The Red Horseman

26

Jake Grafton was asleep when he heard the knocking on the door. “Just a minute.” He pulled on his trousers and opened it.

Yocke walked in lugging his computer. “I’ve written a story and I need to phone it into the paper. You’ll have to read it on the computer.”

He turned on the desk lamp and set up the machine.

Jake seated himself in front of the screen and put on his reading glasses. “You push the buttons.”

“Okay.”

As Jake finished each page, he nodded and Yocke brought up the next one. The story was an eyewitness account of the air assault on Samarra, the recovery of the nuclear weapons, and the death of Saddam Hussein. Yocke got down to cases on the third page.

Jake got out of the chair and switched on more lights.

“I thought you weren’t going to write fiction,” he said to the reporter.

“There isn’t a word in there that isn’t true.”

“Well…”

“Look, you’re doing the best you can with your weapons, I’m using mine.”

“You know, Jack,” Jake Grafton said softly, “that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me, but I don’t know that it’s true. Arranging that little shoot-out was the dirtiest thing I ever did.”

“You were going to shoot Saddam yourself, weren’t you?”

Jake Grafton ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, not at first. After that talk with Yakolev I thought he’d do it, and I felt dirty. I wanted Saddam dead! But if I killed him the political implications would be unpredictable, and perhaps profound. Then in that room listening to him spout bullshit, I thought what the hell, maybe we’ll kill each other.”

“He wouldn’t play, so you let Yakolev shoot him.”

“Something like that.”

“I’m not ever going to print this.”

“I know, Jack.”

“But did someone in Washington want Saddam dead?”

“If they did they never said it to me.” Jake met Yocke’s eyes. “I learned a long time ago in the military that you can have all the authority you are willing to use, but God help you if you screw up.”

“Did you know Yakolev was going to shoot Mikhailov?”

“No. I’m sorry he did. That was his decision.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Hell, what is there to do? I’m going to live with it.”

“Do you feel guilty?”

Jake Grafton made a gesture of irritation.

“You did what had to be done.”

Jake Grafton rubbed his face. “I thought so then, and I thought so when I sent Lieutenant Lutkin on to Moscow in a chopper that I suspected was going to be shot down, when I stuffed those damn poison pills into Herb Tenney’s mouth…but!” He gestured helplessly. “When all the preachers have shouted themselves out, the bottom line is that people shouldn’t kill people who aren’t trying to kill them.” His gaze shifted to Yocke’s face. “The easiest lie ever told is that old nugget you tell yourself, I’m doing what has to be done.”

“You’re not feeling sorry for Saddam Hussein and Yakolev and Herb Tenney, are you? They were guilty.”

Jake Grafton laid a hand on Yocke’s arm. “I’m feeling sorry for myself, Jack. They got what they deserved all right, but what do I deserve? I’m not God. I don’t want his job.”

“This is the real world, Admiral, not some class in metaphysics. Herb Tenney murdered people with poison and died of it himself. An absolute despot and two wanta-bes are dead — they did it to each other. You didn’t pull the trigger.”

“That’s sophistry, Jack. You should have been a lawyer.”

Jack Yocke exploded. “Goddamnit, Admiral! I’ve had it with all these people who tut-tut over the state of the world and won’t do anything. Mass murder, starvation, tyranny — it’s damn near two thousand years since Christ and…” He gestured helplessly. “Guilt seems to be the in drug of the nineties. Okay, I’ll drink my share. I’m glad Saddam’s dead…and those two Russian gangsters in uniform. Looking back, I wish I had pulled the trigger.”

Yocke swallowed hard. “I killed a man last night with a knife. Honest, there was no other way. I had to do it. It was him or me. Then I panicked and gunned a soldier or militiaman who was banging at me with a bolt-action rifle. I wish I hadn’t shot him. I shouldn’t have shot him.” He wiped the perspiration from his face. “I knew at the time that he was no threat, but you know…I wanted to kill him. Do you understand?”

Jake Grafton nodded.

“I’ve been thinking about those two men all day,” Yocke continued. “Thinking about guilt, about what I should have done, what…” He took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. Now he looked at his hands. “…what I wish I had done. But it’s over. And I have to live with it.”

Jake Grafton cleared his throat. “I can live with it too.” His voice became softer. “Maybe that’s why it worked out the way it did.”

Jack Yocke bobbed his head.

“How’s your arm?”

“Fifteen stitches, but the cut wasn’t deep.”

Grafton stood. “Call your story in. I’m going back to bed.”

“Toad says you always try to do the right thing. I think he’s right.”

“I hope he is,” Jake said. He extended his hand. Yocke took it and squeezed.

Yocke closed the door behind him and walked down the hallway of the makeshift BOQ. He called his story in as it was written, not changing a word.

Then he stood looking out the window at the desert. The sun was overhead and heat mirages distorted the horizon.

After his return to the United States from Saudi Arabia, Jack Yocke threw himself at the word processor. His articles on the upheaval in the former Soviet states were well received and widely reprinted. He called the Graftons and invited them out on two occasions, but the first evening he had to cancel and the second time the admiral got tied up at work.

Yocke understood. Jake was the new director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was busy trying to stay on top of rapidly changing events in the former Soviet states and the Middle East.

As Jake Grafton had predicted, the CIA problem took care of itself. As September turned into October Jack found the obituary of Harvey Schenler buried on a back page. Although the story didn’t say so, by Yocke’s count Schenler was the fourth high-ranking CIA officer to die since mid-August. According to the press releases, all died of natural causes. In their sleep.

Jack called Admiral Grafton at the office, and got him.

“Congratulations on the new job.”

“Thank you, Jack. How are things going for you?”

“Oh, just sitting here reading the obituaries. Seems that a deputy director of the CIA died in his sleep last night. Guy named Schenler. Heart failure.”

“Well, all things considered, it’s not a bad way to go,” Jake Grafton told him.

“Fourth CIA bigwig in the last six weeks. Must be something in the water over at Langley.”

“It was their choice. Protects their families and the institution.”

“How is the Toad-man?”

“Doing fine.”

“Think I’ll ever get to write anything about Schenler and his pals?”

“I doubt it,” Jake said promptly. “Certainly not anytime soon.” He paused, then continued with a hint of concern in his voice: “You aren’t running out of stuff to write about, are you?”

“We’re managing to keep the paper full — turmoil in the Middle East, a revolution in Iraq, Yeltsin still riding the tiger and trying not to get eaten. Same old song, different verse. How’s Callie and Amy?”

“Doing fine, Jack. Doing fine. I’ll tell them you asked.”

“Well, I’ll let you go, Admiral. But the reason I called — I just wanted to say thanks.”

“For what?”

“For taking me along, for keeping me alive, for making me a part of the team. Thanks.”

“Take care, Jack.”

In October Jack was notified by the Russian embassy that his request for an in-depth interview with Boris Yeltsin had been granted.

When he checked into the Metropolitan Hotel in Moscow there was some difficulty about the bill from his previous visit — they had held his room for a week after his hurried departure to the U.S. embassy. He had a tense conference with the manager. After a call back to Washington, he agreed to pay the disputed amount.

Once again the barman greeted him by name. The oil painting of the nobleman outside the Kremlin walls hadn’t been cleaned. Jack Yocke sat staring up at it and thinking of Shirley Ross, or Judith Farrell, as Toad and Jake had called her.

After his interview with Yeltsin, he took a taxi to the entrance to Gorky Park, then walked east. The statues of Stalin and his henchman now lay in the early winter snow surrounded by naked trees. The branches swayed in the bitter wind.

Jack found where a bullet had scarred the last bronze standing upright. He fingered the mark as he took in the scene one last time, then buried his hands in his pockets and walked back to the waiting taxi.

In November Yocke was invited to speak on the problems facing Russia at a symposium at Georgetown University. He was seated on the stage near the podium nervously fingering his notes and waiting for the lights to dim when he saw them come in: Rita Moravia, Toad Tarkington, Amy and Callie and Jake Grafton. They found seats along the left side of the auditorium.

Rita looked pregnant, Yocke noted with surprise.

Amy Carol waved, so he waved back. Jake and Toad returned his grin. Both the women smiled at him.

A warm glow settled over Jack Yocke. It’s good to have real friends, he told himself, and he was very fortunate — he had five. Perhaps they would like to go out for coffee and ice cream later this evening when the lecture was over. He would ask.

Jake Grafton put the bottle containing the tablets of binary poison into a desk drawer at his office and forgot about them. Through the winter and the rains of spring, through meetings, briefings and staff conferences, through turmoil and upheaval in Iraq and Russia, through coups in South America, through wars in the Balkans and another round of mass starvation in the horn of Africa, the pills stayed in the drawer.

He found them one evening in late May as he rooted in the drawer for a fresh pen. He fingered the bottle, then pried off the cap and dumped the white tablets on the desk in front of him. As he looked at the pills, the whole experience came flooding back.

Toxic waste. That’s what these pills were. If he dumped them down the toilet the man-made chemical compounds would go through the sewage treatment plant into the Potomac. Too dangerous to just toss them into the garbage for burial in a landfill. Can’t throw them into the ocean. If he burned them…but Lord knows what that might do to the active ingredients. And the resultant fumes might be poisonous.

These things were like plutonium pellets, their components deadly in the most minute quantities, difficult to dispose of safely.

That evening on the way home he bought a new battery for the car and asked if he could bring in the old battery in the morning for recycling. Sure.

After he had the new battery installed, he opened one of the plastic cell caps on the old one and dropped the tablets into the acid. Then he quickly screwed the cap back on.

When he looked up he found Callie was standing there in the garage with her arms folded across her chest, watching him. “What was that stuff you put in there?”

“Ahh…”

She stood looking at him with raised eyebrows.

What the hell! “Binary poison. This was what all the hassle was about last summer.” He told her about Herb Tenney.

“Do you think putting that stuff in there is safe?”

“Should be. They’ll drain this battery into a huge vat of acid and that will dilute the poison. Whatever they do to the acid should destroy the compound, I think.”

“It’s a risk then.”

“Life’s a risky business,” he told her as he wiped his hands on a rag.

“Jake, what really happened in Iraq?”

“That was ten months ago, Callie. Does it matter?”

She shrugged. “I suppose not, but on some level it does. Last fall when we went out for ice cream with Jack Yocke after that lecture, he and I talked. I read his story in the Post.”

“And?”

“Well, I never understood exactly what happened. Why did Saddam get killed? The Russian generals?”

“Yocke talked to you about that?” The words came out sharply, and Jake regretted it.

Callie didn’t seem to notice. “No,” she said slowly, recalling that conversation. “He said his story covered it. That was the problem. The story just explained what happened, not why. I kept the clipping. I was looking at it again last week. You usually never talk about things like that — which I can understand, although at times it seems hard, unfair even. There’s a whole side of you I don’t know about.”

“Why did you wait until now to bring this up?”

“I wasn’t going to,” Callie said. “Then you brought that poison home. So I’m asking. If you don’t want to tell me, I understand.”

Jake Grafton stared at his wife. After a moment he said, “Yocke’s story is true. He reported what he saw.”

“But not everything he saw.”

“No, not everything.” Jake ran his fingers through his hair. “We were in the hangar at Samarra. Toad put the gun he was holding on the table in front of Yakolev and bent over to cut the plastic tie that held his hands. Yakolev grabbed the gun and killed Mikhailov and Hussein.”

“Toad wouldn’t make a mistake like that. You set it up?”

My wife knows me very well, Jake reflected. Too well. “Yes,” he said softly.

“And the marine captain killed Yakolev?”

“Yes.”

“Shot him in the back?”

“Yes.”

Callie thought about it. “Why?”

“I thought the world would be a lot better place if Saddam Hussein wasn’t in it. My responsibility. But if I shot him he would be a martyr. So I had a talk with Yakolev. We both knew that if he went back to Russia he would be shot. He said he was a soldier, he didn’t fear a bullet. I told him I knew that and wanted his help.”

“And what was his reply?”

“He just looked me in the eye and said he would think about it. So I set it up. When Yakolev saw the pistol placed on the table within his reach, he knew what it was I wanted. And he knew how it would end. He made his choice. Mikhailov didn’t know what was going on but perhaps he would have wanted it to end the way it did. Maybe. He was old and tired and wanted to die…that was my impression, anyway.”

She stepped toward him and touched his cheek. “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner? You shouldn’t have carried this by yourself.”

“Yakolev and Mikhailov were soldiers. They screwed up big-time. I think they realized that toward the end.”

“And Hussein?”

“Saddam Hussein was a thug who clawed his way to the top of the neighborhood dung heap, like Al Capone, Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Attila the Hun and a hundred others. I have no regrets.”

“General Land? The president? What did they think afterward?”

“They liked Jack Yocke’s version. After they put down the newspaper they probably said, Next problem.”

He flipped off the garage light as he followed her out the door into the late spring evening.

“How many times,” she asked, “can you take on the Herb Tenneys and Saddam Husseins of the world and come out alive?”

He looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Gimme a break, Callie. I lead a very sedentary life. I’m a bureaucrat, for heaven’s sake. You know me!”

“I know you better, Jacob.”

He examined her face, pushed a stray lock back from her forehead. “I’ll fight the good fight as long as I have any fight left in me.”

She smiled, then brushed her lips across his cheek as she took his hand. “Come eat your dinner,” she said as she led him toward the house. “You can’t fight on an empty stomach.”