“Will somebody tell him to get up there where he belongs?” demanded someone in a peevish voice.
“Bates,” said Pierrard in a voice whose volume and clarity suggested the anger behind it, “we’ll proceed more smoothly if only those with business choose to speak.”
The room paused. Kelly nodded approvingly to the white-haired man, who then continued into the silence he had wrought. “How did you manage to insert your report that way, Mr. Kelly?”
The veteran laughed. Everyone else in the room was twisted in the bolted-down chairs to see him, save for those in the last row – behind him – who had a direct view of the back of his head. He would’ve gone to the lectern as directed except that he had been directed; and besides, it would feel a little too much like being a duck in a shooting gallery.
“Oh, that wasn’t me,” Kelly said, looking down. “NSA’s good, but we’re not that good. That was the aliens you sent me to find.” It had been disconcertingly natural for him to verbally put on a uniform again the way he just had.
There was a ripple of talk, more of it directed at neighbors than at the veteran. 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 not drawing on it.
Kelly rose, resting his buttocks on the seat back and curling his right foot directly beneath his hip to lock him there. “Look,” he repeated, “I couldn’t have gotten through any way I know about, not from Diyarbakir, not if I were the President.”
The veteran’s eyes were adjusting to the light and his mind was locking down into the gears suitable for the present situation. He nodded to a man he recognized from the office of the National Security Advisor – not the Advisor himself, a political opportunist whose pronouncements always sounded as though he were still a Marine battalion commander.
“Anyway,” Kelly continued, finding that his new perch was less stable than he had thought – the 747 was still climbing – “the important thing is dealing with the situation. I can do that with a little cooperation. A lot less cooperation than it took to put all you people together in one room, believe me.”
Kelly’s mind was cataloguing the faces turned awkwardly over their seats toward him, and he found that he recognized a surprising number of them from his 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 dirty work, required to solve the real problems.
“What is the situation, in your view, Mr. Kelly?” asked a Space Command colonel named Stoddard. Kelly had been on a Tom and Jim’ basis with him for over 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 their association 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 the men around him with consciousness of the power which knowledge gave him, “and I 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. I assume all the station personnel are dead. I know the Kurds have been eliminated now that their job’s done, so there’s no possibility of outsiders within 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 to contact Fortress, and I’ve told you how.”
“We don’t know they’re actually Germans because they say they are,” said the shorthaired, red-faced man, whom Kelly now recognized as Bates. “Maybe they’re Russkies, 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 have some business here.” Almost in the same breath, he said, bending toward General Redstone, “I’m sorry, Red, I didn’t mean to do that. S’okay now.”