“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Kelly said, squeezing the pilot’s hand again before he turned to follow Gisela.
Moments after the two passengers had stepped onto the concrete and dogged the hatch closed, the Porter rotated and lifted again – a brief hop to the fueling point a quarter mile farther down the runway – instead of taxiing properly.
“Not exactly the least conspicuous vehicle,” Kelly muttered as he and the dancer stepped toward the truck. “But I didn’t think we’d do better through Atwater, even if I kicked and screamed for something civilian. The folks who were supposed to arrange that sorta thing for me are either dead or wish I was.”
The man standing beside the truck was in his mid-twenties, wearing a moustache and sideburns which were within, though barely, the loose parameters of the US Air Force. “Colonel Monaghan?” he asked without saluting; neither he nor Kelly were in uniform, and there was a look in the man’s eyes that suggested he didn’t volunteer salutes anyway.
“Yessir,” said Kelly, nodding courteously. The other man’s eyes had drifted to the dancer. “I much appreciate this. I know it’s not the sort of thing you’re here for.”
There were only a few US liaison officers at the airbase here in Diyarbakir. This man and the vehicle had to have been requisitioned from the NSA listening post at Pirinclik, fifteen miles west of the city, where the midflight telemetry of tests from the Russian missile proving ground at Tyuratam was monitored. Pirinclik was staffed by the US Air Force; but nonetheless, Sergeant Atwater must have called in personal chips to arrange for a vehicle over a general phone line.
“Here’s the key, sir,” the younger man said with a modicum of respect in his voice. “There’s a chain to run from the steering wheel to the foot-feed. No ignition lock, you know?”
Kelly nodded. “Much appreciated,” he repeated as he opened the driver’s side door and handed Gisela behind the wheel. She knew where they were going, Lord willing. “Hope you’ve got a way back?” he added, suddenly struck by the fact that the airman looked very much alone against the empty background of runways on an alluvial plain. “We’re in more of a time crunch than …”
“So I hear,” the younger man agreed with a tight smile. At a base like Pirinclik, there were more sources of information than the official channels. It struck Kelly that this fellow might know a lot more than he and Gisela themselves did, but there really wasn’t time to explore that possibility. “I’ll call and they’ll send a jeep. Just didn’t want to tie up two vehicles on so loose an ETA.” He nodded toward the Turbo-Porter, shrunken into a dark huddle at the distant service point.
Gisela cranked the engine, which caught on the second attempt, just before the airman called, “Pump once and – ”
“The gate’s off to the left,” Kelly said as he closed his own door, wondering how often he’d flown in or out of the Third TAP base. More times than he could remember, literally, because once he’d been delirious, controllable only because he was just as weak as he was crazy. . . .
They paused for the gate, chain link on a sturdy frame, to be swung open by Turks from the sandbagged bunkers to either side. There was no identification check for people leaving in an American vehicle, though the guards showed some surprise that the driver was a blond woman. Gisela turned left on the narrow blacktop highway and accelerated jerkily while she determined the throw and engagement of the pickup’s clutch.
“You’ve been here before,” Kelly said, noting that the woman turned without hesitation.
She glanced aside, then back to the road. “Not here,” she said in a cool voice, aware that the American was fishing for information – and willing to give it to him even though he had not, by habit, done her the courtesy of asking directly. “Not the airfield. But of course, I’ve spent a great deal of time at our base in the city.”
The landscape through which they drove as fast as the truck’s front-end shimmy permitted was as flat as any place Kelly had ever been. It appeared to be rolling countryside, but the scale of distance was so great that it gave shape to what would otherwise have been considered dead-level ground.