The Red Horseman

12

Admiral Grafton, this is Jack Yocke. I’ve got a little problem and need your help.”

“What kind of problem?” The tone of the admiral’s voice on the telephone made it clear that he didn’t have time for a social call.

“It’s a long story, sir, and I’d like to tell it to you in person.”

“I’m really swamped right now. Where are you?”

“Down here in the little reception office in front of the embassy compound.”

Grafton sighed. “Okay. I’ll send Toad down.”

“Thanks.”

Yocke hung up the telephone and went back outside. Gregor was sitting in the car, double-parked in the street. The reporter bent down so he could talk through the passenger window. “I’ll need the computer out of the trunk.”

Gregor killed the engine and climbed out. He opened the trunk without a word and let Yocke reach in and get the computer case. “So it’s good-bye then.”

“You’re still on the payroll, Gregor. And I will talk to the editor about that raise.”

Gregor closed the trunk, locked it, then got back into the car. Yocke pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and peeled off five twenties. He stood by the driver’s door. “Here. This is for you.”

Gregor stared up at him. He tried to smile but it didn’t come out that way. “No.”

“This isn’t charity, Gregor. You’ve earned it. Feed your family.”

The Russian started the car and put it in gear. Yocke tossed the bills in his lap as the car got under way. “I’ll call you,” he shouted.

He adjusted the strap of the computer bag and watched the Lada go down the street trailing a thin blue cloud of exhaust fumes. After it disappeared from sight he turned toward the embassy gate. Toad Tarkington was standing there watching him.

“What have you been into this time?”

Yocke glanced at the gate guard, a Moscow policeman wearing the usual gray uniform. He went past him into the reception office and turned to face Tarkington.

“The KGB was waiting for me at my hotel.”

Toad snorted. “You sure?”

“We drove by. There were a dozen police cars out front, a dozen or so guys in dark suits around the entrance. Three or four at every other door. It looked like Al Capone’s garden party. I tripped over a hornet’s nest.”

Toad snorted. “Kicked it over, you mean. Then you come charging over to the Hotel Grafton with your hair on fire and a rat in your mouth.”

“Dammit, Toad, I’ve got to write this story and file it.”

“Story on what?”

“The Soviet Square killings.”

Toad pursed his lips as he examined Yocke’s face. “Better come up and tell it to the admiral,” he said, and made a hi sign to the receptionist behind the safety glass. After she pushed her button Toad opened the door for the reporter.

Jake Grafton was surrounded by computer printouts and maps. He was curt. “Let’s hear it.”

So Toad told it. Quickly and concisely. When he had completed his recitation the admiral glanced at Tarkington, who was leaning back against the wall with his eyebrows up as far as they would go.

“So the KGB set up their stooge, Kolts-something,” the admiral said. “Why?”

“Well, there are several possible reasons why they might have done it, like—”

“You’re going to write this story without knowing why they did it?”

“Yep.” Yocke glanced at his watch. “It’ll run on tomorrow’s front page.” Seeing the look on Grafton’s face, the reporter went on: “Gimme a break, Admiral. If we had waited to get Lee Harvey Oswald’s reasons before we reported Kennedy’s assassination, we’d still be waiting.”

“That’s a real argument stopper, but it’s hardly germane to this case.”

“Facts are facts.”

“If you’ve got any.”

Jack Yocke’s face flushed. “Jesus! You’re worse than my editor.”

“I’m just pointing out the obvious. If I were a reporter I’d want it in spades before I accused someone of murder. But you’re the guy they pay the big bucks.” Grafton cleared his throat while Jack Yocke figured out how to handle his face.

When the reporter spoke his voice was carefully under control. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’ve got a story about how the police were pulled out of that square and in my professional opinion, it’s solid. I—” He stopped speaking because Jake Grafton had waved his hand, cutting him off.

The admiral toyed with a pen, clicking the point in and out a few times. “Yeltsin is going to be one happy man when he hears about this,” he said finally.

“I suppose.”

Toad cleared his throat. “How about describing this woman you met in the bar.”

“Now wait a minute. It doesn’t really matter who she is. She merely gave me a tip and I verified it by an independent investigation.”

Yocke hadn’t given the woman’s motives a thought and Toad’s question irritated him. In America people routinely sought out reporters to put them onto a story. Reporters knew these people were driven by a variety of motives, including revenge. Yet if the story checked out as true and newsworthy, the tipster’s motives didn’t really matter. And Jack Yocke knew damn well he had latched onto a big, true story. A huge story. The dimensions of it slightly awed him. And it was solid. There was no way in hell those people today were acting, feeding him a line. After questioning a few thousand people, he knew the truth when he heard it. If he heard it. And by God, today he had heard it.

The problem was Tarkington. He was a good man, but at times he was tough to swallow. Jack Yocke took a deep breath and added, “The public prosecutor has the three KGB agents who went to the police station locked up right now. They want to jug me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. You’ve scooped everybody and you’re gonna be famous. Now tell me what this broad looked like.”

“Well, she was about five eight or so, dark brown shoulder-length hair, dark brown — almost black — eyes set wide apart, a classic bone structure.”

“Good figure?”

“Well, I suppose so.”

“You queer or what?” Tarkington asked sharply.

“She was wearing modest clothes, a good wool suit. Underneath it all she was probably built like a brick shithouse. Is that what you want to hear, sailor boy?”

Toad met Jake Grafton’s gaze. His eyebrows went up and down once in reply to Grafton’s silent question.

“You know her?” Yocke asked Toad.

“Just curious, Jack. What I’m trying to figure out is why you.”

“Because she knew I was a reporter.”

“This town is full of reporters. Why you?”

“You two sailors are a real pair. I thought you’d let me hole up here.” His voice rose: “But no, Jack, you might write something that embarrasses the good ol’ U.S. of A. and we probably can’t handle—”

“That’s enough,” Jake said disgustedly. “You can sleep on the couch. Right now you go into Toad’s room”—he nodded toward the bedroom door—“and write your story. When you’re ready to send it in let me know. In the meantime don’t pick up the phone even if it rings.”

Jack Yocke stood and hoisted the computer. He had half a mind to tell these two clowns where to go and what to do to themselves when they got there, but… He mumbled his thanks, then his eye fell on the maps and computer printouts. “Say, what is all this paper?”

“Not a word to your editor about this one,” Jake told him. “But you ain’t the only guy with problems. The Russians just had another nuclear power plant meltdown.”

“Holy…! Like Chernobyl?”

“Maybe worse.”

“Where? Around here?”

“Someplace called Serdobsk, about three hundred miles southeast of here. Now go in there and shut the door and let us work.”

After the door closed Toad turned on the radio. Classical music came out.

“Judith Farrell?” Jake asked.

“I’d bet the ranch, CAG.”

Jake Grafton went to the window and stood looking out. He rubbed the back of his neck, then moved his shoulders up and down. Finally he stretched.

When he turned around he told Toad, “The Israelis sure get their money’s worth out of that woman.”

“Uh-huh.”

Toad was looking at the map spread upon the floor. The wind was going to spread that radioactivity over hundreds of square miles. He was looking now at the villages in the fallout zone. He couldn’t even pronounce the Russian names upon the chart. A great many people from a culture he didn’t know were about to die, and it sickened him.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked Jake Grafton.

“Only on Sundays,” the admiral replied.

“There’s a military base here in this footprint, sir. Petrovsk. Here, take a look. Wasn’t that the base we visited a couple days ago?”

Jake Grafton looked. “Yes. Petrovsk. Missiles with nuclear warheads.”

“They’ll have to evacuate that base, if they haven’t already.”

Evacuate. That meant airplanes, fuel. And what percentage of the base personnel could be carried on the planes?

“Wonder if Moscow will even tell those people that a lethal cloud of radioactivity is coming their way?”

“If only five or ten percent of them could possibly escape, would you tell them?” Jake Grafton mused, his voice so low that Toad almost missed the comment. “What would you tell them?”

A little later he muttered, “A lot of that radioactivity is going to go into the Volga.”

He looked again at the predicted radioactivity levels. The numbers were two or three times worse than Chernobyl. How did people manage to make such horrible messes on this tiny, fragile planet? His finger moved on the map, down the Volga past Saratov and Engels, past Kamyshin, all the way to Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. The water supplies of those cities would be grossly contaminated. The land. The food supply. Jake Grafton picked up the estimate of the various isotope levels and their half-lives and stared at it, trying to take it in.

And on down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. How much radioactivity could that closed inland ocean tolerate before it became a dead sea?

This was worse than a disaster — it was a nightmare. When the Russian people finally learned the truth, what would be their reaction?

The telephone rang and Toad picked it up. After saying “Yessir,” several times, he replaced the receiver and told Jake, “The ambassador wants you to go with him to the Kremlin. In a couple hours our president will announce that the United States will assist Russia any way it can.”

Jake Grafton took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So when is the Yeltsin government going public on this?”

“The ambassador’s aide didn’t say. Soon, apparently.”

Yeltsin had no choice. Gorbachev had waited for days to tell the world of Chernobyl and had been excoriated for it. But Gorbachev had been a Communist and Yeltsin swore he no longer was. “Umm,” Jake Grafton said.

“Maybe you’d better wear your uniform, sir,” Toad said gently. “It looks like it’s going to be one of those days.”

“Jack Yocke has just been had by a pro. She conned him good and he’s so anxious for a story — any story — that he swallowed it without even tasting it.”

Toad Tarkington nodded. “I’ll buy that.”

“She may try again.”

“Naw. She’s not that stupid. Too big a risk.”

“When the stakes get this large any risk is justified. Any risk! We’ve got to get to her before Jack Yocke does.”

Captain Herbert “Tom” Collins was the naval attaché. As the senior naval officer he supervised a staff of just three other officers: one a marine lieutenant colonel, one a navy commander, and the other the politically impure lieutenant, Spiro Dalworth. A surface warfare officer with a destroyer command behind him, Collins had acquired a degree in Russian from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, while he was still a lieutenant. Tonight Jake recalled with a jolt that Collins’ first assignment after the Naval Academy had been to nuclear power school. After graduating, he then spent his first tour tending a reactor aboard a nuclear-powered frigate.

These days Collins tried to keep track of what was happening in the former Soviet Navy as the ships, planes and sailors were divided between the newly independent republics. The job was impossible. In the past the naval officers had subsisted on a mere trickle of information, mainly what the Soviets wanted them to see and hear — now they were drowning in it. The Russians were showing them everything, telling everything, talking openly about weapons capability, maintenance problems with ships, engines, radars, planes, problems with personnel, training, recruitment, supply, food…everything. If there were any secrets left in the new Commonwealth, Collins had yet to bump into one of them.

Two nights ago he told Jake Grafton, “Today the Russian Navy would lose a fight with the Italians. Honest to God, since the collapse they can’t get food or fuel to steam with. They can’t feed the sailors; they can’t maintain the ships; they got ’em tied up rusting at the pier. A couple more years of this and most of those ships will be beyond salvage.”

Tonight in the courtyard Tom Collins turned up the volume on his portable radio, which was tuned to a Russian station playing American jazz. They were standing in the shadow of the new embassy complex, empty and condemned because it was hopelessly infested with bugs — the electronic kind.

“Isn’t one of your chiefs a communications specialist?” Jake asked.

“One of my two, sir. Senior Chief Holley.” Collins was eyeing Jake’s uniform and the ribbons displayed there. The admiral had just returned from the Kremlin with the ambassador.

“I need to borrow him for a while. Holley and Dalworth.”

“We’re drowning in my shop, Admiral. I’ve got them working twenty hours a day.” Collins and the other military people were using every contact they had to try to discover what the Russian military knew about the extent of the damage from the Serdobsk meltdown. Jake had spent the day helping, trying to analyze information received in dribbles from all quarters.

“I understand. This is important.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jake Grafton felt like a jerk. He merely needed two people he could trust — anyone really — and Collins had an important job to do. Still, if he could get to Judith Farrell…

“So what are the Russians saying?” Jake asked.

“Same old story. It’s all Yeltsin’s fault.”

“Is it?”

“Well, there’s no money to maintain reactors and they’re all in terrible shape. An American inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have a heart attack if he saw one of those plants, but they’ve been like that for years. This country is too poor to properly build or maintain or operate nuclear power plants. They just don’t have the technical expertise or the trained people.” Collins’ shoulders sagged. “They’re like monkeys with a computer.”

“Nobody over at the Kremlin will even hazard a guess about why that thing melted.”

Collins grunted. “There are meltdowns and there are meltdowns,” he said. “The accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl could be classified as radiation leaks. This one was a real whing-ding, snap-doodle of a meltdown — there isn’t much left out there. The satellite sensors show unbelievable temperatures. The first reading they got was thirty minutes after the thing went. We got a fax of a satellite photo half an hour ago and you wouldn’t believe it. Looks like the damn thing was hit with a ten-ton blockbuster. The structure is gone — steel, concrete, everything. Nothing left but some rubble and a hole in the ground.”

After a bit Collins added, “Of course, there’s not a chance in a zillion that anyone survived it.”

Grafton whistled. “You’re saying it’s almost like it blew up.”

“That’s precisely what it did. In the argot of the trade, ‘a power excursion,’ or a runaway. In lay terms, the son of a bitch blew up.”

Jake was stunned. Today no one had mentioned an explosion, nor had the word passed the lips of anyone at the Kremlin. “I thought nuclear reactors couldn’t explode.”

“A popular misconception. Fast breeders can. This one did.”

Jake was still trying to take it in. “Exploded?”

“The core exploded.”

“A nuclear explosion?”

“Boom.”

“How could that happen?”

Collins rubbed his face. He looked around, then by reflex turned up the volume on the radio. “Serdobsk was a liquid metal fast breeder reactor, one of the first ones the Russians built. The core is made up of uranium-235, which is surrounded by rods of uranium-238, which breed into plutonium. In a water-cooled pressure reactor, bleeding off the water causes the core to melt and fission to stop. Of course the hot core can melt the containment vessel and release radioactivity, but fission stops. In a breeder, loss of coolant has the opposite effect: the fission reaction increases. The more rapid the coolant loss, the worse the effect. As the temperature rises the core melts and fills the spaces between the rods. When the material is compact enough, it can detonate in a nuclear explosion.”

Collins waved a hand impatiently. “It’s been years since I studied this stuff, but as I recall, theoretically you could get an explosion about the equivalent of ten tons of TNT if the core is really cooking when the coolant goes. That looks to me about what they had. An explosion like that would blow maybe half the core material into the atmosphere — that’s tons of really filthy uranium, plutonium, iodine, strontium-90, that kind of crap.”

Jake Grafton felt like a sinner listening to God’s verdict. “Tons?”

Collins was merciless. “If you want all the trade words, a liquid-metal cooled breeder is autocatalytic — it’s its own catalyst for manufacturing power excursions. The process of compaction and excursions that result in more compactions is a little like what happens in a collapsing star at the end of its life. Power melts the core, it crashes down, more power, more rebound or crashdown, poof! Think of it like a little supernova. The nuclear reaction stops only when the core disassembles — blows itself to smithereens.”

“What could cause this…core compaction?”

“Well, I’m no expert, but—”

“You’re as close to an expert as I’ve got.”

“As I recall, there are a bunch of theoretical possibilities. Basically any event that causes the core to be compacted can start the process. The reactor is cooled by liquid sodium, which is hotter than hell: molten steel could cause the sodium to vaporize and explode. A sodium vapor explosion is the most likely way, but fuel vaporizing could trigger it. Or an external explosion that damages the core and compacts it, or coolant loss or surges that damage the core—”

Jake had had enough. He stopped the recitation with a raised hand. “So how bad is it?”

“Bad?” Collins stared at him as if he were a dense child. “This reactor was old, full of plutonium and really raunchy crud. Plutonium is the deadliest substance known to man. It has a half-life of twenty-four thousand two hundred years. One would have to wait for about ten half-lives, call it two hundred and fifty thousand years, for the stuff to cool off to the tolerable level.”

“Forever.”

“Essentially forever.”

“How much land will have to be permanently abandoned?”

“I dunno. They’re trying to figure that out in Washington. And I’m trying to make some estimates. Depends on the winds and how much atmospheric mixing there was, how much rain, all that stuff.”

“So guess,” Jake Grafton said.

“Maybe fifty thousand square miles. Maybe twice that.” Collins shrugged.

“Yeltsin’s fault,” Jake Grafton said slowly.

“It’s somebody’s.” Collins weighed his words. “You know, I got out of nuclear power after my first tour. Oh, I was a gung-ho little nuke all right — had my interview with that troll Rickover and did my time in Idaho and thought we had the fucking genie corked up tight. But this stuff”—he looked around again, searching for words—“God uses fusion to make the stars burn. We use fission now and we’re working up to fusion. We’re playing God…toddlers sitting in the dark playing with matches. The consequences…I just decided I wanted no more of it.”

“Serdobsk blew. Man’s hubris? Or did someone help this supernova compaction along?”

“What do you want, Admiral? Probability theory?”

“Yes.”

“Never bet on God. Go with the main chance. Men build ’em, men screw ’em up.”

“If you were going to blow a breeder, how would you go about it?”

Collins was in no mood for what-if games, yet a glance at Grafton’s face made him concentrate on the question. “Shaped charges on top of the vessel. Blow down and in. Put some hot molten steel into that sodium stew. The charges wouldn’t have to be very big since the containment vessel is unpressurized. With luck I’d get a little sodium vapor explosion that would send a shock wave down into the core. The first shock wave would lead to a power excursion and another — bigger — shock wave, and so on. If I were willing to meet my maker with that on my conscience, that’s the way I’d do it.”

Jake Grafton just grunted.

The telephone rang at midnight. “Admiral Grafton.”

“This is Richard, Admiral. I’ve got it.”

Jake came wide awake. Richard Harper. “This isn’t a secure line, Richard.”

“Okay.” Two seconds of silence. “It was a hell of a trail and they were damn cute, but I got it. How do you want it?”

“I’ll have someone call you. Can you write it out?”

“Sure.”