The Red Horseman

17

When the airliner was level at cruising altitude, Captain Collins checked everyone for radiation. Jake had to part with his shirt. Colonel Rheinhart lost his trousers. “As soon as we get to Moscow,” Collins told them, “I want each of you to take a long shower. Wash your hair thoroughly. The stuff you want to get rid of is radioactive dust and dirt. Stay in the shower as long as you can stand it and don’t come out until you’re as clean as a new penny.”

When Jake had settled into a seat, Yocke came over and sat beside him. “Where’d you guys get this airliner?”

“Aeroflot.”

“Who’d you have to kill?”

“Nobody. Toad told them we wanted to charter an airliner and waved American money. He got this one full of gas for seventeen hundred dollars cash and two bottles of mediocre whiskey that he stole out of Spaso House on the Fourth of July. The Aeroflot man insisted a Russian pilot come along, but he came down with something and got off when Rita gave him a hundred. She flew it out of Sheremetyevo.”

“What about air traffic control?”

“One of the enlisted marines speaks tolerable Russian. He’s up in the cockpit with Rita now.”

Yocke shook his head. “It’s amazing what real money will buy.”

“Ain’t it, now.”

“Think that’s what happened to those missiles?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Now, Jake! Don’t start that crap! I’ve risked my butt this afternoon right along with you and Rita and all these other military heroes. It wouldn’t hurt an iota for you to come clean and tell me the whole truth. For once.”

Jack Yocke got the gray eyes full face. There was no warmth in them. “That’s the second time you’ve called me Jake. You aren’t old enough or wise enough. Don’t do it again.”

“Yessir. No offense. But I mean it about leveling with me. I feel like a kid in a haunted Halloween house. I’ve paid my buck and I keep getting the shit scared out of me even after it ceases to be fun. How about telling me what you know?”

“I don’t know what happened to those weapons. I was as surprised as you were when I saw those empty transporters and the bodies.”

“The story I heard that got me over to this country was that the Iraqis were trying to buy some nuke weapons. I heard they had three billion to spend for the right toys.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

Jack Yocke scratched his nose, then rubbed his face good. It went against the grain to reveal a source but he didn’t see any way out of it. Finally he said, “One of the ICB executives told me, off the record. He was sitting in a New York jail awaiting trial when I interviewed him.” The International Commerce Bank had recently been shut down worldwide for money laundering on a stupendous scale, that and a garden variety of other financial crimes.

“Did you believe him?”

This was the crucial question. A professional reporter hears a lot of stories, every now and then a true one. The good reporters can smell a lie a block away. “I thought he was telling the truth,” Yocke told the admiral. “Or what he believed to be the truth. It had the right feel.”

“I don’t mean to insult you, but did you get that feel when Judith Farrell told you her Soviet Square tale?”

“Yeah, I did. I’ve been thinking about that. In the first place she was a professional liar and damn good, and second, most of the story was true, in fact all of it except who was ultimately responsible. So it played well. There was nothing fancy or hyped. I bought it.” He shrugged.

Jake Grafton visibly relaxed. “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. I bought one of her stories one time too.”

Jack Yocke got the feeling he had just passed some kind of test. “Well, the ICB tip didn’t pan out over here. I had the names of two former ICB execs who had run to earth in Moscow that my source swore knew the ins and outs — if they could be persuaded to talk. These two birds supposedly shuffled the money every which way to Sunday to make it impossible to trace. That made sense, so I looked for them for four straight days but couldn’t get a sniff. Not that I’m any great shakes at finding people in Moscow, but still…”

“I heard about the money going through ICB too,” Jake said softly. “Maybe from Iraq. Maybe from an Iraqi working for Iran.”

“Heard any names? Which Russian might have gotten the dough?”

“A name or two. That much money, it’s impossible to keep it secret. Oh, they’ve tried. But that much money…” He had repeated the rumors to Richard Harper in the hope that he could find the trail. Did he?

He heard the power being reduced. “I’d better go talk to Rita,” Jake said. “We’ll land at another airport and Toad can call Aeroflot. No use letting the manager see who was on his chartered airplane.” Yocke got out of his seat, then Jake maneuvered himself into the aisle and walked forward to the cockpit.

Three billion dollars. That wasn’t pocket change anywhere, but in Russia it was a stupendous amount of money. Too much, really. Jack Yocke moved to the window seat and sat staring out, wondering where the money could be, what a Russian could use it for. In Russia there were no stocks to buy, no bonds, no office buildings to invest in, no art masterpieces for sale, no private oil syndicates setting out to drill up Siberia or the Gulf of Mexico. It was amazing, really. Here was a whole nation with not a goddamn thing to invest money in, unless you were looking to throw your bucks into worn-out factories producing obsolete, shoddy goods that no one on the planet except starving, penniless Russians wanted.

However, one possibility did come to mind. He looked toward the cockpit, started to get out of the seat and go that way, then decided against it. If he thought of it, the idea must have already occurred to Jake Grafton.

He sighed and scratched himself and turned his attention back to the window.

It was dark when the Tupolev 154 landed at Domodedovo, a huge field for domestic airliners thirty miles southeast of Moscow. Rita taxied to the corner of the airport most remote from the terminal and shut down the engines. Jake went back to find Captain Collins. He wiggled a finger at Iron Mike McElroy, the marine captain, who came over. “I want this airplane washed before we call Aeroflot. I don’t want any radioactivity overdoses on my conscience.”

McElroy agreed to use his people to find some tank trucks and hoses and to do the washing, and Collins agreed to use his equipment to ensure they got the hot spots and diluted the runoff as much as possible.

“Do the best you can,” Jake told them, and left it at that.

An hour later Jake was in Ambassador Lancaster’s office in the embassy complex. Ms. Hempstead sat on the couch with a notepad on her lap.

“Yeltsin refused to resign,” Lancaster said. “The anti-Yeltsin forces have forced a no-confidence vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies. The best Yeltsin could do was get it delayed until Friday.”

This was Monday evening. Jake glanced at the calendar on the ambassador’s desk to make sure. Three days.

“Yakolev and Shmarov have been on television,” the ambassador continued. “They and the rest of the junta seem to have a lot of support. People are hungry, unemployed, the factories don’t have raw materials or markets, this Serdobsk disaster may have been the last straw.”

“Yeltsin was popularly elected. I didn’t know the legislature could throw him out.”

“Technically they can’t. But over here they’re still making up the rules as they go along. If he loses on the no-confidence vote he can either call for a new election of deputies or resign and let the congress choose a successor. The problem is that his support is melting away.”

“What’s the American position?”

“We’ve got to let the Russians sort it out for themselves. We’ll recognize any government that gets in without resort to violence.”

“How about blowing up the Serdobsk reactor? Would Washington classify that as a violent act?”

Lancaster goggled. Hempstead came off the couch and floated toward the desk. “Blew it up? Who?”

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m merely asking a question.”

“This isn’t the time for soaring hypotheticals, Admiral,” Hempstead said acidly, “or cute questions about when someone stopped beating his wife.” She stalked back to the couch and snatched up her notepad.

“I assume you do have some basis for your question,” Owen Lancaster said uneasily. “Exactly what did you find out on your helicopter trip to Serdobsk?”

“The reactor and containment vessel are gone, sir, nothing left but a crater and some rubble. The entire control building was destroyed. A storage building a hundred yards or so from the reactor was severely damaged and the plutonium containers that were inside ruptured.”

Lancaster merely nodded. Like most people, he had only the vaguest idea of what a meltdown was or what the physical effects might be. He expected something terrible of course, but just what was rather hazy. This description sounded properly catastrophic, so he murmured “horrible” and shook his head. “Nobody survived, I suppose?”

“No, sir,” Jake Grafton said, and paused for a few seconds to gape at the vastness of the great man’s ignorance.

Then he continued: “The fallout zone is huge and extraordinarily hot. Collins will have some numbers in a few hours. We won’t know the exact dimensions of the fallout zone until aerial surveys are conducted. But to return to my question — I guess I didn’t phrase it right. Please excuse me. I’m just curious about how willing the United States government might be to get into a shooting scrape over here if the junta looks like it might be coming out on top.”

“That’s a decision for the president,” Hempstead piped from her ringside seat, her tone suggesting Grafton was a few cards short of a full deck.

Lancaster spoke more slowly. “I seriously doubt if anyone in Washington will be very enthusiastic about a military adventure in Russia, Admiral, even if Yakolev himself personally blew up a dozen reactors and CBS News has a videotape of him pushing the plunger. Speaking hypothetically, of course.”

Jake Grafton wondered what the administration’s reaction would be to medium-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Iran or Iraq. He didn’t ask the diplomats though. He wanted to talk to Hayden Land before he set Lancaster’s pants on fire.

While Senior Chief Holley was checking the navy’s minuscule office for bugs and rigging the telephone scrambler, Jake went to find Jack Yocke. “I want you to write a story about what you saw today. Get the radiation numbers and isotopes and all that from Collins when he gets back. Write an eyewitness account, just what you saw. Leave out the bit about the transporters and the missiles. And let me see the story before you call it in.”

Jack Yocke had just completed his shower. He was tired and looked longingly at the couch in the small apartment that Grafton and Tarkington shared. Now Grafton was ordering up journalism like a fried-to-order hamburger. Yet he barely paused before he said, “Yessir. I’ll have the story for you in about an hour. When Collins gets back I can just insert a few paragraphs.”

“I’ll be down in the office.”

Back in the office Holley was still looking for electromagnetic fields that shouldn’t be there. “What did Herb Tenney do today?” Jake asked.

“He left the embassy about eleven, sir, and returned in time for dinner.”

The admiral grunted and began to think about what he was going to say to Hayden Land. When Holley pronounced the office clean, Jake punched his code into the scrambler and placed his call. It took seven minutes before the Pentagon operator got them connected.

“Let’s go secure,” Land told him after he heard Jake’s voice.

Jake pushed the proper button and waited while the two encrypters talked to each other with chirps and clicks, then he heard Land’s voice. “Richard Harper is dead.”

“How?”

“Apparent heart attack.”

“Do you have the report?”

“No. The house was ransacked.”

Jake didn’t wait for the effect of that to numb him. He immediately began to report the events of the day.

While Jack Yocke tapped away on his laptop in the small living room, Toad and Rita took a long shower together and then crawled into bed. With the lights out and her head cradled on Toad’s shoulder, Rita said, “On the ride over here from the airport Yocke was telling me some wild tale about some women he met, a Shirley Ross and a Judith Farrell. I listened for about five minutes before it dawned on me that he was talking about Elizabeth Thorn.”

“She had a lot of names.”

“And she’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“You loved her, didn’t you?” Rita whispered.

“Yes.”

“Yocke needed someone to share it with.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s a good guy underneath.”

Toad Tarkington didn’t want to talk about Jack Yocke. Judith Farrell was on his mind, and this extraordinary woman beside him. “It wasn’t—” Toad began.

“Hush,” she told him. “I’m not jealous. I know what I mean to you.”

He thought about that, tried to get the round peg into the square hole. Women are really amazing creatures — just when you think you’ve got their brain structure figured out, they stun you by revealing a feature of genetic engineering that you never expected, not in your wildest—

“Still,” she added, “I think you should have told me about her. Oh, you married me and all that, but I didn’t realize that you had all these torrid romances stacked in the closet that I am going to have to keep dealing with.”

It dawned on Toad that the peg wouldn’t fit. “You aren’t the first woman I ever shook hands with.”

“You did a lot more than shake Elizabeth Thorn’s hand, or Judith Farrell, or whatever her name was. Don’t sugarcoat it and don’t deny it.”

“Rita, I’m not denying anything! And I’m not going to lie to you about Judith. She was one hell of a fine woman. I loved her very much. She went her way and I went mine and eventually I met you. And I’m damn sorry she’s dead.”

“Just how many more of these women are out there?”

The ol’ Horny Toad knew the ice was damn thin. He carefully weighed his answer. “You’re the woman I married. You’re the woman I want to spend my life with. Why are you jealous?”

“I am not jealous! Answer the question.”

“What question?”

“How many?”

“I dunno for sure. I didn’t carve notches on the bedstead. Not counting you, let’s see…maybe ten thousand, more or less.”

“Go ahead and count me, Romeo,” she growled. There was acid in her voice.

“Well, I’d have to consult my little black books. All of us Romeos have those. I did ratings, on a one-to-ten scale. I can probably use those records to come up with a fairly accurate count, although of course I didn’t rate casual encounters. As I recall you scored a ten. It’s sorta sad, but there weren’t many tens, not more than one a month. All those books…it’ll be a big job.” He took a deep breath and exhaled audibly, laced his fingers across his chest and stared at the ceiling, apparently contemplating the vast quantities of time and effort that were going to be involved in rooting through his voluminous files.

When she remained silent, he decided to take the offensive. But carefully. “How many of your old boyfriends are you gonna torture me with?”

She thought about that. Finally she began counting on her fingers. At last she said, “One hundred ninety-three. The first was a boy named Freddy that I had a crush on in kindergarten. He had blond hair and dimples and I desperately wanted him for my very own. The second was—”

“I missed you,” Toad told her.

“Oh, Toad, I missed you too.”

And then she sat up and he could see her whole face, her eyes, her nose, her mouth spreading into a smile. “You’re going to be a daddy,” she said softly.

“What?”

“It’s too early to be absolutely sure, but I think so.”

He was horrified. He shoved her out to arm’s length. “You’re pregnant and you flew that jet into that radioactive hell this afternoon? Are you out of your mind?”

One of her eyebrows arched. “Not so loud. Let’s not discuss this with Jack Yocke.”

“Rita,” he hissed, “if you’re pregnant you can’t—”

“I can do what has to be done. Like every kid ever conceived, Toad Junior is going to have to take his parents as they come. Flying is what I do.” She stroked his eyebrows with a fingertip. “Relax. I’ll be careful. I pulled his father out of the fiery furnace today. Someday the Toadlet will understand and thank me.”

Toad needed time to digest it. After a while he said, “Do you think it’s a boy?”

Rita grinned and shrugged.

“Well, you ought to go back to the States. You shouldn’t even have come over here. This place is too goddamn polluted for a pregnant woman.” Herb Tenney and his binary poisons crossed his mind. “And—”

She wrapped her arms around him and pushed him backward. With her face just inches from his, she told him, “Toad Tarkington. The women you fall in love with aren’t housewives. If I become one I risk losing you. That’s a risk I have no intention of taking.”

“But—”

“But nothing! This baby is mine too. You just stifle your male instincts and start thinking up names. I’ll handle the rest of it.”

Toad tried to sort it out. Perhaps she was right, he decided. Probably. Women! If it floats, flies or fucks, rent — don’t buy! Great advice but impossible to follow. After a bit he asked, “Can you still make love?”

This question drew a giggle from the mother-to-be, who grasped him in a very intimate way and lowered her mouth onto his.

Senior Chief Holley woke Jake at five in the morning. The sun was already up. “The helicopter made it back a couple hours ago. The guys just got here.”

“Fine,” Jake said, and the senior chief closed the door behind him. Jake had left orders that he be awakened when they returned, now he had trouble getting back to sleep.

He couldn’t eat, not with Herb Tenney in the same city, and he was only getting a few hours sleep a night. This regimen wasn’t good for him — he would soon have trouble concentrating. Maybe he was already feeling the effects.

He lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling. Soon his thoughts were on Callie and Amy. What time was it in Washington? What would they be doing today?

When he came awake again the chief was shaking him. “Admiral, we have a call from General Land. I’ve set up the encrypter in the living room.”

Jake got out of bed and pulled on his pants. In the living room Jack Yocke was drinking coffee.

“What time is it?”

“Almost noon.”

“Toad up?”

“Still in bed.”

“Let him sleep.”

“Want me to leave?”

“You can stay, but everything you hear is classified. You can’t print anything.”

“I know the ground rules,” Yocke said mildly and sipped at the coffee. “Take your call. I’ll get you a cup.”

“Admiral Grafton, sir.”

“Land. I got yesterday morning’s satellite photo and the one the bird got at seven local time this morning over Petrovsk. How many empty transporters were there outside when you were there?”

“Three, sir.”

“This morning there were four. There were also two bodies there this morning.”

“Dead bodies?”

“They’re lying down. The photo interpreter’s labeled them dead. They look dead to me. One is right by a transporter, the other is near the abandoned helicopter.”

“Much cloud cover at Petrovsk this morning?”

“About thirty percent or so. There was a decent hole over the field when the bird went by.”

“We’re lucky.” Jake had asked for the daily satellite shoot, but he hadn’t expected anything this dramatic. “Sounds like someone went back to the gold mine.”

“The morning after the meltdown was overcast, so nothing that morning. The next day the transporters were there. And yesterday. This morning four.”

“Who was it?” Jack Yocke handed Jake a cup of coffee and sat down on the couch.

“An AWACS bird over the Persian Gulf picked up three transports leaving a military airfield near Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, at a few minutes after nine last night. They tracked them flying just a little west of north until they departed the area. Then three transports came back this morning a few minutes after dawn. One crashed fifty miles north of the air base, the other two landed there.”

“They didn’t have the right gear to withstand the radiation.”

“Looks that way.”

“General, somebody is going to have to destroy those missiles before any more of them are carried away. Those missiles are too big a temptation.”

“I’m going over to the White House in about fifteen minutes. I’ve already talked to the secretary of defense. He and the national security adviser will meet us there. Why don’t you be in Ambassador Lancaster’s office about an hour and a half from now? Someone will call you.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jake hung up the phone and switched off the crypto device.

“Someone went back?” Yocke asked.

“Apparently. They carried off at least three missiles before the meltdown. That night. The radiation was supposed to cover up the fact the missiles were missing, for a while anyway. But someone got careless and left the transporters outside.”

“Why didn’t they take the transporters too?”

“Too big. Too heavy. Oh, maybe they took one or two, but they opted to leave at least three behind and take the missiles instead.”

“And someone went back last night?”

“And maybe got a couple more missiles. Left at least two dead people on the mat and one more empty transporter.”

“Satellite?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just how good are those satellites?”

“They can see something the size of a pack of cigarettes. The problem is that we only have so many satellites. Right now we’re trying to monitor every base in Russia where nukes are stored.” Jake started to add something, then just shook his head.

“So what are we going to do?”

“If you mean the United States, Land is going to see the president now.”

“Who got the missiles?”

“Saddam Hussein.”

“Oh, hell.”

“That isn’t the worst of it. Remember all those warheads stacked around? Those are highly portable. Odds are that for every missile they carried away, they took half a dozen warheads.”

Jake Grafton headed for the bathroom to shower and shave. He decided to put on his uniform. It looked like it might be that kind of day.

“What?” said Ms. Hempstead, her brows knitted.

“I expect the ambassador will be getting a call in a little while from the White House. General Land asked me to be here when it comes.”

“Have a seat, Admiral. I’ll talk to the ambassador. He’s on the telephone right now with Yeltsin’s aide, trying to arrange an appointment.” She whirled and marched for the door to the inner sanctum.

Jake Grafton picked a seat and settled in. The secretary thought she could spare him a smile, then thought better of it and went back to pounding the keyboard of her computer terminal. Jake picked up a three-month-old copy of Southern Living and began to leaf through it. There were articles there on a couple of houses he wouldn’t mind living in if he ever inherited five million dollars.

Ten minutes later he tired of the magazine. He checked his watch. The ambassador’s door was firmly closed. The secretary was pretending to work on something on her desk.

He was examining the paintings on the wall thirty minutes later when the door opened. “Would you come in, please, Admiral Grafton,” Hempstead said. She stood aside and he walked in.

The ambassador was on the telephone. He was listening. Every now and then he said, “Yessir.” Finally he said, “He’s here now with me, sir… Yessir… If you think… I’ll let you know immediately. Yessir. Good-bye.”

Lancaster hung up and looked around blinking. His eyes settled on Grafton, then moved to Hempstead. “Agatha, please use the telephone in the other room to get me an appointment with Yeltsin. Tell the aide I have an oral message from our president that I must deliver immediately. Have a seat, Admiral.” Jake did so.

When Hempstead was gone, Lancaster said, “It would have been nice if you had given me some warning about this last night.”

“I thought I’d better talk to my boss first, sir.”

“So you didn’t level with me. I’ve been an ambassador on and off for over twenty years. I was talking to presidents about affairs of state when you were a lieutenant filling out fitness reports on drunken sailors. I was helping prevent World War III when our new president was smoking pot without inhaling.”

Owen Lancaster got out of his chair and walked around the desk. He leaned against the mantel of the fireplace, then half-turned so he could see Jake.

“I’ll tell you right now that the United States has no business taking sides in the Russians’ political battles. We have no money to offer them. We have no bottled cure for all the problems they face. All our crowd knows how to do is jack the interest rate up or down a half a point and hire another ten thousand bureaucrats to manage the social problem de jure. These people are going to have to solve their own problems.”

When Jake said nothing, Lancaster came over and dropped into the adjacent chair. “The president wants me personally to brief Yeltsin on the goings on at the Petrovsk military base. I am to give him two options. A — he may order an air strike on the missiles and warheads still in the hangars at Petrovsk. The weapons must be destroyed by noon tomorrow, or B — the United States will do the job for him. His choice.”

“I doubt if he will accept either option,” Jake murmured.

“That is also my opinion. He doesn’t have enough clout with the Russian military to enforce an order telling them to blow up their own base, and it would be political suicide to allow American war-planes to fly across Russian territory to make an attack on a Russian military installation. The president and national security adviser see this the same way. So…if he refuses both options, I am to give him a third, a compromise. He will supply two airplanes and weapons and two of your test pilots will fly to Petrovsk and destroy the base.”

“I see.”

“I wish you did, Admiral.” Owen Lancaster levered himself from the chair and went to the window. With his back to Jake he said, “The Russians are a proud people. We are going to force Yeltsin into doing something that will probably sink him politically. To get rid of what? — a hundred or so nuclear warheads? — we are going to run a serious risk of putting a military dictatorship into the Kremlin. A hundred weapons — a drop in the bucket. Our president made this decision in less than an hour after talking with only Hayden Land and the national security adviser, who six months ago was preaching the big ideas to pimple-faced fraternity boys at a college in New England, kids who are still carrying their first condom in their wallets.”

“Yeltsin is no liberal Little Rock Democrat, sir. He’s half dictator. Any government Russia gets will be a dictatorship to some degree.”

“Admiral, I quit listening to that isolationist apologia when my hair started falling out. The Russians have gone from tyrant to tyrant since the dawn of time. They like tyrants — someone to do the thinking for them. But Yeltsin…he’s trying to force these isolated wood hicks into the world economy, the world culture. Boris Yeltsin may be Russia’s last hope. And ours.”

Lancaster headed for the door. As he went he muttered, “You knot-heads don’t seem to understand that you can’t go off half-cocked when the whole goddamn planet is at risk.”