But this wasn’t President Clinton’s call. The interpreter hung up his phone and Yeltsin fell into his chair as he listened intently on his own instrument. Occasionally his eyes swung to Grafton. This went on for several minutes with Yeltsin grunting occasionally. Finally he replaced the telephone on its hook and swiveled his chair to face Grafton. He wiggled his finger at the interpreter and spoke.
The intrepreter said, “A news story has appeared in the Washington Post. You are quoted. Did you release a story to the newspaper?”
Jake nodded. “I did.”
Yeltsin listened to the answer and swiveled his chair nervously. He toyed with a pencil, then stared at it, finally replaced it. He said something to the interpreter.
“The president wishes to know why you released the story.”
“As we discussed last night, it is of critical importance that those weapons be recovered or rendered harmless. We cannot go after those weapons without a public explanation of our actions. So the truth must be told. The truth is that a small group of individuals here in Russia sold weapons to get money to overthrow the elected government. They murdered hundreds of thousands of people to cover up their crime. This is the story. The sooner the world knows it, the better—for Russia, for the United States, for the people of the Middle East.”
“You released this story?”
“Yes.” Of course he had discussed it with General Hayden Land, but both men had agreed it would be best if Jake took the responsibility. If the story came from Jake it was deniable in Washington, and that might well be the first reaction of panicky politicians with a genetic aversion to telling the public about disasters. In the ordinary course of things weeks might pass before they screwed up the courage to talk publicly about this one. Yet Hayden Land and Jake Grafton knew they didn’t have weeks to clean up this mess: at best, they had hours.
“What is going on, Admiral?” In Washington, Yeltsin meant.
“Sir, we discussed this matter last night. Nothing has changed. U.S. Air Force planes are flying in from Germany to take me and the other foreign military observers to Arabia. From there we will go to Iraq to recover the weapons. You agreed that Marshal Mikhailov and General Yakolev would accompany our group on behalf of the Russian Republic.”
“I don’t want them talking to reporters.”
“I understand. I promise that they won’t.”
“I should have been consulted before you talked to the press.”
Jake acknowledged this. He apologized, though not very convincingly.
Yeltsin didn’t look too put out—the story Yocke wrote couldn’t have been more favorable to him even if he had written it himself. Complete innocence was a rare commodity, one to be savored. Being the unwounded target of a cutthroat power play that misfired was even nicer.
“I have a suggestion,” Jake added. “In an hour or so you, Mr. President, are going to be besieged by reporters wanting your comments. The reporter who wrote this morning’s story for the Washington Post, Jack Yocke, is downstairs. Why not get him up here, give him an interview, and get your side of this on record before the spin doctors in Washington and Baghdad get into the act? Mr. Yocke is knowledgeable about this matter and sympathetic to your government.”
The mention of Baghdad did the trick. Saddam Hussein would be on camera as soon as he heard about the Post story. Hussein had just two options, as far as Jake could see: deny he had nuclear weapons or admit it and claim that the government of Russia sold them to him. That government, of course, was Boris Yeltsin. Which option Hussein picked would depend, Jake suspected, on the amount of time he still needed to get the nuclear weapons operational. The nearer he was to being ready to push the button the more likely he was to admit that he had them. But this was speculation, and just now Jake was trying to cover all the possibilities.
In minutes Jack Yocke was being ushered into the president’s office. He glanced at Rear Admiral Jake Grafton seated at an oblique angle from Yeltsin’s desk, then turned his attention to the Russian president.
Yocke knew exactly what his editor, Mike Gatler, wanted—a gold-plated confirmation of the first story—and he went after it without making any detours. Point by point he led Yeltsin through the story and scribbled his answers on a small steno pad.
Yes, it was true that Shmarov had used the KGB to collect money from Saddam Hussein. He sold things that belonged to the nation that he had no right to sell. That was a crime. Such a thing would be a crime in any nation on earth.
Yes, Shmarov allowed the removal of planeloads of weapons from the base at Petrovsk the day before the Serdobsk reactor was destroyed. Yes, Shmarov ordered Colonel Gagarin of the KGB to destroy the Serdobsk fast breeder reactor. And yes, Gagarin committed the crime. Yeltsin was not yet prepared to say what Shmarov did with the money he collected for the weapons—the government was investigating. The new fact to lead off this story—Yeltsin had ordered Marshal Mikhailov, commander of the Russian armed forces, and General Yakolev, commander of the Russian army, to accompany Rear Admiral Jake Grafton and a group of officers from Germany, Britain, France and Italy on a trip to Iraq to recover the stolen weapons.
“Stolen?” Yocke asked, looking up at Yeltsin.
“Stolen,” the interpreter repeated after a burst from Yeltsin. “The government of Russia has never sold and will never sell or give away nuclear weapons. We have given our solemn promise on that point to numerous governments throughout the world. We have signed treaties.”
Jack Yocke then asked the next logical question: what would Russia do to get the stolen weapons back if Saddam Hussein wasn’t gentleman enough to return them? The answer: “We are cooperating with the United States and the governments of other nations to secure the return of the stolen weapons.”
That should have been the end of it, but Yocke was Yocke and couldn’t resist asking one more. After a glance at Grafton, whose face showed no emotion whatever, he said, “General Shmarov allegedly died of a heart attack the night before last. Was it a heart attack?”
“I don’t know,” Boris Yeltsin said. “An autopsy is being performed.”
Yocke opened his mouth, glanced again at Grafton, then thanked President Yeltsin for the interview. He was ushered from the room. Jake Grafton remained seated.
Out in the waiting area Yocke grabbed his computer from the chair where he had placed it and opened it on his lap. In seconds he was tapping away while the U.S. marine captain, McElroy, watched over his shoulder.
When Yocke finished and looked up, McElroy and the four enlisted marines with him were no longer in the room. But there was a secretary behind the desk and she had a telephone in front of her. “May I make a collect telephone call?” he asked.
She merely grinned nervously at him.
“Use the phone?” He reached for it and raised his eyebrows.
She nodded. Yocke snagged the instrument and when he heard a voice addressing him in Russian, asked for the international operator.
The C-141 was somewhere over the Black Sea when Jack Yocke tired of looking out the window at the four F-15 escorts, their KC-135 tanker and the electronic warfare E-3 Sentry that formed this aerial armada. Jake Grafton obviously intended to make it to Arabia regardless of who had other ideas.
As they were boarding the airplane in Moscow, Yocke had asked, “You don’t really expect the Russian air force to try to shoot us down, do you?”
“With the story out, probably not. But we have Mikhailov and Yakolev. Who knows how that will play? It’s like trying to figure prison politics.”
Yocke had watched with growing wonder as the F-15s occasionally slipped in behind the tanker for fuel, then slid away afterward. The planes seemed to hang motionless in the sky, a perspective Yocke found unique and fascinating. The noise of their engines was masked by the background noise inside the C-141, so the show outside was a silent, effortless ballet.
He had already tried to interview Lieutenant Colonel Jocko West and the three bird colonels from Germany, Italy and France. None of t
hem wanted to talk, on or off the record. They did spell their names for him, for future reference. Then they shooed him off. As he turned to go back to his seat, West told him with a grin, “Reporters are like solicitors and doctors—the less you see of them the more tranquil your life.”
Marshal Mikhailov and General Yakolev were in the back of the compartment surrounded by four armed marines. Captain McElroy was seated nearby; he had merely moved his head from side to side about half a millimeter when Yocke looked his way.
Up front Jake Grafton was in conference with Toad Tarkington and Captain Tom Collins. Yocke stood in the aisle and stretched. Even after that hassle with the story last night and just two hours sleep, he wasn’t a bit tired. How often is it that you get to interview the president of a big nation and write a story that will make every front page on the planet, then jump on a plane and jet off to do another? Ah, he could get used to this.
Better enjoy it while it lasts, he told himself, because when it’s over it’ll be really over. He would be back scribbling crime stories and the city council news that was fit to print all too soon.
Yocke passed by Grafton and his colleagues and went forward to the cockpit. Rita Moravia was in the left seat. She turned and flashed him a grin.
“She’s not really a pilot, you know,” Jack told the air force major standing behind Rita. “She was Miss July of 1991.”
“Careful, friend,” the major rumbled. “This is the new modern American military. Comments with any sexist content whatsoever have been outlawed.”
“Sorry.”
“You want to remain politically correct and ideologically pure, don’t you? No more male and female pronouns. Everything is it. During the transition period you may say hit and sit instead of it, but no shit. One slip and the sexual gestapo will be on your case.”
“After they gets finished with you,” the copilot told him gravely, “you’ll have to Spiro Agnew.”
“Actually,” Rita Moravia said, patting her hair to ensure it was just so, “I was Miz July.”
“Where are we?” Yocke asked when the three stooges had calmed down. All he could see out the window was sea and sky.
“Thirty-three thousand feet up,” the copilot told him, and laughed shamelessly at his own wit.
The reporter groaned. Look out, Saddam! The Americans are coming again. Yocke left the flight deck and went back to the cabin.
Jake Grafton was seated beside Tarkington. Collins was back in his own seat reading something, so Jack sat on the arm of the seat across the aisle from the admiral. “How’s planning for the war?”
Jake Grafton examined Yocke’s face. “Our agreement is still in effect, right?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“I mention it because last night you flapped your mouth to your editor about General Shmarov’s death. That subject was and is off limits.”
“Admiral, Gatler was on the fence over whether or not to run the story. I had to give him a hot off-the-record fact so he would think I had a lot more, that we were scraping the icing off a very big cake. And that tidbit about Shmarov was the only hot fact I could think of just then. I assumed you wanted the story in the paper or you wouldn’t have bothered to order it”—Yocke snapped his fingers—“like a ham and cheese on rye.”
“Then you tried to inch onto that subject with Yeltsin this afternoon with that last question, on the off chance he might spill his guts on the spot.”
“Admiral, I—”
Jake cut him off. “I saw you give me that guilty look, should I or shouldn’t I, just before you put your mouth in motion. Either you play the game my way or you can zip right over to the commercial airport when we land and ride your plastic right on back to Moscow. We are playing with my ball, Jack.”
“Yessir. Your ball, your rules. But for my info, are you ever going to let me loose on the CIA’s creative use of binary poisons?”
Grafton shrugged. “I don’t know. Doubtful. That situation will probably solve itself.”
“ ‘Solve itself,’ ” Yocke repeated sourly, and drew in air for an oration on the hypocrisy of not airing our dirty linen while we launder other people’s.
He never got the chance. Jake jerked his thumb aft. “Those two are a part of our international team.”
“The two Russian prisoners, you mean?” Yocke said, and instantly regretted it. Jake Grafton’s gray eyes looked like river ice in winter.
“This may be just a story for you,” Grafton said, almost a whisper, “but there’s a bit more at stake for everybody else.”
“I’m not writing fiction, Admiral. Not intentionally, anyway.”
“I’m not asking you to. But no interviews with them until I say so, if and when.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Yocke tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice and succeeded fairly well. Tarkington gave him the eye, though.
Grafton went back to studying the photographs that lay in his lap. He used a magnifying glass.
“Aerial photos?” Yocke asked.
“Satellite.”
“May I look?”
Grafton passed him a couple. They looked like shots from just a couple thousand feet above an airfield. He could see the aircraft clearly, the power carts, the revetments, even people and the shadows they cast. “These are really clear,” he murmured. “Are the missiles here at this base?”
“I think so. The trouble with satellite surveillance is that you can rarely be absolutely certain of anything. It’s true, at times the resolution is so good that you can read license plate numbers, and if people like Saddam think we can see everything all the time, that’s just fine with us. But we can’t. There are very real technical limitations. The art is in the interpretation of what you can see.”
“So are we going to hit this base with an air strike?”
“That would be the easy way,” Jake acknowledged, then selected another photo and bent to examine it. When he finally straightened he added, “Nobody ever accused us of doing anything the easy way.”
Jack Yocke returned the photos and went back to his seat by the window. He sat staring at the two fighters he could see. They were in loose formation, so loose one was over a mile away.
The sun was setting, firing the tops of the clouds below with pinks and oranges. Beneath that the sea was a deep, deep purple, almost black. He stared downward, between the clouds. That looked like…maybe it was land. Were they over Turkey? Or was that ocean down there in the gloom?
He finally reclined his seat and tried to sleep.
Up forward Toad Tarkington muttered to his boss, “You may trust that jackass, but I don’t.”
“To which of our jackasses are you referring?”
“Yocke.”
“Oh, he’s got his rough edges,” Jake said, “but he’s an honest man. Rather like you in that regard.” When he saw that Toad was at a loss for a reply, Jake grinned and added, “You guys are Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. Amy says you’re both fun to have around. She’s still trying to decide which of you is Tweedledumber.”
“Thanks, CAG.”
“Anytime, Toad.”
23
The command bunker at the sprawling military base outside of Riyadh looked like a Star Wars movie set. A long rack of television monitors mounted above a huge wall chart of the region displayed everything from the current CNN broadcast to real-time satellite ambient light and infrared views of selected areas inside Iraq, computer presentations of Iraqi and U.N. troop positions, computer presentations of the vehicles moving near Baghdad and Samarra, aircraft aloft over Iraq, Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf, ships at sea in the Gulf—everything a commander might want to know was on one of those screens. At computer stations facing the screens were the men and women who punched the keys that made it all work.
Just now all eyes in the room were on the CNN monitor. Jake Grafton and the European colonels stood together in a knot staring upward at the jowly visage of Saddam Hussein, who was busy calling the Washington Post and Boris Yeltsin liars
. “Iraq does not possess nuclear weapons. Lies have been told. Yeltsin is desperate, attempting to use Iraq as a scapegoat to prevent political collapse in Russia.”
“What do you think?” Jake asked Jocko West.
“If he has trained Russian technicians, I think he can shoot the missiles on launchers any time. At best, within hours. But he probably only has two or three missiles on their Russian Army launchers. The launchers were just too bulky and heavy to transport. He took as many missiles as he could, probably intending to put them on launchers he already has. And he took warheads, which are small and could be loaded quickly onto his planes. I suspect that he’s playing for time in order to load the missiles he stole on old Scud launchers and adapt the warheads for use on his missiles.”
Colonel Rheinhart agreed. “If he has the people and the proper tools, he can begin placing nuclear warheads on the Scuds in a few days, arm perhaps thirty Scuds in ten days or so. Five or six ready-to-shoot weapons are not enough for a war.”
The Italian and Frenchman nodded at this assessment. Jake Grafton wasn’t so sure. A lunatic might start a war even if he had only one bullet.
As Jake Grafton stared at Saddam’s image on the monitor, he reviewed what he knew about the Iraqi dictator. Born poor, poor as only an Arab can be, in a squalid village a hundred miles north of Baghdad, he went to live with an uncle in the capital at the age of ten, about 1947. His uncle was the author of a screed entitled Three Things That God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies. This tract became young Saddam’s Mein Kampf. Within months, according to his official biography, he killed his first man.
When he was twenty, the young thug joined the Iraqi Baath party, where he became a triggerman disposing of the party’s enemies, of whom there were many. One of the people he murdered was his brother-in-law. Two years later, in 1959, he bungled an assassination attempt aimed at the current Iraqi dictator, General Abdul Kassem, and was shot by Kassem’s guards. Somehow he escaped and fled to Egypt.
In 1963 the Baath party successfully murdered Kassem and took power. Saddam returned to Iraq and ended up in prison nine months later when the Baathists were overthrown by an army junta.
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