Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels by David Drake

Author:David Drake [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Espionage, Action & Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9781439134504
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2011-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

Fortress

DEDICATION

To Tom Doherty,

who published my first book also,

and most of those in between.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Among the people who helped with bits of unclassified

background on this one are Glenn and Helen Knight;

Bernadette Bosky and Arthur Hlavaty; and Congressman

Newt Gingrich and his personal assistant, Laurie James.

Many thanks to all of them.

Prologue

Another 1965

Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy’s fifth State of the Union Address—his so-called “Buck Rogers Speech”—at a firebase in the Shuf Mountains, watching Druse 122-mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the night sky.

The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed and sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly’s cheap portable radio. Inside the high-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant could have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars worth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle carried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made almost certain.

Shooooo . . . hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.

“Our enemies, the enemies of freedom,” said the President, more distant from Kelly’s reality than seven time zones could imply, “have proven in Hungary, in Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealings except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe, ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least sign of weakness among the Western democracies.”

By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for protection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscape breathed, Kelly’s left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14, knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own weapons: Mausers abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs slipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenades stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .

“In Europe and the Middle East,” continued the President in a nasal voice further attenuated by the transmission and the radio’s tinny speaker, “in Africa and Latin America—wherever the totalitarians and their surrogates choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on behalf of the free world which will convince our enemies that we have the strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they gather on Earth itself.”

The five tubes of howitzer battery—the sixth hog was deadlined for repair—cut loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglike dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzle brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The short-barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges. Nothing to do with the turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flat curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.