Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - Red Horseman

by Red Horseman (lit)

  Without muss or fuss you just cease to be. Cease to be anythingf These people have ruled this country with terror for seventy years and they are real goddamn good at it. If you aren't pissing yourself when you think about them you're a congenital idiot. There ain't no rules but theirs and they keep changing them all the time. This ain't good ol" Iowa, Frogface." Toad grinned at the admiral and jerked his thumb at Yocke. "You may find this hard to believe, but I'm beginning to like this guy." Yocke wasn't paying attention. Already he was trying to figure out how to explain this to his editor.

  He looked at his watch. It was 2 A.m.

  in Washington. He he would call Gatler at home again. Mike was going to be thrilled.

  "Let's get something to eat," Toad suggested.

  "For some reason I'm hungry." Jake nodded.

  "Well, there's a good hard currency restaurant with big prices up the street at the Savoy and a slightly more modest one here at the Metropolitan. It's all Russian grub and the city water system is contaminated, unfit for human consumption. It's Russian roulette-radioactive beef and milk and vegetables full of heavy metals-spin the cylinder and pull the trigger." He sighed. "I know you want to treat, so you pick." "Here," Jake said. Toad killed the engine and they climbed out. "But we call your editor first." "Let me get this straight, Admiral. You want me to call Hayden Land right now, at two-twenty in the morning, and ask him to come to the Post to call you in the morning?" Mike Gatler's voice was remarkably clear-the miracle of modern communications technology-and the amazement and disbelief seemed about to leak out of the telephone. Apparently Yocke's call had roused him from a sound sleep.

  "No, sir. Tell him you want to meet him at the guard's shack in front of the river entrance to the Pentagon at 8 A.m. There you ask him to call me at this number in Moscow as soon as he can.

  He can use a phone in your office or a pay phone. This is important, Mr. Gatler-no other telephones. Have him call me here at this number in Moscow. Have you got that?" "Put Yocke back on the line." Jake handed the telephone to the reporter, who mumbled into the instrument and listened intently. After a bit he said, "Admiral Grafton came over to the hotel this morning and asked for this favor.

  No.

  he hasn't said. He won't say... Yes." Yocke turned and eyed the two naval officers.

  "Gotcha," he told the telephone. "I understand... how did you like my story about-was He bit it off and replaced the instrument on its cradle.

  "I'm not to call him again at home in the middle of the night unless I'm dead. And I'm supposed to guarantee you absolute confidentiality." He sat down beside Jake Grafton on the bed.

  "You'll be deep background, never quoted or even referred to. I'm supposed to wring you out like a sponge." Jake Grafton grinned. He had a good grin under a nose that was a size too big for his face.

  When he grinned his gray eyes twinkled. "Think Gatler will do it?" "Yeah. The one thing you gotta have in the news game is curiosity-Mike Gatler is chock full of it. He's a helluva newspaperman.

  I don't know if Hayden Land will agree to see him, but I guarantee Mike will try." "He'll see him a right. If Gatler uses my name. Now let's go get some food. I'm starved." "Don't they feed you guys at the embassy?" "Stove isn't working right," Jake muttered and led the way through the door.

  "Hayden Land, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Yocke said cheerfully as he trailed the naval officers down the hall. "This is big, huh?" "So how long you guys been in Moscow?" Yocke asked after they had gone through the buffet line and were picking at the watery scrambled eggs and sampling the fatty sausage. They had a table in the middle of the room and were surrounded by businessmen and here and there pairs of tourists. Over near the buffet line sat eight Japanese businessmen drinking orange juice and coffee and eating grapes.

  For twenty U.s. dollars a head. The Russians, Jake Grafton decided, have capitalism all figured out. Charge every nickel the traffic will bear until they quit coming, then drop the price just enough to get them back.

  "Couple days." "So what do you think?" "I think a twenty-dollar breakfast is one hell of a way to start a morning," Jake replied.

  He managed to choke down his first bite of fatty, greasy sausage and shoved the rest of it to the side of his plate. He tentatively sipped the coffee.

  It was hot and black, thank God!

  "Twenty and ten percent tip," Yocke said cheerfully.

  "Twenty-two American smackeroos to get past that squat lady at the door." "These bastards bypassed capitalism and went straight into highway robbery," Toad mumbled as he stared at the mess on the plate in front of him.

  "No wonder Marx was appalled. Twenty-two fucking dollars!

  Jeeezus!" Jake looked slowly around at the huge, splendid room in which they sat with the businessmen and tourists, eating nervously. There were just no Russian restaurants that served food a Western stomach could tolerate-none.

  "This place is a boom town, like San Francisco during the gold rush.

  There's no price competition right now." He shrugged. "Maybe it'll come." Yocke tried to change the subject. "What are you guys here for?" Jake Grafton eyed the reporter and this time his gray eyes didn't twinkle. "Give it up, Jack." "You gotta admit, Admiral, this whole thing is curious as hell. The embassy has gotta have enough communications gear to put you in touch with Slick Willie Clinton snarfing gut bombs in a McDonald's. Yocke shrugged, then leaned back in his chair and assumed his philosophical attitude: "This whole darn country is curious.

  Everything is failing apart, nothing works right, yet everybody you meet is a literature expert, a music scholar, or an authority on eighteenth-century Russian poetry. Not a solitary one of them owns a screwdriver or a pair of pliers or even knows what they're for. So the commodes don't work, the light bulbs are burned out, the furnace in the basement crapped out last year, the pipes are busted--and they sit amid the rubble and talk about the nuances in Dostoyevski, the genius of Tolstoy. The whole place is a nuthouse, one giant pyscho ward, some psychiatrist's wet dream." "They must have something going for them," Jake said as he smeared jam inside a croissant. "They kicked the hell out of Hitler. They're tough, resilient people. They're survivors." Jack Yocke rubbed his head and thought about it.

  He was having trouble getting the right perspective, having trouble seeing the human beings hidden behind the body armor they all wore. "Maybe," he muttered.

  "Maybe." "So what stories have you been working on while you've been here?" Toad Tarkington asked this question.

  "Been wandering around trying to get a feel for the place, for the people. They're desperate. It's a scary situation. The people seem to just have no hope. And the Commies are playing to their fears. The anti-Semitism is right out in the open and it's ugly." Toad glanced at Jake Grafton, who was looking out the window at the street, now bathed in weak sunshine, as Jack Yocke rambled on about the more prominent Communists and their stump rantings. When the reporter finally paused Jake asked, "How ugly?" "What?" "How ugly is the anti-Semitism?" "They're prosecuting Jews for hooliganism, profiteering and hoarding.

  Throwing them into jail. Everyone is doing it but the only people being prosecuted are Jews charged before they changed the law. The persecution is even more blatant outside of Moscow, out in those little provincial towns nobody ever heard of where old Communists are still running the show. To hear some of the Commies tell it, they never had a chance to run this country right because 1he Jews screwed up everything.

  It's Hitler's big lie one more time." "It worked before," Jake murmured.

  He looked at his watch. Almost eleven. Five or six hours to wait.

  Maybe Toad could spend the afternoon with Yocke and he could get some sleep in Yocke's bed. He managed only an hour or two's sleep last night. Jet lag. He felt hot and dirty and tired. Or maybe he had caught a dose of that desperation that everyone here seemed to be infected with.

  And this would be a good time to call Richard Harper, his private computer hacker, to ask if he had made any progress finding
the money.

  If someone was buying nuclear weapons, then someone was getting paid.

  But what will you do when you know?

  Hayden Land was the first black man to hold the top job in the American military. A highly intelligent soldier and top-notch political operator, he also had the ability to think very straight when everyone else was panicking. This quality had served him well during the Gulf War several years ago when his sound leadership made him a national hero.

  Those in the know in national politics even mentioned him as possible presidential timber in 19%, when presumably he would be retired.

  Jake Grafton had worked for Land in the past, so the general's calmness on the telephone was no surprise. Hayden Land never lost his cool.

  "What did you want to talk about, Admiral?" "Sir, I understand General Brown died a few days ago.

  I wonder if you have the autopsy results." "Well, I don't even know if an autopsy will be performed," General Land said. "I thought he died at home of a heart attack." "One more question, sir. Have you seen a report from General Brown about listening devices being found in the DIA office spaces?" Silence. It dragged for several seconds.

  "No. Is there such a report?" "The day I left to come over here General Brown said he was going to write one. We found the bugs a day or so before. Both he and I suspected they were planted and monitored by our friends at Langley, suspected for some very good reasons, but we had no rock-solid proof.

  One of the things my aide and I had discussed where it could be overheard by those bugs was the death a year or so ago of Nigel Keren, the British publisher.

  We thought we had some indications that someone from Langley might have killed him with binary poison." Jake paused for a moment. Land said nothing.

  "Are you still with me, sit?" "I'm here." "General Brown's death might also have been caused by binary poison.

  Since he apparently didn't write that report of those listening devices, I suggest you ensure that there will be an autopsy, a damn good one." "Just what were you and General Brown working on, Admiral?" "We were discussing Nigel Keren, how he died, who might have killed him.

  I don't want to go any further into that on this telephone, sir. The KGB is probably eavesdropping. Still, this telephone was preferable to using the embassy communications systems. And I request that you don't use the telephones in your office, car or home to discuss this matter." More silence, then a slow, "I think I see what you're driving at." "I don't know what is going on, General, but something is and I'm on the edge of it. So I need some help." "What?" That one-word response was pure Hayden Land. No beating around the bush, no questioning of his subordinate's assessment of the situation or demands for further information, just a straight, quick trip to the heart of the matter.

  So Jake told him. The two officers talked for another twenty minutes before they spent a few minutes discussing what they were going to tell the Washington Post to explain this curious method of communication.

  Their answer-nothing at this time.

  Jake straightened his uniform and put his shoes back on and locked the door behind him.

  He found Toad Tarkington and Jack Yocke in the bar drinking espresso and gobbling pretzels.

  They both stood as Jake walked toward them.

  "Thanks a lot, Jack," Jake said.

  "He called you?" "Yes." "One word?" Yocke looked incredulous. "That's all you're going to give me?" Jake grinned. He extended his hand and the reporter took it.

  As Toad and Jake were walking toward the main entrance, Yocke called, "You owe me a steak when I get back to Washington." Jake lifted his hand in acknowledgment.

  Out in the car Toad asked, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking about that Yegor Somebody killing?" "Not the Russians' style, you told Yocke.

  You can't hand Yocke a bone like that with meat on it, Toad-he's too smart." "Yeah. I'm sorry." "The whole thing looks like a classic in-your-face Mossad hit. Like Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, and a dozen others you could name. The KGB makes you disappear, the Mossad makes you a wire-service example." "Maybe the Russians are changing tactics." was Maybe." "Then again.

  For a while Grafton rode silently, looking out the window. Then he said, "Say the Mossad decided to wipe a struggling young Hitler protege and dropped a hint to someone in the Yeltsin government. Maybe some of Yeltsin's lieutenants thought the idea up. Whatever. Someone thought that Kolokoltsev's departure to Communist heaven wouldn't be an unmitigated disaster and called the cops off.

  That much is obvious, yet there's no way in the world to prove a damn thing on anybody. None of these clowns are ever going to breathe a word. Yocke is wasting his time asking embarrassing questions through an interpreter who is trying to keep from wetting his pants. All he'll do is irritate people who don't like to be irritated." Tarkington grunted. He was thinking about General Brown, smacked like a fly. "Are you just speculating about the Mossad, Admiral, or was that a power think?" Jake Grafton growled irritably. "I don't know a damn thing." "I don't like any of this." "Write a letter home to mama," Jake told him.

  At least Judith Farrell is somewhere in Maryland, Toad told himself.

  She's mowing grass and watching baseball games on television and going to the theater on Friday nights. But even as he trotted that idea out for inspection he threw it back-he didn't believe it. He had seen her in action once, eliminating a terrorist in a Naples hotel. That memory came flooding back and he felt slightly ill.

  "The Russians have their own rules," Jake Grafton said.

  "The language is different, the heritage is different, the mores are different, they don't think like we do. It's hard to believe this is the same planet we live on." Jake Grafton had listened for over twenty years to stories about all-male Russian dinners and vodka celebrations.

  They were always thirdhand or fourthhand, and the parties described sounded rather like something one might find in a college fraternity house on a Saturday night after the big football game.

  And that, he thought ruefully, would be a good way to describe the festive atmosphere of which he was a reluctant part.

  The problem was quite simple-he hadn't had this much to drink in years.

  He was sweating profusely and feeling slightly dizzy.

  Across the table from him Nicolai Yakolev was telling another Russian joke, one about a high party official and a simple country girl. He had to tell it loud to be heard over the noise of the piano.

  Jake had told a few of these jokes himself earlier in the evening, before the level of the fluid in the vodka bottle had gone down very far. He had never been very good with jokes--comcdn't remember them long enough to find someone to tell them to-but he did recall several of those crude riddles that had been popular years ago, the so-called Polish jokes. So he transformed the bumblers into Communists and delighted the general and his guests with questions such as, How many Communists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Twelve-one to stand on the chair and hold the bulb, eleven to turn the chair.

  Before dinner he had had a chance to meet the allied officers one on one.

  Lieutenant Colonel West of the Queen's Own Highlanders was a deeply tanned trim man, about five feet six inches, with dark hair longer than U.s. military regulations allowed. He seemed quite relaxed with the Russians and Jake heard him murmur a few phrases in the language.

  "Delighted to see you, Admiral," West said when they shook hands. "Met you one time in Singapore years ago.

  No reason you should remember. Think you were a commander then." Jake seemed to think he did recall the man.

  "A party with the Aussies?" "Righto. About ten years ago. Jolly good show, that." Now he remembered. Jocko West, a specialist on guerrilla, warfare, terrorism and jungle survival. "You seem to have picked up a little of the local lingo, Colonel." West leaned closer and lowered his voice.

  "Afghanistan, sir. A bit irregular, I dare say. Sort of a busman's holiday.

  These lads were the oppo." He sighed. "Well, the world turns, eh?" The Frenchman w
as Colonel Reynaud, impeccably uniformed. He spent dinner chatting with two Russian officers in French. Prior to dinner, when he and Jake were introduced, he used English, which he spoke with a delicious accent. "A pleas-aire, Admiral Grafton." "How did you manage to wrangle a trip to Moscow in the summertime, Colonel?" "I am a student of Napoleon, sir, you comprehend?

  Think, had Napoleon arrived in the summer, perhaps history would have been so different, without these Communists. I came to see where it went wrong for him, for France. So I will do a little of work, a little of the seeing of the sights." "The people at my embassy told me you are an expert on nuclear weapons." Reynaud smiled. "Alas, that is true. I study the big boom. In a way it is unmilitary, n'est-ce pas? The nuclear weapons will make la guerre so short, it will not be la guerre. They leave us without honor. It is not pretty." Jake managed to shake hands with Colonel Rheinhart, the German, and Colonel Galvano, the Italian, but he didn't get to visit with them until after dinner. They both impressed him as extremely competent officers of great ability.