The Red Horseman

23

The command bunker at the sprawling military base outside of Riyadh looked like a Star Wars movie set. A long rack of television monitors mounted above a huge wall chart of the region displayed everything from the current CNN broadcast to real-time satellite ambient light and infrared views of selected areas inside Iraq, computer presentations of Iraqi and U.N. troop positions, computer presentations of the vehicles moving near Baghdad and Samarra, aircraft aloft over Iraq, Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf, ships at sea in the Gulf — everything a commander might want to know was on one of those screens. At computer stations facing the screens were the men and women who punched the keys that made it all work.

Just now all eyes in the room were on the CNN monitor. Jake Grafton and the European colonels stood together in a knot staring upward at the jowly visage of Saddam Hussein, who was busy calling the Washington Post and Boris Yeltsin liars. “Iraq does not possess nuclear weapons. Lies have been told. Yeltsin is desperate, attempting to use Iraq as a scapegoat to prevent political collapse in Russia.”

“What do you think?” Jake asked Jocko West.

“If he has trained Russian technicians, I think he can shoot the missiles on launchers any time. At best, within hours. But he probably only has two or three missiles on their Russian Army launchers. The launchers were just too bulky and heavy to transport. He took as many missiles as he could, probably intending to put them on launchers he already has. And he took warheads, which are small and could be loaded quickly onto his planes. I suspect that he’s playing for time in order to load the missiles he stole on old Scud launchers and adapt the warheads for use on his missiles.”

Colonel Rheinhart agreed. “If he has the people and the proper tools, he can begin placing nuclear warheads on the Scuds in a few days, arm perhaps thirty Scuds in ten days or so. Five or six ready-to-shoot weapons are not enough for a war.”

The Italian and Frenchman nodded at this assessment. Jake Grafton wasn’t so sure. A lunatic might start a war even if he had only one bullet.

As Jake Grafton stared at Saddam’s image on the monitor, he reviewed what he knew about the Iraqi dictator. Born poor, poor as only an Arab can be, in a squalid village a hundred miles north of Baghdad, he went to live with an uncle in the capital at the age of ten, about 1947. His uncle was the author of a screed entitled Three Things That God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies. This tract became young Saddam’s Mein Kampf. Within months, according to his official biography, he killed his first man.

When he was twenty, the young thug joined the Iraqi Baath party, where he became a triggerman disposing of the party’s enemies, of whom there were many. One of the people he murdered was his brother-in-law. Two years later, in 1959, he bungled an assassination attempt aimed at the current Iraqi dictator, General Abdul Kassem, and was shot by Kassem’s guards. Somehow he escaped and fled to Egypt.

In 1963 the Baath party successfully murdered Kassem and took power. Saddam returned to Iraq and ended up in prison nine months later when the Baathists were overthrown by an army junta.

When the Baathists seized power again in 1968, Saddam was there in the councils of power. In a stunning parallel to the career of Josef Stalin, he took control of the secret police and systematically set out to murder everyone he could not control, thereby becoming the real ruler of Iraq. Before long he took personal control of the nation’s foreign policy. The nominal president of the country soldiered on under Saddam’s orders until 1979, when he retired, thereby becoming the first ruler of Iraq not to die in office within the memory of living men. Saddam anointed himself dictator and gave himself a new title, The Awesome. Perhaps it loses something in translation.

Yet Saddam never forgot how he got to the top, never lost touch with his roots. New title and all, he still liked to use a pistol to personally execute cabinet officers, generals, and relatives who had the temerity to argue with him or whom he suspected of harboring a nascent seed of disloyalty.

From any possible viewpoint, Jake Grafton thought, Saddam appeared as the master thug, a self-centered man without conscience or remorse capable of any crime. In other words, a perfect dictator.

Oh, he had screwed up badly a time or two — the eight-year war with Iran cost Iraq a hundred thousand lives and $70 billion it didn’t have, and the little fracas over Kuwait didn’t turn out quite the way Saddam thought it would. But the man wasn’t a quitter. After those debacles he had ruthlessly shot, gassed and starved his domestic enemies into oblivion. Iraq was still his: he was hanging tough, arming himself with nuclear weapons. Then he would find who still wanted to play the game and who was willing to kneel at his throne.

Saddam’s tragedy was that he ruled such a small corner of the world. If only he could have had a stage the size of Germany or Russia!

A naive person might wonder why the civilized nations of the earth continued to deal with miserable vermin like Saddam, but Jake Grafton didn’t. Realpolitik kept him alive. He was part and parcel of the forces in dynamic tension that kept the Middle East from exploding into religious and race war. And Iraq had oil.

Jake wondered if now, finally, the fearful politicians of the “civilized nations” had had enough. He was still pondering that question when he was called into a room with General Frank Loy, the UN commander. General Loy was talking on the satellite link. He handed the telephonelike handset to Jake.

“Rear Admiral Grafton, sir.”

“Hayden Land. Glad you arrived.”

“I just watched Saddam on the tube.”

“Yeah. They’re in a dither here. They’re pissed that you gave the story to the Post and I had to admit I authorized it. So they’re peeved at me. If I weren’t black they would have fired me.” He indulged himself in an expletive. “Anyway, Saddam isn’t cooperating. He denied he has nukes, so now the fact that there is no independent confirmation has them in a sweat.”

“So no air strike?”

“No air strike,” Land said wearily.

“Saddam has put his forces on alert,” Jake said. “It’ll take four or five days to bring them up to full alert, so whatever we’re going to do we must do quickly. Every hour that goes by is going to cost us lives.”

“I know that,” Land said.

“The German expert thinks that Saddam could have the stolen missiles ready to launch in hours, if they aren’t ready to go now.”

Land didn’t respond. In a moment he said, “These people here are trying to figure out a way to blame this mess on George Bush. He had his chance to stomp this cockroach and didn’t, so now they have to dirty their shoes with it.”

“Yessir. Should Yocke do another story?”

“Your staff reporter? No. Not right now. They would lock me out of the White House if that happened. Soooo…I want you to plan an assault on that airfield. Figure out what it will take, when you can do it, what it will cost.” Jake knew that when Hayden Land talked cost, he wasn’t talking dollars: he was talking lives. “Then call me back. If you and Loy think an assault is feasible, my idea is for you to take some network camera teams along. If we treated the world to a live broadcast showing the Russian missiles and warheads that Saddam says he doesn’t have, these people here will be off the hook. Then you can fly the weapons out.”

“We try to fly the weapons out, General, this is going to be a big operation and damned risky.”

“I know that. But these people inside the Beltway don’t have the balls to take any flak from the Sierra Club about nuclear pollution. They’d rather take U.S. casualties than Iraqi casualties. It’s not that they’re callous, it’s just the fact that they got in with a plurality of the votes. We’re dealing with a president that sixty percent of the American people didn’t want. He knows it, his staff knows it — and they won’t risk alienating the support they do have. That’s political reality. So plan for an airlift.”

“Don’t we have a carrier battle group in the Gulf of Oman? If she ran west through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf that would help.”

“We’ll send her in. Now let me talk to Loy again.”

Jake passed the handset to General Loy and walked out of the room.

“They’re in Samarra.” The air intelligence staff officer said it positively.

Jake Grafton needed to be sold. “A fifty-fifty chance, sixty-forty, what?”

“No, sir. They’re there. We saw the planes come in from Russia and nothing big enough to transport a missile has left. We’ve got round-the-clock real-time satellite surveillance. They’re there.”

“The missiles?”

“The missiles are there, yessir.”

“And the warheads?”

“I don’t know,” the staff officer said, and shook his head. “They’re so small…”

“Have they been moving Scuds around?”

“No. We would have seen that. They’ve tried to keep them under cover since the war. We know where some of them are, but certainly not all.”

“Let me see if I have this right: the Russian missiles are in Samarra, but we only know where some of the Scuds are. If the Iraqis are mating nuclear warheads to the Scuds, they must have taken the warheads to the missiles, because they haven’t brought the missiles to Samarra.”

“Yessir.”

“Then we’re fucked.”

“Yes, sir. That’s a very apt description. I couldn’t say it any better myself.”

“Find the Scuds.”

“Sir, we’ve been trying to do that for eighteen months.”

“Have the Iraqis taken warheads to the sites of the Scuds we know about?”

“I don’t know, sir. We’ve been trying—”

“You’re not trying hard enough,” Jake Grafton said coldly. “Track every vehicle leaving the Samarra base and see where it goes. If the vehicle visits the site of a known Scud, you’ve just found one.” Jake lowered his voice. “They tell me you people are the very best. Your equipment is the best. Find those warheads. I don’t care what you have to do, but find them. Now!”

A modern joint military operation is extraordinarily complex and requires extensive planning. The myriad of details cannot be worked out in hours, not even by competent, experienced professionals. Days, even weeks, go into the planning of a successful joint operation.

Jake Grafton was demanding this one be put together and be ready to launch in eighteen hours, by 20:00 local time tomorrow. He would have gone sooner, even in daylight, if the planning could have been completed, but even he had to admit there was no way. As it was there would be no time for a run-through with the commanders involved, no time to sort things out before the starting gun fired, so there were going to be snafus — people getting in one another’s way, people who didn’t go at all, busted equipment, too many people at one place, too few at others, things that had to happen but didn’t… He expected all that. But it could get worse — there could be good guys shooting at good guys. He and the troops would have to live with it. Or die with it. Being Jake Grafton, he didn’t think much about the dying part, except to ensure that the medical support would be there, all that could be fitted in.

Fortunately General Loy named a competent professional to plan and command the operation, Major General Daniel Serkin, a whipcord-tough soldier with only one pace — fast.

Jake Grafton stood and watched, walked the floor and listened to the planners, perused op orders, conferred repeatedly with General Serkin. And worried that while the allies fretted over call signs and radio frequencies Saddam would start spraying nuclear warheads at his enemies.

At dawn he called General Land and gave him a preliminary overview. The operation would start with a navy SEAL team delayed parachute drop from thirty thousand feet. Chutes would open under two thousand feet. The team would secure the airport perimeter, wipe out antiaircraft resistance and machine gun emplacements. A battalion from the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) would then arrive in helicopters escorted by electronic warfare aircraft — Wild Weasels — and fighters, with helicopter gunships providing close air support. The idea was to quickly overpower any resistance, make the airfield safe for transports. These would come in with their own aerial escort, which would orbit overhead and prevent Iraqi forces from counterattacking. With all the Russian weapons aboard, the transports would leave and the American and allied troops would pull out under air cover. If everything went according to plan, the raid would be over before the Iraqis could bring overwhelming military power to bear.

Fortunately Saddam Hussein seemed to be expecting an air strike. The radars in the Baghdad and Samarra area were almost constantly on the air and mobile antiaircraft guns were moving into the area. But not troops.

Toad Tarkington suggested a name for this operation, Operation Appointment. Jake told him the name lacked pizzazz, but he too had read John O’Hara so he recommended the name to General Land, who accepted it without comment.

“So it all depends on how deep the Iraqi forces are at the airfield?” Land said finally, when Jake was finished.

“Yessir. Intelligence says we’ll be facing a battalion of Republican Guard.”

“Armor?”

“Yessir. We have a choice — try to wipe out the tanks with Apaches prior to the SEAL drop, or drop the SEALs and try to achieve surprise, then bring in the Apaches.”

“Has General Serkin made a decision?”

“Not yet.”

“Found the Scuds?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“What if you don’t find them?”

“We’ll go anyway.”

“And the antiaircraft defenses?”

“We’ll use missiles, chaff, and jamming, then A-6s and A-10s.”

“Call me back later.”

Jake went to find a place to sleep. One office had a couch. He was pulling off his shoes when Toad Tarkington tracked him down. “Here’s a message from Ambassador Lancaster in Moscow, for your eyes only.”

Jake tore open the envelope. Herb Tenney was dead. In his sleep.

Half the pills Jake put in Herb’s mouth were aspirin, but some of them were part of the binary cocktail. Perhaps Herb already had the other half in his system. Damn! Or someone just poisoned him.

Jake replaced the message in the envelope and passed it back to Toad. “Herb Tenney died in his sleep.”

Toad snorted. “His tough luck.”

Jake balled his fist and started to pound his thigh, then opened his hand and ran it through his hair. “I am really sick of this mess.”

“I know,” Toad said. “I know.”

“Turn the lights out and close the door. Let me sleep for three hours.”

“Yessir.”

“And question General Yakolev. Find out if they shot down that Russian helicopter pilot, Vasily Lutkin.”

“CAG, you aren’t responsible for that. Yakolev is. You can’t—”

“Just do it, Toad.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He lay in the darkness trying to relax. Too many details ran through his mind, too many questions were still unanswered.

Saddam Hussein was down to his last trick, but it was a dilly this time. He had tried to take the Iranian oil fields and lost, tried to take Kuwait and found out that a second- or third-rate military power could not win on a modern conventional battlefield. So now he was playing the nuclear card. And it would be a winner unless allied forces arrived in time.

In time.

What was happening in Washington?

When Toad woke Jake up, he had a message. “The president said Go. You’re to call General Land.”

For some reason he didn’t quite understand, Jake felt refreshed and relaxed after his nap. He followed Toad to the com center and sat drinking coffee while the technicians placed the call to Washington.

Hayden Land’s voice had a note of optimism this morning, actually midnight or after in Washington. “The White House crowd finally faced up to the fact they have no choice.”

No choice! The words echoed in Jake’s mind. It’s almost as if the grand smashup is preordained, he thought.

“Where are the Scud missiles?”

“They aren’t moving on the roads, sir,” the air intelligence officer told Jake Grafton. “And we can’t find any vehicles leaving the Samarra base that go to any of the Scud sites we know about. None. We’ve used computers to analyze satellite imagery and side-looking radar to track their vehicles. We’ve come up dry.”

“Maybe most of the warheads are still at the Samarra base.”

“Reluctantly, I come to that conclusion too, Admiral.”

It is never safe to assume that your opponent is doing what you want him to do. Jake Grafton was well aware of that pitfall, and yet… “Perhaps,” he murmured, “Saddam is having his trouble adapting the warheads to the missiles.”

“It’s possible,” Colonel Rheinhart agreed. “The Iraqis reduced the payload capability of their missiles several years ago in order to carry more fuel.”

“So where is Saddam?” Jake asked the intelligence staff.

“He rode out the Gulf War in ’91 in a camping trailer that moved randomly around Baghdad. We told the press we knew where all the command and control facilities were, which was a serious stretcher. Then we blew up a few of them with smart bombs and he concluded we were telling the truth.”

“And now?”

“Well, we’ve refined our satellite capability since the Gulf War. We have side-looking radar in the air that tracks moving vehicles so that we can find Scud sites. Now we do have all the command and control facilities spotted and we can follow Saddam for days at a time. Unfortunately, right now we seem to have lost track of him.”

“Could he be at the Samarra base?” Jake asked. “Sir, he could be anywhere.”

General Loy, Major General Serkin, and Jake Grafton reviewed the final plan together. They set H-Hour for 24:00 this night. Serkin said he didn’t think they could go sooner, and with yet another glance at his watch Jake acquiesced.

Then he went to find Toad. “Did you get anything out of Yakolev?”

“He refused to say a word. When he heard the question he looked at me like I was crazy.”

Jake Grafton sighed. “I’m jumping tonight with the SEALs,” he said after a bit. “I want you to bring the nuclear weapons experts in on choppers. Get chopper transport for Jack Yocke and a network camera team and as many other print and television reporters as you can cram in. Have Captain McElroy and the marines bring our two Russian friends and Spiro Dalworth. Bring Colonel Rheinhart, Jocko West and the other international observers. You’re in charge of that operation.”

“No, sir. I’m going with you.”

Jake Grafton did a double take. “Toad, I want you to get the press and the international people there. This is the key to the whole deal.”

“Rita can handle it, CAG. I’m going with you.”

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, Commander. You—”

“CAG, you can court-martial me if you like. But I’m going with you and watch your back. You are the key to this operation and if you get zapped, the rest of us are in big fucking trouble. I’d never forgive myself if that happened and Rita wouldn’t forgive me either. Now that’s that.”

“Have you ever made a delayed parachute drop?”

“I’ve done as many as you have, sir.”

“Okay, smart-ass. We’ll hold hands all the way down.”

Jack Yocke had a request of his own when Toad told him he was going in on a chopper with Rita. “I’d like to go with you and the admiral.”

“Yeah, I bet you would,” Toad said. “Forget it, pencil pilot. We’ll give you a window seat on the executive helicopter if you promise not to pee your pants.”

“No, I want to jump with you guys. It’ll be a great story.”

“You don’t seem to understand, Jack. We’ll be the first guys in. This is a twenty-eight-thousand-foot free fall at night into a concentration of enemy troops who are probably on full alert. There’ll be bullets flying around, helicopter gunships blasting tanks, the whole greasy enchilada. Get serious! Your mother wouldn’t even let you play with a cap pistol when you were a kid.”

“Let me ask the admiral.”

Grafton listened to Yocke state his case, gave Toad an evil glance, and said, “Sure you can come. Why not? The more the merrier.”

They started sweating during the suiting up at 20:00, after dinner in the main cafeteria. Camo clothing, insulated one-piece jumpsuit, jump boots, helmet, silenced submachine gun, ammo, knife, radio, canteen, flak vest—“The bullets will bounce off like you’re fucking Superman”—parachute harness, parachutes, oxygen mask, oxygen supply system, gloves, jump goggles, night vision goggles for on the ground…almost eighty pounds of equipment. They waddled when they were finally outfitted.

“I don’t want a gun,” Yocke said.

“No weapon, no jump,” Jake Grafton told him curtly. “Your choice. I’m not taking a tourist into a firefight, and that’s final.”

So they hung a submachine gun and ammo on Yocke and he kept his mouth shut. As a final indignity, Toad Tarkington smeared his face with black camouflage grease.

It was bizarre. The SEALs looked like extras from an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick. Zap, boom, pow! No doubt he did too. And they were all grown men!

Yocke began really sweating in the lecture that followed. A chief petty officer explained each piece of gear, explained about the wrist altimeter, how they should check it occasionally but wait for the main chute to deploy automatically—“It’ll work! Honest! It’s guaranteed. If it doesn’t, you bring it back and we’ll give you another”—how they would run out of the back of the C-141 in lines, lay themselves out in the air to keep from tumbling, steer in free fall, steer when the chute opened, how they should land.

And when all the questions had been answered from the three neophytes, the final piece of advice: “Don’t think about it — just do it.”

Jake Grafton had too many things on his mind to worry about the jump. As the C-141 climbed away from the runway, he adjusted his oxygen mask, ensured the oxygen was flowing and let the jumpmaster check his equipment, all the while trying to figure out what Saddam Hussein had done with the weapons. Were they still at the Samarra base, or had The Awesome outsmarted the Americans?

Sitting beside the admiral, Toad Tarkington thought about the upcoming jump as the air inside the plane cooled. The red lights of the plane’s interior and the noise gave it the feel and sound of flight deck control, the handler’s kingdom in the bottom of a carrier’s island. And he had that night-cat-shot rock in the pit of his stomach.

He looked at the blank faces and averted eyes of the SEALs around him and thought about Rita. Would she be all right? Had he made the right decision coming with Grafton? If they shot Rita down she had no parachute, no ejection seat — if that woman died Toad wanted to die with her. This thought had tripped across his synapses when he was weighing his request to accompany Grafton. Nuclear weapons to murder millions — with Jake Grafton alive and thinking, they had a chance to pull off this crazy assault. With him dead it would be just another bloodletting and probably end up too little, too late. Although racked with powerful misgivings, Toad had elected to go with his head and not his heart.

The oxygen, he noted now, had a slightly metallic taste.

Maybe, Toad decided, a little prayer wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t bother the Lord often, just checked in occasionally to let the man — or woman — upstairs know he was still down here kicking, but now, he thought, might be a good time to put in an earnest supplication from the heart.

Dear God, don’t let anything happen to Rita.

Jack Yocke was thinking exclusively about the upcoming free fall. Unlike Grafton and Tarkington, he had never ejected from an airplane, nor had he ever jumped out of one. He knew people whose idea of a perfect Saturday was to leap out of an airplane with six of their buddies and free fall, then float down in sport parachutes, those colorful flying wings. He had never had the slightest desire to join the macho brigade. Maybe those folks had maladjusted hormone levels or were trying to spice up dull, boring existences, but Jack Yocke was perfectly happy with his feet upon the ground. He still got dates when he wanted them and his dick got stiff at the right time, so why spit in the devil’s eye?

Part of the reason he was here, he admitted to himself, was Tarkington. The Toad-man had a knack of rubbing him the wrong way. That coolest-of-the-cool, studlier-than-thou attitude, that…asshole! So now here he was, getting colder and colder, about to fall over five fucking miles through the night sky, then ride a parachute — if that contraption of bedsheets and fishing lines opened — right smack into the middle of a goddamn war with a bunch of raghead Nazis.

What if the chute doesn’t open? I mean, really! You gotta lay there in the air like a store dummy for two minutes and forty seconds waiting…waiting…waiting… If you panicked and pulled the manual ripcord too high you might run out of oxygen, or drift away from the landing area and the support of your fellow soldiers. Or you might find yourself hanging up there when the helicopter gunships and troop transports came in with their blades whirling around, flak searching the darkness, cannon fire, machine gun bullets… No, Jack, don’t take a chance on pulling the ripcord too early. Wait for this seventy-nine-cent gizmo from Woolworth’s to do the job for you.

He would wait. Under absolutely no circumstances would he panic. He told himself that yet again, trying to believe it. He would close his eyes and wait until the chute opened. It would open. He assured himself of that for the fiftieth time. If it didn’t, by God, they would scrape him off the asphalt in the middle of the runway, his eyes scrunched shut, his hands and legs outstretched, still waiting.

Now, fifteen minutes after takeoff, Yocke was ready. He was properly psyched and ready to leap straight into hell. Then he looked at his watch and saw that they had over an hour to go.

Oh, Jesus!

Rita Moravia sat in almost total darkness with her back against the forward bulkhead of the Blackhawk’s passenger compartment. Sharing the compartment with her but quite invisible were the four European colonels “observing” and the two Russian flag officers.

The Russians also had escorts, Captain Iron Mike McElroy and one of his sergeants. Rita had briefed them carefully.

Right now she wasn’t thinking about the other passengers. She was listening to the muffled roar of the engines through her headset and thinking about her husband, Toad.

He would be okay, she assured herself. When she heard he was jumping she thought of the two steel pins in his leg and wondered if he should. When she mentioned his leg he glared at her.

Isn’t that just like a man? If the man is concerned he’s thoughtful, chivalrous, gallant. If a woman voices her concern she’s a nag.

So life isn’t fair. Tell it to Yocke and let him put it on the front page.

The navy had been a tough row to hoe. First the Naval Academy, then flight training, the squadrons, test pilot school — Rita had encountered subtle covert and overt discrimination every step of the way. Oh, the senior officers thought it would be fine to have women in the navy as long as the pretty ones wanted to be executive secretaries to those said senior officers, but women shouldn’t be on ships! Or in cockpits. Or where men were shooting. Or drinking. Or telling dirty jokes. Heaven forbid!

Jake Grafton didn’t think like that. Because he didn’t Rita had found herself riding the tip of the arrow, slaughtering doomed men with a 30mm cannon.

Here in the darkness inside this helicopter over the desert, Rita Moravia remembered that moment. She remembered the feel of her airplane, the look of the clouds, the look of the Iraqi plane on the parking mat as she dove at it, the Gs tugging at her as she maneuvered, the lighted reticle in the sight glass, the vibration as the cannon vomited out its shells, the smoke billowing skyward as she pulled up and banked away… Everything was crystal clear, engraved on her memory.

She had killed.

Oh, it had to be done… but she had done it.

She thought now that she understood those senior officers she had met through the years, understood that look in their eyes. It had been a tired look, a weary look.

Now she forgave them. Yet they were wrong.

Jake Grafton was right.

You can’t avoid it or wash it off your hands just because you didn’t get a Y chromosome and a penis. Oh no.

Little Toadlet inside of me, this world you will come into isn’t just flowers and teddy bears. Male or female, you are going to have to live, endure, survive, do the best you can. You must be strong, little one. Somehow, some way, you must find the strength to do what you believe to be right. And the strength to live with it afterward.