The viewpoint narrowed on the opened chamber itself, though with none of the mechanical feeling of a camera being dollied. When a gun fires, some residues of the reaction remain aswirl in the breech. Similarly, there was a single human figure still drifting in the chamber from which his fellows had been voided. At one point he had been trying to grasp the screw latch of the airlock to one of the adjoining compartments. His grip had lost definition, though it had not wholly relaxed, and now he floated with his fingers hooked into vain claws.
The victim had been a stocky man of medium height.
His beard, moustache, and white tunic had been sprayed a brilliant red with blood when air within his body cavity expanded to ram his empty lungs out his mouth and nostrils. Kelly did not recognize the rank insignia on the tunic sleeves, but the SS runes on the collar were unmistakable.
Kelly knew the victim, and that knowledge was not the false assurance of a dream. He could not recall the fellow’s full name, but he was known as ben Majlis, and he had been leader of a squad of Kurds while Operation Birdlike was up and running.
The body twitched harshly, mindlessly, not quite close enough to a bulkhead or the floor for the movement to thrust against something solid. The corneas of ben Majlis’s eyes were red with ruptured capillaries, and ice crystals were already beginning to glitter on them.
One of the hands flopped toward Kelly’s point of view, driven by the Kurd’s dying convulsions. As it did so, something touched the veteran’s shoulder in good truth. He leaped up with a cry and a look of horror that drove back the loadmaster who had just awakened Kelly to tell him that the C-141 was making its final approach to Torrejeon.
The Starlifter’s crew greased her in, the instant of touchdown unnoticed until the thrust reversers on the big turbo-fans grabbed hold of the air and tried to pull the aircraft backwards. Skill in a fighter meant quickness; skill in a transport was a matter of being smooth, and sliding a hundred and some tons onto a concrete slab without evident shock was skill indeed.
“What’s the drill from here?” Kelly asked the loadmaster, who now had his helmet’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 the aluminum walls around them, but the crewman was in touch with the flight deck through his intercom.
The loadmaster spoke an acknowledgment into the straw-slim microphone wand and stepped closer to Kelly in order to explain without shouting, “We’re going to taxi 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.” To Kelly 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 tell people that have more use’n I do for brass,” the veteran said with a smile of his own. “I gonna need the flight suit?” He had surprisingly little stiffness or specific pain from the battering he’d taken in the past few days, but he found when he shrugged that his whole body felt as if there were an inch of fuzz growing on it.
“On an Airborne Command Post?” the loadmaster said. “Nossir, I don’t guess you will.”
The big crewman paused again, this time in response to memory rather than a voice in his earphones. “Look sir, you were serious about putting a lid on this? 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 of terrorists. And I can’t do a damn thing for what’s gone down already; but yeah, I can put a lid on it.”
He grinned a shark’s grin. The loadmaster remembered the fight he had tried to pick when his passenger came aboard. “I can put some people,” Kelly said, “where they won’t be a problem till Judgment Day.”