The Red Horseman

13

The storm broke in Russia the next morning. The speaker of the Congress of People’s Deputies managed to call the house to order, but that was the last thing he accomplished. While the world watched on television the deputies brawled. Finger pointing and shouting gave way to shoving and fists. Before the camera was turned off several deputies were seen to be on the floor being kicked and pounded with fists by their colleagues.

A huge, angry crowd gathered in Red Square. Conspicuous today were the red flags, the ugly mood. Then, as if someone struck a match, the crowd exploded. A truck was overturned and set on fire. Policemen were beaten, several to death. Then the rioters spilled out of the square and headed for the nearby hard-currency hotels and restaurants, which they looted. One hotel was set ablaze. Foreigners were attacked on the streets and beaten mercilessly. Somehow CNN managed to televise most of the riot live to a stunned, angry, frightened world.

Although the sense of fear and betrayal was strongest in Russia, the rest of the world felt it too. Nuclear power plants stood throughout the Western world. Their safety had long been an issue, but the debate seemed esoteric to electorates concerned with the mundane issues of jobs, wages, education and housing. The massive, catastrophic pollution from the Serdobsk accident was something the public could understand. They were seeing the consequences of an accident that advocates of nuclear power said would never happen.

In Italy the coalition government fractured and the premier resigned. The French president addressed a crowd estimated at ten thousand people and was forced to stop speaking when a riot broke out on the edge of the crowd. Across the channel the British prime minister was questioned sharply in Parliament from both sides of the aisle about the dangers of Britain’s nuclear reactors. Here too a significant percentage of the lawmakers were immediately ready to shut down all the reactors.

By the time Americans began to wake up with their coffee, newspapers and morning television shows, the fat was in the fire. The television played scenes of rioting in Russia and the political crises in Europe while people read the front pages of their newspapers with a growing sense of horror. Jack Yocke’s story on the KGB’s involvement in the Soviet Square massacre — it was dubbed a massacre by an inspired headline writer and the name stuck — made the front page of the Washington Post, at the very bottom. The rest of the page was devoted to the Serdobsk meltdown.

Experts were stunned by the extent of the disaster. It was as if none of the redundant safety systems in the reactor had functioned. Initial estimates on the level of radioactivity at ground level where the reactor had stood were hastily developed from satellite infrared and other sensors. “It will be three hundred thousand years,” one physicist declared, “before an unprotected human can safely walk upon that site.”

In the Capitol in Washington congressmen elbowed one another vying to get in front of the cameras in the press briefing rooms. Every one of them swore he would support a critical review of the American nuclear power program. A significant minority was ready to shut down all the reactors right now. Among this minority were several of the legislators who had fought hardest on behalf of the utilities that operated reactors — the same people, incidentally, who had accepted the most PAC money from those utilities.

The antinuclear lobby was having a great day. Triumphant and exultant as the tide lifted their boat, they excoriated senators and congressmen who had consistently pooh-poohed safety concerns. They damned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an industry puppet, vilified every public official who ever said that nuclear power was safe, and demanded the immediate resignation of the secretary of the Department of Energy.

While the antinukes danced and pranced in television studios in New York and Washington, a huge crowd gathered outside the Capitol and were harangued by impromptu speakers. After an hour the crowd became unruly and police used tear gas to break it up.

When the sun rose in Japan the antinuclear, antitechnology forces arrayed in helmets and plastic body armor were ready to do battle with club-wielding riot police. The battle surged through downtown Tokyo, commuter trains were literally overturned, power lines were dragged down while still hot, and a mob broke through the fence at Narita airport. Outnumbered riot police turned and ran as the demonstrators charged for the Boeing 747s at the terminal gates. Most of the giant planes suffered minor damage, mostly to their tires, but two were set on fire.

The chaos brought the city to a choking halt while legislators in the Diet crafted a hasty plan to shut down Japan’s nuclear power plants. The power loss would stun the economy, but in a small nation that had never forgotten Hiroshima or Nagasaki, this was the only possible political choice. As uncomfortable, perspiring physicists sat before television cameras and tried to assess the Serdobsk meltdown damage based on fragmentary information, Japan got out of the nuclear power business.

At stock exchanges around the world the value of stocks in electrical utilities that owned nuclear power plants fell disastrously before trading was halted because of the huge disparity between buy and sell orders.

But Serdobsk was in Russia, and it was there that the situation got completely out of control as the evening shadows lengthened. The development “at any price” mentality of the post-World War II years was revealed for what it was — a grotesque miscalculation that had bankrupted the nation, left the people paupers on the brink of starvation, and now had made huge portions of the nation uninhabitable. Raging mobs roamed the core of Moscow and no foreigner was safe. Three hotels were now ablaze. The entrances to the Kremlin were blocked with barricades, and police hid behind them to fire into the enraged crowds. Several tanks appeared on the streets, only to be surrounded and disabled. The crews were dragged out and beaten to death as television camera crews broadcast the scenes from the safety of the rooftops.

A mob surrounded the American embassy complex and probably would have stormed it if the ambassador hadn’t ordered the marines to use live ammunition and shoot to kill. They did. By the time the summer sun had set, over a dozen bodies lay on the streets around the embassy. One of the bodies was of a young woman who had tried to get close enough to the wall to hurl a Molotov cocktail. When a corporal shot her, the bottle shattered beside her and her corpse was immolated. This vignette would have made great television, but unfortunately the CNN crew on the rooftop across the boulevard was having trouble with their satellite feed.

Jack Yocke saw the incident and used it to lead off a story for the Post. He knew he had something. The woman’s hair blowing in the wind as she lay dead in the street, the burning gasoline igniting the asphalt, her clothing, and finally that wispy brown hair — he could still see the scene in his mind’s eye as he tapped on the laptop and tried to capture the insanity of infuriated, berserk people charging marines behind a brick wall armed with M-16s. Blood and guts were what he did best, so he wrote quickly and confidently.

As he wrote he could still hear the occasional sharp crack of an M-16. Now and then through the open window he got a whiff of the acrid smoke of a burning car that the locals had torched this morning. It was a Ford with diplomatic plates — just which embassy employee it belonged to Yocke didn’t know. When he was finished he checked his work over for spelling and punctuation, then called the Post on Grafton’s telephone and sent the story via modem.

After Yocke had sent off his story, he locked the door of the apartment and went looking for Jake Grafton. He found him against the southwest corner of the compound wall busy with the TACSAT gear and encoder. The admiral merely glanced at him and continued to punch buttons, so Yocke sat down beside him.

Above them, standing on some empty furniture crates so he could see over the wall, was a marine with a rifle. He was scanning the windows of a Russian apartment house just across the alley. Fortunately no rioters had chosen to get up there and shoot down into the compound, probably because none of them had guns. The Communists had made damn sure that the civilian inhabitants of their workers’ paradise were unarmed and stayed that way.

“Hell of a day, huh?” Yocke said.

Grafton finished with the number sequence. He diddled a bit with the dish and high-gain antenna on top of the box and finally got the voice echo in sync with his voice. He pushed another button, then leaned back against the wall with the telephone-style handset cradled on his shoulder and glanced at the reporter. “Yeah,” he said.

After a moment he spoke into the mouthpiece. “General Land, please. Admiral Grafton calling.”

More waiting. Grafton nodded at Yocke’s trousers. “Toad loan you those?”

“His are too small. He bought me some stuff at the embassy store.”

Grafton merely nodded and played with the handset cord.

Almost a minute passed before he spoke again:

“Admiral Grafton, sir. Calling from the embassy compound in Moscow… Yessir… Ambassador Lancaster talked to Yeltsin about a half hour ago on the satellite phone. Called Washington and they called Yeltsin and patched him through… I think the local phone system is overloaded, everybody calling everybody… Yessir… Yeltsin told the ambassador that the generals won’t bring in troops to put down the rioting. They want him to resign and appoint a junta… That’s right, a junta — seven of them… Marshal Mikhailov, General Yakolev, a KGB guy named Shmarov — those three I’ve heard of. There’re a couple more generals and one admiral. The seventh guy is some civilian… Yessir.”

Grafton eyed Yocke, who had raised his eyes and was watching the marine on the crates.

“I don’t know,” Grafton said, then listened some more.

Grafton was in civilian clothes — Yocke noticed that the trousers were none too clean. Neither was the shirt. Then he realized the clothes were Russian, not American. So were the shoes.

“I wonder if you could order some photos for me. I want satellite photos of the Russian base at Petrovsk.” He listened a moment, then spelled the name of the base. “That’s right. It’s in the footprint of the Serdobsk fallout. Should be too hot for humans. I want a shot at least a month old, one maybe last week and one now. And some of that Serdobsk nuke plant.”

The admiral listened a moment, then went on. “Well, I would like about six antiradiation suits… No, better make that ten suits, with oxygen-breathing apparatus. Fly them in on a C-141. We’ll get out to the airport somehow… Ten… Yessir… Self-contained breathing apparatus, the whole shooting match. Geiger counters, film badges, everything… Yessir, I’d like to get down to Serdobsk if I can.

“Well, I don’t think Yakolev is going to lift a finger. He’s busy trying to take over the government… Not a soul, sir. No, I don’t think he’ll do anything to obstruct us, but the worse this gets the worse Yeltsin and the democrats look… I know, that occurred to me too. That’s one reason I want to get to Serdobsk.”

Grafton fell silent for a moment and eyed Yocke. It wasn’t a pleasant look. “We’ll steal one,” he told General Land. “Send me a couple pilots that can fly anything, and I mean anything. And just to be on the safe side, could you send a marine recon team with all their gear and hot suits?”

They talked about that for a moment, then Jake said, “And one more thing, sir. I’ve had a man named Richard Harper trying to find the money trail to whoever it is here in Russia that is selling weapons. He called last night and said he has it. I asked him to write a report. He’s supposed to mail it to my wife, but I wonder if you could send someone from your office over to his house in Chevy Chase to pick it up? Make a copy for yourself and send me a copy.” Jake gave him Harper’s address.

“Thank you, sir,” he said finally and hung up the receiver. He punched buttons and the lights on the gadget went out.

“Needless to say, you don’t want me to print a word of that,” Yocke said conversationally.

“Needless to say.”

“What are you going to steal?”

“A helicopter.”

“Can I go too?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Yocke nodded. Grafton packed the com gear into a soft carrying bag. He was zipping it closed when Yocke asked, “Think Yeltsin will resign?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, by God, after—”

“He may not have a choice,” Grafton said. “In case you haven’t noticed, Russia is a Third World shithole. The rule in Third World shitholes is that the head of government serves at the pleasure of the guys with the guns.”

Jack Yocke wasn’t paying much attention. His mind was in high gear ruminating on Nikolai Demodov and the KGB general, Shmarov, who it turned out wanted to be one of the magnificent seven. And Demodov denied he had been involved in the Soviet Square rubout… Shit! Those assholes must have been biding their time, waiting for just the proper moment to dump Yeltsin. They just didn’t want that xenophobic neo-nazi Kolokoltsev around to embarrass them when the puck went down. But how could he tie those Commies to Kolokoltsev’s killing?

Grafton stood and arranged the strap of the com gear bag over his shoulder. He looked up at the Marine. “Did you hear anything, Corporal Williams?”

“Not a word, sir.”

“Fine.”

Grafton took a couple steps, then paused and looked back at Yocke. “Well, you coming or are you going to sit there in the dirt contemplating your navel?”

The reporter got up and dusted his trousers. “You oughta see my navel. Got a ruby in it. Arab belly dancer gave it to me when I was sixteen. She was my first piece of ass.”

Yocke’s attempt at humor fell flat with Jake Grafton. He too had seen the girl shot and her corpse burned. And he was trying to understand what must have moved her to pick up a bottle filled with gasoline with a burning rag stuck in the mouth and run across that street at the American embassy.

Betrayal? The Russian people had been betrayed by the Communists, all right, who had promised much and delivered little.

But the American embassy?

Perhaps she felt a profound anger at a system that for fifty years had paid any price to acquire technology, yet in the end the technology betrayed them all. The Americans were the gurus of high-tech, the master alchemists.

Musing thus, Jake was still unsure. A great disgust at technology and technicians was motivating much of the political unrest worldwide, he thought, but still…Serdobsk was a Russian reactor. Perhaps mixed with those emotions was the age-old Russian suspicion of all things foreign. The Russians weren’t as bad as the Chinese in that regard, but they did fear the outside world, some sort of a national inferiority complex that they soaked up with their mother’s milk.

He would liked to have asked that young woman, but that chance was gone forever. She was a heap of charcoal and bone now, out there on a spot of melted, charred asphalt.

Jake Grafton wondered if the dead woman had had any relatives at Serdobsk or out there in that radioactive footprint.

He was opening the door to the apartment building when Jack Yocke asked, “Did General Land say what America’s response to the meltdown was going to be?”

Now Jake saw it. He let go of the door handle and turned to face Yocke. He could almost hear her voice. You are America. You are not stupid and venal and corrupt, yet you did nothing to help us. You let the stupid, venal, corrupt men tell their lies and build their poisonous monuments to our ignorance and so destroy us, the helpless. You, America.

Jack Yocke repeated his question.

“No,” Jake Grafton muttered, shaking his head. “He didn’t.” And he turned back for the door handle.

Upstairs in the apartment, which of necessity was also Jake’s office, Yocke had more questions. “Just how much nuclear material was in that reactor, anyway?”

“About four and a half tons.”

“Tons?”

“Yeah. Maybe three or so tons of uranium and a ton and a half of plutonium.”

“Gee, that sounds like a lot. I guess I always thought those things used just a couple of hatfuls.”

“This was a fast breeder. A typical water-cooled reactor would have maybe three times that amount.”

“So this time they got off lucky?”

Jake Grafton snorted. “Not hardly. The goddamn stuff blew up, went nuclear. Probably half the core went into the atmosphere. We don’t know enough yet to even make an intelligent estimate. And a breeder like that — it figures they had three or four tons of plutonium in the pipeline, just lying around. Some of that probably got swept up into the atmosphere and scattered all over too. No, these Russians just had no luck at all.”

After a bit Yocke asked, “So how bad is it?”

“Bad?” Grafton looked perplexed.

“Compared to Chernobyl.”

Grafton shrugged. “A hundred times worse? Two hundred times? ‘Bad’ is a ridiculous understatement. The stuff that went into the air is really filthy…” He groped for words, then gave up. “Really filthy,” he repeated. “Serdobsk is way the hell and gone away from everything, so no cities were poisoned immediately, but by the time all that fallout hits the rivers and streams and lakes…” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this incident ultimately kills a million people.”

Jack Yocke just stared.

“Another million,” Jake Grafton roared savagely. “God in heaven, when will it ever stop?”

Yocke got out his laptop and pecked aimlessly until Jake suggested he do that in the bedroom, so he went in and closed the door. The muffled crack of a rifle penetrated the room and Jake half-rose off the couch before he thought better of it.

He needed time to think. One of the most trying things about a military career, he thought, was that so many decisions had to be made immediately with the best information available, which used to be precious little and fragmentary at best. Then came computers and the highly touted information age; the trickle of information became a raging torrent of facts and numbers endlessly pouring from laser printers that no one had time to look at. Who could drink from a fire hose?

Jake Grafton knew that if he merely picked up a telephone and asked, he could have more information in an hour than he could read in a year. Better to go with what he had. He leaned his head back onto the couch, closed his eyes and tried to assess his meager collection of facts and impressions.

The most important fact…impression maybe…was one he wasn’t sure he had right. Most people automatically assume that people everywhere are all alike—“they think like we do!” Jake knew better. But he thought he could see the viewpoint of the professional soldiers like Yakolev who saw their place in Russian society slipping out from under them. Without the American enemy to stimulate the allocation of damn scarce resources and keep the ranks filled and people motivated, the military was crumbling. They had tried to fashion a new mission to protect ethnic Russian minorities wherever they might be and had been outmaneuvered by Yeltsin and his allies. The nukes were being taken away while the Americans and Europeans kept their conventional forces, there was no money, not even to feed the troops, the industrial establishment necessary to support a modern military was disintegrating, all at a time when the values the leaders had devoted their lives to were belittled or rendered politically meaningless. The Soviet Union was gone. Mother Russia was collapsing from within, there were no more secrets to guard, there was no place for men of integrity and honor. So the generals were going to save Russia in spite of politicians.

How far would these men go?

How far had they already gone?

Yakolev: “I serve Russia!” A uniform for a patriot or a bloody rag to hide a tyrant’s nakedness?

Someone was shaking him. He opened his eyes with a start. It was Tarkington, holding a finger to his lips for silence. He seized Jake’s arm and nodded toward the hall door, which was partially open. His lips moved, a silent word: “Come.”

When they were in the hallway Toad eased the door shut behind them until it clicked, then led Jake down the hall. He passed Jake his pistol, which was sheathed in its shoulder holster. The gun had been under the pillow in Jake’s bedroom, and Toad had retrieved it before he woke the boss.

“Yocke has an outside call,” he whispered. “The senior chief stalled and told her he’s trying to find him. When we get back to the switchboard he’ll ring the phone. Yocke’s in there, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.” Jake glanced at his watch. Almost two in the morning.

Toad broke into a trot.

“Is it her?” Jake wanted to know.

“I didn’t hear her voice. But I got this feeling.” After all, Toad thought, how many women could there be in Moscow who want to talk to Jack Yocke?

When the two officers came through the door, Senior Chief Dan Holley flipped a switch on the switchboard. “Still there, ma’am?” he asked. Then he said, “He’s staying with some folks. I’ll ring now.” Then he toggled the switch again and handed the headset to Jake Grafton.

“The mike won’t work, but you’ll hear everything.”

Jake donned the headset and listened to the ringing. The telephone in the apartment was in the small living room and Yocke was probably asleep, so this was probably going to take a moment.

The phone rang and rang.

Oh, damn. Two nights ago when Yocke arrived at the embassy, he had told him not to answer the phone. What if he doesn’t?

Toad and the senior chief were watching. More ringing.

C’mon, Jack. You’re supposed to be a curious reporter!

“It’s ringing,” Jake told his audience. And then the door opened and Spiro Dalworth slipped into the room. Jake had had Spiro, Toad and the senior chief alternating shifts on this switchboard since Captain Collins gave his approval. The regular operator supervised and gave them directions, but the navy men listened to the voice of every caller and waited for someone to ask for Jack Yocke.

Now it had happened.

Ten rings. Eleven. Dammit, Jack! Answer the phone!

“Hello.” Yocke was still half asleep.

“Jack?” A woman’s voice. An American woman. Was it her?

“I think so.” He sounded almost petulant.

“This is Shirley Ross. I’m glad I reached you. I tried half the hotels in town and was about to give up when I thought of the embassy.”

“Hmm. What time is it?”

“It’s late I know, but I just had to talk to you.”

“Glad you called.” Yocke’s voice was crisp and alert. He was wide awake now. “How are you weathering the riot?”

“I heard about your story,” she gushed. “I’m so thrilled! It’s so important that people know the truth.” She was laying it on too thick, Jake Grafton thought, and he bit his lip. “I never thought you would get it,” she finished.

“Luck.”

“And… I don’t know just how to say this, but… I didn’t think you had the courage to write it.”

“Balls like a bull. What’s on your mind tonight, Shirley?”

“There’s more. A lot more. They’re counting on the fact that no one will ask the right people the right questions.”

Yocke merely grunted.

“They’re playing for keeps, and they don’t really care who gets hurt.”

“Shirley, I’ll never get inside that place, even if anyone inside would talk to me, which they won’t. Oh, I could do some follow-up on the guys who followed orders and got arrested — when they get out of the can — if they ever get out — but the story has hit the wall. These things happen.”

“It’s something else.”

Silence as Yocke digested it.

When the silence had gone on too long, she said, “Something really important…”

“I’m listening.”

“The Rizhsky subway station.”

“Gimme a fact, Shirley. One little fact and the promise that you know more.”

“Have I lied to you?”

“Jesus! How many times have I heard that line! Yeah, baby, I love you no shit.” Yocke sighed audibly. “A subway station. Are the subways still running?”

Jake Grafton’s eyes widened in surprise. He hadn’t thought she could pull it off.

“Amazingly enough, yes. An hour from now. Come alone. And be careful.”

“Where is that, anyway?” Yocke asked, but she had already hung up.

Jake pulled off the headset and tossed it on the table.

Geez, she calls on the local phone system, which is only working because it’s the middle of the night, and she tells him where to meet her! She might as well have put it in the newspaper. So it’ll be Judith Farrell, Jack Yocke and enough KGB agents to arrest the Presidium.

“She told him he had courage,” Jake reported to the little group. “He told her he had balls like a bull.”

Toad Tarkington grinned broadly.

She’ll meet him on the way. Or someone will. That’s the way she’ll work it. She just wants him out on the street and moving in the right direction. That means she’ll probably pick him up quick, not long after he leaves the embassy.

“She set up a meet at the Rizhsky subway station,” Grafton told his audience. He rubbed his face to ease his fatigue. “As curious as Yocke is, it’s hard to see how the sucker lived this long. Unbelievable.”

He had three guys plus Yocke. No radios. Clandestine surveillance in a foreign city was Judith Farrell’s game, her profession, how she lived — none of his people had any training or experience, including Jake.

“Okay,” Jake said finally. “Toad, go see how many of those rioters are still outside and figure out how we can get out of here without getting beaten to death. Then get back here quick. Spiro, go get Yocke. Senior Chief, go find the marine captain and get a couple more pistols, three M-16s, four of those infrared binoculars, and some ammo. Go.” He shooed them out.

There was no way he could trap Judith Farrell. He was going to have to send Yocke out into the streets and pray that Farrell found him before the KGB did, and that the reporter could somehow convince Farrell to play the game Jake’s way.

“Amateur night in Moscow,” he muttered disgustedly.

The switchboard lights were blinking again. Jake went into the office next door to find the regular operator and ask him to return to the board.