The Red Horseman (30 page)

She thought about that. Finally she began counting on her
fingers. At last she said, “One hundred
ninety-three.

The first was a boy named Freddy that I had a
crush on in kindergarten.

He had blond hair and dimples and I
desperately wanted him for my very own. The second
was-was

“I missed you,” Toad told her.

“Oh, Toad, I missed you too.”

And then she sat up and he could see her whole
face, her eyes, her nose, her mouth spreading
into a smile.

“You’re going to be a daddy,” she said softly.

“What?”

“It’s too early to be absolutely sure, but
I think so.”

He was horrified. He shoved her out to arm’s
length.

“You’re pregnant and you flew that jet into that
radioactive hell this afternoon? Are you out of your
mind?”

One of her eyebrows arched. “Not so loud.
Let’s not discuss this with Jack Yocke.”

“Rita,” he hissed, “if you’re pregnant you
can’t-was

“I can do what has to be done. Like every kid ever
conceived, Toad Junior is going to have to take his
parents as they come. Flying is what I do.” She
stroked his eyebrows with a fingertip. “Relax.
I’ll be careful. I pulled his father out of the fiery
furnace today. Someday the Toadlet will understand and
thank me.”

Toad needed time to digest it. After a while he
said, “Do you think it’s a boy?”

Rita grinned and shrugged.

“Well, you ought to go back to the States. You
shouldn’t even have come over here. This place is too
goddamn polluted for a pregnant woman.”

Herb Tenney and his binary poisons crossed his
mind. “And-was

She wrapped her arms around him and pushed him
backward. With her face just inches from his, she
told him, “Toad Tarkington. The women you fall
in love with aren’t housewives. If I become one
I risk losing you.

That’s a risk I have no intention of taking.”"

“But-was

“But nothing! This baby is mine too. You just
stifle your male instincts and start thinking up names.
I’ll handle the rest of it.

Toad tried to sort it out. Perhaps she was right, he
deCided. Probably.

Women! If it floats, flies or fucks,
rentdon’t buy! Great advice but impossible
to follow. After a bit he asked, “Can you still make
love?”

This question drew a giggle from the mother-to-be, who
grasped him in a very intimate way and lowered her
mouth onto his.

Senior Chief Holley woke Jake at
five in the morning.

The sun was already up. “The helicopter made it
back a couple hours ago. The guys just got
here.”

“Fine,” Jake said, and the senior chief closed
the door behind him. Jake had left orders that he be
awakened when they returned, now he had trouble
getting back to sleep.

He couldn’t eat, not with Herb Tenney in the
same city, and he was only getting a few hours
sleep a night. This regimen wasn’t good for
him-he would soon have trouble concentrating. Maybe he
was already feeling the effects.

He lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling.
Soon his thoughts were on Callie and Amy. What
time was it im Washington? What would they be doing today?

When he came awake again the chief was shaking him.

“Admiral, we have a call from General Land.
I’ve set up the encrypter in the living room.”

Jake got out of bed and pulled on his pants.
In the living room Jack Yocke was drinking
coffee.

“What time is it?”

“Almost noon.”

“Toad up?”

“Still in bed.”

“Let him sleep.”

“Want me to leave?”

“You can stay, but everything you hear is classified.
You can’t print anything.”

“I know the ground rules,” Yocke said mildly
and sipped at the coffee.

“Take your call. I’ll get you a cup.”

“Admiral Grafton, sir.”

“Land. I got yesterday morning’s satellite
photo and the one the bird got at seven local time
this morning over Petrovsk. How many empty
transporters were there outside when you were there?”

“Three, sir.”

“This morning there were four. There were also two
bodies there this morning.”

“Dead bodies?”

“They’re lying down. The photo interpreter’s
labeled them dead. They look dead to me. One is
right by a transporter, the other is near the abandoned
helicopter.”

“Much cloud cover at Petrovsk this morning?”

“About thirty percent or so. There was a decent
hole over the field when the bird went
by.”

“We’re lucky.” Jake had asked for the daily
satellite shoot, but he hadn’t expected anything
this dramatic.

“Sounds like someone went back to the gold mine.”

“The morning after the meltdown was overcast, so
nothing that morning.

The next day the transporters were there.

And yesterday. This morning found.”

“Who was it?” Jack Yocke handed Jake a
cup of coffee and sat down on the couch.

“An AWACS bird over the Persian Gulf
picked up three transports leaving a military
airfield near Samarra, northwest of Baghdad,
at a few minutes after nine last night.

They tracked them flying just a little west of north
until they departed the area. Then three
transports came back this morning a few
minutes after dawn. One crashed fifty miles
north of the air base, the other two landed there.”

“They didn’t have the right gear to withstand the radiation.”

“Looks that way.”

“General, somebody is going to have to destroy those
missiles before any more of them are carried away.
Those missiles are too big a
temptation.”

“I’m going over to the White House in about
fifteen minutes. I’ve already talked to the
secretary of defense. He and the national security
adviser will meet us there. Why don’t you be in
Ambassador Lancaster’s office about an hour
and a half from now? Someone will call you.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jake hung up the phone and switched off the
crypto device.

“Someone went back?” Yocke asked.

“Apparently. They carried off at least three
missiles before the meltdown. That night. The
radiation was supposed to cover up the fact the
missiles were missing, for a while anyway. But
someone got careless and left the transporters
outside.”

“Why didn’t they take the transporters
too?”

“Too big. Too heavy. Oh, maybe they
took one or two, but they opted to leave at least
three behind and take the missiles instead.”

“And someone went back last night?”

“And maybe got a couple more missiles.
Left at least two dead people on the mat and
one more empty transporter.”

“Satellite?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just how good are those satellites?”

“They can see something the size of a pack of
cigarettes.

The problem is that we only have so many
satellites. Right now we’re trying to monitor every
base in Russia where nukes are stored.” Jake
started to add something, then just shook his head.

“So what are we going to do?”

“If you mean the United States, Land is going
to see the president now.”

“Who got the missiles?”

“Saddam Hussein.”

“Oh, hell.”

“That isn’t the worst of it. Remember all those
warheads stacked around? Those are highly portable.
Odds are that ry missile they carried away, they
took half a dozen ads.”

Jake Grafton headed for the bathroom to shower and
shave. He decided to put on his uniform. It
looked like it might be that kind of day.

“What9″ said His. Hempstead, her brows
knitted”.

“I expect the ambassador will be getting a
call in a little while from the White House. General
Land asked me to be here when it comes…”

“Have a seat, Admiral. I’ll talk to the
ambassador. He’s on the telephone right now with
Yeltsin’s aide, trying to arrange an
appointment.” She whirled and marched for the door to the
inner sanctum.

Jake Grafton picked a seat and settled
in. The secretary thought she could spare him a
smile, then thought better of it and went back to pounding
the keyboard of her computer terminal. Jake picked
up a three-month-old copy of Southern Living and
began to leaf through it.

There were articles there on a couple of houses he
wouldn’t mind living in if he ever inherited five
million dollars.

Ten minutes later he tired of the magazine.
He checked his watch. The ambassador’s door was
firmly closed. The secretary was pretending to work
on something on her desk.

He was examining the paintings on the wall thirty
minutes later when the door opened. “Would you come
in, please, Admiral Grafton,” Hempstead
said. She stood aside and he walked in,
The ambassador was on the telephone. He was
listening.

Every now and then he said, “Yessir.” Finally he
said, “He’s here now with me, sir … Yessir
… If you think … I’ll let you know immediately.
Yessir. Good-bye.”

Lancaster hung up and looked around blinking. His
eyes settled on Grafton, then moved
to Hempstead. “Agatha, please use the telephone
in the other room to get me an appointment with
Yeltsin. Tell the aide I have an oral
message from our president that I must deliver
immediately, Have a seat, Admiral.” Jake did so.

When Hempstead was gone, Lancaster said, “It
would have been nice if you had given me some warning about
this last night.”

“I thought I’d better talk to my boss first,
sir,”

“So you didn’t level with me. I’ve been an
ambassador on and off for over twenty years. I
was talking to presidents about affairs of state when you
were a lieutenant filling out fitness reports on
drunken sailors. I was helping prevent World
War III when our new president was smoking pot
without inhaling.”

Owen Lancaster got out of his chair and walked
around the desk. He leaned against the mantel of the
fireplace, then half-turned so he could see
Jake.

“I’ll tell you right now that the United States
has no business taking sides in the Russians’
political battles. We have no money to offer
them. We have no bottled cure for all the problems
they face. All our crowd knows how to do is jack
the interest rate up or down a half a point and
hire another ten thousand bureaucrats to manage the
social problem de jure. These people are going to have
to solve their own problems.”

When Jake said nothing, Lancaster came over and
dropped into the adjacent chair. “The president
wants me personally to brief Yeltsin on the
goings on at the Petrovsk military base. I
am to give him two options. A-he may order
an air strike on the missiles and warheads still in
the hangars at Petrovsk. The weapons must be
destroyed by noon tomorrow, or B-the United States
will do the job for him. His choice.”

“I doubt if he will accept either option,” Jake
murmured.

“That is also my opinion. He
doesn’t have enough clout with the Russian military
to enforce an order telling them to blow up their own
base, and it would be political suicide to allow
American warplanes to fly across Russian
territory to make an attack on a Russian
military installation.

The president and national security adviser see
this the same way. So .. if he refuses both
options, I am to give him a third, a
compromise.

He will supply two airplanes and weapons and
two of your test pilots will fly to Petrovsk and
destroy the base.”

“I see.”

“I wish you did, Admiral.” Owen Lancaster
levered himself from the chair and went to the window. With his
back to Jake he said, “The Russians are a
proud people. We are going to force Yeltsin into doing
something that will probably sink him politically.
To get rid of what?-a hundred or so nuclear
warheads?-we are going to run a serious risk of
putting a military dictatorship into the Kremlin.
A hundred weapons-a drop in the bucket. Our
president made this decision in less than an hour
after talking with only Hayden Land and the
national security adviser, who six months ago was
preaching the big ideas to pimple-faced fraternity
boys at a college in New England, kids who
are still carrying their first condom in their wallets.”

“Yeltsin is no liberal Little Rock
Democrat, sir. He’s half dictator.

Any government Russia gets will be a
dictatorship to some degree.”

“Admiral, I quit listening to that isolationist
apologia when my hair started falling out. The
Russians have gone from tyrant to tyrant since the
dawn of time. They like tallyrants-someone to do the thinking
for them. But Yeltsin …

he’s trying to force these isolated wood hicks
into the world economy, the world culture. Boris
Yeltsin may be Russia’s last hope. And
ours.”

Lancaster headed for the door. As he went he
muttered, “You knotheads don’t seem to understand that
you can’t go off half-cocked when the whole goddamn
planet is at risk.”

IT WAS THREE IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN
LANCASTER IN-FORMED Jake by telephone of
Yeltsin’s decision. “He’ll make two
Su-25’s available at the Lipetsk
air base.”

“Where is Lipetsk?”

“About two hundred miles south. There will be a
helicopter waiting for your pilots in two hours
at Domodedovo. It will take them there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Admiral … I don’t know what story
he is telling the air force.”

“Uh, are you trying to say we’re on our own?”

was Precisely Jake hung up the telephone
and looked around at his little staff. “Okay, gang.
Here’s the plan. Rita and I will catch a chopper
in two hours at Domodedovo that will take us to a
Russian air base.

They’ll make two Su-25 Frogfoots
available. Rita and I will bomb the base at
Petrovsk. Any questions?”

“Uh, CAG,” Toad began, glanced at
Rita and cleared his throat. “Why Rita?”

Jake was genuinely surprised. Toad was not in
the habit of questioning Jake’s decisions. “Well,
she flew FirstA-18’s for several years before she
went to test pilot school. Goober Groelke
has a helo background, and Miles–the third
test pilot–came out of antisubmarine
warfare. This job is dropping bombs and getting
hits the first time around.”