Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - Red Horseman

by Red Horseman (lit)

  "I get five nine three point six four seven-something." "You were born in 1945, right?" "Yes.

  "Okay, Admiral. You would just punch that six-digit number into the encrypter and place the decimal in the proper place. Always start with a positive integer and carry out any fractions so that you have six digits. Add zeros to the right of the decimal as necessary." "Who has this code, besides you and me?" "Just General Land." "We'll always use Moscow time?" "Moscow date and time." "Okay. Come upstairs and give Toad and me a complete brief on the gear and we'll be all set. Did you just get in from Washington?" "I came here straight from the airport, sir.

  They re waiting to take me back." "Long flight." "I'm used to it. I sleep on the plane." Jake Grafton stared at the communications devices with a sinking feeling. After a moment he screwed up the courage to ask, "Just how secure is this techno-junk?" The sergeant faced him squarely. "Admiral, this stuff is like a padlock on a garage. It'll keep honest people honest.

  But with a good computer a competent cryptographer could break any message in a couple hours." All Jake Grafton could manage was a grunt.

  "The good news," the sergeant continued, "is that the ruskies don't have many good computers. They do most of their crypto work by hand, so it'll take them a couple weeks. Then one hopes the report will get routed here and there through the bureaucracy and a couple more weeks will pass before it lands on the desk of someone who may or may not decide to believe it." "A couple hours. With a good computer." "That's about the size of it, sir." And the CIA has the best computers in the world, Jake Grafton took a deep breath and thanked the sergeant for his trouble. Being an army man, the sergeant saluted.

  THE PLANE WAS THE PERSONAL TRANSPORT OF THE MINIS-TER of defense and still the rest room smelled like an outhouse and no water came out of the sink taps. No paper towels.

  So much for personal hygiene!

  Jake opened the door and stepped out into the aisle that led to the cockpit. There was no cockpit door and he could see the instrument panel between the pilots.

  The warning placards were in Cyrillic and the instruments had funny labels. He stood there looking over their shoulders for several seconds before the pilot realized he was there and looked over his shoulder. He said something in Russian and Jake replied in English.

  "Good morning," the pilot managed.

  "Good morning," Jake echoed. "Nice plane you got here." When the pilot tapped his watch and made half a circle on the face with his finger, Jake nodded sagely and returned to his seat.

  General Yakolev was in a seat across the aisle conferring with his aide.

  They were going over documents. Toad sat in the next row with Jocko West, who was broadening the American's horizons. Behind them sat the other foreign military representatives.

  Today they were making a trip to a Russian nuclear weapons depot to see how warheads were disassembled. The name of the base they were going to was Petrovsk, on the Volga watershed. Jake glanced at the map again.

  The place was a hundred miles or so north northeast of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, where the Soviet army shattered Adolph Hitler's ambitions.

  Jake Grafton hadn't even been born then, but Yakolev was a young soldier in the Soviet army. Once again Jake pondered the twists of fate that had lifted Yakolev to the top, wondered again about the man who wore that uniform.

  The window was scratched from being repeatedly wiped with dirty rags, but Jake managed to get a look through it at the land sliding by thirty thousand or so feet below.

  Forests, occasional small villages, roads that followed the contours of the land.

  It just didn't look like America, or even western Europe.

  Those landscapes had their own distinct look that an experienced air traveler would recognize at a glance. Part of the problem, Jake decided, was that Russia was just too big.

  Great distances were the blessing that caused Napoleon and Hitler to founder and the curse that had stymied generations of Communist economic planners.

  Soon Jake heard the power being reduced and felt the nose drop a degree or two as the pilot began his descent.

  All this talk about weapons... it would be good finally to see some of the damned things.

  The weapons were being disassembled in a makeshift clean room that didn't look any too tight. This was the scene of Yakolev's show-and-tell session.

  The Western visitors gathered in front of a plate-glass window and watched white-robed technicians use mechanical arms to manipulate the warhead parts while an interpreter translated Yakolev's comments, which were in Russian.

  Amazingly, when they entered the facility no one had offered them film badges to record the level of radiation to which they might be exposed, nor was anyone working here wearing one.

  Beside the general stood a man in civilian clothes who looked nervous.

  Jake assumed he was the manager of this facility. Occasionally Yakolev asked him a question and pondered the reply, but the interpreter didn't translate these exchanges.

  From the clean room an army truck took the party to a large hangar where row after row of missiles sat on their transporters, Against one wall were stacked wooden crates of pallets-nuclear warheads. The small party stood in silence taking it all in.

  Yakolev stood beside Jake. Finally he spoke, in English.

  "Impressive, yes?" "That it is." "Russia shook the world with these missiles," Yakolev said. "And now we take them apart." Jake Grafton searched the older man's impassive face.

  "We become another poor country without a voice in the world's affairs," the general continued after a moment, still looking at the row upon row of missiles decorated with huge red stars. "The television brings us news of the great things that are happening in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Bonn... We learn the thoughts of the great men of our age. The world's leaders ponder the future of mankind and debate how much money to give Russia while we eat our potatoes and borsch." Yakolev slapped Jake on the back. "That is progress, no? No more bad old Communists!

  Now Russians buy televisions and watch CNN and the BBC and bet on world cup soccer and tennis matches at Wimbledon. They worry about stock prices in Tokyo and London and New York.

  No more bad old Russians! They are just like us." Yakolev turned away and Jake Grafton watched his retreating back. Then he stood looking at the missiles.

  General Yakolev excused himself for a few hours work, so Jake asked for a tour of the base. This disconcerted the civilian interpreter, but within a few minutes a military guide-interpreter was provided. "What want to see?" the man asked with a heavy accent, wearing a perplexed look.

  "The enlisted barracks, the mess hall and the hospital," Jake told him.

  The guide Was in uniform, with a rank designation that Jake didn't recognize, and now he looked around in bewilderment, Jake guessed that he was in his early twenties.

  Seeing no one handy to voice his concerns to, yet unwilling to refuse the request of this important foreign visitor in the strange uniform, he slowly led Jake and Toad out the door of the hangar office and set a course across the packed dirt toward a distant building. comWhat's your name?" "Mikhail Babkin, sir." Jake Grafton mouthed "You speak excellent English.

  tie easily, without a twinge of con the complimentary n all other languages, he science.

  English is different that reflected. Most Frenchmen listening to badly spoken French will pretend that they cannot understand or ignore the offender entirely. Yet any American meeting a goatherd in sub-Sahara Africa or on the windswept steppes of Mongolia who knows a word or two of pidgen English will comPliment that worthy on his command of the language The barracks was of concrete construction, the usual Russian mix of too little cement, too much sand. The soldiers lived in one large, smelly, musty room with wooden bunks without springs. In the middle of the room stood a wood stove with an exhaust pipe leading to the roof. The bathrooms were communal, with no seats on the filthy toilets and one large shower with five drippy heads. There was no hot water heater. The
smell.

  "No hot water?" "Hot? No." For an American naval officer who had spent half his adult life aboard ship where men were forced to live together in close quarters, this barracks was an appalling sight. The men who lived here must be constantly sick.

  The mess hall was even worse. It was filthy, without refrigeration facilities or hot water.

  Jake asked how the dishes were washed and was told that each man dips his plate into a large drum of cold water. He was shown the drums.

  At the hospital he wandered the corridors and looked at the soldiers in the beds. They stared back at him. He peeked into one empty operating room with little equipment.

  "Where do you sterilize the instruments?" They are boiled, he was told.

  There was a sink in the anteroom, the taps dripping, He turned them on full and let them run.

  Uh-oh.

  "Hot water?" "Hot? No. Want see X-ray machine?" Stunned, Jake left the dimly lit building meekly when an officious person, presumably the administrator or doctor in charge, fired a volley of Russian at their escort and pointed at the door.

  "The sewage treatment plant... I want to see the sewage treatment plant." The translator had great difficulty understanding the request. Toad got into the act. Finally Jake realized that there was no sewage treatment plant.

  Eventually it became clear that the sewage was piped straight to the local river. The translator led them to the bank where they could look down upon the discharge pipes.

  And nearby was the garbage dump. Above ground, The wind brought a whiff of it to where Jake and Toad and the translator were standing. Some small creature darted toward the pile, birds wheeled above, clouds of flies.

  For all these years, Jake thought savagely, we have been told about the vast capabilities of the Soviet military machine. And it's all a lie.

  The shiny missiles and pretty tanks are the whole show. The men who must operate these weapons are poorly housed, in ill health, live in unsanitary conditions and eat food a Western health inspector would send to a landfill. It's all a lie.

  What was it General Brown had said? The Soviet Union is a nation in total social and economic collapse. Nothing works. Nothing!

  He was in a subdued mood when he boarded the plane for the return flight to Moscow. General Yakolev made some comment but he paid no attention.

  Toad Tarkington had a drink in each hand, and he held out one to Jake Grafton, who looked but didn't reach.

  "It's Scotch on the rocks," Toad said.

  Seeing the look on Grafton's face, he added, "I broke the seal on the bottle myself and poured it." Jake accepted the glass and tried to grin.

  "I know," Toad said.

  Around them the Fourth of July reception at Spaso House, the United States" ambassador's residence, was in full swing.

  Jake Grafton estimated the crowd at four or five hundred people. They were everywhere, in every room, in every hall, running into one another, taking delicacies from the trays of passing waiters, and drinking champagne by the gallon. In one corner a combo played light music by American composers.

  The light from the chandeliers cast a warm, soft glow over everything.

  Ambassador Owen Lancaster was mixing and mingling.

  Agatha Hempstead hovered discreetly, ready to whisper a name into the ambassador's ear yet far enough away that she was not a party to his conversations. It was a delicate balancing act but she seemed to pull it off without effort.

  A few minutes ago Jake had seen Herb Tenney talking to the British Army officer, Colonel Jocko West. In rumpled civilian clothes that somehow didn't quite fit, West looked like the caterer's husband dragged away from the television to help with the snack tray.

  On the other hand Colonel Reynaud, the French officer, looked like a millionaire standing in the casino at Monte Carlo waiting for the baccarat tables to open. He was impeccably turned out in full dress uniform with medals. Just now he seemed to be discussing a wine with one of the embassy staffers-he was holding the glass up to the light, now sniffing it, paying close attention to what the State Department employee had to say.

  Colonel Galvano, the Italian, was in a corner with a Russian diplomat.

  They were deep in conversation but weren't grinning.

  "Jack Yocke here yet?" Jake asked Toad.

  "Not yet, sir. Dalworth is waiting for him at the door," Toad reached out and flicked a piece of lint off the left shoulderboard of Jake's white dress uniform. With medals and sword. Toad was similarly decked out. He squared his shoulders and adjusted his sword.

  "We look sorta sPiffally, don't we, sir? What say you go stand over next to that South American general or policeman or postal inspector and let me get a photo for posterity." "Dalworth know what to do?" "Yessir. I briefed him. Stick like glue all evening." "Even in the head." "All evening," Toad repeated. Jake wanted Herb Tenney and his CIA colleagues to see Yocke and learn who he was, but he didn't want them moving in on him. So Spiro Dalworth had been carefully briefed.

  "Okay," the admiral said. Toad wandered off.

  Dalworth seemed like a bright, capable junior officer.

  Just how the navy managed to keep attracting quality young people was one of the modern mysteries. It wasn't the pay or career opportunities, not in this era of red tape, budget cuts, Politically correct witch hunts and reductions in force.

  Jake was sipping his drink and musing about the hundreds of men like Dalworth he had known through the years when the ambassador rendezvoused on his right elbow.

  "Good evening, Admiral." "Good evening, sir- Are all the Fourth of July whingdings like this?" was Well, this is my first, and the staff said I was going to be surprised. I think for a lot of the Russians the invitations were a welcome relief from the ordinary. I don't think we'll have many leftovers, if you know what I mean." Jake knew. He had already glimpsed several Russians by the hors d'oeuvre table surreptitiously wrapping food items in napkins and pocketing them. He had pretended not to notice.

  tw Haven'l had a chance to chat with you the last day or o. Everything going okay?" Jake Grafton nodded thoughtfully.

  "So far." "Anything I or my staff can do... What do you think of General Yakolev?" "I'm not sure yet." "He's as Russian as Rasputin. When you figure him out, I'd be interested to hear what you think." "Yessir. If I may ask, who are these four or five Americans that arrived this afternoon?" "Eight of them, I think," Lancaster said.

  "They're investigators who are going to go through the files of the KGB, the Apparat..." Lancaster waved vaguely. "When Yeltsin invited the Americans over to look at the files, we took him up on it. They're FBI, CIA, some military investigators, one each from the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees." "Will there be anything left in the files to find?" Jake asked, musing aloud.

  "Depends on how hard they look," Lancaster said sourly. "I doubt that shredder technology has arrived here yet but the Russians have matches and garbage dumps.

  Still, one never knows. A lot of these people thought they were in the vanguard of the march of history and wanted to preserve their place in it with written records.

  Then there's the bureaucratic imperative, what I believe you military types crudely refer to as CYA." CYA--COVER Your Ass. Jake Grafton knew about that!

  "Is Yeltsin here yet?" he asked the ambassador.

  "No. He didn't come last year either, which is a diplomatic faux pas that no European prime minister or president would ever commit. But this is Russia." Agatha Hempstead brushed against the ambassador's elbow, and he raised one eyebrow at Jake. Then he was on his way to the next group. Jake smiled at Agatha as she passed and got an expressionless nod in return.

  He looked at his watch. What was the time in Washington? About ten in the morning. If it were not a holiday Callie would be at the university holding office hours. She had an eleven o'clock class this semester.

  Amy was on summer vacation, going swimming and flirting with the Jackson boy, who had long hair and pimples and a learner's permit. Since it was a holiday, t
hey had probably gone to the beach. Jake wished he were there with them.

  General Yakolev was here tonight with his boss, Marshal Dimitri Mikhailov. The head of the Russian military looked every inch a curmudgeon used to getting his own way. He was playing with a champagne glass and listening to. an interpreter explain what the British ambassador was saying.

  Apparently not that enthused with diplomacy, Yakolev wandered to the buffet table and helped himself.

  Soon Ambassador Lancaster had him cornered, but the Russian was eyeing His. Goodbody Hempstead as he munched Swedish meatballs.

  Hempstead favored him with a demure smile.

  And there was Herb Tenney, handing them champagne from a tray. Herb Tenney, champagne waiter... Those CIA guys had all the social graces.