Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels by David Drake Read Free Book Online

fucking file, don’t you?” Kelly snapped. “You know what I mean by carte blanche !”He looked back at the Defense Attaché and said, almost pleading, “Look, General, my skills—I’m not a diplomat. You say you need it quick and dirty, but . . . sir, it can get real dirty. And that’s the only way I can be sure to get it done. There’s people who wouldn’t make waves, not like . . . not like me.”
    The Defense Attaché nodded. “That was considered,” he agreed. “But—you see, there were two plans for getting the hostages out of the Tehran Embassy,” he continued. “One of them was the CIA’s. Everybody knows that one; it’s the one they tried. Real slick. Minimum fuss and bother, minimum men and equipment committed so nobody’d make a big fuss in the UN afterward. That was one way.”
    The general sat down again. Captain Laidlaw licked his lips nervously. “Ah, sir, I don’t know—” he began.
    “If you don’t know, then keep quiet!” Pedler retorted. His heavy voice continued, “The other plan came from the JCS, and as it chance, I worked on it. I’d been Air Attaché in Tehran a few years before, you see.” The general’s thumb riffled a stack of papers on his desktop. “What we wanted to do was use a ring of daisy-cutters to isolate the compound—” Laidlaw frowned in puzzlement rather than disapproval. “Not a piece of Navy ordnance, Mark?” Pedler asked with a smile. “Fourteen-thousand-pound high-capacity bombs, then. They take two pallets in the belly of a C-130 to carry them, and when they go off, they can clear a quarter-mile circle of jungle for a landing zone. They’d have done the same thing to the buildings in the center of Tehran. We were going to use Rangers, parachuting in on MC-1 chutes and coming back on a Fulton Recovery System with the hostages.”
    The general’s grin was as cold as a woman’s mercy. “That would have taken time, reeling in people who’d never used a snatch lift before. But it would have worked, which choppers couldn’t, not flying that far. And there would’ve been plenty of time. It’d have taken the rag-heads three days to bulldoze through rubble and bodies the daisy-cutters would have left.”
    Kelly chuckled appreciatively, a sound that could have come from the throat of an attack dog. The hot glare of old emotions was making his palms sweat. “And when they got there,” he said, “they’d have found every mothering ‘student’ with his balls in his mouth, wouldn’t they?”
    The general cocked his head. “That wasn’t part of the written plan,” he said.
    “Sure it was,” the civilian said. “You made that decision when you decided to send in Rangers. Sure you did. . . .”
    Captain Laidlaw was beginning to look ill. Both his spit-shined low quarters were flat on the floor. Pedler continued, “This operation is being handled through Paris instead of Rome because my opposite number in Rome refused to have anything to do with it. Well, maybe he was right. But I’ve been told that I’ve got a free hand, so long as the job gets done. And that means you’ve got a free hand, too, Kelly. So long as you come back with the goods.”
    The civilian began rewinding his antenna wire to give his hands something to do while his brain worked. “You’ve got a full briefing set up, I suppose?” he said.
    Pedler nodded. “Are you go or no-go?” he asked.
    Kelly looked away and cleared his throat. “Oh, I’m go,” he said toward a corner of the ceiling. “In a month or two I’ll ask you if you still think you knew what you were doing. If I’m around to ask. But I’m go, provided you take care of one thing.”
    Pedler’s face went as blank as a poker player’s. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
    “Somebody may try to run an Article 15 through on the guy who drove me in today,” the civilian said. “Specialist 5 Phillips. I want the papers torn up—if there are any papers.”
    The Attaché’s expression did not change.