“Bates, for god’s sake, keep your mouth shut,” Pierrard said angrily. He followed 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 his outburst. “They call ’emselves the Service, the Dienst, and I guess everybody here’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 harmless as they look, except they got outa Germany in ’45 with a flying saucer” – he spread his hands toward his audience, recognizing the incredulity they must be feeling – “and engineers to build more of the damn things.”
“I suggest,” said Pierrard, touching the wave of his white hair with the fingers of his left hand, “that for the present we ignore the question of responsibility and move on to a discussion of Mr. Kelly’s proposal for action.”
One of the men Kelly remembered from the orderly room at Fort Meade slipped out of the Briefing Room in response to a signal the veteran had not seen Pierrard give. Checking on the Dienst, no doubt, through the Airborne Command Post’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 had already 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 men aboard 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, and the Russian equivalent at Tyuratam, have all been nuked.”
“Who told you?” demanded a man who’d been a GS-16 in Defense when Kelly last talked with him. “No information on that subject has been released.”
“They’d know at Pirinclik!” someone else suggested excitedly. “Has he been allowed into the compound at Pirinclik?”
“Look,” Kelly shouted, exasperated by men who were stuck with their own functional areas instead of focusing their minds on the real problem. “It was the fucking aliens, I told you, the little guys like the one in the freezer at Meade – and it doesn’t matter. All it means is, unless you’ve got another way to lift me to orbit, I go up on the monocle ferry at Bliss. You got a better way, let’s hear it, because I’m just counting on enough of the bugs to be worked out that it does like it’s supposed to one time.”
“Yes, well,” said Pierrard, meeting the veteran’s eyes while his right hand played with his meerschaum pipe, “there’s also the question of who goes up in the 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 leaning toward Pierrard across the intervening seats and startled men. “Just one time in my life there’s going to be something I did that I point to and say I did it; good, bad or indifferent. You chose me. I’m going!”
“We didn’t choose you for this, Kelly,” said General Redstone, the only man in the 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 you did, 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 a moment before. “Used to be something’d come up and I’d be told, ‘Right, but that’s not in your area any more. It’s in the hands of the people who take care of that.’ This is what you made my area, folks.” He looked grimly around the room. “This is what I’ve done for you for twenty years. Killing people.”