The Red Horseman jg-5 Page 25

  * * *

  Jack Yocke tapped listlessly on his computer. He had found that having the keyboard under his fingers was therapeutic. When his mind was wandering his fingers merely tapped out disjointed phrases, but when he was thinking about something specific his fingers strung words together into sentences as his thoughts rolled along.

  The secret is to think in logical, coherent sentences, which most people don’t do. Yocke did, most of the time. As he witnessed an event or thought about a subject the words scrolled through his mind. If he had a keyboard under his fingers the words became text.

  Now he glanced at the screen. “Nigel Keren” was written there.

  Ah yes. The headline flashed through his mind and the words appeared on the screen. “British billionaire Nigel Keren murdered by CIA.” That headline could get him a story in every newspaper in the world.

  And he couldn’t write the story.

  Frustrated, he got up from the computer and went to the window. He was still in Admiral Grafton’s apartment in the embassy complex, and unless he was willing to head straight back to the land of Diet Coke and hot dogs, he was going to have to stay here.

  A great end to your first foreign correspondent assignment, Jack! Write one good story that blames a political murder on the wrong crowd, the local secret police, who promptly jump on your case like stink on Limburger.

  Maybe he should call his editor. He glanced at the phone and even took a step in that direction, then returned to the window.

  Yocke knew his editor. Gatler would pretend to be incredulous, thunderstruck: you’re hiding out and missing the great stories, the big, stupendous, attack-on-Pearl Harbor, war-declared stories — world’s worst nuclear accident kills zillions, democracy collapses in Russia, military dictatorship ousts Yeltsin? If you don’t get a piece of those stories, his editor would shout, you’ll go back on the cop beat for the rest of your natural, miserable life.

  Jack Yocke had no intention of informing his editor that he had made a tiny little mistake on the Soviet Square Massacre story. That the KGB were innocent lambs, victims of a foul Israeli plot to besmirch their honor. He wasn’t going to call that one in, even if Grafton gave him permission to print the truth, which he wouldn’t.

  The fact is that he had been set up by someone who knew just how much truth he could uncover and how to twist it into the story she wanted told. Now he knew, and he couldn’t tell. Wouldn’t tell, even if he could.

  But everyone manipulates the press, don’t they? Politicians and cops, athletes and movie stars do it all the time.

  Moscow seemed quiet out there beyond the brick wall topped with two strands of barbed wire. Yocke could see the marine opening the front gate and letting cars go in and out.

  As he watched he saw Toad Tarkington, Rita Moravia and Spiro Dalworth pile into a car with a couple of marines armed with M-16s. Two more marines and the other two pilots got into a second car. Away they went, out the gate. His curiosity piqued, Yocke wondered about their errand and destination.

  When the second car turned the corner and was out of sight, Yocke turned back to his computer.

  No, the story he wasn’t getting was KGB blows up Serdobsk reactor! Zillions Die! Now that would be a story that would make Jack Yocke as famous as Michael Jackson, a story to launch a hell of a career, a story to get him his own column, maybe even an investigative team like Bob Woodward had. And what did Woodward dig out from under his rock? Richard Nixon with a coverup dripping from his fingers — a popcorn fart compared to this little beauty.

  But he hadn’t missed it yet. Oh no! Jake Grafton had it and no other reporter was going to get a sniff. Sooner or later Jack Yocke would mine that ore. He could feel it in his bones.

  Zillions die. Not zillions, but maybe tens of thousands.

  The import of those words struck home as Yocke stared at them on the computer screen. Tens of thousands, men, women, children — the lame, the halt, the blind, the virtuous, the guilty, the oh so very human. All. Everyone in the fallout zone.

  And that Mossad killer Judith Farrell told Jake Grafton the KGB did it intentionally. On purpose. Murder. Political murder. The ends justify the means. Kill them all.

  Was she lying again?

  Suddenly Yocke had had enough of the computer. He turned it off and went to the window and looked out for a while.

  Then, since he was tired, he laid down and tried to sleep.

  After a while he did.

  * * *

  Jake Grafton was also thinking about the people in the fallout zone, thousands who were already dead or dying or sick as a human could be. If this were America or western Europe there would be no helicopters to steal. Those machines the networks hadn’t commandeered to carry their insta-cams, satellite feed gear and blow-dried reporters would all be in use for evacuation and relief efforts. If this were America or western Europe.

  One of the interpreters was watching Russian television and periodically summarizing what she heard, and she had not gotten a single hint that any relief efforts were under way.

  “It’s too early,” Captain Collins said uneasily. “It’ll take them a while to figure out what they need to do, then another while for anyone to decide he has the authority to set things in motion, then a third while for anybody to get off his ass and actually do something. The only certainty is whatever they do will be too little, too late, and completely ineffective.”

  Jake nodded. He had had only an hour’s sleep last night and was very tired. He tried to concentrate.

  “How hot is the fallout zone?” he asked Collins.

  The nuclear engineering officer just shrugged. “At one of these Russian nuke facilities a few years ago,” he said, “they didn’t know what to do with the hot waste, so they dumped it into a pond a hundred feet deep. Kept doing that. Then one summer the pond partially dried up and the mud turned to dust and blew away. Contaminated an area of four hundred eleven square miles. Contamination level of six hundred roentgens an hour, which is a fatal dose. Spend one hour anywhere in that area unprotected and you’re history.”

  “So what did the Russians do after Chernobyl?”

  “They lied about the extent of the accident, they lied about the radiation dosages people got and the number of victims, they ordered in troops to clean up the mess and lied about the dosages they got, they lied about the extent of food contamination, the relief money was stolen by corrupt officials, they misdiagnosed the cancers…they basically fucked it up from end to end.”

  Collins searched for words. “Maybe lie is the wrong word. These people have always operated on the premise that no one should ever be told bad news, so they are incapable of effectively dealing with any problem at any level. Bad news doesn’t go up the ladder and doesn’t come down, which means that no one ever knows the truth.”

  On that note Collins felt silent. When Jake failed to ask any more questions, Collins had a question of his own. “What do you want me to do with Dalworth, Admiral?”

  “Did he tell you about the fracas in the park?”

  “Yessir. And about whispering to Herb Tenney.”

  It was Jake’s turn to shrug. “Don’t do anything.”

  Collins picked at a discolored place on his uniform trousers.

  “Did Dalworth tell you those two guys we killed were CIA?”

  “Uh, yessir.”

  “I may need Dalworth,” Jake said slowly. “I don’t know what the hell Herb Tenney is up to, but whatever it is, it’s going to get him burned. I intend to light the fire.”

  16

  What was Herb Tenney up to? Jake worried the question as he lay inert on a couch with a throbbing headache. He had downed four aspirin and now had a wet washcloth draped across his forehead. Droplets of water trickled through his hair and wet the miserably thin pillow.

  It was hard to keep the proper perspective. Somehow, some way, a group within the CIA was embedded in this Russian mess up to its hidden microphones. Perhaps Toad’s reaction was the proper one — absol
ute outrage. But Toad would surrender to that emotion and lose sight of the other aspects. That was the thing about Toad…passionate sincerity was the steal buried under that flippant shell he wore to ward off the bumps and abrasions of everyday life.

  He still loved Judith Farrell, Jake was positive of that. Toad had given himself to her once, years ago, and he was the type of man for whom there could never be any emotional retreat. Love once bestowed could never be withdrawn. Oh, he could love another woman, and did — he was desperately in love with Rita Moravia. Now he must hide the hurt of the loss to avoid injuring another — only the Toad-man would get himself into that predicament. And Jake could only guess how badly he was hurting.

  Yakolev, Shmarov… He had met those two and come away confused. Yakolev at least wore the face he thought the foreigners wanted to see: maybe all he did was wear it. Shmarov looked like some hideous apparition from a Boris Karloff movie, ready to jerk out fingernails and slice off testicles.

  Money. Somehow he had missed the money connection between Nigel Keren and the Mossad, and it was right there in plain sight. Billionaire publisher and industrialist Nigel Keren… Money, money, money…

  Richard Harper said he had it. But what did he have? Is money the connection between the CIA and the KGB?

  The salient feature of communism that made it different from every other system of government man has yet devised was that it made everyone poor. All one could hope for under communism was access to more perks, to the right schools, a dacha in the Lenin Hills, a car, shopping in the party stores, party hospitals, and a plot in a party cemetery when the party doctors could do no more. But money? No. Today Boris Yeltsin was only paid the ruble equivalent of a hundred dollars a month.

  What do desperate comrades do when the tide goes out and leaves them stranded on a mud bar?

  What have they done?

  Everyone must be dead at the Petrovsk Rocket Base. Collins said it was in the center of the fallout pattern, a mere eighty miles downwind. The men and women there must have died quickly, almost in their tracks. Perhaps the people in the clean rooms lasted a little longer. Perhaps not.

  But the missiles and their warheads would be unaffected. They would be sitting there in the hangars on their transports and the clean room would be full of partially disassembled warheads.

  How do you dispose of plutonium warheads? This was the question that had bedeviled the foreign experts and the Russian military. Simply taking them apart wasn’t the answer — they could be assembled again by anyone with the know-how.

  Atomic weapons were the ultimate curse, Jake told himself once again. Their very existence warped space and time and human affairs like little black holes.

  There must be some solution, something that rendered the warheads incapable of harming anyone. But what?

  “Admiral. Admiral Grafton.”

  It was Senior Chief Holley.

  “Commander Tarkington called on the scrambled hand-held.” At least the marines had brought com equipment! “They’ve found some choppers. He said to tell you it’ll be a couple more hours before they’re fueled and checked out.”

  “Thanks, Senior Chief.”

  He tried again to turn off the muscles, to relax completely into sleep. So Toad found some choppers…

  He was drifting in a late afternoon sky filled with giant white clouds over a blue landscape, clouds with tops shot with fire and bases hidden in deepening shadow.

  He saw the clouds the other day from the window of the jet as they flew back to Moscow from the missile base, saw them from above, from the angle that God sees them. What does He think, watching the clouds drift across the landscape, watching the humans grapple in the mud, poisoning one another in the deep purple shadows?

  The question flitted across a tired mind, then was gone, leaving only the clouds and the blue land below and the dark shadows of the coming night.

  * * *

  They looked like garbagemen in the one-size-fits-all baggy NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits. American servicemen called these things hot suits because there was no provision to cool the wearer. Britain’s Jocko West helped the French and German officers into their suits, then donned his own. The Italian officer, Colonel Galvano, couldn’t be reached at his hotel or the Italian embassy.

  Although normally the suits merely provided filtered air, these were the latest models with a limited self-contained oxygen supply. When the oxygen was gone they would have to go on filtered air, and in an environment as hot as the one Tom Collins predicted, the filters were going to get quickly contaminated.

  Before they came out to the airport, a heliport on the southeastern side of the city, Jake had spent twenty minutes talking with General Hayden Land on the scrambled telephone. “Do what you think best,” Land said. What else could he have said?

  “Can you fly this…thing?” Jake asked Lieutenant Justin “Goober” Groelke, one of the pilots who came to Russia with Rita and the marines. Goober was already decked out in his hot suit.

  “I think so, sir. I got a couple thousand hours in big choppers.”

  “How much fuel do we have?”

  “Not enough. We’ll all ride in this one. Toad’s loaded the other machine with fuel in drums. All we could find was a hand pump. We’ll fly in formation as far southeast as we can, land the other machine in a clean area. Then we’ll refuel this chopper and fly on. When we come back from the hot zone we’ll fuel up again.”

  “Or abandon this machine.”

  “Yessir. If it’s too contaminated.”

  “What kind of condition are these machines in?”

  Here Groelke paused. “These are fairly new machines, Aeroflot Mi-8s, with very low times on the tachs. They’ve been sitting outside without engine covers for a couple months, apparently. We cleaned the dirt and bird shit out of the intakes as best we could, drained the sumps, checked all the systems we could, all the fluid levels, the hubs… The hydraulic fluid may have some water in it and the engine oil doesn’t look good on either machine. The batteries were dead. We used a power cart to start the engines and we hovered both machines. There’s no telling how much dirt was in the engines before we turned them up. I assumed that you were willing to run some risks…” His voice trailed off as Jake’s head bobbed once.

  Both men were professional aviators — they well knew the risks of flying in unknown machines that had been essentially abandoned. The weeds were now flattened by the rotor downwash where Goober hovered, but they had been up to the belly of the machines when the Americans found them. One of the tires of the helicopter carrying the fuel had been flat. A half hour was spent getting an air compressor from the hangar to start. A family of birds had nested in one cooling intake, but Goober didn’t think that worth mentioning.

  “How are you going to get these engines started out there”—Jake nodded toward the southeast—“if they run long enough to get us there?”

  “We loaded two power carts into the other chopper, sir. That cut the amount of extra fuel we could carry.”

  “I don’t want to walk back.”

  “I think we’ll be all right, sir.”

  Well, Goober was his pilot. He could go over the figures with him or take his word for it. “Okay,” Jake told him and turned to his little group. “Let’s get out of these suits after Captain Collins checks each one. Be careful with them. These are the only hot suits we have.”

  “How did you get permission to borrow these machines, Admiral?” Colonel Rheinhart asked as he worked his zipper down.

  “It’s a standard midnight requisition, Colonel,” Toad put in, but his smile never arrived. Jake Grafton saw that and wondered if Rita did. She was helping Captain Collins check the suits. “Common procedure in the American Navy,” Toad assured him.

  “Oh, you’re stealing them?”

  “We showed the guards at the gate a personal note from Boris Yeltsin.” The colonel looked at him askance, so Toad added, “An interpreter at the embassy wrote the note. We gave it to t
he sergeant of the guard as a souvenir, along with two cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon.” Actually Spiro Dalworth had done the talking and Toad had watched. Dalworth was trying hard to please Tarkington, who had little to say to him. Just now Dalworth stood watching this exchange. He wasn’t trying on a hot suit since he was going to remain with the fuel chopper.

  “What if the Russians shoot us down?” Jack Yocke whispered to Jake Grafton, who pretended not to hear him. The admiral walked over to Rita and had some final words with her.

  “If I may, gentlemen,” Colonel Reynaud offered, “I believe it is time to ‘mount up’? As zhey say in ze western movies, we are burning ze daylight.”

  Jake rode beside Goober Groelke in the copilot’s seat for the first leg. He was impressed by Groelke’s flying ability: he handled the large Russian helicopter like he had flown it for years. Jake examined the faces of the instruments that were telling him God-knows-what and watched the pilot at work for the first five minutes, then his mind wandered.

  More puffy clouds this afternoon. And they had a late start.

  They soon left the heavily industrialized suburbs of Moscow behind and followed a two-lane road for a while, then the road turned more to the east and the helicopters flew across wood lots and fields and here and there small villages. The land didn’t look prosperous, Jake decided. From a thousand feet the fields looked weedy and unattended, the occasional house just a shack, the villages collections of shacks. At random intervals the machines crossed above power lines and railroad tracks, incongruous fixtures that ran across the gently rolling countryside from one hazy infinity to the other.

  The helicopter flew from sunlight into the random cloud shadow, back to sunlight again while Jake Grafton thought about radioactivity and nuclear warheads.

  The noise was loud but not painfully so. Oh, to be able to fly on forever and never have to arrive. His eyelids grew heavy. To fly on and on and never have to arrive at the radioactive hell embedded in the haze and puffy clouds somewhere beyond the horizon, beyond the blighted promises and twisted dreams…