The Red Horseman

20

The helicopter’s two radios were mounted on a shelf on the bulkhead between the cockpit and passenger compartment. The leads had a collar that allowed them to be unscrewed when the radio needed to be removed for servicing. Jake Grafton used his fingers to twist the collars and pull out the plugs. Then he told Spiro Dalworth to tell the pilot to land at the Lipetsk railroad station.

Not a single Russian had come out to look the Su-25s over when Jake landed at the army airfield fifteen minutes ago. He climbed down from the cockpit and followed Rita toward the helicopter.

“What happened at Petrovsk?” Jake asked.

“There was a four-engine jet transport on the mat, sir, and they were loading a missile aboard. I looked on the first pass and shot on the second. On the third the transport caught fire. I then bombed the hangar and it caught fire. I fired out the gun on the clean room.”

He wondered what thoughts went through Rita Moravia’s mind when she saw live humans and knew they couldn’t be allowed to get on that plane and leave. What had she thought when she lined up the cargo plane in her sight and pulled the trigger? All things considered, it was probably better not to ask. “Did you see any markings on the plane?”

“Arabic script, sir. They must have wanted those missiles pretty badly to risk a trip in daylight.”

“Lot of cloud cover. They might have pulled it off.”

“Saddam sent his people on a suicide mission. One man I saw on the ground wasn’t wearing a hot suit.”

The wars of the kings were much more civilized, Jake reflected. No wonder Churchill preferred the nineteenth century over this one.

The Russian chopper pilot was already in the cockpit and started the engines as they climbed aboard. Within a minute he lifted the machine from the parking mat.

Staring now at the disconnected radio leads, Jake concluded he needed a knife. He didn’t have one. He wedged the lead between the hammer and frame of his revolver and used that to strip off the collar. Now the lead could not be reconnected. He did the same with the lead to the second radio.

Someone wanted him dead. Perhaps those dead fighter pilots had orders to concentrate on the lead plane or were so ill with buck fever that they lost track of Rita at a crucial moment. Whichever, both he and Rita were fortunate to be alive. Still, with only a telephone call more fighters could be launched to shoot down this unarmed helicopter and convert their earlier escape into an alarmingly brief reprieve.

A prudent man would find another form of transportation. Jake Grafton was a prudent man.

Very prudent. After the chopper settled into the street in front of the railway station, he asked Dalworth, “What’s the pilot’s name?”

“Lieutenant Vasily Lutkin, sir.”

“Tell him to fly on to Moscow after we get off.”

He watched the helo pilot lift the collective and feed in forward cyclic. The pilot glanced once at him, then concentrated his attention on flying his machine.

Jake watched the helicopter until it crossed the rooftops heading just a little west of north.

Vasily Lutkin might make it. Maybe. If his luck was in.

Those four fighter pilots were trying to kill you, Jake, but not this guy.

Okay, so now you know how Josef Stalin did it. Just give the order and watch them go to their doom.

With sagging shoulders he followed Dalworth and Rita into the cavernous station.

And how much luck do you have left in your miserable little horde, Jake Grafton? Not much, friend. Not much. Guilt and luck don’t mix.

There was a vending booth inside the terminal building selling Pepsi in tiny paper cups, about an ounce of the soft drink for a ruble. Jake laid a ten-ruble note on the counter and while Dalworth went to buy tickets, he and Rita each drank five cupfuls of the sticky sweet liquid. Then Jake wandered off for the men’s room, burping uncontrollably.

The train was full to bursting. There were no empty seats in the car they found themselves in so the three Americans wedged themselves into a little space on the floor. Men, women, and children with everything they owned filled the car. One man had a goat. Several women had baskets that contained live chickens. A man lay in the floor between the aisles vomiting repeatedly while a woman periodically gave him something to drink from a bottle.

“Radiation sickness, I think,” Dalworth whispered.

Jake just nodded. After a half hour Rita went over to help, dragging Dalworth along to translate.

The air was thick with a miasma of odors. Smoke from Papirosi cigarettes made a heavy haze.

The train stopped about once an hour for ten minutes or so. Each time Jake stayed seated in his corner with his hand under his jacket on his gun butt watching the people fighting their way aboard. The scrambler was wedged under his legs.

No one got off the train. Moscow was the universal destination. Some of the people who clamored aboard were soldiers in uniform, but they were wrestling bags of personal articles. No one in uniform or out paid any attention to the Americans. Finally the train got under way again and all the struggling humanity somehow found a place to ride.

These Russians had endured so much, yet there was so much still to endure. When he had replayed the morning’s flight for the twentieth time and the adrenaline had finally burned itself from his system, Jake sat looking at his fellow passengers, trying to fathom their stories and their lives as snatches of Russian swirled on the laden air. Finally his head sagged onto his knees and he slept.

Every minute passed slower and slower for Toad Tarkington. He paced, he stood at the window from time to time and stared out, occasionally he turned on the television and stood gazing at the images on the screen for minutes at a time without seeing them, then snapped it off. He paced some more.

When he could stand it no longer he picked up the telephone and dialed. “Captain, this is Toad. Heard anything?”

Then he hung up and went back to pacing, and fidgeting, and gazing gloomily at Herb Tenney and Jack Yocke.

“What did Collins say?” Yocke asked.

“Nothing.”

“What are you going to do if Grafton and Rita don’t come back?”

Toad didn’t answer. He didn’t want even to acknowledge the possibility out loud, let alone discuss it with Jack Yocke. Jake Grafton and Rita Moravia were the two most important people in his life. He felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a vast, dark abyss. Every minute that passed made the gaping horror more probable, and more unspeakable.

After a while Yocke said, “Surely we ought to discuss it.”

“They’ll be back.” End of conversation.

They were on the ground somewhere. Tactical jets carry a limited supply of fuel, and when it’s exhausted…no one ever ran out of gas and floated around up there unable to get down. So where were they? In the fallout zone? Shot down? Why hadn’t they called? Any way you figured it, something had gone seriously wrong. And our boy Herb probably had something to do with that something.

Toad found himself glowering at the CIA agent asleep on the couch. Sleeping! He forced himself to look away.

By six o’clock in the evening Toad had reached the breaking point. For lack of something better to do, he decided to go find Collins. “I’m going out,” he announced to Jack Yocke, who looked up from the paperback novel he was reading. “Keep an eye on Herb.” Toad hoisted himself erect and walked toward the door.

“Aren’t you going to give me your pistol?” Yocke asked.

“Nah. There’s marines outside.”

“Outside?”

“In the hallway. You have any trouble, just shout and they’ll come running.”

The reporter was speechless.

Toad pulled the Browning from his waistband. “This thing wouldn’t do you any good anyway.” He thumbed off the safety and pulled the trigger. Click. “It’s empty.”

Yocke found his voice. “Empty!”

One of Jack Yocke’s endearing qualities — and he had precious few, in Toad’s opinion — was that sometimes he was extraordinarily slow on the uptake. Maybe it was an act. Whatever, Toad Tarkington savored the moment. “You don’t think I’m stupid enough to give a loaded gun to a trigger-happy thrill-killer like you, do ya? If you didn’t shoot off your own toe, you’d probably go berserk and murder everybody north of the Moskva.”

“You dirty, rotten, slimy, retarded stumblebum, you—”

That was the high point in a long, dreary day of merciless tension and uncertainty. Toad stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him before Jack Yocke got really wound up. He mumbled a greeting to the marine sitting at the top of the stairs as he went by.

It was after 7 P.M. when a pale, exhausted Rita Moravia sagged onto the floor beside Jake. Her flight suit reeked of vomit.

“How is that sick man?” Jake asked.

“Dead. Radiation poisoning, dehydration I think — oh, I don’t know. His heart stopped and we just…gave up.” She brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes and hugged her knees.

Several platitudes occurred to Jake, but he held his tongue.

“How did you evade those fighters this morning?” Rita asked. “This morning! God, it seems like another lifetime ago.”

“One guy stalled and went in, I shot down the others.”

“You were lucky.”

“That’s all life is: luck — some good, some bad, most indifferent. Some of it you make yourself, most of it you just have to take as it comes.”

“What’s going on here, Admiral? Why did the Russians blow up their own reactor?”

“To hide the fact that nuclear weapons were gone.”

“You aren’t serious?”

“Oh, but I am. Somebody — let’s postulate a small group of somebodys — collected a lot of money from Saddam Hussein for some nuclear weapons. Saddam took delivery at Petrovsk the evening before the reactor blew up. Everyone there who wasn’t in on the sale was killed. Then the reactor exploded and the usual prevailing wind delivered a lethal concentration of fallout on Petrovsk. Eventually someone would visit Petrovsk, but the way things work in Russia, that visit was a long way off. Maybe years. When it eventually came to pass, our small group of somebodys were sure they could control the dissemination of the news of what happened at Petrovsk because long before then Boris Yeltsin would be driven from power. And they would be in.”

“How could they be sure of that?”

“The reactor explosion would cause a political crisis. They would escalate the event to a crisis if it didn’t happen naturally. And they had done their homework with Saddam’s money. A lot of money. Real money, hard currency. The people at the top in Russia are just like the people at the top everywhere else — they want good food, nice clothes, adequate housing, an education for their kids, decent medical care. The Communist party used to deliver all that, but those days are gone. Whoever can deliver that life-style to the people in power will rule.”

“Money.”

“Hard currency — U.S. dollars. For bribes. To dole out to the faithful. To buy votes in the legislature. There’s a flourishing dollar economy in Moscow — just how on earth does an honest Russian come by dollars?”

“Oh, my God,” Rita whispered. “To murder all those people! I can’t believe it.”

“This is Russia,” Jake told her, his voice low. “Even the stones are guilty. See that old man over there, the one with the campaign ribbons on his lapel? He’s a veteran of World War II. He probably has a hundred stories about how he and his fellow soldiers fought to the last ditch and saved Russia from Hitler. What he won’t tell you about are the penal battalions — every division had one. These were unarmed battalions of political prisoners — Russians who had said something unwise about Stalin or the NKVD, people who appeared to be less than happy living in the new Communist paradise. The men in the penal battalions were herded ahead of the tanks before every attack to step on the land mines and clear the way. And German machine gunners slaughtered them and revealed their positions to the Red Army troops. Then the tanks and gallant soldiers like that old man killed Nazis and won glorious victories. They saved Mother Russia. Ah yes, that old man is proud of his ribbons.

“Yet this is the amazing part—the Commies never ran out of recruits for the penal battalions. That maniac Hitler gassed and shot and starved his domestic enemies — all at his cost. Stalin killed his enemies just as dead but he turned a nice profit doing it. And Stalin didn’t bother cremating the corpses: he let the body parts rot right where they lay to fertilize the soil.

“Yes, Rita, a group of ambitious people intentionally blew up the Serdobsk reactor. If a half million humans had to die to get them to the top, so be it. Like that old man over there with the ribbons, these people have paid their dues. They have created a hell on earth and they are going to rule it.”

“Stalin’s children,” Rita murmured.

Twenty minutes later the train entered the outskirts of Moscow. “Where’s Dalworth?” Jake asked Rita.

“I don’t know. He wandered off when that man died.”

“Find him. We’re going to have to hop off this train fast and try for a taxi. If our luck is in, no one will be looking for us at the railroad station.”

She was very tired. “You sent that helicopter pilot off to be shot down.” It was just a statement of fact, without inflection.

Jake Grafton merely glanced at her. “Go find Dalworth,” he told her patiently.

If there were any security men scrutinizing the crowd, Jake didn’t see them. The three Americans went through the station unaccosted, found the exit with Dalworth’s help, and walked out onto the sidewalk. There were taxis. Jake and Rita climbed into the backseat of one while Dalworth negotiated the fare.

The streets looked normal to Jake’s eye with the usual traffic and strolling pedestrians, here and there a policeman. At ten o’clock in the evening the sunlight, diffused by a thin layer of cirrus, came in at a very low angle and gave the city a soft, almost inviting look.

Dalworth sat in the front seat chatting with the taxi driver, and in a few moments he turned around and said to Jake, “This fellow says that troops have road blocks around the embassy. They’re checking everyone’s papers.”

The taxi proceeded for several blocks before Jake spoke. “We need to find something else to ride in.”

“Like a tank,” Rita said gloomily.

About a quarter mile from the embassy they passed a line of armored personnel carriers parked by the curb. “One of these might do,” Jake said. “Could you drive one, Rita?”

“It doesn’t have wings,” she pointed out.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Spiro, tell the driver to pull over.”

He dropped them at the head of the line. One soldier with a rifle stood on the curb. There were at least a dozen APCs in the line and another soldier lounged at the far end, almost two hundred feet away. Apparently the concept of vehicle theft hadn’t caught on here yet.

“Walk by this guy,” Jake told his companions, and the three moved. Jake kept talking. “Rita will drive. Dalworth will take the soldier’s rifle and I’ll assist him into the vehicle.”

The Russian soldier remained relaxed as they approached, his rifle held in the crook of his left arm. He watched them disinterestedly. As the trio passed him Jake drew his revolver and stuck it into the Russian’s ribs as Dalworth neatly seized the rifle. The door to the APC stood open, so Rita merely climbed in.

Jake nodded toward the vehicle and the soldier, wearing a look of uncertainty and fear, went willingly enough. Jake glanced toward the other sentry. He was facing in the other direction. Really, these kids shouldn’t be guarding anything more valuable than a garbage dump!

When everyone was inside, Dalworth closed the door and dogged it down.

“Any time, Rita.”

“Give me a minute, sir.” She was looking at the controls.

The seconds dragged by. Finally she adjusted a lever and pushed a button. The engine turned over but didn’t catch.

More fiddling.

“Maybe our guy here knows how to drive,” Dalworth suggested.

“Ask him.”

Dalworth did so. The soldier’s eyes got big, but he held his tongue. He was young, about twenty. Not a trace of beard showed on his face.

Rita ground some more with the starter. Then the diesel caught. She wrestled with the shift lever, ground the gears, then engaged the clutch. The thing lurched, then got under way.

“Empty his rifle,” Jake told Dalworth, “and throw it in the back.”

Dalworth popped out the magazine and handed it to Jake, who tossed it into the back of the vehicle. The rifle followed.

The APC lumbered along at a stately pace. Rita steered it toward the center of the street. Two blocks later they saw a line of cars waiting in front of a roadblock with several dozen soldiers milling about.

“Drive right through,” Jake told his pilot. “And don’t run over anybody.”

“Admiral!”

“They’ll get out of your way.”

She floored it and the soldiers ahead scattered. Amazingly, no shots were fired.

“Maybe they would have let us through,” Dalworth remarked.

“Maybe,” Rita agreed.

Jake kept his maybes to himself.

The APC rumbled the two blocks to the embassy along an empty street. She turned the corner from the boulevard and dropped down the street to the main entrance of the embassy, where she braked to a stop.

At least the stars and stripes were still flying.

The Russian soldier sat glued to his seat staring dumbfounded as the trio walked past four armed U.S. marines in battle dress and entered the little brick reception building.

The marine on duty behind the desk punched the button to let them in and spoke through the window. “The ambassador wants to see you, sir, and so does Captain Collins. And welcome back!”

He was rewarded with a grin from Rita.

The security door hadn’t even closed behind the trio as the sergeant at the desk dialed Toad’s telephone number. Lieutenant Commander Tarkington had been down here three times this evening — the sergeant was delighted that he had some good news to deliver for a change.

Toad came thundering down the stairs as Rita started up.

“Hey, Babe!”

“Hello, Toad-man,” she said as she was lifted from her feet in a fierce bear hug.