“What?” asked Gisela Romer, over the rattle of the van’s body panels in the wind of their passage.
If he was going to start thinking out loud, then he was an even bigger damned fool than he’d realized. “I was thinking,” Kelly said truthfully, “that if people had been less interested in fucking with me, then I’m not the only one who’d have been better off.”
The woman looked at her passenger’s frowning profile. “You won’t regret the help you have given me – given us,” she said. “There has never been greater need 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’s the 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 everything started to slip away it slipped toward the crevasse that seemed to have been banged in his skull.
That focused him and brought him back to awareness of the heavily-guarded terminal building.
It still hurt like hell.
The airmen could be distinguished from the National Police because the former wore khaki and carried automatic rifles while the police were in green with submachine-guns. There were six in each party, pausing in their banter to track Kelly and the woman from the little-used portion of the parking lot to the military terminal.
Some airports pretended to be cities of the future, with ramps and glass and cantilevered 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 more controlled. The veteran could almost feel her determining which persona she would don for the guards – haughty or sexy or mysterious. Most of these Turks were moonfaced and nineteen – and the same stock as those who stormed through naval gunfire at Gallipoli to drive the Anzacs back into the sea at bayonet point.
“Keep a low profile, love,” Kelly said, risking a friendly pat on the woman’s shoulder. He winked at the troops, one GI approaching some others, and all of them on fuckin’ government business. “This is exactly the sorta thing they expect 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 my support, he added silently. And of course, the general fucked-upness of trying to 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, but the Air Force section was under a senior lieutenant with pips and a bolstered pistol to make identification certain.
“Sir,” said Kelly in Turkish, taking out a billfold bulging with the documentation his case officer had given him, “we have urgent business with the flight controller’s office.”
The Turkish officer looked carefully at both sides of the card he was proffered, feeling the points of the seal impressed through the attached bunny-in-the-headlights photograph of Tom Kelly. The back was signed by a Turkish brigadier general from the Adana District, in his NATO capacity.
After a pause that wouldn’t have been nerve-racking except for the fact that Kelly had put so many bodies to cool in the recent past, the Turk saluted and said, “An honor to meet you, Colonel. Do you know where you’re going, or would you like a guide?”
Christ, he hadn’t noticed the rank she’d given him for this one. Tom Kelly couldn’t remember ever meeting a colonel with whom he’d have willingly shared a 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, then Kelly was still speaking Turkish.