Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - Red Horseman

by Red Horseman (lit)

  I've got to trust my boss, but who else? I can't call friends in the FBI, in the CIA, people I've known for years.

  If there is a small cabal in the CIA, only the people involved know it is a cabal. Everyone else thinks they are doing their duty when they report conversations, fill out reports, do what they are told to do.

  That's the problem." "How do you want me to report toyou?" Harper asked.

  "Well, written reports would be okay.

  Mail them to my wife. She'll see that I get them wherever I am. I may be out of town for a few weeks." He gave Harper his address.

  When Jake and Toad left at four in the morning, Rita was asleep on the front seat of the car.

  Under the streetlight Toad said, "I have a real bad feeling about this, Admiral. If Harper steals money or screws up some accounts, you and I will end up in prison." "I hope they give us separate cells," Jake told him. "A rear admiral ought to rate a private cell." YLTSIN SAID yFs. Two HOURS AGO muttered.

  "Sure took him long enough," Jake Grafton if I were sitting on all those weapons I'd have got a hot seat months ago." General Brown consulted his watch- "Fifteen hours ago ere attacked. The Russian government two army bases w guns, artillery, APCS and says the attackers stole machine at'l'east ten truckloads of ammuniti0nTruckloads?" "Yeah," General Brown said. "They killed sixty s tdiers blew up all but the trucks at one base, fifty at another, and and APC'S they drove out." Who?". Maybe Criminal gangs, maybe Armey.

  "They aren't sure Idiers who are starting their nians again. Maybe some ex-sO d to the map On own private army. I General Brown steppe nted. "Here and here." the wall and Poi eat, he said, "The CIA'S man When he had resumed his s went over yesterday." "Tenney?" "Yes. He'll meet you at the embassy.

  Ambassador Lancaster will brief you. The president wants the nukes neutralized and the Russian government strengthened. Talk to those people.

  Let us know what you need to do the job." Jake Grafton didn't laugh. it was too ridiculous for that.

  How in hell had he gotten into the middle of this mess?

  "And," General Brown continued, "if You can Piss on any Of those Outlaw or rebel gangs, that'll be all right too." His stomach felt like there was a rock in it.

  "Yessir," he managed.

  "The air force will have a C-141 at Andrews in six hours.

  Be on it." "Aye aye, sir." Albert Sidney Brown came around the desk and held out his hand. "Good luck, Admiral.

  "Don't worry, sir. I'll take my rabbit's foot along." "You're going to need more than a rabbit's foot,- Callie told Jake as she passed him aspirin and toilet articles to Put in his bag. He had just mentioned his Parting remark to General Brown. She didn't think it was very funny. As she watched him stuff underwear around his Smith and Wesson com357 Magnum and shoulder holster, she tartly added, "You're also going to need more than that little Popgun." She pushed her hair back out of her eyes.

  "Oh, You men!

  Jetting off into the middle of a revolution. It's so damn Pathetic." "It isn't really a revolution," her husband replied as he folded underwear around a box Of Pistol ammunition and added it to the bag.

  "Yeltsin's still in the driver's seat, still in control.

  *'For how long? What does anyone think you and Toad can really accomplish?" "Oh, we'll have some help. Too much probably.

  we can just prod the Russians into- But if "Don't change the subject," Callie said sharply. "You know precisely what I mean. Even with the entire United States Army over there You'd still be outnumbered ten to one. Sending you and Toad over there is some kind of insane joke." "UmPh," Jake grunted.

  Toad Tarkington's opinion had been more colorful but "Once ag no more optimistic: ain our politicians are saving the world from foreign politicians stupider than they are.

  And we nincompoops in uniform smartly salute and grab ankles. BOHICA!" Ah yes, that lovely old acronym, BOHICA-BEND Over, Here It Comes Again.

  Callie jerked a pair of trousers away from him that he was rolling up.

  She folded them carefully and handed them back.

  "Not that they'll send the entire army," she said.

  "You'll be lucky to get two privates and a corporal. One of the privates will he the cook and the other will peel potatoes. Presumably the corporal will have a few minutes a day to help you and Toad when he isn't busy supervising the privates." She sat heavily. "Oh, Jake. Why you?" He sat down beside her and took her in his arms.

  "Everything will work out. It always does." "No. Everything doesn't always work out. I'm really tired of hearing that trite little phrase." "You know me, Callie," Jake Grafton said. "Trust me." "Hey, babe. It's me, Toad. We're leaving today." "Now?" Rita asked.

  Toad gripped the telephone tightly.

  "Plane leaves Andrews at six," "I'll see if I can get the rest of the day off," she said.

  "You're at home?

  "Yeah. Packing." "If I don't call in ten minutes I'm on my way home." "Okay. I I "I have a bad feeling about this, Toad." "It'll be okay." "I love Y." "I know that, babe. And I love you." "See you in a white." The C-141 headed north on the great circle route to Moscow. After it climbed above the stratus clouds covering the East Coast of the United States, it flew in a clear sky illuminated by the sun low on the horizon.

  Jake Grafton came up to the flight deck and visited a moment with the pilots, then stood looking at the va/s of the sky. "It doesn't ever get dark at this time of year at these latitudes," the copilot told him.

  "How many times have you guys flown this route?" Jake asked.

  "Couple dozen times for me, sir," the pilot, an air force major, replied. He nodded at the copilot, a first lieutenant.

  "This is his second trip." Cold. The sky looked bleak and cold, even with the sun shining. The cockpit was a tiny capsule of life adrift in an indifferent universe.

  Jake shivered once, then returned to the little passenger section. There were only eight seats and Toad was asleep comin one of them. In the next row the liftmaster, a senior sergeant, also snoozed.

  The rest of the plane was filled with military rations bound for orphanages and soup kitchens for the elderly. The admiral opened the door to the cargo r compartment and stood there looking. Overhead lights illuminated the cargo compartment and the sea of boxes stacked on pallets.

  The incongruity of the situation appalled him, filled him with a sadness devoid of hope that seemed to drain the energy from him. Insanity, Callie had said. Yes, that was the word. A nation with enough nuclear weapons to kill half the life on earth and doom the rest couldn't feed its old people, its children.

  Jake closed the door and sagged into a seat.

  He tried to sleep but it wouldn't come. Finally he turned so he could look out the window at the cold, infinite sky.

  At Sheremetyevo Airport near Moscow, the C-141 was parked next to a Soviet military terminal across the field from the regular passenger terminal. Jake and Toad exited the plane through the rear cargo door after it had been opened. Although the plane had been airborne for twelve hours and it was 6 A.m. in Washington, it was two o'clock in the afternoon here on a pleasant summer day. Small puffy clouds floated in a blue sky. They stood on the concrete ramp beside their bags and watched a limo driving pop" toward them. It came to a halt and a man in a U.s. naval officer's uniform climbed out.

  "Lieutenant Dalworth, sir," said the young officer after he had saluted.

  He pulled open the back door of the car.

  As Jake and Toad climbed in he added, "You don't have to go through customs." "How come?" "I arranged it, sir. I've become pretty good friends with several of the customs and emigration guys." "Jake was taken slightly aback.

  "Don't worry, sir. With diplomatic passports, the whole deal is just a formality- I've partied with those guys, given 'them some sacks of groceri I es and gotten drunk with them.

  They know I won't screw em." Three minutes later, after Jake's and Toad's baggage was Joaded in the trunk, Dalworth climbed in and got the car in motion.

  Toad Ta
rkington mused, "Dalworth. Dalworth.

  By any chance, are you Spiro Dalworth?" A look of discomfort crossed the young officer's face.

  Tarkington grinned broadly and seized the lieutenant's hand. He pumped it heartily. "As I live and breathe." Jake Grafton recognized the name too.

  Lieutenant Dal worth had been assigned to the navy's public relations staff in New York City when he somehow wound up on a television talk show panel discussing "women in the modern military." After thirty minutes of weathering abuse from a prominent feminist fanatic who shared the panel with him, Dalworth lost his temper. His parting shot at her had been, "Oh, Spiro Agnew." Three days later someone told the female warrior that the former vice president's name was an anagram for "grow a pem." She charged into the navy's cubbyhole office in the Manhattan federal building with a television reporter and cameraman in tow and proceeded to assault Dalworth with an umbrella while she hurled invective. After she shouted herself out and departed, a stunned Dalworth told the re porter that the feminist had a brain like a prune and a body to match.

  The episode was marvelous television.

  Alas, Dalworth's new status as a media celebrity interfered with his work and embarrassed the navy, still reeling from the 1991 Tailhook Convention scandal, so now he was a very junior naval attached at the American embassy in Moscow, eight time zones away from the nearest militant feminist armed with a television camera and umbrella.

  "That whole thing was almost eight months ago," Dalworth Muttered, "You'd think people would at least start to forget." He was a rangy Young man, several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and bulging biceps. At some point in his athletic past his nose had been slightly rearranged, and the effect was a memorable face. Not hand.

  some, but unique.

  "What an honor, SP-IRO! I sure am pleased to meetcha," Toad enthused. He playfully tapped Dalworth on the shoulder.

  "Did you have a good flight?" Dalworth asked.

  "Terrific. Filet mignon over the North Pole and all the free champagne we could drink." "The cold chicken box lunch, huh?" "Yeah. You wonder what the air force does to the chicken to make it taste so bad." "Ever been to Moscow before?" "Neither one of us," Toad said.

  "Sleepy?" After a glance at Grafton, Toad told him, "Not too."...Drive you around the downtown a little before we go to Fort Apache. was Fort Apache, Jake knew, was the complex behind the embassy where the residents lived, a tag that came straight from the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx.

  "Give You the hundred-ruble tour." The endless rows of concrete apartment buildings were soon in view. Nine and a half million people, Jake knew, lived in Moscow, most of them stuffed into tiny apartments in these crumbling mausoleums.

  Yet on a sunny June day they didn't took bad. Almost as if he could read Jake's thoughts, Daiworth said, "Place looks a lot different in the winter.

  Then it's the devil's own refrigerator, gray and terminally dismal." Soon the car was bucketing down a broad boulevard q POW toward the center of the city, a chip afloat in a stream of little sedans and huge trucks, all emitting a noxious miasma that stung the eyes and throat.

  "Bad pollution, about like Delhi, India. Sorta like Seoul without the kimchi.dalworth piloted them into the center of the city. Soon they were circling the brick walls and onion-topped towers of the Kremlin.

  Jake's eye was caught by the cars on the side of the road with their hoods up and people bending over the engines. Someone seemed to be broken down in very block.

  Dalworth pointed out the naked pedestals where once statues stood. "See those? They even tore down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in front of KGB Headquarters, presumably while the KGB types watched out the windows.

  Now I'll show you my favorite place in Moscow. I found this the other day when I was out walking." After three more stoplights, he turned and crossed the Moskva River and went down one of the side streets. In one of the river channels a cruise ship sat listing in the mud, gutted and abandoned.

  Ahead across the sidewalk was a park. A dirt road for park maintenance vehicles was blocked by steel crowd-control railings. Dalworth drove the car onto the sidewalk, stopped, then got out and moved the railings. He pulled the car through, then replaced them.

  The park was young trees and grass, but the grass was half weeds and hadn't been mowed. Here and there women with strollers sat taking the sun. After Dalworth drove about a hundred yards, he pulled the car to a stop.

  Just to the left, surrounded on three sides by more hapazardly placed crowd-control railings, stood three huge bronze statues amid the dandelions and grass. A smaller marble statue lay on its side in front of the others. Behind them half-hidden by the foliage of the trees one could glimpse rows of apartments.

  "This is where they dumped some of the statues," Dalworth explained. He parked the car and the three men got out.

  Jake Grafton ran his hands over the marble defaced with swatches of paint. The lower portion of the statue was broken off and lying in the grass. He moved to the head and stared down into the paint-daubed face of Josef Stalin.

  "Who are these others?" The standing bronzes were three or four times life size.

  "They look to me to be three likenesses of the same guy, Admiral," Dalworth said.

  "Dzerzhinsky, I think, but I don't know for sure. Maybe Lenin with hair. For sure he was some big Commie mucky-muck that they were tired of looking at and hearing about. He looks sort of like a Slavic Thomas Jefferson, doesn't be?" "More like Jefferson Davis," Jake Grafton murmured, and looked around.

  "What's that over there?" He pointed at a huge gray concrete structure three or four stories high a hundred yards away, beside the river. The parking lots were empty, and even from this distance he could see the building was shabby, the facade crumbling.

  "Some kind of cultural thing. Just beyond it across that boulevard is the entrance to Gorky Park. See that huge gate?" 1.umm." Jake Grafton turned back to Stalin. He ran his bands over the marble and looked again into the stone eyes, 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," was Toad Tarkington said.

  Lieutenant Spiro Dalworth was more down-to-earth. "Be fun to have one of these out in the backyard, wouldn't it?

  To piss on whenever you felt in the mood.

  U.s. Ambassador Owen Lancaster was not a career diplomat-rather he was one of those political insiders who had been repeatedly appointed to key embassies by both Democratic and Republican administrations. His political affiliation was a subject that never seemed to get mentioned by anyone, even the press. In short, he was The Establishment from fingertips to toenails.

  And he looked it, Jake Grafton concluded.

  Tall, lean, Patrician and impeccably turned out in a tailor-made wool suit and a handmade silk tie, Owen Lancaster looked exactly like central casting's idea of an heir to a nineteenthcentury Yankee merchant's fortune, which he was. it pow seemed as if this room in Spaso House were designed around him: the lighting, color scheme, expensive furniture and carpeting-the room was an exquisite tribute to the interior designer's art. God would have a living room like this if He had the money.

  In a chair to the left of the ambassador sat one of the career diplomats, a woman in her mid to late thirties maybe early forties-it was hard to tell. She wore modest, expensive clothes and no makeup that Jake could see. Her name was His. Agatha Hempstead, with the emphasis on the His. She hadn't yet opened her mouth but Jake Grafton already suspected that she was three or four notches smarter than Old Money Lancaster.

  On the other side of the ambassador sat Herb Tenney.

  He was wearing a suit and tie this afternoon and looked as if he had merely dropped in to pass a few social moments.

  After he had smiled and nodded pleasantly to Jake and Toad, he devoted his attention to the ambassador's pleasantries.

  I don't pretend to knowjust what instructions you have been given in Washington, Admiral," the ambassador was saying, "or what we Americans can do to improve this situation. I don't know that we can contribute anything to the solu
tion of this particular problem, but it certainly won't hurt to try. The Russians must learn that they can cooperate with us on matters of mutual interest and, in deed, it is in their best interests to do so. I think that's critical..." Jake Grafton twisted in his ornate, polished mahogany chair. Herb Tenney looked innocent, Jake concluded. His whole presence radiated comfort, proclaimed to everyone who saw him that here was a man at peace with humanity and his conscience, a man who knew in his heart of hearts that he had nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for, nothing to fear.

  All of which somehow irritated Jake Grafton.

  We can help," Ambassador Lancaster was saying, solve problems in a constructive way that will Toad Tarkington caught Jake's eye with a warning Sohen Coonty glance. Apparently he could see that his boss was struggling to keep a grip on his temper.