The Red Horseman (34 page)

Jack Yocke had another question, but he didn’t
ask it.

Did Jake Grafton tell you to corral
Tenney? Toad didn It do anything unless Jake
Grafton told him to, Yocke told himself, and
once told, Toad would do literally anything.

The asshole was like a Doberman, ready to rip the
throat out of the first man his master sicced him on.

Yocke sighed and went back to tapping. He was
listing what he knew about Nigel Keren, about the
Mossad bribing Russians to get Jews out of the
country and assassinating Russian politicians,
about the KGB blowing up the Serdobsk reactor,
about a hangarftjl of nuclear-armed mobile
missiles and warheads that were going south into Iraq a
planeload at a time. He was sitting on at least
four huge stories, any one of which would win him a
Pulitzer prize, and all he could do was tap on this
frigging keyboard and pray that someday soon he could
telephone something to the Post. If he still had a
job!

He felt a little like the prospector who has
spent his whole life looking for traces of
color when he finally stumbles onto the mother lode.
And doesn’t know where the vein leads..

All he really had were pieces of stories.
Jack Yocke had spent five years chasing
stories and he knew that he didn’t have all ofany
one of them. Oh, he had some great pieces, but he
didn’t know where the roots led.

Jake Grafton knew. Of that he was convinced
Damn, he was getting as goofy as Tarkington.
Toad sat there playing with his pistol and if you
asked, he would tell you that Jake Grafton knows
everything. What’s your problem? Grafton will tell
you what he wants you to know when he wants you to know
it. If that time ever comes.

And if it doesn’t, then you shouldn’t know Jack
Yocke didn’t think Jake Grafton knew
all the answers. He thought Jake was feeling his
way along, examining the trees, trying to size up
the forest. Jack Yocke didn’t have Toad’s
faith.

The truth, he decided, was probably somewhere in
the middle.

He jabbed the button to save what he had
written and then turned off the computer. He closed
the screen over the keyboard and pulled the
plug out.

“You done?” Toad asked.

“What’s it look like?” Yocke snarled. He was
extremely frustrated, and Toad marching in a big
CIA weenie at gunpoint hadn’t helped.

“Would you like to help me?”

“Do what?” Jack asked suspiciously.

“Well, you gotta sit here with this pistol and
watch our boy Herb. I have an errand. If Herb
twitches, blow his fucking head off. If anybody
comes through that door besides me, blow their fucking head
off.

Think you can handle it?”

“No.

“You ought to be the pro-choice poster child, Jack.
if your mother only knew how you were going to turn out she
would have grabbed a rusty old coat hanger and done it
herself.

“Any time you get the itch, Tarkington, you can
kiss my rosy red ass. I am not about to get
mixed up in the middle V of a war or shoot
anybody.

And no more goddamn cracks about-was

Toad tossed the gun at him. Yocke snagged
it to prevent it from hitting him in the face.

Toad stood up. He looked over the items from
Herb’s pockets that were spread on the low coffee
table and selected a ring of keys, then faced
Yocke. “Anyone besides me comes through that door,
they’ll kill you if you don’t kill them first. And you
can bet your puny little dick that Herb would cheerfully
do the job if he had his hands free.

Think about it.”

With that Toad went to the door and carefully opened
it” He looked out.

Now he checked to ensure the door would lock behind
him, passed through and pulled it closed.

Jack Yocke looked at Herb Tenney to see
if he had any big ideas.

Apparently not. He then examined the pistol in his
hand. This thingy on the left side looked like the
safety.

Is it on? Yocke kept his finger well away
from the trigger, just in case.

He had had a journalism professor who
once told the class that the problem with the profession
was the company a reporter had to keep to get his
stories, Truer words were never spoken, Jack
told himself ruefully.

“If I get out of this alive,” he
informed Herb Tenney, “I’m going to get a job
washing beer mugs in a bikers’ saloon.
Associate with a better class of people. Keep
better hours. Make more money. Get laid more.”

Out in the hallway Toad slowed to talk to the
marine sergeant sitting at the head of the stairs with an
M-16 across his knees. He also wore a pistol
in a holster on a web belt around his middle.
“Everything okay?”

“Yessir. Not a soul’s been around.”

Toad glanced down the ha at the marine on the
other end, who was looking his way.

Satisfied, Toad said, “He’s in there with
Jack Yocke. If he comes out shoot him in the
legs. Whatever you do, don’t kill him.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

When he was inside Herb’s room, Toad
scanned it, then went straight to the bathroom and
Herb’s shaving kit above the sink. Yep, the shit still
had that plastic pill bottle with the child-proof cap.
Toad glanced at them to ensure they were what he
wanted, then pocketed them. He considered taking
Herb his toothbrush. Naw. His fucking teeth could
just rot.

Out in the bedroom Toad got Herb’s
suitcase and opened it. Well, ol’ Herb was a
neat packer. His mother would be proud.

Toad dumped everything into a pile in the middle
of the bed and examined the lining of the suitcase. He and
Jake Grafton had been through Herb’s stuff
once before, but it wouldn’t hurt to do it again.
Carefully and thoroughly.

ca Underwear, socks, shirts, trousers, a
sweater. A spare n of shaving cream. Toad
squirted some onto the carpet.

Yep, shaving cream.

The closet held several suits, ties, white
shirts and a spare pair of shoes. Toad examined
the shoes. He got out his penknife and pried off the
heels. Nothing. He felt the suits carefully and
threw them on the floor. Except for a spare pen
and a pack of matches that Herb had overlooked, the
pockets were empty.

Now he turned his attention to the room,
systematically taking everything apart. As he worked he
thought about Rita.

Pregnant. Refusing to stop flying.

If he were her, he would … But he wasn’t
Rita. Rita was Rita an that was why he married
her.

You just have to take women as they come. It’s hard to do
at times, considering. Amazing that hormone chemistry
could make such a big difference in the way men and
women’s brains worked. It was like they were a different
species, or creatures from another planet.

He threw himself into the chair and sat staring
morosely at the mess in front of him. There was
nothing here to be found, of that he was sure.

So he thought some more about Rita in the cockpit of
that jet, flying through a strange sky over a
radioactive landscape, nursing the stick and
throttles and dropping bombs and fighting the Gs.

There were so many things that could go wrong. And a
Russian jet for chrissake, designed, built
and maintained by a bunch of vodka-swilling sots.

She can handle it, he told himself, wanting
to believe.

She’ll get back all right. She’s with Jake
Grafton. I mean, she’s good and he’s great.
They’re a good team. They’ll make it.

Fuck, they’d better! He wasn’t up to losing
Rita just now. She had damn near died in a crash
a few years backjust the memory of those days
made him nauseated.

And he didn’t want to lose Jake
Grafton either. Grafton told him to snag Herb
Tenney, and if Grafton didn’t come back,
Toad was going to have to figure out what to do next.

Not that he had a lot of options. One thing sure,
thoughHerb was going to be finishing off his supply of
happy pills if Jake Grafton didn’t
make it.

When he opened the door to the apartment, the first thing
he saw was Jack Yocke’s pasty face, then the
Browning Hi-Power which he held with both hands. It
was pointed askew at nothing at all.

Toad locked the door behind him and took a look
at Herb, who was pretending to sleep.

Yocke held the pistol out to Toad butt-first.
Toad took it and stuffed it into his waistband.
“Thanks,” he said. “I kept waiting to hear the
shots.”

Yocke didn’t think that comment worth a reply.

“Would you have used this?” Toad wanted to know.

“I don’t know.”

After they had sat Herb Tenney on the ceramic
convenience in the bathroom, then fixed a can of chili for
lunch, Yocke asked, “How can you just walk around
sticking pistols in people’s faces?”

Toad looked mildly surprised.
“I’m in the military. Jake Grafton gives
orders, I obey them.”

“This isn’t a movie, you know. That’s a real
gun with real bullets.”

Toad helped himself to another spoonful of chili.
When it was on its way south he said, “You keep
looking for moral absolutes, Jack. There aren’t
any. Not in this life.

All we can do is the best we can.”

“But how do you know you’re doing the right thing?”

“I don’t. But Jake Grafton does.
It’s uncanny. He’ll do the right thing regardless
of the consequences, regardless of how the chips fall.

I’ll take that. I do what I’m told knowing that
the CAG is trying to do right.” Even as he said it his
mind jumped to Rita. He had bowed to Rita’s
decision to fly while pregnant based on faith in
her judgment.

Now the chili made a lump in his stomach. He
dropped the spoon into the bowl and shoved it away.
“You gotta believe in people or you’re in a hell of a
fix,” he said slowly.

“You answer a question, Toad, by evading it. What
is right? Why do you think Grafton knows what right
is?”

Toad was no longer paying attention. He was staring
at his watch, watching the second hand sweep. They
should be on the ground by now …

if they were still alive. Why hadn’t they called?
Did he really trust her judgment, or was he a
coward not to assert hmf9 If anything happened to her
…

Jake Grafton saw the smoke column
twenty miles away.

The black smoke towered like a giant chimney
at least three thousand feet into the atmosphere. As
he got closer he could see that the wind had tilted
the column, which was Visibly growing taller,
mushrooming into the upper atmosphere.

Creeping up to two hundred feet to avoid the
dust being sucked into the inferno raging at the base of the
smoke, he bounced in turbulence even here on the
up-wind side of the fire. The turbulence made his
bowels feel watery: that damaged wing might have a
broken spar. As the plane bucked the stick felt
sloppy and the secondary hydraulic system
pressure dropped. He must be oh so careful.

The hangar was ablaze. Rita.

Ten or fifteen minutes ago?

Something silver on the mat? A wing?

It couldn’t be a wing from Rita’s plane, could it?
Could it?

He edged in for a closer look. No. It was a
big wing, attached to a transport that was also on
fire. She caught someone parked on the mat and shot
them apart.

He turned away from the blaze and consulted his
fuel gauge. Fuel would have been okay plus a
bunch if he hadn’t spent all that time maneuvering
at full throttle and let that jerk shoot up his
plane. Going to be tight.

Right engine was still alive and pulling hard-no more
warning lights.

The slop in the controls when operating on the
backup hydraulic system was acceptable as long as
he didn’t have to defend himself, as long as the
secondary pump held together, as long as he could
make his aching right leg work. The plane flew okay
on one engine if he held in forty pounds or so of
right rudder. The rudder trim wasn’t working. Sorry
about that!

He had about forty miles of radioactive
terrain to cross before he could get out and walk. It was
a little like flying over a shark-infested ocean-you prayed
for the engine to keep running, counted every mile,
watched the minute hand of the panel clock with intense
interest.

Jake Grafton’s eyes scanned the vast
distances between the horizon and the bottom of the
cumulonimbus clouds.

He gazed up into the gaps between the clouds, searched
behind him and out to both sides. The sky appeared to be
empty. Because he knew how difficult another
aircraft was to spot in a huge, indefinite sky,
he kept looking. And occasionally his eyes came
inside to check the clock.

So she made it to here and took out the hangar and that
transport on the mat. He hadn’t seen any
craters on the mat that would mark misses.

Apparently she put all her ordnance into the
bucket, a neat, professional job.

Thank you, Rita, wherever you are.

He listened to the engine. He watched the clock
hand sweep. He unhooked his oxygen mask and
swabbed the sweat from his eyes.

Forty miles of terrain required about ten
minutes of flying to cross.

When the ten minutes had passed Jake began
to relax. His right leg was hurting since he had
to maintain constant pressure on the rudder,
but he felt better. It was goofy when you thought about
it–Captain Collins said about forty miles, and of
course the fallout zone had no definite boundary.
The intensity of the radiation would just decrease as the
miles went by. Knowing all this and feeling slightly
silly, Jake still felt better with each passing
mile.

If this shot-up jet would just hold together .

When the city of Lipetsk appeared in the haze
at ten or twelve miles, Jake Grafton
eased the nose of his Su-25 into a climb. He
went across the city at several thousand feet and made
a gentle turn to line up for the northwest runway
about eight miles away.

Nothing happened when he lowered the gear handle.
He round the little emergency switch and held it in the
down position. The gear broke free of the wells and
fell into 1he slipstream-he could feel the drag
increase.

His numb right leg refused to put the right amount of
pressure on the rudder. The nose wandered a little from
side to side. Carefully playing his single engine,
Jake Grafton tried to keep the speed up and
fly a flat approach.

Only when he was sure he could make the
field did he use the electrical switch
to drop ten degrees of flaps.

He cut the engine immediately after he felt the
tires squeak. Without brakes this thing would roll
forever; he had no idea how to engage the emergency
system. He had tried turning the parking brake
handle ninety degrees and it didn’t want
to rotate.

When the jet was down to about twenty MPH it began
to drift toward the edge of the runway. There was nothing
he could do. It rolled off the edge and came to rest in
the grass.

For the first time in over an hour, Jake Grafton
relaxed his right leg.

It was numb, shaking.

Jake used the battery to open the canopy. As the
huge silence enveloped him he took off his mask
and helmet and wiped the sweat from his hair.

He was drained.

Somehow he managed the energy to get his gloves
off and begin unstrapping. When he got the fittings
released he sat there massaging his right thigh.

“Admiral! Admiral Grafton!” It was
Rita, running across the grass toward him.

“Hey, kid. Am I glad to see
you!”

She slowed to a walk, just fifty feet or so
away. She glanced at the shattered wing pylon, then
looked up at Jake.

“I got the hangar, sir.”

“I know,” Jake said, and wiped his eyes with his
fingers.

“I know.”

THE HEL1COPTER’S TWO RADIOS
WERE MOUNTED ON A shelf on the bulkhead between
the cockpit and passenger compartment. The leads had a
collar that allowed them to be unscrewed when the radio
needed to be removed for servicing. Jake Grafton
used his fingers to twist the collars and pull out the
plugs. Then he told Spiro Dalworth to tell
the pilot to land at the Lipetsk railroad station.

Not a single Russian had come out to look the
Su-25’s over when Jake landed at the army
airfield fifteen minutes ago. He climbed
down from the cockpit and followed Rita toward the
helicopter.

“What happened at Petrovsk?” Jake
asked.

“There was a four-engine jet transport on the
mat, sir, and they were loading a missile
aboard. I looked on the first pass and shot on the
second. On the third the transport caught
fire. I then bombed the hangar and it caught
fire. I fired out the gun on the clean room.”

He wondered what thoughts went through Rita
Moravia’s mind when she saw live humans and
knew they couldn’t be allowed to get on that plane and
leave. What had she thought when she lined up the cargo
plane in her sight and pulled the trigger? All
things considered, it was probably better not to ask.
“Did you see any markings on the plane?”

“Arabic script, sir. They must have wanted those
missiles pretty badly to risk a trip in
daylight.”

“Lot of cloud cover. They might have pulled it
off.”

“Saddam sent his people on a suicide mission.
One man I saw on the ground wasn’t wearing a
hot suit.”

The wars of the kings were much more civilized, Jake
reflected. No wonder Churchill preferred the
nineteenth century over this one.

The Russian chopper pilot was already in the
cockpit and started the engines as they climbed
aboard. Within a minute he lifted the
machine from the parking mat.

Staring now at the disconnected radio leads,
Jake concluded he needed a knife. He didn’t
have one. He wedged the lead between the hammer and frame
of his revolver and used that to strip off the collar.
Now the lead could not be reconnected. He did the
same with the lead to the second radio.

Someone wanted him dead. Perhaps those dead fighter
pilots had orders to concentrate on the lead plane
or were so ill with buck fever that they lost track of
Rita at a cruci moment. Whichever, both he and
Rita were fortunate to al be alive. Still, with only
a telephone call more fighters could be launched
to shoot down this unarmed helicopter and convert their
earlier escape into an alarmingly brief
reprieve.

A prudent man would find another form of
transportation. Jake Grafton was a prudent
man.

Very prudent. After the chopper settled into the
street in front of the railway station, he asked
Dalworth, “What’s the pilot’s name?”

“Lieutenant Vasily Lutkin, sir.”

“Tell him to fly on to Moscow after we get
off.”

He watched the helo pilot lift the
collective and feed in forward cyclic. The pilot
glanced once at him, then concentrated his attention
on flying his machine.

Jake watched the helicopter until it crossed
the rooftops heading just a little west of north.

Vasily Lutkin might make it. Maybe.
If his luck was in.

Those four fighter pilots were trying to kill you,
Jake, but not this guy.

Okay, so now you know how Josef Stalin did
it. Just give the order and watch them go to their doom.

With sagging shoulders he followed Dalworth and
Rita into the cavernous station.

And how much luck do you have left in your miserable
little hoard, Jake Grafton? Not much, friend. Not
much.

Guilt and luck don’t mix.

There was a vending booth inside the terminal
building selling Pepsi in tiny paper cups, about
an ounce of the soft drink for a ruble. Jake laid a
ten-ruble note on the counter and while Dalworth
went to buy tickets, he and Rita each drank
five cupfuls of the sticky sweet liquid.

Then Jake wandered off for the men’s room,
burping uncontrollably.

The train was full to bursting. There were no empty
seats in the car they found themselves in so the three
Americans wedged themselves into a little space on the
floor. Men, women, and children with everything they owned
filled the car. One man had a goat. Several
women had baskets that contained live chickens. A
man lay in the floor between the aisles vomiting
repeatedly while a woman periodically gave him
something to drink from a bottle.

“Radiation sickness, I think,” Dalworth
whispered.

Jake just nodded. After a half hour Rita went
over to help, dragging Dalworth along
to translate.

The air was thick with a miasma of odors.
Smoke from Papirosi cigarettes made a heavy
haze.

The train stopped about once an hour for ten
minutes or so. Each time Jake stayed seated in his
corner with his hand under his jacket on his gun butt
watching the people fighting their way aboard. The scrambler
was wedged under his legs.

No one got off the train. Moscow was the
universal destination. Some of the people who
clamored aboard were soldiers in uniform, but they were
wrestling bags of personal articles. No one in
uniform or out paid any attention to the Americans.
Finally the train got under way again and all the
struggling humanity somehow found a place to ride.

These Russians had endured so much, yet there was
so much still to endure. When he had replayed the
morning’s flight for the twentieth time and the adrenaline
had finally burned itself from his system, Jake sat
looking at his fellow passengers, trying to fathom
their stories and their lives as snatches of
Russian swirled on the laden air. Finally his
head sagged onto his knees and he slept.

Every minute passed slower and slower for Toad
Tarkington. He paced, he stood at the window from
time to time and stared out, occasionally he turned on the
television and stood gazing at the images on the
screen for minutes at a time without seeing them, then
snapped it off. He paced some more.

When he could stand it no longer he picked up the
phone and dialed.

“Captain, this is Toad. Heard anything?”

Then he hung up and went back to pacing, and
fidgeting, and gazing gloomily at Herb Tenney
and Jack Yocke.

“What did Collins say?” Yocke asked.

“Nothing.”

“What are you going to do if Grafton and Rita
don’t come back?”

Toad didn’t answer. He didn’t want
even to acknowledge the possibility out loud, let
alone discuss it with Jack Yocke. Jake
Grafton and Rita Moravia were the two most
important people in his life. He felt as if he were
teetering on the edge of a dark abyss. Every minute that
passed made the gaping horror more probable, and more
unspeakable.

After a while Yocke said, “Surely we ought
to discuss it.”

“They’ll be back.” End of conversation.

They were on the ground somewhere. Tactical jets
carry a limited supply of fuel, and when it’s
exhausted … no one ever ran out of gas and
floated around up there unable to get down. So where were
they? In the fallout zone? Shot down? Why hadn’t
they called? Any way you figured it, something had
gone seriously wrong. And our boy Herb
probably had something to do with that something.

Toad found himself glowering at the CIA agent
asleep on the couch.

Sleeping! He forced himself to look away.

By six o’clock in the evening Toad had reached the
breaking point. For lack of something better to do, he
decided to go find Collins. “I’m going out,” he
announced to Jack Yocke, who looked up from the
paperback novel he was reading. “Keep an eye
on Herb.” Toad hoisted himself erect and walked
toward the door.

“Aren’t you going to give me your pistol?”
Yocke asked.

“Nah. There’s marines outside.”

“Outside?”

“In the hallway. You have any trouble, just shout and
they’ll come running.”

The reporter was speechless.

Toad pulled the Browning from his waistband. “This
thing wouldn’t do you any good anyway.” He thumbed
off the safety and pulled the trigger.

Click. “It’s empty.”

Yocke found his voice. “Empty!”

One of Jack Yocke’s endearing qualities–
and he had precious few, in Toad’s
opinion-was that sometimes he was extraordinarily
slow on the uptake. Maybe it was an act.

Whatever, Toad Tarkington savored the
moment. “You don’t think I’m stupid enough to give a
loaded gun to a trigger-happy thrill-killer like
you, do ya? If you didn’t shoot off your own toe,
you’d probably go berserk and murder everybody
north of the Moskva.”

“You dirty, rotten, slimy, retarded
stumblebum, you-was

That was the high point in a long, dreary day of
merciless tension and uncertainty. Toad stepped through
the door and pulled it shut behind him before Jack
Yocke got really wound up. He mumbled a
greeting to the marine sitting at the top of the stairs as
he went by.

It was after 7 P.m. when a pate, exhausted
Rita Moravia sagged onto the floor beside
Jake. Her flight suit reeked of vomit.

“How is that sick man?” Jake asked.

“Dead. Radiation poisoning, dehydration I
think–comoh, I don’t know. His heart stopped and
we just gave up.”

She brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes and
hugged her knees.

Several platitudes occurred to Jake, but he
held his tongue.

“How did you evade those fighters this
morning?” Rita asked. “This morning! God, it
seems like another lifetime ago-,, “One guy
stalled and went in, I shot down the others.”

“You were lucky.”

“That’s all life is: luck-some good, some bad,
most indifferent. Some of it you make yourself, most of it
you just have to take as it comes.”

“What’s going on here, Admiral? Why did the
Russians blow up their own reactor?”

“To hide the fact that nuclear weapons were gone.”

“You aren’t serious?”

“Oh, but I am. Somebody-let’s postulate
a small group of somebodys–comcollected a lot
of money from Saddam Hussein for some nuclear
weapons. Saddam took delivery at Petrovsk
the evening before the reactor blew up. Everyone there
who wasn’t in on the sale was killed. Then the
reactor exploded and the usual prevailing wind
delivered a lethal concentration of fallout on
Petrovsk. Eventually someone would visit
Petrovsk, but the way things work in Russia, that
visit was a long way off. Maybe years. When it
eventually came to pass, our small group of
somebodys were sure they could control the dissemination of the
news of what happened at Petrovsk because
long before then Boris Yeltsin would be driven from
power. And they would be in.”