The Red Horseman

5

“Yeltsin said yes. Two hours ago.”

“Sure took him long enough,” Jake Grafton muttered. “If I were sitting on all those weapons I’d have got a hot seat months ago.”

General Brown consulted his watch. “Fifteen hours ago two army bases were attacked. The Russian government says the attackers stole machine guns, artillery, APCs and at least ten truckloads of ammunition.”

“Truckloads?”

“Yeah,” General Brown said. “They killed sixty soldiers at one base, fifty at another, and blew up all but the trucks and APCs they drove out.”

“Who?”

“They aren’t sure. Maybe criminal gangs, maybe Armenians again. Maybe some ex-soldiers who are starting their own private army.” General Brown stepped to the map on the wall and pointed. “Here and here.”

When he had resumed his seat, he said, “The CIA’s man went over yesterday.”

“Tenney?”

“Yes. He’ll meet you at the embassy. Ambassador Lancaster will brief you. The president wants the nukes neutralized and the Russian government strengthened. Talk to those people. Let us know what you need to do the job.”

Jake Grafton didn’t laugh. It was too ridiculous for that. How in hell had he gotten into the middle of this mess?

“And,” General Brown continued, “if you can piss on any of those outlaw or rebel gangs, that’ll be all right too.”

His stomach felt like there was a rock in it. “Yessir,” he managed.

“The air force will have a C-141 at Andrews in six hours. Be on it.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Albert Sidney Brown came around the desk and held out his hand. “Good luck, Admiral.”

“Don’t worry, sir. I’ll take my rabbit’s foot along.”

“You’re going to need more than a rabbit’s foot,” Callie told Jake as she passed him aspirin and toilet articles to put in his bag. He had just mentioned his parting remark to General Brown. She didn’t think it was very funny. As she watched him stuff underwear around his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum and shoulder holster, she tartly added, “You’re also going to need more than that little popgun.”

She pushed her hair back out of her eyes. “Oh, you men! Jetting off into the middle of a revolution. It’s so damn pathetic.”

“It isn’t really a revolution,” her husband replied as he folded underwear around a box of pistol ammunition and added it to the bag. “Yeltsin’s still in the driver’s seat, still in control.”

“For how long? What does anyone think you and Toad can really accomplish?”

“Oh, we’ll have some help. Too much probably. But if we can just prod the Russians into—”

“Don’t change the subject,” Callie said sharply. “You know precisely what I mean. Even with the entire United States Army over there you’d still be outnumbered ten to one. Sending you and Toad over there is some kind of insane joke.”

“Umph,” Jake grunted.

Toad Tarkington’s opinion had been more colorful but no more optimistic: “Once again our politicians are saving the world from foreign politicians stupider than they are. And we nincompoops in uniform smartly salute and grab ankles. BOHICA!” Ah yes, that lovely old acronym, BOHICA — Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.

Callie jerked a pair of trousers away from him that he was rolling up. She folded them carefully and handed them back. “Not that they’ll send the entire army,” she said. “You’ll be lucky to get two privates and a corporal. One of the privates will be the cook and the other will peel potatoes. Presumably the corporal will have a few minutes a day to help you and Toad when he isn’t busy supervising the privates.”

She sat heavily. “Oh, Jake. Why you?”

He sat down beside her and took her in his arms.

“Everything will work out. It always does.”

“No. Everything doesn’t always work out. I’m really tired of hearing that trite little phrase.”

“You know me, Callie,” Jake Grafton said. “Trust me.”

“Hey, babe. It’s me, Toad. We’re leaving today.”

“Now?” Rita asked.

Toad gripped the telephone tightly. “Plane leaves Andrews at six.”

“I’ll see if I can get the rest of the day off,” she said. “You’re at home?”

“Yeah. Packing.”

“If I don’t call in ten minutes I’m on my way home.”

“Okay.”

“I have a bad feeling about this, Toad.”

“It’ll be okay.”

“I love you.”

“I know that, babe. And I love you.”

“See you in a while.”

The C-141 headed north on the great circle route to Moscow. After it climbed above the stratus clouds covering the East Coast of the United States, it flew in a clear sky illuminated by the sun low on the horizon.

Jake Grafton came up to the flight deck and visited a moment with the pilots, then stood looking at the vastness of the sky. “It doesn’t ever get dark at this time of year at these latitudes,” the copilot told him.

“How many times have you guys flown this route?” Jake asked.

“Couple dozen times for me, sir,” the pilot, an air force major, replied. He nodded at the copilot, a first lieutenant. “This is his second trip.”

Cold. The sky looked bleak and cold, even with the sun shining. The cockpit was a tiny capsule of life adrift in an indifferent universe.

Jake shivered once, then returned to the little passenger section. There were only eight seats and Toad was asleep in one of them. In the next row the liftmaster, a senior sergeant, also snoozed. The rest of the plane was filled with military rations bound for orphanages and soup kitchens for the elderly. The admiral opened the door to the cargo compartment and stood there looking. Overhead lights illuminated the cargo compartment and the sea of boxes stacked on pallets.

The incongruity of the situation appalled him, filled him with a sadness devoid of hope that seemed to drain the energy from him. Insanity, Callie had said. Yes, that was the word. A nation with enough nuclear weapons to kill half the life on earth and doom the rest couldn’t feed its old people, its children.

Jake closed the door and sagged into a seat.

He tried to sleep but it wouldn’t come. Finally he turned so he could look out the window at the cold, infinite sky.

At Sheremetyevo Airport near Moscow, the C-141 was parked next to a Soviet military terminal across the field from the regular passenger terminal. Jake and Toad exited the plane through the rear cargo door after it had been opened. Although the plane had been airborne for twelve hours and it was 6 A.M. in Washington, it was two o’clock in the afternoon here on a pleasant summer day. Small puffy clouds floated in a blue sky. They stood on the concrete ramp beside their bags and watched a limo driving toward them. It came to a halt and a man in a U.S. naval officer’s uniform climbed out.

“Lieutenant Dalworth, sir,” said the young officer after he had saluted. He pulled open the back door of the car. As Jake and Toad climbed in he added, “You don’t have to go through customs.”

“How come?”

“I arranged it, sir. I’ve become pretty good friends with several of the customs and emigration guys.”

Jake was taken slightly aback.

“Don’t worry, sir. With diplomatic passports, the whole deal is just a formality. I’ve partied with those guys, given them some sacks of groceries and gotten drunk with them. They know I won’t screw ’em.”

Three minutes later, after Jake’s and Toad’s baggage was loaded in the trunk, Dalworth climbed in and got the car in motion. Toad Tarkington mused, “Dalworth. Dalworth… By any chance, are you Spiro Dalworth?”

A look of discomfort crossed the young officer’s face.

Tarkington grinned broadly and seized the lieutenant’s hand. He pumped it heartily. “As I live and breathe.”

Jake Grafton recognized the name too. Lieutenant Dalworth had been assigned to the navy’s public relations staff in New York City when he somehow wound up on a television talk show panel discussing “women in the modern military.” After thirty minutes of weathering abuse from a prominent feminist fanatic who shared the panel with him, Dalworth lost his temper. His parting shot at her had been, “Oh, Spiro Agnew.”

Three days later someone told the female warrior that the former vice president’s name was an anagram for “grow a penis.”

She charged into the navy’s cubbyhole office in the Manhattan federal building with a television reporter and cameraman in tow and proceeded to assault Dalworth with an umbrella while she hurled invective. After she shouted herself out and departed, a stunned Dalworth told the reporter that the feminist had a brain like a prune and a body to match.

The episode was marvelous television.

Alas, Dalworth’s new status as a media celebrity interfered with his work and embarrassed the navy, still reeling from the 1991 Tailhook Convention scandal, so now he was a very junior naval attaché at the American embassy in Moscow, eight time zones away from the nearest militant feminist armed with a television camera and umbrella.

“That whole thing was almost eight months ago,” Dalworth muttered. “You’d think people would at least start to forget.” He was a rangy young man, several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and bulging biceps. At some point in his athletic past his nose had been slightly rearranged, and the effect was a memorable face. Not handsome, but unique.

“What an honor, Spiro! I sure am pleased to meetcha,” Toad enthused. He playfully tapped Dalworth on the shoulder.

“Did you have a good flight?” Dalworth asked.

“Terrific. Filet mignon over the North Pole and all the free champagne we could drink.”

“The cold chicken box lunch, huh?”

“Yeah. You wonder what the air force does to the chicken to make it taste so bad.”

“Ever been to Moscow before?”

“Neither one of us,” Toad said.

“Sleepy?”

After a glance at Grafton, Toad told him, “Not too.”

“Drive you around the downtown a little before we go to Fort Apache.” Fort Apache, Jake knew, was the complex behind the embassy where the residents lived, a tag that came straight from the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx. “Give you the hundred-ruble tour.”

The endless rows of concrete apartment buildings were soon in view. Nine and a half million people, Jake knew, lived in Moscow, most of them stuffed into tiny apartments in these crumbling mausoleums. Yet on a sunny June day they didn’t look bad. Almost as if he could read Jake’s thoughts, Dalworth said, “Place looks a lot different in the winter. Then it’s the devil’s own refrigerator, gray and terminally dismal.”

Soon the car was bucketing down a broad boulevard toward the center of the city, a chip afloat in a stream of little sedans and huge trucks, all emitting a noxious miasma that stung the eyes and throat. “Bad pollution, about like Delhi, India. Sorta like Seoul without the kimchi.”

Dalworth piloted them into the center of the city. Soon they were circling the brick walls and onion-topped towers of the Kremlin. Jake’s eye was caught by the cars on the side of the road with their hoods up and people bending over the engines. Someone seemed to be broken down in every block.

Dalworth pointed out the naked pedestals where once statues stood. “See those? They even tore down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in front of KGB Headquarters, presumably while the KGB types watched out the windows. Now I’ll show you my favorite place in Moscow. I found this the other day when I was out walking.”

After three more stoplights, he turned and crossed the Moskva River and went down one of the side streets. In one of the river channels a cruise ship sat listing in the mud, gutted and abandoned. Ahead across the sidewalk was a park. A dirt road for park maintenance vehicles was blocked by steel crowd-control railings. Dalworth drove the car onto the sidewalk, stopped, then got out and moved the railings. He pulled the car through, then replaced them. The park was young trees and grass, but the grass was half weeds and hadn’t been mowed. Here and there women with strollers sat taking the sun. After Dalworth drove about a hundred yards, he pulled the car to a stop.

Just to the left, surrounded on three sides by more haphazardly placed crowd-control railings, stood three huge bronze statues amid the dandelions and grass. A smaller marble statue lay on its side in front of the others. Behind them half-hidden by the foliage of the trees one could glimpse rows of apartments.

“This is where they dumped some of the statues,” Dalworth explained. He parked the car and the three men got out.

Jake Grafton ran his hands over the marble defaced with swatches of paint. The lower portion of the statue was broken off and lying in the grass. He moved to the head and stared down into the paint-daubed face of Josef Stalin.

“Who are these others?”

The standing bronzes were three or four times life size. “They look to me to be three likenesses of the same guy, Admiral,” Dalworth said. “Dzerzhinsky, I think, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe Lenin with hair. For sure he was some big Commie mucky-muck that they were tired of looking at and hearing about. He looks sort of like a slavic Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t he?”

“More like Jefferson Davis,” Jake Grafton murmured, and looked around. “What’s that over there?” He pointed at a huge gray concrete structure three or four stories high a hundred yards away, beside the river. The parking lots were empty, and even from this distance he could see the building was shabby, the facade crumbling.

“Some kind of cultural thing. Just beyond it across that boulevard is the entrance to Gorky Park. See that huge gate?”

“Umm.”

Jake Grafton turned back to Stalin. He ran his hands over the marble and looked again into the stone eyes.

“ ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ ” Toad Tarkington said.

Lieutenant Spiro Dalworth was more down-to-earth. “Be fun to have one of these out in the backyard, wouldn’t it? To piss on whenever you felt in the mood.”

U.S. Ambassador Owen Lancaster was not a career diplomat— rather he was one of those political insiders who had been repeatedly appointed to key embassies by both Democratic and Republican administrations. His political affiliation was a subject that never seemed to get mentioned by anyone, even the press. In short, he was The Establishment from fingertips to toenails.

And he looked it, Jake Grafton concluded. Tall, lean, patrician and impeccably turned out in a tailor-made wool suit and a handmade silk tie, Owen Lancaster looked exactly like central casting’s idea of an heir to a nineteenth-century Yankee merchant’s fortune, which he was. It seemed as if this room in Spaso House were designed around him: the lighting, color scheme, expensive furniture and carpeting — the room was an exquisite tribute to the interior designer’s art. God would have a living room like this if He had the money.

In a chair to the left of the ambassador sat one of the career diplomats, a woman in her mid to late thirties — maybe early forties — it was hard to tell. She wore modest, expensive clothes and no makeup that Jake could see. Her name was Ms. Agatha Hempstead, with the emphasis on the Ms. She hadn’t yet opened her mouth but Jake Grafton already suspected that she was three or four notches smarter than Old Money Lancaster.

On the other side of the ambassador sat Herb Tenney. He was wearing a suit and tie this afternoon and looked as if he had merely dropped in to pass a few social moments. After he had smiled and nodded pleasantly to Jake and Toad, he devoted his attention to the ambassador’s pleasantries.

“I don’t pretend to know just what instructions you have been given in Washington, Admiral,” the ambassador was saying, “or what we Americans can do to improve this situation. I don’t know that we can contribute anything to the solution of this particular problem, but it certainly won’t hurt to try. The Russians must learn that they can cooperate with us on matters of mutual interest and, indeed, it is in their best interests to do so. I think that’s critical…”

Jake Grafton twisted in his ornate, polished mahogany chair. Herb Tenney looked innocent, Jake concluded. His whole presence radiated comfort, proclaimed to everyone who saw him that here was a man at peace with humanity and his conscience, a man who knew in his heart of hearts that he had nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for, nothing to fear.

All of which somehow irritated Jake Grafton.

“…We can help,” Ambassador Lancaster was saying, “solve problems in a constructive way that will…”

Toad Tarkington caught Jake’s eye with a warning glance. Apparently he could see that his boss was struggling to keep a grip on his temper.

God! Was it that obvious?

The fact that Tenney could probably also see the effect of his innocent act was gasoline on the fire. Jake felt the heat as his face flushed. Herb Tenney and his CIA bugs… Sunday op-ed drivel from the ambassador…if he had to sit here in this museum exhibit of bureaucratic good taste for another two minutes he was going to be in a mood to strangle them both.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Jake interrupted as he struggled to rise from the overstuffed chair. “I didn’t get any sleep on the plane and I’ve just spent an hour with the naval attaché. I’ve got to lie down for a few hours. Is there anyplace I can crash?”

“Oh, of course, of course. You must be rested when you meet General Yakolev in the morning. I should have thought of that. Would you like something to eat before you go to bed?”

“No, thank you, sir. Perhaps a light breakfast in the morning?”

“No problem, Admiral. We’ll talk again then.”

Jake Grafton shook the ambassador’s hand, nodded at Ms. Hempstead, then turned and tramped out without even a glance at Tenney.

He woke up at midnight after four hours’ sleep and found he was wide awake. He turned on the bedside light and examined his watch. What time was it in Washington? What the hell was the time differential? Eight hours? Four o’clock in the afternoon in Washington. No wonder he couldn’t sleep even though he was tired.

From the window he could see the Moscow skyline as the anemic city lights made the clouds glow. And the sky wasn’t completely dark — sort of a twilight.

He dressed quickly in civilian clothes and pulled on a light jacket. He picked up the phone and was quickly connected to the enlisted marine at the duty desk. “Could I get a car and driver? I’d like to do a little sight-seeing.”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir.” The marine’s voice was matter of fact, held not a trace of surprise. Perhaps these requests were common, Jake mused, from new arrivals suffering from jet lag.

“Okay.”

“It’ll be just a few minutes, sir.”

The driver, a sergeant, motored slowly on a journey without a destination as Jake Grafton took it all in from the backseat. The city didn’t resemble any city he had ever visited. The streets were poorly lit and had private cars parked everywhere. There seemed to be no shortage of parking spaces. At least there was one thing Russia had enough of. Only because they didn’t have many cars. Occasionally he saw a few soldiers at street corners, here and there some civilians.

Now and then the driver told him the name of some public building, softly, almost whispering it.

Yes, Jake too felt like a trespasser.

The public buildings were large and grand, but once away from them the streets were lined with endless blocks of concrete buildings designed without imagination and constructed without craft. What these buildings would look like covered with snow and ice was something Grafton didn’t want to think about. Some of the buildings were abandoned, mere shells with sockets where the windows had been.

He always got depressed at first in foreign cities — culture shock, he supposed. Tonight the empty streets and the dark blocks of miserable flats reflected a people devoid of hope. It was a sadness that shook Jake Grafton to the marrow.

Inevitably his mind turned to the eighty-five million. Murder on that scale must have a profound effect on those left behind — an effect beyond anything encompassed by grief or tragedy. To live with evil on such a scale was beyond Jake Grafton’s comprehension. These people were all guilty, all of them; those who gave the orders and those who pulled the triggers and those who buried them and those who pretended it never happened.

Where does responsibility stop? Is it an exclusive property of these miserable, impoverished people crowded into these miserable, mean buildings, fighting for survival?

Jake Grafton thought not. He rode through the summer twilight streets looking at the new sights with old, tired eyes.