The Red Horseman (22 page)

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. You’ve scooped
everybody and you’re gonna be famous. Now
tell me what this broad looked like.

“Well, she was about five eight or so, dark
brown shoulder-length hair, dark brown-almost
black-eyes set wide apart, a classic bone
structure.”

“Good figure?”

“Well, I suppose so.”

“You queer or what?” Tarkington asked sharply.

“She was wearing modest clothes, a good wool
suit. Underneath it all she was probably built like
a brick shithouse.

Is that what you want to hear, sailor boy?”

Toad met Jake Grafton’s gaze. His
eyebrows went up and down once in reply
to Grafton’s silent question.

“You know her?” Yocke asked Toad.

“Just curious, Jack. What I’m trying
to figure out is why you.”

“Because she knew I was a reporter.”

con.th town is full of reporters. Why you?”

“You two sailors are a real pair. I thought
you’d let me hole up here.”

His voice rose: “But no, Jack, you might
write something that embarrasses the good ol” U.s.
of A.

and we probably can’t handle-was

“That’s enough,” Jake said disgustedly. “You can
sleep on the couch.

Right now you go into Toad’s room–he nodded
toward the bedroom door–and write your story.

When you’re ready to send it in let me know. In the
meantime don’t pick up the phone even if it
rings.”

Jack Yocke stood and hoisted the computer. He
had half a mind to tell these two clowns where to go and
what to do to themselves when they got there, but … He
mumbled his thanks, then his eye fell on the maps and
computer printouts. “Say, what is all this
paper?”

“Not a word to your editor about this one,” Jake
told him. “But you ain’t the only guy with problems.
The Russians just had another nuclear power plant
meltdown.”

“Holy … to Like Chernobyl?”

“Maybe worse.”

con”Where? Around here?”

“Someplace called Serdobsk, about three
hundred miles southeast of here.

Now go in there and shut the door and let us work.”

After the door closed Toad turned on
the radio. Classical music came out.

“Judith Farrell?” Jake asked.

“I’d bet the ranch, CAG.”

Jake Grafton went to the window and stood
looking out.

He rubbed the back of his neck, then moved his
shoulders up and down.

Finally he stretched.

When he turned around he told Toad, “The
Israelis sure get their money’s worth out of that
woman.”

“Uh-huh.”

Toad was looking at the map spread upon the
floor. The wind was going to spread that
radioactivity over hundreds of square miles.
He was looking now at the villages in the fallout
zone. He couldn’t even pronounce the Russian
names upon the chart. A great many people from a culture he
didn’t know were about to die, and it sickened him.

con’Do you believe in God?” he asked Jake
Grafton.

“Only on Sundays,” the admiral replied.

“There’s a military base here in this footprint,
sir. a trovsk. Here, take a look. Wasn’t
that the base we visited a couple days
ago?”

Jake Grafton looked. “Yes.
Petrovsk. Missiles with nuclear warheads.”

“They’ll have to evacuate that base, if they
haven’t already, his

Evacuate. That meant airplanes, fuel. And
what percentage of the base personnel could be carried
on the planes?

“Wonder if Moscow will even tell those people that a
lethal cloud of radioactivity is coming their way?”

” I’IF only five or ten percent of them
could possibly escape, would you tell them?” Jake
Grafton mused, his voice so low that Toad almost
missed the comment. “What would you tell them?”

A little later he muttered, “A lot of that
radioactivity is going to go into the Volga.”

He looked again at the predicted
radioactivity levels. The numbers were two or
three times worse than Chernobyl.

How did people manage to make such horrible
messes on this tiny, fragile planet? His finger
moved on the map, down the Volga past Saratov
and Engels, past Kamyshin, all the way
to Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad.

The water supplies of those cities would
be grossly contaminated. The land.

The food supply. Jake Grafton picked
up the estimate of the various isotope levels and
their half-lives and stared at it, trying to take it
in.

And on down the Volga to the Caspian Sea.
How much radioactivity could that closed inland ocean
tolerate before it became a dead sea?

This was worse than a disaster-it was a nightmare.

When the Russian people finally learned the truth,
what would be their reaction?

The telephone rang and Toad picked it up.
After saying “Yessir,” several times, he
replaced the receiver and told Jake, “The
ambassador wants you to go with him to the Kremlin.
In a couple hours our president will announce that
the United States will assist Russia any way
it can.”

Jake Grafton took a deep breath and let
it out slowly.

“So when is the Yeltsin government going public
on this?”

“The ambassador’s aide didn’t say.
Soon, apparently.”

Yeltsin had no choice. Gorbachev
had waited for days to tell the world of Chernobyl and
had been excoriated for it. But Gorbachev had
been a Communist and Yeltsin swore he no longer
was. “Umm,” Jake Grafton said.

“Maybe you’d better wear your uniform, sir,”
Toad said gently. “It looks like it’s going to be
one of those days.”

“Jack Yocke has just been had by a pro. She
conned him good and he’s so anxious for a story-any
story-that he swallowed it without even tasting it.”

Toad Tarkington nodded. “I’ll buy that.”

“She may try again.”

“Naw. She’s not that stupid. Too big a
risk.”

“When the stakes get this large any risk is
justified. Any risk! We’ve got to get to her
before Jack Yocke does.”

Captain Herbert “Tom” Collins was the
naval attache.

As the senior naval officer he supervised a
staff of just three other officers: one a marine
lieutenant colonel, one a navy commander, and the
other the politically impure lieutenant, Spiro
Dalworth. A surface warfare officer with a
destroyer command behind him, Collins had
acquired a degree in Russian from the U.s.
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
California, while he was still a lieutenant.

Tonight Jake recalled with a jolt that Collins’
first assignment after the Naval Academy had been
to nuclear power school. After graduating, he then
spent his first tour tending a reactor aboard a
nuclear-powered frigate.

These days Collins tried to keep track of what
was happening in the former Soviet Navy as the ships,
planes and sailors were divided between the newly
independent republics. The job was impossible.
In the past the naval officers heggd subsisted on
a mere trickle of information, mainly what the
Soviets wanted them to see and hear-now they were
drowning in it. The Russians were showing them everything,
telling everything, talking openly about weapons
capability, maintenance problems with ships, engines,
radars, planes, problems with personnel, training,
recruitment, supply, food … everything. If
there were any secrets left in the new Commonwealth,
Collins had yet to bump into one of them.

Two nights ago he told Jake Grafton,
“Today the Russian Navy would lose a fight with the
Italians. Honest to God, since the
collapse they can’t get food or fuel to steam with.

They can’t feed the sailors; they can’t maintain the
ships; they got “em tied up rusting at the pier.
A couple more years of this and most of those ships will be
beyond salvage.”

Tonight in the courtyard Tom Collins turned up
the volume on his portable radio, which was tuned to a
Russian station playing American jazz. They were
standing in the shadow of the new embassy complex, empty
and condemned because it was hopelessly infested with bug”…he
electronic kind.

“Isn’t one of your chiefs a communications
specialist?”

Jake asked.

“One of my two, sir. Senior Chief
Holley.” Collins was eyeing Jake’s uniform
and the ribbons displayed there. The admiral had just
returned from the Kremlin with the ambassador.

“I need to borrow him for a while. Holley and
Dalworth.”

“We’re drowning in my shop, Admiral.
I’ve got them working twenty hours a day.”
Collins and the other military people were using every contact
they had to try to discover what the Russian military
knew about the extent of the damage from the
Serdobsk meltdown. Jake had spent the day
helping, trying to analyze information received in dribbles
from all quarters.

“I understand. This is important.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jake Grafton felt like ajerk. He merely
needed two people he could trust-anyone really-and
Collins had an important job to do. Still, if
he could get to Judith Farrell …

“So what are the Russians saying?” Jake
asked.

“Same old story. It’s all Yeltsin’s
fault.”

“Is it?”

“Well, there’s no money to maintain reactors
and they’re all in terrible shape. An American
inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
would have a heart attack if he saw one of those
plants, but they’ve been like that for years. This country
is too poor to properly build or maintain or
operate nuclear power plants. They just don’t have
the technical expertise or the trained people.”
Collins” shoulders sagged.

“They’re like monkeys with a computer.”

“Nobody over at the Kremlin Will
even hazard a guess about why that thing melted.”

ins grunted. “There are meltdowns and there are
meltdowns,” he said.

“The accidents at Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl could be classified as radiation leaks.
This one was a real whing-ding, snap-doodle of a
meltdownthere isn’t much left out there. The
satellite sensors show unbelievable
temperatures. The first reading they got was thirty
minutes after the thing went. We got a fax of a
satellite photo half an hour ago and you
wouldn’t believe it.

Looks like the damn thing was hit with a ten-ton
blockbuster. The structure is gone-steel,
concrete, everything.

Nothing left but some rubble and a hole in the
ground.”

After a bit Collins added, “Of course, there’s
not a chance in a zillion that anyone survived it.”

Grafton whistled. “You’re saying it’s almost like
it blew up.”

“That’s precisely what it did. In the argot
of the trade, la power excursion,” or a
runaway. In lay terms, the son of a bitch blew
up.”

Jake was stunned. Today no one had mentioned an
explosion, nor had the word passed the lips of
anyone at the Kren-din. “I thought nuclear
reactors couldn’t explode.”

“A popular misconception. Fast breeders can.
This one did.”

Jake was still trying to take it in. “Exploded?”

“The core exploded.”

con’A nuclear explosion?”

“Boom.”

“How could that happen?”

Collins rubbed his face. He looked around, then
by reflex turned up the volume on the radio.
“Serdobsk was a liquid metal fast breeder
reactor, one of the first ones the Russians built.
The core is made up of uranium-235, which is
surrounded by rods of uranium-238, which breed
into plutonium. In a water-cooled pressure
reactor, bleeding off the water causes the core
to melt and fission to stop. Of course the hot core
can melt the containment vessel and release
radioactivity, but fission stops. In a breeder,
loss of coolant has the opposite effect: the
fission reaction increases. The more rapid the
coolant loss, the worse the effect. As
the temperature rises the core melts and fills
the spaces between the rods. When the material is
compact enough, it can detonate in a nuclear
explosion.”

Collins waved a hand impatiently. “It’s
been years since I studied this stuff, but as I
recall, theoretically you could get an explosion about
the equivalent of ten tons of TNT if the core
is really cooking when the coolant goes. That
looks to me about what they had. An explosion like that
would blow maybe half the core material into the
atmosphere-that’s tons of really filthy uranium,
plutonium, iodine, strontium-90, that kind of
crap.”

Jake Grafton felt like a sinner listening
to God’s verdict.

“Tons?”

Collins was merciless. “If you want all the
trade words, a liquid-metal cooled breeder is
autocatalytic-it’s its own catalyst for
manufacturing power excursions. The process of
compaction and excursions that result in more compactions
is a little like what happens in a collapsing star at
the end of its life. Power melts the core, it
crashes down, more power, more rebound or
crashdown, poof! Think of it like a little supernova.
The nuclear reaction stops only when the core
disassembles-blows itself to smithereens.”

“What could cause this … core compaction?”

“Well, I’m no expert, but-was

“You’re as close to an expert as I’ve got.”

“As I recall, there are a bunch of
theoretical possibilities.

Basically any event that causes the core to be
compacted can start the process. The reactor is
cooled by liquid sodium, which is hotter than
hell: molten steel could cause the sodium
to vaporize and explode. A sodium vapor
explosion is the most likely way, but fuel
vaporizing could trigger it. Or an external
explosion that damages the core and compacts it, or
coolant loss or surges that damage the core-was

Jake had had enough. He stopped the recitation
with a raised hand. “So how bad is it?”

“Bad?” Collins stared at him as if he were a
dense child.

“This reactor was old, full of plutonium and
really raunchy crud.

Plutonium is the deadliest substance known
to man.

It has a half-life of twenty-four thousand
two hundred years. One would have to wait for about ten
half-lives, call it two hundred and fifty
thousand years, for the stuff to cool off to the tolerable
level.”

“Forever.”

“Essentially forever.”

“How much land will have to be permanently abandoned?”

“I dunno. They’re trying to figure that out in
Washington. And I’m trying to make some
estimates. Depends on the winds and how much
atmospheric mixing there was, how much rain, all that
stuff.”

“So guess,” Jake Grafton said.

“Maybe fifty thousand square miles. Maybe
twice that.”

Collins shrugged.

“Yeltsin’s fault,” Jake Grafton said
slowly.

“It’s somebody’s.” Collins weighed his words.
“You know, I got out of nuclear power after my first
tour. Oh, I was a gung-ho little nuke all
right-had my interview with that troll Rickover and
did my time in Idaho and thought we had the fucking
genie corked up tight. But this stuff”…he
looked around again, searching for words-“God uses
fusion to make the stars burn. We use fission now
and we’re working up to fusion. We’re playing God
… toddlers sitting in the dark playing with matches.
The consequences … I just decided I wanted no
more of it.”

“Serdobsk blew. Man’s hubris? Or did
someone help this supernova compaction along?”

“What do you want, Admiral? Probability
theory?”

“Yes.”

“Never bet on God. Go with the main chance, Men
build em, men screw ‘em up.”

“If you were going to blow a breeder, how would you go
about it?”

Collins was in no mood for what-if games,
yet a glance at Grafton’s face made him
concentrate on the question.

“Shaped charges on top of the vessel. Blow
down and in.

Put some hot molten steel into that sodium stew.
The charges wouldn’t have to be very big since the containment
vessel is unpressurized. With luck I’d get
a little sodium vapor explosion that would send a
shock wave down into the core. The first
shock wave would lead to a power excursion and
another-bigger-shock wave, and so on. If I were
willing to meet my maker with that on my conscience,
that’s the way I’d do it.”

Jake Grafton just grunted.

The telephone rang at midnight. “Admiral
Grafton.”

“This is Richard, Admiral. I’ve got it.”

Jake came wide awake. Richard Harper.
“This isn’t a secure line, Richard.”

“Okay.” Two seconds of silence. “It was a
hell of a trail and they were damn cute, but I got
it. How do you want it?”

“I’ll have someone call you. Can you write it out?”

Sure.

THE STORM BROKE IN RUSSIA THE
NEXT MORNING. THE speaker of the Congress of
People’s Deputies managed to call the house
to order, but that was the last thing he accomplished.
While the world watched on television the deputies
brawled. Finger pointing and shouting gave way to shoving
and fists. Before the camera was turned off several
deputies were seen to be on the floor being kicked and
pounded with fists by their colleagues.

A huge, angry crowd gathered in Red
Square. Conspicuous today were the red flags, the
ugly mood. Then, as if someone struck a match,
the crowd exploded. A truck was overturned and
set on fire. Policemen were beaten, several
to death. Then the rioters spilled out of the square and
headed for the nearby hard-currency hotels and
restaurants, which they looted. One hotel was set
ablaze. Foreigners were attacked on the streets and
beaten mercilessly. Somehow CNN managed
to televise most of the riot live to a stunned,
angry, frightened world.

Although the sense of fear and betrayal was strongest in
Russia, the rest of the world felt it too. Nuclear
power plants stood throughout the Western world. Their
safety had long been an issue, but the debate
seemed esoteric to electorates concerned with the
mundane issues of jobs, wages, education and
housing. The massive, catastrophic pollution from
the Serdobsk accident was something the public could
understand.

They were seeing the consequences of an accident that
advocates of nuclear power said would never happen.

In Italy the coalition government fractured
and the premier resigned.

The French president addressed a
crowd estimated at ten thousand people and was forced to stop
speaking when a riot broke out on the edge of the
crowd.

Across the channel the British prime minister was
questioned sharply in Parliament from both sides of the
aisle about the dangers of Britain’s nuclear
reactors. Here too a significant percentage
of the lawmakers were immediately ready to shut down all the
reactors.

By the time Americans began to wake up with their
coffee, newspapers and morning television shows, the
fat was in the fire. The television played scenes
of rioting in Russia and the political crises in
Europe while people read the front pages of their
newspapers with a growing sense of horror. Jack
Yocke’s story on the KGB’S involvement in the
Soviet Square massacre-it was dubbed a
massacre by an inspired headline writer and the name
stuck-made the front page of the Washington Post,
at the very bottom. The rest of the page was devoted
to the Serdobsk meltdown.

Experts were stunned by the extent of the disaster. It was
as if none of the redundant safety systems in the
reactor had functioned. Initial estimates on
the level of radioactivity at ground
level where the reactor had stood were hastily
developed from satellite infrared and other
sensors.

“It will be three hundred thousand years,” one
physicist declared, “before an unprotected human can
safety walk upon that site.”

In the Capitol in Washington congressmen
elbowed one another vying to get in front of the
cameras in the press briefing rooms. Every one of
them swore he would support a critical review
of the American nuclear power program.

A significant minority was ready to shut down
all the reactors right now. Among this minority were
several of the legislators who had fought hardest on
behalf of the utilities that operated reactors-the
same people, incidentally, who had accepted the most
PAC money from those utilities.

The antinuclear lobby was having a great day.
Triumphant and exultant as the tide lifted their
boat, they excoriated senators and congressmen who
had consistently poohpoohed safety concerns. They
damned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an
industry puppet, vitified every public official
who ever said that nuclear power was safe, and demanded the
immediate resignation of the secretary of the
Department of Energy.

While the antinukes danced and pranced in
television studios in New York and Washington,
a huge crowd gathered outside the Capitol and were
harangued by impromptu speakers. After an hour the
crowd became unruly and police used tear gas
to break it up.

When the sun rose in Japan the antinuclear,
antitechnology forces arrayed in helmets and
plastic body armor were ready to do battle with
club-wielding riot police. The battle surged
through downtown Tokyo, commuter trains were literally
overturned, power lines were dragged down while still
hot, and a mob broke through the fence at Narita
airport.

Outnumbered riot police turned and ran as the
demonstrators charged for the Boeing 747’s at the
terminal gates.

Most of the giant planes suffered minor
damage, mostly to their tires, but two were set on
fire.

The chaos brought the city to a choking halt while
legislators in the Diet crafted a hasty plan
to shut down Japan’s nuclear power plants. The
power loss would stun the economy, but in a
small nation that had never forgotten Hiroshima or
Nagasaki, this was the only possible political
choice. As uncomfortable, perspiring physicists
sat before television cameras and tried to assess the
Serdobsk meltdown damage based on fragmentary
information, Japan got out of the nuclear power
business.

At stock exchanges around the world the value of
stocks in electrical utilities that owned
nuclear power plants fell disastrously before trading
was halted because of the huge disparity between buy and sell
orders.

But Serdobsk was in Russia, and it was there that the
situation got completely out of control as the evening
shadows lengthened. The development “at any
price” mentality of the post-World War II years
was revealed for what it was-a grotesque
miscalculation that had bankrupted the nation, left the
people paupers on the brink of starvation, and now had made
huge portions of the nation uninhabitable. Raging
mobs roamed the core of Moscow and no foreigner was
safe. Three hotels were now ablaze. The
entrances to the Kremlin were blocked with barricades,
and police hid behind them to fire into the enraged
crowds.

Several tanks appeared on the streets, only
to be surrounded and disabled. The crews were dragged out and
beaten to death as television camera crews
broadcast the scenes from the safety of the rooftops.

A mob surrounded the American embassy
complex and probably would have stormed it if the
ambassador hadn’t ordered the marines to use live
ammunition and shoot to kill. They did. By the time the
summer sun had set, over a dozen bodies lay
on the streets around the embassy. One of the bodies
was of a young woman who had tried to get close enough to the
wall to hurl a Molotov cocktail. When a
corporal shot her, the bottle shattered beside her and
her corpse was immolated. This vignette would have
made great television, but unfortunately the CNN
crew on the rooftop across the boulevard was having
trouble with their satellite feed.

Jack Yocke saw the incident and used it to lead
off a story for the Post. He knew he had something.
The woman’s hair blowing in the wind as she lay
dead in the street, the burning gasoline igniting the
asphalt, her clothing, and finally that wispy brown
hair-he could still see the scene in his mind’s eye as
he tapped on the laptop and tried to capture the
insanity of infuriated, berserk people charging
marines behind a brick wall armed with M-16’s.
Blood and guts were what he did best, so he
wrote quickly and confidently.

As he wrote he could still hear the occasional sharp
crack of an M-16.

Now and then through the open window he got a whiff
of the acrid smoke of a burning car that the locals had
torched this morning. It was a Ford with diplomatic
plates-just which embassy employee it belonged
to Yocke didn’t know. When he was finished he
checked his work over for spelling and punctuation, then
called the Post on Grafton’s telephone and
sent the story via modern.

After Yocke had sent off his story, he locked
the door of the apartment and went looking for Jake
Grafton. He found him against the southwest corner
of the compound wall busy with the TACSAT gear and
encoder. The admiral merely glanced at him and
continued to punch buttons, so Yocke sat down beside
him.

Above them, standing on some empty furniture
crates so he could see over the wall, was a marine
with a rifle. He was scanning the windows of a
Russian apartment house just across the alley.
Fortunately no rioters had chosen to get
up there and shoot down into the compound, probably because
none of them had guns. The Communists had made
damn sure that the civilian inhabitants of their
workers” paradise were unarmed and stayed that way.

“Hell of a day, huh?” Yocke said.

Grafton finished with the number sequence. He
diddled a bit with the dish and high-gain antenna on
top of the box and finally got the voice echo in sync
with his voice. He pushed another button, then
leaned back against the wall with the telephone-style
handset cradled on his shoulder and glanced at the
reporter. “Yeah,” he said.

After a moment he spoke into the mouthpiece.
“General Land, please.

Admiral Grafton calling.”

More waiting. Grafton nodded at Yocke’s
trousers.

“Toad loan you those?”

“His are too small. He bought me some stuff
at the embassy store.”

Grafton merely nodded and played with the handset
cord.

Almost a minute passed before he spoke again:

“Admiral Grafton, sir. Calling from the
embassy compound in Moscow …

Yessir … Ambassador Lancaster talked
to Yeltsin about a half hour ago on the
satellite phone. Called Washington and they
called Yeltsin and patched him through … I think the
local phone system is overloaded, everybody
calling everybody … Yessir . . .

Yeltsin told the ambassador that the generals
won’t bring in troops to put down the rioting. They
want him to resign and appoint a junta …

That’s right, a junta-seven of them … Marshal
Mikhailov, General Yakolev, a KGB guy
named Shmarov-those three I’ve heard of. There’re
a couple more generals and one admiral. The seventh
guy is some civilian .. Yessir.”