The Red Horseman jg-5 Page 15

  “Sort of like Washington a couple of years ago, eh?” Yocke said with a grin. “Same rules?”

  “Well, not exactly.” Jake frowned. “I guess I don’t know precisely what the rules should be. So I’d want some sort of promise that you won’t print anything on any subject without my okay.”

  “I assume that you’re working with the Russians. Do they know I’ll be there? A reporter?”

  “I’ve talked to General Yakolev about it. I told him I could trust you.”

  Toad groaned again. “Spreading it a little thick, aren’t you, sir? I’d trust Jack the Hack with parking meter money, but…”

  “Yakolev? Isn’t he the chief of staff for the new Commonwealth Army?”

  “That’s the guy. Nicolai Yakolev.”

  “Soaks up vodka like a sponge,” Toad tossed in.

  “I agree.” Yocke grinned broadly and offered Jake his hand. After the admiral shook it, he grabbed a steno pad and a pencil and plopped onto the edge of the bed, forcing Tarkington to scoot over. He flipped the pad open to a fresh page and said, “Shoot.”

  “No notes. None.”

  “I have to take notes. I got a good memory but it ain’t Memorex. Only way to ensure accuracy later on when I write the story.”

  Grafton appeared unmoved, so Yocke steamed on. “We’re talking the Washington Post here, not the Alfalfa County Clarion.” Yocke added confidentially, “I’ll use my own private shorthand. No one can read it but me. Honest.”

  “Not even if you write in Swahili.”

  Tarkington chortled.

  Yocke tossed the steno pad on top of the dresser. “No notes.”

  “The other part of it is that the CIA may try to kill you.”

  Yocke’s mouth fell open. He glanced at Toad, then back at Jake. “The CIA? Our guys? You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t write a story if I’m dead.”

  “That thought may occur to them too.”

  “Them? The whole CIA or a couple of bad apples or who?”

  “I dunno.”

  Yocke lost his temper. “Jesus Christ, Admiral! You don’t give a guy much. What say we do this the conventional, tried-and-true traditional way? You tell me whatever you want to tell me and I’ll write and publish it, just like a real working reporter. You’ll be an anonymous, reliable source, an unnamed high government official. I won’t reveal your name to another living soul, even if they throw me in jail. I’ll stay alive and out of your hair. Anytime you want to talk, just give a shout.”

  “Be like having your own psychotherapist on the cheap, CAG,” Toad said unctuously, “but you could skip the messy details about your sex life unless you wanted our modern Dr. Freud to make you famous.”

  Jake Grafton shook his head. “Won’t work that way,” he told Yocke. “You either come along for the ride on the chance that someday you may get to write a story or you stay at home. It’s up to you.”

  “Just what do you get out of this arrangement?” Yocke demanded.

  “I get an independent observer who has the power to reach the American public. I’m not sure what that will be worth because I don’t know how things will shake out. But…if Toad and I get killed and you somehow manage to live to tell the tale, it might make very interesting reading in some quarters. I don’t know. Too many ifs. I just don’t know.” He eyed Yocke. “At the very least you’re an unknown quantity added to the equation.” He shrugged.

  A knock sounded on the door.

  “Well?” Jake asked. “Yea or nay?”

  “I’m in.”

  Yocke went to answer the door. The man who came in was wearing a suit and overcoat and had a hard case that looked as if it contained a videocamera handcuffed to his wrist. The case displayed a diplomatic tag.

  “Admiral Grafton?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Master Sergeant Emmett Thornton. I need to see your ID, sir.”

  Jake took out his wallet and extracted his green military ID card. Thornton gave it a careful look, then handed it back. “Thank you, sir.” He extracted a piece of paper from his inside coat pocket and held it out. “Now if you will just sign for this equipment, it’s all yours.”

  Jake scribbled his name. “How much is this going to cost me if I lose it, Sergeant?”

  “About a hundred grand.”

  Toad snapped his fingers. “We’ll put it on our Amoco card.”

  Thornton glanced at Yocke.

  “He’s okay,” Grafton told him.

  Thornton laid the case on the bed and used a key to open it. They gathered around for a look as he began unpacking items. “What we have here is a TACSAT — tactical satellite — com unit with built-in encryption device. The signal goes right up to the bird, which re-broadcasts it to the Pentagon com center. Ni-cad batteries and a universal recharger. All you do is set the encryption code and use it like a two-way radio. General Land wanted me to remind you that the codes were generated by the National Security Agency.”

  Jake examined the switches and buttons on the device. “We’ll need a brief and the codes.”

  “Yessir. I’ll come to that. This other item is simpler. It’s a tape recorder with an encryption device attached. You merely record a message, anything you want up to thirty minutes. Then you punch up a six-digit code in this window here. Find a telephone, call the party you want, and when they are ready, you hit the play button. The garbled sound goes out at high speed. Takes about sixty seconds to play a thirty-minute message. If the other party has a message for you, you then put your machine on record and hold it up to the phone. Later on you can play the message and the machine will decode it into plain English. This thing works with telephones or TACSAT.”

  The TACSAT came with a set of codes on water-soluble paper. Since it was possible the codes could fall into the wrong hands, “unauthorized personnel” was Thornton’s phrase, each authentic message should start with a code word that the admiral was to make up. Now. After a moment’s thought Jake wrote a word on a matchbook and showed it to the sergeant, who then burned the matchbook in the wastepaper basket.

  “The code for the telephone encrypter is a little more difficult. If you other gentlemen would like to step out of the room for a minute?”

  “No, Sergeant,” Jake told him. “Let’s you and I go for a walk.”

  Out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel the evening breeze was picking up. The sergeant explained: “General Land suggested this code. Take the date, multiply it by the year in which you were born, then divide by the hour of the day in which you sent the message.” He produced a sheet of paper. “Try it. Today is the second of July here so write that as seven oh two. And use local time in the military format. It’s now twenty-three fifty, so use twenty-three hundred.”

  Jake got a pen from his shirt pocket and did the math. “I get five nine three point six four seven — something.”

  “You were born in 1945, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Admiral. You would just punch that six-digit number into the encrypter and place the decimal in the proper place. Always start with a positive integer and carry out any fractions so that you have six digits. Add zeros to the right of the decimal as necessary.”

  “Who has this code, besides you and me?”

  “Just General Land.”

  “We’ll always use Moscow time?”

  “Moscow date and time.”

  “Okay. Come upstairs and give Toad and me a complete brief on the gear and we’ll be all set. Did you just get in from Washington?”

  “I came here straight from the airport, sir. They’re waiting to take me back.”

  “Long flight.”

  “I’m used to it. I sleep on the plane.”

  Jake Grafton stared at the communications devices with a sinking feeling. After a moment he screwed up the courage to ask, “Just how secure is this techno-junk?”

  The sergeant faced him squarely. “Admiral, this stuff is like a padlock on a garage
. It’ll keep honest people honest. But with a good computer a competent cryptographer could break any message in a couple hours.”

  All Jake Grafton could manage was a grunt.

  “The good news,” the sergeant continued, “is that the ruskies don’t have many good computers. They do most of their crypto work by hand, so it’ll take them a couple weeks. Then one hopes the report will get routed here and there through the bureaucracy and a couple more weeks will pass before it lands on the desk of someone who may or may not decide to believe it.”

  “A couple hours. With a good computer.”

  “That’s about the size of it, sir.”

  And the CIA has the best computers in the world. Jake Grafton took a deep breath and thanked the sergeant for his trouble. Being an army man, the sergeant saluted.

  9

  The plane was the personal transport of the Minister of defense and still the rest room smelled like an outhouse and no water came out of the sink taps. No paper towels. So much for personal hygiene!

  Jake opened the door and stepped out into the aisle that led to the cockpit. There was no cockpit door and he could see the instrument panel between the pilots.

  The warning placards were in Cyrillic and the instruments had funny labels. He stood there looking over their shoulders for several seconds before the pilot realized he was there and looked over his shoulder. He said something in Russian and Jake replied in English.

  “Good morning,” the pilot managed.

  “Good morning,” Jake echoed. “Nice plane you got here.”

  When the pilot tapped his watch and made half a circle on the face with his finger, Jake nodded sagely and returned to his seat.

  General Yakolev was in a seat across the aisle conferring with his aide. They were going over documents. Toad sat in the next row with Jocko West, who was broadening the American’s horizons. Behind them sat the other foreign military representatives.

  Today they were making a trip to a Russian nuclear weapons depot to see how warheads were disassembled. The name of the base they were going to was Petrovsk, on the Volga watershed. Jake glanced at the map again. The place was a hundred miles or so north northeast of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, where the Soviet army shattered Adolph Hitler’s ambitions.

  Jake Grafton hadn’t even been born then, but Yakolev was a young soldier in the Soviet army. Once again Jake pondered the twists of fate that had lifted Yakolev to the top, wondered again about the man who wore that uniform.

  The window was scratched from being repeatedly wiped with dirty rags, but Jake managed to get a look through it at the land sliding by thirty thousand or so feet below. Forests, occasional small villages, roads that followed the contours of the land.

  It just didn’t look like America, or even western Europe. Those landscapes had their own distinct look that an experienced air traveler would recognize at a glance. Part of the problem, Jake decided, was that Russia was just too big. Great distances were the blessing that caused Napoleon and Hitler to founder and the curse that had stymied generations of Communist economic planners.

  Soon Jake heard the power being reduced and felt the nose drop a degree or two as the pilot began his descent.

  All this talk about weapons…it would be good finally to see some of the damned things.

  * * *

  The weapons were being disassembled in a makeshift clean room that didn’t look any too tight. This was the scene of Yakolev’s show-and-tell session. The Western visitors gathered in front of a plate-glass window and watched white-robed technicians use mechanical arms to manipulate the warhead parts while an interpreter translated Yakolev’s comments, which were in Russian. Amazingly, when they entered the facility no one had offered them film badges to record the level of radiation to which they might be exposed, nor was anyone working here wearing one.

  Beside the general stood a man in civilian clothes who looked nervous. Jake assumed he was the manager of this facility. Occasionally Yakolev asked him a question and pondered the reply, but the interpreter didn’t translate these exchanges.

  From the clean room an army truck took the party to a large hangar where row after row of missiles sat on their transporters. Against one wall were stacked wooden crates of pallets — nuclear warheads. The small party stood in silence taking it all in.

  Yakolev stood beside Jake. Finally he spoke, in English. “Impressive, yes?”

  “That it is.”

  “Russia shook the world with these missiles,” Yakolev said. “And now we take them apart.”

  Jake Grafton searched the older man’s impassive face.

  “We become another poor country without a voice in the world’s affairs,” the general continued after a moment, still looking at the row upon row of missiles decorated with huge red stars. “The television brings us news of the great things that are happening in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Bonn… We learn the thoughts of the great men of our age. The world’s leaders ponder the future of mankind and debate how much money to give Russia while we eat our potatoes and borsch.”

  Yakolev slapped Jake on the back. “That is progress, no? No more bad old Communists! Now Russians buy televisions and watch CNN and the BBC and bet on world cup soccer and tennis matches at Wimbledon. They worry about stock prices in Tokyo and London and New York. No more bad old Russians! They are just like us.”

  Yakolev turned away and Jake Grafton watched his retreating back. Then he stood looking at the missiles.

  * * *

  General Yakolev excused himself for a few hours work, so Jake asked for a tour of the base. This disconcerted the civilian interpreter, but within a few minutes a military guide-interpreter was provided. “What want to see?” the man asked with a heavy accent, wearing a perplexed look.

  “The enlisted barracks, the mess hall and the hospital,” Jake told him.

  The guide was in uniform, with a rank designation that Jake didn’t recognize, and now he looked around in bewilderment. Jake guessed that he was in his early twenties. Seeing no one handy to voice his concerns to, yet unwilling to refuse the request of this important foreign visitor in the strange uniform, he slowly led Jake and Toad out the door of the hangar office and set a course across the packed dirt toward a distant building.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mikhail Babkin, sir.”

  “You speak excellent English.” Jake Grafton mouthed the complimentary lie easily, without a twinge of conscience. English is different than all other languages, he reflected. Most Frenchmen listening to badly spoken French will pretend that they cannot understand or ignore the offender entirely. Yet any American meeting a goatherd in sub-Sahara Africa or on the windswept steppes of Mongolia who knows a word or two of pidgen English will compliment that worthy on his command of the language.

  The barracks was of concrete construction, the usual Russian mix of too little cement, too much sand. The soldiers lived in one large, smelly, musty room with wooden bunks without springs. In the middle of the room stood a wood stove with an exhaust pipe leading to the roof. The bathrooms were communal, with no seats on the filthy toilets and one large shower with five drippy heads. There was no hot water heater. The smell…

  “No hot water?”

  “Hot? No.”

  For an American naval officer who had spent half his adult life aboard ship where men were forced to live together in close quarters, this barracks was an appalling sight. The men who lived here must be constantly sick.

  The mess hall was even worse. It was filthy, without refrigeration facilities or hot water. Jake asked how the dishes were washed and was told that each man dips his plate into a large drum of cold water. He was shown the drums.

  At the hospital he wandered the corridors and looked at the soldiers in the beds. They stared back at him. He peeked into one empty operating room with little equipment.

  “Where do you sterilize the instruments?” They are boiled, he was told. There was a sink in the anteroom, the taps drippin
g. He turned them on full and let them run. Uh-oh.

  “Hot water?”

  “Hot? No. Want see X-ray machine?”

  Stunned, Jake left the dimly lit building meekly when an officious person, presumably the administrator or doctor in charge, fired a volley of Russian at their escort and pointed at the door.

  “The sewage treatment plant… I want to see the sewage treatment plant.”

  The translator had great difficulty understanding the request. Toad got into the act. Finally Jake realized that there was no sewage treatment plant. Eventually it became clear that the sewage was piped straight to the local river. The translator led them to the bank where they could look down upon the discharge pipes.

  And nearby was the garbage dump. Above ground. The wind brought a whiff of it to where Jake and Toad and the translator were standing. Some small creature darted toward the pile, birds wheeled above, clouds of flies…

  For all these years, Jake thought savagely, we have been told about the vast capabilities of the Soviet military machine. And it’s all a lie. The shiny missiles and pretty tanks are the whole show. The men who must operate these weapons are poorly housed, in ill health, live in unsanitary conditions and eat food a Western health inspector would send to a landfill. It’s all a lie.

  What was it General Brown had said? The Soviet Union is a nation in total social and economic collapse. Nothing works. Nothing!

  He was in a subdued mood when he boarded the plane for the return flight to Moscow. General Yakolev made some comment but he paid no attention.

  * * *

  Toad Tarkington had a drink in each hand, and he held out one to Jake Grafton, who looked but didn’t reach.

  “It’s Scotch on the rocks,” Toad said. Seeing the look on Grafton’s face, he added, “I broke the seal on the bottle myself and poured it.”

  Jake accepted the glass and tried to grin.

  “I know,” Toad said.

  Around them the Fourth of July reception at Spaso House, the United States’ ambassador’s residence, was in full swing. Jake Grafton estimated the crowd at four or five hundred people. They were everywhere, in every room, in every hall, bumping into one another, nibbling delicacies from the trays of passing waiters, and drinking champagne by the gallon. In one corner a combo played light music by American composers. The light from the chandeliers cast a warm, soft glow over everything.