The Red Horseman

16

What was Herb Tenney up to? Jake worried the question as he lay inert on a couch with a throbbing headache. He had downed four aspirin and now had a wet washcloth draped across his forehead. Droplets of water trickled through his hair and wet the miserably thin pillow.

It was hard to keep the proper perspective. Somehow, some way, a group within the CIA was embedded in this Russian mess up to its hidden microphones. Perhaps Toad’s reaction was the proper one — absolute outrage. But Toad would surrender to that emotion and lose sight of the other aspects. That was the thing about Toad…passionate sincerity was the steal buried under that flippant shell he wore to ward off the bumps and abrasions of everyday life.

He still loved Judith Farrell, Jake was positive of that. Toad had given himself to her once, years ago, and he was the type of man for whom there could never be any emotional retreat. Love once bestowed could never be withdrawn. Oh, he could love another woman, and did — he was desperately in love with Rita Moravia. Now he must hide the hurt of the loss to avoid injuring another — only the Toad-man would get himself into that predicament. And Jake could only guess how badly he was hurting.

Yakolev, Shmarov… He had met those two and come away confused. Yakolev at least wore the face he thought the foreigners wanted to see: maybe all he did was wear it. Shmarov looked like some hideous apparition from a Boris Karloff movie, ready to jerk out fingernails and slice off testicles.

Money. Somehow he had missed the money connection between Nigel Keren and the Mossad, and it was right there in plain sight. Billionaire publisher and industrialist Nigel Keren… Money, money, money…

Richard Harper said he had it. But what did he have? Is money the connection between the CIA and the KGB?

The salient feature of communism that made it different from every other system of government man has yet devised was that it made everyone poor. All one could hope for under communism was access to more perks, to the right schools, a dacha in the Lenin Hills, a car, shopping in the party stores, party hospitals, and a plot in a party cemetery when the party doctors could do no more. But money? No. Today Boris Yeltsin was only paid the ruble equivalent of a hundred dollars a month.

What do desperate comrades do when the tide goes out and leaves them stranded on a mud bar?

What have they done?

Everyone must be dead at the Petrovsk Rocket Base. Collins said it was in the center of the fallout pattern, a mere eighty miles downwind. The men and women there must have died quickly, almost in their tracks. Perhaps the people in the clean rooms lasted a little longer. Perhaps not.

But the missiles and their warheads would be unaffected. They would be sitting there in the hangars on their transports and the clean room would be full of partially disassembled warheads.

How do you dispose of plutonium warheads? This was the question that had bedeviled the foreign experts and the Russian military. Simply taking them apart wasn’t the answer — they could be assembled again by anyone with the know-how.

Atomic weapons were the ultimate curse, Jake told himself once again. Their very existence warped space and time and human affairs like little black holes.

There must be some solution, something that rendered the warheads incapable of harming anyone. But what?

“Admiral. Admiral Grafton.”

It was Senior Chief Holley.

“Commander Tarkington called on the scrambled hand-held.” At least the marines had brought com equipment! “They’ve found some choppers. He said to tell you it’ll be a couple more hours before they’re fueled and checked out.”

“Thanks, Senior Chief.”

He tried again to turn off the muscles, to relax completely into sleep. So Toad found some choppers…

He was drifting in a late afternoon sky filled with giant white clouds over a blue landscape, clouds with tops shot with fire and bases hidden in deepening shadow.

He saw the clouds the other day from the window of the jet as they flew back to Moscow from the missile base, saw them from above, from the angle that God sees them. What does He think, watching the clouds drift across the landscape, watching the humans grapple in the mud, poisoning one another in the deep purple shadows?

The question flitted across a tired mind, then was gone, leaving only the clouds and the blue land below and the dark shadows of the coming night.

They looked like garbagemen in the one-size-fits-all baggy NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits. American servicemen called these things hot suits because there was no provision to cool the wearer. Britain’s Jocko West helped the French and German officers into their suits, then donned his own. The Italian officer, Colonel Galvano, couldn’t be reached at his hotel or the Italian embassy.

Although normally the suits merely provided filtered air, these were the latest models with a limited self-contained oxygen supply. When the oxygen was gone they would have to go on filtered air, and in an environment as hot as the one Tom Collins predicted, the filters were going to get quickly contaminated.

Before they came out to the airport, a heliport on the southeastern side of the city, Jake had spent twenty minutes talking with General Hayden Land on the scrambled telephone. “Do what you think best,” Land said. What else could he have said?

“Can you fly this…thing?” Jake asked Lieutenant Justin “Goober” Groelke, one of the pilots who came to Russia with Rita and the marines. Goober was already decked out in his hot suit.

“I think so, sir. I got a couple thousand hours in big choppers.”

“How much fuel do we have?”

“Not enough. We’ll all ride in this one. Toad’s loaded the other machine with fuel in drums. All we could find was a hand pump. We’ll fly in formation as far southeast as we can, land the other machine in a clean area. Then we’ll refuel this chopper and fly on. When we come back from the hot zone we’ll fuel up again.”

“Or abandon this machine.”

“Yessir. If it’s too contaminated.”

“What kind of condition are these machines in?”

Here Groelke paused. “These are fairly new machines, Aeroflot Mi-8s, with very low times on the tachs. They’ve been sitting outside without engine covers for a couple months, apparently. We cleaned the dirt and bird shit out of the intakes as best we could, drained the sumps, checked all the systems we could, all the fluid levels, the hubs… The hydraulic fluid may have some water in it and the engine oil doesn’t look good on either machine. The batteries were dead. We used a power cart to start the engines and we hovered both machines. There’s no telling how much dirt was in the engines before we turned them up. I assumed that you were willing to run some risks…” His voice trailed off as Jake’s head bobbed once.

Both men were professional aviators — they well knew the risks of flying in unknown machines that had been essentially abandoned. The weeds were now flattened by the rotor downwash where Goober hovered, but they had been up to the belly of the machines when the Americans found them. One of the tires of the helicopter carrying the fuel had been flat. A half hour was spent getting an air compressor from the hangar to start. A family of birds had nested in one cooling intake, but Goober didn’t think that worth mentioning.

“How are you going to get these engines started out there”—Jake nodded toward the southeast—“if they run long enough to get us there?”

“We loaded two power carts into the other chopper, sir. That cut the amount of extra fuel we could carry.”

“I don’t want to walk back.”

“I think we’ll be all right, sir.”

Well, Goober was his pilot. He could go over the figures with him or take his word for it. “Okay,” Jake told him and turned to his little group. “Let’s get out of these suits after Captain Collins checks each one. Be careful with them. These are the only hot suits we have.”

“How did you get permission to borrow these machines, Admiral?” Colonel Rheinhart asked as he worked his zipper down.

“It’s a standard midnight requisition, Colonel,” Toad put in, but his smile never arrived. Jake Grafton saw that and wondered if Rita did. She was helping Captain Collins check the suits. “Common procedure in the American Navy,” Toad assured him.

“Oh, you’re stealing them?”

“We showed the guards at the gate a personal note from Boris Yeltsin.” The colonel looked at him askance, so Toad added, “An interpreter at the embassy wrote the note. We gave it to the sergeant of the guard as a souvenir, along with two cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon.” Actually Spiro Dalworth had done the talking and Toad had watched. Dalworth was trying hard to please Tarkington, who had little to say to him. Just now Dalworth stood watching this exchange. He wasn’t trying on a hot suit since he was going to remain with the fuel chopper.

“What if the Russians shoot us down?” Jack Yocke whispered to Jake Grafton, who pretended not to hear him. The admiral walked over to Rita and had some final words with her.

“If I may, gentlemen,” Colonel Reynaud offered, “I believe it is time to ‘mount up’? As zhey say in ze western movies, we are burning ze daylight.”

Jake rode beside Goober Groelke in the copilot’s seat for the first leg. He was impressed by Groelke’s flying ability: he handled the large Russian helicopter like he had flown it for years. Jake examined the faces of the instruments that were telling him God-knows-what and watched the pilot at work for the first five minutes, then his mind wandered.

More puffy clouds this afternoon. And they had a late start.

They soon left the heavily industrialized suburbs of Moscow behind and followed a two-lane road for a while, then the road turned more to the east and the helicopters flew across wood lots and fields and here and there small villages. The land didn’t look prosperous, Jake decided. From a thousand feet the fields looked weedy and unattended, the occasional house just a shack, the villages collections of shacks. At random intervals the machines crossed above power lines and railroad tracks, incongruous fixtures that ran across the gently rolling countryside from one hazy infinity to the other.

The helicopter flew from sunlight into the random cloud shadow, back to sunlight again while Jake Grafton thought about radioactivity and nuclear warheads.

The noise was loud but not painfully so. Oh, to be able to fly on forever and never have to arrive. His eyelids grew heavy. To fly on and on and never have to arrive at the radioactive hell embedded in the haze and puffy clouds somewhere beyond the horizon, beyond the blighted promises and twisted dreams…

Fueling the helicopter that was to take them on to Serdobsk and Petrovsk was a nightmare. The hand pump leaked and took the best efforts of two men. Everyone took turns. Three or four minutes of intense effort reduced most of them to puffing. The marine captain was in the best shape, but after five minutes even he needed a break.

They were in a pasture several miles from the nearest village, but no one came to see who they were or why they had landed. Two scrawny steers watched from the safety of some trees at the far end of the field.

“How’s the machine flying?” Jake asked Goober.

“Left engine is running a little hot,” he was told, “but the oil levels seem okay. And the pressure in the primary hydraulic system fluctuates occasionally, but it’s nothing we can’t live with.”

“And the other machine?”

“A bunch of circuit breakers popped. The stab aug is out. Several hydraulic leaks.”

The refueling took over an hour while Tom Collins rigged his radioactivity detection equipment, which he described to Jake as advanced Geiger counters. The censors were on small winches so they could be lowered from the open rear door of the chopper to get readings at ground level. In the meantime Groelke and the other pilot climbed all over the two helicopters, checking everything.

When fueling was complete, everyone stepped behind the helicopter to relieve themselves, then took long drinks of water. The party that was flying on donned the hot suits.

“Toad,” Jake said, “you ride with Goober in the cockpit.” Toad would do the navigation. He had several charts which he got out and stacked in the order in which he would need them. Most of the officers had cameras. They checked them carefully before they donned their helmets and zipped the gloves into place.

They were going to breathe filtered air as long as the radiation levels were not too high. Collins would tell everyone when to switch on their oxygen systems.

Jack Yocke walked over to Jake and said, “If anything goes wrong, we’re dead men. You know that?”

Jake Grafton was tempted to make a flippant reply, but after a look at the reporter’s face, he refrained. “I know, Jack,” he said patiently, and pulled his helmet on.

He knew the dangers better than the reporter did. No one in the other machine had hot suits and the machines would be too far apart for radio reception. If this machine had a serious mechanical problem and was forced down, everyone aboard was doomed. Even in well-maintained helicopters with excellent equipment and thorough, careful planning, this mission was too dangerous for anyone but a desperate fool. Which was, he told himself scornfully, why the Russians weren’t here and he was.

He had given the other pilot explicit orders: if we don’t come back after six hours, you are to return to Moscow.

The hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from Moscow had put a sufficient charge on the helicopter’s batteries that Goober got a start without using the external power cart. They had wrestled one of the carts into the passenger bay and Spiro Dalworth was outside standing beside the other, just in case.

Jake strapped himself into the crewman’s seat by the rear door. He surveyed the compartment. Some of the other people had strapped in, some hadn’t. Yocke was playing with his buckle, toying with the adjustment catch. Perhaps each of them in his own way was pondering his karma.

Jake looked forward and saw Toad looking back at him. He gave Tarkington a thumbs up.

When the engine RPM had stabilized, Goober lifted the tail and the machine left the ground.

All that remained of the Serdobsk fast breeder reactor was rubble arranged around a shallow hole in the ground. From a hover two hundred feet above the plant it was obvious that no one had survived the blast. Jake Grafton lay on his belly with his helmeted head poking out the open helicopter door. Seventy-five feet below him the radioactivity sensor was inscribing little circles in the air. Beside him people were taking turns snapping cameras.

Jake felt a hand pulling him. It was Collins. They put their helmets together and Collins shouted, “We can’t stay here more than a couple minutes. It’s hotter than holy hell down there.”

“What’s that stuff over there?” Jake pointed to the wreckage of a building several hundred yards away from where the reactor had stood. Numerous drums were visible amid the concrete rubble, some of them split open. The contents looked dark, almost black.

“Plutonium. They probably had tons of the shit stored there.”

“The containers have ruptured.”

“Yeah, and the stuff is going to get blown away on the wind or washed into the creeks and rivers or soaked into the soil. Come on, Admiral, let’s get the hell outta here.”

Jake went forward to the cockpit and tapped Goober on the shoulder. The pilot eased the stick forward and the helicopter left the hover.

“Circle over that KGB troop facility.”

Groelke did so. One of the buildings had burned and several bodies were visible, but nothing moved. Nothing.

The helicopter flew in a gentle circle until it was pointed southeast toward Petrovsk. Goober Groelke climbed to several thousand feet to minimize their radioactivity exposure.

Now the noise of the engines became mesmerizing, Jack Yocke thought. One listened carefully, anxious not to hear any change, any burble or hiccup or unexplained sound. With your life depending on the continued smooth running of these two engines, the sound captures your attention and holds you spellbound. The ruins of the reactor had been horrifying, but the sound of these engines was the promise of continuing life, a drug more powerful than anything a doctor could prescribe.

Yocke tried to put his emotions into words, tried to string the words together as he sat with closed eyes and concentrated on that perfect humming.

On the floor of the passenger compartment Tom Collins fiddled with his equipment and made notes of radioactivity readings from which he could extrapolate estimates of the levels present on the surface. Jake Grafton watched him. At times Collins shook his head. Finally he folded up the notebook and sat hunched, staring at the needles on the dials in front of him.

The helicopter flew over a village, then a small town, then farther along another village. Cattle lay dead in the fields. Not a sign of life below, not even buzzards. They were dead too.

All those people went to bed one evening and at dawn, or just after, the radioactive fallout arrived, an invisible rain that fell without noise, without beauty, without warning, and brought quick, gentle death. Most of the victims probably died in their sleep.

Is that the fate of civilization? Is that the end that awaits our species? No bang, no warning, just death for every last man, woman and child as they lay sleeping on the dawn of the last day?

Jake Grafton felt his eyes tearing over and blinked repeatedly.

Collins had given up on the instruments and was standing beside Grafton looking aft, out the open door, when they saw the river, the Volga, broad and deep, the water reflecting the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds.

“Let’s go down and hover just above the surface.”

Goober turned the machine and went back. After twenty seconds of hovering, Collins signaled to fly on. Toad saw him and waved his hand at Groelke.

Jake bent down to where Collins was making notes. He was not writing down radiation levels, but a sentence: “The Volga is now a river of radiation carrying poison to the sea.”

They circled the Petrovsk Rocket Base while Collins took more readings. Jake looked out the window. The barracks and offices and hangars were all intact, but nothing moved. From this altitude the scene reminded Jake of a model railroad setup, complete with cars, trucks and several airplanes parked on the mat just off the runway, and a locomotive and flatcars near the biggest hangar.

But his attention was captured by the empty transporters parked on the mat. There were three of them, green tractors with green flat trailers hooked behind them, all empty.

Jocko West and the two European officers stood in the door looking at the transports, then Rheinhart began snapping pictures.

“I think we can land, Admiral,” Collins shouted.

“How long?”

“As little time on the ground as possible.”

“How hot is it?”

“Unprotected, you’d be fatally ill in a half hour. Maybe less.”

Groelke put the chopper near the main hangar and killed the engines to save fuel. Breathing pure oxygen, the people got out of the machine carefully, gingerly, conscious of anything that might rip or damage their antiradiation suit.

“Goober, stay with the machine. Toad, stay with him.”

Jake Grafton led the little party toward the open hangar door.

The giant missiles riding on their transporters were stark, functional sculptures with the red star prominent upon their flanks.

There was open space near the door, apparently enough for the three transporters that sat a quarter-mile away across the concrete. Impressive as the missiles were, the little group was soon standing gazing at medium-size wood crates arranged on pallets.

One of the boxes had been ripped open, revealing a cylindrical-shaped device about twelve inches in diameter. Wires and electronic devices covered it like spaghetti. Yet just visible between some of the wire bundles was a dull black substance arranged in the shape of a ball. This black stuff, Jake knew, was the conventional explosive trigger. Upon detonation it would squeeze the plutonium in the core— the center of the ball — into a supercritical mass. There in that tiny space the plutonium atoms would have their electrons stripped away, an instantaneous rape that would release stupendous amounts of energy. E = MC².

Jake Grafton counted quickly. Four warheads on each pallet, how many pallets? Almost a hundred.

The visitors were wandering away from the warheads when they saw the bodies stacked in one corner. Jake went over for a look, then found that only Jack Yocke had followed him.

Blood everywhere. Blood? Jesus, these people were shot! Lined up and gunned down.

Now he saw the spent cartridges that lay scattered around. He picked one up. Soviet. Not that that meant anything. The Soviets sold military equipment all over the world, just like the Americans, Germans, French and British. Superpowers do that, right? To keep the factories humming and the diplomats employed.

How many people? Fifteen or so.

There was a telephone on the wall and he went toward it. He held the handset against his helmet and tried to hear a dial tone. Nothing. He played with the buttons. Finally he replaced the instrument on its hook.

He left the building and headed for the clean room.

More bodies, all with bullet wounds. Some had died quickly, others bled a lot. There were bullet holes in the protective shield that sealed the room from the raw plutonium on the other side of the window. Even the flies were dead on the floor. Jake Grafton looked, then turned to find Jack Yocke staring at him through his faceplate. Yocke had a camera but he wasn’t taking any pictures. Jake brushed past him and headed for the door.

He had seen all he wanted to see. The others were ahead of him, walking toward the helicopter. Yocke trailed behind. Jake counted. Everyone here.

He climbed through the door and found Goober and Toad in the cockpit. “Crank it up,” he shouted. “Let’s get outta here.”

Goober manipulated switches. Nothing happened. “Battery’s dead,” he announced.

It took all of them to manhandle the power cart out of the helicopter. After looking all the controls over carefully, Toad Tarkington set the choke, turned on the battery, and pushed the start button. Nothing happened.

“Fuck,” Toad said, loud enough for Grafton to hear. “Nothing in this fucking country works,” he announced, then turned back to Jake.

Grafton looked at his watch. They had been on the ground for fourteen minutes. “Those transporters probably have jumper cables and some hand tools. Maybe. Go see.”

Toad went trotting off, a silver figure laboring through the heat waves rising from the concrete.

Time passed. Jake Grafton stared at the sky.

There was a jet up there. He could see the contrail. There it was, a silver gleam coming out from behind that cloud.

The mirror was in his pocket. Inside the hot suit.

Well, there was no other way. He gingerly unzipped the suit enough to admit his hand, reached inside and snagged the mirror. Then he zipped the suit closed.

The mirror was rectangular, about two inches by four inches, with a hole in the middle. Jake looked above him for the jet, then raised the mirror and tried to get the refracted spot of sunlight to come into the crosshair. Then he realized that a cloud had drifted between him and the sun. He put the mirror down and studied the clouds.

A few minutes.

“Those people were murdered.”

Jack Yocke was beside him.

“Everyone southeast of Serdobsk was murdered,” Jake Grafton said. “Those folks in there just happened to be shot.”

“Why?”

Jake flipped a hand at the empty transporters.

“Somebody stole some missiles?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“How are we going to get this helicopter started?”

“I don’t know that we can.”

Then the sun came out. And there was the jet, still high up there against the blue. Jake raised the mirror to his eye and moved it carefully to focus the light.

Yocke began to understand. “Is that Rita up there?”

“Maybe. I hope so.”

“Goddamn it, Grafton,” Yocke began. “Why didn’t—”

“We’ll get out of this or we won’t, Jack. That’s the whole story.” He was working the mirror. The sunspot was right on the crosshair. “Those people in there look like they are at peace.”

“That’s a peace I’m not ready for yet.”

“They probably weren’t ready either, but it came regardless. The one thing I can promise you — this is going to be one of the most peaceful spots on this planet for a couple hundred thousand years.” Jake removed the mirror from his eye and turned to face the reporter. “The peace that death brings is all any of us can count on.”

Yocke was watching the jet high in the sky above. “I think maybe she saw you,” he said.

One of the transporters rumbled into life. With diesel smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe, it slowly rolled toward the helicopter. “There’s a set of jumper cables in it,” Toad told Jake when he got down from the cab, “but no tools. The fucking Russians stole ’em or never put them in.”

“Try to hook the cables up and get that power cart started. Rita’s coming but we may still need this chopper.”

The jet was a three-holer, a Tupolev 154 with Aeroflot markings, a Russian ripoff of the Boeing 727 design. It wasn’t until it turned off the runway that Jake realized there was no hot gas coming from the center engine exhaust.

Rita taxied up and gestured to him from the cockpit.

“Everyone, we’re taking the jet,” Jake roared. “Help Captain Collins with his gear. Then get on the back of the transporter. Toad, when everyone’s on it, back that thing up to the door of the jet.”

Two U.S. marines opened the door for them and they scrambled aboard. Toad came in last. “Do we need to move the transporter?”

Rita was standing there. “No,” she told him. “I’ll back us out with thrust reversers. Close the door and let’s go.”

They took off the hot suits and threw them into the back of the passenger cabin. Jake made his way to the cockpit and dropped into the copilot’s seat. “You got an engine out?”

“Yessir. It was overheating. Maybe a bad thermocouple, but I don’t know. We got a heck of a takeoff roll without it, but I think we can make it.”

“How much runway we got?”

“About nine thousand feet. We’re light, nowhere near max gross weight. We’ll make it if the tires don’t blow. There’s no tread left and I could see cord in a couple places.”

Jake Grafton looked down the runway at the trees beyond. Relatively flat terrain, thank the Lord! “Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

Toad stuck his head in. “Rita, you get more beautiful every time I see you.”

She flashed him a wide grin.

“Did you see the mirror okay?” Jake asked.

“Yessir. I had a little trouble finding this place. Most of the Russian nav aids don’t work. I circled for about a half hour and had about decided you were going out on the chopper.” She was all business, relating it crisply, a matter of fact just to be reported.

“There’s the gear handle and the flaps.” She touched each lever. “We’ll begin our takeoff roll with the flaps up so we’ll accelerate a little faster. I’ll call for takeoff flaps at about a hundred eighty kilometers per hour — the airspeed is calculated in clicks so don’t get excited. You put them down to the first detent, takeoff. When we’re airborne I’ll call for the gear, then the flaps.”

“Let’s do it.”

She taxied to the very end of the runway and held the brakes while she ran her two good engines up to full power. Then she released the brakes.

The jet accelerated slowly. Jake could hear the thumping as the wheels passed over the expansion joints.

Rita Moravia made no attempt to rotate, merely sat monitoring the engine instruments and the airspeed indicator between glances at the end of the runway, which they were stampeding toward at an ever increasing pace.

“Flaps,” she called.

Jake moved the handle to takeoff. The indicator moved. “They’re coming!”

The airspeed needle kept rising, but oh so slowly. The end of the runway came closer, closer.

Jake was reaching for the control wheel to rotate the plane when Rita eased it back and the nose came off, then the main wheels just as the end of the runway flashed by.

“Gear up,” she called, and Jake Grafton raised the handle.

When the gear was fully retracted the plane accelerated better. Still Rita kept the nose down and let the airspeed increase. “Flaps up,” she said at last, and Jake moved the handle.

When they were climbing through three thousand meters — the altimeter was calibrated in meters — Rita told Jake, “This is the biggest plane I’ve flown. Handles better than I thought it would.”