The Red Horseman (10 page)

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.” I

“It’ll be just a few minutes, sir.”

The driver, a sergeant, motored slowly on
ajourney 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.

HERB TENNEY ARRIVED AT THE
BREAKFAST TABLE AS the orange juice and
coffee were served.

“Morning, Admiral. Commander.” He nodded at
eac of them in turn and gave his order to the waiter.

“Your first time in Moscow?” Tenney asked as
Jake Grafton turned his attention back to his
coffee cup.

was Uh-huh.”

Tenney launched into a discourse on the city that
sounded suspiciously like the text from a guidebook.
He looked rested and fresh after a good night’s
sleep, which wasn’t the way Jake felt. He had
gotten only one more hour of sleep after the excursion
last night. This morning he felt tired, listless.

Tenney poured himself a cup of coffee without
missing a beat in his monologue. He added a
dollop of cream to the mixture and half a
spoonful of sugar, then agitated the liquid with a
spoon. He paused in his discourse and took a
sip.

“Ahh, nothing like coffee in the morning.
Anyway, Peter the Great built .. 1, Jake
stared at the black liquid in the cup in front of
him.

E 78 a He had already had a sip and the
slightly acid taste lingered still in his mouth. Would there
be a taste to binary poison?

What had that report said?

Tenney took another sip of his coffee, then
added another smidgen of sugar and languidly
stirred with his spoon while he rambled on about the
city of the czars.

When the waiter slid a plate of bacon and eggs
in front of him, Jake Grafton could only stare
at it.

“Something wrong, Admiral?”

Tenney was looking at him solicitously.

Jake Grafton gritted his teeth. Then his
face relaxed into a smile.

“Jet lag.”

“Takes a while to get over,” Tenney said.
“The main thing is to sleep when you’re sleepy and not
try to fool Mother Nature.”

Jake Grafton slid his chair back. “I
wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, then glanced at
Toad. “Come up to my room when you’re
finished here.”

“Yes, sir.”

General Nicolai Yakolev, the Russian
Army chief of staff, was a short, ugly man with
bushy eyebrows, a huge veined nose, a lantern
jaw, and ears that stuck out like jug handles. The
wonder was that he could see anything at all with the
eyebrows and clifflike nose obstructing his vision.

Still, once you ignored nature’s decorations you
caught a glimpse of lively blue eyes.

Yakolev squeezed Jake’s right hand with a vise
grip, then shook hands with Herb Tenney as Jake
flexed his right hand several times to restore the
circulation and watched that impressive, ugly
face.

“Bad news, she rides a fast horse,” the
Russian said in easily understandable English.

“So I’ve heard,” Jake Grafton replied
and looked curiously around the room, a vast cavern
with ceilings at least eighteen feet high.
Mirrors, chandeliers, a massive wooden desk
atop a colorful Persian carpet, walls
covered with books and several oil
paintings-apparently Communists were as fond of perks
as Democrats and Republicans. They
were on the second floor of the Kremlin Arsenal, a
two story yellow building inside the walls.

“Nice room,” he commented.

The general smiled.

“So, Admiral, what did the American
government really send you here to do?”

“Watch you take tactical nuclear warheads
apart, General.

“Sounds very boring.”

“I’m also supposed to count them.”

“Ah, one … two three … four Yakolev
laughed. “And you, Mr. Tenney?”

“I’m with the State Department, sir. Here
to assist the admiral.

Yakolev nodded and shifted his eyes to Jake.
“Is that true?” he asked.

Jake mulled it for about two seconds, then said,
“He’s here to keep an eye on me all right, but
he’s CIA.”

“Ahhh, a political officer, a commissar.
I’ve known a few of them in my time. But as you
gentlemen know, our zampolits are at the moment
unemployed. The world changes. So, please, Mr.
Tenney, since I am at the disadvantage, I
ask you to let the admiral and me converse
alone.

Then no harm will be done if we inadvertently
make any little political mistakes.”

Tenney glanced at Grafton, then rose and
left the room.

Jake got a glimpse of twinkling eyes behind
Yakolev’s bushy brows, then the general turned his
attention to a file that lay before him.

“Your dossier,” he said, indicating the file.
“The GRU is very thorough, one of their few
virtues.”

He flipped from page to page. “Let us see.
You had combat experience in Vietnam, the usual
tours aboard numerous aircraft carriers, command of
two air wings …

Ah, here is a summary of a regrettable
incident in the Mediterranean that we thought would
surely end your careerand that involved nuclear
weapons, I believe.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

The general laughed, a hearty roar. “Very
funny, Admiral. You make a little joke, and I
like that. We Russians laugh to make the pain
endurable. But I tell you frankly, if you
expect to work with me, you and I must learn
to tell each other the unpleasant truths.” He
wagged a finger at Jake. “Regardless of what our
politicians say or the lies they tell, you and
I must treat each other as professionals.

We must work together as colleagues. No lies.
All truth.

Only truth. You comprehend?”

Jake studied the Soviet general in front of
him. He held out his hand.

“May I see the dossier?”

“It is in Russian.”

Jake nodded.

The general closed the file and passed it across the
desk.

Jake opened it on his lap. It was thick,
contained maybe thirty pages of material. Most
of the pages were indeed in Russian, some
typewritten, others in script. There was a front
page of the New York Times with his photo and
another photo taken on a street somewhere several
years ago.

He had been in civilian clothes then. Also in
the files were several photocopies of newspaper and
magazine articles about the A-12 Avenger stealth
attack plane for which he had been the
project manager, before full-scale production was
canceled. One of the articles was from Aviation Week and
Space Technology: a magazine commonly
referred to as Aviation Leak by the American
military. The file also contained a photo of
Toad Tarkington. Jake closed the file and
passed it back.

“I don’t read Russian.”

“I know. That fact is in the dossier.”

“You speak excellent English.”

“I spent several years in Washington and two in
London.

But that was years ago, when I was just a colonel.”

“This is my third trip to the Soviet
Union-Russia.” This of course was a lie. It
was Jake’s first trip.

The general merely nodded and lit a cigarette.
The heavy smoke wafted gently across the desk and
Jake got a dose.

It stank.

Jake looked around the room again. Hard
to believe, after all those years of reading intelligence
reports about the Soviet military, all those
years of planning to fight them, here he was in the inner
sanctum talking to a Soviet-now
Russian-four-star. And the subject was nuclear
weapons.

The whole thing had an air of unreality. He
felt like an actor in a bad play devoid of
logic. Life without reason that’s the definition of
insanity, isn’t it?

Jake Grafton scanned the room yet again,
rubbed his hands over the solid arms of his chair,
reached out to touch the polished wood of the desk.

But are these guys on the level? Do they really
intend to destroy their tactical nukes? Or is this
whole thing some kind of weird chess game with
nuclear pieces, something out of one of those wretched
thrillers about crazed Communists out to checkmate
all their opponents and take over the planet?

“Do you play chess?” Jake Grafton asked
the general behind the desk, who was watching him through the
drifting smoke.

, I Yes,” Yakolev said, “but not very well.”
His lips twisted. This was his grin. After the lie
came the grin. Very American, like a used-car
salesman.

Jake Grafton grinned back. “I looked
at your dossier in the Pentagon a week or so
ago. It says you like to fuck little boys.”

The lips twisted again. “I like you, Grafton.
Da!”

Jake cleared his throat. “We know your
politicians are–he was going to say “less than
accurate” but thought better of it–lying about the
degree of control they have the army has-over these
weapons. I am here to evaluate the extent of your
problems and make a report to my superiors . And
to offer suggestions if you are receptive.”

Jake Grafton paused as he eyed the
Russian general.

“My superiors want the Yeltsin government
to succeed in the revolution that Gorbachev began.
They do not want the Communists to regain power, nor
do they want to see the Soviet Union
balkanized unless there is no other way.

Baldly, they want to see a stable government in
this country that has the support of the populace, a
government that indeed is trying to improve the lot of
its citizens.”

“They are humanitarians,” General Yakoiev
said lightly.

“Don’t ever think that,” Jake Grafton shot
back. “They are damn worried men. Their primary
concern is nuclear weapons. They do not
want to see nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons technology exported. They desperately
–qi Now want you to establish a viable
democracy here, but first and foremost–the most
important factor-your government must keep
absolute control of all the nuclear weapons that
exist on your soil.”

“Yeltsin is not in control of anything right now.
He is at the center but the storm revolves around
him. How I say it?-he is like one of your cowboys
on a crazy bronco horse. He is still on the
saddle but the horse goes his own way. Understand?”

“I will give you the frank, blunt truth,
General. I will not repeat the platitudes of the
politicians. The Americans will deal with whoever
has these weapons, be it a Communist dictator,
fascist demagogue, religious fanatic, or a
criminal gang leader. Whoever. And I suspect
the same is true of the British, the Germans, the
French-all the Western democracies. But their
liaison officers can tell you that themselves.”

Yakolev came around the desk and pulled a
chair closer to Grafton. He sat. “You and I
can work together. We are both military men, both
patriots. I serve Mother Russia.

You understand?”

Jake nodded.

“I am not blind. Russia must join the world. This
planet is too small to sustain an isolated
society of three hundred million people. We have
tried dictatorship and it failed; now we must try
democracy. But I lay out the truth for your
inspection: no matter who rules the Kremlin, I
serve Russia.”

Russia the grand abstraction, Jake thought
ruefully. Well, every nation is an abstraction if
you stop to think about it.

He irritably dismissed the thought and asked,
“And the army? Whom does the army serve?” When the
Russian was slow to answer, Jake sharpened the question:
“Will the army obey your orders?”

General Nicolai Yakolev spit out the word,
“Yes.”

That, Jake Grafton suspected, was the biggest
and baldest lie so far.

And mouthed like a pro. And yet . “These weapons
distort everything,” he said.

“I know.”

“While they exist, you serve only them,” Jake
said.

“Control all the nuclear weapons that exist, you
said. I noted your choice of words, Admiral.”

“They must be destroyed,” Jake Grafton said,
“before they destroy you.

You asked for truth — There it is.”

The Russian leaned toward Jake. “You are a
soldier, not a politician. I like that. I think
we can do business. Come.”

He led Jake to a table under a huge oil
painting that should have been in a museum. There was a
large map on the table. The Russian general
pointed and explained where the weapons were and what might
be done with the plutonium after the warheads were
disassembled. Through the tall windows Jake could see
the soft summer sun sifting down, gently bathing
everything in a surreal light.

An hour later the men were back at the general’s
desk drinking strong, black tea in tall
glasses with metal holders.

At the general’s suggestion Jake had stirred in
juice from a slice of lemon and a spoonful of
something that looked like blackberry jam.

“Perhaps You could tell me a little about yourself, oss
General,” Jake Grafton said, jerking his thumb
at the d ier.

The Russian laughed. “All the time, effort, and
expense that goes in!compiling dossiers, and you know
what yours tells me? That You are a professional
officer. Nothing else.

And that I knew before I opened it.

“But it is me you want to know about, even after reading
my dossier in the Pentagon. Dossiers are the
same the world over. I am old, seventy years.
I fought in the Great War. I was young enough to enjoy
killing Nazis. In Berlin I saw Hitler’s
bunker, helped search it. I saw the patio where
they burned his body, his and Eva Braun’s. I
walked through the rubble. All Europe was nibble then,
my friend, I tell you that.”

So Yakolev had once been a shooter, a
warrior. Maybe down deep under the wrinkles and
gray hair he still was.

Most of the top men in the world’s military
organizations weren’t: they were bureaucrats and
cocktail party politicians.

The general shook his head. “I was very young then.

And that is the only fact about me that would be of
interest.

The rest is obvious. I survived. I
survived!”

Ahh, Jake mused, at what cost? How many
men have you sold out, General, how many lies have you
told, how much of your honor can possibly be left
after you clawed and scratched and gouged your way to the
top of this squirming snake pile of criminal
psychopaths? The scars must be there .

unless you have become one of them, a man-without
conscience, a man to whom the end justifies whatever it
takes to get there. If so …

The general rumbled on. “But no stories. Old
men tell too many stories, stories of a dead past
that are of little interest to the young, who think their own
problems unique.”

“And I am too young,” Jake Grafton said.

General Yakolev’s eyes searched his face.
“Perhaps.

Your youth . . .” He shook his head. “You
Americans turn out your officers to fatten in the
pasture so very early, just when they grow old enough to have a
bit of wisdom, just when they are old enough to understand all
the things that they are not, all the things that they can never
be, will never be. Just when they are old enough.”

Jake sipped his tea. It wasn’t like
American tea, weak and insipid. He liked it.

“What do you know of Russia?”

Jake drank the last of the tea and set the cup in
its saucer. “The usual, which is not much … the bare
essentials, twenty years of reading intelligence
briefs, a few books.”

“Toistoy?”

“A little. Chekov I liked. Andreyev’s The
Seven Who were Hanged was too Russian,”
Oops! He should not have said that! “Solzhenitsyn .
.

was What could he say about Solzhenitsyn’s
descriptions of hell on earth?

They had horrifled Jake Grafton, painted
communism as one of the foulest evils ever perpetrated
by man upon man. “I have read him,” he finished
lamely.

“Hmmm,” said Yakolev, his face a mask.
“Dinner tomorrow night, yes? The military observers
from Britain, Germany, France and Italy will also be
here. You know them, yes?”

“No, sir. I’ve never met them.”

“I will send my car for You at the embassy. About
eight.

“May I bring my aide, sir?”

“If you like. We will take the time to learn to know
each other better.

I will be interested to learn where you draw the line between
Russian and too Russian. Jake was led back
through the long cold hallways with their dim lights and
dark oil paintings that could barely be seen. Herb
Tenney was standing near the door, waiting.

Outside the summer sun of the Kremlin grounds
made Jake squint. The contrast between inside and
outside hit him hard. He held his hat on his
head as he climbed into the car.

Culture shock, Jack Yocke decided.
He felt depressed, alone, listless.

He could count on one hand the number of people he had
met who spoke English. The constant fumbring with the
paperback Russian-English dictionary
frustrated him. The heavy, fatty mystery meat and
greasy comvegetables were clogging his bowels.
Culture shock, he told himself, hoping that sooner
or later he would adjust.

How good it would be to be back in the Post
newsroom, talking on the phone to someone who spoke
American, understanding the nuances of what wasn’t said
as readily as he captured the intent of what was.
Oh, for a bacon and egg breakfast, with eggs from a
lovely American chicken and crisp fried bacon
from a handsome American pig! To 90 across
the street to the Madison coffee shop for a hot
pastrami on rye! And an American beer, a
tall cold American beer in a frosty glass with
foam spilling over the top.

He was gloomily contemplating the difference between
American beer and the Russian horse piss
product when the motorcade came around the corner
into view. Three vehicles. Black. Limos.

He was stuck off to one side of the platform where the
speakers were going to address the rally. Perhaps a thousand
people, mostly men and babushkas, milled around the
square and luxuriated in the sun, rolling up
sleeves to brown their white arms, drinking juice from
glass bottles.

The few children were messily eating ice cream bars
sold by a sidewalk vendor, who was doing a land
office business today. Apparently the vendors, for the
city sidewalks seemed crammed with them, were something
new, fledgling capitalists trying the new way right
here beside a Communist rally. The irony of it made
Yocke smile.

The paper’s Russian stringer translator was
sucking on a foul cigarette and chatting in
Russian with his counterpart from the New York Times.

The Times reporter was on the other side
of these two and busy scribbling notes, no doubt
literate political insights that would form the heart
of an incisive think piece. Damn the Times!

Jack Yocke took off his sports coat and
hung it over one arm. He wiped the perspiration from
his forehead. And damn these Commies! Why can’t they
hire a hall like politicians in more civilized
climes?

The senior Post correspondent was over at the
Kremlin today buttonholing Yeltsin
lieutenants, so Yocke was stuck covering this rally
of nationalistic Commie retrogrades, people who thought
that the Stalin era was Russia’s finest hour.

Yes, there were still live human beings on this
planet who believed that, and here were some of them, waving
red flags and posters with slogans. Some of them even
wore red armbands, but the red flags were the grabber:
to Yocke’s American eye the blood red flags
looked like an image straight from a museum
exhibit. That there were still people who firmly believed in
the gospel of Marx, Engels, and Lenin was a fact
that he knew intellectually, yet seeing it in the
flesh was a jolt.

These people were obviously committed. Just below the
platform four older men were arranged in a
circle, shouting at one another. No, it was three
against one. Yocke couldn’t understand a word of it and thought
about asking the stringer what it was all about, then decided
against it.

He thought he already knew the answer.

Yegor Kolokoltsev was their guru, a man
who could rant anti-Semitic filth that would have been
too raw for Joseph Goebbels and in the next
breath extol the glories of Mother Russia. As
Yocke understood Kolokoltsev’s message, the
Communists never had a chance to purify the Soviet
Union and make her great because the Jews had
subverted them, stolen the fruit of the proletariat’s
labor, betrayed the revolution, sucked blood from
the veins of honest Communists, etc., etc.

So now he stood sweating as the motorcade drew
to a halt and burly guards jumped from the cars and
began opening a pathway to the platform.

Idly Yocke looked around for soldiers or
uniformed policemen. There were none in sight. Not a
one.

The bodyguards in civilian clothes had no
trouble clearing a path. The crowd parted courteously,
as befitted old Communists. And these were mostly old
Communists, workers and retired grandmothers.
Here and there the mix was leavened by better-dressed younger
men, probably bureaucrats or apparatchiks who
had lost or were losing their jobs under the new order.
Some of the waving signs and red flags partially
obscured Yocke’s vision of the arriving
dignitaries.

The lack of policemen and soldiers bothered
Jack Yocke slightly, and he turned to his
translator to ask a question about their absence when he
heard the noise, a sharp popping audible even above
the sounds of traffic from the street.

An automatic weapon!

There was no mistaking the sound.

The crowd panicked. People turned their backs on
Yegor Kolokoltsev and his guards and tried
to flee. The urge to leave hastily seemed to enter the
head of every living soul there at precisely the same
instant.

More weapons. The sharp popping was now the staccato
buzzing of numerous weapons, but it was strangely
muffled by screams and shouts.

Yocke grabbed a handhold on the rail of the
speaker’s platform and pulled himself up a couple
feet so he could see better.

Four people with automatic weapons were
shooting at the guards, most of whom were now on the
ground. One or two gunmen were pouring lead into the
middle limousine.

With all the guards down, two of the gunmen walked
toward the car. They were dressed in the usual dark
gray suits and wore hats. The crowd was dispersing
rapidly now, everyone fleeing for their lives.
Several of the elderly were sprawled on the pavement.
One or two of them were struggling to rise.

One of the gunmen opened the car door and the other
emptied a magazine through the opening from a distance of
three feet.

Yocke looked around wildly. The stragglers from
the retreating crowd were rounding the corners, probably
running down the streets that led away from the square.

The gunmen dropped their weapons and walked away
without haste.

No sirens. No more screams.

Silence.

Yocke looked around for the other reporters and their
Russian stringers.

Gone. He was alone, still clinging to the side of the
speaker’s platform.

He released his grip and dropped to the pavement.
The whole thing had been like a slow-motion
film–he had seen everything, felt everything, the
fear, the horror, the sense of doom descending
inexorably, controlled by an unseen, godlike
hand. Now if he could only get it down!

How much time had elapsed? Minutes? No-no more
than forty or fifty seconds. Maybe a
minute.

He looked at the backs of the fleeing people. The
last of the crowd was hobbling around the corners. Some people
had apparently been trampled in the panic; six
or eight bodies lay around the square.

Yocke stood and watched the last of the gunmen
disappear around the corner where the motorcade had
entered the square. A half mile or so down that
street was Red Square. The entrance to the metro, the
subway that would take them anywhere in Moscow, was
only a hundred yards away.