Red Horseman

by Stephen Coonts

  Jack Yocke just shook his head. “What’s happening?”

  “It was screwed up from the beginning,” Toad muttered. “The warheads are out of bigger, heavier Soviet missiles. Saddam wanted them installed in the Scuds but they wouldn’t fit. World-class problem solver that he is, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “So he shot two Russians?”

  “To motivate the others. Terrific leadership technique, huh?”

  “How about the missiles they have sitting out there? Why didn’t he roll them out and tell the world to kiss its ass good-bye?”

  Toad leaned closer to Yocke’s ear. “Those missiles don’t have any guidance systems. Oh, the warheads are there, the fuel and all the rest of it. But without guidance systems…”

  And Jack Yocke nodded. Russia, the land where nothing works, where shortages are endemic. It was sort of funny, really. Saddam, The Awesome, makes a sharp deal and the Russians give him the shaft.

  “Can I print this?”

  “That’s up to the admiral.”

  “This whole…thing, a goddamn fuck-up?”

  “Sometimes the best-laid plans…”

  A half-million Russians dead, another half-million or million or two million doomed, Americans dying outside, Iraqis…all because some Russian politicians desperately needed money and Saddam Hussein wants to be the Arab Stalin!

  And he himself had just killed two men. So he could go on breathing and write the big stories…about how fucked up the world is!

  Yocke walked over to a corner and plopped down. Suddenly he had a raging thirst. He got out his canteen and took a long drink, then another. He was nursing the water and listening to the translators when the first television crew arrived. The camera man was dragging the end of a cable, which went out the door. Another man set up some lights.

  “Can we film in here?” the reporter asked Grafton.

  “Have right at it,” the admiral said, and got out of his chair. “Interview these Russians.” Jake gestured at Toad. The two of them left the room together.

  There was a massive steel beam that formed an angle with one of the upright supports on the wall. Staring at it and listening to the CNN reporter’s breathless delivery into the camera, Jack Yocke got an idea. He removed the magazine from his weapon. Then he wedged the silencer and barrel of the piece into the junction of the beam and angular support. Now he pulled with all his might. He paused, braced his feet, then put his weight into it. The barrel bent. With sweat popping on his forehead he made a supreme effort. The bend got bigger. When the barrel had bent about thirty degrees the stock shattered. Yocke removed the remains of the submachine gun from the joint, inspected it, then tossed it on the floor.

  Everyone was watching the television reporter interview the Russian technicians.

  Jack Yocke wandered out of the room with his hands in his pockets, lost in thought.

  The air base was secure. For the moment. Approximately a hundred casualties, about thirty of them fatal. The 101st Airborne assault commander wanted to be gone in three hours, at least an hour before he estimated that the Iraqis could put together an armored assault. Although he had real-time communications via satellite with headquarters in Arabia and thought he had the air power available to stop any conceivable Iraqi military effort, he didn’t want to take any more chances or casualties than he had to.

  Jake Grafton listened to the report and nodded. He had no questions. The little knot of officers stood in one corner of the hangar watching technicians load the warheads onto pallets with forklifts. Through the open doors came the whine of helicopter engines at idle and the pulsating thud of turning rotors. This noise almost drowned out the distant bark of artillery, which was shelling known remnants of Iraqi forces to prevent their concentration. Almost drowned it out, but not quite.

  Someone handed Jake Grafton a paper cup full of coffee. Beside him someone else lit a cigarette.

  “Can you spare the rest of that pack of cigarettes?”

  “Sure, Admiral.”

  “And the lighter.”

  The staff officer handed it over. “I didn’t know you smoked, sir.”

  “I don’t.”

  As he walked across the hangar Jake saw Jack Yocke standing with his hands in his pockets. He looked tired and pensive, the flesh of his face tightly drawn across the bones. “You okay?” Jake asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come with me,” Jake said and walked on.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Yocke told the admiral’s back. Jake Grafton acted like he hadn’t heard. Yocke quickened his pace to catch up. “I’ve had enough.”

  The admiral didn’t even look at him. “Who hasn’t?” he muttered.

  The marine guard outside the door of the room where General Yakolev and Marshal Mikhailov were being held saluted Jake as he approached. Rita Moravia was standing beside him, and she also saluted.

  “Are you injured?” Jake Grafton asked. She had blood on the front of her flight suit.

  “No, sir. We arrived fifteen minutes ago. Our pilot was killed by small-arms fire.”

  “Is the machine airworthy?”

  “I think so, sir. We took a couple of other hits, but nothing vital. They’re refueling now from a bladder that one of the Sky Crane’s brought in. We’ll be ready to leave in another fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Fine. Have the Russians had anything to say?”

  “No, sir. Lieutenant Dalworth is inside with them now, just in case.”

  Jake nodded and opened the door. Jack Yocke followed him into the room. Dalworth stood up. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Let me have a few minutes alone with these gentlemen.”

  “Yessir.”

  When the door closed behind Dalworth, Jake sat down at the table across from Yakolev and passed him the pack of cigarettes and the lighter. Yocke took a chair in a corner.

  “A last cigarette, Admiral?” Nicolai Yakolev muttered. He took one and offered the pack to Mikhailov, who also stuck one in his mouth.

  “Perhaps. We’ll get to that.”

  “At least these aren’t Russian cigarettes.”

  Yakolev glanced at Yocke, who was getting out his notebook. Mikhailov concentrated on savoring his cigarette and ignored Jake. He looked exhausted, shrunken, the lines around his eyes and mouth now deeply cut slashes. He looked old. The marshal didn’t speak English, Jake remembered.

  “Who is he?” Yakolev inclined his head an eighth of an inch at Yocke.

  “A reporter.”

  “A reporter?”

  “That’s right. His specialty is news that isn’t fit to print.”

  Yakolev closed his eyes. He took an experimental drag on the cigarette, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, then exhaled through his nose.

  “So explain to me, General,” Jake said, “how the hell you got yourself into this fucking mess.”

  “You want the history of Russia in the twentieth century? For an American newspaper? Will this be deep background or a Sunday think-piece?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Another philosopher,” Yakolev said heavily. “I give you some good advice, Admiral. While you wear that uniform you cannot afford to be a philosopher, to ponder the nuances of good and evil. You do the best for your country that you can and live or die with the results. That’s what the uniform means.”

  “Blowing up a reactor? Poisoning hundreds of thousands of your own countrymen? You did that for your country?”

  Yakolev smoked the first cigarette in silence, then lit another off the butt of the first one and puffed several times to ensure it was lit. Under his heavy eyebrows his eyes scanned Jake Grafton’s face carefully.

  “Russia is disintegrating,” the Russian general said finally. “Very soon it will be like Somalia, without government, without law, without civilization, without food for its people. We are not talking about a return to the Dark Ages, Admiral, but a return to the Stone Age. Roving bands of armed thugs, mass starvation, epidemics, a complete breakdown of the social
order—to survive, future Russians will become vicious, starving rats fighting on the dung heap.”

  Yakolev glanced at Mikhailov, then continued. “Already it has begun in the countryside, in the republics, in little towns in Russia that your news media does not cover, on the farms where there is no one to see the babies and old people starve, no one to watch or care as people die of pneumonia and tuberculosis. No agriculture, no food, no fuel, no transportation, no medical care, no electricity, no one to protect those who cannot protect themselves, violence leading to ethnic warfare, feuds building toward genocide—it is here now!

  “In Moscow the ministries are corrupt from top to bottom. A small number of bureaucrats trade in dollars and live well while the rest of Russia—the rest of the Soviet Union—sinks deeper and deeper into the morass of starvation. This is what the future looks like when this grand scheme you call civilization collapses.”

  He shifted his weight in his chair. Mikhailov said something, to which Yakolev gave a short reply. Then he turned his attention back to Jake. “You Americans, with your television eyes. You look at Yeltsin and expect him to create miracles with his mouth! Those political swine—hot air is all they are good for.”

  Yakolev leaned forward and reached for another cigarette. “That is why.”

  In the silence that followed, the sounds of a helicopter going overhead penetrated the room, followed by distant explosions.

  “Do you have any regrets?” Jake Grafton asked when it became obvious Yakolev felt his explanation was sufficient.

  “Regrets?” Yakolev said the word bitterly. “Oh, yes!” His head bobbed. “I wish the God the Communists swore did not exist had given this stupid sack of shit sitting beside me some balls. If he had had some balls we would have shot Yeltsin. We would have thrown the selfish swine out of the Congress of People’s Deputies. We would have gone through the ministries and shot every corrupt bastard that we could lay hands on. We would have hunted down the thugs terrorizing the countryside and slaughtered them like rabbits. Then we would have made the farmers grow food and the trains run and people would have had food to eat. Regrets? To watch your country die while the politicians argue and the cowards wring their hands? Yes, Admiral, I have regrets.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot him first?”

  “That is what I should have done.” Yakolev leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face. “Ahh, I am old and tired. I have lived too long. I have seen too much. I am ready to die.”

  “The world is going to hell, so you played God.”

  “You Americans have a phrase that seems a perfect reply to sanctimonious comments like that: fuck you.”

  “You won’t get off that easy,” Jake Grafton said. His voice had an edge to it. “Russia is in the mess it’s in because of people like you, because czars and dictators and administrators used pens to authorize murder. ‘It had to be done.’ ‘I had to do it.’ ‘I am responsible and I know the way things have to be, so they have to die!’

  “You Commie messiahs think your people are pigs. For them you have the profoundest contempt. They are too ignorant, too stupid, too blind to see what’s good for them, so they must be taken care of by wise men like you. You feed, clothe, and house them, keep them warm in the winter, and slaughter them when necessary. All for their own good. It’s just too goddamn bad they don’t understand how wonderful it is that learned, wise, responsible men like you are willing to get their hands dirty running the hog farm.”

  Jake Grafton leaned forward in his chair. “What if you’re wrong?”

  “We weren’t wrong.”

  “Don’t give me that shit!” Grafton roared. “Lenin was wrong, Stalin was wrong, you’re wrong! I’m sick to death of you self-anointed messiahs willing to murder half the people on earth to save the other half, the half you’re in. You make me want to vomit!”

  Yakolev said nothing, merely reached for another cigarette.

  “We have another one out there”—Jake pointed toward the hangar bay—“ready to slaughter everyone alive who doesn’t agree with him. Now I tell you this—it’s time for all of us little people to take a page from the book of you prophets of doom and damnation.” He stared at Yakolev.

  The Russian sneered. “So you brought two Russian villains to Iraq to parade in front of your cameras. The folks at home can see the dirty devils on CNN, prisoners of the victorious, virtuous Americans.”

  “No. I brought you here to help me solve a problem. I need your help.”

  “Help?” Yakolev laughed, a dry, vicious bark.

  “As one soldier to another.”

  The laughter died. Nicolai Yakolev’s face twisted again. “You tell me I have no honor, then you appeal to it.” He spit on the table, in Jake’s direction. “I am not a coward! I am not afraid of death. I do not fear a bullet.”

  “I know that,” Jake said gently.

  “I have two sons and a daughter. They have children.”

  “A trial…”

  “When?”

  “You’ll know when the time comes.”

  Yakolev glanced again at Jack Yocke, then shrugged. “I’ll think about it. For you personally I would do nothing.”

  Jake Grafton rose from the chair and started for the door. “Come on, Jack.”

  Out in the hangar bay Yocke wanted to know, “What was that all about?”

  “About doing the right thing, for a change.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  The room had a table in it about eight feet long. And chairs. At one end of the table sat Saddam Hussein, who glowered at Jake Grafton and Jack Yocke when they came in. He roared something in Arabic. The translator said to Jake, “He wants to know if you are in charge, sir.”

  “I’m one of the officers in charge, yes,” Jake said as he motioned to the two soldiers on guard duty to leave the room.

  Hussein ignored Yocke, who leaned against the wall opposite the translator, and directed his remarks at Jake. “The United States makes war upon Iraq,” the translator said. “You meddle in affairs that are none of your business.”

  Hussein’s hands were bound with a single plastic tie in front of him, so he waved them, now stopped and shook his doubled-up fists: “How long, how long, until you nonbelievers stop raping our daughters? How long until you stop defiling the sacred places? How long until you leave the children of God to worship as the Prophet taught us?”

  Toad came over to Jake and handed him a pistol, a 9mm automatic. “We took this off him.”

  Saddam thundered on: “You violate the sovereignty of this nation, of this people. You shoot down Iraqi airplanes over Iraq, you send inspectors to hunt through our offices, you—”

  Jake Grafton fired the pistol into the ceiling. The deafening report stopped the flow of words.

  The spent casing slapped against the wall and fell to the floor with a tinny, metallic sound.

  “I have a question,” Jake said softly to the translator. “Ask him how many Iraqis he has killed with this pistol.”

  The translator did so.

  Hussein sat in silence, saying nothing.

  “How many Iranians?”

  Silence.

  “How many Kuwaitis?

  “How many Kurds?

  “How many Shiites?”

  Unbroken silence.

  “If you don’t know or can’t remember how many men you have personally murdered, perhaps you can tell me how many have died at your orders?”

  Saddam Hussein’s eyes were mere slits.

  “When you are dead will they hold a great funeral, or will they drag your corpse through the streets and burn it on a dung heap?”

  When he heard the translation Saddam Hussein opened his mouth to speak, then apparently decided not to. He looked at the translator, at Jack Yocke, then let his gaze return to Jake Grafton.

  The automatic was heavy. Jake Grafton stared at it, examined the safety, the hammer, the maker’s name stamped into the metal. Then slowly he removed his
own pistol, a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, and hefted it thoughtfully.

  He laid the revolver about a foot from his right hand, then gave the automatic a gentle shove with his left. It slid down the table and came to rest about a foot or so in front of the Iraqi dictator, the barrel pointing out to one side.

  “Let’s settle this right here,” Jake said. “You have killed many men—one more certainly won’t matter on Allah’s scales. And an unbeliever to boot. Go ahead! You grab for yours and I’ll grab for mine and we’ll kill each other.”

  As the translator rattled this off Jake studied the Iraqi’s face. It had gone white. Beads of sweat were coalescing into little rivulets that ran down beside Hussein’s nose and dripped off his mustache. Stains were rapidly spreading across his shirt from under each armpit.

  “You’ve seen cowboy movies, haven’t you? Let’s shoot it out, you simple, filthy son of a bitch.”

  Hussein sat frozen. He didn’t even glance at the automatic within his grasp.

  “Pick it up,” Jake Grafton roared.

  Hussein sat silently while Jake regained his composure. He took several deep breaths, then said, “This is your last chance to go out like a man. The next time you will get the same chance you gave your minister of health, the same chance you give the people you send your thugs to kill, the same chance you were going to give the people those bombs out there were meant for, which is none at all. This is your only chance!”

  Seconds passed. A tic developed in Hussein’s left eyelid. As the twitching became worse, he raised his hands and rubbed his eye. Finally he lowered his hands back to his lap.

  Jake reached for the revolver. As he grasped it the Iraqi started visibly. The admiral rose from his chair, and holding the revolver in his right hand, retrieved the automatic. He stuck it into his belt.

  After one last look at the dictator, Jake Grafton turned and left the room.

  Jack Yocke had stood throughout this exchange. Now he pulled a chair away from the table and dropped into it. He got out his notebook and mechanical pencil and very carefully wrote the date on a clean sheet of paper. Beside it he wrote the dictator’s name.

  He looked at Hussein, who was staring at the open door. An armed American soldier stood there gazing back at him.