared at him like a vicious dog which precisely knows the length of itschain. "If you drop a bowling ball, you can trust it to do certain things. Youjust have to know ahead of time if they're the things you want."
Gisela smiled, an expression that made the most of the width of her mouth. "Ithink I'll trust you to protect my life, Monaghan. As for my virtue, I'lldecide later if that needs to be protected or not."
She made a quick, dismissing gesture toward the glass door without botheringto look around to see how it was received. Kelly saw the attendant's head goback in a nod of acceptance, but the motion might equally have followed aslap. The man strode away from the door, his back straight and his neck nolonger swiveling. Christ, you'd think they'd be used to it, whatever therelationships were. . . .
"I'd like to talk, Mr. Monaghan," Gisela said as she touched the sleeve of hissuitcoat and rubbed the fabric approvingly between thumb and forefinger. "Ihave a comfortable place, if you're inclined. . . . and we can take your caror mine." 


"Does yours come with a couple kibitzers?" the American asked, feeling hisface smile as his mind correlated the two operations: meeting a valuablesource who was not trustworthy, and meeting a woman whom he intended at aninstinctive level to fuck. The second part of the equation should have beentoo trivial for present consideration; but, because Tom Kelly was as human asthe next guy, it was going to get at least equal billing until he didsomething about it.
"They'll go in the van," said the woman. She had exchanged her pumps forflats, and still only the thick Vibram heels on Kelly's shoes put his eyes ona level with hers. "I have my own car - and it has only two seats." Definitelya nice smile. 
"Let's go," said Kelly, thrusting the door open for his companion, after whomhe stepped into the night.
Mercury vapor lights on tall aluminum poles illuminated the Hilton lot wellenough for Turkey, but the effect was very sparse by American standards. Thelot was overparked tonight, as Kelly had expected. Close to the sidewalk was aBritish-style delivery truck, with roughly the wheelbase of a full-sizedAmerican car but a taller roofline than an American van. The sides were not 
painted with GISELA or a similar legend, but the attendant who had beenwatching over the dancer was walking toward the passenger side. The secondthrough tenth floors of the hotel overhung the ground floor and basement sothat the glow from lighted guest rooms curtained the wall near the doorwaywith shadows deeper than they would otherwise have been. Nonetheless, the eyesof Gisela's attendant had been dark-adapted, and it was inconceivable thatsomeone had been standing close to the door without being seen.
"Thomas Kelly," said a voice as clear and recognizable as what the agentthought he had heard on the tape in his room. He spun around.
"Do not be afraid because we must speak." There were three short men inovercoats and hats with brims, shadows amid shadows against the concrete wall.
One of them carried a transistor radio, from whose speaker the voice issued.
The figures would not have been there unnoticed earlier, they could not havestepped through the concrete, and Kelly would have caught motion from thecorner of his eye had they come running toward him alongside the building. Butthey were there now, ten feet away, their radio speaking as the attendant justgetting into the van shrieked a warning.
Gisela cried out also. A purse dangled from her left wrist, but it was towardthe side pocket of her coat instead that her free hand dived.
First things first. The shorter attendant and his companion, who stood up onthe driver's side-step and looked over the van's cab, were both reaching forhardware. Kelly threw himself sideways, toward the line of yews fringing thethirty-foot walkway to the parking lot. His hundred and eighty pounds meat-
axed the dancer ahead of him, out of the line of fire.
It occurred to him as the first shot banged from the cab of the van that hemight be getting a personal demonstration of how Mohammed Ayyubi had died: inthe wrong place at the wrong time.
Ricochets have a soul-freezing sound that rightly suggests the flattenedbullet may rip a hole through you from any direction. This round cracked twicefrom the concrete, wall and overhang, before thrumming viciously into thenight. Ten yards is spitting distance on a lighted pistol range, but shock anddarkness made the gunman at the van as great a threat to the world at large ashe was to his target.
As they crashed through the prickly branches of the shrubs, Kelly expected tohit the ground on top of the woman he was trying to save. He had notconsidered the fact that she was his superior as an athlete. She twisted inthe air, using Kelly's own weight as a fulcrum, and hit the hard ground beyondhim on braced fingers and toes. The weight of the gun in her right side pockettwisted the tail of the coat around behind her. 


"Kelly - " the radio voice in back of him called. There was a snap as theAmerican scrambled to his feet. The sound was not a gunshot like the volleyblasting from around the van; it could have been the release of a bowstring.
"Your car!" Kelly cried to the woman beside him. Glass shattered from thebuilding, and the man shooting from in front of the van splayed like anelectrocuted squirrel as he fell backward.
Crouching, Kelly aware that the woman's light-colored coat made as good anaiming point as his own dark suit was a bad one, the couple broke for theasphalt lot at an angle which thankfully spread them further from the secondattendant, who continued to shoot over the cab of the van. The three figuresstood like sandbagged dummies, unaffected by the bullets. One round vanishedin a violet flash that lighted the wall of the hotel instead of ricochetingaway.
"This one!" Gisela shouted, motioning with her right arm toward a car parkedat the edge of the asphalt. It was a Mercedes coupe with the slight roundingof lines that marked it as ten or fifteen years old rather than brand new. Themercury-vapor lamp was reflected as a rich blue pool from the bodywork ofmetallic silver, a German hallmark which Japanese automakers attempted tomatch with less success than they showed in matters of pure mechanics.
There was a second snap! and the remaining attendant catapulted from the van.
Gisela, instead of dodging around the front bumper of the coupe, vaulted thehood which her dangling coattail struck with a clang. Kelly flattened himselfon the ground, reaching up for the passenger-side door as he twisted his headback to see what weapons were being aimed. He had not attempted to clear therevolver attached to his waistband. All it was going to do under presentcircumstances was tie up his hand and make a target of him.
A better target.
Two of the figures, the men if they were men, ran toward him while the third'sradio shouted, "Thomas Kelly, for your planet's sake - "
The long burst of submachinegun fire from a parked Audi sedan drowned thecough-brap! of the six-cylinder Mercedes engine catching.
Kelly expected the coupe's door to be locked. It was not. He threw it open andtossed himself into the passenger seat of the low car, wishing he were half asagile as the woman he was accompanying. The nearer of the two figures runningtoward the car toppled limply. The second froze and remained standing in aviolet blaze as two or three automatic weapons ripped at it.
The Mercedes was accelerating before Kelly got his door closed. Gisela pulleda hard left turn, spinning the little vehicle in about its own length. The 280SL had not been a dragster even when new, but its engine was in a sharp stateof tune and snarled happily as the driver revved it through the powerband.
Centrifugal force made the door in Kelly's hand a weight worthy of hisstrength as he drew it closed.
"Thomas Kelly!" the radio voice called over the roar of gunfire and exhaust.
Shots raked the building in a cloud of pulverized concrete, lighted internallyby spluttering arcs from the figure who stood in the midst of the bulletsuntil he disappeared instead of falling.
As the coupe straightened in the aisle, heading in the direction opposite tothe way it had been parked, Gisela's foot blipped the throttle so that theautomatic clutch would let her upshift. There was a red and white glare from asecond Audi, backing at speed across the head of the aisle to block them. Themedley of tail and backup lights was as uncompromising as the muzzle flashesfrom the other German sedan. 
The shriek of the Mercedes' brakes was louder than the angry whine of theAudi's gearbox being overrevved in reverse gear. The coupe's blunt nose slewedthirty degrees to the left as that front disk gripped minutely before itscompanion. Kelly's left hand was furiously searching the door panel for a wayto roll down the window. Gisela had not switched on her lights, and the 


parking lot fixtures overhead did nothing to illuminate the car's interior toeyes dazzled by muzzle flashes and the electric coruscance which bullets haddrawn from the three figures.
He poised the revolver in his hand, bumping the coupe's low roof with it as hereadied to smash out the side window with the gun butt. Instead, Gisela flunghis unbraced body against her as she downshifted again and cut the wheelright.
Inertia had carried the heavy sedan from its blocking position against thedrag of its own brakes. As it lunged back against its springs when the tiresgot a firm grip, Gisela punched the coupe between the Audi and the rear bumperof the nearest parked car.
The sedan's bright headlights reflected explosively from the metallic side ofthe Mercedes squirming past it, accelerating. The Mercedes was too solidlybuilt for competitive racing, but the little engine had enough torque to shootthem through a gap which neither Kelly nor the Audi's driver thought waspresent.
"Not yours?" Kelly shouted over the exhaust note reflected from the sides ofparked cars. Lights scissored across the sky behind them as both sedansmaneuvered in the parking lot.
"I don't know whose," Gisela shouted back, shifting into third up the shortramp to Mete Street. The headlights of a car parked illegally on the streetflashed on. "What are you doing?" Her gearshift hand batted down at Kelly.
The car on Mete Street was a third Audi. 
"You drive," said Kelly as he worked the gun from the woman's coat pocket.
"I'll worry about the rest."
Gisela's hand touched the control standard on the left side of the steeringcolumn, throwing her headlights on and bright. That might have spooked thepassenger in the third sedan into putting his burst of shots into the dirt anddriveway curb instead of through the Mercedes' windshield. Alternatively, hemight have been trying merely to disable the coupe by shooting out the left-
side tires. Either way, the muzzle blasts and the ringing crash of a ricochetinto one of the Mercedes' rocker panels confirmed a decision Kelly had more orless made already. The guy who shot at them had just clarified the rules.
Gisela had flinched as the bullet hit the car, but her hands were rock-steadynow at the ten and two o'clock positions on the steering wheel. She crossedthem right and straightened expertly to give the coupe room at the head of thedrive if this Audi too attempted to drive across their path. The Mercedeslurched, brushing but not rebounding from the right-hand radius of the curbcut. Then they were in Mete Street, using the full considerable width of thepavement to hang a left turn while continuing to accelerate. There was morefiring distantly behind them, but nothing passed close to the 280 SL.
The dancer's two attendants had carried pocket pistols, .32's by the sound ofthem: the highly-portable European answer to situations in which Americanstended to carry small revolvers. Both choices were guns you carried when youwanted to be armed but didn't expect to have to use your hardware. The pistolKelly hauled from Gisela's coat was something else again: a Walther P-38, oldenough to have a steel frame and grooved wooden grips. It fired full-house 9mmParabellum ammunition through a five-inch barrel, which, with the projectinghammer, safety, and front sight, made the weapon as bad a choice for pocketcarry as could be imagined.
On the plus side, Kelly couldn't have asked for a better weapon to use if hehad to be limited to pistols.
Behind them, the lights of a car bounced wildly as it plunged into Mete Streetin pursuit. The Audi which had shot at them waited for its companion to clearthe driveway before pulling a U-turn to follow. Kelly couldn't be sure throughthe rear window whether or not the third sedan was following also; but two,
crewed by men with submachineguns, were certainly enough. 


"Goddam," he muttered, then raised his voice enough to add, "See if you canlose 'em. They may not want us dead."
Men with submachineguns, and possibly a woman.
The Taksim District with its broad streets and low-density development public 
buildings and luxury hotels landscaped like no other area of the city was 
as good a place to drive fast as anywhere in Istanbul. That made it theleast suitable place for them to lose pursuers in cars which, for all thecoupe's sporting appearance, had the legs of them. Metallurgy and thetechnology of internal combustion engines had not stood still during" the pastfifteen years.
Gisela sent the Mercedes snarling past the Sport Palace - the enclosed soccerstadium - without shifting up from third gear, and entered what was supposedto be a controlled intersection at speed. As it chanced, the light was intheir favor - but a '56 Chevy, for Chrissake, being driven with almost as muchabandon as the coupe, was running it from Kadergalar, the merging street.
Kelly's feet were planted against the firewall and his shoulders compressedthe springs of the seatback, anchoring him despite the violent accelerationsof the car. Gisela yanked her wheel left, trusting the gap in oncomingtraffic, as the driver of the Chevy slammed on brakes which grabbed on theright front and started his car spinning just before the moment of contact.
The result was something closer to elastic rebound than auto bodies collapsingwithin one another, though eight tires simultaneously losing their grip on thepavement sounded like a chorus of the damned.
The coupe's right headlight nacelle touched the left bumper of the tallerAmerican design, spraying glass and a cloud of tungsten which had sublimed ina green arc. The front ends counterrotated and the rear quarter-panel of theChevy patted the Mercedes' back bumper with the control of a handball player'sglove. Gisela, bracing herself on the wheel rim as her passenger did on thecarpeted firewall, did not attempt input through the brakes or steering wheeluntil the tires regained enough traction to accept it.
The Chevy, its back end drifting to the right in response to the secondimpact, broadsided the end of the iron-tube barrier intended to separate carsand pedestrians at the intersection. The scattering of individuals waiting tocross the street at this hour leaped into recessed shop fronts or tried toclimb the grated window of a branch bank as the car sawed itself in half withtrunk and rear wheels on the sidewalk and the remainder sliding in the street.
Gisela's 280 SL swapped ends twice in a hundred yards of skidding while itstires shrieked without fatal overtones of metal dragging as well. The coupe'sshort wheelbase and tight suspension made the uncontrolled spin lessphysically punishing than it might have been in another vehicle, but the Chevybeside them separating in sparks both from friction and the sheared powerlinefeeding the traffic signal was a sight with heart-freezing elements ofprophecy.
They missed an Anadol at the next intersection, marked as a taxi by its bandof black and yellow checkerboard, because its driver had braked hard to watchthe Chevy disintegrate. The Mercedes' left front brushed the little Ford justhard enough to give Gisela control again. She could not have managed theobtuse angle required to turn left onto Bayildim Street, but there was acobblestone alley directly across the intersection. The Mercedes dropped intoit like a bullet through the muzzle of a smoothbore.
The alley ran between the dun-stuccoed courtyard walls of multistory apartmentblocks. The coupe's single remaining headlight filled the passageway, save forthe black fingers of shadow flung ahead of the car by projections from thewalls. Gisela's eyes and mouth were both wide open in an expression moremasklike than fearful. The engine stuttered and boomed as she downshifted, butshe did not lose the car's minimal traction except for the instant a drivingwheel slipped on garbage and the coupe's right side streaked the plaster 


silver. 
Kelly's left hand massaged his thigh where the hammer of the P-38 had bittenhim while the car spun. His thumb touched the safety lever. Christ, it was onsafe! The woman knew a lot more about cars than she did double-action pistols.
When he had clicked the safety up to fire position, he also checked the littlepin which projected above the hammer to show that a round was chambered.
Kelly didn't expect to need the gun now, given the likelihood that thecollision would have screened their escape and possibly even blocked pursuit.
The Chevy had not exploded as it well might have done - and he was glad it hadnot. Kelly lacked the willingness to ignore side effects displayed by certainof his superiors who would cheerfully have incinerated scores of Turkishcivilians in a gasoline fire if it suited their purposes. The victims would benonwhites, after all, wogs; and certainly non-Christians.
Still, Kelly was not writing the Audis out; he unrolled his window as anunlighted lamp bracket beside a courtyard gate clacked against his door handleand Gisela braked hard. Only when she was sure of her clearance did she spinthe wheel and the Mercedes hard right, up a slightly-wider alley leading backtoward the Catholic church adjoining the grounds of the Technical School.
There was an echoing cry of metal behind them. The car plunging down the alleythey were leaving had scraped twenty feet of stucco from the same wall thecoupe had touched. The dazzle of headlights made the vehicle itself invisible,
but the only reasonable question about its identity was which of the threeAudis this one was. 
"Pull right at the next street," Kelly ordered loudly in a voice asemotionless as the echoing exhaust of the twin pipes. "Drop me half a blockdown, and go like hell till I take care of the problem."
The woman glanced at her passenger. Kelly had reached across his body left-
handed to unlatch his door and hold it ajar. He held the P-38 vertical besidehis head, so that the muzzle was clear of his skull no matter what shocks theweapon received in the next moments.
"All right," she said, and the agent realized from her tone that she knew howsure she had better be that it was all right.
The Mercedes fishtailed onto Macka Street, losing just enough momentum in adownshift as it burst from the alley that it thrust a Fiat taxi out of theway, by presence rather than by collision, horns on both cars blaring. Thetaxi cut left, threatening oncoming traffic for a moment but giving the coupewhat amounted to a third lane along the curb. Pedestrians and the shills infront of the few shops still open shouted more in enthusiasm than fear.
Gisela braked hard and the Mercedes slewed again, scraping the curb with theedge and sidewall of the front tire as the Fiat that had continued to racethem for the slot in traffic shot ahead in a Dopplered howl of alarm. Threemore subcompact sedans swerved outward from the coupe's blazing brake lights,
honking and cursing but without real animus. Gisela's present maneuvering wasnot greatly out of the ordinary for the streets of the densely-built old city.
Kelly let the inertia of the door swing it open against the coupe's breakingeffort, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He immediately tumbled, balling hishead and limbs against his torso to save himself serious injury from theunintended somersaults. Only to the agent's speeded-up senses had the carstopped. It and he were still moving at about ten miles an hour when his foothit the concrete, and the small contact patch provided by his right heel couldnot possibly bring to a halt his hundred and eighty pound mass as he intended.
The 280 SL accelerated away, surely enough to save the door's hinges thoughnot to latch it firmly again. Kelly skidded to a stop on his back, the suitcoat bunched beneath his shoulders. He rolled to his feet and stood, lookingback toward the alley they had left.
Men in sweaters or baggy suits who had run to help him up scattered when theysaw the big pistol in Kelly's hand. There was holster wear at the muzzle and 


the squared-off edges of the slide, and the external bar that was part of thetrigger mechanism had polished a patch of bluing from the frame. That onlymeant that the P-38 had been used, however, and guns were meant to be used.
Horns and tires competed in cacaphony behind Kelly, with the insistent note ofrubber skidding on concrete probably the winner of the contest. He spun,
bracing his left palm against the blistered paint of a light pole. He hadexpected the Audi which was their immediate pursuit to exit the alleymomentarily; headlights already blazed from its mouth across the intersectingstreet. 
But another of the German sedans had expertly circled the whole warren ofalleys on Sport Street - named because of the stadium - and had been speedingnorth on Macka Street past the Technical School when the driver caught sightof Gisela heading in the other direction.
The way the Audi changed front and scrubbed off velocity in an all-wheel driftwas testimony both to the driver's skill and the tact that the sedan had four-
wheel drive. Otherwise, the weight shift during braking would have unloadedthe rear wheels and thrown the vehicle into an uncontrollable spin as thedriver tried to change direction.
Gisela had made room for herself in the southbound lane by bluff and audacity.
The Audi sedan was a 5000, heavy and as close to a full-sized car as anythingmade in Europe save for six-door limousines. It simply brushed aside a Skodapickup which crashed to a halt against the barred front of an apothecary'sshop twenty feet south of the agent.
A man Kelly did not recognize from behind was hanging out of the passenger-
side window as the Audi regained forward momentum in its new direction. The P-
38's thin front sightblade and its U-notch rear were almost useless in the badlighting, but the Walther pointed like his own finger as Kelly squeezed thetrigger through its first long double-action pull. The muzzle blast of the 9mm, even from a relatively long barrel, was a deafening crash more painfulthan that of larger and more powerful cartridges operating at lower levels ofpressure.
Handgun recoil was always more a matter of perception than physicalpunishment, and the P-38's was mild by reasonable standards in any case. Thebarrel had a right-hand twist, giving the gun a torque opposite to what ashooter expected as it recoiled and returned to battery, but neither that northe lift of the light barrel kept Kelly from putting out a second aimed shotwithin a fraction of a second of the first. Ears ringing and his retinasflooded by purple afterimages of the huge flashes from the muzzle of hisweapon, Kelly rotated back to the Audi which he had intended for his initialtarget when he jumped from the coupe.
Kelly had aimed not at the passenger, though the man presumably had asubmachinegun, but rather at the side window behind him. Reflection from thesmooth glass made the empty rectangle a good aiming point, and Kelly'squartering angle on the sedan meant that the bullets would snap across thetonneau and the space most likely to be occupied by the driver's head.
The Audi spun broadside as the driver's hands flung the wheel away and hisfoot came off the gas before he had quite compensated for the momentum of thevehicle's drift. An oncoming bus smashed into the right side of the Audi justas an Anadol hit the sedan from what would have been behind a fraction of a 
second earlier. The man leaning from the right-hand window rebounded twicebetween the door and window posts before sprawling, as limp as an officialexplanation, against the door.
It hadn't mattered to Kelly - and probably not to the driver bouncing insidethe crumpling sedan - whether or not he actually hit the man at the wheel. The9 mm bullets were supersonic. Their ballistic crack within inches at most ofthe driver's ears and the way the windshield exploded into webbed opacity asthey exited were enough to throw the best wheelman in the world into a 


disastrous error in this traffic. 
The people in the second Audi had seen enough of what happened to target Kellyeven as he turned back to face them. The passenger opened up with an automaticweapon as the sedan, its side streaked surreally by the battering it had takenin the alley, pulled halfway up on the curb with a snarl of low-end power asit came toward Kelly.
God himself couldn't count on hitting anything from a moving car. That was whyKelly had jumped from the Mercedes when it became obvious that they were notgoing to shake the pursuit. The Audi gunner's long burst lifted the muzzle sothat bullets spalled concrete from the sidewalk halfway between weapon andtarget, riddled the neon tobacconist's sign above Kelly's head, and sparkedfrom a rooftop flagpole halfway down the block.
One ricochet gouged ten inches of fabric from the left tail of Kelly's coatunnoticed, and the spray of hot glass from above made him flinch and send anunintended third shot after the two he aimed at the Audi's windshield, at theplace where the gunner's torso should be if his head was behind the blindingmuzzle flashes of the submachinegun.
If the windshield was bulletproof, Kelly was shit outa luck - but surely noone could drive at night with the skill these men had shown if there was athick plate of Lexan between their eyes and the road.
The submachinegun fell, banging off one more round as it hit the concrete andskittered. The gunner slumped back, his right forearm flopping against theoutside of the door. The two bullets through the windshield had crazed most ofit into a milky smear.
Kelly had stepped away from the light pole when he switched targets. Thehalogen headlights of the sedan bearing down on him flamed the plate glass ofshop windows into dazzling facets and threw shadows like curtains over thedoor alcoves the lights did not penetrate.
The quartz-iodide lights did not blind Kelly as he shifted his left foot ahalf step to swing his gun and rigid arm. He fired pistols one-handed, notbecause he thought it was better than modern two-hand grips but because it wasthe way he had first learned - and thus was better for him. The car, twentyfeet away and jouncing closer, was too near for the lights to interfere withhis sight line toward the driver.
The Audi slammed to a stop so abrupt that the nose dipped and the undamagedportion of the windshield reflected flashes of advertising signs like aheliograph. The car lurched into reverse and, with its right front wheel stillon the sidewalk, crunched again to a halt against some unfortunate econobox inthe traffic lane. 
Kelly held his fire, shielding his eyes now with his free left hand. The sedanwas cocked upward, lights on and motor racing as the driver leaped out.
"No!" he screamed to Kelly, throwing his own hands out before him inunintended mimickry. It was the first time Kelly had actually seen one of themen from the Audis. 
It was George, the balding member of Elaine's team, who apparently handleddriving chores as well as sweeping for bugs. Christ on a crutch.
Kelly fired, aiming between the Audi's headlights, the clanging of his high-
velocity bullet against metal an instant counterpoint to the muzzle blast.
George leaped as though he had been hit and ran across the street, regardlessof the cars trying to extricate themselves from the chaos of multiplecollisions. 
Maybe the ricochet or flecks of metal ripped from the bullet and the car hadhit him. More likely it had been pure terror, an emotion Kelly could wellappreciate. His own thighs were wet with something, probably sweat or bloodand lymph where the fall from the car had scraped him. But he could've shithimself; it happened more often'n anybody who hadn't been there'd believe.
And 'there' was a place Tom Kelly was back to this night for sure. 


The right 9 mm loads had penetration up the ass, so it was possible that thebullet had holed the aluminum engine block. The steam that gushed from thesedan's grill proved that Kelly had taken out at least the radiator, whichmade the car undrivable even if somebody shut off the motor before it melteditself down. There was still one car not accounted for, but Kelly intended tolimit further pursuit as completely as he could.
Without killing additional friendlies. More or less friendly.
Gunfire had cleared the sidewalks almost as thoroughly as if all thepedestrians had been shot. Cars still moved or tried to, and the windows ofapartments on upper floors were thrown open by curious occupants.
Kelly was trying to look down the street, shielding his eyes from the Audi'shalogen glare with his left forearm, when what had been the shadowed side ofthe pilastered wall before him brightened with light from a new direction. Hespun.
The indicator pin told him there was still a cartridge in the chamber; but hecouldn't remember how many shots he had fired, nor did he know whether thepiece had originally been loaded to its full nine-round capacity. The snubbiewas still where Kelly had dropped it on clearing the Walther, in the sidepocket of his coat - and thank the dear Lord that he hadn't found time torefix it at the base of his spine before skidding down the sidewalk on hisback. The short-barreled revolver was as bad a choice for shooting at vehiclesas the P-38 was a good one.
A car was driving up the sidewalk toward him, opposite to the flow of trafficwhich the nearer lane would have had if George's Audi had not blocked it. Anet bag full of soccer balls, dropped by some shopper or peddler to thesidewalk, burst and spewed its contents in all directions as the car neared attwenty miles an hour.
The car had only one headlight, the left one. Gisela had come back to fetchhim, despite the tangle and the bloody violence that anybody with sensewould've driven like hell to avoid. One thing about having the shit hit thefan: it taught you who you wanted to keep among the people you knew.
Kelly stepped off the curb to let the Mercedes by and flung open the door ofthe coupe that squealed to a halt beside him.
"There's another one out there," Kelly said, meaning the Audi and too wired towonder whether or not he was understood. He flopped onto the low seat andpulled the door closed after him. "Hope to god it doesn't find us."
The dancer pulled around the tangled Audi and the car it had backed into, thencramped her wheel hard and bumped off the curb again with a clang from the lowundercarriage. The vehicle immediately behind the cars paired by the collisionhad begun to back clear to skirt the obstacle. Gisela accelerated through themomentary gap, ignoring both the screamed curses and the clack as she smashedoff her outside mirror against the fender of the higher car.
"I'm taking you to the pickup point," she said in German. They had spoken inEnglish before, but stress had thrown the dancer back to her birth language.
Kelly was fluent enough in German that the change didn't matter to him, butthe fact of it was a datum to file. "We - we've needed somebody like you, forthe people you know. This has proven how little time there is."
Kelly started to say, "Wait," although waiting was the last thing he reallywanted to do in this confusion with its chance of fire and explosion and itscertainty of heavily-armed patrols descending at any moment. Instead, asGisela negotiated the acute turn onto Tesfikige Street, bumping over the curbagain to clear the van stalled in the intersection, Kelly said, "Gisela, runme back to the Sheraton. There's something I need in my room there."
"Are you sick in the head?" she demanded, sparing him a glance.
"Didn't say it was a great idea," the American said as he met her eyes. "ButI've never volunteered for a suicide mission, and that's what tonight'll havebeen if I don't have some way to cover my ass." He grimaced and looked away. 


"Yeah, and get a change of clothes, too. These" - he felt the back of his 
coat with his free left hand - "haven't come through the night much betterthan I have." 
"But you'll come," the woman said. She was driving normally. The traffic nowwas Istanbul's normal dense matrix, and there was no reason to call attentionto themselves by attempting to break out of it. There was no particularly goodway to get from one place to another in the ancient streets laid out bydonkey-drivers, so their present course was not a bad one from Kelly'sstandpoint.
"I'm with you as soon as we're outa my hotel," the agent agreed, slidingforward in his seat so that he could replace the little revolver at the backof his waistband. He didn't want it to clank against the Walther he intendedto carry in his trouser pocket, screened by the coattail, when he got out ofthe car. "I go up to the room, grab my stuff like I'm just changing clothes toparry some more, and I think anybody listening's going to leave me alone untilthey've got a better notion of what's going on tonight. Better'n I do,
anyway."
Why in the hell had they shot at him, George and whoever had been with Georgeor at least issuing his orders? Confusion rather than deliberate purpose,
perhaps, but you don't issue somebody a gun in a civilized venue unless youtrust him not to shoot first and ask questions later.
Except that to Doug and his ilk in their English suits and Italian shoes,
Turkey wasn't civilized; it was part of the great brown mass of Wog-land,
where a white man could do anything he pleased if he had money and the USgovernment behind him.
So they might have thought there were - use the word - aliens in the Mercedes,
and they might have thought it was Kelly about to pull something unstructuredon his own. Either way, somebody had made the decision to stop the car at anycost. 
They just hadn't realized who would be paying most of that cost.
"Got another magazine for this?" Kelly asked, tapping the slide of the P-38.
His eyes searched traffic for anything his trigger reflexes needed to know.
"No," said Gisela. She had switched back to English, but the shake of her headwas a bit too abrupt to have been without emotional undertones. "It was ... itwas my father's before they killed him. The crabs. They took even his bodyaway."
"It'll do," said Kelly, unwilling to remove the magazine and check the load onthe off chance that he'd need the weapon fully functional during those fewseconds. "Why did they murder your father?"
Nothing in the files Elaine had showed him said anything about direct contactbetween the aliens and the Dienst. More important, nothing in the conversationKelly had bugged suggested that his case officer and her chief subordinate hadany inkling of the connection. Maybe there was more in Kelly's meeting withGisela Romer than a way of gaming his employers. . . .
"I don't know," she said miserably, reacting to the concern in her passenger'svoice. It was genuine enough, concern that a human being had been killed bymonsters; but Kelly displayed his feeling because it was politic to do so, theway it would have been politic to display affection if he were trying to getinto the woman's pants . . . which might come yet, the aftermath of theadrenaline rush of the firefight accentuating his lust.
"We've known about them for three years," Gisela went on. She forced her wayin a blare of horns onto Besiktas Street, through a light that had alreadychanged. None of her memories were keeping her from being as aggressive adriver as Istanbul traffic required. "Ever since the - they made the Plan - myfather and the other Old Fighters - the crabs, the aliens, have been attackingus one by one, all over Earth."
"Which plan was that?" asked Kelly mildly, to give the impression that he was 


just making conversation.
"You'll have to learn," said Gisela. A sudden distance in her tone implied thequestion had not been delicate enough. "But not from me, it is not my place."
Three truckloads of Paramilitary Police passed at speed with their two-notehooters blasting as Gisela turned past the open-air stadium on the Bosphorusside of the huge Taksim Park. Kelly kept his left hand over the pistol in hislap, knowing that the blue-bereted policemen hanging off the sides of theirtrucks might catch a glimpse into the interior of the low coupe. On aterrorist alert like this, a burst of automatic rifle fire through theMercedes was a very possible response.
Perhaps because of a similar thought, the woman glanced at Kelly and said,
"You saved my life, didn't you? Was it your job to do that?"
Wonder what Elaine's answer would be, Kelly thought, but he didn't wonder atall. Aloud he said, "Look, dammit, maybe I needed a driver."
It bothered him to be thanked for what he thought of as acts of simplehumanity, getting somebody out of the line of fire, getting somebody to adust-off bird. ... It meant that either Kelly's vision of humanity was skewed,
or that other people's perceptions of Kelly himself were very different fromhis own. 
Two taxis and a BMW sedan were picking up passengers under the marquee of theSheraton. Gisela pulled ahead of them and as far up onto the sidewalk aspermitted by the posts set to prevent that behavior. "I'll be quick," Kellysaid as he got out.
The driver's door thumped closed an instant before Kelly's own did. Gisela wasalready striding toward the hotel's uniformed attendant. The agent caught upwith her just as she handed the Turk a bank note folded at a slant so that thenumerical 1000 on two corners was clearly visible. "No trouble if we run infor a few minutes, is there?" she asked cheerfully in Turkish, smiling down atthe attendant from her six-inch height advantage.
"Well . . . " the door man temporized, but his fingers had closed over thebill and were refolding it apparently of their own volition.
"Another one for you when we return," Gisela promised, taking Kelly's left armwith her own right hand and beginning to stride toward the entrance.
The doorman looked at the thousand-lire note, then toward the back of theleggy beauty who had given it to him. Kelly himself got only a bemused glance,
though from the rear his coat and trousers were in worse shape than thecoupe's battered right side.
"Listen, this may get hot," Kelly hissed in angry German as he pushed open adoor for them. He had not spoken earlier because he did not know of anylanguage he had in common with Gisela which the doorman did not share. "Havingyou along makes it worse." He was trying to read her expression at the sametime that he searched the lobby and alcoves for an observer or even an ambush.
"It makes it better, darling," Gisela purred as her hand moved up to strokehis shoulder blades as they walked toward the elevator. "You want to convincethem there's nothing wrong, it's all innocent - we'll convince them." Shegiggled - was the woman really that relaxed? - and added, "All not innocent,
not so?" 
Christ, thought Kelly as he stepped onto the elevator. She was probably right,
but if the shit hit the fan again . . . The P-38 would be even harder to clearfrom his pants pocket than it had been from Gisela's coat, and the snubbie waspositioned for concealment rather than instant use.
But maybe nothing like that would be necessary. Maybe he'd waltz into hisroom, change clothes - pick up the radio and tape recorder - and waltz outagain. By now, Elaine or whoever had survived the mess in the parking lot andafterwards would know that something had blown wide open . . . but in thedarkness, with at least four sets of participants involved, nobody might beabsolutely sure of Kelly's own role in the business. Not even George, who, at 


best, saw not Kelly but a dark suit and a pistol aiming at him. They'd want totalk to him, but to brace Kelly now - with his target, if they recognizedGisela, or with an innocent bystander if they didn't - would be breaking toomany rules.
Unless they knew already what their agent had done to the teams in the Audis.
There was no one in the seventh-floor hallway.
"Well, I tell you, honey," Kelly said as he slipped his left hand aroundGisela's waist, "you give me a few minutes to change, and then you can show mehow to show you the best time in Istanbul." He shifted Gisela to his otherside and drew the Walther from his pocket, using the bulk of both their bodiesto shield it from sight of anything but the door of 725.
Left-handed, he inserted the room key, which he had cut from its brass tag tomake more portable. Kelly had not expected to reenter the Sheraton lookinglike something the cat dragged in, but he had considered the possibility thathe would. 
There was no sound from 727, the next door down, and there was no tense auraof someone waiting within Kelly's room. Electronics weren't the mosttrustworthy indicators available to a trained human.
He closed the door and bolted it before turning and taking a deep breath withhis palms flat against the panel. That was as close to collapse as Kelly couldpermit himself to come for a good long time yet.
Moving again with deliberate speed, Kelly strode to the window and closed themechanical slide-switch of the Sony 2002, shutting off the recorder hidden inthe battery pack as well. He telescoped the antenna and locked it in place,
then put the units, still linked so that no one would open the pack simplybecause of ignorance as to its outward purpose, in his limp attache case.
"Say, honey," he called over his shoulder as he straightened, shrugging offhis abraded jacket and turning instinctively so that the butt of the snubbiewould remain concealed from his companion, "you wanna use the john, go ahead,
it's - " Kelly's tongue missed a syllable, two syllables, as he looked at thewoman for the first time since they entered the room, "just like America," heconcluded. 
The light between the twin beds had gone on when Kelly flicked the switch inthe short hallway. Its shade was the color of old parchment and the wallpaperwas cream. Between them they enriched the sheen of Gisela's hair, of her beigeknit dress, and of the breast which she had lifted above the scooped-out neckof that dress. 
"I want a good time right now," she said.
Kelly scowled angrily. He would ignore her, dammit! He started to bend tounlace his shoes since their thick soles would catch in his trouser legs if hetried to change pants without taking the shoes off first. The P-38 jabbed histhigh with its front sight and safety lever, it was a terrible gun to carryunholstered, and he drew it from his pocket to toss it on the bed next to thedancer's overcoat. 
The Walther wasn't perfect but it did its job; so what was he bitching about?
"Come on, honey, that's right," the woman said, leaning her shoulders againstthe wall where the hallway broadened into the room proper and thrusting herhips out toward Kelly. There was a smile in her voice, but her face was asneutral as Kelly's own and the laugh with which she followed the words wasbrittle. She was tight, the American realized, tight as a cocked mainspring,
but she was too accomplished a professional to let that show to the audienceon the other end of the possible listening devices.
She seemed to know exactly how she wanted the show to proceed.
"Well, I don't know," said Kelly, fumbling at his shoelaces so badly that hehad to look down to see what he was doing. Dammit! "I've got reservations.
..." 
The lie was an unintended pun, and in any case his body had no reservations at 


all. His erection was so obvious when he stood again that it brought a reallycheerful giggle from the dancer's lips. "That's right," she said again.
Kelly stepped closer to Gisela as he tried to unbutton his shirt. It, like thecoat, was torn in back and probably bloodied as well. Since his fingers didn'tgoddam work at the moment, and he needed some sort of release under thecircumstances, Kelly gripped his shirttails and ripped it open.
Buttons rather than fabric gave, popping and pattering around the laughingdancer like the leading edge of a sleet storm. The cuffs still held him, andhe hooked his fingers in the left one as he bent closer to Gisela. "How thehell long do you think we've got?" he whispered. "Later!" He jerked his handdownward and, after the sleeve button popped off, the whole cuff tore away inhis hand. 
"How long did you think it was going to take?" Gisela murmured back. There wasnothing wrong with her fine motor control as she unbuckled Kelly's belt.
Kelly's trousers dropped around his ankles abruptly, pulled by the hiddensnubbie, leaving him bare though he scarcely noticed it.
Gisela's whole body was taut as a guitar string, and like a string it vibratedas he met her lips. He was thinking with his dick, which was about as good away to get killed as he knew of; and right now, nothing he knew matteredexcept the way that his left hand cupped her bare breast and lightly pinchedthe already-erect nipple. She began to lift her dress with one hand while theother gripped Kelly's member firmly to the soft fabric still covering hergroin.
"I was. going to fuck you tonight, not so?" she whispered in German as shelaid her cheek against Kelly's, eyes closed. She tongued the lobe of his ear.
"Why should I not because you save my life and make me want you?"
Who the hell expects anything to make sense, thought Kelly. His free handfondled her buttock, bare now that she had raised the hem of her dress highenough. There could be somebody in the room after all, waiting for the rightmoment to deck him from behind, or a team in the hallway poised to smashthrough the door as soon as Gisela shouted the code word. She could have adozen diseases, ranging from loathsome to incurable. God knew who'd dipped hiswick in her over the years And 
none of it fucking mattered, because just now fucking was the only thingthat mattered. 
Gisela wore a slip, but no hose or underwear, which helped explain the speedwith which she had changed from her costume to street dress in the Hilton. Herhip muscles were ripplingly powerful, but the layer of subcutaneous fat commonto all women, whatever their level of exercise, was like plush beneath Kelly'spalm.
Gisela's pubic hair was darker than that of her head or the fine down coveringher body, but like the mane of a lion its bronze highlights made it more thansimply brown. Kelly's shirt still dangled from the agent's right wrist; now hestepped on the tail and pulled off everything except the cuff itself.
The dancer rose onto her toes to increase her height advantage and, grippingKelly's member firmly, rubbed the head of it against the lips of her sex. Shewas dry and tightly closed, her body in this event rebelling against her will.
She was murmuring something, but Kelly could not tell whether actual wordswere intended. 
He bent to the nipple of the breast he held awkwardly from the dress, awarethat the pair of them must look ridiculous. He was more concerned at somelevel of his mind about that than he was over the fact that he had just killeda number of people and that he might die himself before the night was out. Hechuckled mentally at himself and, though he did not lose his erection, fullyregained intellectual control over what he was doing.
Kelly shifted his weight and cupped her groin from the front with his righthand. The knit dress spilled down and both of them made simultaneous left



handed clutches for the garment. "Good," Gisela muttered in German with hereyes still closed as Kelly inserted a finger. "Good. Good."
The one-syllable approval was delivered in a technical tone, but the dancer'smuscles were in full operation, clamping with a rhythmic pulse which drew himmore deeply within her.
Gisela's eyes opened and the corners of her mouth spread widely in a smile ofbeatific happiness. Like Kelly himself, she expected her equipment to workwhen and as required, and that included the hardware she had been issued atbirth. 
She turned away, still gripping the shaft of his member with her own righthand. "What . . . ?" Kelly said as her hips brushed his groin and he wasnestled momentarily between her buttocks while she pulled the hem of the dressup to her waist.
"Now," Gisela said firmly as she planted her left palm and forearm on the walland rested her forehead against them. She inserted the head of his member intoher vulva where his thrust and her eagerness drew it home at once.
It also drew Kelly into a climax more sudden than anything he had experiencedsince being rotated to base after sixty-three days in an outpost with nofemale company save a ewe with a smile that had begun to look flirtatious.
Gisela's simultaneous gasp passed unnoticed, but her cry a moment later as herhips pumped was loud enough to be heard in the next room with no need forbugging devices.
No partner of Kelly's had ever come as quickly as that, and certainly thedancer was as well able to fake a climax as anyone he'd met. Still, thevaginal spasms as he continued to thrust seemed uncontrolled; and the Lordknew, they'd both been ready for this or it wouldn't have had even the chanceto happen. The whole business had taken approximately a minute and a half; andhell, he'd needed to undress anyway.
"Oh," Gisela said in a fairly normal tone. She chuckled as she straightened upwith a friendly twitch of her buttocks against the man. "Yes, a very goodtime. Very good."
Kelly leaned over and scooped the tatters of his shirt from the floor. He heldit to their paired groins before he withdrew from her and began to wipehimself dry with the tail. "Wonder if you can buy terry cloth shirts," hemurmured as Gisela mopped at herself with a sleeve. "Might lay in a stockbefore the next time you'n me get together."
Gisela turned, dropping the damp shirt sleeve and letting her dress fallnormally. She kissed him lightly on the tip of the nose, knelt, and, brushingaway Kelly's hand and the shirt, engulfed very nearly the full length of hisstill-erect member with a momentary pause for adjustment at the halfway mark.
She released Kelly, rising again and flashing him the smile which had alreadybecome his identification point for memories of Gisela Romer. "Another time,
we will take more time, not so? When we come back tonight, I think. But nowyou must dress."
Perfectly, Teutonically, correct, Kelly thought as he shuffled to the closetand chose another pair of slacks. He palmed the snubbie as he stepped out ofhis ankle-lapping trousers, uncertain as to whether the woman had alreadycaught sight of the gun or not. The point of a real hideout gun is thesurprise it offers the user, not primarily its function as a weapon. If peoplealready know you're armed, then you may as well go for something that'llreally do the job - like an automatic rifle.
Not that the P-38 he also stuck into the side pocket of the clean pants wouldbe a surprise to anybody likely to be interested in the fact. You did what youcould. . . . 
"If it's okay to ask where we're going," Kelly said as Gisela drove east onCiragan Street, away from the hotel and beyond it the Old City, "then I'dkinda like to know." 


He kept his eyes on the fender before him, bent up at a sharp angle like aforesight where it should have been curved smoothly over the headlight. If helooked at her while he spoke, it would imply that he was pressing for theinformation. He did want to know, but pushing her was a damned bad way tolearn anything.
She looked at him, the planes of her face a pattern of reflections moving atthe corner of his eye. When she did not speak for a moment further, he wenton, "Look, this car's going to be pretty conspicuous. I've got an address'rtwo where we might find something a little less so." He turned squarely towardher and smiled. "Isn't going to be as nice, but maybe for a couple days . . .
?" 
"First, we're going to Asia, Tommy," Gisela said, beginning to smile herselfas her eyes returned to the traffic.
"For Chrissake, don't call me that," Kelly protested with a laugh. Fine, itwas a friendly conversation and not an interrogation session. "Call me Tom hell, 
call me muledick if you want . . . but not Tommy, huh?"
"Puh," the woman said, a plosive sound rather than an attempt at words. Hersmile toward the bumper of the leading car, a late forties Mercury, of allthings, broadened. "We go to Asia, Tom, where you will meet people with whomyou will discuss, not so? And if we choose to proceed, as I think we will,
then this car will remain at the place of meeting, yes."
Asia. Well, he'd known they were headed toward either the Bosphorus Bridge orthe Black Sea, and the latter was a hell of a long way north. Kelly wasn't incontrol, hadn't been in control since the moment he agreed to meet GiselaRomer. His alternative had been to disappear, to hunt up acquaintances inDiyarbakir and hope that they'd lead him closer to the aliens.
Which might have worked. But gathering information was a lot like deerhunting: people who stomp around making noise are less likely to nail whatthey're after than are the folks who settle themselves in a suitable locationand let targets step into range.
"It . . ." Gisela looked over at her passenger again before continuing. "Thecrabs may appear again and you will be ready." She was speaking in thedidactic certainty of a teacher coaxing a student into proper behavior. "Butusually they do not twice so soon between. And you must not threaten mycolleagues. That would be worse for you and for your country than youimagine."
"No problem," said Kelly. "I don't generally threaten people anyhow."
He'd pulled the Walther from his pocket as they drove away from the Sheratonand lowered it between his seat and the door panel, where he held it now.
Pierrard's gang had given Kelly credentials with the Dienst so solid that, itcrossed the agent's mind, perhaps it had all been part of the plan. Thatseemed unlikely, upon reflection. Even if they had been willing to write offsix figures worth of cars and every operative within gunshot of Tom Kelly,
both of those possible decisions by the Suits, there was simply no way to besure that Kelly and the dancer wouldn't be added to the butcher's bill. Thathad been live ammo being fired from the Audis.
Perhaps they didn't know the extent to which these German exiles were involvedwith the aliens. But there was no reason to have Kelly penetrate the group.
They already had adequate access to it through Gisela. Who seemed to haveplayed her American 'employers' for right fools, feeding them information onillegal activities they would wink at - and hiding the very fact of thealiens, and of the Plan . . . which wasn't Kelly's job tonight either.
"We'll need the toll," Gisela said. "Do you - ? My purse is in the back."
Kelly nodded and took a five hundred-lire bill from his breast pocket, left-
handed. Gisela had tossed her purse behind the seat, into the coupe's luggagecompartment, with a thump almost as solid as that which the Sony radio inKelly's attache case had made. He assumed she had another gun there, the 


standard place for a woman to carry her hardware, though it was a lousy choiceunless she walked around with one hand under the flap the way Elaine Tuttlehad done the night Kelly met her.
But why had Gisela tried to draw the awkward P-38 from her coat when thealiens appeared, rather than going for whatever she had in her purse? Well,
people didn't always do what you expected them to in a crisis. Kelly wouldtrade a bad decision on pistols for the way she brought the car back for himany day.
The Bosphorus Bridge was lighted into a display unique in Turkey as theMercedes slowed and eased into one of the multiple approach lanes to the tollplaza. The bridge was a mile long; and while there might have been moreimpressive engineering feats elsewhere in the world, this one joined twocontinents. The nearer of the five-hundred-foot high suspension towers was inEurope, and the second was, as Gisela had said, in Asia. The span and itsapproaches curling uphill from either end were illuminated by closely-spacedlight standards, and sidescatter from the floodlit towers picked out thehigher portions of the suspension cables as well.
Gisela paid, then accelerated through the mass of other vehicles merging intothe three eastbound lanes. There was no need for special haste, but thechallenge had brought out the competitiveness never far beneath the surface ofthe dancer's mind. She flicked her passenger a glance, saw him facing forward,
smiling and as relaxed as a sensible man ever is with his hand on a gun butt,
and downshifted again to surge into a slot in the traffic.
"You don't like the way I drive," Gisela said flatly as they settled into asteady pace.
"I love it," said Kelly, patting her thigh with his left hand. "When I drive,
I push when I don't need to and get all tied up in knots." He grinned.
"Yes, well," she said as her hand squeezed Kelly a little closer to her,
"someone must lead and someone must follow, that is so. That it should be wewho follow - the minutes do not matter, but that does matter, perhaps."
Kelly should have felt nakedly open on the bridge, with a two-hundred-footdrop to the water beneath them and a major sea to either side of the longchannel over which they passed. There were people looking for him, and therewere things that weren't people - he didn't need Gisela's warning to tell himthat. They wanted something from him, but the Dienst might be able to tell himwhat that was. Maybe not the best way to learn, asking somebody's enemy whatthe first party intended, but it had the advantage of involving fewer unknownsthan the direct approach.
There were some real unknowns in this one. 
The lighting created a box around the huge bridge and the vehicles on it,
separating them from sea, sky, and the feeling of openness. The illuminationcurtained even the city behind them, much less anyone searching the bridgewith binoculars from the surrounding high ground. Someone could be followingthem, since there was no need of a close tail on a vehicle forced to a singledirection and speed. Nonetheless, Kelly felt better for the blanket of lightthat hid his enemies from him. To the extent there was a justification forthat emotional response, it was that when there was really nothing you coulddo, you might as well relax.
The contrast of the highway to Kisikli and Ankara beyond, lighted only by theheavy traffic, brought the American again to full wariness, though his lefthand continued to rest on Gisela's thigh. Camlica and the heights which gave apanorama of the whole city, its blemishes cloaked by darkness, led off on abranching road.
Just beyond that, but before they reached the cloverleaf that merged theIstanbul Bypass with the major routes through Anatolia, Gisela turned off.
After a hundred yards on a frontage road serving a number of repair shops,
closed and grated, the Mercedes turned again past the side of the last cinder



block structure in the row. 
The roar of traffic dissipated behind them as the coupe proceeded, fast forrutted gravel and a single headlight, down a road marked by Turkish NoTrespassing signs. There was brush and scrub pine, but no hardwoods and verylittle grass along the route. The one-lane road itself seemed to have beenbulldozed from the side of the hill to the right and the rushes to the otherside suggested at least a temporary watercourse. The possibility that a carwas following the Mercedes had disappeared at the moment they turned to thefrontage road.
"How far - " Kelly started to say as the coupe twisted again with the road anda ten-foot chain link fence webbed the road in the beam of their headlight.
The red-lettered sign on the vehicle gate was again in Turkish, stating thatthis was the Palace Gravel Quarry, with no admittance to unauthorizedpersonnel. There was a gatehouse within, unlighted, and no response at all toGisela's blip on the horn.
Kelly got out, closing the door quickly behind him to shut off the courtesylight. He walked a few steps sideways, knowing that the galvanized fencingstill reflected well enough to make him a target in silhouette to a marksmanbehind him. Dust from the road drifted around him, swirling before the car asit settled, and the only sound in the night was a fast idle of the 280 SL'swarm engine.
"It's chained," he said loudly enough to be heard within the car, through thewindow he had left open. He held the P-38 muzzle-down along his pants leg, asinconspicuous and nonthreatening as it could be and still remain instantlyavailable. 
Gisela switched off the headlights and called, "There should be someone. Takethis key and be very careful."
Her hand was white and warm when Kelly took the circular-warded key from her.
A high overcast hid the stars and the lights of a jet making an internal hopto Ankara, but the sound of its turbines rumbled down regardless. If there wasa gun in Gisela's purse, she had left it there.
At the loop-chained gate, Kelly loosed the heavy padlock and swung inward thewell-balanced portal. There was still no sound but that of the car and of theplane diminishing with distance and altitude. He walked into a graveledcourtyard, sidling to the right enough to take him out of the path of thecoupe. He waved Gisela in with his free hand, the one which was not grippingthe big Walther.
Subconsciously, Kelly had thought that the grunt of the Mercedes' engine andthe crunch of stones beneath its tires would cause something to happen. Giselacircled the car in a broad sweep in front of the building which the fenceenclosed, a metal prefab painted beige where it was not washed with rustyspeckles from rivet heads and the eaves. The headlight and the willing littlemotor shut off when Gisela faced the car out the open gateway again, and thenight returned to its own sounds.
Gisela's door closing and her footsteps were muted, not so much cautious asprecise applications of muscular effort by a woman whose physical self-controlwas as nearly complete as was possible for a human being.
"Who are we looking for?" Kelly asked softly as the woman paused at arm'slength.
"I'll try the building," she responded, with enough tremor in her voice toindicate that she was as taut and puzzled as the American - which, perversely,
was a comfort to him. 
They walked toward the warehouse door, Kelly a pace behind and to the side.
The weight of the pistol aligned with his pants leg made him feel silly, buthe was willing neither to point the weapon without a real target nor to pocketit when the next moment might bring instant need. It would have been nice ifhe had known what the hell was happening, but as usual he didn't - it wasn't a 


line of work in which you could expect to understand 'the big picture.'
Unless you wore a suit, in which case you probably didn't understand anything,
whatever you might think.
The warehouse had a vehicular door, made to slide sideways on top and bottomrails, and next to it a door for people. There was also a four-panel window,
covered on the outside by a steel grating and on the inside by something thatblacked out the interior. 
Kelly expected the warehouse to be pitch dark. He stepped close to the hingeside of the door as Gisela opened it, so that he would not be silhouettedagainst the sky glow to anyone waiting within.
The big square interior was as well-illuminated as the courtyard, and as opento sky; what appeared from the ground to be a flat-roofed warehouse was fourwalls with no roof, only bracing posts along the hundred-foot sides. It held avehicle backed against one corner of the structure, a van like the one whichGisela's attendants had been entering when the shooting started. Apart fromthat, the interior seemed as empty as the courtyard.
"Come," snapped Gisela, motioning Kelly peremptorily within and closing thedoor behind him, a precaution the American could not understand until thewoman switched on a flashlight she had taken from a hook on the wall.
"What - " began Kelly, unable to see anything worth the exercise in theflickering beam of the light.
'"Nothing, nothing, nothing!" the dancer said, her inflection rising intospluttering fury. She strode fiercely toward the van, the tight beam of theflashlight bobbling up and down on the windshield like the laser sighting dotof a moving tank. "They could've left a note, surely?"
The floor of the warehouse was gravel, marked in unexpected ways. There werethe usual lines and blotches of motor oil and other vehicular fluids 
inevitable in any parking space. The drips, however, were absent from thecenter of the enclosed structure, so far as Kelly could tell. Why wall solarge an area if only the edges were to be used?
Gisela jerked open the van's door. The courtesy light went on but had tocompete with the beam of the flashlight which the dancer had angrily twistedto wide aperture. "Nothing," she repeated in a voice like Kelly's the day theytold him what had happened to Pacheco and another hundred of the White Plains'complement.
"This is the one your - " the American began, touching the side panel of thevan. 
"Yes, Franz and Dietrich," Gisela snapped as she straightened to slam the doorof the vehicle closed. "They must have come back from the hotel, told them I'dbeen" - her hands writhed in a gesture that aimed the light skyward until shethumbed it off, plunging them back into darkness - "whatever, killed,
captured. And they went off and left me!"
"They could get a job with some of my former employers," the American said,
briefly thinking of his own Kurdish guerrillas. "But look," he added with afrown, "I saw your people go down. There was a flash and they went over whenthe whatevers were trading shots with 'em."
"That doesn't mean they were dead," the dancer said bitterly as she walkedback toward the door through which they had entered. She couldn't see anybetter than Kelly could, but she knew there was nothing in the way. "We've hadit happen before, people they've shot but not taken away as they usually do,
the crabs. They'll come around again, in half an hour or so, and haveheadaches for a week - but live." 
"It doesn't sound like your crabs," Kelly said, frowning, as the woman openedthe door and stepped out, "are quite as hard-nosed about what they're doing asmaybe I'd - "
"Tom," the woman said.
It was too late to matter because Kelly was half through the doorway already 


and the hand-held spotlight that switched on was as blinding to him as it wassuitable for sighting whatever guns were arrayed behind it. For a moment hethought of the P-38, but a voice from behind the screen of light said, "Tryit, fucker."
It was Doug Blakeley's voice, and Kelly was in no doubt as to what wouldhappen in a fraction of a second if his pistol didn't drop on the gravel.
As the Walther slipped from Kelly's fingers, an automobile engine spun to lifewith a whine and a rumble. There was nothing sinister in the noise - but everyunexpected sound was a blast of gunshots to Kelly's imagination, and he almostdived after the pistol in an instinctive desire to die with his teeth in athroat. 
"Assume the position, Tommy-boy," called Doug in a hectoring voice.
Rectangular headlights replaced the spotlight even more dazzlingly. Doug andwhoever he'd brought along had driven through the open gate and poised there,
waiting for their quarry to exit. Now they were using the car's lights forillumination, the way somebody in Diyarbakir had lighted Mustapha and thealien the night they were gunned down.
Kelly turned to the 'warehouse' wall and gingerly permitted it to take some ofhis weight through his arms. The structure was less stable than it appeared a 
roof contributed more to strength than any amount of bracing in the plane ofthe walls could do. To judge from the amount of weathering, however, thisconstruct had survived at least a decade of wind and storms, and the wall onlycreaked when the veteran leaned against it.
Chances were that Doug Blakeley had gotten everything he knew about bodysearches from cop shows or watching other people do the work. Kelly took aminor chance, spreading his legs and angling his body - but not so much thathe could not spin upright by thrusting himself off with his hands. The P-38lay at his right foot, throwing its own flat shadow across the gravel to thebase of the wall. 
How many were there behind the lights? If Doug were alone, this was going toend real quick no matter where Gisela decided to stand in the business.
Which was an open question in Kelly's mind right now, because the woman hadsidled a few steps from his and was shielding her eyes with an upliftedforearm. She looked disconcerted, but not nearly as shocked by this as she hadbeen by the fact that her friends had gone off and left her. The situationmade reasonable sense to Kelly, waiting for a frisk or a gunshot, if DougBlakeley was one of the dancer's friends.
The asthmatic wheeze of a turbocharged engine at low rpm's masked but did nothide the sound of footsteps. Kelly's eyes were adjusting to the glare. Withoutshifting the position of his limbs or body, he turned his head and squintedover his shoulder. 
There were two of them approaching, one from either side, their shadowsdistorted by the corrugations of the metal wall. The man to Kelly's left said,
"Peter here told me I should shoot you right off, Tom-lad. Blink wrong and wedo just that." It was Doug.
Kelly snapped his head around to center it between the lines of his shoulderblades. Peter has good sense, motherfucker, he thought, but not so good thathe doesn't take orders from you.
Gisela moved unexpectedly closer to the American. "I hadn't thought you wouldarrive like this," she said pleasantly, in English. Peter, the bull-neckedprofessional to the right, knelt and picked up the Walther without removinghis gaze or the muzzle of his weapon from Kelly's chest. He and Doug bothcarried compact submachineguns - Beretta Model 12's whose wire stocks werefolded along the receivers. Beretta 12's were easily distinguished fromsimilar weapons by the fact that they had handgrips both before and behind themagazine well. Given his choice of wraparound bolt submachineguns, Kelly wouldhave picked an Uzi or an Ingram, where the magazine in the handgrip 


facilitated reloading in a tight spot.
But given his choice, Kelly would have held the gun instead of being at themuzzle-end of two goons who were at least willing to blow him away.
Peter handed the P-38 to Doug, the shadow of the transfer warping itselfacross the beige metal wall. Both men carried their submachineguns in what wasto Kelly the outside hand: he could probably grab either of his captors, butnot both, and he could not grab either of the guns.
The engine of the car suddenly speeded up. It was an automatic responsetriggered either by the headlights' load on the alternator or the block's needfor greater cooling than the fan could provide at a low idle. Peter snarledsomething in Bulgarian toward the vehicle, however, indicating both that hewas jumpy - as Kelly would have been, forced to hold a gun on Peter - and thatthere was at least a third member of Doug's present team.
Elaine might possibly speak Bulgarian, but it wouldn't be the gunman's choiceof a language in which to address her, even at the present tense moment.
"He didn't have a gun," said Doug, "and then he's got this to use on us. Howdo you suppose that happened?"
Kelly was so focused on himself and his own problems that he did not realizehe was the subject of the sentence, not the question, until Gisela said, "Hetook - " and Doug slapped her alongside the jaw with the butt of the pistol.
Had the weapon fired, it would have punched a nine-millimeter hole downthrough Doug's belly, pelvis, and buttocks, a good start on what the fellowneeded. . . . But Walthers, save for those churned out with bad steel and nocare in the last days of the Nazis, were about as safe as handguns could be.
The wooden grips cracked loudly on Gisela's jawbone, and the wall rang as theblow threw her head against it.
The veteran turned a few degrees to the left, enough to give him a direct viewof what was happening without providing an excuse for Peter who had backed astep away.
Doug flung the P-38 toward the darkness. The fencing, thirty yards away,
rattled angrily when the pistol struck it. "Oh, 'I just made a mistake'?"
shouted the blond American as he hit the woman again with his open hand. Theblow had a solid, meaty sound to it, and this time Gisela collapsed as herlegs splayed. The black gloves which Doug was wearing probably had pockets oflead shot sewn into the palm and knuckles, giving his hand the inertia of ablackjack.
"Did you expect to get away with that shit?" he screamed to the woman whotoppled onto her face, away from the wall, when her hips struck the ground.
Facing the wall squarely so that nothing in his stance would spark anger,
Kelly said, "Look, Mr. Blakeley, maybe we all oughta sit down with Elaine andsee about - " 
Doug hit him, and the question of whether the blow was backhand or withclenched fist was beyond the veteran's calculation. The blond American wasn'tjust big - he had real muscle under that fine tailoring, and he put plenty ofit into the blow. 
The roar to which Kelly awakened was real, not his blood; Peter was shoutingsomething in anger to his employer. Kelly knelt on the gravel, his palms andforehead against the painted steel wall. All his senses were covered by ascreen that trembled through white and red, attenuating the sights and soundsof the world. His skin was hot, sticky hot, with the exception of his leftcheek and jaw where something cold had gnawed all the flesh away.
Kelly had blacked out for only a fraction of a second, but for moments longerhe had no idea of where he was or what was happening. "Don't point that thingat me!" Doug shouted over Kelly's head. "You hold him like I tell you!"
"I - " Kelly found as he tried to look up at Doug that his neck hurt and histongue was thick and fiery. A hand gripped his left shoulder from behind,
grabbed a handful of fabric and lifted. Doug punched him in the ribs. 


Kelly's breath sprayed out with blood from the tongue and cheek, cut againsthis teeth by the previous blow. The veteran sagged back, his knees brushingthe ground, but Peter's strength was enough to hold him.
"Higher," ordered Doug, breathing heavily himself.
Kelly didn't think his ribs had cracked that time, but his whole chest felt asif it were swelling, bursting. He knew where he was now, being beaten by ahotshot American who had finally found a way to assert his authority - while aThird World thug waited to blow holes in him if he didn't sit and take it.
Stand and take it. Peter dragged Kelly fully upright and Doug punched himagain.
He aimed at the veteran's face, but the lead-burdened fist moved slowly enoughthat Kelly was able to duck so that Doug hit the point of his forehead insteadof the nose. Even though the blond man was wearing a sap glove, the result wasmore likely to break knuckles than to do Kelly serious injury.
The veteran blinked against the jumbled dazzle of light caused by his brainbouncing within the bone. He went limp again, at least partly by volition, andhis weight forced Peter back a step.
The Beretta was short for an automatic weapon but still, at seventeen inches,
much longer than an ordinary handgun. In order to point the weapon at Kellywithout letting the muzzle touch him, Peter had to hold the veteran out atarm's length with his left hand. The gunman was strong, but Kelly's solidweight was an impossible load under those conditions.
"Get Tomashek!" Peter growled in English.
"Big, bad man who thinks he can shoot my people," Doug said as he panted. Hehad been trying to keep his Beretta muzzle-up as he swung at Kelly with hisright hand alone, but the eight-pound submachinegun pulled itself down towardthe gravel as the blond man tried to catch his breath.
Peter swore bitterly.
The cold patch on Kelly's forehead was probably blood cooling, but it felt asif the blow had lifted off a patch of skin. Flashes of light moved across hisvision like the rotary shutter of a movie camera, but through them he couldsee Gisela still slumped where she had fallen. Kelly couldn't be sure, but hethought one of the dancer's legs flexed minutely when the blond man's shoebrushed it. 
"Straighten him up," Doug ordered, wiping his forehead with the back of hisgloved hand.
"Look, I said get Tomashek," Peter said. "I'm not - "
"Listen, you bastard!" the blond American roared. "You want to spend the restof your life in a cell in Buca, you just give me lip once more. Lift him!"
Peter grunted in a combination of anger and effort as he obeyed. He bent hisleft arm at the elbow and half knelt, then used his leg muscles to jerk theveteran into place for another punch.
Kelly hurt in more places than the glove had touched him directly, signalsscrambled when his brain jounced, but the inexpert beating had not thus farmade him nonfunctional. He'd been in worse shape after a night drop intosteppe country once - and that hadn't kept him from blowing up hardware thatsomebody else shouldn't have left behind and trekking out again himself.
He wasn't a boxer, but neither was Doug, and the fist the blond man aimed atKelly's face was slow and clumsy. The veteran jerked his head to the sideinstinctively, even though part of his mind knew that it might be better toaccept the punch than to piss off Doug further by dodging it. The fist touchedthe lobe of Kelly's left ear before momentum carried it into Peter's shoulder.
Peter blurted a curse, again in Bulgarian. Doug screamed incoherently andswung the Beretta at Kelly's head.
The looping sideways blow was beyond Kelly's ability to dodge, but Peter's ownflinching reaction gave the veteran enough slack to avoid the worst of it.
The submachinegun's stock glanced off Kelly's skull, just above his right 


temple, and the shock jarred the gun's heavy bolt off the sear. The boltclanged forward and fired the top round in the magazine.
The muzzle blast of the nine-millimeter round was deafening to all three men;
gas and unburned powder bloomed simultaneously from the muzzle in a yellow-
orange flash, stinging Peter's cheek as the bullet itself gouged a long slotthrough the wall. Sparks flew, and the howl of the unstabilized bullet cutthrough the echoing crash of the sheet metal.
'You have pig shit for brains!" Peter shouted as he grabbed Doug's weapon bythe magazine and twisted until the muzzle was safely skyward. Kelly, sprawledon his back, tangled the feet of the two men who had been beating him a momentbefore. "Either you're going to get more help here or you're going to do italone, I swear to you!"
Kelly reached under himself as his heels and shoulders lifted the small of hisback from the ground.
The Beretta's wire stock had flexed enough on impact to keep the veteran'sskull from cracking, but there was still a four-inch pressure cut in hisscalp, and blood had begun to mat the black hair before his body hit theground. It felt as though he had been struck by an ax, laying his brain opento the chill night air, and a part of him was quite sure that he was dying.
"Watch - " one of the men above him shouted as Kelly lifted the aluminumsnubbie and shot twice, close enough to Peter's belly that the shirt caughtfire. 
Kelly's vision was sharp, though he had no color sense at the moment. Bothsubmachineguns were still pointed up, but Peter had started to lower his tocover the man on the ground when the bullets hit him like punches in the solarplexus. The gunman doubled up, clamping both elbows to his wounds. The muzzleblasts had jerked the front of his shirt out of his pants, to smolder over theoval entrance holes just beneath his rib cage.
The cup-pointed bullets had perforated the diaphragm and meandered upwardthrough the gunman's right kidney and lung. Neither nicked his heart, but theblood vessels they destroyed before they lodged under the skin of Peter'supper chest were sufficient to pour his life into his body cavity in a matterof seconds. 
Hunched over and mincing because his knees were bent, Peter tried to run alongthe front of the warehouse to escape the glare of the car's headlights. Doughad stumbled back a pace when his employee released the Beretta. The blondman's mouth was open in a snarl of disapproval. Kelly, still on his back,
aimed for the center of Doug's mass and fired twice more.
The muzzle flashes were red to the victim, bright gray to the shooter, andblack swirls on the wall where the halogen beams were distorted into shadow bythe balls of powder gases.
Doug's wire-slim belt buckle pinged as a bullet scalloped a section throughits upper rim, and there was a black hole marring the mauve-gray-and-whitestriping of his left shirt pocket. Minusculely later, blood spurted to distortthe clean outline the wadcutter had punched in the shirt fabric.
The blond American started both to turn away and to lower the submachinegun.
Gisela scissored her legs, catching Doug at the ankles, and sent the big mandown in a sprawl.
The gasp of the car's intake manifold trying to increase flow coincided with asideways shift of the headlights, throwing shadows along the wall in anexaggerated reciprocal of the car's motion. Doug scrabbled on all fours towardthe vehicle, splashing dark blood on the gravel every time his damaged heartpulsed. When his arms failed him, his legs continued for several seconds tothrash and hump his buttocks.
As the car started to move, Kelly sat up and tried for the first time to aimhis revolver. The short radius and tenth-inch blade sight would have made realaccuracy impossible, even if the veteran himself had been up to it. He fired 


at the broadside of the vehicle as it turned. There was no clang or smack ofglass to indicate that he had hit anything. About all Kelly gained by theshot, his last, was to learn from the flash that he was seeing in color again.
"Here," said the dancer. She handed Kelly the submachinegun she had wrestledfrom Doug during the moment that she and the wounded American had threshedtogether on the ground.
The car was turning so sharply that the power steering belts rubbed andscreamed. It was by European standards a large sedan, very probably anotherAudi 5000 Quattro, now in silhouette against the chain link fencing which itsown lights illuminated. Kelly aimed, wishing that he had enough leisure tounlatch the stock and butt the weapon firmly against his shoulder.
There were two push-through selectors at the top of the rear handgrip. One ofthem was presumably the safety, while the other selected single shots orautomatic fire. Kelly had no idea what combination would permit him to firethe bursts he wanted; but the best way to tell was to align the rear notchwith the hooded front blade and squeeze the trigger.
Which gave him a three-round burst and a new respect for the Beretta becausethe front grip and the comfortably slow rate of fire made the weapon perfectlycontrollable at its rock-and-roll setting.
There were no tracers in the magazine, but Kelly caught the spark of onebullet beyond the muzzle flashes, snapping through the air a foot above thesedan's roofline. He had been sighting instinctively on the fence, againstwhich he could see the post and notch, for the car merged with the gunsightsin a uniformly dark mass. As the Audi fish-tailed to center itself with thegate opening, Kelly lowered the muzzle a fraction of an inch and squeezed offagain. He was smiling.
Glass flew up like early snowflakes, winking in the powder flashes andreflected headlights. The car, which had begun to straighten, went into afour-wheel drift to the left instead. Kelly gave the broadside fifty feet awaya long burst. At least half the bullets appeared as red flecks on the doorpanels as friction heated both lead and sheet metal when the nine-millimeterrounds punched their way through the car body.
These muzzle blasts were less shocking than the first had been. In part, thatwas a matter of psychology, but the earlier shots had been literallydeafening, and Kelly's back was now to the warehouse wall that had acted as asounding board initially.
The headlights swung across Kelly and the dancer once more; then the Audi cameto a stop with the driver's door to them. The engine had died, but bits ofmetal cooling at differential rates hissed and pinged.
Kelly walked a final burst across both front and rear doors, aiming six inchesabove the rocker panels to catch anyone cowering on the floor. Then for amoment, nothing moved at all.
Gisela dusted herself briskly with her palms, started for her Mercedes, andstumbled. 
"Wait," said Kelly, and he began to walk toward the Audi, whose headlightsseemed already to be yellowing as they drained the battery, though that mighthave been an illusion. He couldn't hear properly. There was a high-pitchedringing in his right ear, and cocoons of white noise blurred the edges of allthe ordinary sounds, his voice or the scrunch of feet on the gravel.
Because of the pain, each step the veteran took threatened to topple him ontothe ground. It wasn't the blow to his chest, though sharp prickles warned thatat best the muscles there were cramping, while at worst they were beingsavaged by the edges of broken ribs. The battering his head had taken, fromthe leaded glove and the steel tube of the receiver, was a different order ofproblem. The brain has no pain receptors of its own, but it has ways of makingits displeasure known. Kelly's stomach and throat contracted with transferreddiscomfort every time his heel touched the ground. 


Holding the Beretta by the back grip as if it were a pistol, Kelly tried toopen the driver's door. It resisted; though the door was unlocked, one of itsedges had been riveted into the frame by a bullet. There was a sharp whiff ofgasoline near the car which cut the sweetish, nauseating odor of nitro powdersand the chemicals which coated them. 
Nothing gurgled from a punctured tank, and the smell of gas was vagrant enoughto result from the way the car had stalled rather even than a clipped fuelline. Whatever the cause, thank the Lord that the Audi hadn't ignited. Theywere too far from the highway for the shots to have been noticed, but twentygallons of gasoline flaring up would arouse interest for sure.
The courtesy light shone directly on the face of a man Kelly had never seenbefore. His feet were tangled with the gas and brake pedals, but his upperbody lay on the floor of the passenger side. The bullet hole above his lefteye could have been either an entrance or an exit wound. Its greenish edgeshad puckered back over the puncture.
No one else was in the tonneau of the car. 
Kelly turned and closed the door. Gisela stood ten feet away, rubbing her jawand waiting.
The waiting was over for Doug Blakeley, who lay belly-down on the gravel withhis limbs splayed into a broad X. The huddle beside the sheet-metal wall,
twenty feet from the place shooting had started, was Peter. That one was toodangerous to have been safely forgotten, but there'd been no time to worryabout him when the worries would have been justified.
And the poor anonymous bastard in the car, who might have reported to somebodyif a jacketed bullet hadn't churned his brain to jelly . . .
The veteran knelt down. Being hit on the head was making him feel nauseated.
Bits of safety glass which had shattered into irregular prisms now glitteredat Kelly amid the crushed granite. Then his stomach heaved and splashed mostof its contents onto the ground. A second spasm followed, with just enough ofan interval for Kelly to move the submachinegun ' he still held a littlefarther away from his stomach's target area.
He couldn't say that he felt good as he panted on all fours, trying to catchhis breath; but he felt a lot better.
Gisela Romer was standing beside the Mercedes. She had taken her purse fromthe coupe and was rummaging in it. Kelly heard sounds from her and thought fora moment that the woman might also be vomiting.
It sounded more like sobs, however.
Kelly rose, spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand as hewalked over to the dancer. He could feel his individual injuries separatelynow, even the dimples left on his knees by the rough stones while he lost hisdinner. The long list of pains, however, was a lot better than the totalmalaise which had preceded it, and his skin was no longer swollen with whathad seemed to be three degrees of fever.
Gisela lifted something from her purse and cracked it down on the fender ofthe Mercedes. 
That was the side that had crumpled in the alley. The action shocked Kellyhowever, since the coupe was too well cared for not to be loved by its owner.
"What . . . ?" the veteran said as his free hand closed over Gisela's when she 
lifted it for another blow. 
The woman surrendered the object to Kelly's grip without struggling. He'd beenright about the sobs.
"He told me it was to call for help," she said as Kelly examined the object.
"He said I should be careful, that you were very dangerous. If I needed help,
I should throw that switch." 
The object was a prism, three inches by two and about half an inch deep. Thecasing was dark resin, featureless except for a thumb slide on one of thenarrow faces. 


Kelly reached into the car, twisting the ignition key to the auxiliaryposition and then walking the radio up and down the dial. There was a loudsqueal at the bottom of the FM band, near 85 megahertz. Sliding the switchback and forth did not affect the signal.
"Just a beacon," the veteran said as he dropped the little signal generator onthe ground. "The slide's a dummy. Doesn't look like they trusted you."
He brought his heel down on the center of the case. He couldn't feel anythinggive, but the squealing on the coupe's radio vanished in an angry crackle ofstatic. 
"Wouldn't help a lot in town," Kelly added in an emotionless voice, "but oncewe got out on the road where the signal doesn't get lost with all thebuildings, it'd home 'em right in." He turned off the radio and the ignition.
Gisela still said nothing.
"Do you know where your friends've gone?" Kelly asked, pointing at the empty,
roofless structure. "Unless Doug and his boys were who you were looking for?"
"No!" the woman snapped. She shook her hair out, her visage relaxing slightlynow that she had been able to let some of her anger loose. She went on, "Thereshould be someone in Diyarbakir. But it will take us days ..."
Kelly shrugged. "Not if we fly," he said. "And I figure that's a lot betteridea than sticking around here."
He closed his eyes and pressed the palm of his free hand against the bruise inthe center of his forehead. "They deserved it, more'r less," he said verysoftly. His stomach threatened him briefly when a breeze brought him areminder of Doug Blakeley, whose sphincter muscles had relaxed to empty hisbladder and bowels as he died. 
"Might not've made any difference," Kelly continued, speaking to somethingmore shadowy than the blond woman beginning to frown at him. "Wasn't going tobe a clean way out, maybe. But maybe if they hadn't knocked me half silly, I'dhave tried harder. I can run on reflex, but it ain't real pretty."
He opened his eyes to meet Gisela's. "Is it?" he added, putting a period towords he already regretted saying.
Gisela looked around her, at the bodies and the silent sky, before she facedKelly again. "All right," she said. "What do I need to do?"
"Drive us to Yesilköy Airport," the American replied as he gathered hisattaché case from the Mercedes, "and I learn whether my authorization codesare much use there at the military terminal. If you've got the keys to thatvan" - he waved toward the vehicular door in the wall -"then it might bepolitic to take it. Can't guarantee we've cleared up all the - road hazards with 
these." 
"All right," the dancer repeated.
Gisela had a key to the sliding vehicular door. As she manipulated it, Kellysearched the shadows for his aluminum Smith and Wesson. It seemed none the 
worse for having been fired and dropped without ceremony, though it would geta proper cleaning if Kelly had the opportunity. He had no .38 Specialammunition, so the gun was useless for the moment, as well as a dangerous linkto the killings here. Peter and the driver weren't going to be a problem: verylikely they weren't Turkish citizens, and they certainly weren't Amcits. ButDoug was another matter, one that could land Tom Kelly in shit to his hairline - on the slim chance that he survived long enough for that to matter.
He velcroed the snubbie back in place on his waistband anyway. It'd been afriend when he needed one; and people who ditched their friends at theconclusion of present need wound up real quick with no friends.
The door rolled back with the rumble of well-oiled trunnions. 
"The only thing I can't figure," said the veteran easily as he followed Giselato the van, "is you working so close with the Jews and not figuring whatthey'd do if they got ahold of me."
The woman froze stock-still, then turned. "What?" she said sharply. "I do not 


understand." 
Kelly blinked in false puzzlement. They were standing close; he could see herface was set like a death mask. "Well, you know about me, don't you?" he said.
"About the White Plains and - an' all?" 
"What do you mean about the Jews!" Gisela demanded. She had reverted toGerman, and her tongue flicked unintentional spittle when she said "dieJuden." 
"Well, who the hell did you think Doug worked for?"
Kelly responded, adding an undertone of anger, equally false, at the woman'sobtuseness. "Surely you knew."
Gisela was swaying. "The American Central Intelligence Agency," she said in adistant voice, a mother begging the surgeon for the answer his face hadalready told her was a vain hope.
"Christ, I thought you people were professionals," Kelly snapped. "He's ShinBet, the section of Israeli intelligence that reports to their Ministry ofDefense. They really did play you for suckers, didn't they."
And then he caught the blond woman as she stumbled forward into his arms.
"Easy," the veteran said as he patted her back, pretended concern in his voiceand unholy joy in his heart for having won one, having manipulated a subjectinto total submission. In this case, on the spur of the moment and without anysignificant amount of preparation. . . . "Easy," he repeated gently. "Are youall right to drive? I just thought you knew."
Gisela straightened as if bracing herself to attention - shoulders back, chinout, arms stiff at her sides. "Yes," she said, and drew a shudderingly deepbreath. "Yes, of course. I'll have to report this to the . . ."
She turned around abruptly, perhaps to hide her expression or a tear, but shereached back for Kelly to show that she was not trying to cut herself off fromhim. "Come.." she said, "we must get first to the airport." She was speakingEnglish again and her tone, if urgent, was not panicked.
"Right you are," murmured Kelly.
The doors of the van were not locked, nor did the vehicle have a lockableignition. Gisela turned the switch on the steering column and stepped firmlyon the clutch so that the back of the clutch pedal engaged the starter buttonbeneath it on the firewall. The engine spun easily and caught at once. Thewoman turned on the headlights and cautiously engaged what turned out to be asticky clutch.
"You must understand," she said, her face set, as she reversed to face thevehicle toward the door, "that I acted in accordance with my orders."
She braked, shifted gears, and went on, "We worked with the ones we thoughtwere CIA, but it was always to further the Plan, to gain time until the daycame. Not for - their purposes, though we did not know they were the Jews."
They drove out into the courtyard, past the parked coupe and the bullet-
shattered Audi. "Soon it will not matter, but - whatever I can do to make itup to you, Thomas Monaghan, I will do."
"What you're doing already is all I could ask for," said Kelly, meeting thewoman's eyes in the dash lights. "I need friends real bad. Take me to your topfolks and, if they'll help me, I'll do everything I can about the crabs withthem. With you all." He paused before adding, "And my real last name's Kelly,
but Tom's just fine."
There was one thing more the veteran needed to do before he tried to talk hisway - bluff his way, in a manner of speaking, but he was doing precisely thejob he'd been tasked to do - onto a military flight at the airport. Kellyunzipped one pocket of his attache case to remove his radio, the concealedtape deck, and the headphones. Working by the greenish light of the gas andtemperature gauges, Kelly rewound the tape and set it to play back whatever ithad heard in Elaine's hotel room. 
The lengthy hash with which the tape began was, Kelly realized after a minute 


or two, neither jamming nor a malfunction: the maid had entered 727 and wasvacuuming it. He advanced the tape and, as he was preparing to blip forward athird time, heard the wheezing vacuum replaced by a click of static and therecorded ring of a telephone.
Click. "Go ahead," said the voice of Elaine Tuttle, who picked up the handsetbefore the completion of the first ring.
Click. "Having sex, he says. It's, I don't know. Could be true, certainlycould be." 
Click. "Doug, Us - "
Click. "No, just listen to me. He doesn't have a gun right now, but he couldget one very easily. We don't want to push him, that's not what we're - "
Click. "Of course we don't trust him. I'm saying we've got to give him theroom to do what he's tasked to do, or there was no point in - "
Click. "Except that wasn't your decision or even mine," Elaine's voice said,
each word as distinct as a blade of obsidian set in a wooden warclub. "If youwant to take that up with those who made the assignment, then I'll give youliberty right now to get on the next plane."
It was noticeable that though she had not raised her voice, this time she wasable to finish her sentence without being cut off by the person on the otherend of the line. 
Click. "All right, I'm not neglecting the long-term. Trace them, it'll be goodto cross-check Kelly as well as adding to our database on those Nazis. Butdon't crowd him; he's still as good a chance as we've got of coming up withthe link between the Dienst, the Kurds, and the aliens."
Click. "All right. But be careful, sweetheart, he's dangerous even if hedoesn't have a gun."
There was nothing more of interest on the tape, not even the slam of the dooras Elaine went out. Twice, the toilet flushed loudly enough to trip therecorder, but there were no phone calls and no face-to-face conversationsafter Elaine had signed off with a warning that Doug Blakeley had chosen toignore. She had waited in her room, ready to relay information or orders, andneither had come. 
Doug should have reported on the shooting in the Hilton parking lot. Eitherhe'd been afraid because he was sure that his career had ended in the melee;
or, more likely, he was afraid that the orders he would get would clearlydebar him from the revenge he intended to take on one Tom Kelly, the working-
class slob who was the cause of all the trouble . . . because there had to be 
a single cause for Doug's mind to grip. Otherwise there was nothing at all tokeep him from slipping into a universe with no certainties at all.
Kelly took off his headphones and touched the Rewind switch of the recorder.
Wonder if there's anybody left to give'er a phone call, he thought, or ifshe's going to read about it all in the papers. Maybe George has the number tocall. 
"What?" asked Gisela Romer, over the rattle of the van's body panels in thewind of their passage.
If he was going to start thinking out loud, then he was an even bigger damnedfool than he'd realized. "I was thinking," Kelly said truthfully, "that ifpeople had been less interested in fucking with me, then I'm not the only onewho'd have been better off." 
The woman looked at her passenger's frowning profile. "You won't regret thehelp you have given me - given us," she said. "There has never been greaterneed for men like you, men willing to act resolutely."
Guess even Doug'd give me high marks for that, Kelly thought. Especially Doug.
"He's dead, so I guess he deserved to die," the veteran said aloud. "That'sthe only way there is to figure, just let hindsight do it."
"Pardon?" said the woman. "I don't understand." 
"Me neither," said Tom Kelly. He squeezed her right thigh firmly to assure 


himself that it was real and the world was real. "But we'll do what we can 
anyway."
Kelly was almost glad for the way his head hurt because when everythingstarted to slip away it slipped toward the crevasse that seemed to have beenbanged in his skull.
That focused him and brought him back to awareness of the heavily-guardedterminal building.
It still hurt like hell. 
The airmen could be distinguished from the National Police because the formerwore khaki and carried automatic rifles while the police were in green withsubmachine-guns. There were six in each party, pausing in their banter totrack Kelly and the woman from the little-used portion of the parking lot tothe military terminal.
Some airports pretended to be cities of the future, with ramps and glass andcantilevered buildings. Yesilköy was by contrast an aging factory district,
where the pavement was cracked and the structures had been built for function,
defined by an earlier generation, rather than ambiance.
Tom Kelly wasn't feeling much like a man of the future himself.
Gisela Romer did not exactly stiffen, but her stride became minutely morecontrolled. The veteran could almost feel her determining which persona shewould don for the guards - haughty or sexy or mysterious. Most of these Turkswere moonfaced and nineteen - and the same stock as those who stormed throughnaval gunfire at Gallipoli to drive the Anzacs back into the sea at bayonetpoint.
"Keep a low profile, love," Kelly said, risking a friendly pat on the woman'sshoulder. He winked at the troops, one GI approaching some others, and all ofthem on fuckin' government business. "This is exactly the sorta thing theyexpect if I'm doing my job, and I've got authorizations up the ass."
It just feels funny because the people I just blew away were supposed to be mysupport, he added silently. And of course, the general fucked-upness of tryingto do anything through channels wasn't to be overlooked as a factor.
"No sweat," he said jauntily.
Kelly figured he could spot the head of the National Police contingent, butthe Air Force section was under a senior lieutenant with pips and a bolsteredpistol to make identification certain.
"Sir," said Kelly in Turkish, taking out a billfold bulging with thedocumentation his case officer had given him, "we have urgent business withthe flight controller's office."
The Turkish officer looked carefully at both sides of the card he wasproffered, feeling the points of the seal impressed through the attachedbunny-in-the-headlights photograph of Tom Kelly. The back was signed by aTurkish brigadier general from the Adana District, in his NATO capacity.
After a pause that wouldn't have been nerve-racking except for the fact thatKelly had put so many bodies to cool in the recent past, the Turk saluted andsaid, "An honor to meet you, Colonel. Do you know where you're going, or wouldyou like a guide?"
Christ, he hadn't noticed the rank she'd given him for this one. Tom Kellycouldn't remember ever meeting a colonel with whom he'd have willingly shareda meal. 
"Is there, ah," the veteran said aloud, "an American duty section?"
"Of course," said the lieutenant; and, if his tone was a trifle cooler, thenKelly was still speaking Turkish.
Too many of the Americans who entered the terminal took the attitude thatanybody understood English if you raised your voice enough, and that Turks hadabout enough brains to be busboys. There were no American bases in Turkey;
there were many Turkish installations dedicated to NATO and manned byAmericans . . . and if more Americans kept that distinction clear, a demagogue 


like Ecevit would have found it harder to divert attention from the 
corruptness of his government with anti-American rhetoric.
"Corporal," said the officer to one of the men with worn-looking G-3 rifles,
"take Colonel O'Neill to the NATO office." 
Kelly gestured the dancer ahead before he himself followed the sturdy-lookingnoncom through the terminal doors. Neither he nor the Turk had referred toGisela, who was not specifically covered by the authorization. On the otherhand, she was only a woman and as such under the colonel's control. Much hadchanged since the Revolution of 1919, but the Turks were still the people whohad given the word seraglio to the rest of the world.
What was now the military terminal had presumably been built in past years forcivilian uses, long outgrown. It had the feel inside of a train station, withwainscots and plaster moldings, now dingy but painted in complementarypastels. The lobby, at present empty, was equipped with backless woodenbenches. 
"Are you expecting a flight any time soon?" Kelly asked, mostly to put theirguide at ease.
The corporal turned and flashed a smile that was unwilling to become involved,
the look of a well-dressed pedestrian faced with a man-in-the-street reporter.
Kelly shrugged.
As he and Gisela followed their guide down a side hallway they saw a portlyfigure in khakis coming the other way and calling over his shoulder, "Well forChrissake, Larry, get it off when you can, okay?" The fellow spoke Englishwith a Midwestern twang and wore USAF sleeve insignia - master sergeant's,
Kelly thought, but it was always hard to tell with the multiplicity of wingedrockers the Air Force affected to be different. 
The Turkish corporal gestured toward the sergeant, said "Sir," to Kelly, andwhisked himself back toward his unit with a slight rattle of his weapon'sinternal parts.
"Yes, can I help you, sir?" asked the sergeant as he paused in the doorway ofan office which was lighted much better than the hall which served it.
Kelly stepped close to the sergeant to use the light in finding the rightdocument this time. The blue nametape over the man's breast pocket readAtwater. His moustache was neat and pencil-slim, and despite carrying an extraforty pounds, he had the dignified presence called 'military bearing' whencoupled with a uniform.
"Yes, sergeant," said Kelly, handing over a layered plastic card with an insethologram of the Great Seal and another bad photo of Kelly. "My companion and Ineed to get to Diyarbakir soonest, and we don't have time to wait for theTurkey Trot."
"Ummm," said Atwater, frowning with concern at the card as he led the othersinto his office. "That could be a bit of a problem, sir. ..."
The phone on his desk began to ring. He lifted the handset and poked the holdbutton without answering the call. The light began to pulse angrily. "Yousee," he continued, "there's some kinda flap on, and ..." His voice trailedoff again as he shifted the card between his thumbs and forefingers to movethe seal in and out of focus. 
Atwater was not giving them a runaround; he was genuinely concentrating as hestared at the card. Kelly, though his face did not change, was chilling downinside, and it was at the last moment before the veteran exploded that Atwaterstood up.
"Look," he said, "I'll see what I can do. I don't have any equipment on handand the Turkey Trot - there's not another for two days anyway." He raised hishand. "Besides you don't want to run that way, I know, sir."
Kelly nodded guardedly. Every week, a C-130 transport made a circuit of themajor US-manned installations in Turkey like an aerial bus route. The delaywould be a problem, but the questions and whispers of the military types and 


their dependents sharing the flight made that option even worse.
"I'm going to check with the indigs, see if I can pull a favor or two," thesergeant continued. "If it was just you, sir" - he spread his hands - "maybewe could stick you in the rear seat of something. Two of you, that's a bit ofa problem - not anything to do with you, you understand, ma'am."
Kelly had been sitting on the arm of one of the office chairs along the wall.
Now he stood up but faced the plastic relief map of Anatolia instead of thesergeant to avoid making a threat by his posture. "Ah, look, SergeantAtwater," he said, getting his voice back under control after the first fewsyllables, "that card really means what it says, absolute priority. If thatmeans stranding the ambassador in Kars, that's what it means."
He turned carefully, thrusting his hands in his hip pockets and looking at thedesk before he added, "And if there's a Logistics Support aircraft handy, itmeans that too." 
Gisela had judged the conversation perfectly. She sat as still as the chairbeneath her, examining her nails. Because she so perfectly mimicked a piece offurniture, the two Americans were able to hold the necessary discussion forwhich she should not have been present.
"Yessir, I sorta figured that," said Sergeant Atwater with a grimace. Herubbed his forehead and thinning hair with his palm, then returned the card toKelly. "There's a bird here, you bet; only, you see, I don't dispatch 'em,
exactly."
The hefty noncom spread his hands again. "It's not Logistics Support, it'sCommunications Service. For this week at least. But I won't BS you, it's justthe situation that's the problem."
"Well, you've got the codes, haven't you?" the veteran asked in amazement. "Iknow it's got to be authorized stateside, but it has been. Just punch it inand the confirmation'll be along soonest. This signature" - he raised the cardso that the back was to Atwater - "ain't a facsimile, friend."
"Right, Colonel, didn't think it was," the sergeant said.
He was sweating profusely, though his manner was one of angry frustrationrather than fear. Atwater was within a year of retirement and he knew that ifhe did his job by the rules, his ass was covered no matter how hacked offanybody got about it. But that wasn't the way to do a job right; and, likemost members of most bureaucracies, the sergeant really liked to do his jobright.
"Look, the way it is, I can't get stateside on a protected line to check thosecodes," he said, gesturing with a crooked finger at the card Kelly held. "Ican't even get Rome, which'd be good enough. All the secure lines're locked upwith priority traffic. Somebody's really dumped manure in the blender" - henodded to the silent Gisela and a drop of perspiration wobbled off his nose "
if you'll pardon me, ma'am. It don't seem to be Double-you Double-you Threefrom anything BBC or Armed Forces radio say, they're talking progress inGeneva ... but it's a flap and no mistake."
"I think," said Tom Kelly, looking at the woman who was as still as a blondcaryatid, "we'd better get to Diyarbakir."
Gisela raised her head and nodded. 
"Right," said Atwater, sucking his lips inward so that his moustache twitched.
"We'll go talk to the man, and if he'll fly you, I'll log it as authorizedpending confirmation."
The sergeant led the way down the hall. The next room had a Dutch door, bothhalves closed, with the legend Messages on the top portion and a counter builtout from the lower one. Kelly's face stiffened as he strode past and he feltthe weight of the tape recorder in his attache case. "Hang on," he said,
though part of him knew he ought to wait until he was wheels-up from Istanbul.
He rapped on the door.
The upper panel was opened at once by an American airman. Behind him a 


partition baffled the remainder of the room from the hallway. "Look, Don," hesaid, looking past Kelly to Sergeant Atwater, "it'll go when it goes. What canI say?" There was a muted clatter of static and machinery from behind him.
"I've got something to go out in clear," Kelly said, pulling the top sheetfrom the memo pad on the counter before he started to write on it with one ofthe stub pencils there for the purpose.
"Sir?" said the airman, raising an eyebrow.
"He's got authorization, Larry," said the sergeant, before Kelly, havingfinished with the cable address, could take out his card case again.
"I gather there's some problem with encrypted material," the veteran said,
shuttling the code clerk's eyes back to him as he set the miniature tape deckon the counter. He opened the case to display the workings of the recorderwithin. "I don't want encryption anyway. For all I care, you can put this onthe twenty-meter amateur band and beam it right off the tape."
He paused before locking his eyes with those of the young airman. "You can getit out in clear, can't you, despite the tie-up?"
"Yessir," said the airman. He blinked to break eye contact so that he couldlook at the camouflaged recorder.
"Output's through what would be the battery jack," Kelly said. "You people canhandle that, I'm sure."
"Oh, yes sir," the airman agreed, turning the memo slip to face him. Heblinked again and said, "Jesus."
The veteran smiled as their eyes met again over the counter. "No sweat,
buddy," he said. "It'll give you something to play with while the prioritychannels're busy with other people's worries."
"Check, sir," agreed the airman. He managed a smile of his own. "It's justthat - I thought NSA Headquarters got even requests for furniture polishencrypted."
"Not this time, my friend," said Kelly as he waved to chop the conversation,
then turned away. "This time the idea's for a whole lotta people to know whatwent down. The medium damn well is the message."
The door leaf swung closed behind him. "That's that, sergeant," the veteransaid to Atwater's expressionless face. "Let's see about transportation."
The hall ended in a metal door that gave out onto the airfield itself. Theyreached it just as a Turkish Airlines 727 was lunging skyward beyond the wire-
reinforced window. As Atwater knocked on the unmarked door to the right of themetal one, the roar of the commercial jet's engines shook the building like aterrier on a rat. 
"Shine!" the sergeant called through the lessening rumble. "I got aproposition for you."
"Is she - " said a voice as the door opened. The speaker was a black man,
five-five or six, wearing a one-piece gray flight suit. His hair was croppedso close that he could have passed for a Marine in boot camp.
When his brown, opaque eyes flickered past Atwater's shoulder, the pilotpaused with his mouth already shaped to speak the next word. "Well, Jesus andhis saints," he said instead, "it's Monaghan, isn't it, or have I died andgone to hell?"
"We've been to hell, Shine," said Kelly with a sudden recollection of tracerbullets crisscrossing the makeshift flare path and the high-wing aircraftsetting down. "It didn't kill us, did it?"
He gave the pilot a lopsided smile. "Ready for another little jaunt? A realpiece a' cake, just a ferry run to Diyarbakir."
Shine cocked his head and looked at the sergeant. "He got his clearances?"
"We've got that problem with the message traffic, like you know," Atwaterreplied, looking at a corner of the Ready Room. A magazine lay open on therumpled bunk from which the pilot had risen. "We'll get through when we getthrough, but. . . . Colonel here seems to think there's a bit of a crunch." 


"Colonel, are we?" said the pilot. "Hadn't heard you were on quite thoseterms, Tommy. Guess you figure I owe you one for not going in for the rest ofyour team when they pulled the plug on Birdlike?"
Kelly shrugged. "I'd walked away from that one before you did, Shine. We alldo what we do." 
The black grinned and traced a line across the side of his skull, miming thetrack of blood matting Kelly's hair. "So-o-o," Shine said, "a milk run, noflak a'tall. Till I come back and try to explain why I flew you, m'friend.
There's gonna be a lot of flak then."
"Look, Shine - " began Sergeant Atwater with a puzzled frown.
Kelly touched the sergeant's arm to silence him and said with his eyes meetingthe pilot's, "I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, man."
"Shit, let's fly," the pilot said, lifting a zip-lock folder and his flighthelmet from the shelf beside the door. "I figure I owe you one. Or I owesomebody and you're closest."
The aircraft being rolled from a hangar to meet them, a Pilatus Turbo-Porter,
was, like the pilot, on twenty-four hour standby with its preflight checkalready completed. Its straight wing, exceptionally long and broad for anaircraft of the size, was fitted with slotted flaps to lower the stall speedeven further. 
The Porter's undersurfaces were painted a dark blue-gray that betterapproximated the shade of the night sky than black would. The upper surfaceswere whorls of black over brown and maroon almost as dark to keep the aircraftfrom having an identifiable outline from above.
Kelly knew where the Logistics Support unit in Istanbul had been flying threeyears before. Now that the political situation in Greece had stabilized - orreverted, depending on your bias - he was mildly surprised that an agent-
transporting aircraft was still based here. Some things had their own inertia,
especially when the secrecy of the operation kept it out of normal budgetaryexaminations. Score one for inefficiency.
Shine - his last name was Jacobs, Kelly thought, or at least it had been whenhe had been on the eastern border of Turkey supporting Kurdish operations ducked 
through the port-side entry doors, springing off the step attached tothe fuselage. The Porter was awkward to board because its fixed landing gearwas mounted on long struts to take the impact of landings that closelyapproached vertical. Even the tail wheel was lifted by a shock absorber.
Kelly started to hand the woman up the high step, an action as reflexive forhim as was her look of scorn as she entered the cabin unaided. Hell, theveteran thought, he was the one who needed help. Walking to the hangar hadbrought him double vision, and the two steps to enter the aircraft rang likehammers in his skull. 
He'd been hurt worse before, plenty times; but he'd never been this oldbefore, any more than he'd ever be this young again. If he didn't start usingcommon sense about the things he let his body in for, the aging problem wasgoing to take care of itself real quick.
A ground crewman closed the cabin door while the starter cart whirled thePorter's turbine engine into wailing life. Shine was forward in the cockpit,
and Gisela eyed the sparse furnishings of the cabin. There was a fold-downbench of aluminum tubing and canvas on the starboard bulkhead across from thedoors, and individual jumpseats of similar construction to port.
Kelly unlatched a seat, then the bench, as Shine ran the five-hundred-horseturbine up to speed. With his mouth close to Gisela's ears, the veteran said,
"You got any problem if I rack out on the bench?" He pointed. "I'm not ... Imean, I think I could use a couple hours, if that's okay."
Gisela smiled grimly at what both of them recognized as an admission ofweakness - and an apology for treating her like a girl moments earlier.
"Fine," she said, and nodded toward the cockpit. "Do you think your friend 


will mind if I sit next to him?" 
Kelly glanced forward toward the back of Shine's helmet, just visible over hisseat back. The right-hand cockpit seat was empty. "Not unless he's changed ahell of a lot since I last knew him," the veteran said with a chuckle. "He'dscrew a snake if somebody held it down. Of course, it'd have to be a girlsnake." 
The woman laughed also and patted Kelly's shoulder as she slid her way intothe empty forward seat. He could not hear the brief exchange between Giselaand the pilot a moment before the Porter began to taxi, but the dancer's laughtrilled again above the turbine whine.
Kelly seated himself and belted in as the aircraft waited for clearance. Thebelt wasn't going to do a hell of a lot of good with a side-facing seat boltedonto the frame of a light aircraft; but it was the way he'd been trained, andhis brain was running on autopilot. Christ, it felt as if each revolution ofthe spinning prop was shaving a little deeper through his skull.
He'd be better for sleep. If he could sleep.
The runway could accommodate 747's, but Shine took off within the firsthundred and twenty yards of the pavement. The Porter lifted at a one-to-oneratio, gaining a foot of altitude for every foot of forward flight. In astraight-sided gulley or a clearing literally blasted in triple-canopy jungle,
such a takeoff might have been necessary. Here, it was necessary only becauseShine needed to prove that he and the plane could do it every time - becausenext time it might not be a matter of choice.
They climbed at over a thousand feet per minute toward whatever Shine chose tocall cruising altitude for this flight. It had been possible that he'd fly theentire seven hundred miles on the deck to prove his capabilities in the mostbruising way possible. Probably he wanted enough height to engage theautopilot safely - and leave his hands free, since Gisela had decided to sitforward. 
Even before the Porter leveled off, Kelly had unbuckled his seat belt andstretched out on the narrow bench. A severe bank to port would fling himacross the cabin lengthwise like a log to the flume, but Shine wouldn't dothat except at need. The bench, trembling with the thrust of the prop and theshudder of air past the skin of the aircraft, made a poor bed ... but betterthan some, and, in the event, good enough.
He dreamed again of ancient Amida, its black basalt walls shrugging off attackby the Romans who had raised them initially. And he dreamed of the Fortress;
but in the way of dreams and nightmares, the two merged into a single, starkthreat, in space and on the empty plains of Mesopotamia.
It was still dark when he awakened to the gentle pressure of Gisela's hands onhis shoulder blades. Shine was making his final approach to the airbase atDiyarbakir, headquarters of the Turkish Third Tactical Air Force.
And perhaps the headquarters of the Dienst and its Plan, as well as whateverthe aliens had been doing when one was shot with Mohammed. Rise and shine, TomKelly, there's no rest for the wicked in this life.
The airfield at Diyarbakir had been paved for fully-laden fighter bombers,
but, as on takeoff, the pilot had his own notions of proper utilization. Kellywas scarcely buckled in across from the woman who had awakened him when theTurbo-Porter hit the ground at an angle nearly as steep as that at which theyhad lifted off. 
The cabin bucked and hammered in sudden turbulence as Shine reversed the blade 
pitch and brought the aircraft to a halt against the full snarling power ofthe Garrett turbine. The engine braked them to a stop within seventy feet ofthe point they first touched down.
Shine throttled back. Over the keening of the turbine as it settled to fortypercent power through a medley of harmonics, he shouted, "You got groundtransport laid on?" 


"Ought to," Kelly answered, nodding and finding that the motion did not hurthim nearly as much as he had expected. The nightmares he had seen and joinedhad wrung him out mentally, but his physical state was surprisingly close tonormal. He unbuckled himself and stood up, rocking as Shine changed bladepitch to taxi and tapped on the left brake to swing the nose.
Through the windscreen Kelly could see a control tower of dun-colored brick,
with corrugated-metal additions turned a similar shade by the blowing dust. Atthe edge of the building was parked a Dodge pickup truck painted Air Forceblue. While the pilot centered the Porter's prop spinner on the vehicle, itsdoor opened and the driver got out.
Shine braked and feathered the prop again, only ten feet from the bumper ofthe pickup. "Door-to-door service a specialty," he shouted.
Kelly gestured Gisela toward the cabin door but stepped forward himself sothat he could be heard, and heard privately. "Appreciate it, man," the veteransaid, shaking the pilot's hand between the two seatbacks. "You done a goodthing."
Shine laughed without much humor. "Yeah, well, Tommy," he said, "you meet upwith any of the types who got back anyway, the ragheads - you tell 'em I'msorry. There was orders, sure, but ... you know, the longer I live, the less Iregret the times I violated orders, and the less I like to remember some ofthe ones I obeyed. You know?"
"Don't feel like the Lone Ranger," Kelly said, squeezing the pilot's handagain before he turned to follow Gisela.
Moments after the two passengers had stepped onto the concrete and dogged thehatch closed, the Porter rotated and lifted again - a brief hop to the fuelingpoint a quarter mile farther down the runway - instead of taxiing properly.
"Not exactly the least conspicuous vehicle," Kelly muttered as he and thedancer stepped toward the truck. "But I didn't think we'd do better throughAtwater, even if I kicked and screamed for something civilian. The folks whowere supposed to arrange that sorta thing for me are either dead or wish Iwas." 
The man standing beside the truck was in his mid-twenties, wearing a moustacheand sideburns which were within, though barely, the loose parameters of the USAir Force. "Colonel Monaghan?" he asked without saluting; neither he nor Kellywere in uniform, and there was a look in the man's eyes that suggested hedidn't volunteer salutes anyway.
"Yessir," said Kelly, nodding courteously. The other man's eyes had drifted tothe dancer. "I much appreciate this. I know it's not the sort of thing you'rehere for." 
There were only a few US liaison officers at the airbase here in Diyarbakir.
This man and the vehicle had to have been requisitioned from the NSA listeningpost at Pirinclik, fifteen miles west of the city, where the midflighttelemetry of tests from the Russian missile proving ground at Tyuratam wasmonitored. Pirinclik was staffed by the US Air Force; but nonetheless,
Sergeant Atwater must have called in personal chips to arrange for a vehicleover a general phone line.
"Here's the key, sir," the younger man said with a modicum of respect in hisvoice. "There's a chain to run from the steering wheel to the foot-feed. Noignition lock, you know?"
Kelly nodded. "Much appreciated," he repeated as he opened the driver's sidedoor and handed Gisela behind the wheel. She knew where they were going, Lordwilling. "Hope you've got a way back?" he added, suddenly struck by the factthat the airman looked very much alone against the empty background of runwayson an alluvial plain. "We're in more of a time crunch than ..."
"So I hear," the younger man agreed with a tight smile. At a base likePirinclik, there were more sources of information than the official channels.
It struck Kelly that this fellow might know a lot more than he and Gisela 


themselves did, but there really wasn't time to explore that possibility.
"I'll call and they'll send a jeep. Just didn't want to tie up two vehicles onso loose an ETA." He nodded toward the Turbo-Porter, shrunken into a darkhuddle at the distant service point.
Gisela cranked the engine, which caught on the second attempt, just before theairman called, "Pump once and - "
"The gate's off to the left," Kelly said as he closed his own door, wonderinghow often he'd flown in or out of the Third TAP base. More times than he could 
remember, literally, because once he'd been delirious, controllable onlybecause he was just as weak as he was crazy. . . .
They paused for the gate, chain link on a sturdy frame, to be swung open byTurks from the sandbagged bunkers to either side. There was no identificationcheck for people leaving in an American vehicle, though the guards showed somesurprise that the driver was a blond woman. Gisela turned left on the narrowblacktop highway and accelerated jerkily while she determined the throw andengagement of the pickup's clutch.
"You've been here before," Kelly said, noting that the woman turned withouthesitation. 
She glanced aside, then back to the road. "Not here," she said in a coolvoice, aware that the American was fishing for information - and willing togive it to him even though he had not, by habit, done her the courtesy ofasking directly. "Not the airfield. But of course, I've spent a great deal oftime at our base in the city."
The landscape through which they drove as fast as the truck's front-end shimmypermitted was as flat as any place Kelly had ever been. It appeared to berolling countryside, but the scale of distance was so great that it gave shapeto what would otherwise have been considered dead-level ground.
But the plains were neither smooth nor green - at least this early in theyear; Kelly knew from experience that by early summer the oats and barleyplanted in some of the unfenced fields would have grown high enough to hidethe rocks. 
The soil of Mesopotamia had been cultivated for millennia, for virtually aslong as any area of the Earth's surface. Every time a plow bit, it sent a puffof yellow-gray dust off on the constant wind and diminished the soil by thatmuch. The rocks, from pebbles to blocks the size of a man's torso, remained .
. . and from a slight distance, from a road, those rocks were all thatremained of what had been the most fertile lands on Earth. One could still 
cultivate with care and hardship, however, and pasture sheep.
"We - concentrated here in Diyarbakir, when the Plan was developed," Giselasaid deliberately, "in part for recruitment's sake - the Kurds." She lookedover to make sure her student was following. Kelly nodded obediently.
"But more because it is, you see, not developed," the woman continued, "butstill there are the airbase and the tracking station. Competing jurisdictions,
do you see?" The tutor looked over again.
"So that if things should be seen that neither understands, your NSA or TurkHava Kuvvertli" - Gisela used the indigenous words for Turkish Air Forcewithin the English of her lecture - "both blame the other ... but not blame,
because of security."
She smiled toward the windshield as, downshifting the long-throw gearbox, shepassed a horse-drawn wagon in a flapping roar. Communication among friendlyforces was a more necessary ingredient of success than was intelligence of theenemy, but it was notable that whenever military bureaucracies set priorities,
information flow came in a bad second to security. Perhaps that was a case ofmaking a virtue of necessity, since it was almost impossible to pass datathrough a military bureaucracy anyway.
"So each thinks the other responsible and says nothing, so as not to embarrassan ally and to poke into what is not their own business," Gisela concluded. 


"Bad practice of security."
The road off to the right, past a small orchard of pistachio trees, could havebeen a goat track save that it meandered in double rather than single file.
Gisela found the brakes were spongy and downshifted sharply to let the enginecompression help slow the truck. They made the turn comfortably, though thepickup swayed on springs abused by too many rutted roads like this.
"Reach into my right coat pocket," the woman directed. She had crossed rightarm over left to take the turnoff, and even in the moment it took her toreposition her hands afterwards, the steering wheel jibbed viciously.
Kelly obeyed, expecting to find sunglasses or something similar. Instead therewas a round-nosed cylinder that could have been a lipstick, save that it wasclicking against three others like it - and a fifth, buried deeply in a cornerof the lining.
He drew out the handful of .38 Special cartridges, a full load for thecylinder of the snubbie now nestled empty against his spine. "Well, I'll be asonofabitch," said the veteran softly as he drew the weapon to load it.
The rounds were US Government issue, bearing Lake City Arsenal headstamps and130-grain bullets with full metal jackets. They were really intended for 9-mmautoloaders and would literally rattle down the bore of most .38 Specialrevolvers. When fired, however, they upset enough to take the rifling.
They weren't a perfect load for the aluminum snubbie, but they were a hell ofan improvement over an empty cylinder . . . and the fact that Gisela hadprocured them for him, just before he was to be introduced to her associates,
was a sign more valuable than any real protection that the weapon gave him.
"I got them from the pilot," Gisela said needlessly. "I thought you wouldn'task, to call attention. So I asked, and it won't be reported."
Kelly hunched forward to replace the little revolver. He'd carried it a lot ofyears and never used it before the previous night, but that didn't mean hewouldn't need it again soon. Lightning was liable to keep striking the sameplace so long as the storm raged and the tree still stood in its path.
The ground became broken to either side of the road, lifting in outcrops ofdense rock shaded by brush instead of sere grass. Gisela downshifted againinto compound low. A moment later, the hood of the truck dipped as the rutsled into a gorge notched through the plain in two stages.
They drove down the upper, broader level; then Gisela cramped the wheels hardleft to follow the track across a single-arched bridge of stone, vaulting thenarrow center of the gully. There was enough water in the rivulet below toflash in the sun before the truck began climbing from the declivity with ashiver of wheelspin.
"How old was that bridge?" asked Kelly, craning his neck to look out the backwindow, an effort made vain by the coating of dust over the glass.
"Seljuk at least," answered the woman with a shrug which merged into ashoulder thrust as the steering fought her when they rattled out of the gully.
"Maybe Byzantine, maybe Roman, maybe - who knows? There's probably been abridge there as long as men have lived here and farmed . . . and that is avery long time."
"And now you're here," Kelly said quietly. "The Service."
"Here." Gisela's smile was more arrogant than pleased. "And soon, everywhere.
To the world's benefit." 
The ground dropped a few feet on the left side of the road. Gisela swung tothe right around a basalt rock face and then pulled left toward the recentlyrefurbished gate of a han, a caravanserai, ruined by time.
The walls of basalt blocks weathered gray gleamed in the sunlight, but theshadowed gaps in the dome of the mosque which formed one corner of theenclosure were as black as a colonel's soul. The dome was crumbling; but,
though the ages had scalloped the upper edge of the wall around the courtyard,
it was still solid and at no point less than eight feet high. 


The original gateway had been built between the mosque and a gatehouse, butpart of the latter had been demolished when the new gate was constructed. Thiswas steel, double-leafed and wide enough to pass a semi-trailer. The posts towhich the leaves were hinged were themselves steel, eight inches in diameterand concrete-filled if they were not solid billets.
In the far corner of the facing wall there were arrow slits, in the walls andthe blockhouse. It struck Kelly that the stone edifice was proof to any modernweapons up through tank cannon, and that the embrasures could showermachinegun fire on trespassers as effectively as the arrows for which they hadbeen intended. 
Gisela pulled up to the gate and honked imperiously. The dust cloud they hadraised in their passage continued to drift forward, settling on Kelly's rightsleeve and the ledge of his open window. The back of his neck began to tingle.
He shifted in his seat, unwilling to draw his revolver but certain that apremonition of danger was causing his hair to bristle.
The woman honked again and said, "If somebody's asleep at this time, they'll " 
"Jesus Christ!" shouted Kelly. He unlatched his door so hastily that his feettangled as he got out of the cab. He did not draw his gun, any more than hewould have thought to do so if he found himself in the path of a diesellocomotive. 
At first it was more like watching time-lapse photography of a building underconstruction, for the object was huge and silent and rising vertically in animbus of brilliant light. Hairs that had been prickling all over Kelly's bodynow stood straight out, and when he reached for the car door to steady himselfa static spark snapped six inches from the metal to numb his hand.
It wasn't a cylinder rising on jacks from the han courtyard: it was a diskfifty feet in diameter with a bluntly-rounded circumference and a centraldepth of about twelve feet.
It was a fucking flying saucer.
Gisela was out of the truck also, shouting and waving her clenched fist inobvious fury. The underside of the saucer was clearly visible, so it couldscarcely be called an unidentified flying object. The veil of lightsurrounding the vehicle as it rose was pastel and of uncertain color, shiftinglike the aurora but bright enough to be visible now in broad daylight.
The skin of the flying saucer was formed of riveted plates. The junctions ofthe plates and the individual rivet heads stood out despite the nimbus becausethe portion of the field emanating from those surface irregularities was of ashade which contrasted with that of the plates themselves.
The whole aura shifted across the spectrum and, as the saucer continued to rise, 
faded. The craft climbed vertically. A bright line appeared from the rimto the central axis, as if the nimbus had been pleated there and trebled inthickness. The line rotated across the circular undersurface faster than the 
second hand on a watch dial, hissing and crackling with violent electricaldischarges. The rate of the saucer's rise accelerated with the sweep of theline, so that there was only a speck of dazzling corona by the time the fullsurface area should have been swept. Then there was nothing at all.
"It was Dora," said Gisela brokenly. She touched the truck's fender with ahand for balance, looking as staggered as she had been the moment Doug hadslapped her with a shot-loaded hand.
"Have the aliens come and taken your friend?" Kelly demanded harshly in orderto be understood through the woman's dismay.
"No, not the crabs," Gisela said petulantly, turning so that both her palmswere braced against the vehicle.
The breeze that was too constant to be noticed made enough noise in thebackground that she was hard to hear, since the truck separated her fromKelly. 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 thedetails of gathering information, Tom Kelly was able to avoid boggling inertlyas 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 prototypewhich escaped to the Antarctic base from the Bavarian Alps in 1945. She musthave 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 hadbegun to well from the inner corners of her blue eyes. "We may as well go backinto the city, Thomas Kelly. We'll be able to communicate from the officethere, but I'm sure no one will have time for us until everything has beenaccomplished.
"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 hismind was on Gisela anymore. He was far more concerned with the fact that notall of the UFOs being sighted were under the control of aliens whose motiveswere at least uncertain. 

Some of the spacecraft were in the hands of Nazis whose motives were notdoubtful in the slightest.
Kelly started back to Diyarbakir with Gisela slumped as his passenger againstthe other door. He drove with the caution demanded by the loose steering andhis 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 andrecalling 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, nowit doesn't matter - secrecy. No need for it, no chance for it either. And theyleft me behind." 
The sky had darkened abruptly, as if the flying saucer had punched a hole inthe stratosphere and let the storm rush in. That was what had happened, nearenough in the larger sense, Kelly supposed. Not asking the question wouldn'tmake the situation go away, though.
"Exactly what is the Plan?" the veteran asked, while his hands and eyes drovethe truck and left his intellect free for things he would have preferred notto think about. 
"To control the world by using your Fortress," the dancer said, destroyingwith her flat voice any possibility that Kelly's imagination might have runaway with him.
"At first we had the base in Antarctica," Gisela continued. "My father wascommander of the detachment guarding the salt mines at Kertl, in Bavaria. WhenBritish troops were within five kilometers and they could hear Russian guns inthe east, so near were they, a motorcycle arrived with orders that they shouldleave at once for Thule Base in the Antarctic, taking all flyable SpecialApplications craft."
The woman was speaking in German, and her voice had the sing-song texture of atale which had been repeated so many times.
"Only Dora, the fourth prototype, could be flown," said Gisela. "Some of thoseat Kertl wished to wait still further for the aircraft from Berlin Tempelhofthey had been hoping would arrive. Others would have fled to the British inorder to escape the Bolsheviks, but they feared to entrust themselves to ajourney of twenty thousand kilometers in a craft which had thus far been thesubject only of static testing.
"But my father understood that orders must be obeyed, not questioned; and heunderstood 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 enoughthings in his own lifetime to be able to imagine that scene in the foothillsof the Alps close to the time he was being born. Electrostatic charges fromDora, the prototype built so solidly that she still flew like nothing else onEarth, must have lighted up the salt mine in which the laboratory hid fromAllied bombers. It would have been like living in the heart of a neon lampwhile the powerplant was run up to takeoff level.
But the machinery was only part of the drama. The rest was that of the men andwomen wearing laboratory smocks or laborers' coveralls, the personnel who haddecided to ignore the order from Berlin and stay behind. As Dora readied toattempt her final mission, those who were not aboard her would have begun tounderstand exactly what decision they had really made.
The guard detachment of Waffen SS would have been in spatter-camouflageuniforms and carrying the revolutionary MP-44 assault rifles which could notwin the war for Germany but which armed a generation of liberation movementsafter the Russians lightly modified the design into the AK-47. Even the pickof Germany's fighting strength there at the end would have been a far cry fromthe triumphant legions of the Blitzkrieg: boys, taller and blonder, perhaps,
than their classmates, but still fifteen years old; and a leavening ofveterans 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 itwould have been to have stood with those guardsmen; and how little he wouldhave felt when Colonel Schneider gave the order to fire and the bellow of ascore 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 memoryof ice and snow and a constant wind, with even bare rock so deep ice had to beexcavated to reach it. "But it was useless save as a place to hide while wereorganized and gathered the wealth required for the task. Three U-boats ofthe Type XXI rendezvoused with the refugees from Dora, and there was theoriginal complement of Thule Base ... but still very few, you mustunderstand?" 
A few oversized drops of rain splattered down, followed by a downpour snakingacross the highway in a distinct line. The dust on the hood and windshieldturned immediately to mud which the desiccated wiper blades pushed across theglass in streaks when Kelly found their switch.
"Others provided aid, supplied us with connections and part of the moneyrequired," the woman said, raising her voice over the drumbeat of raindrops asthough addressing a hall of awestruck, upturned faces which hung on her words.
"But there were two secrets which the Service kept: those original strugglersat 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 AradoBlitzbomber as planned - but north, to one of the Swedish islands, where thosewho flew in it transferred to a U-boat which would proceed to Antarctica tomeet us." 
They were getting close to the incorporated area of the city. Diyarbakir hadspread to the north and west of ancient Amida. The city walls to the southloomed on an escarpment, free of modern buildings, and the eastern boundarywas 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-treadpattern of the pickup's tires made Kelly concentrate more on his driving thanhe wanted to. The rhythm of outside sounds and the greasy divorcement of therain-slick highway were releasing Gisela's tongue, however. They were in amicrocosm of their own, she and Kelly; not the universe that others inhabitedand 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 thatwe could supply. However, there was no place on Earth where we could safelyproduce what we needed for the day we knew would come, when the Service wouldprovide thousands of craft like Dora for the legions of New Germany to sweepaway Bolshevism and materialism together."
Brake lights turned the road ahead of them into a strand of rubies, twinklingon their windshield and on the rain spattering toward the street. A majorfactory, one of the few in a city almost wholly dependent on agriculture, wasletting the workers out to choke the road with motorcycles, private cars, anddolmuses - mini vans that followed fixed routes like buses, but on noparticular schedule and with an even higher degree of overloading than was thenorm for Turkish buses. 
"Turn here," Gisela said with a note of disapproval. "You should have turnedat the last cross street. We enter the Old City best by the Urfa Gate."
Kelly nodded obsequiously. Colonel Schneider's - Romer's - daughter wastelling him things now, in a state divorced from reason, which she had nottold 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 whosebusiness the explanations were - but not to overstep her own duties.
Irrational snappishness when he missed the turn to a location unknown to himwas 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 theinner circumferential, facing the walls."
"No problem," the veteran answered in German. He inched forward, thankful forthe rain-swept traffic that kept them from what might be the terminus of theirconversation. "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 sloppylinkages of third and fourth when his arm twitched forward. "Okay," he saidwhen he thought his voice would be calm. "I guess I thought maybe you had asatellite of your own. Like Fortress."
"It was easier to armor against vacuum than it was the winds and convectioncooling at Thule Base," said the woman. "And the Moon had what neitherAntarctica nor an orbiting platform could provide: ores. Raw material to beformed into aluminum for the skin and girders of the fleet. Dora had beenbuilt of impervium, chromium-vanadium alloy; but that was not necessary, thescientists who escaped with my father decided.
"The instruments and the drive units, the great electromagnetic engines thatdraw their power from the auras surrounding the Earth and Sun, had to beconstructed here; but that was easy to arrange, since the pieces divulgedlittle of their purpose. They are shipped as freight to our warehouse atIskenderun and there loaded on a motorship which the Service owns through aGreek 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 ofher newer sisters." 
Traffic surged forward like a clot releasing in a blood vessel. The wall abovethe Urfa Gate was whole and fifty feet high, with semicircular towers flankingthe treble entrances and rising even higher. Only the arched central gateway,
tall enough and wide enough to pass the heaviest military equipment ofByzantine times, was used for vehicular traffic. It constricted the moderntwo-lane road; Kelly swore under his breath as he watched the cars ahead ofthem slither on the pavement, threatening traffic in the other lane and stonewalls that had survived at least fifteen centuries of collisions. 
"And then you Americans started to build your nuclear Fortress, and we knewthat 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 thatwhat somebody did in the course of his job - or her job - was what he liked todo. It made him mad every time somebody read his file and looked at him withface muscles stiffening as if that would armor the person against the monstercalling itself Tom Kelly.
But he did the same thing, even knowing better; even knowing that there wereworse things in the life of Gisela Romer than years spent on the Antarcticice, but you did what had to be done. . . .
There had been a pitiable attempt to landscape the approach to the Urfa Gatewith trees. Those which still survived at twenty-meter intervals along theboulevard were trees like those found throughout the inhabited Middle East:
stunted, the major branches a yard or so long from the point they forked, anda burst of first-year twigs splaying from the cut ends like the hair of adrowned woman. Firewood was at a premium, and each year these trees would bepruned back secretly by those whose only choice was to freeze.
And sometimes the long-term choices people made for themselves and for mankindweren't a whole lot prettier; that was all.
Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk within the circumferential, bent andsquinting as though they could shut themselves off from the battering rain.
The hooped iron barrier which separated them from the vehicular way gleamedsilver in the lights of cars turning into the Old City, providing a touch offairyland for a scene otherwise harsh and squalid. The girdered tower holdinga transformer substation just within the walls could as well have been theguard post of a concentration camp. Life is not exotic while it is beinglived. The walls which made Diyarbakir an archeological treasure were proof ofa past reality as cruel as anything that put Fortress in orbit above the Earthtoday.
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 hada 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 thesituation. 
"What was the message you sent out from Istanbul?" Gisela asked unexpectedly.
She had talked her way through her shock at being left behind at the crucialjuncture. She had reason to ask the question, and Kelly had no reason at allto lie in his answer. 
"I was set up last night," he said, leaning forward for a better angle throughthe windshield. At least it had been raining hard enough to wash the dust fromthe glass. Presumably he would get further directions when it was time forthem. 
"We were set up," Kelly went on, amending his initial words. "I got a tape ofit, back at my room. What we picked up before heading for the airport, toolate for it to do us any good right then."
The woman grinned as the same memory struck both of them simultaneously. Sheran her fingertips up Kelly's right thigh, then cupped his groin firmly.
"There will be more of that, you and I," she promised with a wink.
Kelly laughed. "There isn't a bad time to think about sex," he said. But therewere more important things to think about which were very bad indeed.
"Set up by my own people," the American continued because Gisela expected himto. "I - " He paused, then went on, "Assuming I get through this in one piece,
I'm going to be deep in shit for blowing away the people I did."
The woman nodded. "Yes," she said seriously, "we know how closely your countryworks with the Jews. That is why it was so, of so much importance to us tofind someone like you who had access to your intelligence community but whocould be trusted not to be a puppet of the Jews."
Yep, thought Kelly, that's exactly why they handed me to you, Elaine and her 


bosses. Tom Kelly's a fuckin' Nazi, he'll get along just fine with these otherNazis, and maybe we'll learn what kinda games the Service's been playin' withthe funny-looking gray guys in the flying saucers.
The hell of it was, things had worked out just about the way Pierrard would'vewanted them to - except maybe in detail, though Suits didn't like beingbothered with details about who'd been killed and where and how many. Thething Pierrard really wouldn't like was the fact that he'd been so slow offthe mark that the information was probably getting to him through the eveningnews. 
Knowing the type, the delay was going to turn out to be the fault of somesubordinate - very possibly the fault of Tom Kelly. Officers called that"delegation of responsibility."
"So," the veteran continued, "I figured that the tape of that conversationsent clear text so there's no way in hell they could be sure who'd heard it,
all over the world - that'd give 'em another bone to gnaw instead of me."
His tongue touched his lips again. "Besides," he added so softly that hispassenger could not have been sure of the words, "they gotta learn: If theystick it to me, I stick it right back. Whoever they are."
"We can either park here," Gisela said, "or you can go left at Gazi Boulevardand left again at once in the alley, unless somebody's blocking it."
She had the same trick he did, Kelly noticed, of giving directions withoutraising her voice unless they were very goddam important. Him driving aroundin the rain because he was too dumb to listen to a normal voice wouldn't have 
been that important; and he wasn't too dumb to listen.
"Here" was an area within an angle of the walls, set off from the occupiedportion of the city by law and the circumferential road. The big circulartower at the apex of the angle was a famous one, the Married Tower, thoughKelly couldn't remember the reason for that name if he ever had known. Theclear area would have been a park if it were landscaped. At the moment, it wasa wasteland whose dust had been wetted to mud by the rain - too unusual acircumstance for grass to have secured a foothold.
There were bushes planted at the edge of the circumferential, but the hardconditions had opened several gaps in the attempted hedge through which thetruck could drive without doing further damage. The truck with US Air Forceplates could sit undisturbed there, and, in this downpour, more or lessunnoticed. The buildings across the circumferential were raised on commonwalls, and the alley behind them would have been laid out when donkeys werethe sole form of transportation.
Kelly shifted down into the granny gear, standing on the brake pedal as he didso to warn the driver behind him. He pulled hard right, and the truck bumpedover the curb with less commotion than it had negotiated the road to the hanwhere Dora hid. 
The shock of recognition which Kelly felt was real enough to send a tingle uphis arm from the finger which was switching off the headlights. He sworesoftly as the rain-streaked glow faded in his memory.
Not that it should have been a surprise.
"This is where Mohammed Ayyubi bought it," Kelly said, gesturing with his chintoward the walls thirty feet away. The rain paused, then sent a fierce lash ofdroplets across the hood and windshield. The stark battlements were hiddenbeyond the rain and glass, but Kelly's mind superimposed the videotaped scenein Congressman Bianci's office on the image his headlights had just shown: thesame wall, the same dripping illumination. . . . Bodies only in what thecamera had recorded; at least so far.
"Yes, Mohammed made the initial approach and screening for the Kurds werecruited for the Field Force," Gisela agreed. "We couldn't recruit in Europe,
not safely. And besides, Europeans - even the Aryans - have grown soft."
The woman shrugged; the act gave her the look of a person rising from 


catastrophe. "He was coming to meet me at the office here. There were theshots and many vehicles. We scattered, of course, though there was no attemptto make arrests . . . and afterwards, who can say? The crabs, we thought once,
but they do not use guns - though one was killed there. A colonel of policewas full of tales of the thing that the Americans had bundled away from thesite." 
Her eyes had been on the inner curve of the windshield, on her reflection orher memory. Now she turned to the American agent and said, "He spoke of youoften, you know, Tom Kelly. I think now perhaps it was the Jews who killedhim." 
"Something like that," said Kelly as he opened his door and felt water drip onthe bare skin of his wrist. "Could well be." 
There was no street lighting, and the lights of the traffic hid rather thanilluminated Kelly's surroundings by levering shadows through the sparse hedgein a counterfeit of nearby motion. The courtesy light in the cab winked asGisela got out on her side. The vehicle neatly plugged the gap through whichKelly had driven. He stepped around the front of the pickup, toward the womanand another opening in the hedge.
"Thomas Kelly," said a voice that he recognized, "we must speak with you. Itmay be that there still is time to save your world."
There were three of them again, one on either side of the pickup and the thirdfacing the vehicle's hood and the two humans. The pair on the flanks wereutterly motionless, but white noise surrounded them in a palpable cloak. Thewords were coming from the little radio in Kelly's attache case, though itspower was turned off. The rain that fell with fitful intensity wasdisintegrating away from the standing figures, without the fiery enthusiasm ofbullets the night before but with an accompaniment of sound.
Gisela, arm's length from the American, made a grab for the gun beneath hiswaistband. 
She was lithe and very strong; but not so strong as Kelly, nor as quick. Hecaught her right wrist in his right hand and, with the other, tried to gripher about the waist. I "Wait!" he cried. 
One of the frozen-seeming pair of strangers changed appearance. He - it remained 
motionless, but the frosting and sizzle of rain that did not quitetouch the form now wetted it normally. "Wait!" Kelly screamed again, this timeto the figures who stood like wooden carvings of humanity.
Kelly was not willing to hurt the dancer, and she was willing to do whateverwas necessary to escape. During the preceding day he had twice saved her life

-so she thought at any rate - and gained such intellectual trust as a personlike Gisela Romer had to offer. But her fear and hatred of the aliens were 
matters ingrained for years and redoubled by the fate of her father.
Her muscles flexed against Kelly's grip by habit, sure from experience thatshe could tear herself free from any man before he realized her strength.
Kelly held her like a band of iron. The point of her shoulder jarred hisforehead hard enough for pain to explode in sheets of light across his opticnerves. Even then the veteran's grip did not loosen, but his eyes missed themotion of her free hand. 
He knew what she'd done surely enough when her knuckles slammed him in thegroin.
On a conscious level Kelly thought he was still winning, still in control. Hecould block the pain while he reached for Gisela's left hand also and his lipsordered her to His 
lips passed only a rattle like that of a strangled rabbit. His bellymuscles had drawn up so tightly that he could not breathe, much less speak.
And the will was there, but the strength had poured from his muscles likeblood from the throat of a stuck pig. Gisela lunged back and away from him.
Kelly still did not feel the pain he knew must be wracking him, but he could 

not feel anything at all between his knees and his shoulders.
Christ, that woman could break rocks with her bare hands.
He toppled as she twisted aside and froze, a splendid Valkyrie, in a dazzle oflight as sharp and sudden as a static spark. Neither of the man-lookingfigures Kelly could see as his shoulder hit the ground had moved, though theone to the truck's side began to hiss and shimmer again at the touch ofraindrops. One or both must have shot the woman, but Kelly could only deducethat from the result. He reached back toward the Smith and Wesson he had 
refused to draw a moment before. 
"Please, Mr. Kelly," begged the radio voice. "She is not harmed. Please, wemust speak with you while there may be time."
"Christ," muttered Tom Kelly as mottlings of shadow and light from the roadwayquivered across the fully-human face of one of the strangers. The rain on hisown face and forehead felt good because it both cooled and dampened skin whichfelt as though it had been parching in an oven. He had feeling throughout hisbody again, an ache radiating from his groin in steady pulses with randomflashes of pain to add piquancy.
Gisela'd done her usual professional job. If this trio didn't want to shoothim the way they had her, they'd have plenty of time to stomp Kelly down intothe muddy gravel before he, in his present state, could clear the snubbie.
Hell, he'd needed to talk with 'em anyway. And if Gisela was as dead as herboneless sprawl implied - there'd be a time to fix that, the only way a manlike Tom Kelly knew to fix things. . . .
"The neuroreceptors of her brain are blocked," said the voice of the stranger,
who/which might either be reading Kelly's mind in good truth or making ashrewd estimate on the basis of file data. They must have files, or theywouldn't have found reason to track him across Anatolia; though the Lord knewwhat those reasons might be.
"She will be well in half an hour," the central stranger continued as Kellyrose carefully to his feet. The other two figures in dark overcoats, darkeningfurther as the rain wet them, minced in slowly from either side. "You mustbelieve me, Thomas Kelly, that we will not kill even to save a world. Even tosave your world from itself."
"Keep away from her," Kelly grunted to the silent figures as they began tokneel beside Gisela. He stepped to her, steady enough, though the muscles inhis thighs trembled as if with extreme fatigue.
The stranger across from him paused, looking up at the veteran with a blandface that almost certainly emanated from the medallion on the figure's chest.
Kelly shouldered the other one aside. He could feel the give of bones andjoints that were as inhuman as the corpse in the freezer back on Fort Meade.
"Alive, is she?" Kelly said as he, himself, knelt, and touched the woman'sthroat. The carotid pulse was as strong and steady as Kelly's own.
"Oh, boy," the veteran said. He rocked back on his haunches and exhaled thebreath which he had not realized he was holding. Gisela's throat felt warm,
not hot, and that reminded him that his own bare skin was chilled by the rain.
The woman needed to be under shelter, or her final state would be the same asif the - hell, the aliens - had used .45's.
"Look - " Kelly began.
The two silent aliens knelt again, reaching for the woman, and the radio'sspeaker said, "We will carry her within the office of her organization." Thecentral alien pointed with his whole arm past the hedge and road to the two-
and three-story building facing the walls.
"There is no one there now," the alien voice continued as the figure refoldedhis arm against his chest with a motion which was grossly wrong for what heappeared to be. "But she will be warm and dry and recover quickly."
Kelly frowned, but he stepped back to allow the other pair to lift Gisela.
They were lighter than men and Kelly had assumed they were frail, but they 


handled the dancer's solid form as easily as two humans of the veteran's ownbuild could have done. 
"Another time," the alien voice said as his companions walked the womanthrough a gap in the hedge like men with a friend who had drunk herselfinsensible, "we would have held her as we hold others of her organization, sothat they could not execute their Plan. But we did not hold enough of them.
Now it is too late for prevention, Thomas Kelly, and the cure is somethingthat we cannot do for you.
"We cannot kill, even to save a world."
Tom Kelly stretched his arms out stiffly behind him and bent forward, thenback, from the waist. His head spun in slow circles when he lowered it, andthe throb radiating from his groin picked up its tempo when the motion of historso thrust his hips out. For all that, he felt better for the exercise; felthuman at any rate, and that was an improvement over the way he'd felt sinceGisela punched him in the balls.
Since he thought he saw her killed. No point in kidding himself about what theworst part of the shock had been.
Kelly stepped to the open door of the truck and picked up the radio, shieldingit from the continuing drizzle with the flap of his coat.
"Somebody told you I was the right guy to contract out killing to, did they?"
said Kelly. He was relieved enough that she was alive and he was alive - andfor Chrissake, that somebody saw a way clear of a world disaster that was realclear even without the details - that the implications that he had just madeovert didn't bother him the way they usually did.
Not that it wasn't true. The Lord knew he'd painted his reputation in theblood of more men than Doug and his buddies . . . and women too, bombs weren'treal fussy, and he'd used bombs when they seemed the choice.
The two of them were alone now, Kelly and the alien who talked. The other pairwere jaywalking Gisela across the boulevard; safer, perhaps, than it lookedbecause the traffic was crawling despite being bumper to bumper - but he'd let'em go ahead for lack of a better idea, and he wasn't going to second-guessmatters now. "Do you have a name?" he demanded, wishing that it wasn'training, wishing a lot of things.
"Call me Wun, Mr. Kelly," said the alien through the speaker beneath Kelly'scoat, and the face smiled as a fragment of headlight beam trolled across it.
The 'skin' surface reflected normally, even showing streaks of rain, but Kellyknew from the corpse and the videotape that the perceived features were whollyimmaterial. 
"One as in bir, digit?" Kelly asked, translating the word he understood intoTurkish and raising a single index finger.
"No, Mr. Kelly, more like the Spanish Juan," said the other. "But just Wun.
Are you not comfortable here?" He raised his arm toward the sky. "Should we goinside your vehicle?"
Kelly chopped his hand like a blade in the direction of the ancient walls. Hedidn't feel like putting himself in a metal box, no, but the basalt rampartswere shelter of a sort against both rain and the breeze. He wondered ifMohammed Ayyubi had thought the same thing the night those stones hadbackstopped the bullets which killed him.
"Come on," he said aloud. "Dunno that I'm ever going to be comfortable, but wecan get outa some of the rain."
"The Dienst has taken over your Fortress," Wun said as they walked together,
man and not-man, toward walls that were a stone patchwork of more than athousand years. "They think to rule the Earth, at least to their satisfaction,
because they are invulnerable and have the power to destroy whatever targetsthey may choose."
No sign of bullet pocks on the hard stone, no certain sign in this light atany rate. The rubble and concrete foundations were Roman; the sections of 


large ashlars which sprawled across the fabric like birthmarks were probablyByzantine repairs; and the Turks, both Seljuk and Osmanli, had rebuilt theupper levels, perhaps many times, with squared stones of smaller and lessregular size. The presence of the massive edifice gave Kelly a feeling ofprotection which he knew was specious, but anything to calm his subconsciouswas worthwhile so long as it let his intellect get on with what it needed todo. 
"All right, then," the veteran said, focusing his mind by planting his rightpalm against the wet stone, "it's government level now and I'm tactical. Sohell, it's in somebody else's court, and I don't know that Gisela and herbuddies are much crazier than some of the folk who've had their fingers on thebutton officially."
"It is your business, Mr. Kelly," said Wun. His dark-coated body was almostinvisible, close to the basalt and farther from the light flickering from thecircumferential. Kelly thought the alien was shivering, however.
"Don't tell me my business," the American snapped. "Look, I walked into this,
and if I'd been in time I'd've done something about it, sure. I don't need tobe tasked before I'll blow my nose. But it's gone, fucked - and that's not myproblem."
"The Soviets will not believe the space station has changed hands, Mr. Kelly,"
Wun said with inhumanly-precise enunciation. "They are convinced that theevents of the past hours, including the nuclear destruction of the shuttlelaunching facilities at Luke and Kennedy Space Command bases, are all part ofAmerican policy. When the Dienst presses its demands on Russia by attackingmajor cities in addition to the space launching facilities which have alreadybeen destroyed, the Soviets will react against those they believe to be thetrue aggressors. Your world will survive the result, Mr. Kelly; but yourcivilization will not, and your race may not."
Kelly's mouth opened to repeat that there was nothing he could do about it.
Before he spoke the words, he heard them in his mind, being spoken by everyonehe'd heard say them in the past, every cowardly shit who wouldn't act andwouldn't let Tom Kelly act when something really had to be done.
"Christ," said the veteran, and he took a deep breath. "All right, what is itthat I can do?" 
"You must enter Fortress and destroy it," replied Wun as calmly as if he hadnot considered that Kelly might make any other answer. "We can bring you fromorbit to the structure, but we cannot enter a solid object, and we will nothelp you further in a work of death."
"Christ, you're sweethearts!" Kelly said. "You oughta run for Congress, you'dfit right fuckin' in with the clean-hands crowd."
"We do not have to ask you to understand principles, Mr. Kelly," the aliensaid. "You have principles yourself. They differ from ours; and yours willpermit you to save your world from consequences which could never occur to ourrace. We will not kill." 
"Yeah, sorry," the American said, turning his eyes toward the stone, tracingthe irregular courses upward till they blended with the sky and the rainwashed the embarrassment from his face. They might be crazy, Wun and hisbuddies, but they were crazy in a better way than most anybody else Kellyknew. You had to draw lines, and no damn body else in the world had a right tocomplain about lines you drew and chose to live by.
" 'Fortress' isn't a public relations gag," he said aloud. "If those Nazis'vereally taken it over, then its going to be a bitch to get close withoutgetting blown into dust clouds."
"We can get you to the satellite unnoticed, Thomas Kelly," said Wun. "We cando no more." 
"Guess that oughta be enough," said Kelly, stretching his arms overhead andpulling the wet fingers of one hand against those of the other. He had to 


think that way; he'd have gone off in a shivering funk years ago if he hadn'tbelieved at bottom that he could do any job he was willing to undertake.
The movement of Kelly's body worked the slick metal of the revolver againstthe base of his spine. "Why me?" he demanded flatly, fixing the alien with hiseyes as firmly as he could in the half-light. Now that he'd made his decision,
he had to have the background information that anyone with good sense would'vedemanded earlier. 
"Because of the physical contact," the alien said. His hand mimed a face-
rubbing gesture, and Kelly recalled the way he had touched the corpse of thealien that night on Fort Meade. He'd done that to prove to the Suits that hewasn't afraid - and to himself, that he could do whatever he had to do, evenif he was scared shitless. . . . 
"We could find you then, Mr. Kelly," Wun was saying, "and even before we foundyou, we could begin to speak to you, through your mind. You felt us, surely?
We are not expert on your race's psychology. Though we have observed you for acentury, it is only in the past three years, since you achieved stardrive,
that we have been permitted to interact with you. We still have much tolearn." 
"Stardrive," the American repeated, filing the remainder of the statement tobe considered at some other time. Wun, space travel's something I'm paid toknow about. We're still talking chemical rockets here, unless you mean themonocle ferry - and that's a low-orbit system, pure and simple."
"The researchers at Cambridge University who are responsible for thediscovery," Wun replied, "still think they are working with time travel. Weknow better, however, and that is sufficient for those to whom we must reporton the progress of our oversight. Without that, Mr. Kelly, we could not haveattempted to immobilize the members of the Service; and I could not now betalking to you."
"Okay," said Kelly, pressing his hands firmly against his face, fingertips toforehead. The tight skin over his nose and cheekbones crinkled and lost someof the numbness that the tension and cool rain had brought. His coat wassoaked across the back. "Okay. But you'll have to get me there, all the way. Idoubt I can get outa Diyarbakir the way things are. There'd be too many peopleto convince. Christ, there's like as not a scratch order out on me right now.
And my chances of even getting a message out, much less listened to, when I'min West Bumfuck and there's been nukes going off in ConUS - zip, zed, zero."
He pointed toward the dark sky. "If you need me, Wun, you carry me all the wayin your ship."
"Our ships are not on Earth. We cannot carry you to them as we are carried,
because you - were not there already, Thomas Kelly," the alien said.
Wun was shivering, though his seeming face and bare hands were motionless.
Wun's arms and torso quaked beneath the dark overcoat, however. "Whatevermessage you need to pass, we can pass for you - to anyone, anywhere. For now,
you must move yourself on your own world and from it."
"You did leave a message on my tape," Kelly said "Told me you had to see me orlike that. It wasn't in my head; I was really hearing it through theearphones?"
Wun nodded. "Yes," he said, "of course. We dared not leave a longer messagefor you then until you had seen us in person."
Kelly laughed. "You know," he said, "I was thinking there was no way you'd beable to get into the Tank . . . and maybe there isn't. But if you can punch mymessage through to the heart of the Pentagon, then it's going to save a wholelot of time. Because even if they don't believe me - which they won't, notafter some of what's gone down lately - they'll damn well hop to meet whoevercan play games that way with their codes.
"Come on," he added, striding back toward the truck. "You may not need thiswritten out, but I need paper to compose it. There'll be a destination sheet 


and a clipboard in the pickup, and we'll just use the back of that."
The funny thing was, Kelly thought, that he felt pretty good. Oh, he'd been inbetter physical shape than he was now - but hell, he was functional, and thatwas a long sight better than he'd felt in the recent past. Hurt didn't matter;
he'd been hurt before. 
And he was in the middle of something that was either going to work or itwasn't - but it wouldn't fry its circuits just because the folks he dependedon for support made a policy decision to do something else. He trusted Wun ina way that he had never trusted a human in a suit or an officer's uniform.
Partly, that was crazy; and a gut reaction was, by definition, irrational.
But he could find reason to justify the way he felt. They'd come a very longway to lie to Tom Kelly, if they were lying, and what Wun had just told himabout Fortress was exactly what the veteran had extrapolated from Gisela'swords. 
The aliens didn't have to be altruists - they could want Earth for themselves,
for any damn reason you cared to name. If they managed to save the place froma bunch of Nazis with H-bombs, then what else they wanted could be dealt within its own good time.
And if Tom Kelly could do something to help with the problem, then it wasabout the first time in twenty years he'd been tasked to do something hereally believed in.
It occurred to Kelly that he might simply get lost in the sprawling airbase.
Third TAF was one of the two combat divisions of the Turkish Air Force, andthe bureaucracy at its Diyarbakir headquarters was both extensive andunfamiliar to the American. If all went well, someone in Washington wouldshortly be sending a message about Tom Kelly to someone in Diyarbakir AirDivision. Whom the recipient was going to be, and through what combination ofTurkish, NATO, and American channels the message would be delivered, were bothquestions at whose answer Kelly could not even guess; and that meant that hehadn't the faintest notion as to where on the base he ought to be waiting tobe noticed when the time came. 
The veteran smiled as he approached the main gate of the airbase again,
visualizing the end of the world in nuclear cataclysm while Turks sped throughthe halls and grounds of the great airbase, too intent on what they understoodwere their own duties to pay any attention to the American screaming himselfhoarse. 
Like a lot of things, it didn't cost any more to laugh.
In the hours since Kelly had driven the borrowed pickup out the main gate,
there had been some subtle changes. Instead of a squad on duty to check IDs,
there was a platoon - and the earlier relaxed atmosphere was gone. A barrierof concertina wire on a tube-steel frame had been swung across the road, andbehind it waited an open-topped Cadillac-Gage armored car with an airman readyat the pair of pintle-mounted machineguns.
The guards must have recognized the truck's markings, and a few of themprobably recalled Kelly himself driving away in the vehicle. Whatever word wasout regarding the world situation - nothing on local civilian radio, Kellyknew from sweeping the shortwave and AM band with his portable - it had sureconvinced Third TAF to raise its state of readiness. 
Three airmen and a lieutenant with automatic rifles were waiting outside thebarrier. They ran to the truck from both sides as soon as Kelly stopped, andthe way their guns pointed caused him to get out and remove his card case withslow, nonthreatening motions.
It made his decision as to where to wait relatively easy, however.
While two airmen peered at the - empty - bed of the pickup to make sure thatit was not packed with explosives and acetylene tanks, Kelly handed hisTurkish ID to the lieutenant. 
"Sir," the American said in the officer's own language, "sometime in the next 


-I don't know, it might be a day" - it might be never, but there was no pointin thinking that - "there are going to be orders sent regarding me. Thenthings will have to move very fast. For now, I think it's best that I remainhere at the gate, outside if you prefer. But it is absolutely critical thatthe Officer of the Day and the head of base security both be informedimmediately that I am here, and that I'll stay right here until sent for."
He paused, but before the Turk could frame a reply, Kelly added, "In additionto the name on this card, they may come looking for Thomas Kelly."
Elaine would very likely have been furious had she known Kelly was carryinghis own North Carolina driver's license with him, but there were times yousimply had to have real ID. The Lord only knew which of Kelly's various covernames the Pentagon would reference him under - assuming the message had gottenthrough - but at bottom, they would probably include the real name.
Kelly gave the driver's license to the officer; if it saved only five minutesin the course of the next twenty-four hours, then five minutes could be realimportant.
"One moment, please," the lieutenant said. His lips pursed and he frowned ashe looked at the cards, practicing the unfamiliar names under his breath. Thenhe walked back to the regular guard post, stepping through the narrow gap leftbetween the gate post and the barbed wire barricade.
"Any notion of what's going on?" Kelly said to the airmen, primarily to makeconversation; people don't let their guns point at folks with whom they'reholding a friendly conversation.
"It's a full alert, sir," one of the Turks responded. "They're fueling andarming everything that'll fly."
The lieutenant, watching Kelly through the glass of the guardpost, hung up thephone and barked an unheard order. Six airmen trotted past the officer as hestrode toward Kelly. They grabbed crossbars extending from the concertina wireand began to drag the barricade to one side.
"You may come in, sir," the lieutenant said, a little less dourly hostile thanhe had seemed before. Perhaps he had just been afraid of being chewed out byhis superiors for reporting something nonstandard. Now he handed back the twoidentification cards. "Your pass permits that, and for the rest - it will beas God wills. The Officer of the Day says he will report your presence toGeneral Tergut, as you requested."
"Thank you, Lieutenant," the American said as he got back into the truck. Therain had stopped by the time he made it out of the walled city, but thevehicle's heater had not even begun to dry his soaked clothing. He sneezed ashe put the pickup in gear, wondering whether after everything he had gonethrough he wasn't going to wind up a casualty from pneumonia. Inshallah - asGod wills it. 
That was about as good a philosophy for a soldier as any Kelly had heard. Andright 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 besidewhich he was parked. There were two vehicles speeding toward the gate from theheart of the installation, both of them flashing blue lights and crying outthe hearts of their European-style warning hooters. The road was asphalt-
surfaced, but the vehicles raised plumes of surface dust to reflect theheadlights 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 truckthat his muscles had stiffened. The Turkish lieutenant ran to him, leaving hisrifle behind this time. "Sir!" he shouted to Kelly, "they're sending a car foryou!"
"Thank you, Lieutenant," the veteran said as he twisted some of the rigidityout 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 inIstanbul 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 carriedany distance in it if there were an alternative. A short wheelbase and four-
wheel independent suspension made jeeps marvelously handy; but that also madethem flip and kill hell outa everybody on board when the driver turned sharplyat speed. There was nothing about the way the Hava Polis driver had approachedthe guard post to make Kelly trust his judgment.
The man who jumped from the van was heavyset and wore a US Air Force uniformwith rosettes on the epaulets. In the colored light of the flashers, Kellycould not be certain whether the rank insignia were the gold of a major or alieutenant-colonel's silver. 
"Thomas Kelly?" the Air Force Officer shouted through the chest-crampingracket 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 toIncirlik." 
"Colonel Kelly," said the veteran. "And you can ride in back if you need tocome along, Major Snipes." The name tag over the officer's pocket was clearlyvisible, and he obeyed Kelly without objection.
"Yes?" said the Turkish driver when Kelly slid in beside him. The back doorbanged and latched.
"Take me where we're going," Kelly replied in Turkish, giving the airman alopsided smile.
Grinning back, the Turk hauled the van around in a tight, accelerating turnthat must have spilled the occupants of the side benches in the back onto thefloor and into one another's arms. Kelly, bracing his right palm against thedashboard, smiled broadly.
To the veteran's surprise, the two-vehicle entourage did not halt at one ofthe administration buildings. Instead they sped along access roads to theflight line, passing fuel tankers and firefighting vehicles. Men bustled overeach of the aircraft in open-topped revetments which would be of limitedprotection against parafrags or cluster bombs sown by low-flying attackers.
Or, of course, the nukes that Nazis in orbit could unload here in the eventthey decided it was a good idea.
But that made him think about Gisela, and the blond dancer was one of the lastthings Tom Kelly wanted on his mind right now.
The van's right brakes grabbed as the driver stepped on them hard, making thevehicle shimmy against the simultaneous twist on the steering wheel to swingthem into a revetment. There was already a car there, a Plymouth, and the menwaiting included some in Turkish and American dress uniforms besides those incoveralls servicing a razor-winged TF-104G.
"This one's Kelly!" called Major Snipes, throwing open the back of the vanbefore 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 largeby half. "Who gave us the size?" the captain demanded. "Come on, we'll takehim back and outfit him properly."
"Wait a minute," an American bird colonel said as he grabbed Major Snipes bythe 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 thenow-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 hisright leg into the pressure suit, rotating a half step on the other foot toforestall 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 tobe me if I wasn't?" 
"He is not the man you wish?" asked a Turk with a huge moustache and whatKelly thought were general's insignia. His English was labored rather thanhesitant, suggestive of bricklaying with words.
"Robbie," said Snipes to the colonel, "it's all copacetic. The fat's in thefire now, and the last thing we need is for a review board to decide it wasall the fault of US liaison at Diyarbakir."
"Colonel," Kelly put in more calmly as he checked for torso fasteners, "I'mthe man they're looking for. It's not the usual sort of deal" - he tried onthe helmet which, for a wonder, fitted perfectly - "but it's the deal we'vebeen 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. SometimesKelly found it useful to remember that during the disasters of Ishandhlwanaand of Pearl Harbor, armorers had refused to issue ammunition to the troopsbecause the proper chits had not been signed. The military collected a lot ofpeople to whom order was more important than anything else on Earth. Troublewas, the times you really needed the military, the only thing you could bankon was disorder. 
No bullets. No shouts, in fact, though squabbling in Turkish and Englishcontinued behind him as he strode away.
The TF-104G was a thing of beauty, the two-seat conversion trainermodification of the aircraft which had seduced the top fighter jocks of thefifties and sixties and had killed literally hundreds of their less-skilledbrethren. The F-104 was fast, quick, and maneuverable. It also had the glideangle of a brick and offered its crew no desirable options when the single J79 
turbojet failed on takeoff.
But this was also a situation in which a fast ride was preferable to a safeone. For that matter, the Turks - one of the last major users of the F-104 inseveral variants - hadn't had nearly the problem with crashes that others,
particularly the Luftwaffe, had experienced. West German maintenance wasnotoriously 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 beenhanded this time. 
Turkish ground crewmen helped Kelly up the narrow steps to the rear seat inthe cockpit. They grinned and gestured to point out the warning arrows settingoff the jet intake. The rushing whine of air to the turbine would haveoverwhelmed human speech.
Kelly dumped himself into the seat behind the pilot. He flew enough that hesometimes thought he'd spent five years of his life in airplanes; but he wasstrictly a passenger, with neither knowledge nor interest in the sort of thingthat happened in the cockpit. That included, he began to realize, matters likewhere to put his feet, and how to buckle himself into the ejection seat, whichhe supposed included a parachute.
The pilot - Turkish or American? - didn't care any more about Kelly's problemsthan Kelly would have had their positions been reversed. As soon as thepassenger dropped into the cockpit, the TF-104G's brakes released with a jerkand the aircraft slid out of its revetment on the narrow undercarriagesplaying from its fuselage. The wings were too thin to conceal a tire.
The cockpit canopy closed smoothly, bringing blessed relief from the howl ofthe jet being reflected from the berm. Kelly found the oxygen mask and fittedit while the right brake and the delicate, steerable nosewheel aligned the 


aircraft with the runway. There had been a minimum of rollout; this was acombat installation, not a commercial operation handcuffed by the need toserve 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 pilotwound it out. Then acceleration punched him back into a seat which seemedremarkably uncomfortable.
The hell with the radio, Kelly thought as the needle nose lifted and the Earthfell 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 awaitedhim 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 neverapproached the hundred-percent failure rate that the monocle ferry held todate. 
Knowing that he was still in Turkey, Kelly could have told from the air thatthey were over Incirlik Airbase by the planes deployed on the ground: C-141Starlifters 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 tacticalwings based in Europe. Turkey herself could afford neither the big cargoaircraft nor state-of-the-art fighters like the F-15. Despite that, theperformance of Kelly's pilot and his aging F-104, without notice and on anontasked mission, suggested that the Turkish Air Force would hold up its endjust fine if it came to a crunch.
They touched down firmly, jarring off knots, and the thump and shock thatlifted their nose again startled Kelly until he realized that a drag chute wasdeploying behind them. The F-104 slowed abruptly. Presumably in response toinstructions from the tower, the pilot braked to a near stop and turned onto ataxiway.
As the cockpit canopies began to rise again, the veteran looked to the sideand saw that a car was driving parallel with them, a midsize American stationwagon. 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 wantedfunctional. If they decided to parachute him out over Fort Bliss instead oflanding, he couldn't rightly complain.
Though as long as it'd been since he last jumped, he'd probably wind upcratering the mesquite.
The TF-104 halted in the middle of the taxiway. An American, carefully donninghis saucer hat as he stepped out of the back door of the car, waved to Kellyand shouted something not quite audible. The man's upturned face lookedanxious in the aircraft's clearance lights.
Kelly started to get out and was pulled up short by the feed of his oxygenmask. He unhooked it and swung himself out of the cockpit. He felt as ifsomeone had conducted a search and destroy mission in his sinuses. He couldnot 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 outof the car gave a squawk when Kelly sprawled at his feet, but there was noharm done. 
"Mr. Kelly," said the officer, gripping the veteran by both forearms andlifting, "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 thequickest, simplest way by entering the car as if it were a burrow and he a foxgoing to ground. The greeting officer, another captain, hesitated a momentbefore he ran around to the far door. The driver, watching them in the mirror,
had the car rolling even before the door closed.
"Where am I cleared to this time?" Kelly asked, enunciating carefully. Hestraightened himself in the seat as precisely as if he were a diplomatarriving at a major conference. He wasn't so wrecked that he couldn't act for 


a few minutes like the VIP these people had been led to expect. He didn't knowof any reason why he had to put on a front, but it was cheaper to do so thanto learn later that he should have. 
"Sir, I really don't have that information," the captain replied. "From, ah from 
rumor, I'm not sure that the flight crew does. This flight was originallyheaded for Rome, but that's maybe been changed along with the - the cargo."
They were speeding toward one of the C-141's, whose white-painted uppersurfaces drew a palette of colors from the rising sun and made the gray lowercurves almost disappear. The wings, mounted high so that the main spar did notcut the cabin in half, now drooped under the weight of four big turbofans, butin flight they would flex upward as they lifted the huge mass of the aircraftand cargo.
Kelly was thoroughly familiar with C-141's, the logistics workhorse of theLebanon Involvement. They were aluminum cylinders which hauled cargo very welland very efficiently, so this one was of particular interest to him onlybecause he was apparently making the next stage of his journey on it.
The scene on the pad was a great deal more unusual.
Separated from the aircraft by thirty yards and what looked like a platoon ofAir Police was a huge clot of civilians, women and children. The driver had toswing wide around them in order to approach the plane's lowered tail ramp. Ashe did so, a number of civilians darted from the larger group and blocked thevehicle's path.
The driver swore softly and slammed the transmission into reverse.
A woman struggled up to Kelly's window. Her rage-distorted face might havebeen cute under other circumstances, and the amazing puffiness of her torsowas surely because she was wearing at least six outfits on top of one another.
A child of perhaps three, similarly overdressed, tugged at the tail of thelong cloth coat on top; and because she held an infant in her left arm, shehad to drop her suitcase in order to hammer on the window while she screamed,
"You bastard! You've got to let Dawn and Jeffie aboard! What kind of - "
An airman wearing a helmet instead of a cap caught the woman from behind bywrist and shoulder, dragging her back as the car reversed in a quick arc. Moregrim-faced police spread themselves in a loose barricade against the would-berefugees while the driver accelerated toward the ramp.
"My god," said the captain, "I've never seen anything like that."
"Goddam," said Kelly, trying to mop his forehead and finding that he stillwore the flight helmet.
There were no additional officers waiting for Kelly at the ramp of the C-141.
The captain who had greeted him at the TF-104 now shepherded him onto the rampalone. "Good luck, sir," he said, and offered his hand.
Offhand, Kelly couldn't remember anybody saying that - and sounding like hemeant it - since this business began.
"I appreciate that," the veteran said as they shook hands. "And - folks prettyhigh up" - which described the aliens as well as anything could - "tell meit'll all be fine if I do my job. Which I do."
"Door's lifting," said the loadmaster at the cargo bay's rear control panel,
but his hand did not actually hit the lifter switch until the captain hadsprung back down the ramp. As the ramp started to rise, the loadmaster calleda terse report on his commo helmet, glanced at Kelly, and then looked down thenearly empty cargo bay.
The benches were folded down and locked in place along both windowless sidesof the fuselage. During the Starlifter's usual 'passenger' operation as atroop transport, the broad central aisleway would have been loaded withmunitions and heavy equipment. It was empty now. Beneath one of the benches,
however, was a child's suitcase of pink vinyl.
The loadmaster strode over to the piece of miniature luggage, jerked it fromits partial concealment, and hurled it underhand toward the tail. The suitcase 


bounced from the ramp and out the narrowing gap to the concrete.
The C-141 was already moving, rotating outward in a manner disconcertingbecause nothing outside the cargo bay was visible. Kelly took off the helmet;
he would not need it on this flight. The curving sides and roofline gave himthe feeling of being trapped in a subway tunnel which echoed to the roar of anoncoming train.
"Well, that kid'll need it more'n we will, won't she?" the loadmaster demandedloudly as he walked over to the veteran. He was a burly man, unaffected by themotion of the aircraft through long familiarity.
"Got a problem, friend?" asked Kelly as he sat down on the bench. If anythingdid start, the bulkhead anchoring him would be better than a fair trade-offfor the height advantage that he surrendered.
"You really rate, doncha?" the crewman continued. "Had 'em all aboard, overtwo hundred dependents. Another three minutes and we'd have been wheels-up forRome. Then, bingo! Off-load everybody and prepare to take on a specialpassenger. Not, 'a special passenger and the dependents.' Oh, no. And the oneswho don't move quick enough, there's nightsticks to move 'em along. So my wifeand kids are out there on the fuckin' pad, and you've got the plane toyourself, buddy."
"Think Rome's going to be a great place if they nuke it?" Kelly asked in atone of cool curiosity. His right hand gripped the strap of the helmet, readyto use it as a club if things worked out that way.
"I'd be with them, at least," the loadmaster said harshly.
"There's people who think if I get back to the World quick enough, there won'tbe any more nukes," Kelly snapped in a voice that could have been heard overgunfire. He stood, dropping the helmet because it wasn't going to be needed.
"Who the fuck do you think I am, Sergeant? Some politician running home from ajunket? Don't you want this shit to stop?"
The loadmaster blinked and backed a step. "Oh," he said. "Ah ..."
"Christ, I'm sorry, buddy," Kelly said, looking down as if he wereembarrassed. "Look, I'm really tight. I left some people behind too, and - "
He raised his eyes and met the crewman's in false candor. " - Wasn't a greatplace, you know? Even if this other crap quiets down."
"Ah. . . ." said the crewman. "Aw, hell, we're all jumpy. You know how it is."
He tried out a rather careful smile. "Want to go forward before we lift?"
"Lemme strip this suit off," the veteran answered with an equally abashedsmile, textured for the use. "After we get the wheels up, I'll go say 'hi' . .
. but this is the part of the plane I'm used to."
He grinned, this time genuinely - not that the difference was noticeable.
"Only thing is, it's a lot bigger'n the ones I've had to jump out."
"You bet your ass," the crewman agreed proudly, then reported on his commohelmet as he settled himself in a seat by the tail ramp.
The flight was uneventful. It would have seemed uneventful even if Kelly hadnot spent much of the air time asleep. The crew had a job to do, and they werecruising at twenty knots above normal speed; even with the agreed need forhaste, there was no reasonable way to wring more out of a big bird optimizedto move cargo.
The cockpit windows showed the clouds below or, through the clouds, theMediterranean. The wall of gauges and displays in front of each flightengineer had more potential interest, at least - the possibility that boardswould suddenly glow red and the sea would take on a reality beyond that of abackdrop for the hole the C-141 was punching through the sky.
But sleep was useful, once the demands of socializing had been met. The newrouting was to Torrejeon, just outside Madrid. That could change at anymoment; since this Starlifter was a B model with air refueling capability inaddition to a lengthened fuselage, their final touchdown could be El Paso - ifthe Powers That Be decided. 


Kelly dreamed of Fortress, but not as he had seen it in photographs andartists' renderings. Now there was a trio of saucers tethered near the dockingarea. Their design prevented them from using the airlocks in normal fashion,
but a saucer was still connected to Fortress by a thick umbilicus configuredat its nether end to mate with the station in the same manner as the nose of a 
Space Command transporter.
Fortress showed no sign of the struggle in which it had been captured. Theouter doughnut of raw bauxite and ilmenite from the Moon, the same materialthat was refined and extruded in the solar furnaces with which Fortress built 
itself, was beginning to weather into greater uniformity under the impact ofmicrometeorites and hard radiation. It was not scarred by anything more major,
the high-explosive or even nuclear warheads against which it gave reasonableprotection.
The close-in defense arrays visible from the north pole of the space stationwere empty, the spidery launching frames catching sunlight and shadowing oneanother at unexpected angles. Two of the launchers were missing, sheared downto their bases when their rockets gang-fired.
The space station itself was a dumbbell rotating within the hoop of shieldingmaterial. Each lobe of the station was a short length of cylinder connected bya spoke to the spherical hub. Now the dream-viewpoint shifted, angling acrossthe center of the doughnut toward the windows through which mirrors deflectedsunlight into the living quarters of Fortress. Polished slats repeatedly re-
reflected light while filtering the radiation which would otherwise haveentered through the windows as well. As 
Kelly's mind watched, the trailing end of one of the lobes flew outward inslow motion. The aluminum panels twisted under stress but kept their generalshape and even clung in part to the girders on which they had been hung.
Glass-honeycomb insulation disintegrated, providing a spinning cloud whichmimicked the bloom of white-hot gases to be expected from a normal explosion.
The real blast had been only a small one - strip charges laid along the innerframe of the panel. The difference in pressure between hard vacuum and thepart of the space station which had just been opened to that vacuum wassufficient to void most of the chamber's contents, however. Flimsy furniture,
sheets of paper, and over a hundred living men spewed into space along withthe metal and shredded glass.
Some of the men flapped their arms vigorously, as if they were trying to swimto the hub or the brightly-sunlit saucers docked there. In the event, when afew of them did collide with bracing wires, they spun slowly away; they hadlost the ability to comprehend what might seem a hope of safety, though theystill were not legally dead.
The viewpoint narrowed on the opened chamber itself, though with none of themechanical feeling of a camera being dollied. When a gun fires, some residuesof the reaction remain aswirl in the breech. Similarly, there was a singlehuman figure still drifting in the chamber from which his fellows had beenvoided. At one point he had been trying to grasp the screw latch of theairlock to one of the adjoining compartments. His grip had lost definition,
though it had not wholly relaxed, and now he floated with his fingers hookedinto vain claws. 
The victim had been a stocky man of medium height.
His beard, moustache, and white tunic had been sprayed a brilliant red withblood when air within his body cavity expanded to ram his empty lungs out hismouth and nostrils. Kelly did not recognize the rank insignia on the tunicsleeves, but the SS runes on the collar were unmistakable.
Kelly knew the victim, and that knowledge was not the false assurance of adream. He could not recall the fellow's full name, but he was known as benMajlis, and he had been leader of a squad of Kurds while Operation Birdlikewas up and running. 


The body twitched harshly, mindlessly, not quite close enough to a bulkhead orthe floor for the movement to thrust against something solid. The corneas ofben Majlis's eyes were red with ruptured capillaries, and ice crystals werealready beginning to glitter on them.
One of the hands flopped toward Kelly's point of view, driven by the Kurd'sdying convulsions. As it did so, something touched the veteran's shoulder ingood truth. He leaped up with a cry and a look of horror that drove back theloadmaster who had just awakened Kelly to tell him that the C-141 was makingits final approach to Torrejeon.
The Starlifter's crew greased her in, the instant of touchdown unnoticed untilthe thrust reversers on the big turbo-fans grabbed hold of the air and triedto pull the aircraft backwards. Skill in a fighter meant quickness; skill in atransport was a matter of being smooth, and sliding a hundred and some tonsonto a concrete slab without evident shock was skill indeed. 
"What's the drill from here?" Kelly asked the loadmaster, who now had hishelmet's long cord plugged into a console near one of the forward doors.
Neither of the men in the echoing cargo bay could see anything save thealuminum walls around them, but the crewman was in touch with the flight deckthrough his intercom.
The loadmaster spoke an acknowledgment into the straw-slim microphone wand andstepped closer to Kelly in order to explain without shouting, "We're going totaxi to N-2. There's a bird waiting there for you already."
He paused, then touched the intercom key of his helmet to say, "Gotcha." ToKelly he then went on, smiling, "Seems like you're stepping up in the world,
Colonel Kelly."
"It used to be 'sergent,' and right now it's 'civilian' - whatever I tellpeople that have more use'n I do for brass," the veteran said with a smile ofhis own. "I gonna need the flight suit?" He had surprisingly little stiffnessor specific pain from the battering he'd taken in the past few days, but hefound when he shrugged that his whole body felt as if there were an inch offuzz growing on it.
"On an Airborne Command Post?" the loadmaster said. "Nossir, I don't guess youwill." 
The big crewman paused again, this time in response to memory rather than avoice in his earphones. "Look sir, you were serious about putting a lid onthis? Word is ... word is, they've already pooped a nuke. If they did . . ."
"Thing is" - Kelly frowned as he chose words that could explain things simply

-and hopefully - " 'they' aren't the Reds, not yet. They're a bunch ofterrorists. And I can't do a damn thing for what's gone down already; butyeah, I can put a lid on it."
He grinned a shark's grin. The loadmaster remembered the fight he had tried topick when his passenger came aboard. "I can put some people," Kelly said,
"where they won't be a problem till Judgment Day."
One of the three men waiting in civilian clothes atop the truck-mountedboarding steps was General Redstone. That was good because the other two hadthe look and the size of folks who'd be sent to take Kelly out of play.
If they'd wanted to do that, of course - especially after what had happened atthe landing site near Istanbul - there were going to be more than two guyssent. 
"Christ, that's beautiful," Kelly blurted as he stepped from the Starlifteronto the landing of the boarding stairs.
"Hang on," directed Redstone, and the two - call them attendants - eachgrabbed Kelly firmly with one hand while anchoring themselves to the railingwith the other. "Somebody thought this'd - "
The truck backed away from the C-141 in an arc, then braked sharply enoughthat Kelly gripped one of the attendants and the closest portion of therailing himself. The big men's touch had shocked him, but they had not tried 

to immobilize his hands. The truck accelerated forward, toward the open hatchof the plane that had drawn Kelly's exclamation.
The aircraft was a Boeing 747 which had few external modifications beyond theslight excrescence on the nose for accepting a refueling drogue, and theradome which recapitulated in miniature the bulge of the flight deck on whichit rested. 
Kelly's vision of the Strategic Air Command had been molded by the tired B52D's 
which had flown to Lebanon out of Akrotiri, painted in camouflage colorsand carrying tens of tons of high-explosive bombs under the wings. But anAirborne Command Post was as close to being a showpiece as SAC had available;
and in these days, when budget cutters reasonably suggested the nuclear strikemission be left wholly to Space Command and Fortress, the manned-bomber boysweren't going to miss any opportunity for show.
The big aircraft was painted dazzling white, with a blue accent stripe downthe line of windows from nose to tail. Above the stripe, in Times Romanletters that must have been five feet high, were the words United States ofAmerica. The forward entrance hatch was swung inward, awaiting the motorizedboarding stairs.
"Geez," Kelly muttered, "do they paint 'em like that to make 'em easier totarget on?"
"Maybe somebody told 'em white'd make the damn thing more survivable in a nearnuke," responded Redstone with a grimace of his own. Red hadn't been thesmartest fellow Kelly had met in the service, but his instincts were good andhe'd been willing to go to the wall for his men. How he'd made general was awonder and a half. "Of course," Redstone continued, "that flag on the tail'sgoing to burn seven red stripes right through the control surfaces."
"Purty, though," Kelly observed. He was squinting. Twenty miles an hour seemedplenty fast enough when you hung onto a railing fifteen feet in the air.
Grit was blowing across the field, along with fumes from the big turbofans ofthe aircraft they approached. The odor left no question but that the bird wasburning JP-4 rather than kerosene-based JP-1. The gasoline propellant could beexpected both to significantly increase speed and range, and to turn theaircraft into a huge bomb if it had to make a belly landing.
Well, Kelly's taste had always been for performance over survivability. Hisplans for Fortress didn't strike him as particularly survivable, even ifeverything worked up to specs.
The truck slowed. An attendant in the doorway of the 747 was talking thedriver in. A flat-topped yellow fuel tanker pulled away from the other side ofthe aircraft which it had been topping off. Kelly wondered how long theAirborne Command Post had been idling here, ready to take off as soon as theStarlifter from Incirlik landed its cargo.
"Something you might keep in mind, Kelly," said General Redstone as the truckbegan to nestle the stairs' padded bumpers against the 747, "is that a lot of'em don't like you, and I don't guess anybody believes everything you put inthat cable - me included. But nobody knows what the fuck's going on, either.
If you keep your temper - that's always been the problem, Kelly - and you keepsaying what you say you know . . . then I guess you might get what you say youwant." 
The boarding stairs butted gently against the aircraft. Kelly rocked slightlyand the two attendants released him. " 'I say,' " he quoted with a grin. " 'Isay.' You know me, Red. I say what I mean." He took the precedence the generaloffered with a hand and strode aboard the Airborne Command Post. 
"This way, please," said a female attendant whose dark skirt and blazer lookedlike a uniform, though they had no insignia - military or civilian. Kellyfollowed her, keeping the figure centered in a hallway which seemed extremelydim after the sunblasted concrete of the Spanish airport outside. The corridorwas enclosed by bulkheads to either side, so that none of the light from the 


extensive windows reached it. 
There was a muted sound from the outer hatch as it closed and sealed behind 
them, and all the noises external to the aircraft disappeared.
Offhand, Kelly couldn't think of any group of people with whom he less caredto share a miniature universe than the ones he expected to see in a moment.
"They're here," said the female attendant to the pair of men outside the firstopen door to the right. The guards could have passed for brothers to those whohad received Kelly on the boarding stairs and who now tramped down the hallbehind him. The aircraft was already beginning to trundle forward.
One of the guards turned his head into the room and murmured something. Theother shifted his body slightly to block the doorway, but he focused his eyeswell above Kelly's head so that the action did not become an overt challenge.
"Yes, of course!" snapped a male voice from within, and the guards sprangaside with the suddenness of the Symplegades parting to trap another ship.
Kelly gave the one who had blocked him a wry smile as he passed. Working forfolks who got off by jumping on the hired help wasn't his idea of a real goodtime. By now, at least, they must realize that Tom Kelly wasn't part of thehired help.
The plaque of layered plastic on the door said Briefing Room, and within werethirty upholstered seats facing aft in an arc toward an offset lectern. "Goodmorning, Pierrard," the veteran said to the miasma of pipe smoke which wasidentifiable before the man himself was, one of a score of faces turned towatch over their shoulders and seatbacks as the newcomers arrived. 
"Sit down and strap in, Kelly," directed the white-haired man in the second ofthe five rows of seats. "We're about to take off." He pointed to the trio ofjump seats now folded against the bulkhead behind the lectern.
Kelly slid into the empty seat nearest the door instead. The upholstery andcarpet were royal blue, a shade that reminded the veteran of CongressmanBianci's office. For a moment he felt - not homesick, but nonethelessnostalgic; he didn't really belong in that world, but it had been a good placeto be. 
Redstone, whose seat the agent had probably taken, grimaced and found anotherone by stepping over a naval officer with enough stripes on his sleeves to beat least a captain. "It's no sweat, Red," Kelly called over the rumble of thefour turbofans booting the 747 down the runway on full enriched thrust. "I'mcool, I just like these chairs better."
Everyone waited until the pilot had lifted them without wasting time, thoughwith nothing like the abrupt intent of the Starfighter at Diyarbakir somehours before. It was still a big enough world that traveling across it tookfinite blocks of time. Within the atmosphere, at any rate; the orbital periodof Fortress was ninety-five minutes, plus or minus a few depending on howrecently the engines had been fired to correct for atmospheric friction.
That was the maximum amount of time before any particular point on Earthbecame a potential target for a thermonuclear warhead on an unstoppabletrajectory.
After less than two minutes, despite what it felt like to all those in thebriefing room, the big aircraft's upward lunge reached the point at whichcabin attendants on commercial flights would have begun their spiel aboutcomplimentary beverages. Kelly turned his eyes from the windows, past whichrags of low cloud were tearing, and took a deep breath. He might or might notswitch planes again. Either way, this room and these men - they were all men were 
the last stage of the preliminaries.
"Will somebody tell him to get up there where he belongs?" demanded someone ina peevish voice.
"Bates," said Pierrard in a voice whose volume and clarity suggested the angerbehind it, "we'll proceed more smoothly if only those with business choose tospeak." 


The room paused. Kelly nodded approvingly to the white-haired man, who thencontinued into the silence he had wrought. "How did you manage to insert yourreport that way, Mr. Kelly?"
The veteran laughed. Everyone else in the room was twisted in the bolted-downchairs to see him, save for those in the last row - behind him - who had adirect view of the back of his head. He would've gone to the lectern asdirected except that he had been directed; and besides, it would feel a littletoo much like being a duck in a shooting gallery.
"Oh, that wasn't me," Kelly said, looking down. "NSA's good, but we're notthat good. That was the aliens you sent me to find." It had beendisconcertingly natural for him to verbally put on a uniform again the way hejust had.
There was a ripple of talk, more of it directed at neighbors than at theveteran. Pierrard was giving himself time by lifting his pipe to his lips,
though smoke continued to trickle from the bowl in indication that he was notdrawing on it.
Kelly rose, resting his buttocks on the seat back and curling his right footdirectly beneath his hip to lock him there. "Look," he repeated, "I couldn'thave gotten through any way I know about, not from Diyarbakir, not if I werethe President." 
The veteran's eyes were adjusting to the light and his mind was locking downinto the gears suitable for the present situation. He nodded to a man herecognized from the office of the National Security Advisor - not the Advisorhimself, a political opportunist whose pronouncements always sounded as thoughhe were still a Marine battalion commander. 
"Anyway," Kelly continued, finding that his new perch was less stable than hehad thought - the 747 was still climbing - "the important thing is dealingwith the situation. I can do that with a little cooperation. A lot lesscooperation than it took to put all you people together in one room, believeme." 
Kelly's mind was cataloguing the faces turned awkwardly over their seatstoward him, and he found that he recognized a surprising number of them fromhis years on Capitol Hill. They were not the men who discussed crises on-
camera. They - like Kelly - were the ones who did the groundwork, or the dirtywork, required to solve the real problems.
"What is the situation, in your view, Mr. Kelly?" asked a Space Commandcolonel named Stoddard. Kelly had been on a Tom and Jim' basis with him forover a year, ever since Stoddard became the Command's liaison - lobbyist with 
Congress. Kelly couldn't blame him for not making a big thing about theirassociation just now, when the veteran's status was at best in doubt.
"A small group of Nazis," Kelly said, projecting his voice and his gaze at themen around him with consciousness of the power which knowledge gave him, "andI don't mean Neo-Nazis; these're the real thing, holdouts and their kids.
Anyway, they've taken over Fortress, using trained Kurds as shock troops. Iassume all the station personnel are dead. I know the Kurds have beeneliminated now that their job's done, so there's no possibility of outsiderswithin Fortress being turned, even if you had a way to contact them."
He paused, but added through the first syllables of response, "I'm your way tocontact Fortress, and I've told you how."
"We don't know they're actually Germans because they say they are," said theshorthaired, red-faced man, whom Kelly now recognized as Bates. "Maybe they'reRusskies, maybe they're these aliens you claim you're right about."
"Maybe if you had a brain in your head, Bates," Kelly snapped, "you'd havesome business here." Almost in the same breath, he said, bending towardGeneral Redstone, "I'm sorry, Red, I didn't mean to do that. S'okay now."
"Bates, for god's sake, keep your mouth shut," Pierrard said angrily. Hefollowed it with a spasm of coughing from which spurted pipe smoke that he had 


not exhaled properly before speaking.
"Yeah, they're for real, the Nazis," Kelly said quietly, making amends for hisoutburst. "They call 'emselves the Service, the Dienst, and I guess everybodyhere's data bank's got a megabyte of background on 'em."
He smiled and shook his head ruefully. "You know, they'd be just as harmlessas they look, except they got outa Germany in '45 with a flying saucer" - hespread his hands toward his audience, recognizing the incredulity they must befeeling - "and engineers to build more of the damn things."
"I suggest," said Pierrard, touching the wave of his white hair with thefingers of his left hand, "that for the present we ignore the question ofresponsibility and move on to a discussion of Mr. Kelly's proposal foraction." 
One of the men Kelly remembered from the orderly room at Fort Meade slippedout of the Briefing Room in response to a signal the veteran had not seenPierrard give. Checking on the Dienst, no doubt, through the Airborne CommandPost's shielded data links with every computer bank in the federal government.
The question the old man said he would ignore was obviously one that hadalready been answered to his satisfaction.
Pierrard was a bastard, but Kelly had never assumed he was a stupid bastard.
The fact that the veteran had been met by this particular aircraft and the menaboard it suggested more clearly than Redstone had that a sufficient 'they'were willing to go along with, if not trust, Tom Kelly.
"I was told," Kelly said carefully, "that the ferry pads on both coasts, andthe Russian equivalent at Tyuratam, have all been nuked."
"Who told you?" demanded a man who'd been a GS-16 in Defense when Kelly lasttalked with him. "No information on that subject has been released."
"They'd know at Pirinclik!" someone else suggested excitedly. "Has he beenallowed into the compound at Pirinclik?"
"Look," Kelly shouted, exasperated by men who were stuck with their ownfunctional areas instead of focusing their minds on the real problem. "It wasthe fucking aliens, I told you, the little guys like the one in the freezer atMeade - and it doesn't matter. All it means is, unless you've got another wayto lift me to orbit, I go up on the monocle ferry at Bliss. You got a betterway, let's hear it, because I'm just counting on enough of the bugs to beworked out that it does like it's supposed to one time."
"Yes, well," said Pierrard, meeting the veteran's eyes while his right handplayed with his meerschaum pipe, "there's also the question of who goes up inthe ferry if we do choose that option. There are - "
"That's not a question," said Kelly. "I go."
"There are younger men with better training both in - " Pierrard began.
"God damn it," said the veteran, stepping forward from his perch and leaningtoward Pierrard across the intervening seats and startled men. "Just one timein my life there's going to be something I did that I point to and say I didit; good, bad or indifferent. You chose me. I'm going!"
"We didn't choose you for this, Kelly," said General Redstone, the only man inthe room willing to argue calmly in the face of the veteran's obvious fury.
Kelly took a deep breath. "Sure you did, Red," he replied in a husky, low-
pitched voice as he rubbed his eyes and forehead with both hands. "Sure youdid, even if you didn't know it just then."
"I - " Pierrard said as the stocky agent paused.
"Look," Kelly continued, loudly enough to interrupt but without the anger of amoment before. "Used to be something'd come up and I'd be told, 'Right, butthat's not in your area any more. It's in the hands of the people who takecare of that.' This is what you made my area, folks." He looked grimly aroundthe room. "This is what I've done for you for twenty years. Killing people."
"Not for me, buddy," someone unseen rumbled.
Kelly turned in that direction and smiled. No one else spoke for several 


seconds. 
"The aliens won't take orders from you, Mr. Kelly," said Pierrard, using theword aliens with none of the incredulous hesitancy that had plagued otherswhen they found they had no alternative.
"Won't they, Pierrard?" replied Kelly, continuing to smile as he reachedoverhead and stretched his legs up on tiptoes besides. His fingers couldn'ttouch the ceiling. This was a hell of a big plane, and as steady as a trainthrough the skies besides. "How do you know? You can't even speak with them."
"Do you - " someone began.
"One moment," snapped Pierrard, his eyes meeting Kelly's as the veteranlowered his hands and stood arms akimbo, relaxed in the way a poker playerrelaxes when he has laid down a straight flush to the king.
Pierrard got his moment, got several, while smoke from his pipe wreathed himand the hand with which he stroked his hair seemed as rigid as a claw. "Mr.
Kelly," he said at last, "there are quarters provided for you, and there's alounge. If you'd care to - "
"My room have a shower?" the veteran interrupted.
"Yes." The syllable Pierrard spoke held no emotion, but there was rage in hiseyes to equal that of Kelly a few minutes before.
"You've got my address," Kelly said with a brittle smile.
When Kelly opened the hall door, the two guards snapped to alertness. "Takethis gentleman to room sixteen," called Pierrard from behind Kelly, justbefore the veteran closed the door again.
One of the guards touched the key of his throat mike. "Bev, report to theBriefing Room," came from his lips and was syncopated by the same orderwhispering down the corridor from a speaker forward.
"Christ, people, I can find a room number myself," the agent said with agrimace. He had done so and was opening the door when the earnest-lookingfemale attendant scurried past. High levels of government were the wrongplaces to look for women's liberation. Generals and their civilian equivalentsliked perks to remind them of their power, and chirpy girls in menialpositions were high on their list of requirements.
The room wasn't huge, though it had two windows with a nice view of clouds ahell of a long way down. The fittings were more than comfortable - chair,
writing desk, and a bed which seemed a trifle longer than standard. VIPstended to be men of above-average height, and the Strategic Air Commandcertainly had its share of officers who could not be comfortably fitted intofighter cockpits.
There was the promised shower, not an enormous luxury so far as space went...
but the weight of the water to feed it and the other similar facilities wassomething else again. No wonder the bird in this configuration had an all-upweight of four hundred tons.
The water felt good, as it always did. Soap, dust, body oils, and dried bloodcurled down the drain as a gray slurry. By adjusting the taps as hot as hecould stand it, Kelly was able to knead with his fingertips the injury thatseemed most bothersome: the welt across his right temple where Doug hadslapped him with the submachinegun. The general pain of the hot water providedcover for him to work loose the scabs and get normal circulation flowing.
The pain had another benefit. It made Kelly think of Doug as a figure beatinghim . . . displacing, for the moment, at least, memory of Doug as somethingrecently human, huddled now and forever in a pool of blood and feces becauseTom Kelly had made him that way.
Kelly hadn't locked the door, hadn't even looked to see if there was a lock.
It was no surprise to hear the door open, and a relief but no surprise thatthe intruder - water sprayed toward the bed when Kelly swung open the stall'sfrosted glass door without first closing the faucets - was General Redstone,
rather than six or eight of the husky attendants. 


"Hey, Red," said the veteran, shutting off the water, "good to see you." Whichwas true on a number of levels. 
"I thought you'd, you know, hold it against me I didn't come with you when youleft," Redstone said, settling himself in the swivel chair bolted down infront of the desk. Light gleamed from his bald scalp, and the older man hadgained at least twenty pounds since he had last toured the training campoutside Diyarbakir in a set of khaki desert fatigues.
"Hell, I'd rather have a friend in court than somebody to hold my hand," saidthe agent.
He hadn't left Redstone behind as a friend, exactly. Red was the sort of guywho would sacrifice his firstborn if God in the guise of the US governmentdemanded it. Not that he wouldn't argue about the decision.
But Kelly also knew that Redstone wasn't going to let one of his boys befucked over just because that seemed like a good policy to somebody in a suit.
He would spend Kelly or spend himself; but, like Kelly, only if that wererequired to accomplish the task.
"Well, what they going to go with, Red?" the agent asked as he spilled thecartridges onto the bunk and began to clean the revolver. "Me or nothing?"
"We've got a preliminary report from Istanbul," Redstone said, looking towardthe windows instead of the nude, scarred body of the man who had once servedunder him. "About Blakeley."
"That mean I'm out, then?" Kelly asked in a bantering tone. His handsconcentrated on feeding a corner of the towel into each of the chambers. Hehadn't had a chance to clean the weapon properly since he'd used it on Doug. .
. . 
"Funny world," said Redstone idly. He looked at Kelly. "Convinced some folksyou meant what you said. God knows I'd tried. Means you're on, on your terms.
Nobody had a better plan that didn't include you, and nobody seemed to thinkyou were going to mellow out any time soon."
"Jesus," said Kelly. He sat down on the bed, still holding the towel-wrappedgun but without pretending any longer that it had his attention. Thecartridges rolled down the bedspread and against his right thigh. "Well, atleast they got that'n right."
"Now," said the older man, leaning forward with his hands clasped above hisknees, "are you going off and do it your way, or are you willing to listen toreason on the hardware?" 
Kelly pursed his lips. "I'm willing," he said slowly, "to talk things overwith somebody who knows which end of a gun the bang comes out of ... which" he 
grinned - "is you and nobody else within about seven vertical miles."
"Then take an Ultimax 100 instead," the general said earnestly. "Twelve and ahalf pounds with the hundred-round drum, rate of fire low enough to becontrollable even in light gravity, and absolutely reliable in or out of anatmosphere."
"Sure, nice gun, Red," said Kelly, the individual words agreeable but theimplication a refusal. He resumed the task of cleaning the Smith and Wessonwhile the air and bedspread got on with the business of drying his body. "Butall thumbs'd be mild for the way I'll be, rigged out in a space suit. Amachinegun won't cut it."
"Well, there's been some talk about that ..." said Redstone. Both men wererelaxing now that the conversation had lapsed into routine and minutiae. Thegeneral locked his fingers behind his neck and stretched out his legs,
demonstrating in the process that the chair back reclined. "If you blow eachsegment as you go through, then everybody's on the same footing. You say theyterminated the Kurds, right?"
"Sure." Kelly held the revolver with the cylinder open so that light wasreflected from the recoil plate through the barrel to his eye. "I'm probablyon better'n even terms with each one of the maybe twenty Germans. Not great 


odds, buddy, and I can't watch both directions at once. I need somethingthat'll take 'em out section by section - fast, because it's me that's gottamove to get to the control room. If I wait to blow doors instead of justopening them, they'll sure as shit get around behind and scrag me."
"You'll be awkward as a hog on ice, lugging all that gear, baby." Redstonegrimaced, though his relaxed posture did not change.
"I'll be awkward as hell in a space suit anyway," Kelly agreed with a shrug.
"Red, you got anything thin enough to feed through this bore or do I tear offa bit of the sheet?" 
Redstone fished in his top pocket for a handkerchief. "We can probably huntyou up a proper cleaning kit," he grumbled. "Carry a backup, hey? Those thingsfuck up more ways than a seventeen-year-old kid."
"Thought maybe a shotgun," the veteran agreed, keeping his eyes on the gun.
"Look, Red. You find a way to put a platoon in orbit fast, then we'll do itthat way. Otherwise, this is the choice, and I don't need any shit about it.
I'm right." He glared fiercely at the older man.
"Never said you weren't," Redstone agreed with a shrug. Businesslike again, hewent on, "I'll call in, have 'em cut down a Model 1100 and put a pistol gripon it." 
Kelly cocked his head. "Figured a pump gun from stores," he said. "Why anautoloader?" 
"You figure to have both hands free, Kelly?" the general replied with a grin.
"Besides, it'll function better, especially with you in a suit and likely toshortstroke the slide." He raised his hand. "Don't tell me it wouldn't happento you. It won't happen if you let a gas valve do all the thinking the timesthat you've got other things on your plate."
"Yeah, okay," Kelly said. He began reloading the cylinder of his snubbie.
"Suppose anybody thought to bring me a change of clothes? I didn't think ofit." 
"We'll rustle something up," the general said, evaluating the veteran's bodywith a practiced eye. "You're in pretty good shape, Kelly. Be nice if you werenineteen and still had your experience, but I guess the experience's thechoice." He nodded toward the door, then started to get up. "There's peoplewaiting to brief you on layout and the control sequence as soon as you'reready to hear about that."
"Right," said Kelly. "Find me a pair of slacks at least and send 'em with thebriefing team."
"Right," Redstone agreed, but big hands stayed on the back of the chair, whichhe swiveled in a pair of short, nervous arcs.
"Spit it out, Red," the veteran said sharply, his eyes narrowing. "Hard totell when you'll get a better chance."
"Why'd you blow her that way, Kelly?" Redstone said, each word chipped fromstone. "Elaine, I mean. Why'd you fuck her over?"
"Goddam," Kelly said in surprise. "Red, I didn't know you knew the lady."
"Answer the goddam question," the general whispered.
"Roger," said Kelly coolly. "Because she lied to me, and because she set meup. Any more questions?"
"Goddammit, she didn't set you up!" Redstone burst out. "I heard the fuckingtape! You were supposed to get the kid gloves treatment, and except for thatshithead Blakeley you'd have gotten it!"
He turned toward the wall, and for a moment Kelly thought the older man wasgoing to break a hand trying to punch a hole in the bulkhead. He saggedinstead, bracing himself with his hands flattened on either side of thedoorframe. 
"I'm sorry, Red," Kelly said as calmly as he could. "If I'd known a littlemore, maybe some things I'd have done another way. But I'm not psychic, man."
"Shit, Kelly, shit," General Redstone muttered to the door. He faced the agent 


again. Moments before he had been flushed, but now he looked sallow and veryold. "We all lie," he said. "Sometimes it's hard to draw the line, I guess."
Redstone shook his head violently from side to side, as if to clear it ofsomething clinging. "Sorry," he muttered. "Sorry."
"Red." Kelly waited until the other man met his eyes. "Somebody greasedMohammed Ayyubi in order to get me into this whole thing. I told his brotherI'd even the score." He took a deep breath. "I'm going to, Red. Someday I'lllearn who gave the scratch order, and then I'll handle it. If that's somethingyou need to pass on, then that's how it is."
"Oh, Christ, Kelly," the general said with an operational smile that relaxedthe veteran as no words could have done, "you already took care of that one.
It was Blakeley, and - and it got cleared afterwards because of the other, thefunny gray guy. But that was when they decided that somebody ought to bebrought in over Blakeley to ride herd."
Redstone nodded a period to his thought. Then, in a voice that could have beenTom Kelly's in a similar case, he added, "And if you hadn't nailed him,
soldier, I would've done it myself after the bucket he put - a whole lottapeople in."
He turned quickly, mumbling as he opened the door, "I'll see to your pants."
"Damn, it's bright out there," said Tom Kelly as Redstone slid closed the doorof the van. The latch stuck and the panting general had to bang the door againto jar loose metal covered with El Paso's omnipresent yellow-gray grit. "Iought to eat more carrots."
"It's an old wives' tale that carrots improve vision," said the passenger whohad arrived with the van. They were idling beside the low terminal buildinguntil the rest of the entourage had mounted up. The cavalcade of locallyavailable transportation included a pair of canvas-topped Army three-quartertons. 
At least they'd put Kelly in something air-conditioned, though that wasprobably because he was riding with Pierrard. "Are you having trouble withyour eyes?"
"You're a doctor?" Kelly asked, squinting. The thirtyish man had short hairand a short-sleeved shirt with a tie. 
The car radio sputtered. The driver with a plug earphone turned and said"Sir?" to Pierrard. 
"Drive on," ordered the white-haired man, scowling.
"I'm an MD, if that's what you mean," the passenger said. "Also a PhD. Name'sSuggs." He offered Kelly his hand.
The veteran shook it, saying, "Then you ought to know that carotene helps theeye adapt to rapid changes in light level - which is the only eye problem I'vegot."
Dr. Suggs jumped as though Kelly had hit him with a joy buzzer.
"Kelly, calm down," said General Redstone. "Doctor, you're here to do a quickphysical, not to talk. Why don't you get on with it?"
The landscape beginning to slide past the van's windows was not dissimilar tothat in the vicinity of Diyarbakir, though the mountains in the distance hereseemed neither as extensive nor as high.
"Will you roll up your sleeve, please?" said the doctor distantly as he took asphygmomanometer from his case.
"How tight's the timing?" Kelly asked Redstone. The van rocked more violentlythan the condition of the road seemed to require. The vehicle was loaded wellbelow its normal capacity of nine persons and luggage, so the springing seemedunduly harsh.
"This isn't the time to discuss the situation," Pierrard said in a flat voice.
"It's the goddam time we got," Kelly snapped back as Suggs started to fit therubber cuff on him. "Look" - Kelly waved and the doctor sucked in his lipswith a hiss of anger, poising as if to capture the arm when next it came torest - "you've got a lieutenant colonel driving, for Chrissake. If you'll go 


that far for a secure environment, then use it. Even if you don't like me,
okay?"
The uniformed driver's eyes flickered back in the rearview mirror, though heneither spoke nor turned his head.
Pierrard had taken his unlighted pipe from a side pocket of his suit.
Unexpectedly, he dropped it back and said, "I don't like very many people, Mr.
Kelly, and that has not in general affected my performance."
He smiled, and though the expression itself was forced, the attempt wassignificant. "I think it may be that you don't cringe enough."
"Naw," said the veteran. "When I'm scared, I fly hot. And you scare the crapouta me, buddy, that I'll tell you."
Redstone, seated behind Pierrard and kitty-corner across the van's narrowaisle from Kelly, looked from man to man and squeezed unconsciously againsthis own seatback. 
"The gun in your pocket," said Pierrard, nodding toward the borrowed trousersover which Kelly let the tail of the borrowed shirt hang. "That's the one thatkilled Blakeley?"
"That's the one," Kelly agreed. He kept his hands plainly in sight on the backof his seat and the one in front of him. Suggs, on the other half of thedouble seat, tried again to fit the cuff.
"I assumed so," Pierrard said. "I think I can say that at least we sharecommon emotions, Mr. Kelly, when we're forced to deal with one another."
The old man paused, then went on. "We - the proper parties - are innegotiation with the parties who claim to have captured Fortress."
"Claim?" repeated Kelly, glancing over at Redstone.
"I misspoke, Mr. Kelly," Pierrard said. "Litotes when bluntness would havebeen appropriate. They have accurately targeted and released a number of thenuclear weapons from Fortress, so common sense indicates that they are fullyin control as they claim."
Pierrard's hand began to play with the hidden meerschaum. "They did not," hecontinued, "expect that news of a nuclear attack could be obfuscated; I cannotclaim that it was totally concealed for over a day in both the countries whichwere victimized. There has been a considerable outcry at 'launching disasters'with attendant loss of life ... but the, the 'Aryan Legion,' as they choose tostyle themselves now, has received no publicity. As you can imagine, thecapabilities designed into Fortress do not include general broadcastequipment." He permitted himself a tight smile.
"So you figure they're going to up the stakes with something you can't coverup," Kelly suggested.
"Moscow and Washington, we feared," agreed Pierrard. "Perhaps only Moscow, ifthey are what you tell us, Nazi holdouts . . . but the result will be thesame, since the Soviets can be expected to respond against the presumedperpetrators, the West."
"Yeah, I've heard that estimate already," the veteran agreed, remembering therain-swept walls of Diyarbakir and the thing, Wun, that spoke to him there.
"Shit." He made sure he held the older man's eyes as he added, "How did the X-
ray lasers work?"
Something else he hadn't any business knowing, Kelly thought and Pierrard knewquite well. That one wasn't going to be decoyed into answering a questionwhose premises went beyond anything Kelly was cleared for.
"Perfectly," Pierrard said coolly. "The Soviets attacked with three flights oftwenty missiles apiece. Each salvo was destroyed by a single unit of thedefensive constellation, operating presumably in an automatic mode. We do notknow that the" - he coughed - "Aryan Legion can launch additional defensivesatellites as the normal complement would have done ... but since on the nextpass both the silo farms from which the Soviets launched received multiplebombs from Fortress, neither superpower is likely to proceed further in that 


direction." 
"Yeah, well," Kelly said. He turned to look out the window, although withoutseeing much of the scenery - one-story buildings, mesquite bushes, and dust.
"Yeah. Well, I'll be glad to get it over with myself."
"You can't see out the cockpit windows," said Tom Kelly cautiously. "I can'tsee through the windows."
"Ummm," agreed Desmond, the project scientist who had been the bright spot inKelly's previous visit to the Biggs Field installation. "You're going to haveenough problems, Mr. Kelly, without being cooked by the beams that raise theferry. They're very precisely directed, but both the distances and velocitiesinvolved are considerable and will magnify slight misalignments."
"Check," said Kelly, nodding ruefully. "And we're talking the same wavelengthsas the warming racks at the local hamburger joint. Sorry, should've thought."
The suit - the space suit, though it shocked Kelly to think of it that way was 
bulky and constricting because of its weight and stiffness, though it didnot feel tight. His mind was treating the garment as protective armor ratherthan a burden. That was good in a way, but the suit really was both - and thefact that his subconscious was more concerned about the threat to him than the 
object he had to achieve was more than a little bothersome.
"You won't be able to do anything with the controls anyway." The scientistseemed to think he was offering reassurance. "So it doesn't matter whether ornot you can see."
"Great." 
The makeshift crew vehicle pulled up at the ferry pad.
Well, it wasn't really any different from a night insertion by helicopter; youcouldn't see a damned thing, you couldn't change a thing either, and you hadto trust not only the hardware but the skills of the man in control of it. Onthe plus side, nobody'd be shooting at him on this leg of the operation; liftoff 
would occur while Earth eclipsed Fortress from El Paso. The battle stationwas not a reconnaissance satellite, but there was no point in riskingdisclosure because some Nazi glanced at southwest Texas and wondered what thebright flash was.
Desmond opened the door of the van. This one had been modified by the removalof the three seats across the middle to provide more room for a man wrapped inthe bulk of a space suit with breathing apparatus in place. "I'm sorry," saidthe physicist, "you'll have to walk the remainder of the way. We don't haveproper equipment for this."
Kelly ducked to look out the door at the monocle ferry, over which waited acastered framework meant for the maintenance crews. There were no crew 
accommodations here; all the testing was ground controlled, as this flightwould be as well. "Guess I can make twenty yards," he said, and, when Desmonddid not precede him, he stepped past the physicist onto the ground.
The pad was hexagonal, for no particular reason, and four feet above thesurrounding soil, in higher than most of the dust stinging along on theconstant wind. A tank truck preceded by dust and steaming with the blow-off ofits remaining load of liquid hydrogen drove away, downwind.
Kelly led the scientist to the pad's steps, realizing as he walked that hiscenter of balance was farther back than he was used to. Desmond, who carriedthe helmet, was simply making sure that he was in position to support theveteran if he stumbled backward. The ferry looked larger at each of the sixupward steps. That was reassuring. Though Kelly had been close to the Frisbee-
shaped vehicle before, his mental image throughout the planning was of a tinydisk beneath his seat in the helicopter, preparing to disintegrate as an eventinier speck above him.
"How will you arrange for transfer?" Desmond asked as Kelly reached the top ofthe pad. Several men in coveralls stood beside the ferry, but they wereservice crew rather than a send-off committee. The brass was all in the 


control bunker; there were no choppers orbiting today.
Kelly tried to glance over his shoulder, but the suit got in the way and hisbalance wasn't that good anyway. "Honest to god, I don't know," he calledagainst the force of the breeze. He had no idea of how much the physicist hadbeen told. From the fact that Desmond had scrupulously avoided comment on theattempt, whose risks he knew and for whose failure he would feel responsible,
Kelly assumed that the man must know a great deal.
"Right up here, sir," said a technician, steadying the tube and steel meshservice bridge with one hand and gesturing toward the nearer flight of stepswith the other. "Please don't touch the mirrored surfaces when you step intothe cockpit."
The bridge was two flights of metal steps supporting an angle-iron walkwaythat skimmed the upper surface of the cockpit, either closed or clam-shelledopen as now. The railing appeared to be one-inch ID waterpipe, and the wholeensemble had clearly been built in a base workshop. It was sturdy, functional,
and almost certainly superior to anything General Dynamics would have achievedwith a $350,000 sole-source Space Command contract to the same end. There wereadvantages to being the poor relation.
The upper surfaces of the ferry were dazzling, the structural members evenmore so than the sapphire hexagons that accepted the laser beams. Kelly hadexpected the windows to be bluish, but the segments had only the color of whatthey chanced to be reflecting - the bridge, the pale sky, or the sun like thepoint of a blazing dagger.
"We'd better lock this down," Desmond said, offering the helmet to Kelly.
The agent bowed slightly so that Desmond could fit the helmet instead of justhanding it over. "There's a certain amount of dust on the surface anyway," hesaid without inflection. 
"Yes, the raised platform was only to lessen the accumulation," the physicistagreed as he lowered the helmet, "not to eliminate it." His voice becomingmuffled as the padded thermoplastic slid down over Kelly's ears, he continued,
"It burns off cleanly in the laser flux. We've retrieved enough of the earliertest units to be sure that wasn't the cause of failure." 
The locking cogs began to snap into place around the base of the helmet. Verysoftly, the veteran heard Desmond conclude, "Enough pieces."
There was a crackle in Kelly's ears as the project scientist connected theearphones to the power pack. "Do we have a link?" demanded a compressed voice.
"Dancer One, do you read me? Over."
"Yes," Kelly said as he mounted the steps, bending forward at the waistbecause the base of the helmet cut off his normal downward peripheral vision.
The pure oxygen he was now breathing flooded his sinuses like a seepage of icewater. "Now get off the air. Please."
"Dancer One, are you having difficulties with the boarding bridge? Should weget you some personnel to help? Over."
Kelly paused, found the power connection with his gloved hand, and unpluggedthe radio. Then he resumed trudging to the middle of the walkway where therailing had been cut away. He lowered himself carefully, one leg at a time,
into the cramped cockpit. Where they thought there'd be room for anybody tolend a hand with the process was beyond him. Maybe a gantry, but there weren'tany available on-site.
His position in the saucer was roughly that of an F-16 pilot or a Russian tankdriver: flat on his back with his head raised less than would've been 
comfortable for reading in bed. In the contemplated operational use, therewould have been a condenser screen in front of the pilot and a projectorbetween his knees to throw instrument data onto that screen. 
For this run, the heads-up display had been removed so that the fuel andpressure tanks of Kelly's additional gear could fill the space. More than fillit, as a matter of fact; what would have been a tight fit now nearly required 


a shoehorn. The boarding bridge clattered as a technician and Dr. Desmondclimbed on from opposite ends.
"I'm all right, dammit!" Kelly snapped, his scowl evident through the faceshield, though his words must have been unintelligible.
The physicist nodded approvingly, reached down for the throat of the fueltank, and lifted it the fraction of an inch that permitted Kelly's legs toclear to either side. The veteran sank back thankfully onto the seat, aware ofhis previous tension once he had released it.
The technician began to close half the cockpit cover. His hands were gloved; ahandprint in body oils on the reflective surface would dangerously concentratethe initial laser pulse. Desmond stopped the man, pointed at Kelly's helmet,
and then mimed on his own neck the process of reconnecting the veteran'sradio. It would be next to impossible for Kelly to mate the plugs himself inthe strait cockpit.
Kelly smiled but shook his head, and the doors above shut him into blackness.
Then there was nothing to do save wait; but Tom Kelly, like a leopard, was'very good at waiting for a kill.
Kelly's mind had drifted so that when the monocle ferry took off, itspassenger flashed that he was again riding an armored personnel carrier whichhad just rolled over a mine.
That - the feeling at least - was an apt analogy for the event. The ferrylifted off without the buildup of power inevitable in any fuel-burning system.
The laser flux converted the air trapped between the pad and the mirroredconcavity of the ferry's underside into plasma expanding with a suddennessgreater than the propagation rate of high explosive. Kelly left the ground asif shot from a gun.
The roaring acceleration was so fierce that it trapped the hand which reflextried to thrust down to the shotgun holstered alongside Kelly's right calf.
The ferry shifted to pulsejet mode as soon as the initial blast lifted it fromthe pad. The low-frequency hammering of the chambers firing in quicksuccession, blasting out as plasma air that they had earlier sucked in, sonearly resembled the vibration of a piston engine about to drop a valve thatanticipation kept the veteran rigid for long seconds after g-forces haddecreased to a level against which he could have moved had he continued totry.
The rim of the ferry with the firing chambers spun at high speed around thecockpit at the hub. Kelly had expected to be aware of that gyroscopic motion,
to feel or hear the contact of the bearing surfaces surrounding him. There wasno such vibration, and it was only as he found himself straining to hear thenonexistent that the veteran realized he had not been blown to fragments abovethe Texas desert the way the test units had gone.
Worrying about minutiae was probably the best way available to avoid funkingin the face of real danger.
There was a pause. Thrust was replaced by real gravity: lower than surface-
normal, but genuine enough that Kelly felt himself and the couch on which helay begin to fall backward.
Instinct then told him falsely that there had been a total propulsion failure.
His mind flashed him images of air crashes he had seen, craters rimmed withflesh and metal shredded together like colored tinsel, all lighted by theflare of burning fuel Fuel. 
And the slamming acceleration resumed. The chambers began valving theinternal hydrogen as reaction mass in place of the atmosphere which had becometoo thin to sustain the laser-powered ferry's upward momentum.
This was worse than insertion by parachute - at least Kelly'd done thatbefore. If the Nazis didn't scare him any worse than the manner of thereaching them was doing, he was still going to wind up the mission with whitehair. 


Though that, unlike carrots for the eyes, was wholly myth.
Because operation of the monocle ferry was new to Kelly, the occurrence ofsomething that would have amazed Dr. Desmond did not cause the veteran towonder what was happening. The reaction chambers continued to blast in rapidsuccession, but the feeling of acceleration faded into apparentweightlessness. Only then did the vibration stop, leaving Kelly to think aboutwhen and how Wun and his fellows would reach the ferry.
Whether they would reach the ferry.
And then the cockpit opened, the two halves moving apart as smoothly as ifthey were driven by hydraulic jacks instead of the arms of gray, nakedmonsters like the creature dead at Fort Meade. 
Kelly's first thought was that the pair of aliens stood in hard vacuum, havingsomehow walked to the rising ferry without a ship of their own. He began tolift himself against the cockpit coaming, gripping the metal firmly with histhick gloves for fear of drifting away. There was, to the veteran's surprise weren't 
they in orbit? - gravity after all; a slight fraction of what he wasused to, perhaps a tenth, but enough to orient and anchor Kelly while heuntangled his suited legs.
The monocle ferry floated against light-absorbent blackness that held it assolidly as had Earth gravity and the concrete pad. The aliens who had undoggedthe cockpit had firm footing also, on something invisible a hand's breadthabove the mirrored surface. 
Kelly could see the monocle ferry, his own suited limbs, and the aliensclearly, though without the depth that shadows would have given. There was,
however, no apparent source of light nor any sign of stars, of the Sun, or ofthe Earth, whose sunlit surface should have filled much of the sphericalhorizon at this low altitude. 
The veteran was still supporting himself on the lip of the cockpit. Grimacing,
he took his hand away and found that he did not fall back onto the seat. Hereached down into the cockpit for the equipment he had brought with him,
noticing that he moved without resistance but that, apart from volitionalactions, his body stayed exactly where he had last put it.
"Very well done, Mr. Kelly," said Wun's voice through the helmet earphonesthat Kelly had not reconnected. "How much time do you need before we place youat your Fortress?"
"Wun, can you hear me?" Kelly asked, turning and wondering whether he shouldopen his face shield. The two visible aliens, stepping back on nothing now,
wore no clothing, protective or otherwise.
Wun stood a few yards behind the veteran. Unlike his fellows, he wore abusiness suit and a human face which was at the moment smiling. "Yes," hesaid, his lips in synch with the voice in Kelly's earphones, "very well. Andplease do not open your helmet. It will not be necessary."
"Yeah, right," said Kelly. He pursed his lips. "Wun, where the hell are we?"
"It does what a ship does," said the alien. "Therefore I described it as aship. We will be able to return you to Earth whenever you please now that youhave reached here." 
"Yeah, that's great," said Kelly, checking his equipment. Looked okay; and ifit wasn't, he'd use the shotgun that weighted his right leg. Hell, he'd tearthroats out with his teeth if that was what it took to get the job done.
Or he'd die trying . . . but that would mean he failed, and failure wasn'tacceptable.
"How quick can you get me to Fortress?" the veteran asked, returning to Wun'sinitial question but not answering it until he had further data.
"Momentarily, Thomas Kelly," said the alien, bobbing his head in what waseither an Oriental gesture or something indigenous to his own inhuman species.
"Okay," Kelly said, a place holder while he thought. He met the alien's eyes,
or what passed for eyes in the human simulacrum. "You showed me - the dream, I 


mean - the balance half of the dumbbell was blown open. If that's still thecase, can you land me at that opening instead of the docking hub?"
"Yes," Wun said simply, bobbing again.
"You know - " Kelly began and caught himself. Of course the aliens knew thatthe lobes were spinning around their common center. If Wun said they couldland him there, that meant they would match velocities and land him there.
Now that he was within the alien 'ship,' he could understand Wun's confidenceat being able to avoid the radars and X-ray lasers guarding the space station.
Previously, he had taken the alien's word for that simply because there wasn'ta damn thing to be done if Wun was talking through his hat.
The Nazis had probably achieved surprise by approaching in a wholly-unexpectedtrajectory, claiming to be from the American lunar base when they were finallychallenged - and having only a minimal German crew with the Kurdish shocktroops aboard the leading saucers, the ones that would take the salvos ofFortress's close-in defenses. Even so, the highest leaders of the Dienst wouldhave waited well apart from the attack, in Antarctica or on the Moon, untilthe issue was decided. 
"Okay," said Kelly again, hefting his gear. "Gimme a hand with this. It's beenmodified to strap on me, but the suit doesn't bend so well I can even get thestraps over my shoulders myself."
He was starting to breathe fast. Hell, he'd hyperventilate on oxygen if hedidn't watch out. "And then," the veteran concluded, "you set me aboardFortress. And keep your fingers crossed."
Between the air supply on his back and the weapons pack slung across hischest, Tom Kelly looked like a truckload of bottles mounted on legs. The bulkfelt friendly, though, even without the weight that should have accompaniedit. 
The thing that nobody who directed war movies understood - and why shouldthey? It would have come as news to rear echelons in all the various armies aswell - was that the guys at the sharp end carried it all on their backs.
The irreducible minimum for life in a combat zone was water, arms andmunitions, and food. In most environments, heavy clothing or shelter had to befactored in as well; exposure in a hilltop trench would kill you just as deadas a bullet. 
Helicopters were fine, but they weren't going to land while you lay baking ona bare hillside traversed by enemy guns; so you carried water in gallons, notquarts, and it was life itself. If you ran out of ammo, they'd cut you apartwith split bamboo if that was what they had ... so you carried extrabandoliers and extra grenades, and a pistol of your own because the rifle youwere issued was going to jam at the worst possible time, no matter whodesigned it or how hard you tried to keep it clean.
Besides that, you carried a belt of ammo for one of the overburdenedmachinegunners or a trio of shells for the poor bastard with the mortar tubeon his back. You were all in it together; and besides, when the shit hit thefan you were going to need heavy-weapons support.
And the chances were that, if you were really trying to get the jump on theelusive other side, you had a case of rations to hump with you as well. Everytime a resupply bird whop-whopped to you across hostile terrain, it fingeredyou for the enemy and guaranteed that engagement would be on the enemy'sterms. 
So you didn't move very fast, but you moved, and you did your job of kickingbutt while folks in strack uniforms crayoned little boxes and arrows onacetate-covered maps, learnedly discussing your location. That was the way theworld worked; and that was why Tom Kelly felt subconsciously better for theequipment slung on his body as he shuffled into combat.
"All right," Kelly said with his shotgun drawn in his right hand and his leftextended to grasp the first hold chance offered. Recoil from the charge of 


buckshot would accelerate the veteran right out of business if he hadn'tanchored himself before he fired. Not that there was supposed to be anybody inthis half of Fortress. 
"Just walk forward, Mr. Kelly," said Wun's voice, "as if it were a beadedcurtain." 
There wasn't supposed to be a gang of Nazis in control of Fortress, period if 
you were going to get hung up on supposed-to-bes.
"Right," said Tom Kelly, shifting his weight and stepping through a wall thatwas nothing, not even color, into Fortress,
The alien ship - the place, if even that did not imply too much - from whichKelly stepped could be seen only as an absence of the things which should havebeen visible behind it, and even that only in a seven-foot disk withoutdiscernible thickness. The disk, which could only be the point of impingementbetween the universe which Kelly knew and wherever the hell the aliens were,
rotated at the same speed as the space station, so that the veteran had notexpected to notice motion as he stepped aboard Fortress.
He had forgotten the shielding doughnut of lunar slag within which the twolobes of the dumbbell spun at a relative velocity of almost two hundred milesan hour. The gap between the portal and the space station was only a fewinches wide, but that was enough to give Kelly the impression that he waswatching a gravel road through the rusted-out floorboards of a speeding car.
This job was assuredly finding unique ways to give him the willies.
The first thing he noticed when his feet hit the bare aluminum planking of thedumbbell's floor was that he had weight again, real weight, although not quitethe load that he would have been carrying in full Earth gravity. Fortress spunat a rate which gave it approximately .8 g's at the floor level of eitherdumbbell. The arms revolved at nearly two revolutions per minute, fast enoughto displace a dropping object several inches from where it would have fallenunder the pull of gravity instead of centrifugal force. It would play hellwith marksmanship also, but Kelly with his gloves and helmet hadn't the leastchance of target accuracy anyway.
The corpse in the SS uniform lay exactly where it had in Kelly's dream.
The chamber was brightly illuminated by sunlight reflected through the solarpanels above. Where it fell on the dead Kurd, his skin appeared shrunken anddarker than it had been during life - a shade close to that of waxed mahogany.
One outflung hand was shaded by a structural member, however, and it gleamedwith a tracery of hoarfrost. Ice was crystallizing from the corpse's bodyfluids and from there subliming into vacuum, leaving behind the rind of a manthat would not age or spoil if it lay here until the heat death of theuniverse. 
Perhaps houris were ministering to ben Majlis's soul in Paradise. Ben Majlisdeserved that as much as any soldier did; and as little.
The next part was tricky. Kelly stepped past ben Majlis's body to reach thedoor the Kurd had tried to open. The doors of Fortress did not lock, but itwas possible that the Nazis had welded this one shut before blowing theirKurdish cannon fodder into the void at the end of their perceived usefulness.
If the door was welded, Kelly would have to punch his entrance withexplosives, and that was almost certain to warn those who had taken over thestation. 
Awkward because of his glove and the fact he was using only his left hand on amechanism meant for two, Kelly rotated the large aluminum wheel that latchedthe door between this compartment and the remainder of Fortress. The dogsfreed with no more than the hesitation to be expected when plates of aluminumare left in contact long enough for their oxide coatings to creep together.
The agent pulled. Nothing gave. His lips curled to rip out a curse; and as hereached back for the self-adhesive strip charge hanging in a roll from hisleft hip, he noticed that the panel was beveled to open away from him instead 


of toward him as the plans and instructor on the Airborne Command Post hadassured him. Somebody had misread the specs, or else the construction crew hadreasonably decided that it didn't matter a hoot in hell which way they hungthe doors so long as the seal was good.
Kelly hit the panel with a shoulder backed with all his mass and that of theequipment he carried. The seal popped enough to spray air from around half thecircumference. Then the door opened fully, and the veteran lurched insidebehind his shotgun.
The air that escaped around Kelly scattered and softened the light which untilthen had lain flat on the panel of aluminum/ceramic fiber sandwich. It ruffledthe sleeve of ben Majlis's uniform as it surged past, but it lacked the forceand volume that would have been required to eject the corpse from the openchamber. 
As soon as he was inside the undamaged compartment, Kelly thrust the door shutand fell to his knees with the ill-controlled effort. Despite the air that hadpuffed into the void, the residual pressure within the compartment slammed thedoor firmly against the seals.
This compartment was about as empty as the one whose wall had been blown away.
It had attachment points up and down both long walls, but nothing was slungfrom them and there were no bodies on the floor. The vertical lighting diddisplay a line of oval punctures stitched at chest height across one wall:
bullet holes punched at an angle through the metal facing but swallowedharmlessly by the glass core - all save one which was covered by a piece ofSpeedtape. Somebody from the original complement of Fortress had made it thisfar; and then, no doubt, made it into vacuum as just another body, shortly tobe followed by the Kurds who had gunned him down.
And now it was the turn of the Nazis. 
The atmosphere-exchange vents which had swung closed when air surged throughthe open door had reopened when the pressure drop ceased, bringing the chamberback in balance with the remainder of the space station. Kelly turned theinner door wheel to lock the dogs home, keeping his eyes and gun on the doorat the far end of the chamber. 
The quantity of air lost when Kelly entered the space station had probablyregistered somewhere; but since the 'leak' had shut off immediately, the newowners of Fortress would probably not notice anything amiss. The pointedshotgun was cheap insurance, however . . . and by the time Kelly had finishedlatching the door, he was sure that the chamber's oxygen level had returnedwhat was normal for Fortress, a partial pressure equal to that of Earth at sealevel, although the quantity of nitrogen in the atmosphere was only half thatof Earth by unit volume.
With the atmosphere back to normal, Kelly could unlimber the flamethrower hehad brought as his primary weapon.
The two cross-connected napalm tanks and the smaller air bottle whichpressurized them weighed almost fifty pounds here, even though all wereconstructed of aluminum. The flame gun itself had a pistolgrip with a bartrigger for the fuel valve, easily grasped and used despite Kelly's protectiveclothing. The ignition lever just behind the nozzle was of similar handy size.
The veteran went to the far end of the compartment and twisted the latch wheelof the door which would be, according to the plans, the central one of thefive in this lobe of the dumbbell. Then, with his hands on both controls ofthe flame gun, he kicked the panel open.
The third compartment was stacked with crated supplies, primarily foodstuffs,
and one cage of the dual elevators waited beside the helical staircase whichalso led toward the hub. There was nothing alive to see Kelly burst throughthe doorway.
Each of the elevator shafts was fifteen feet in diameter, large enough tohandle any cargo which could be ferried to orbit on existing hardware. The 


elevators' size had determined the thickness of the spokes connecting thelobes of the dumbbell to the hub, since strength requirements could have beenmet by spokes thinner than the thirty-five feet or so of the presentstructure. 
The elevators were intended to move simultaneously and in opposite directions,
one cage rising as the other fell, though in an emergency the pair could bedecoupled. As a further preparation for emergency, stairs were built into partof the spoke diameter left over when the elevator shafts were laid out, and itwas this staircase by which Kelly had intended to cross to the hub.
Using the elevator that gaped like a holding cell would be crazy, Kellythought as he shuffled to the stairs. With one hand on the railing to keepfrom overbalancing, he bent backwards to look up the helical staircase. Dabsof light blurred like beads on a string on the steps and the closed elevatorshafts beside which the steps proceeded upward. From the bottom they seemed aninterminable escalade. 
Hell, he'd take the elevator. If he weren't crazy, he'd have stayed home.
Kelly hadn't been briefed on the elevators, but the controls could scarcelyhave been simpler. The door was a section of the cage's cylindrical wall. Itslid around on rollered tracks at top and bottom when Kelly pulled at itsstaple-shaped handle. The door did not latch, nor did there appear to be anyinterlock between it and the elevator control. 
After considering the situation for a moment, Kelly slid the door open again,
faced it, and prodded the single palm-sized button on the cage wall with themuzzle of the flame gun. Nothing happened for long enough that the veteranreached for the door handle again, convinced that he must have been wrongabout the interlock. The cage staggered into upward motion before his armcompleted its motion. There was simply a delay built into its operation,
probably tied to a warning signal in the other elevator, which would start atthe same time. 
That might or might not be important. Holding the flame gun in a two-handedgrip, Kelly grinned toward the elevator shaft that slid past his open door.
He did not see the metal sheathing, however. His mind was trying to imaginethe face of the next person it would direct the veteran's hands to kill. Overthe years, he had come surprisingly close a number of times. . . .
The elevator shaft was almost nine hundred feet high-long, in a manner ofspeaking, because the cage ceased to go 'up' as it neared the hub and theeffect of centrifugal force lessened. The drive was hydraulic and very smoothafter the initial jerk as the pumps cut in. As the impellers pressurized thecolumn to raise the cage in which Kelly rode, they drew a partial vacuum inthe other column to drag the cage down from hub level. Ordinary cableoperation would not work in the absence of true gravity, and a cogged-railsystem like that of some mountain railways would have put unbalanced stresseson the spokes, whose thickness and mass would have had to be greatly increasedto avoid warping.
The portion of the design that was critical at the moment was the fact thatthe pumps were in the lobe, not at the hub, and that the elevator's operationwas therefore effectively silent at the inner end. It didn't mean that theapproaching cage would not be noticed; but at least there would be nosqualling take-up spool to rivet the attention of all those in the hub on theelevator shaft. 
Kelly's hands were clammy, though his gloves would keep them from slipping onthe triggers of the flame gun. This wasn't like Istanbul, where he was in toodeep too quickly to think. Three hundred yards, three football fields end toend, with the cage moving at the speed of a man walking fast. Plenty of timeto review the faces of the men you'd already killed - only the ones you'dreally seen, not the lumps sprawled like piles of laundry on the ground you'draked. . . . 


Some people had nightmares about the times they'd almost bought the farmthemselves. Kelly saw instead faces distorted by pain or rage or the shockwaves of the bullet already splashing flesh to the side. He was as likely toawaken screaming as those who feared their own death; and he was surely aslikely to slug his brain with alcohol to blur the memories he knew it couldnot erase. 
But it was the only thing Tom Kelly did that his gut knew he could win at, andhe was only really alive during those rare moments that he was winning.
The edge of the spherical hub began to rotate past the open door of the cage.
A gray-haired woman in a skirt and bemedaled jacket glanced over her shouldertoward the cage. Kelly squeezed the valve lever in the pistol grip and, as thenozzle began to buck, fired an ignition cartridge with the lever under hisleft hand. 
Recoil from Kelly's shot, a five-pound stream of napalm, thrust him backagainst the wall of the elevator cage, but that was of no significance to theeffect of the short burst. The veteran had only a momentary glimpse past theuniformed woman before his flame obliterated the scene, but there were atleast two dozen figures in the center of the hub. They all wore formaluniforms and were attempting to stand braced in formation, despite thetendency to float in the absence of gravity.
Kelly's flame devoured them. The effect of his weapon under these conditionswas beyond anything he had seen or dreamed of on Earth.
The compressed air tank could send the jet of fuel fifty yards, even withgravity to pull it down. Here it easily splashed the thickened gasoline offthe far side of the hub, barely a hundred feet from the weapon. The loweredair pressure, half that of Earth, combined with the high relative oxygen levelto turn what would have been a narrow jet of flame into a fireball whichexploded across the open area like the flame-front filling the cylinder of agasoline engine on the power stroke.
The gush of orange blinded Kelly and kicked him back against the wall fromwhich he had begun to recoil from the thrust of the napalm itself. The suit hewore was designed to protect its wearer against the unshielded power of theSun and insulate him against the cold of objects which had radiated all theirheat into the insatiable black maw of vacuum. Its design parameters weresufficient to shield him here against the second of ravenous flame he hadreleased. Blinking and wishing he had flipped down the sunshield over hisfaceplate before he fired, Kelly thrust himself off the wall of the stationaryelevator and into the hub proper.
The great domed room was filled with violent motion. Smoke and occasionalbeads of napalm still afire swirled in the shock waves rebounding from thecurved walls. 
The men and women who had shared the room with the fireball cavorted now like 
gobbets spewed from a Roman candle. Their hair and uniforms blazed, fanned bythe screaming, frantic efforts of the victims to extinguish them. Nazis,
blinded as their eyeballs bubbled, collided with one another and sailed offacross the dome on random courses, pinwheeling slowly.
Slender poles were set every twenty feet or so in the floor and walls of theroom to give purchase to those who, like Kelly at present, were driftingwithout adequate control. The veteran snagged one of the wands in the crook ofhis left arm. He locked his body against it to kill the spin he had been givenby the elevator cage which rotated with the spoke. When he had anchoredhimself, he was able to survey the room and the possible threats it held.
The bodies, some corpses and some still in the process of dying, which driftedlike lazy blowflies over carrion, were no danger to anyone. A touch on theback of Kelly's leg caused him to twist in panic, cursing the way the helmetlimited his peripheral vision. Something smoldering had brushed him,
surrounded by a mist of blood from lungs which had hemorrhaged when they 


sucked in flame. 
Here in the hub there was a walkway seven feet wide at the point the spokesmated with it and the elevators debouched. 
The plane of the walkway was continued by solid flooring across the hub, sothat the sphere was separated into slightly unequal volumes. The larger onewas the open, northern portion which served for zero-gravity transport betweenthe lobes and from them through the docking module to the rest of theuniverse. Beneath the flooring, the other moiety of the hub was given over tothe controls which ruled both the defensive array and the three thousandfusion warheads waiting for the command that would trip their retro rockets toset them on the path to reentry.
The elevators to the other lobe of the dumbbell were not moving, and thecircular doorway to the control section was closed and flush with the flooracross which Kelly's boots floated. The portal to the docking module abovehim, however, at the north pole, was sphinctering open. Keeping the polewithin the circle of his arms, Kelly leaned backward and aimed the flame guntoward the opening portal.
The recoil of two gallons of thickened gasoline shoved him down against thefloor this time, but the pole anchored him well enough to send most of thethree-second burst into the docking module. Ammunition carried by some of themen inside blew up with a violence that sprayed bits of metal, plastic, andbodies down into the dome. 
Only after the explosion did it occur to Kelly to wonder whose arrival hadcaused the personnel who had conquered Fortress to draw themselves up forinspection. Well, it didn't matter now.
The second jet of flame, though of longer duration than the first, had a morelimited effect because the chamber's oxygen had been depleted faster than theventilation system could replenish it. Napalm spluttered, each drop wrapped ina cloud of black smoke as it drifted lazily back toward Kelly.
It was time to move anyway. He dropped the flame gun and let it trail behindhim from its hose as he thrust himself toward the control room door. 
The doorway was surrounded by a waist-high trio of inverted U's made ofaluminum girder. There was room for a man, even suited and laden as Tom Kellywas, to walk between each adjacent pair, but the U's provided not onlyhandholds the way the wands did but also protection for the doorway in theevent that any high-inertia object sailed down from the docking module.
Kelly braked himself left-handed, tensing his muscles fiercely to halt hisconsiderable mass without using his gun hand as well. The trigger guard of hisshotgun had been cut away so that he could use the weapon with gloves. He wasby no means certain that his motor control in his present garb was fine enoughthat he could count on not putting a charge of shot god knew where.
He might well need all five of the rounds in the gun.
The door handle was a flat semicircle that the veteran had to flip up beforehe could turn it. The men who briefed him on the Airborne Command Post assured 
him there was no locking mechanism, but that didn't mean the Nazis hadn'twelded a bolt in place after they took over. There was the explosive tape ifthey had, but The 
handle turned. Kelly swung the door up, gripping a stanchion between hisbooted feet so that he could point the shotgun muzzle down the opening withhis right hand.
If the job Kelly set himself had been to clear Fortress of the Nazis who hadcaptured it, he would have squirted his remaining gallon of napalm into thecontrol room before he went in himself with the shotgun. Some of the menarguing on the Airborne Command Post had considered that at least the mostdesirable option.
The trouble was that the Soviets, driven to the wall by the fact of Fortress,
had almost certainly been pushed beyond that point when the weapon was 


actually used against them. If something very final did not convince Moscow ofAmerica's good faith, the Soviets would themselves precipitate the holocaustthey assumed was certain in any event.
And a final, unequivocal act of good faith meant that the controls had to beintact. 
Kelly went through the doorway, swinging the panel closed behind him againstthe rain of napalm - though most of the droplets had sputtered to expandingglobes of soot by now. He expected someone to meet him in the enclosed hallway

-a squad of aroused gunmen at worst, at best a trembling technician left onwatch while the ceremony went on above. But there was no one in the hall, andno one in the computer rooms past which the veteran drifted, their cryoniccircuitry made practicable by radiation through heat exchangers on the shadedsurface of the station. 
Even the control room itself, at Fortress's south pole, was empty, though thedefensive array was live and programmed, according to its warning lights, forautomatic engagement.
He couldn't possibly have been the one who had been arriving? Christ, he'dhave been almost a century old. Though in a low-gravity environment like theMoon . . . 
It didn't matter. There was a job to do.
The control room of Fortress was designed to have three officers on duty atall times. Under full War Emergency Orders any two of the consoles could beslaved to the third - with an appropriate accompaniment of lights and sirens.
The arrangement was a concession to the paired facts that nobody in his rightmind wanted a single individual to have the end of the world under hisfingertip - and that if Fortress really had to be used, there wasn't going tobe time to screw around with authorization and confirmation codes. 
The Nazis had, as expected, linked the consoles already.
Kelly unstrapped the flamethrower and settled himself into the seat at themaster unit, drawing himself down by chair arms deliberately set wide enoughto fit a man in a space suit. There was a palm latch that would have permittedKelly to move the back cushion to clear his life-support package. Rather thanfool with nonessentials, he scrunched forward, aimed the waiting light pen atthe screen, and began to press the large buttons.
Kelly was not trained to operate the console, to understand the steps of whathe was doing. There had been neither time nor need for that aboard theAirborne Command Post. This was rote memory, the same sort of learning thatpermitted his fingers to strip and reassemble a fifty-caliber machinegun inthe dark. 
There were twelve weapons in the first rota which the Nazis had punched up onthe screen. Their targets were given as twelve-digit numbers, not names - zipcodes to hell. Warhead data appeared on the line beneath each targetdesignator. The first target was selected for a 1.1 megaton warhead. Ratherthan change those parameters, Kelly flashed his light pen to target two,
already set for a 5 megaton weapon, and engaged the launch sequence with thebutton whose cage was already unlocked.
When the launch button was pressed the first time, the printing on the screenswitched from green-on-white to black-on-yellow. All data for the otherweapons in the rota shrank down into a sidebar in the left corner, while tenadditional data lines for the selected target appeared in large print. Ablack-on-red engagement clock began to run down from 432 in the upper leftcorner. 
Kelly drew the light pen down the screen to the seventh data line, time delay,
and pressed the cancel button. The number 971 blinked to yellow-on-black.
Kelly keyed in the digit one, bending awkwardly to see the alphanumeric padthrough the curve of his faceplate. He palmed the Execute key.
A gong went off loudly enough that Kelly heard and felt it through his suit. 

The top two inches of the screen pulsed Invalid Command in blue and yellow.
The engagement clock continued to run down, but the top half of its digitschanged from red to blue. Kelly hit the Execute button again. The data linechanged from 791 to 1, and the visual and aural alarms ceased.
The veteran's hand reached for the Launch button to confirm. He was warned 
that something was happening behind him, not by the sound but rather becausewhen the door to the north section of the hub opened it reflected a shimmer oflight across the console at which Kelly was working.
Reflex sent his hand to his gun instead of completing the motion it hadstarted; instinct wrapped his gloved fingers around the butt of the weapon hehad laid across his lap, though he could neither see nor feel it, garbed as hewas. He twisted in the seat. 
Three men, all of them wearing what looked more like aircraft pressure suitsthan anything intended for hard vacuum, were groping hand over hand down thepassageway, past the computer rooms. Kelly fired before he could see whetheror not the newcomers were armed. He had to aim overhead, and, even thoughgravity was not a factor, the awkwardness of the position made the fact thathis buckshot missed almost inevitable. 
The newcomers were in straggling echelon across the width of the passage, soone pellet glancing from the wall paneling gouged its way across the flank ofthe rearmost man - without drawing blood. The cut-down shotgun recoiledviciously from the heavy charge, making the veteran's right palm tinglethrough the glove. Kelly clamped his left hand on the fore-end beforetriggering a second round.
If the trio of newcomers had startled Kelly, then the clumsiness with whichthey started to unsling the submachineguns they did in fact carry suggestedthat they had not recognized him as an enemy until that moment. The veterancould not tell whether they came from the other lobe of the dumbbell, from thedocking module and the vessels positioned there, or even from some otherlocation. All that mattered was that the chest of the nearest surrounded the 
front sight of the shotgun as Kelly squeezed off.
Recoil thrust the veteran against the seat cushion as he swung the muzzletoward the next man; the buckshot punched a dozen ragged holes through thefirst target's chest in a pattern the size of a dinner plate. Kinetic energychopped the victim backward, into his fellows, with his limbs windmilling anda spray of blood swirling from the pellet holes.
The third of the newcomers fired wildly as the dead man tangled with him, themuzzle blasts cracking sharply despite Kelly's muffling helmet. The veteranswitched his aim to the man who had his gun clear. He fired, shattering theface shield and hitting the target's own weapon with several pellets whichdrove it off on a course separate from that of the man who had used it.
The German in the middle of the group still had not managed to unsling his gunwhen Kelly's buckshot slammed his lower abdomen and spun him back up theaisle. The center of the passageway was now a fog of blood.
Kelly paused a fraction of a second to be sure that the trio's movements werethe disconnected thrashing of dying men. Then he turned his head down to theconsole and the screen on which the engagement clock had run down to 221seconds. Enough time. He thumped the Launch button again, setting the newparameters which would detonate the 5 megaton warhead one second afterFortress released the reentry vehicle.
There wasn't a prayer of getting out the way he had entered the space station,
but the docking module was a relatively short path to vacuum. There was atleast a chance that Wun would be waiting wherever Kelly exited Fortress. Mightas well hope that, because otherwise Kelly didn't have a snowball's chance inhell of surviving.
He launched himself up the passageway, suddenly terrified by knowledge that ina little over three minutes, Fortress was going to reach the orbital position 


from which it would automatically release the weapon he had cued.
Thrust in weightlessness had its own rules. The veteran moved in asurprisingly straight line, but his body tumbled slowly end over end, so thathe had to catch himself with his free hand on the jamb of a computer-roomdoorway at the midpoint of the aisle. One of the men Kelly had just killedfloated in the same doorway. The German looked to have been about Kelly's agewhen he died . . . and there was a radio with a loaded whip antenna set intothe right side of his helmet.
The veteran, poised to jump the rest of the way to the door, had an instant towonder what his victims might have reported. The burst of fire from thedoorway answered the question even as it was being formed.
Lighting in the passageway was dimmer than that in the domed room above, andthe gunman was sighting past the bodies of his fellows besides; his target wasnot Kelly, lost among the corpses, but rather the motion down by the controlconsole. The burst of submachinegun fire rang on the flamethrower twistinggently in the air currents, rupturing the pressure tank with a bang louderthan that of Kelly returning the shots from his doorway.
The last charge of buckshot lifted the German, now faceless, up in a slow arctoward the top of the dome.
The flamethrower air bottle was still pressurized to several hundredatmospheres when it burst, so bits of it gouged deep holes in the aluminumpanels nearby. The control consoles had been protected from the blast by thenapalm tanks, so the engagement clock continued to count down, unimpaired.
Kelly snatched the submachinegun, a Walther, from the unresisting fingers ofthe body beside him. The three-shot burst he fired emptied the doorway of thefigures already poking guns over the circular lintel . . . but there was noway the veteran was going to escape in that direction.
He pushed himself fiercely back toward the control consoles. No one hadbriefed him on the way to abort a launch sequence, and the clock was down to97 seconds. A shot through the console or bursts into each of the incrediblycomplex computers up the hall would probably shut down the operation - butthat would not save Kelly, only delay his end until hostile manpoweroverwhelmed him, arid it would pretty well guarantee the failure of hismission. Fortress contained too many warheads for their release onto Earth,
even unguided, to be an empty threat.
Tom Kelly was a fox with hounds waiting to rend him at the mouth of hisburrow. Well then, he'd dig out the back - and if it didn't work, it was stilla long step up from resigning himself to his fate.
The south pole of the hub, like the north with its docking module, was clearof the doughnut of shielding which surrounded the lobes of the dumbbell. Kellyflattened himself against the curve of the control-room floor whichcorresponded to the roof of the dome at the other axis. Locking his bootsaround the chair bolted in front of a console, the veteran reeled off a stripof his blasting tape. He was duck soup for any gunman who came through thedoor just now - but if the survivors weren't more cautious than their fellowshad been, they were bloody suicidal.
The adhesive was only on one side of the thick tape, so when Kelly folded thestrip at an angle to make a corner, the second length did not stick to thebulkhead against which it lay. Fucking bad design, but he should have checkedit on the ground himself, and anyway it'd have to do. ...
Kelly stuck down the third side of the square he was taping as a long burst ofautomatic fire squirted from the north side of the sphere. The muzzle blastswere blurred by the helmet and the shots' confusion, with their own multipleechoes, but the ringing of bullets which hit the bulkhead near Kelly was clearenough. Dust puffed, and the tip of his left little finger, extending thefinal length of tape, flicked away from a hole in the aluminum.
The veteran had been wounded in worse ways, but nothing had hurt him like this 


since an ant buried its mandibles in the joint of his big toe. Kelly screamedand crimped the igniter lever in the end of the roll an instant sooner than hehad intended. Five seconds - and at least the pain of his missing fingertip ashe lunged away gave him something to think about besides the blast radius andthe question of whether the gunman was aiming shots or just spraying them downthe passageway.
There was movement in the direction of the door, the floating bodies twistingunder the impact of bullets and fresh men plunging down the passage to finishthe job. The submachinegun Kelly had appropriated had vanished, drifted offunnoticed while the veteran worked with the blasting tape. He lookeddesperately for the gun, wondering if the Nazi bullets had already shatteredthe launch control mechanism. The attackers were acting with a furiousdisregard for the equipment on whose capture they had invested so much effort.
Maybe they The 
outline of PETN explosive blew a square out of the bulkhead so sharplythat a green haze quivered along Kelly's optic nerves. He dived forwardblindly, over the console that had shielded him from his own blast and intothe stream of air rushing out the open. Vacuum would not affect the suitedGermans, but neither should it harm the control-room hardware. The shock ofthe blast might or might not cause an abort. It'd be okay if the designers haddone a proper job of isolating the computer banks from the structure ofFortress, and it was too late to worry about that anyway.
Kelly's head and the hands he had thrown up to protect his faceshield weresucked neatly through the opening, but his thighs slammed the edge. He hadn'trealized just how fierce was the outrush until that blow; it felt as though ahorse had kicked him with both hind legs. Kelly spun head over heels from thespace station, like a diver in an event which would continue throughouteternity for anything he could do to change it.
The tip of his left little finger stung. The veteran reached for itinstinctively with the other hand and squeezed the glove instead against theportion of finger above the second joint - the part that remained. The tearsthat burned worse than the blood freezing on the stump were not shed for painbut rather for loss. A part of Tom Kelly's body was gone as surely as hisyouth and his innocence.
The plume of air from the hub was dazzling where the reflection of the northpolar mirror caught it. Closer to the hull from which it spewed, the ventingatmosphere was a gray translucence lighted only by rays scattered higher inthe plume.
The array of nuclear weapons through which Kelly tumbled was as black andbrutal as a railroad marshaling yard at midnight.
The weapons that were Fortress's reason for being were anchored to the southhub by a tracery of girders, balancing the docking module and lighting mirrorat the other pole of the axis. In schematic, the framework suggested preciserandomness like that of a black widow spider's web, each crossing of strandssupporting a nodule of thermonuclear warheads. The blunt curves of individualreentry vehicles were encased in aluminum pallets which supported clusters ofsmall solid-fuel rockets. 
The rocket motors simply counteracted the orbital momentum which each bombshared as part of the space station. The pallet dropped away from the reentryvehicle after no more than thirty seconds of burn. For the remainder of itscourse, the warhead followed a ballistic trajectory governed by the sameprinciples which had controlled the projectile fired by a fourteenth centurybombard. 
It was only after the reentry vehicle reached its target that advancedtechnology took over again, and the warhead detonated with more force than allof the explosives used in all the wars until that time.
There was no sign of the aliens who Kelly had prayed would meet him. 


He had come out of the hub at an angle, but the nest of warheads was spreadwidely. Kelly saw that at each of his own slow rotations, an outlying node ofbombs - six of them attached like petals to a common center - was growing insilhouette against the blue-white splendor of Earth. Distance was hard tojudge in the absence of scale and atmosphere, but it looked as if the arraywere going to be close enough to touch.
The bomb should have gone off by now; he had drifted for what seemed at leastfive minutes. His strip charge or the flying bullets must have aborted thesequence. Kelly twisted, trying to follow the framework as it floated behindhis head. He could not move even his body for lack of a fulcrum, but if hecould catch hold of some solid object he could halt himself. Then he couldwait for the aliens. Or for the Germans to locate and riddle him. Or for the 
moment he emptied the air pack from which he had been breathing since themonocle ferry was sealed.
The bombs were coming into sight again, past Kelly's toes. He was going tocollide with them; the retro rockets of the nearest were within two yards andgrowing as the The 
rockets fired. 
There was a puff of exhaust that clouded the metal from the ablative coatingof the reentry vehicle itself. Then the cold vapors became three glowingblossoms while the bomb broke away from the cluster, the equivalent of fivemillion tons of TNT fused to detonate one second after release. 
With a horrified scream in his throat, Tom Kelly drifted through an invisibleportal that left him collapsed at the feet of Wun, who still looked like aswarthy businessman in his human suit and face.
When Kelly wanted to watch the destruction of Fortress a third time, thealiens looped the final twenty seconds of the event and played it over andover while they worked on the human's finger.
"Does that hurt, Mr. Kelly?" Wun asked through the speakers of the helmet nowresting beside Kelly.
"Just a little," said the veteran, though his wince a moment before had beendiagnostic. "Look, it's okay."
Three aliens with no concession to human design or accoutrement bent overKelly's outstretched left hand. Beyond them and seemingly as much a part ofpresent reality as the five figures - theirs and Kelly's and Wun's - hung avision of Fortress from about a kilometer away. The doughnut was viewed at aflat angle from the south pole, so that the four saucers at the docking modulewere partly visible over the curve of shielding material. Dora had joined herthree dull-finished aluminum sisters and was linked to Fortress by anumbilicus. 
The webbing holding the nuclear weapons was illuminated by a flash so intensethat aluminum became translucent and only the warheads themselves remainedmomentarily black.
Most or all of the weapons which absorbed the sleet of radiation from thefirst 5 megaton warhead also detonated a microsecond later. Fortress - thespace station, the saucers which had brought the Nazis to it, and the kilotonsof shielding material - became vapor and a retinal memory in a blast thatdevoured the entire field of view . . . and faded back to the start of the 
explosion.
"Mr. Kelly," said Wun peevishly, "the question is not whether you can standthe pain but rather if we can eliminate it. Which we can do unless you pretendstoical indifference." 
Another of the aliens poked toward (though not to) the stump of Kelly's fingerwith an instrument that looked like a miniature orange flyswatter. "Does thathurt?" 
"There's a dull ache on the - the lower side," said the veteran, pointing withhis right index finger. He hated to look at the amputation, though the aliens 


had closed the wound neatly with something pink the texture of fresh skin.
He'd get used to the loss, as he'd gotten used to other things.
The orange instrument twisted. The ache disappeared. Fortress vaporized again
in the ambiance beyond.
"Where will you have us place you when your injury is repaired, Mr. Kelly?"
asked Wun, his eyes on Kelly while his voice came disconcertingly from the
helmet at an angle to the figure.
"You're going to get in touch with governments now?" Kelly said. Lord knew
what that blast would do to communications on the planet below, but there'd be
auroras to tell the grandkids about. There'd be grandkids for those who wanted
them, and that made it worthwhile. "Formal contact, I mean?"
Hell, it'd have been worthwhile if Tom Kelly had become part of the ball of
glowing plasma he'd created with the help of Wun and a lot of luck.
And whatever. 
"We can return you to the base from which you were launched into orbit, for
instance," said Wun. The other three aliens stepped back as if to admire the
repair work they had completed on the human's finger. It was as perfect as it
could be without the portion the bullet had excised.
The loop of destruction flared again. Cheap at the price.
"I've been told in worse ways I oughta mind my own business," said Kelly,
grinning at Wun. "And no. I don't want to go back to El Paso any time soon."
The stocky human stood up and stretched. It felt good to move without the bulk
of the suit, good to breathe air that smelled like Earth's on a spring day. It
felt very good to win one unequivocally.
It would have felt even better to have forgotten the scene in the dome as he
left it. the drifting, smoking bodies. At the time, that part had seemed like
a win also. . . . 
"No," he said, "there's a couple people I owe ... I dunno, maybe an
explanation. Maybe just a chance to take a shot at me."
Kelly's face softened as he thought about his past, recent and farther back,
as far as he could remember. "If I had good sense, I'd just walk away from
that," he said. "But I never did have much use for people who walked away from
things."
The three evident nonhumans had vanished. "You wish to be returned to the 
neighborhood of the woman Tuttle or the woman Romer?" said Wun, who either was
psychic or understood how Kelly's mind worked better than anybody born on
Earth seemed to have done. 
"You can do that?" the veteran demanded. 
"Either one," responded the alien. "Which would you prefer?"
"I - " began Tom Kelly. He laughed without humor, a sound as sharp as the
warheads outlined against the first microsecond of the destruction of
Fortress. 
Then he reached into his trousers pocket to see if there were a coin he could
flip.