Red Horseman

by Stephen Coonts

  So he habitually talked to his computer as his fingers danced across the keyboard. His comments were low, lilting and almost unintelligible, but it was obvious to Toad Tarkington that Harper was in direct communication with whoever or whatever it was that made the machine go. That didn’t bother Toad—he had spent years listening to naval aviators whisper to their lusty jet-fueled mistresses: he didn’t even classify Richard Harper as more than average dingy.

  Just now he tried to make sense of Harper’s incantations. He got a word or two here and there. “…time for a hundred indecisions, a hundred visions and revisions…. Do I dare, do I dare?” After a few minutes he tuned out Harper and scanned the posters, cartoons, and newspaper articles taped to the wall. All over the wall. On every square inch. Computer stuff. Yeck!

  Tarkington regarded computers as just another tool, more expensive than a screwdriver or hammer but no more inherently interesting. Of necessity he periodically applied himself to making one work, and when required could even give a fairly comprehensive technical explanation of what went on down deep inside. But a computer had no pizzazz, no romance, no appeal to his inner being. This Monday morning he leaned idly on the counter and without a twinge of curiosity watched Harper and his computer do their thing.

  But he had a restless mind that had to be mulling something; once again his thoughts went back to Elizabeth Thorn, alias Judith Farrell. He had loved her once. One of the male’s biological defects, he decided, was his inability to stop loving a woman. Oh, you can dump her, avoid her, hate her, love someone else, but once love has struck it cannot be completely eradicated. The wound may scar over nicely, yet some shards of the arrowhead will remain permanently embedded to remind you where you were hit. If you are a man.

  Women, Toad well knew, didn’t suffer from this biological infirmity. Once a woman ditches you her libidinal landscape is wiped clean by Mama Nature, clean as a sand beach swept by the tide, ready for the next victim to leave his tracks like Robinson Crusoe. And like that sucker, he’ll conclude that he is the very first, the one and only. Amazingly, for her he will be.

  Biology, you old devil.

  Ah, me.

  Then Toad’s thoughts moved from theoretical musings to the specific. He poked around the edges of the emotions that the sight and sound and smell of Elizabeth Thorn created in him and concluded, again, that it would be unwise to explore further. Yet he couldn’t leave it. So he circled it and looked from different angles.

  He felt a chill and shuddered involuntarily.

  “Commander Tarkington?”

  It was Harper. This was the second time he had said Toad’s name.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just what is it you want to know about these prints?” Harper flexed his fingers like a concert pianist.

  “Ah, have they been enhanced? Touched up? Whatever the phrase is.”

  “Well, the two prints are identical.” Toad had given Harper two prints, the original that Elizabeth Thorn had handed him Friday night and one he had made yesterday evening from the negative at a one-hour photo shop in a suburban mall. “I ran them through the scanner,” Harper continued, “which looks at the light levels in little segments called pixels and assigns a numerical value, which is how the computer uses the information. The prints are essentially identical with only minor, statistically insignificant variations. Possibly caused by dust on the negative.”

  Toad grunted. “Did anybody doctor it up?”

  “Not that I can see.” Harper punched buttons. Columns of numbers appeared on the screen before him. “What we’re looking for are lines, sharp variations in light values that shouldn’t be there. Of course, with a sophisticated enough computer, those traces could be erased, but then the resultant print would have to be photographed to get a new negative, and that would fuzz everything. I just don’t think so. Maybe one chance in a hundred. Or one in a thousand.”

  “What can you tell me about the picture?”

  Harper’s fingers flew across the keyboard. The photo appeared on the screen. “It’s a man sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Apparently at a sidewalk café.”

  “Do you know the man?”

  “No, but if you like I can access the CIA’s data base and maybe we can match the face.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Toad Tarkington said. “Is there anything in the photo that would indicate where it was taken?”

  The computer wizard stroked the mouse and drew a box over the newspaper. He clicked again on the mouse button and the boxed area filled the screen. The headline was in English and quite legible, but the masthead was less so. “We’ll enhance it a little,” Harper muttered and clicked the mouse again.

  After a few seconds he announced, “The Times.”

  “New York Times?”

  “The Times. The real one. London.”

  “What day?”

  “Can’t tell. The date is just too small. But look at this.” The whole photograph was brought back to the screen and the cursor repositioned over a white splotch on the café window. Now the splotch appeared. Toad came around the counter and stared over Harper’s shoulder. “It’s a notice of the hours the café is open. You can’t read the language in this blowup—the picture is too fuzzy—but if the computer uses an enhancement program to fill in the gaps it should become legible.”

  His fingers danced. After a minute or two he said, “It’s not English. It’s Portuguese.”

  “So the photo was taken in Portugal.”

  “Or in front of a Portuguese café in London, Berlin, Zurich, Rome, Madrid, New York, Washing—”

  “How about the front page of the paper? Can you give me a printout of that?”

  “Sure.” Richard Harper clicked the mouse on the print menu and in a moment the laser began to hum. Toad waited until the page came out of the printer, then examined it carefully. There was a portion of a photo centered under the paper’s big headline, which contained the words “Common Market ministers.” He folded the page and put it back into his pocket.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s everything. Give me back the prints and erase everything from the memory of your idiot box and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  Harper shrugged. He put the prints in the envelope that had originally contained them and passed it to Toad, who slipped the envelope into an inside pocket. Then Harper clicked away on the mouse. After a few seconds of activity he sat back and said, “It’s gone.”

  “I don’t want to insult you,” Toad said, “but I should emphasize this little matter is a tippy top secret, eyes only. Loose lips sink ships.”

  “Everything I do is classified, Commander,” Harper said tartly. He reached for the folder on the top of the pile in his in basket.

  “No offense,” Toad muttered. “By the way, what were those lines you were saying about ‘visions and revisions’?”

  Now Harper colored slightly and made a vague gesture. “ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ ”

  “Umm.”

  An hour later in the media reading room in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress Toad found the page of the London Times that had been captured in the photo. Several weeks’ editions of the newspaper were on each roll of microfilm. He selected the roll that included the date Nigel Keren died, placed it on a Bell & Howell viewing console and began to scroll through the pages. The headline he wanted was on page twenty-three of the scroll, the edition of November 1, 1991.

  Rear Admiral Jake Grafton spent the morning in a briefing. As usual, the subject was nuclear weapons in the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was the old Soviet Union. This matter was boiling on the front burner. The locations of the strategic nuclear missiles—ICBMs—were known and the political control apparatus was more or less public knowledge. But the Allied intelligence community had lost sight of the tactical nuclear weapons—weapons that were by definition mobile. They were hidden behind the pall of smoke rising from the rubble of the Soviet Union.

  Listening to e
xperts discuss nuclear weapons as if they were missing vases from a seedy art gallery, Grafton’s attention wandered. He had first sat through classified lectures on the ins and outs of nuclear weapons technology as a very junior A-6 pilot, before he went to Vietnam for the first time. In those days attack plane crews were each assigned targets under the Single Integrated Operational Plan—SIOP. The lectures were like something from Dr. Strangelove’s horror cabinet—thermal pulses, blast effects, radiation and kill zones and the like. When the course was over he even got a certificate suitable for framing that proclaimed he was a qualified Nuclear Weapons Delivery Pilot.

  But the whole experience was just some weird military mind-bender until he was handed his first target the day after the ship sailed from Pearl Harbor on his first cruise to Vietnam.

  Shanghai.

  He was assigned to drop a nuclear weapon on the military district headquarters in Shanghai. It wasn’t exactly downtown, but it was on the edge of it.

  Actually he was not going to drop the bomb: he was going to toss it, throw it about forty-three thousand feet, as he recalled. That was how far away from the target the pull-up point was. He would cross the initial point at five hundred knots, exactly five hundred feet above the ground, and push the pickle on the stick, which would start the timer on the nuclear ordnance panel. The timer would tick off the preset number of seconds until he reached the calculated pull-up point—that point forty-three thousand feet from the target. Then a tone would sound in his ears. He was to apply smooth, steady back-pressure on the stick so that one second after the tone began he would have four Gs on the aircraft. At about thirty-eight degrees nose-up the tone would cease and the weapon would come off the bomb rack and he would keep pulling, up and over the top, then do a half roll going down the back side and scoot out the way he had come in.

  He had practiced the delivery on the navy’s bombing range in Oregon. With little, blue, twenty-eight-pound practice bombs. The delivery method was inherently inaccurate and the bombs were sprinkled liberally over the countryside, sometimes a couple miles from the intended target. A good delivery was one in which the bomb impacted within a half mile of where you wanted it. With a six-hundred-kiloton nuke, a miss by a mile or two wouldn’t matter much.

  “Close enough for government work,” he and his bombardier assured each other.

  Months later on an aircraft carrier crossing the Pacific with a magazine full of nuclear weapons, the insanity of nuclear war got very personal. Figuring the fuel consumption on each leg of the run-in, working the leg times backward from the hard target time—necessary so he and his bombardier wouldn’t be incinerated by the blast of somebody else’s weapon—plotting antiaircraft defenses, examining the streets and buildings of Shanghai while planning to incinerate every last Chinese man, woman and child in them, he had to pinch himself. This was like trying to figure out how to shoot your way into hell.

  But orders were orders, so he drew the lines and cut and pasted the charts and tried to envision what it would feel like to hurl a thermonuclear weapon into Shanghai. The emotions he would feel as he flew through the flak and SAMs on the run-in, performed the Götterdämmerung alley-oop over a city of ten million people, and tried to keep the airplane upright and flying as the shock wave from the detonation smashed the aircraft like the fist of God as he exited tail-on to the blast—emotions were not on the navy’s agenda.

  Could he nuke Shanghai? Would he do it if ordered to? He didn’t know, which troubled him.

  Fretting about it didn’t help. The problem was too big, the numbers of human lives incomprehensible, the A’s and B’s and C’s of the equation all unknown. He had no answers. Worse, he suspected no one did.

  So he finished his planning and went back to more mundane concerns, like wondering how he was going to stay alive in the night skies over Vietnam.

  That was twenty-three years ago.

  Today listening to the experts discuss the possibility that nuclear weapons might be seeping southward from the Soviet republics into the Middle East, the memories of planning the annihilation of half the population of Shanghai made Jake Grafton slightly nauseated.

  The voice of the three-star army general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency jolted his unpleasant reverie. The general wanted hard intelligence and he was a bit peeved that none seemed to be available.

  “Rumor, surmises, theories…haven’t you experts got one single fact?” he demanded of the briefers. “Just one shabby little irrefutable fact—that’s not too much to ask, is it?”

  The three-star’s name was Albert Sidney Brown. After thirty-plus years in the maw of a vast bureaucracy where every middle name was automatically ground down to an initial, he had somehow managed to retain his.

  The briefer was CIA officer Herb Tenney, who briefed Lieutenant General Brown on a regular basis. Today he tried to reason with the general. “Sir, the place is bedlam. Nobody knows what’s going on, not even Yeltsin. The transportation system’s kaput, the communication system is in tatters, people in the countryside are quietly starving, armed criminal gangs are in control of—”

  “I read the newspapers,” General Brown said acidly. “Do you spooks know anything that the Associated Press doesn’t?”

  “Not right now,” Herb Tenney said with a hint of regret in his voice. Regret, Jake Grafton noted, not apology. Tenney was several inches short of six feet. His graying hair and square jaw with a cleft gave him a distinguished, important look. In his gray wool business suit with thin, subtle blue stripes woven into the cloth he looked more like a Wall Street buccaneer, Jake Grafton thought, than the spy he was.

  “Congress is performing major surgery on the American military without benefit of anesthetic,” General Brown rumbled. “Everybody east of Omaha is tossing flowers at the Russians, and that goddamn cesspool is in meltdown. There are thirty thousand tactical nuclear weapons over there just lying around loose! And the CIA doesn’t know diddly squat.”

  Jake Grafton thought he could see a tiny sympathetic smile on Herb Tenney’s face. His expression looked remarkably like the one on the puss of the guy at the garage giving you the bad news about your transmission. Or was Grafton just imagining it? Damn that Judith Farrell!

  Tenny’s expression seemed to irritate General Brown too. “I am fed up with you people palming off yesterday’s press clippings and unsubstantiated gossip as news. You’re like a bunch of old crones at a whores’ picnic. No more! I want facts and you spies better come up with some. Damn quick!”

  Brown’s fist descended onto the table with a crash. “Like yesterday! I don’t give a shit who you have to bribe, fuck, or rob, but you’d better come up with some hard facts about who has their grubby hands on those goddamn bombs or I’m going to lose my temper and start kicking ass!”

  When the briefers were gone and he and Jake were alone, Albert Sidney Brown rumbled, “They’ll never come up with hard intelligence. Nobody on our side knows anything. Not a goddamn thing. Now that’s a fact.”

  “We just don’t have the HUMINT resources, General,” Jake Grafton said. HUMINT was human intelligence, information from spies. The CIA had never had much luck recruiting spies in the Soviet Union. Prior to the collapse the counterintelligence apparatus had been too efficient. It was a different story now, but a spy network took years to construct.

  “The world is becoming more dangerous,” General Brown said softly. “It’s like the whole planet is on a runaway locomotive going down a mountain, faster and faster, closer and closer to the edge. The big smashup is waiting around the next bend, or the next. And those cretins in Congress are in a dogfight to divide up the ‘peace dividend.’ Makes you want to cry.”

  Jake had had numerous wide-ranging conversations with General Brown since he reported to this job six months ago. Brown was convinced that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was the most dangerous trend in an increasingly unstable international arena. And Jake Grafton agreed with him.

  Recently the United Stat
es and other Western nations had agreed to spend $500 million to pay for destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but the work wasn’t going quickly enough. “They’ve got bombs scattered around over there like junk cars,” Brown told Jake Grafton. “They don’t know what they’ve got or where it is, so it’s imperative that we get someone over there to keep an eye on the situation and prod them in the right direction. You’re that someone.

  “The ambassador is talking to Yeltsin right now, trying to sell military-to-military cooperation at the absolute top level. As soon as we get the okay, you’re on your way. Keep your underwear packed.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Jake, we have got to get a handle on this nuclear weapons situation. I want you to get the hard facts. Ask the Russian generals to their faces—and don’t take no for an answer. There isn’t time to massage bruised egos. They must be as worried as we are. If their criminal gangs or ragtag ethnic warriors start using nukes on one another, Revelation is going to come true word for word. And if those fanatics in the Middle East get their hands on some…” Brown lifted his hands skyward.

  Jake Grafton finished the thought. “This planet will be history.”

  “A radioactive clinker,” Brown agreed, and swiveled his chair toward the map of the old Soviet Union that hung on the wall.

  “The first day of November 1991,” Toad Tarkington repeated, “just three days before Nigel Keren went for his long swim.”

  Toad fell silent. He had completed his recital of what he learned this morning. Jake Grafton was bent over the photograph on his desk, staring at it through a magnifying glass. Finally he straightened with a sigh.

  “We could ask the CIA where Herb Tenney was that week,” Toad suggested.

  “No.” Jake squirmed in his chair. He flexed his right hand several times, then let it rest limply on the arm of the chair. “For the sake of argument, assume that the CIA did kill Keren. Either the president authorized it or someone in the CIA was running his own foreign policy. The Mossad must have concluded the assassination was without authorization or they would not have approached anyone in the American intelligence community, no matter how obliquely. Assuming the CIA did kill Keren. A rather large assumption, but—”