Red Horseman

by Stephen Coonts

  He walked as fast as he could and had to resist the urge to break into a trot.

  If his editor ever heard about this evening’s expedition he would be fired within two heartbeats for taking foolish risks. So why had he agreed to this anyway?

  Grafton had laid out the route, the most direct way to the rendezvous. His course took him north on Tchaikovsky Street, through Vosstanija Square and onto Sadovaja-Kudrinskaja Street, which was really the same boulevard as Tchaikovsky Street. The names of the streets of Moscow changed at every major intersection, a European tradition designed to baffle tourists and keep taxi drivers fully employed.

  He was getting into the rhythm now, his heart and lungs pumping as he swung along with a stride that ate up the distance.

  Once he heard running footsteps and ducked into a doorway. The street was empty. Trying to stay calm, he stood stock-still for several seconds as his heart thudded like a trip-hammer.

  Were they watching? Waiting for him?

  “Someone will meet you long before you get there,” Jake Grafton had said.

  Of course someone is watching.

  For the first time that evening Jack Yocke felt the icy fingers of true fear. Unsure of what he should do now, he finally stepped back onto the sidewalk and resumed his journey. Where in hell was Shirley Ross?

  His head was swiveling uncontrollably. When he realized that he was really seeing nothing because he was trying to see everything, he locked his head facing forward. Still his eyes swept nervously from side to side and he couldn’t resist an occasional glance behind him. But he wasn’t being followed.

  They must be watching. Of course!

  They. Whoever they were. Watching him hump along like a bug scurrying across a stone floor. Any second the shoe would come smashing down and—

  He could smell himself. He was perspiring freely and he stank. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and rubbed his hand against his trousers, which left a wet spot.

  A little car came around the corner and drove past him. The two heads—two male heads—didn’t turn his way. The car went up the street and turned right at the next corner. A black car.

  He was tiring. The nervous energy was burning off and the pace he was making was too fast. He slowed to almost normal speed.

  Ahead of him on the right a door opened. Unconsciously he swerved left toward the street and picked up his pace.

  God! He should have accepted that pistol Grafton offered. Grafton knew what the score was and offered it—why didn’t he have the sense to—

  “In here, Jack.”

  It was her voice, a conversational tone.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Come in here now!”

  He went through the door into a darkened hallway. She was there, with a man. The man closed the door and she took his arm. “Through here, quickly. We have a car out back. Hurry.” She broke into a trot.

  “Jake Grafton wants to see you.”

  “Where?”

  “A park on the south side of the Moskva. He said—”

  “Quiet.” She went through a door and they were in an alley. “Into the car.” She dove into the passenger seat and Yocke climbed into the back. Before he could get the door completely closed the car was in motion. He opened it partially and slammed it shut.

  “Lie down,” she said.

  He did so.

  The car swerved and accelerated with a blast from the exhaust.

  “Jake Grafton said that—”

  “Wait.”

  With his head against the seat Yocke tried to look out the windows. The car was accelerating down a narrow street, now braking and swerving around another corner.

  “When the car stops,” Shirley Ross said, “I want you to quickly get out. The same side you got in on. Be sure to close the door. There will be a panel truck right beside the car. You go into the truck and I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Okay.”

  And almost immediately the car swerved sideways again. In seconds the driver applied the brakes.

  “Now.”

  He sat up and grabbed the door handle and got out as fast as he could. There were four vans there, but only one with the rear doors open. Shirley pushed him toward it. He scrambled in and she followed and someone closed the door and the vehicle began to move.

  “Where?” she said.

  “A park on the south side of the river four hundred yards east of the entrance to Gorky Park. They put the statues there after they tore them down.”

  “I know where it is.” She moved forward in the van’s interior and said something to the driver in a language Yocke didn’t know.

  When she returned to his side she devoted her attention to a small device she held in her hand. Then she held it up to her ear. A radio. Yocke could hear the voices.

  “Are we being followed?”

  “They are following three of the vans.”

  “This one?”

  She held up a hand to silence him. After a minute she went forward to confer with the driver.

  How in hell had he gotten himself into this mess anyway? Hurtling through the streets of Moscow in a van that smelled like a garbage truck, being trailed by the KGB—he braced himself against the swaying of the vehicle as it darted around a corner.

  She was back beside him. “In a few minutes we will switch vehicles again. Stay with me.”

  “Okay.”

  She listened intently to the radio.

  “What’s your real name?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  “You? Nothing. I need to talk to Jake Grafton and the telephones are all tapped. He figured it out.”

  Jack Yocke opened his mouth again but now her fingers were against his face, feminine fingers that brushed his cheek and remained against his lips.

  Jake Grafton sat in the grass with his back against one of Felix Dzerzhinsky’s bronze legs, facing in the direction of Gorky Park. About seventy-five yards to the north, his right, was the south bank of the Moskva River. Farther ahead on the right, between where he sat and the boulevard in front of the Gorky Park entrance columns, was a vast low building, a cultural institute, with its empty parking lots. Farther to the west the Grecian columns of the park entrance gate were visible behind streetlights on the boulevard. Several hundred yards away to the south, on Jake’s left, were block after block of drab apartment buildings. Behind him to the east the park went for a quarter mile until it reached a street.

  Toad Tarkington was on Jake’s left lying on his belly amid some scrub trees and weeds. Spiro Dalworth was against the corner of the cultural building. Senior Chief Holley was behind Jake, watching his back. All three men had M-16s.

  The city seemed abnormally quiet tonight, Jake Grafton thought. Perhaps the day of rioting had drained the energy from the Muscovites and they were home in bed worrying about their future. They certainly had a bucketful of troubles to fret about.

  Ambassador Lancaster had telephoned as Grafton was walking out the door of his apartment, five minutes after dispatching Jack Yocke. Toad took the call and made some excuse. Whatever was on the ambassador’s mind would have to wait a few hours.

  Tonight Jake’s .357 Magnum revolver lay beside him in the grass. All he had to do was drop his hand to it. In his hands he held a stick that he had picked up before he sat down. He was whittling upon it with his pocketknife while he speculated about what Lancaster had wanted. Lancaster didn’t seem the type to invite him to Spaso House for an evening of poker.

  No stars tonight.

  Another high overcast that might or might not bring rain.

  How long had it been? Twenty minutes?

  Over on the boulevard in front of Gorky Park several trucks rumbled by. The noise carried oddly, sounding abnormally loud. The city was too quiet.

  Looking the other way, toward the northeast, Jake could see the turrets and spires of the Kremlin, lit up tonight as usual. It was eerie, in a way, how for centuries that old fo
rtress had housed czars and czarinas in extraordinary opulence. Favored by accidents of birth, they had lived out their lives in that palace and the one in St. Petersburg while the mass of Russians struggled just to stay alive. When the Communists came along they moved right in. Yet like the czars, the days of the Reds were over, so tonight Yeltsin and his allies were in there trying to figure out how to ride the tiger. And out here amid the discarded, smashed statues the Russians were still struggling to stay alive, just as they always had.

  Bracing his elbows against his knees, Jake scanned the area again with what appeared to be heavy binoculars. Unlike regular binoculars, this set picked up infrared light.

  He could see Spiro against the corner of the building. He had told the lieutenant to stay down, but he was up against the wall, peering this way and that.

  Do the Russians have infrared binoculars?

  Toad was nearly invisible—all Jake could see was the faintest indication of a glow where he must be lying. The senior chief seemed equally well hidden.

  No one else in sight. Not a dog, not a prowling cat, not a drunk or pair of lovers. Well, it’s not a good night for drunks or lovers.

  Jake raised the glasses and scanned the buildings to the south and east.

  Somewhere in the city Yocke was playing secret agent. That guy! Always sure he knew everything when in reality he was just stumbling along in the dark with everyone else.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have let Yocke go. If something happened to him…

  Finally he lowered the glasses and zipped up his jacket. The evening was getting chilly. Wondering about Yocke, worrying about Yeltsin and his grand experiment, Jake Grafton went back to his whittling.

  Jack Yocke couldn’t see any of the features of the man behind the wheel of the van, even looking in the rearview mirror. He had dark hair and wore a dark jacket and whispered with Shirley Ross in a foreign language that Yocke tried in vain to identify in the deep silence that had fallen once the van’s engine was turned off. This was the third van he had been in tonight. Shirley Ross apparently had access to a motor pool.

  The driver and the woman consulted a map, made more whispered comments, stared out the window to the left. The driver had a handheld radio that now sounded startlingly loud. He turned down the volume and held it close to his ear.

  Finally she turned back to Yocke. “The statutes are over there about a hundred yards or so, through the little trees.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You and I will get out and walk across the grass. Stay with me. If anything goes wrong, just fall down on your stomach and stay there.”

  “If what goes wrong?”

  “Anything.”

  The man in the front seat handed back a submachine gun. Shirley Ross put the strap across her left shoulder, tucked the butt under her right armpit and grasped the pistol grip and trigger assembly with her right hand.

  The driver got out of the van and closed the door. In seconds the rear doors of the van opened.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and went first.

  Jack Yocke took a deep breath, then followed.

  The van was sitting in front of a huge slab of apartments. Across the street was the park. She was already moving. Yocke followed. As they crossed the sidewalk and entered the weeds and longish grass, it occurred to him that he had never even got a glimpse of the driver’s face.

  There was just enough light for him to pick up the vague outline of tree trunks and bushes. He tripped twice, then had to take several long strides to catch up to Shirley Ross, who was just a vague black shape moving quickly away from him.

  Once she stopped and he almost bumped into her, then she was moving again, though in a slightly different direction.

  Just as Jack Yocke was beginning to wonder if she knew where she was going, she slowed down and spoke softly: “Good morning, Admiral.”

  “Hello, Judith. Come sit over here by Stalin’s head.”

  “I don’t think we were followed, but they might have fooled me. They’ve been running spot surveillance on you since you arrived and they’re hunting really hard for me.”

  Yocke almost fell over the marble statue that lay on its side. He sat down with his back against it. Shirley sat on his right. Sitting facing them, with his back against one of the huge bronze statues, the reporter recognized Jake Grafton. He had a pair of heavy binoculars in his hands.

  “I brought your reporter back,” Shirley told Jake. “Where can we put him so that you and I can have a private conversation?”

  “Oh, I think he’s earned a little piece of the truth. He won’t print anything without my permission.”

  “You trust him?”

  Jake Grafton chuckled. “Beneath that polished, ambitious facade beats a pure and noble heart.”

  “Shmarov blew up the Serdobsk reactor.”

  “Sure,” Jake Grafton said. “And the KGB killed Kolokoltsev in Soviet Square. If we’re going to tell each other fairy stories, Judith, let’s go find a warm bar that serves good whiskey.”

  “Oh, you know we killed Kolokoltsev. After we did it the KGB breathed a collective sigh of relief—the man was an embarrassment to the Old Guard heavy hitters—and so I thought why not get some PR mileage out of it, muddy the water.”

  “How do you know about Serdobsk?”

  “The helicopter pilot that flew them down there is one of ours. He helps us pay off the authorities and smuggle Jews out. Then a few nights ago he was called at home and told to come in for a priority flight. Five men and their equipment to the nuclear power plant at Serdobsk. When he got there he realized things weren’t going right when his passengers shot one security guard and herded the other inside. So he waited a bit, then started the engines and got out of there. The reactor blew up about two hours later.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Jake Grafton asked, “Who does your man work for?”

  “KGB.”

  “And the passengers?”

  “Also KGB. The man in charge was a Colonel Gagarin.”

  “How do you know Gagarin blew the thing up?”

  “Obviously I’m adding two and two.”

  “Where’s Gagarin now?”

  “I don’t know. He never came back.”

  “He blew himself up?” Jake asked incredulously.

  “Well, he didn’t shoot the guard at the front gate for sport, then carry bags full of equipment inside to equip the local baseball team. But he and his men could have gotten out somehow and the KGB then eliminated them. I don’t know.”

  “And Shmarov?”

  “Gagarin was one of his lieutenants. He didn’t do anything that Shmarov didn’t know about and approve.”

  “It’s damn thin, Judith.”

  “Admiral, in this business you are never going to get sworn affidavits.”

  Jake Grafton could see her silhouette but not her face. She sounded tired. How many years had it been since he last saw her? He counted. Five. Five years running clandestine, covert operations, five years of false identities, deceit, risks calculated, chances taken, five years of stalking enemies of the Jewish state, five years of secret warfare…and she had been a covert operations professional when he first met her in Italy.

  “Let’s talk about Nigel Keren,” Jake Grafton said.

  “You guarantee that this reporter…?”

  “If he writes a word that I don’t approve of, you can shoot him anywhere you find him.”

  Jack Yocke didn’t think that was a joke.

  The woman was answering Jake: “…Keren was financing our efforts to get Jews out of Russia. He gave us about a billion dollars.”

  “A billion? That much money—”

  “Bribes,” she told him. “Expenses. We had to pay off the authorities, pay for everything.” She turned slightly, toward Yocke. “You were looking for Yakov Dynkin? He’s in Israel now. We’ll get his wife there as soon as we can. We bought him out of prison, bought a false passport and visa. He left from Sheremetyevo.”

  “Ker
en was a Jew,” Jack Yocke said.

  “Keren wanted to help. The CIA finally found out about it through the KGB and decided to stop Keren’s contributions. The Arabs want Jewish immigration to Israel stopped and the CIA was trying—is trying—to play all sides in the Middle East. Iraq and Syria are buffers against Shiite fundamentalism, but they are bitter enemies of Israel. Give everybody a little, preserve the status quo. They—”

  A shot rang out. Then another.

  A stream of muzzle flashes from the darkness. Jack Yocke threw himself sideways as a surge of adrenaline shot through him and tried to burrow under the marble statue of Stalin. Vaguely he was aware of a silenced, guttural buzzing beside him, more shots, then a weight fell across his legs. A heavy report sounded just beside him. More shots.

  And as suddenly as it began, it was over. In what, ten or fifteen seconds?

  “Judith? Judith?” Jake Grafton’s voice.

  Yocke tried to move but the weight on his legs held him. It was a body. “I’ve got her,” Jake Grafton said. “Get up, Jack.”

  Grafton had a small penlight. “She’s been shot. Judith, can you hear me?”

  Someone else was there. “Two CIA guys from the embassy.” Toad Tarkington’s voice. “They’re both dead. We’ve got to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Judith’s been shot,” Jake told him. Now Toad saw the revolver in his hand. “You and Yocke take her to the car and I’ll get the other guys.” He took the M-16 from Toad and slung it over his shoulder.

  She was heavy. Jack Yocke got her legs and Toad her shoulders. Toad wanted to go faster than Yocke could manage. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” Toad swore. “Move it!”

  They had to carry her a hundred yards. She seemed to weigh a ton and several times Yocke thought he might drop her. She was limp, unconscious. Somehow his savage grip on her bare, shaved legs seemed obscene, an invasion of her womanhood that added embarrassment to the stew of emotions surging through the reporter.

  “What happened?” Yocke asked Toad between breaths as they stumbled along.

  “Two men. I got one with the first shot and the other charged and exchanged shots with Judith. I think they shot each other or else Grafton or somebody drilled him. Hell, maybe I got him too, not that it matters a damn. I got a look at their bodies. Both CIA guys from the embassy.”