The Red Horseman (11 page)

He was alone with the dead and dying. He walked
toward the cars. The guards-he counted the bodies
… seven, eight, nine. He walked from one to the
other, looking. All dead, each of them shot at
least six or eight times. Blood, one’s man’s
brains, intestines oozing inffcongealing piles on the
stones of the square.

The middle limo was splattered with
holes, the door still standing open.

Yocke looked in.

The big man was Yegor Kolokoltsev, or
had been just a few minutes ago.

Now he was as dead as dead can be. Two of the
bullets had struck him in the head, one just under the
left eye and the other high up in the forehead. His
eyes were still open, as was his mouth. Somehow his face still
seemed to register surprise. A dozen or more
bullets had punched through his chest and throat. There was
little blood.

Facing Kolokoltsev was another corpse. The
driver of the limo sat slumped over the wheel.

The other two cars were empty. Empty shell
casings lay scattered on the street.

Alone in the midst of the vast silence Jack
Yocke bent and picked up a shiny shell casing.
9mm.

One of the weapons lay not five feet from him.
He merely looked. He couldn’t tell one
automatic weapon from another.

He turned and looked again at Kolokoltsev.
Then he gagged.

He staggered away.

His mouth was watering copiously and his
eyes were tearing up. He paused and placed his hands
on his knees and spit repeatedly. He had
to write this too, capture all Of it.

Now the sensation was passing.

He walked, working hard at walking without staggering,
without succumbing to the urge to run, which was building.

The urge to run became dire. He began
to trot. Faster, faster . . .

He saw a narrow street leading away from the
square and ran for it.

People were standing on the sidewalks looking into the
square, but he ran by them without slowing down.

Telephone! He must find a telephone.

“Mike Gatler.” Mike was the foreign editor.
He sounded sleepy, and no doubt he was. It was
one-thirty in the afternoon here, but five-thirty in the
morning in Washington.

“Mike, Jack Yocke. I just witnessed an
assassination.”

“Terrific. Send me a story and I’ll read
it.”

“Right in Soviet Square, Mike. Right in
front of Moscow City Hall. They gunned a
big Commie weenie when he arrived for a political
rally. Crowd there and everything.”

“You woke me up for this?”

“Gee, Mike. It’s front page, for
sure.”

Gatler sighed audibly. “What happened?”

“They killed Yegor Kolokoitsev and eleven
of his guards. Five gunmen with automatic
weapons mowed them down.” The words came faster now,
tumbling out: “It was the goddamnest thing I ever
saw, Mike, a cold-blooded execution. First the
guards, then the politician. I’m sure some of the
bystanders in the crowd were shot too. Just their tough
fucking luck. Like something from a movie.

That was my first thought, like something from a movie.

Something staged, unreal. But it was real all right.”

“Are you okay?” Gatler sounded genuinely
concerned.

The contrast between the irritation in Mike’s voice
at first being awakened and the concern he was now expressing
hit Yocke hard.

“I guess so, Mike. Sorry I bothered you
at home.”

“It’s okay, Jack. Write the story.
Take your time and do it right.

Kolokoltsev, huh? The Russian
nationalist?”

“Yeah. Bigot. Anti-Semite. Holy
Russia and all that shit.

A Nazi with a red star on his sleeve.”

“You write it. Do it right.”

“Night, Mike.”

“Night, Jack.”

e hung up the phone and stood in the lofty,
opulent hotel lobby at a loss for what to do
next. Over in the corner a pianist was playing,
and the tune sounded familiar.

Yocke’s heart rate and breathing were returning
to normal after the half-mile jog to the hotel, the
only place he would find a telephone with a
satellite link to call overseas. The Russian
phone system was a relic of Stalin’s era and
couldn’t even be relied upon for a call across town. But
Yocke was still shook. The surprise of it as much as
anything … damn!

Soviet Square … in front of that statue of
Lenin as The Thinker …

with a Pizza Hut restaurant just a block up
the street where they serve real food to real people who have
real money in theirjeans. Hard currency only,
thank you. No dip-shit Russians with only
rubles in the pockets of their Calvin
Kleins …

The clerk behind the counter was staring at him, as were
several of the guests queued up at the cashier’s
counter.

Now the clerk said something in Russian. A question.
He repeated it.

He seemed to have lost his English.

Jack Yocke shrugged, then headed for the
elevator with the clerk staring after him. He should have
made the call from the phone in his room. If he had
thought about the effect of his conversation on the clerk, he
would have.

As the elevator door closed Yocke
recognized the music, Dave Brubeck’s
“Take Five.” He began laughing
uncontrollably.

At the American embassy Jake Grafton
spent a few minutes with the ambassador, then was
shown to a small office that was temporarily unused.
There he began his report to General Brown on the
conference today. He wrote in longhand and handed the
sheets to Toad to type.

“It went well?” Toad asked.

Maybe.” Too Russian. Jake, you could
screw up a wet dream.

He had about finished the report when there was a
knock on the door and Lieutenant Dalworth
stuck his head in.

“Admiral, I have a message for you.”

Dalworth held out the clipboard with an
envelope attached. “Just fill in the number of the
envelope and sign your name, sir.”

Jake did so. As Dalworth left the room
Jake ripped open the envelope, which was marked with a
top secret classification. It had of course
been decoded in the embassy’s message center.

FYI LTGEN A.s. Brown died last night
in his sleep.

News not yet made public.

FYI’-F6R your information, no action
required. Without a word Jake passed the slip of
paper across to Toad Tarkington.

“Just like that?” Toad asked with an air of
disbelief.

“When your heart stops, you’re dead.” Jake
Grafton folded the message and placed it back
into its envelope. It would have to go back to the message
center for logging and destruction. He tossed the
envelope onto the corner of the desk. “Just … like
… that.”

“For Christ’s sake, CAG, we’ve got
to-was

“No!”

“We can’t just-was

“No.”

Toad turned his back for a bit. When he
turned around again he said in a flat voice,
“Okay, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said.

What could he do? Write a letter to the president?

“What did Herb Tenney do today, anyway?”

“He went out this morning after you left,” Toad
told him. “Came back about two or three.”

“He’s got an office?”

“He’s in with the other CIA types. They’ve
got a suite just down the hall and their own radio
equipment and crypto gear. They don’t use the
embassy stuff.”

“Who are the other spies?”

“Well, there are about a dozen, near as I can
tell. Head guy is a fellow named McCann
who has been here a couple years. I met him at
lunch. One of those guys who can talk for an hour and
not say anything.

A gas bag.”

It was impossible, a cesspool of the first order of
magnitude. “Shit,” Jake whispered.

“Yessir. My sentiments exactly.”

“Have they got a safe in their office?”

“I suppose so. I haven’t been in there.”

“Go in tomorrow morning. Look the place over.”

“if I can get in.”

“Tell Herb you want the tour. Gush.
Gee-whiz.”

“Yes, sir.”

Toad threw himself into a chair. He sighed
deeply, then said, “Y’know, I really wish you and
I had a nice safe job back in the real world-like
bungee jumping or explosive ordnance disposal
on a bomb squad. Something with a future.”

Jake Grafton didn’t reply.

Albert Sidney Brown dead. Damn, damn
and doubledamn!

Well, it was time to call a spade a spade.
The odds that Brown’s ticker picked this particular
time to call it quits were not so good. Ten to one he was
poisoned. Murdered.

By the CIA, or someone in the CIA.
Christians in Action.

If the CIA really did it he and
Toad were living on borrowed time.

Perhaps they had already been served half of the binary
chemical cocktail. And any minute now Herb
Tenney or one of his agents might get around
to serving the chaser.

“You and I are going on short rations as of right
now,” Jake told Toad.

“Go down to the kitchen and get us some canned soda
pop and some food that we can eat right out of the can.”

“What do I tell the cook?”

“Tell him we’re having a picnic. I
don’t know. Think of something.

Tell him I’m sick. Go on.”

After Jake delivered his report to the message
center for transmission, he went up to his room.
The door that led to Toad’s room was open and he was
standing in it.

“Someone was in here today,” Toad said.

“You sure?”

“No, sir. But my stuff is a little different.”

Jake felt in his pocket for scratch paper.
On it he wrote, “Look for bugs.”

It took fifteen minutes to find it. They left
it where it was.

“Are you hungry, Admiral?”

“No. Jake took off his uniform and lay down
on the bed. He turned off the light.

Two minutes later he turned it back on,
got out of bed and checked the door lock, then asked
Toad to come in for a moment. With Tarkington watching,
Jake took the Smith and Wesson from his bag,
checked the firing pin, snapped the gun through all six
chambers, then loaded it.

No doubt the bug picked up the sound of the dry
firing.

Well, that was fair warning. If anyone came in
here tonight Jake Grafton fully intended to blow his
head off.

“Night, Toad.”

“Good night, sir.”

Sleep didn’t come. Jake tossed and turned
and rearranged the pillow to no avail.

The problem was that he was totally alone, and it was a
strange feeling.

Always in the past he had a superior officer within
easy reach to toss the hot potatoes to. Everyone
in uniform has a boss-that is the way of the
profession and Jake Grafton had spent his life
in it. Now he had nowhere to turn.

He should have, of course. He should be able
to just walk upstairs and get on the encrypted voice
circuit to Washington. In just a few minutes he
would be bounced off a satellite and connected with the
new acting head of the DIA, or the Chief of
Naval Operations, or even the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, General Hayden Land. The
problem was that the CIA might be monitoring the
circuit.

Not the CIA as an organization, but whoever it was
that had a grubby hand on Tenney’s strings. The
agency was so compartmentalized that a rogue department
head might be able to run his own covert operation for
years before anyone found out. If anyone found out.
If the man at the top took reasonable care and
kept his operation buried within another, legitimate
operation, it was conceivable that it might never be
discovered.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced Jake was that
he had tripped overjust such an operation. Who
controlled it, what its goals were, how many people were
involved-he had no answers to any of these questions.

So the encrypted voice circuits were out. A
commercial line? Every phone in the embassy was
monitored.

And if he found a circuit, who was he
going to talk to?

If these people could casualty squash a three-star
general, no one was beyond reach. The ambassador? That
Boston Brahman, that man of distinction in a
whiskey ad? Yet he had to trust someone.

The military was built on trust. Trust and
communications. In today’s world of high-tech weapons
systems and instant communications everyone in the system
was merely a moving part. Amazingly, none of the moving
parts were critical. As soon as one wore out, was
wounded or killed, it was replaced. And the machine
never paused, never faltered as long as the
communications network remained intact.

Herb Tenney was a soldier too. Staring at the
ceiling, Jake told himself he must not forget that
fact.

As he began to go over it all for the third or
fourth time, his frustration got the better of him. He
climbed from the bed and went to the window. The sun
hadn’t set yet. He tried to visualize what the
city must look like in the snow, for snow was the norm.
The mean annual temperature here was minus two
degrees centigrade. These long, balmy days were
but a short interlude in the life of the city and those who
inhabited it. In spite of the sun’s
golden glow he could see buildings in a gray
winter’s half-light amid the snow driven along
by the wind. He could feel the cutting cold.

The Russian winter had killed tens of thousands
of soldiers in the past three hundred years, he
reflected. No doubt it could kill a few more.

HE WAS GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE SOME
CHANCES, RUN some risks that were impossible
to evaluate. As a young man he had learned to stay
alive in aerial combat by carefully weighing the odds
and never taking an unnecessary chance, so now the unknown
dangers weighed heavily upon him.

And back then he had only his life at stake,
his and his bombardier’s.

Now . . .

But there was no other way.

When Toad came to the room this morning Jake
sent him to get a car.

“You’ll drive it,” Jake told him. “Bring
the blanket off your bed.” He put on his
short-sleeved white uniform shirt and examined the
ribbons and wings insignia in the mirror. All
okay.