The Red Horseman (28 page)

From a thousand feet the fields looked weedy and
unattended, the occasional house just a shack, the
villages collections of shacks. At random
intervals the machines crossed above power lines and
railroad tracks, incongruous fixtures that
ran across the gently rolling countryside from one
hazy infinity to the other.

The helicopter flew from sunlight into the random
cloud shadow, back to sunlight again while Jake
Grafton thought about radioactivity and nuclear
warheads.

The noise was loud but not painfully so. Oh, to be
able to fly on forever and never have to arrive. His
eyelids grew heavy. To fly on and on and never have
to arrive at the radioactive hell embedded in the
haze and puffy clouds somewhere beyond the horizon, beyond
the blighted promises and twisted dreams …

Fueling the helicopter that was to take them on
to Serdobsk and Petrovsk was a nightmare. The hand
pump leaked and took the best efforts of two men.
Everyone took turns. Three or four minutes of
intense effort reduced most rotor downwash where
Goober hovered, but they had been up to the belly of the
machines when the Americans found them. One of the
tires of the helicopter carrying the fuel had been
flat. A half hour was spent getting an air
compressor from the hangar to start. A family of
birds had nested in one cooling intake, but Goober
didn’t think that worth mentioning.

“How are you going to get these engines started out
there”-Jake nodded toward the southeast-“if they run
long enough to get us there?”

We loaded two power carts into the other chopper,
sir.

That cut the amount of extra fuel we could
carry.”

“I don’t want to walk back.”

“I think we’ll be all right, sir.”

Well, Goober was his pilot. He could go over
the figures with him or take his word for it.

“Okay,” Jake told him and turned to his little
group. “Let’s get out of these suits after
Captain Collins checks each one. Be careful with
them. These are the only hot suits we have.”

“How did you get permission to borrow these
machines, Admiral?” Colonel Rheinhart
asked as he worked his zipper down, “It’s a standard
midnight requisition, Colonel,” Toad put
in, but his smile never arrived. Jake Grafton
saw that and wondered if Rita did. She was helping
Captain Collins check the suits. “Common
procedure in the American Navy,” Toad
assured him.

“Oh, You’re stealing them?”

“We showed the guards at the gate a personal
note from Boris Yeltsin.”

The colonel looked at him askance, so
Toad added, “An interpreter at the embassy
wrote the note. We gave it to the sergeant of the
guard as a souvenir, along with two cartons of
cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon.”

Actually Spiro Dalworth had done the talking
and Toad had watched.

Dalworth was trying hard to please Tarkington,
who had little to say to him. Just now Dalworth stood
watching this exchange. He wasn’t trying on a
hot suit since he was going to remain with the fuel
chopper.

was What if the Russians shoot us down?”
Jack Yocke whispered to Jake Grafton, who
pretended not to hear him. The admiral walked over
to Rita and had some final words with, her.

“If I may, gentlemen,” Colonel
Reynaud offered, “I believe it is time to mount
up’? As zhey say in ze western movies, we
are burning ze daylight.”

Jake rode beside Goober Groelke in the
copilot’s seat for the first leg.

He was impressed by Groelke’s flying
ability: he handled the large Russian
helicopter like he had flown it for years. Jake
examined the faces of the instruments that were
telling him God-knows-what and watched the pilot at
work for the first five minutes, then his mind wandered.

More puffy clouds this afternoon. And they had a late
start.

They soon left the heavily industrialized
suburbs of Moscow behind and followed a two-lane
road for a while, then the road turned more to the east
and the helicopters flew across wood lots and
fields and here and there small villages. The land
didn’t look prosperous, Jake decided.

From a thousand feet the fields looked weedy and
unattended, the occasional house just a shack, the
villages collections of shacks. At random
intervals the machines crossed above power lines and
railroad tracks, incongruous fixtures that
ran across the gently rolling countryside from one
hazy infinity to the other.

The helicopter flew from sunlight into the random
cloud shadow, back to sunlight again while Jake
Grafton thought about radioactivity and nuclear
warheads.

The noise was loud but not painfully so. Oh, to be
able to fly on forever and never have to arrive. His
eyelids grew heavy. To fly on and on and never have
to arrive at the radioactive hell
embedded in the haze and puffy clouds somewhere beyond the
horizon, beyond the blighted promises and twisted
dreams …

Fueling the helicopter that was to take them on
to Serdobsk and Petrovsk was a nightmare. The hand
pump leaked and took the best efforts of two men.
Everyone took turns. Three or four minutes of
intense effort reduced most of them to puffing. The
marine captain was in the best shape, but after five
minutes even he needed a break.

They were in a pasture several miles from the nearest
village, but no one came to see who they were or why
they had landed. Two scrawny steers watched from the
safety of some trees at the far end of the field.

“How’s the machine flying?” Jake asked
Goober.

“Left engine is running a little hot,” he was
told, “but the oil levels seem okay. And the
pressure in the primary hydraulic system
fluctuates occasionally, but it’s nothing we can’t
live with.”

“And the other machine?”

“A bunch of circuit breakers popped. The
stab aug is out. Several hydraulic leaks.”

The refueling took over an hour while
Tom Collins rigged his radioactivity detection
equipment, which he described to Jake as advanced
Geiger counters. The censors were on small winches
so they could be lowered from the open rear door of the chopper
to get readings at ground level. In the meantime
Groelke and the other pilot climbed all over the
two helicopters, checking everything.

When fueling was complete, everyone stepped behind the
helicopter to relieve themselves, then took long
drinks of water. The party that was flying on donned the
hot suits.

“Toad,” Jake said, “you ride with Goober in
the cockpit.” Toad would do the navigation. He had
several charts which he got out and stacked in the order in
which he would need them. Most of the officers had
cameras. They checked them carefully before they donned
their helmets and zipped the gloves into place.

They were going to breathe filtered air as long as the
radiation levels were not too high. Collins would
tell everyone when to switch on their oxygen systems.

Jack Yocke walked over to Jake and said,
“If anything goes wrong, we’re dead men. You
know that?”

Jake Grafton was tempted to make a
flippant reply, but after a look at the
reporter’s face, he refrained. “I know,
Jack,” he said patiently, and pulled his helmet
on.

He knew the dangers better than the reporter
did. No one in the other machine had hot suits
and the machines would be too far apart for radio
reception. If this machine had a serious
mechanical problem and was forced down, everyone aboard
was doomed. Even in well-maintained helicopters
with excellent equipment and thorough, careful
planning, this mission was too dangerous for anyone but
a desperate fool. Which was, he told himself
scornfully, why the Russians weren’t here and he
was.

He had given the other pilot explicit
orders: if we don’t come back after six hours,
you are to return to Moscow.

The hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from Moscow
had put a sufficient charge on the helicopter’s
batteries that Goober got a start without using the
external power cart.

They had wrestled one of the carts into the passenger
bay and Spiro Dalworth was outside standing beside the
other, just in case.

Jake strapped himself into the crewman’s
seat by the rear door. He surveyed the compartment.
Some of the other people had strapped in, some hadn’t.
Yocke was playing with his buckle, toying with the
adjustment catch. Perhaps each of them in his own way was
pondering his karma.

Jake looked forward and saw Toad looking
back at him.

He gave Tarkington a thumbs up. and lifted
the bird When the engine Rpm had stabilized, and the
machine left the ground.

All that remained of the Serdobsk fast breeder
reactor was rubble arranged around a shallow hole in
the ground.

From a hover two hundred feet above the plant
it was obvious that no one had survived the blast.
Jake Grafton lay on his belly with his
helmeted head poking out the open helicopter door.
Seventy-five feet below him the radioactivity
sensor was inscribing little circles in the air.

Beside him people were taking turns snapping cameras,
Jake felt a hand pulling him. It was Collins.
They put their helmets together and Collins shouted,
“We can’t stay here more than a couple minutes.
It’s hotter than holy hell down there.”

“What’s that stuff over there?” Jake
pointed to the ay from wreckage of a building several
hundred yards aw where the reactor had stood,
Numerous drums were visible amid the concrete
rubble, some of them split open. The contents looked
dark, almost black.

“Plutonium. They probably had tons of the
shit stored there.”

“The containers have ruptured.”

“Yeah, and the stuff is going to get blown away
on the wind or washed into the creeks and rivers or
soaked into the soil. Come on, Admiral, let’s
get the hell outta here.”

Jake went forward to the cockpit and tapped
Goober on the shoulder. The pilot eased the stick
forward and the helicopter left the hover.

“Circle over that KGB troop facility.”

Groelke did so. One of the buildings had
burned and several bodies were visible, but nothing
moved. Nothing.

The helicopter flew in a gentle circle
until it was pointed southeast toward Petrovsk.
Goober Groelke climbed to several thousand feet
to minimize their radioactivity exposure.

Now the noise of the engines became mesmerizing,
Jack Yocke thought. One listened
carefully, anxious not to hear any change, any
burble or hiccup or unexplained sound.

With your life depending on the continued smooth
running Of these two engines, the sound captures your
attention and holds you spellbound. The ruins of the
reactor had been horrifying, but the sound of these
engines was the promise of continuing life, a drug more
powerful than anything a doctor could prescribe.

Yocke tried to put his emotions into words, tried
to string the words together as he sat with closed eyes and
concentrated on that perfect humming.

On the floor of the passenger compartment Tom
Collins fiddled with his equipment and made notes of
radioactivity readings from which he could extrapolate
estimates of the levels present on the surface.
Jake Grafton watched him.

At times Collins shook his head. Finally he
folded up the notebook and sat hunched, staring at
the needles on the dials in front of him.

The helicopter flew over a village, then a
small town, then farther along another village.
Cattle lay dead in the fields. Not a sign of
life below, not even buzzards. They were dead too.

All those people went to bed one evening and at dawn,
or just after, the radioactive fallout
arrived, an invisible rain that fell without noise,
without beauty, without warning, and brought quick, gentle
death. Most of the victims probably died in their
sleep.

Is that the fate of civilization? Is that the end that
awaits our species? No bang, no warning, just
death for every last man, woman and child as they lay
sleeping on the dawn of the last day?

Jake Grafton felt his eyes tearing over and
blinked repeatedly.

Collins had given up on the instruments and was
standing beside Grafton looking aft, out the open door,
when they saw the river, the Volga, broad and
deep, the water reflecting the blue of the sky and the
white of the clouds.

“Let’s go down and hover just above the surface.”

Goober turned the machine and went back. After
twenty seconds of hovering, Collins signaled
to fly on. Toad saw him and waved his hand at
Groelke.

Jake bent down to where Collins was making
notes. He was not writing down radiation levels,
but a sentence: “The Volga is now a river of
radiation carrying poison to the sea.”

They circled the Petrovsk Rocket
Base while Collins took more readings.

Jake looked out the window. The barracks and
offii’cces and hangars were all intact, but nothing
moved.

From this altitude the scene reminded Jake of a
model railroad setup, complete with cars,
trucks and several airplanes parked on the mat just
off the runway’, and a locomotive and flatcars
near the biggest hangari But his attention was captured
by the empty transporters parked on the mat. There
were three of them, green tractors with green flat
trailers hooked behind them, all empty.

Jocko West and the two European officers
stood in the door looking at the transports, then
Rheinhart began snapping pictures.

“I think we can land, Admiral,” Collins
shouted.

“How long?”

“As little time on the ground as possible.”

“How hot is it?”

“Unprotected, you’d be fatally ill in a half
hour. Maybe less.”

Groelke put the chopper near the main hangar and
killed the engines to save fuel. Breathing pure
oxygen, the people got out of the machine
carefully, gingerly, conscious of anything that might
rip or damage their antiradiation suit.

“Goober, stay with the machine. Toad, stay with
him.”

Jake Grafton led the little party toward the open
hangar door.

The giant missiles riding on their
transporters were stark, functional sculptures
with the red star prominent upon their flanks.

There was open space near the door, apparently enough
for the three transporters that sat a quarter-mile
away across the concrete.

impressive as the missiles were, the little group
was soon standing gazing at medium-size wood
crates arranged on pallets.

One of the boxes had been ripped open, revealing
a cylindrical-shaped device about twelve inches
in diameter.

Wires and electronic devices covered it like
spaghetti. Yet Just visible between some of the wire
bundles was a dull black substance arranged in the
shape of a ball. This black stuff, Jake knew,
was the conventional explosive trigger.

Upon detonation it would squeeze the plutonium in
the core-the center of the ball-into a
supercritical mass.

There in that tiny space the plutonium atoms would
have their electrons stripped away, an
instantaneous rape.that would release stupendous
amounts of energy. E equals MC2.

Jake Grafton counted quickly. Four warheads
on each pallet, how many pallets? Almost a
hundred.

The visitors were wandering away from the warheads when
they saw the bodies stacked in one corner. Jake
went over for a look, then found that only Jack
Yocke had followed him.

Blood everywhere. Blood? Jesus, these people were
shot! Lined up and gunned down.

Now he saw the spent cartridges that lay
scattered around. He picked one up. Soviet.
Not that that meant anything. The Soviets sold
military equipment all over the world, just like the
Americans, Germans, French and British.
Superpowers do that, right? To keep the factories
humming and the diplomats employed.

How many people? Fifteen or so.

There was a telephone on the wall and he went
toward it. He held the handset against his helmet and
tried to hear a dial tone. Nothing. He
played with the buttons. Finally he replaced the
instrument on its hook, He left the building and
headed for the clean room., More bodies, all with
bullet wounds. Some had died quickly, others bled a
lot. There were bullet holes in the protective
shield that sealed the room from the raw plutonium on
the other side of the window. Even the flies were dead
on the floor. Jake Grafton looked, then
turned to find.

Jack Yocke staring at him through his faceplate.
Yocke had a camera but he wasn’t taking any
pictures. Jake brushed past him and headed for the
door.

He had seen all he wanted to see. The others
were ahead of him, walking toward the helicopter.
Yocke trailed behind. Jake counted. Everyone here.

He climbed through the door and found Goober and
Toad in the cockpit.

“Crank it up,” he shouted. “Let’s get
outta here.

Goober manipulated switches. Nothing
happened. “Battery’s dead,” he announced.

It took all of them to manhandle the power cart out
of the helicopter.

After looking all the controls over
carefully, Toad Tarkington set the choke,
turned on the battery, and pushed the start button.
Nothing happened.

“Fuck,” Toad said, loud enough for Grafton
to bear.

“Nothing in this fucking country works,” he
announced, then turned back to Jake.

Grafton looked at his watch. They had been
on the ground for fourteen minutes, “Those
transporters probably have jumper cables and some
hand tools. Maybe. Go see.”

Toad went trotting off, a silver figure
laboring through the heat waves rising from the concrete.

Time passed. Jake Grafton stared at the
sky.

There was a jet up there. He could see the
contrail. There it was, a silver gleam coming out from
behind that cloud.

The mirror was in his pocket. Inside the hot
suit.

Well, there was no other way. He gingerly
unzipped the suit enough to admit his hand, reached inside
and snagged the mirror. Then he zipped the suit
closed.

The mirror was rectangular, about two
inches by four inches, with a hole in the middle. Jake
looked above him for the jet, then raised the mirror and
tried to get the refracted spot of sunlight to come
into the crosshair. Then he realized that a cloud had
drifted between him and the sun. He put the mirror
down and studied the clouds.

A few minutes.

“Those people were murdered.”

Jack Yocke was beside him.

“Everyone southeast of Serdobsk was murdered,”
Jake Grafton said. “Those folks in there just
happened to be shot.”

“Why?”

Jake flipped a hand at the empty
transporters.

“Somebody stole some missiles?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“How are we going to get this helicopter started?”

“I don’t know that we can.”

Then the sun came out. And there was the jet, still high
up there against the blue. Jake raised the mirror
to his eye and moved it carefully to focus the light.

Yocke began to understand. “Is that Rita up
there?”

“Maybe. I hope so.”

“Goddamn it, Grafton,” Yocke began.
“Why didn’t-was

“We’ll get out of this or we won’t, Jack.
That’s the whole story.” He was working the mirror.
The sunspot was right on the crosshair. “Those people in
there look like they are at peace.”

“That’s a peace I’m not ready for yet.”

“They probably weren’t ready either, but it came
regardless. The one thing I can promise you-this is
going to be one of the most peaceful spots on this
planet for a couple hundred thousand years.” Jake
removed the mirror from his eye and turned to face the
reporter. “The peace that death brings is all any
of us can count on.”

Yocke was watching the jet high in the sky above.
“I think maybe she saw you,” he said.

One of the transporters rumbled into life. With
diesel smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe, it
slowly rolled toward the helicopter. “There’s a
set of jumper cables in it,” Toad told Jake
when he got down from the cab, “but no tools. The
fucking Russians stole “em or never put them
in.”

“Try to hook the cables up and get that power cart
started. Rita’s coming but we may still need this
chopper.”

The jet was a three-holer, a Tupolev 154
with Aeroflot markings, a Russian ripoff of the
Boeing 727 design. It wasn’t until it
turned off the runway that Jake realized there was no
hot gas coming from the center engine exhaust.

Rita taxied up and gestured to him from the
cockpit.

“Everyone, we’re taking the jet,” Jake
roared. “Help Captain Collins with his gear.
Then get on the back of the transporter. Toad,
when everyone’s on it, back that thing up to the door of the
jet.”

Two U.s. marines opened the door for them and
they scrambled aboard.

Toad came in last. “Do we need to move the
transporter?”

Rita was standing there. “No,” she told him.
“I’ll back us out with thrust reversers. Close the
door and let’s go.”

They took off the hot suits and threw them into the
back of the passenger cabin. Jake made his way
to the cockpit and dropped into the copilot’s seat.
“You got an engine out?”

“Yessir. It was overheating. Maybe
a bad thermocouple, but I don’t know. We got
a heck of a takeoff roll without it, but I think we
can make it.”

“How much runway we got?”

“About nine thousand feet. We’re light, nowhere
near max gross weight.

We’ll make it if the tires don’t blow.

There’s no tread left and I could see cord in
a couple places.”

Jake Grafton looked down the runway at the
trees beyond. Relatively flat terrain, thank the
Lord! “Well, I guess we’ll find out soon
enough.”

Toad stuck his head in. “Rita, you get more
beautiful every time I see you.”

She flashed him a wide grin.

“Did you see the mirror okay?” Jake
asked.

“Yessir. I had a little trouble finding this
place. Most of the Russian nav aids don’t
work. I circled for about a half hour and had about
decided you were going out on the chopper.” She was all
business, relating it crisply, a matter Of
factjust to be reported.

“There’s the gear handle and the flaps.”
She touched each lever. “We’ll begin our takeoff
roll with the flaps up so we’ll accelerate a little
faster. I’ll call for takeoff flaps at about a
hundred eighty kilometers per hour-the airspeed
is calculated in clicks so don’t get
excited. You put them down to the first detent,
takeoff. When we’re airborne I’ll call for the
gear, then the flaps.”

“Let’s do it.”

She taxied to the very end of the runway and held the
brakes while she ran her two good engines up
to full power.

Then she released the brakes.

The jet accelerated slowly. Jake could hear the
thumping as the wheels passed over the expansion
joints.

Rita Moravia made no attempt
to rotate, merely sat monitoring the engine
instruments and the airspeed indicator between glances at
the end of the runway, which they were stampeding toward at an
ever increasing pace.

“Flaps,” she called.

Jake moved the handle to takeoff. The indicator
moved.

“They’re coming!”

The airspeed needle kept rising, but oh so
slowly. The end of the runway came closer,
closer.

Jake was reaching for the control wheel to rotate the
plane when Rita eased it back and the nose came
off, then the main wheels just as the end of the runway
flashed by.

“Gear up,” she called, and Jake Grafton
raised the handle.

When the gear was fully retracted the plane
accelerated better. Still Rita kept the nose down
and let the airspeed increase. “Flaps up,” she
said at last, and Jake moved the handle.

When they were climbing through three thousand meters-the
altimeter was calibrated in meters-Rita told
Jake, “This is the biggest plane I’ve flown.
Handles better than I thought it would.

V VHEN THE AIRLINER WAS LEVEL
AT CRUISING ALTITUDE, Captain
Collins checked everyone for radiation. Jake had
to part with his shirt.

Colonel Rheinhart lost his trousers.

“As soon as we get to Moscow,” Collins
told them, “I want each of you to take a long
shower. Wash your hair thoroughly. The
stuff you want to get rid of is radioactive
dust and dirt. Stay in the shower as long as you can stand
it and don’t come out until you’re as clean as a new
penny.”

When Jake had settled into a seat, Yocke
came over and sat beside him.

“Where’d you guys get this airliner?”

“Aeroflot.”

“Who’d you have to kill?”

“Nobody. Toad told them we wanted to charter
an airfiner and waved American money. He got
this one full of gas for seventeen hundred dollars
cash and two bottles of mediocre whiskey that he
stole out of Spaso House on the Fourth of
July. The Aeroflot man insisted a Russian
pilot come along, but he came down with something and
got off when Rita gave him a hundred. She
flew it out of Sheremetyevo.”

“What about air traffic control?”

“One of the enlisted marines speaks tolerable
Russian.

He’s up in the cockpit with Rita now.”

Yocke shook his head. “It’s amazing what real
money will buy.”

“Ain’t it, now.”

“Think that’s what happened to those missiles?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Now, Jake! Don’t start that crap! I’ve
risked my butt this afternoon right along with you and Rita
and all these other military heroes. It wouldn’t
hurt an iota for you to come clean and tell me the
whole truth.

For once.”

Jack Yocke got the gray eyes full
face. There was no warmth in them.

“That’s the second time you’ve called me Jake.
You aren’t old enough or wise enough. Don’t do it
again.

“Yessir. No offense. But I mean it about
leveling with me. I feet like a kid in a haunted
Halloween house. I’ve paid my buck and I
keep getting the shit scared out of me even after it
ceases to be fun. How about telling me what you
know?”