The Red Horseman (31 page)

“Oh.”

Jake looked expectantly at Toad.

“Just curious, that’s all.”

Rita was looking at her husband through narrowed
eyes.

A domestic matter, Jake decided, and forgot
about it.

“Frogfoots. Those will be good planes for this
job,” Groelke said.

“Should be,” Jake acknowledged. “We’ll find
out.” He knew the Frogfoot from its reputation.
A Russian close-air support and antiarmor
weapon, the plane was a close copy of the
Northrop A-9, which had lost the U.s.

Air Force’s competition for a tank killer when
flying against the A-10 Warthog. The Soviets
used Frogfoots in Afghanistan and supposedly
they were good airplanes.

“Brunhilde Tarkington,” Toad said to Rita
when they were alone.

I “What?”

“A name for the kid. If it’s a girl.”

“Don’t you ever, ever do that to me again,
Toad. I don’t question your professional
assignments. Don’t you question mine.

“I’m not pregnant. Nor am I ever likely
to be.”

“And don’t get cute with me, Bub!”

“I just love it when you talk dirty.”

She gave him her coldest stare. “I wear the
uniform, I got the training, I take the pay-I
will fly the missions when they come.”

“Brunhilde.”

“Not on your life.”

He watched her walk away with her shoulders
slightly hunched, her head down, as if she were
walking into a strong wind.

This fatherhood bit . . . it was awful sudden. Of
course, when you’re married and do all the conjugal
things, parent hood is one of the risks. Or
rewards. Whichever. Still, it would have been nice to have a
few years to think about it before it became a fact.
Why didn’t she say, Maybe we ought to think about
being parents? Why didn’t she say that?

Perhaps, he thought, she assumed I was thinking about it
all along.

Women are big assumers. The biggest
assumption of all is the one they routinely
make, that men think just like they do. And they are
tortured by disappointment when it is proven for the
umpteenth jillion time that men don’t.

Because he hadn’t been thinking about it. In fact, the
possibility had never once crossed his mind.
Kids are little people who wail in supermarkets, get
beaned by baseballs at Little League, and ride in
the back end of station wagons making faces at people in
other cars. Other people have them. Usually other older people.
The fact that he had been a kid once upon a time
had never inspired him to want one of his very own or
to even contemplate the prospect.

Of course he knew the theory that sex causes
kids, but he had assumed Rita was taking care of
everything. After all, she never got pregnant before.

Surely Rita would not have made a decision like that
on her own. Would she?

Maybe there had been an accident. Toad
Tarkington, professional naval flight officer,
knew a great deal about accidents. A little dollop
of carelessness could cause you to crash, burn and die.
Sometimes even without the carelessness you crashed, burned
and died–at a level too deep for
philosophers, luck was involved. Life is a
grand game of chance. This kid must have been
an accident, he decided. Not that it mattered.

Diapers. They were extremely messy and
smelled to high heaven. Of course he had never
actually seen or smelled a loaded diaper or
wiped a baby’s bottom-he knew from listening
to adults who had taken the parental plunge. As
he contemplated the messy prospect now, he
shuddered.

And washing clothes in the same machine used for
diapers!

Do people get two washing machines? His mom had
never owned but one …

Funny, he had never thought of that before. He would have
to ask somebody.

He wondered if Rita would want to nurse.
There’s somehing … not obscene … jarring, yes,
jarring, about watching a woman open her blouse and do
something to her bra an d plug a kid in. Seeing
a woman nurse gave Toad the same sensation he
got watching a sword swallower: the sight jolted
him right to his toenails. These modern women have
waited so long for kids they do it everywhere–in cars,
restaurants, theaters, stores, hair places-not
just in the ladies” room like their grandmas used to do.

And somebody once said that babies
don’t just eat three squares a day-they are
hungry every two hours. That seemed like a lot, and
he frowned. Every two hours couldn’t be right. That guy
must have had a fat kid.

His kid wouldn’t be fat. He would speak to Rita
about that. Eat right and get plenty of exercise, throw
the ol’ ball around, climb trees and play tag and
all that stuff. He would see to it.

Boy or girl, he would raise this kid right.
Help with the homework and stories at night, lots of
sports …

How in the heck had his parents done it?

He recalled some spankings and flashes from
holidays and picnics, and some run-ins with the little
girl who lived next door-Becky or Rebecca
or something like that-but it was precious little when he tried
to add it up. That stunned him. Shouldn’t he
remember more? God, he hadn’t tried to dredge up
this stuff in years, not since … well, he had
never tried.

And now he needed it. Slam barn thank you
ma’am and he was going to be a father.

Maybe he ought to write to his mom and get some
sort of operator’s manual, something in writing.

Rita wouldn’t like that, might get all
hurry.

Did she remember more about being a kid than he
did?

Probably not, but she would confidently assume that
since she wasn’t cursed by the y chromosome she
would instinctively know the right things to do, Why couldn’t
he remember?

Jake Grafton used the phone in the office after
the senior chief had rigged the scrambler. He reached
General Hayden Land at the Pentagon.

“The real problem is Iraq,” Land told
Jake after he had related Ambassador Land’s
little speech. “Missiles armed with nuclear warheads
in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal is something these people in
Washington don’t want to face.”

“The Iraqis only took a few missiles,”
Jake informed him. “Apparently they elected
to take warheads instead.”

“I think so too. The president didn’t have
any problem putting the wood to the Russians
to destroy Petrovsk. He was ready to use
U.s. assets to bomb it if the Russians
refused. Almost too ready.”

“What do you mean, General?”

“He hasn’t got burned yet by one of
these military adventures blowing up in his face.
So he’s ready to damn the torpedoes and full
speed ahead.”

“What did CIA say to all this?”

“They told the president to go slow. That he
risked making an enemy of Russia. They were about
to threaten World War III but he shut them up before
they got it out.”

“General, now is the time to go get those weapons in
Iraq. Every day that passes means we are one day
closer to a desert Armageddon.”

“I’m listening,” Land said.

“We’re going to have to go into Iraq. An
airborne assault. We’ll go into Hussein’s
backyard, take or destroy the missiles and
warheads, and leave as quick as we can.

We’re going to have to do it before he uses those
weapons.”

Silence. “That won’t be easy.”

“Yes, sir. I know that.”

“Saddam may bag the whole lot of you.”

“That’s a possibility. But we’ll destroy the
missiles first.

General, we’re going to have to pay a little now or
pay a lot later-there are no other
options. Any way you cut it, we’ve got to get
the jump on him. We have to take the initiative
while there is still time.”

“I don’t like it. It’s too risky. Too many
things can go wrong, then you’ll be stuck on the ground
with a lot of casualties. The Iraqis may bag
the whole lot of you, then we have a political
prisoner situation.

No, the way to do this is an air strike.
We’ll bomb that base into powder and that will be the end of
Saddam’s nuclear arsenal. We might lose a
few pilots, but not a whole bunch of people.”

“If destroying the missiles were the only
objective, I would agree with you,” Jake told
the chairman. “But it’s not. We must prove to the world
that Saddam has the weapons. We’ve got to show the
world these missiles and warheads. Here’s what I
want to do.” Jake laid it out. His explanation
took almost five minutes.

When Jake was finished, Land didn’t say
anything for several seconds.

Finally he said, “Well, maybe. I’ll think
about it. Present it to the president. As a
soldier, I’ll tell you right now that all that is
too complicated.”

“It’s our best shot, sir.”

“I’ll, think about it. What time frame are you
thinking about for this operation?”

“As soon as humanly possible, sir. As
soon as we can plan it. The sooner the better.
I’m going to be flying one of these Russian jets
down to Petrovsk tomorrow. We’re flying out of the
Lipetsk air base. We leave here in about an
hour. I figure we’ll get a checkout on the
planes tonight, then fly first thing in the morning. Tomorrow
night I can go to Arabia.”

“The weather people say that you can expect scattered
to broken stratocumulus in the Petrovsk area,
maybe fifty percent coverage, bases around
three or four thousand feet, occasional rain
showers.”

“That’ll be good enough.”

“Who is the other pilot?”

“Lieutenant Commander Moravia, sir.”

“Okay. Take your scrambler with you and call me
from Lipetsk before you take off. I’ll go back to the
White House and see what they think about Saddam
Hussein.”

“Yessir.”

“Good luck, Jake.”

“Thanks, General.”

Only two options left to stop Saddam
Hussein-an air strike or an airborne
assault. Jake thought about that after he broke the
connection. When you are down to just two options in this
dangerous world, you are in deep and serious trouble.
He knew that and Hayden Land knew it, but did the
president?

She was in the apartment rolling her hair into a bun,
with her mouth full of bobby pins. She was already wearing
her flight suit and steel-toed flight boots.

“Gertrude Murgatroyd Tarkington,” Toad
told her. “Or Tarkington-Moravia or
Moravia-Tarkington. Do you want the kid
hyphenated?”

“Tarkington is okay,” she said, grinning around the
bobby pins and eyeing him in the mirror.

He rammed his hands into his pockets and stood
looking at this and that, avoiding meeting her eyes.
“Have you told your folks?” he asked finally.

“Of course not. Just you. We’ll wait until the
rabbit dies before we tell anyone.”

“Does a rabbit really die?”

“Not anymore. Used to though.”

Toad thought about that for a moment, about
rabbits giving their lives to let women know they were
pregnantreally! There was a whole lot about this baby
business that he didn’t know.

He glanced at her reflection in the mirror and
said, “You be careful out there.”

“I will.”

“Be ready for anything.”

“I will.”

He came over and stood right behind her. “This is
supposed to be a little day jaunt down
to Petrovsk, roll in and make a couple of runs
with live ordnance, then back to the barn. But it may
not go like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The other night we were sitting in a park when people
started shooting.

Some people here and there would probably like to see Jake
Grafton dead.

Somebody wants those missiles pretty
badly. Keep your head on a swivel.

Watch your six. If anybody looks
cross-eyed, blow “em out of the sky.”

Rita got her hair the way she wanted it and
inserted bobby pins.

“Grafton’s been shot at
by experts,” he told her. “Anybody that straps
him on is in big trouble. Just stick to him like glue.
Stay with him.

No matter what, fly your own airplane.”

“I will, Toad.”

She finished with her hair and turned around to face
him.

He put his hands on her shoulders. “I want you
back in one piece.”

“I know, lover.”

“We’re in a helluva fix when we send
pregnant women to fight our battles.”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

Jake took Spiro Dalworth along because he
spoke Russian. Unfortunately he knew
next to nothing about aviation or airplanes or
weapons, so the terms didn’t translate very
well. Yet somehow Jake and Rita found out what
they had to know. They took turns sitting in the
cockpit of an Su-25 asking questions. Dalworth
translated and a Russian pilot supplied the
answers.

The pilot was young, a lieutenant. He was in
culture shock. “Who flies?” he asked
Dalworth.

Spiro pointed to Jake and Rita.

“The woman?”

“Yes, she will fly.”

“A woman? She will fly?”

“Yes.

When Rita asked a question, the answer was short,
curt.

When Jake asked one Dalworth had trouble
finding a pause to translate amid the
Russian’s verbal flood. Rita saw the
problem and addressed her comments to Jake, who then
asked the questions. The process seemed to work better that
way.

The olive-drab airplane with a red star on the
tail seemed an excellent piece of military
equipment. With two internal engines generating over
eleven thousand pounds of thrust each, ten external
weapons pylons under a wing designed to haul a
big load of ordnance, an adequate fuel
supply, and a twin-barrel 30mm cannon mounted
internally, the airplane seemed just what the doctor
ordered for ground attack.

The avionics were not state-of-the-art, however. The
plane lacked a radar and had no computer to assist
the pilot, who had to do his own navigation with a
minimum of electronic help. Jake and Rita
would have to find the target with their Mark 1, Mod
Zero eyeballs and attack it with dumb weapons.
The plane contained a laser ranger and could deliver
laser-guided weapons, but it lacked a laser
designator. The bombsight was strictly
mechanical.

The cockpit and pilot chores were straightforward.

enough, yet the switches and gauges were scattered
through out the cockpit with apparently no forethought given
to ease of operation or minimizing the pilot’s
workload.

Visibility from the cockpit wasn’t great either.
Although the pilot sat well forward of the wing, the view
aft was nonexistent and the view downward was
restricted by the sides of the airplane.

The electronic warfare (Ew) panel was
simple and passive. Lights illuminated when the
plane was painted by radars on certain bandwidths, but
after receiving that quiet warning the pilot was on his own.

“It’s no A-6 or FirstA-18,” Rita
remarked.

“More like an A-7,” Jake muttered.

The only officer they met was the lieutenant who
had led them to the hangar for their briefing. The
CO of the base and the CO of the air wing were
conspicuously absent.

They were cooperating on orders from Moscow, but that
was all.

The officers” quarters were a barracks. Rita
tossed her stuff on a bunk and stared back at the
Russian pilots, who were whispering among themselves.

They were offered food. Jake declined for
everyone-he didn’t want to risk a case of the
trots. Hunger was preferable.

After Jake had used his satellite corn gear
for another long talk with General Land in
Washington, he sat on a bottom bunk with
Rita and examined the charts they had brought from
Moscow. With only these charts they had to find the
Petrovsk base, then find their way back here.
Most of the Russian nav aids were inoperable and the
Su-25 might not reliably receive the ones that were
transmitting.

There was a minor flurry in the bathroom when
Spiro insisted all the Russians depart so that
Rita could use it, but the lights went out without
fanfare after Rita disappointed a little knot of
onlookers by crawling under her blanket fully
dressed.

Jake Grafton lay under his blanket staring
into the darkness, tired but not sleepy. The hangar where
the missiles and warheads were housed Was priority
number one tomorrow morning. Then, if there were any
bombs or cannon shells left, they would attack
the clean room with its warhead parts stacked everywhere.
And they had to do it on the first flight.

There was no way they could ask Yeltsin to let them
fly another mission, not with the outstanding cooperation and
friendly attitude these uniformed folks here had
displayed.

And then there was the problem of the missiles in
Iraq.

Just how long did mankind have before Saddam
Hussein decided his new arsenal was operational?
Had the dictator reached that point already?

How could the Americans plan an airborne
assault into Iraq that minimized the hundreds of
possible things that could go wrong and yet gave them a
reasonable chance of grabbing or destroying the weapons
before the Iraqi military massively retaliated?
were the odds good enough to order people into action, or should they be
asked to volunteer? They would volunteer to a man,
Jake was convinced, but he wanted no part of asking
anyone to commit suicide. Nor did he
plan on doing it himself.

What was Herb Tenney up to these days? Did the
CIA tell him of this bombing mission? What could
he do about it? Why would he do anything?

More to the point, what could Yakolev and his
cohorts do, assuming they were so inclined?

Dozens of questions, no answers. But first things first.

The mission tomorrow-Jake knew how tough it would be.

Using contact navigation to get to Petrovsk would
be tough enough.

Flying there in a type of aircraft he had never
flown before was a helluva challenge. The task would
be huge even if he were current on jet
aircraft, which he wasn’t. How long had it been
since he had flown a tacticaf aircraft?
Three years? No, four. Actually four years and
three months.

And Rita had never been in combat. Oh, this
wasn’t supposed to be combat, but what if someone
started shooting?

How would Rita handle it?

Maybe he should have said something to her.

What? Knowing Rita Moravia, anything he could
come up with would wound her pride. Oh, she wouldn’t
let on, would say yessir and nosir with the
utmost respect, but …

So what could go wrong tomorrow)

Only a couple million things. He began
to list them, to sort through the possibilities and try
to decide now what he would do if and when he was faced
with real problems.

He was still mulling contingencies an hour later when
he finally drifted into a troubled sleep filled with
blood and disaster.

He was preflighting the ejection seat and removing
the safety pins when he realized that one pin was already
out.

This one here, attached to the others with this red ribbon
that went where? He looked. Must be somewhere here on.

the side of the seat, to safety the drogue
extraction initiator mechanism.

He found the place. A steel pin protruded from
the hole.

He tried to pull it out with his fingers.

Nope. It was in there to stay.

Someone hammered this steel rod into that hole. Oh,
the ejection seat would still fire, but the drogue chute
would not deploy and so the main chute would stay in its
pack as he sat in the seat waiting, all the way
to the ground.

Jake Grafton climbed back down the ladder
to the concrete. Spiro Dalworth was standing there with the
Russian lieutenant, the only officer on the
base who had talked to them.

“Spiro, tell this clown to take me to the base
commander.”

Dalworth fired off some Russian. When it
didn’t take, he repeated it.

The Russian pilot’s eyes got large, but
he whirled and started walking.

Jake Grafton and Spiro Dalworth stayed
two steps behind him.

The base commander had his office in a crumbling
concrete building with the Russian flag on a pole
out front. He was a rotund individual with a lot
of gold on his epaulets.

A general, probably.

“Someone sabotaged my airplane, hammered a
steel pin into the ejection seat so that it will not function
properly.

Tell him.”

Dalworth did so. The general looked
skeptical.

“I want two different airplanes. And I
want his people to arm them while we watch.”

This time the general fired off a stream of
Russian and gestured widely.

“He says that you are mistaken. You know nothing of
this airplane, which is a fine airplane.
Combat-tested in Afghanistan. His men are all
veterans and take excellent care of their
equipment. This is a front-line fighting unit,
not-was

“Pick up his telephone. Call the Kremlin
in Moscow.

Ask for Yeltsin.”

To his credit, Dalworth didn’t hesitate.
He reached for the telephone as if he were going to order
a pizza. When he asked the operator in
Russian to get him the Kremlin operator, the
general came out of his chair with a bound.

Jake was ready. He pulled the .357
Magnum revolver from his armpit holster and fired a
round through the top of the general’s desk. The gun went
off with a roar that the walls of the room concentrated into a
stupendous, soulo.

numbing thunderclap. The bullet punched a nice
hole in the top of the wooden desk and a long splinter
came loose.

Dalworth almost dropped the telephone.

The general froze, staring at Jake, who looked
him straight in the eye as he returned the Pistol
to the holster under his leather flight jacket.

The door flew open and a soldier with a rifle
appeared.

Dalworth said something to the general and made a
shooing motion to the soldier, who finally backed out of the
room and closed the door., Dalworth started
talking on the telephone. After three or four
sentences and a wait, he looked at Jake
expectantly.

“Tell them that this general doesn’t understand that he
is to cooperate.”

“Tell them that the two airplanes he wants us
to fly have been sabotaged.”

“Tell them that I want two good airplanes
armed to the teeth, and I want them now, as
President Yeltsin promised the president of the
United States.”

Dalworth translated each sentence in turn and
listened a moment, then held out the instrument to the
Russian general, who accepted it reluctantly.

When the general finally hung up the phone, he
stood, straightened his uniform jacket as he snarled
something at Dalworth, jerked his hat on and
headed for the door.

“We are to follow him, Admiral. From what I
could tell, he was bluntly told to cooperate or
face the music.”

Jake grunted and strode after the general.

The Russian general stood in the middle of the
parking mat and gave orders fast and furiously.
He pointed, first at the planes Jake and Rita
were to fly, then at the row of Su-25’s still sitting in
their revetments.

The general was in fine form, with officers and enlisted
saluting and trotting obediently when Rita
approached Jake.

She held out her hand. In it were five coins,
rubles.

“I found these glued to the stator blades inside
the intakes of the plane I was to fly.

Jake nodded. The coins would have stayed glued
while the engines were at idle, but when the engines were
accelerated to full power for the takeoff roll the coins
would have come unstuck and been sucked through the
compressors which would have started shedding blades
seconds later.

The predictable result would be catastrophic
engine failure and perhaps fire just as the
aircraft lifted from the runway with a full load of
weapons. It would be a spectacular way to die.

The airplane switch took an hour. New
planes were pulled forward with a tractor and topped
off with fuel. Two arming crews took the
250-kilogram bombs off the sabotaged planes
and manhandled them onto the racks of the new ones.
Another arming crew serviced the 30mm cannon
on each plane with belts of ammo. While all this
was going on, Rita inspected each aircraft,
examined the fuses on the bombs, looked at each
arming wire.

She was still at it when the general I told
Dalworth the planes were ready, and he translated
this message for Jake; Grafton turned his back
on the airplanes and stood looking toward the office
building. The telephone lines went to a pole that
also carried the lines from the hangars. These lines went
off to the east until they disappeared behind some buildings
that looked like enlisted bar-racks.

Above them clouds floated southeast. Patches of
blue were visible in the gaps. The clouds were puffy,
full of moisture.

When Rita was finished, she came over to Jake.
“Whenever you’re ready, sir.”

The Russians had G-suits, torso
harnesses, oxygen masks and a variety of helmets
arranged upon the hood of a tractor. The two
fliers donned the flight gear carefully and tried
on helmets until they found ones that fitted
snugly.

“I’ll lead,” Jake told Rita. “You
follow me as soon as I begin my takeoff roll
and rendezvous in loose cruise. I want you above
me. We’ll spend the day below two hundred feet
and only climb when the target is in sight. The
radio has four channels-we’ll use channel
one. Get a radio check on.the ground and then stay
off the radio except for emergencies.

“When we’re airborne, I’m going to arm my
gun and shoot out the telephone box on the edge of the
base. Once you arm your weapons, don’t de-arm
them. Our old equipment would always chamber a round
on arming and leave the round in the chamber when you disarmed
it, so the gun jammed the second time you hit the arming
switch. I don’t know how these guns are wired but
let’s take no chances.”

“Yessir.”

“Got any advice on how to fly this thing?”

s “Be smooth,” Rita Moravia
said. “Let the plane fly itelf. No sudden
control inputs–don’t force it to do anything. Stay
in the center of the performance envelope as much as
possible. Visually check every switch before you move
it. Be ready every second. Don’t ever relax.”

“You got your mil setting for the bombsight?”

“One hundred ten mils.”

“Okay. “Rita, if anything happens to me,
bomb that missile storage hangar. No matter
what.”

“Aye aye, sir.” She said it
matter-of-factly, without inflection.

Jake Grafton wanted to ensure that he was
properly understood. “I guess what I’m trying
to say is, do whatever you have to do to destroy those
missiles.”