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.
Jack Yocke cleared his throat and caught the attention of the interpreter, who had also pulled up a chair. “I was wondering, Mr. President,” Yocke said, “if you’d care to grant me an interview for the Washington Post.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later Jake Grafton came back through that door, followed by the two Russian generals. Captain Iron Mike McElroy was behind them, cradling a submachine gun in his arms. Then came a television reporter and cameraman and two technicians with lights and cables in coils over their shoulders.
Jack Yocke got out of his chair and leaned against a wall. Toad Tarkington eased in beside him, but he said nothing. Then Jack realized that Toad was holding a pistol in his hand, down beside his leg, hidden from sight.
Spiro Dalworth was also there. As the television reporter gave orders to his cameraman and the technicians discussed where to put the lights, Yocke heard Jake say to Dalworth, “Ask General Yakolev if Lieutenant Vasily Lutkin is still alive.”
“Lutkin?”
“Lutkin, the helicopter pilot. Ask him.”
Dalworth stepped over to where the general sat and asked the question in a low voice. Yakolev glanced at Jake, then shook his head from side to side. Mikhailov, Yocke noted, sat staring at the top of the table in front of him.
The television types opened a discussion of lighting and camera angles. Later, when he tried to recall exactly what had happened, Jack Yocke was never sure of the sequence. He remembered that someone else from a television crew came in carrying a floodlight and several people began looking for plugs. Another cameraman came in and his helper began unrolling cable.
The television reporter was talking to Admiral Grafton about the possibility of moving the news conference out into the hangar bay so they could use one of the missiles for a backdrop when Toad went over to where General Yakolev sat. Yocke caught that out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t pay much attention.
Toad must have laid the pistol on the table in front of Yakolev, because he was standing there opening a pocketknife — probably to cut the plastic ties around the Russian’s wrists — when Yakolev elbowed him hard and he fell away, off balance.
“No!” Yocke yelled, almost as the first shot hammered his eardrums. Mikhailov’s head went sideways — a bullet right above the ear. Then Yakolev was shooting at Saddam Hussein.
Boom, boom, boom — the pistol’s trip-hammer reports were painfully magnified in the confines of the room.
The Iraqi dictator came half out of his chair on the first shot into Mikhailov, so he took the next three standing up, at a distance of about ten feet. A burst of silenced submachine gun fire followed the pistol shots almost instantly. Yakolev went face forward onto the table as Saddam Hussein fell back into his chair and the chair and the body went over backward with a crash. The whole sequence didn’t take more than three or four seconds.
“Shit, I think they’re all dead.” Tarkington’s voice. He stood and slowly looked around.
Jake Grafton got up from the floor and examined the Russians. Yocke tried to recall when Jake went down and couldn’t.
“Yakolev is dead,” Jake said. “Mikhailov is still breathing. One right above the left ear. I don’t think he’s gonna make it, but…Dalworth, go get a medic.”
Yocke pushed by the horrified Iraqi interpreter, who stood frozen with his hands half-raised. Toad was bending over the body of the dictator, which was lying on its side. Toad rolled him over. Saddam had three holes in his chest, one in the left shoulder, one dead center, and the other a little lower down. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Toad rele
ased a wrist and announced, “No pulse.”
Saddam Hussein was as dead as Petty Officer Murphy…and that Iraqi Jack Yocke had knifed in Samarra, the soldier with the rifle he had mowed down. Dead.
Toad Tarkington stood looking down at Saddam’s face as he folded his pocketknife and dropped it into a pocket. He held the pistol Yakolev had used with his left hand wrapped around the action, so the barrel and butt were both visible. That looks like Saddam’s pistol, Yocke thought, but he couldn’t be sure.
Toad glanced up and met the reporter’s gaze.
Jack Yocke took a last look at the Iraqi dictator, then walked for the door. McElroy was replacing the magazine in his weapon. He didn’t bother to look at Yocke as he went by.
Out in the hangar bay the reporter ran into another television crew, this one still shooting footage of soldiers loading nuclear warheads onto pallets and the pallets into helicopters.
“Were those shots we heard in there? What happened?” The reporter shoved a microphone at him.
“Saddam Hussein is dead,” Jack Yocke said slowly. “A Russian general killed him.”
“Holy…! C’mon, Harry, grab the lights. Ladies and gentlemen, we are broadcasting live from the Iraqi base at Samarra and we have just learned that Saddam Hussein is dead! Stay with us while—”
Yocke walked on through the hangar and went outside. One of the Sky Cranes was lifting off with a Russian missile slung beneath.
The rotors created a terrific wind that almost lifted Yocke’s helmet off. He watched the machine transition into forward flight and disappear into the darkness.
26
Jake Grafton was asleep when he heard the knocking on the door. “Just a minute.” He pulled on his trousers and opened it.
Yocke walked in lugging his computer. “I’ve written a story and I need to phone it into the paper. You’ll have to read it on the computer.”
He turned on the desk lamp and set up the machine.
Jake seated himself in front of the screen and put on his reading glasses. “You push the buttons.”
“Okay.”
As Jake finished each page, he nodded and Yocke brought up the next one. The story was an eyewitness account of the air assault on Samarra, the recovery of the nuclear weapons, and the death of Saddam Hussein. Yocke got down to cases on the third page.
Just before the news conference was to begin. General Yakolev seized a pistol from an American officer and shot Marshal Mikhailov and Saddam Hussein before he himself was shot by a guard. Hussein was shot three times and died instantly. Mikhailov suffered a severe head wound and died approximately an hour later. Yakolev was dead at the scene.
Jake got out of the chair and switched on more lights.
“I thought you weren’t going to write fiction,” he said to the reporter.
“There isn’t a word in there that isn’t true.”
“Well…”
“Look, you’re doing the best you can with your weapons, I’m using mine.”
“You know, Jack,” Jake Grafton said softly, “that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me, but I don’t know that it’s true. Arranging that little shoot-out was the dirtiest thing I ever did.”
“You were going to shoot Saddam yourself, weren’t you?”
Jake Grafton ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, not at first. After that talk with Yakolev I thought he’d do it, and I felt dirty. I wanted Saddam dead! But if I killed him the political implications would be unpredictable, and perhaps profound. Then in that room listening to him spout bullshit, I thought what the hell, maybe we’ll kill each other.”
“He wouldn’t play, so you let Yakolev shoot him.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m not ever going to print this.”
“I know, Jack.”
“But did someone in Washington want Saddam dead?”
“If they did they never said it to me.” Jake met Yocke’s eyes. “I learned a long time ago in the military that you can have all the authority you are willing to use, but God help you if you screw up.”
“Did you know Yakolev was going to shoot Mikhailov?”
“No. I’m sorry he did. That was his decision.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Hell, what is there to do? I’m going to live with it.”
“Do you feel guilty?”
Jake Grafton made a gesture of irritation.
“You did what had to be done.”
Jake Grafton rubbed his face. “I thought so then, and I thought so when I sent Lieutenant Lutkin on to Moscow in a chopper that I suspected was going to be shot down, when I stuffed those damn poison pills into Herb Tenney’s mouth…but!” He gestured helplessly. “When all the preachers have shouted themselves out, the bottom line is that people shouldn’t kill people who aren’t trying to kill them.” His gaze shifted to Yocke’s face. “The easiest lie ever told is that old nugget you tell yourself, I’m doing what has to be done.”
“You’re not feeling sorry for Saddam Hussein and Yakolev and Herb Tenney, are you? They were guilty.”
Jake Grafton laid a hand on Yocke’s arm. “I’m feeling sorry for myself, Jack. They got what they deserved all right, but what do I deserve? I’m not God. I don’t want his job.”
“This is the real world, Admiral, not some class in metaphysics. Herb Tenney murdered people with poison and died of it himself. An absolute despot and two wanta-bes are dead — they did it to each other. You didn’t pull the trigger.”
“That’s sophistry, Jack. You should have been a lawyer.”
Jack Yocke exploded. “Goddamnit, Admiral! I’ve had it with all these people who tut-tut over the state of the world and won’t do anything. Mass murder, starvation, tyranny — it’s damn near two thousand years since Christ and…” He gestured helplessly. “Guilt seems to be the in drug of the nineties. Okay, I’ll drink my share. I’m glad Saddam’s dead…and those two Russian gangsters in uniform. Looking back, I wish I had pulled the trigger.”
Yocke swallowed hard. “I killed a man last night with a knife. Honest, there was no other way. I had to do it. It was him or me. Then I panicked and gunned a soldier or militiaman who was banging at me with a bolt-action rifle. I wish I hadn’t shot him. I shouldn’t have shot him.” He wiped the perspiration from his face. “I knew at the time that he was no threat, but you know…I wanted to kill him. Do you understand?”
Jake Grafton nodded.
“I’ve been thinking about those two men all day,” Yocke continued. “Thinking about guilt, about what I should have done, what…” He took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. Now he looked at his hands. “…what I wish I had done. But it’s over. And I have to live with it.”
Jake Grafton cleared his throat. “I can live with it too.” His voice became softer. “Maybe that’s why it worked out the way it did.”
Jack Yocke bobbed his head.
“How’s your arm?”
“Fifteen stitches, but the cut wasn’t deep.”
Grafton stood. “Call your story in. I’m going back to bed.”
“Toad says you always try to do the right thing. I think he’s right.”
“I hope he is,” Jake said. He extended his hand. Yocke took it and squeezed.
Yocke closed the door behind him and walked down the hallway of the makeshift BOQ. He called his story in as it was written, not changing a word.
Then he stood looking out the window at the desert. The sun was overhead and heat mirages distorted the horizon.
* * *
After his return to the United States from Saudi Arabia, Jack Yocke threw himself at the word processor. His articles on the upheaval in the former Soviet states were well received and widely reprinted. He called the Graftons and invited them out on two occasions, but the first evening he had to cancel and the second time the admiral got tied up at work.
Yocke understood. Jake was the new director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was busy trying to stay
on top of rapidly changing events in the former Soviet states and the Middle East.
As Jake Grafton had predicted, the CIA problem took care of itself. As September turned into October Jack found the obituary of Harvey Schenler buried on a back page. Although the story didn’t say so, by Yocke’s count Schenler was the fourth high-ranking CIA officer to die since mid-August. According to the press releases, all died of natural causes. In their sleep.
Jack called Admiral Grafton at the office, and got him.
“Congratulations on the new job.”
“Thank you, Jack. How are things going for you?”
“Oh, just sitting here reading the obituaries. Seems that a deputy director of the CIA died in his sleep last night. Guy named Schenler. Heart failure.”
“Well, all things considered, it’s not a bad way to go,” Jake Grafton told him.
“Fourth CIA bigwig in the last six weeks. Must be something in the water over at Langley.”
“It was their choice. Protects their families and the institution.”
“How is the Toad-man?”
“Doing fine.”
“Think I’ll ever get to write anything about Schenler and his pals?”
“I doubt it,” Jake said promptly. “Certainly not anytime soon.” He paused, then continued with a hint of concern in his voice: “You aren’t running out of stuff to write about, are you?”
“We’re managing to keep the paper full — turmoil in the Middle East, a revolution in Iraq, Yeltsin still riding the tiger and trying not to get eaten. Same old song, different verse. How’s Callie and Amy?”
“Doing fine, Jack. Doing fine. I’ll tell them you asked.”
“Well, I’ll let you go, Admiral. But the reason I called — I just wanted to say thanks.”
“For what?”
“For taking me along, for keeping me alive, for making me a part of the team. Thanks.”
“Take care, Jack.”
In October Jack was notified by the Russian embassy that his request for an in-depth interview with Boris Yeltsin had been granted.
When he checked into the Metropolitan Hotel in Moscow there was some difficulty about the bill from his previous visit — they had held his room for a week after his hurried departure to the U.S. embassy. He had a tense conference with the manager. After a call back to Washington, he agreed to pay the disputed amount.
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