The Red Horseman jg-5

by Stephen Coonts

  “The KGB is setting up Yeltsin.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Yocke squared off to face her. “What can you tell me?”

  “Nothing that you can print.” She lay down the swizzle stick and hunted in her purse. She extracted a pack of Marlboros and a pack of matches. After she lit one she examined Yocke’s face through the smoke.

  “You came here tonight to meet me, didn’t you?”

  Her eyes stayed on his face. She smoked the cigarette in silence. The dishwasher behind the bar lit off with a rumble.

  “Anything you tell me I have to confirm. Someone else must confirm every fact or I can’t print it.”

  “If you ever tell anyone where you got this or who I am you will ruin me.”

  “We never reveal sources who request anonymity.”

  “This is Russia.”

  She didn’t know anything. Perhaps she thought she knew something, but what the hell could it be? She’s an American, for Chrissake!

  “Three KGB officers…” She stubbed out the cigarette and looked at Dimitri, who was working on receipts on an IBM computer terminal. Her eyes came back to Yocke.

  “Three KGB officers…” He had to lean forward across the table to hear her voice above the noise of the dishwasher.

  She swallowed and fumbled for another cigarette.

  “Three KGB officers went to police headquarters a half hour before the assassination. They ordered the police away from Soviet Square.”

  “How do you know this?”

  A whisper: “The order was transmitted over the radio. The police in the square heard it on their little radios. You’ve seen those little radios they wear, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve seen them.” The police here were wired up just like the cops in Washington and Detroit.

  “Kolokoltsev was a pawn sacrifice. It’s the king they want.”

  “Who’s they?” To his chagrin, Yocke’s voice came out a whisper. He raised it a notch and repeated the question. “Who’s they?”

  She just shook her head.

  “I need some names.”

  She leaned back and sucked fiercely on the cigarette. Her eyes went to Dimitri and stayed there.

  “He can’t hear us.”

  “He’s KGB. All these hard-currency hotel people are.”

  “He can’t hear us over that dishwasher,” Yocke insisted. “You’re going to have to point me in the right direction. Give me a name. One name. Any of them. Any one of them.”

  She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and drained her drink.

  “I have to have someplace to start looking, Shirley, or your trip down here was a waste of time. You must know how goddamn tough it is to get Russians to open up to an American reporter. It’s like asking a dope dealer if he’s got a load coming in anytime soon.”

  Her lips twisted into an attempt at a grin as she stood up. Now the lips straightened. Gripping her purse tightly she leaned across the table and whispered, “Nikolai Demodov.”

  “Was he one of the three?”

  But she was walking out. She went through the door and turned left and was gone.

  * * *

  Up in his room Jack Yocke wrote the name on his computer screen and sat staring at it. Nikolai Demodov.

  Well, it was a pretty story. No getting around that. A pretty story. He didn’t know enough to even guess how much truth there might be to the tale, if any, but his instinct told him some truth was there. You develop that instinct in this business after you have listened to a lot of stories. Maybe it’s their eyes, the body language.

  He tapped aimlessly on the keyboard for a few moments, then turned the computer off.

  He brushed his teeth and washed his face and hands and stared at his reflection in the mirror over the sink while he thought about Shirley Ross and the three KGB agents.

  If only he could have gotten more out of her. How should he have handled it? She must have known all three of the names. At the minimum she knew how the hell Nikolai Demodov fits in. Where had he lost her? And where did she get her information?

  Aaagh! To be tantalized so and have the door slammed in your face! Infuriating…

  Most people are poor liars. Oh, every now and then you meet a good one, but most people have not had the practice it takes to tell a lie properly. Cops can smell a lie. So can some lawyers and preachers. And all good reporters. Even if you can’t put your finger on why it plays right, you know truth when you find it.

  Just now Jack Yocke decided he had seen some of it. And the glimpse excited him.

  10

  Sergi Pavlenko was dozing in the guard shack when the noise of a helicopter brought him awake. He was nineteen years old, a conscript from a collective farm, and he was not used to helicopters. He came immediately awake and went outside where he could see better.

  It was one in the morning, the middle of the summer night, which was still short here three hundred miles southeast of Moscow at the Serdobsk Nuclear Power Plant.

  The lights of the helicopter were curious, a red, a white and a light that flashed and made the machine look like some unearthly thing, some vision from a vodka-drenched nightmare. When it became obvious that the machine was going to land here, Sergi Pavlenko straightened his uniform tunic and resettled his hat on his head at the correct angle. He eased the strap that held his rifle into the correct position and stood erect with his heels together, as a proper soldier should.

  Now the helicopter’s landing light came on, a spotlight that shone downward and slightly ahead. Pavlenko started. He had never before seen a helicopter flying at night and the landing light was unexpected.

  As the light moved toward him, the thought suddenly occurred to him that he might be in the place where the descending machine was going to alight. Galvanized, he scurried back toward the guardhouse at the entrance to the power plant.

  Safe in his refuge, he looked across the enclosure at the guard kiosk at the main gate, where he could just see his friend Leonid under the light pointing with one hand and covering his mouth with the other. Leonid would laugh and tease him; he must have looked like a frightened rabbit running from the helicopter.

  And now it was there in front of him, roaring like an enraged bear and stirring up a hurricane as it settled onto the grass.

  The engines died immediately. The pilot obviously had no fuel to waste.

  Five men climbed out. One of them, wearing a dark suit and dark tie, came toward him. Sergi straightened to attention.

  “Where is the manager?”

  “I don’t know. No one said you were coming.”

  “I’m accustomed to being met by the manager of the facility.”

  “The telephone from the outside is out of order. It has not worked all night.”

  “Well, tell the manager I am here.”

  Sergi was at a loss for words. Who was here? Should he ask for identification? The panic must have shown on his face, for the man’s expression softened and he growled, “Just get him out here.”

  There was a telephone in his guardshack, a little wooden building that looked as if it had been added as an afterthought right by the concrete wall of the reactor building. It was a rotary dial instrument. Sergi wiped his hands on his trousers before he picked up the handset and checked the list of telephone numbers taped to the wall. The list was so dirty as to be almost unreadable. Control room, number 32. That was the only place in the complex where there would be people this time of night.

  The first time Sergi dialed nothing happened. No ringing in the earpiece. The equipment was old and the electrical switches were worn out, like every other telephone system in the former Soviet empire. Still, the only telephone on Sergi’s collective farm had belonged to the manager, an important person, and Sergi had never used it. Having a telephone waiting for him to pick up to call someone — just within the facility, this instrument could not be used to call elsewhere — made Sergi proud. To complain about the qui
rks of the instrument was an impulse that had never crossed his mind.

  Now he used his thumb on the hook to break the circuit, then lifted it and listened for the dial tone. There it was. He carefully dialed the number again. This time he heard the ringing. As he waited he turned and looked at the helicopter and the big red star on the fuselage. One of the passengers was over at the kiosk at the main gate talking to Leonid: Sergi could see them standing together under the light.

  A man’s voice answered the telephone.

  “This is the main door guard,” Sergi Pavlenko said loudly into the mouthpiece. “A helicopter has arrived. An important person wishes to see the manager.”

  “The manager is home in bed. I’m the watch officer.”

  “Yes, yes. He is waiting here to talk to someone in authority. It is a big helicopter with many rotor blades.” This fact impressed Sergi; it should impress the man inside too.

  Apparently it did. “I’ll be right out,” the voice told him.

  Sergi Pavlenko hung up the telephone and turned to report to the man from the helicopter. As he did so the man used a silenced pistol to shoot him once in the head, killing him instantly.

  * * *

  The five men worked fast. The main door had a lock that worked only from the inside. When the watch officer opened it they herded Leonid from the main gate, the watch officer and everyone in the building into an empty office and gunned them down with silenced submachine guns. They didn’t bother to pick up the empty brass cartridge cases strewn about.

  They blocked the front door open with a piece of wood and carried in bags from the helicopter.

  The reactor was operating at 50 percent power. The man who had shot Sergi examined the control panel carefully, then led the way through the lead-lined door that led to the reactor space.

  A nuclear reactor is, when explained to schoolchildren, a very simple piece of machinery — a large tea kettle is the common analogy. True, the first reactor, Enrico Fermi’s pile under the University of Chicago’s football stadium, was indeed simple. But there was nothing simple about the Serdobsk reactor, a liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder. The core was made up of five tons of metallic oxides of uranium-235, plutonium-239, and uranium-238, the breeding material that would be converted into plutonium during the course of the reaction. This material was fashioned into twelve thousand long pins, each less than six millimeters in diameter and arranged with extraordinary precision inside a small core, a hexagonal container only three feet across each face.

  The core sat in a cylindrical stainless-steel pot filled with molten, liquid sodium that was cycled through the core by three pumps. Unavoidably the sodium flowing through the core absorbed some neutrons and was converted into sodium-24, a highly radioactive gamma ray emitter, so the radioactive sodium was run through an exchanger where it gave up some of its heat to the secondary cooling system, also liquid sodium. The unpressurized stainless-steel vat that contained the core and the primary and secondary cooling systems was forty feet high and forty feet in diameter. Between the surface of the liquid sodium and the top of the vat was a cloud of argon, an inert gas. Lead shielding surrounded the entire vat. Surrounding the lead was a concrete vault with walls about three feet thick.

  Pipes brought the secondary sodium out of the vat near the top and took it to a second heat exchanger, where it was used to boil water for steam to turn turbines, then returned it to the vat. The pipe holes in the vat and the lead and concrete shields were all above the level of the liquid sodium.

  The nuclear reaction itself was controlled by dozens of graphite rods that absorbed radiation. These rods were withdrawn from the core to start the reaction and pushed into it to kill it.

  The men from the helicopter began with the rods. Standing on top of the concrete vault, they planted a series of small explosive charges designed to shatter the rod mechanisms before they had a chance to slide down into the core. This job took about half an hour.

  Still on top of the concrete biological shield, they used tape measures and chalk while the man in charge consulted a sheet of paper in his hand. When the chalk marks were precisely where he wanted them, he personally began placing six shaped charges that would vent their explosive force down into the vat. While he was at it several of the men climbed up the ladder and wandered out into the hallway for a smoke.

  One of them came running back. “Colonel, the helicopter is starting!”

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  Yes, he could faintly hear the whine as the engines spooled up. He stumbled and almost fell running for the ladder. He hurried up and raced along the catwalk toward the control room. He arrived outside just in time to see the helicopter transition into forward flight and move away into the darkness.

  Two of the men came out behind him and one aimed his submachine gun at the departing machine.

  “Nyet,” the colonel cried. “That won’t do any good.” The fool! If he successfully shot down the helicopter the noise of the crash would bring everyone in the army camp over here. And it would be damned hard to fly out of here in a crashed helicopter.

  The colonel stood listening to the noise of the machine as it faded. When all he could hear were the night noises of frogs and insects, he still stood undecided. He had expected problems, but not this — to be abandoned by the helicopter pilot! Betrayed!

  The pilot was a Ukranian. He should have demanded a Russian pilot. The colonel choked back his rage and frustration and wondered what to do. He had, he well knew, miserably few options.

  “What do we do now, Colonel?” one of the men asked.

  The query decided him.

  “Let’s set the charges.” He was surprised at his own voice. It sounded calm, in control, which wasn’t the way he felt at all. Usually when he was enraged his voice became a hoarse croak.

  “If we hadn’t cut the telephone lines we could call for another helicopter,” one of the men said disgustedly. “We certainly can’t blow this damn thing up unless we have transport out of here.”

  “Back inside,” the colonel said. “Let’s finish the job while I think.”

  They were reluctant but the habit of obedience was strong. The colonel followed them back into the building.

  It took forty-five minutes to finish setting the charges atop the biological shield. Forty-five minutes of sweating an impossible situation.

  He should have had a backup chopper, should have brought a two-way radio. But there was no time. “No! Do it now! Do it tonight!” the general had said.

  All the careful planning, all the preparations that didn’t get done, all the backups that weren’t quite ready. That was the trouble with the Soviet system — the remorseless pressure to make “it” happen always forced shortcuts, compromises in quality and safety. It was infuriating when you saw the disasters everywhere you looked but goddamn catastrophic when it was your life on the line. How easy it was for a bureaucrat or general to shout “Now!”

  He forced himself to work slowly, with meticulous care, as he set the shaped charges. There would be no second chance. This had to be done right the first time, which, he told himself furiously, would be the only recorded instance of the accomplishment of that feat in Russia since the czar impregnated his bride on their wedding night.

  He was perspiring heavily when he finished. He stood back and used a rag to wipe his face and hands. “Insert the detonators.”

  “Colonel, how are we going to get away from here?”

  “I said insert the detonators. Wire them up but don’t arm the triggering device. I’ll go find us some transport. Give me a submachine gun.”

  One of the men passed his weapon over.

  “Get busy.”

  The colonel slung the weapon over his shoulder and climbed the ladder.

  When he left the cavernous room two of the men were inserting detonators and wiring them to the firing device as the other two watched.

  The army camp was three kilometers up the road. The colonel cooled off as
he walked in the darkness. He was unwilling to use the flashlight, so he stumbled occasionally over uneven places in the road. Still he walked quickly. Only two hours until dawn.

  He stopped when he was still fifty meters from the circle of light above the gate and looked the camp over. It was surrounded by a sagging, rusted wire fence. A guard kiosk stood by the open gate. No doubt a sentry was there, the only man awake in the camp. He hoped that no one else was awake.

  There, by that building in the back, wasn’t that a truck? Yes. It had grass growing around it to the top of its wheels. Perhaps there was a car or another truck in the garage.

  The colonel moved toward the sentry’s kiosk, staying in the shadows, making as little noise as possible. He kept the submachine gun over his shoulder but held the pistol with the silencer in his right hand.

  He was still fifteen feet from the kiosk, just coming into the light circle, when the sentry inside the unpainted wooden shack saw him and jerked in surprise.

  The colonel pointed the pistol at the soldier and said, as calmly as he could and just loud enough to be heard, “Don’t move. Just stay exactly as you are and you won’t get hurt.”

  The man froze. He was young, in his late teens.

  “Now very carefully, step outside.”

  The soldier complied. He was trembling.

  “Where is the other sentry?”

  The soldier merely shook his head.

  The colonel pointed his weapon and repeated the question.

  “I’m the only one, sir.”

  “If you are lying you will be the first to die. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s go look at the truck.” The colonel snapped on his flashlight and used it to point the way. He followed the soldier, who had now decided to raise his hands a little.

  The truck was a rotting hulk. The tires were flat, the glass was broken from several windows, weeds peeked through the radiator grill.

  “Where is the other truck?” he demanded, his voice a forced whisper.

  “In the garage.”