Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels by David Drake Page B

sign here, sir,” he said.
    “43 documents classified Top Secret,” the civilian read aloud. “Well, that’s enough to the point.” He signed his name with a flourish and handed the receipt back to Wooley. “If the count’s short, I know where to find you.”
    “What is this?” asked Sergeant Coleman, pointing to the short-wave receiver. “I mean—the station. Is it Voice of America?”
    All three men paused to listen to the strident news-reader. He was attacking the Italian Communist Party with a passion that, combined with his accent, made the fact that he was speaking in English hard to ascertain. “Radio Albania,” Kelly explained as Wooley’s pen scratched his confirming signature. “The Sixth Fleet’s about to hold exercises in the West Med, and the running-dog poltroons—don’t think I’d ever heard the word spoken before—of the CPI did nothing to prevent this example of bourgeois imperialism. You’d think they’d be screaming about us”—he smiled again—“but with the Albanians, it doesn’t seem to work that way.”
    “Thank you, sir,” said Wooley, folding the receipt into his pocket. He left the rest of the material on the desk. “When you’re ready to return this, or if you have to leave this room for any reason, will you please check with the Marine guards in the hallway. They’ll escort you or call an authorized person from the embassy to watch the documents during your absence.”
    “I’ll be damned,” Kelly said. He strode to the door and opened it. A Marine E-5 in dress blues stood six feet to either side of the door. They carried bolstered .38s. The one on the left nodded to Kelly, but his companion kept his eyes trained toward the end of the hall. “I’ll be damned,” the civilian muttered again. “Well, if Pedler’s willing to play by my rules, I can’t complain if he plays by his at the same time.”
    The two Communicators shook hands with Kelly as they left the room. Coleman paused a further moment in the doorway. “Why do you listen to that?” he asked, gesturing toward the radio with his chin.
    The civilian shrugged. “I spent—a lot of time listening to signals that didn’t mean a whole lot, piecing things together . . . listening. I think better now if there’s somebody talking in the background, if there’s a receiver or two live.” He chuckled to hide his embarrassment. “Besides, I wind up knowing things that sort of seep in. . . . It helps, sometimes.”
    When the door closed, Kelly was alone again, just himself and Albania and a case of classified documents. Sighing, he took the knife carefully from his pocket. He had replaced the round, thin handle of the short-wave receiver with a sand-finished stainless steel strap over an inch wide. A hand-tooled leather wrapper cushioned the handle. Kelly unsnapped the two fasteners on the leather and set his knife into the cut-out machined into the steel strap. He had no idea of how many airport security checks he had passed through with this radio or one of its similarly-modified predecessors. He was simply not going to be at the mercy of whatever set of crazies happened to hijack a plane he was on.
    Off to work. Kelly stripped to his shorts again and opened one of the supplementary folders. It contained only a four-page Current Policy Statement, issued by the US Department of State. It was the text of a speech delivered by the Under Secretary for Security Assistance, Science and Technology, to a—for Christ’ sake!—to a national conference of editorial writers. The title, “Nuclear Power and the Third World,” was about as clear as the discussion got. The speech was the typical Foggy Bottom bumf sent around to all missions. It was intended to give the official line on how to dodge awkward questions.
    The question this time was why the US was opposing the International Conference on Nuclear Power Development. The Conference—though the US did not doubt the good faith of the Algerians who were