The Red Horseman (38 page)

Who knows how that will play? It’s like trying
to figure prison politics.”

Yocke had watched with growing wonder as the
F-15’s occasionally slipped in behind the tanker for
fuel, then slid away afterward. The planes seemed
to hang motionless in the sky, a perspective
Yocke found unique and fascinating.

The noise of their engines was masked by the
background noise inside the C-141, so the show
outside was a silent, effortless ballet.

He had already tried to interview Lieutenant
Colonel Jocko West and the three bird
colonels from Germany, Italy and France. None of
them wanted to talk, on or off the record. They
did spell their names for him, for future reference.
Then they shooed him off. As he turned to go back
to his seat, West told him with a grin,
“Reporters are like solicitors and
doctors-the less you see of them the more tranquil
your life.”

Marshal Mikhailov and General Yakolev were
in the back of the compartment surrounded by four armed
marines.

Captain McElroy was seated nearby; he had
merely moved his head from side to side about half a
millimeter when Yocke looked his way.

Up front Jake Grafton was in conference with
Toad Tarkington and Captain Tom Collins.
Yocke stood in the aisle and stretched. Even after
that hassle with the story last night and just two hours
sleep, he wasn’t a bit tired. How often is
it that you get to interview the president of a big nation
and write a story that will make every front page on
the planet, then jump on a plane and jet off to do
another?

Ah, he could get used to this.

Better enjoy it while it lasts, he told
himself, because when it’s over it’ll be really over. He
would be back scribbling crime stories and the city
council news that was fit to print all too soon.

Yocke passed by Grafton and his colleagues and
went forward to the cockpit. Rita Moravia was in
the left seat.

She turned and flashed him a grin.

“She’s not really a pilot, you know,” Jack
told the air force major standing behind Rita. “She
was Miss July of 1991.”

“Careful, friend,” the major rumbled. “This is the
new modern American military. Comments with any
sexist content whatsoever have been outlawed.”

was Sorry.”

“You want to remain politically correct and
ideologically pure, don’t you? No more male and
female pronouns. Everything is it. During the
transition period you may say hit and sit instead
of it, but no shit.

One slip and the sexual gestapo will be on your
case.”

“After they gets finished with you,” the copilot
told him gravely, “you’ll have to Spiro
Agnew.”

“Actually,” Rita Moravia said, patting her
hair to ensure it was just so, “I was Miz July.”

“Where are we?” Yocke asked when the three
stooges had calmed down. All he could see out the
window was sea and sky.

“Thirty-three thousand feet up,” the copilot
told him, and laughed shamelessly at his own
wit.

The reporter groaned. Look out, Saddam! The
American cans are coming again. Yocke left the
flight deck and went back to the cabin.

Jake Grafton was seated beside Tarkington.
Collins was back in his own seat reading something, so
Jack sat on the arm of the seat across the aisle from the
admiral. “How’s planning for the war?”

Jake Grafton examined Yocke’s face.
“Our agreement is still in effect, right?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I mention it because last night you flapped your mouth
to your editor about General Shmarov’s death. That
subject was and is off limits.”

“Admiral, Gatter was on the fence over whether
or not to run the story.

I had to give him a hot off-the-record fact
so he would think I had a lot more, that we were scraping
the icing off a very big cake. And that tidbit about
Shmarov was the only hot fact I could think of just
then. I assumed you wanted the story in the paper or
you wouldn’t have bothered to order it”-Yocke snapped his
fingers–like a ham and cheese on rye.”

“Then you tried to inch onto that subject with
Yeltsin this afternoon with that last question, on the off
chance he might spill his guts on the spot.”

“Admiral, I- Jake cut him off. “I
saw you give me that guilty look, should I or
shouldn’t 1, just before you put your mouth in motion.

Either you play the game my way or you can zip right
over to the commercial airport when we land and ride
your plastic right on back to Moscow. We are
playiqg with my ball, Jack.”

“Yessir. Your ball, your rules. But for my
info, are you ever going to let me loose on the
CIA’S creative use of binary poisons?”

Grafton shrugged. “I don’t know. Doubtful.
That situation will probably solve itself.”

was ‘Solve itself,” was Yocke repeated sourly,
and drew in air for an oration on the hypocrisy of
not airing our dirty linen while we launder other
people’s.

He never got the chance. Jake jerked his thumb
aft.

“Those two are a part of our international team.”

“The two Russian prisoners, you mean?”
Yocke said, and instantly regretted it. Jake
Grafton’s gray eyes looked like river ice in
winter.

“This may be just a story for you,”
Grafton said, almost a whisper, “but there’s a bit
more at stake for everybody else.”

“I’m not writing fiction, Admiral. Not
intentionally, anyway. “I’m not asking you to. But
no interviews with them until I say so, if and
when.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Yocke tried to keep the
sarcasm out of his voice and succeeded fairly well.
Tarkington gave him the eye, though Grafton went
back to studying the photographs that lay in his lap.
He used a magnifying glass.

“Aerial photos?” Yocke asked.

“Satellite.”

“May I look?”

Grafton passed him a couple. They looked like
shots from just a couple thousand feet above an
airfield. He could see the aircraft clearly,
the power carts, the revetments, even people and the shadows
they cast.

“These are really clear,” he murmured. “Are the
missiles here at this base?”

“I think so. The trouble with satellite
surveillance is that you can rarely be absolutely
certain of anything. It’s true, at times the
resolution is so good that you can read license
plate numbers, and if people like Saddam think we can
see everything all the time, that’s just fine with us. But we
can’t. There are very real technical limitations.

The art is in the interpretation of what you can see.”

“So are we going to hit this base with an air
strike?”

“That would be the easy way,” Jake acknowledged,
then selected another photo and bent to examine it.
When he finally straightened he added, “Nobody ever
accused us of doing anything the easy way.”

Jack Yocke returned the photos and went
back to his seat by the window.

He sat staring at the two fighters he could see.
They were in loose formation, so loose one was over a
mile away.

The sun was setting, firing the tops of the clouds
below with pinks and oranges. Beneath that the sea was a
deep, deep purple, almost black. He stared
downward, between the clouds. That looked like . . .
maybe it was land. were they over Turkey? Or was that
ocean down there in the gloom?

He finally reclined his seat and tried to sleep.

Up forward Toad Tarkington muttered to his
boss, “You may trust that jackass, but I
don’t.”

“To which of our jackasses are you referring?”

“Yocke.”

“Oh, he’s got his rough edges,” Jake said,
“but he’s an honest man.

Rather like you in that regard.” When he saw that Toad
was at a loss for a reply, Jake grinned and added,
“You guys are Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
Amy says you’re both fun to have around. She’s still
trying to decide which of you is Tweedledumber.”

“Thanks, CAG.”…ANYTIME, Toad.”

THE COMMAND BUNKER AT THE SPRAWLING
MILITARY base outside of Riyadh looked like
a Star Wars movie set.

A long rack of television monitors mounted
above a huge wall chart of the region displayed
everything from the current CNN broadcast to real-time
satellite ambient light and infrared views of
selected areas inside Iraq, computer presentations
of Iraqi and U.n. troop positions, computer
presentations of the vehicles moving near Baghdad and
Samarra, aircraft aloft over Iraq,
Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf, ships
at sea in the Gulf-everything a commander might want
to know was on one of those screens.

At computer stations facing the screens were
the men and women who punched the keys that made it all
work.

Just now all eyes in the room were on the CNN
monitor.

Jake Grafton and the European colonels
stood together in a knot staring upward at the jowly
visage of Saddam Hussein, who was busy calling
the Washington Post and Boris Yeltsin liars.
“Iraq does not possess nuclear weapons.
Lies have been told. Yeltsin is desperate,
attempting to use Iraq as a scapegoat
to prevent political collapse in Russia.”

“What do you think?” Jake asked Jocko
West.

“If he has trained Russian technicians,
I think he can shoot the missiles on launchers
any time. At best, within hours. But he probably
only has two or three missiles on their
Russian Army launchers. The launchers were just
too bulky and heavy to transport. He took as
many missiles as he could, probably intending to put
them on launchers he zdready has. And he took
warheads, which are small and could be loaded quickly
onto his planes. I suspect that he’s playing for
time in order to load the missiles he
stole on old Scud launchers and adapt the
warheads for use on his inissiles.”

Colonel Rheinhart agreed. “If he has the
people and the proper tools, he can begin placing nuclear
warheads on theScuds in a few days, arm perhaps
thirty Scuds in ten days or so. Five or six
ready-to-shoot weapons are not enough for a war.”

The Italian and Frenchman nodded at this
assessment.

Jake Grafton wasn’t so sure. A
lunatic might start a war even if he had only
one bullet.

As Jake Grafton stared at Saddam’s
image on the monitor, he reviewed what he
knew about the Iraqi dictator.

Born poor, poor as only an Arab can be,
in a squalid village a hundred miles north
of Baghdad, he went to live with an uncle in the
capital at the age of ten, about 1947. His
uncle was the author of a screed entitled Three
Things That God Should Not Have Created: Persians,
Jews, and Flies. This tract became young
Saddam’s Mein Kampf. Within months, according to his
official biography, he killed his first man.

When he was twenty, the young thug joined the
Iraqi Baath party, where he became a triggerman
disposing of the party’s enemies, of whom there were many.
One of the people he murdered was his brother-in-law.
Two years later, in 1959, he bungled an
assassination attempt aimed at the current
Iraqi dictator, General Abdul Kassem,
and was shot by Kassem’s guards. Somehow he
escaped and fled to Egypt.

In 1963 the Baath party successfully murdered
Kassem and took power.

Saddam returned to Iraq and ended up in
prison nine months later when the Baathists were
overthrown by an arm junta.

When the Baathists seized power again in 1968,
Saddam was there in the councils of power. In a
stunning parallel to the career of Josef Stalin, he
took control of the secret police and
systematically set out to murder everyone he could not
control, thereby becoming the real ruler of Iraq.

Before long he took personal control of the nation’s
foreign policy. The nominal president of the
country soldiered on under Saddam’s orders until
1979, when he retired, thereby becoming the first
ruler of Iraq not to die in office within the memory
of living men. Saddam anointed himself
dictator and gave himself a new title, The
Awesome. Perhaps it loses something in translation.

Yet Saddam never forgot how he got to the top,
never lost touch with his roots. New title and all,
he still liked to use a pistol to personally execute
cabinet officers, generals, and relatives who had
the temerity to argue with him or whom he suspected of
harboring a nascent seed of disloyalty.

From any possible viewpoint, Jake Grafton
thought, Saddam appeared as the master thug, a
self-centered man without conscience or remorse
capable of any crime. In other words, a perfect
dictator.

Oh, he had screved”up badly a time or ”
two-the eight-year war with Iran cost Iraq a
hundred thousand lives and $70 billion it
didn’t have, and the little fracas over Kuwait
didn’t turn out quite the way Saddam thought it would.

But the man wasn’t a quitter. After those
debacles he had ruthlessly shot, gassed and starved
his domestic enemies into oblivion. Iraq was still
his: he was hanging tough, arming himself with nuclear
weapons.

Then he would find who still wanted to play the game
and who was willing to kneel at his throne.

Saddam’s tragedy was that he ruled such a small
corner of the world. If only he could have had a stage
the size of Germany or Russia!

A naive person might wonder why the
civilized nations of the earth continued to deal with miserable
vermin like Saddam, but Jake Grafton didn’t.
Realpolitik kept him alive. He was part and
parcel of the forces in dynamic tension that kept the
Middle East from exploding into refigious and race
war. And Iraq had oil.

Jake wondered if now, finally, the fearful
Politicians of the “civilized nations” had had
enough. He was still pondering that question when he was caHave ”
ed into a room with General Frank Loy, the UN
commander.

General Loy was talking on the satellite
link. He handed the telephonelike handset
to Jake., “Rear Admiral Grafton, sir,
“Hayden Land. Glad you arrived.”