The Red Horseman (27 page)

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 CIAT”

“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.”

NVHAT-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-absolute 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 steel 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
cou Jake Id 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 V does He think, watching the
clouds drift across the land scape, 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 t city, Jake ha
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.”

“What kind of condition are these machines
in?”

“Yessir. If it’s too contaminated.”

Here Groelke paused. “These are fairly new
machines, Aeroflot Mi-8’s, 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 took 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 the sergeant of the guard as a
souvenir, along with two cartons of cigarettes and a
bottle of bourbon.”

I 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 TOM 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.