The Red Horseman (4 page)

Women, Toad well knew, didn’t suffer from
this biological infirmity.

Once a woman ditches you her libidinal
landscape is wiped clean by Mama Nature,
clean as a sand beach swept by the tide, ready for the
next victim to leave his tracks like Robinson
Crusoe. And like that sucker, he’ll conclude that he
is the very first, the one and only. Amazingly, for her
he will be.

Biology, you old devil.

Ah, me.

Then Toad’s thoughts moved from theoretical
musings to the specific. He poked around the edges
of the emotions that the sight and sound and smell of
Elizabeth Thom created in him and concluded, again,
that it would be unwise to explore further. Yet he
couldn’t leave it. So he circled it and looked from
different angles.

He felt a chill and shuddered involuntarily.

“Commander Tarkington?”

It was Harper. This was the second time he had said
Toad’s name.

con’allyeah.”

‘Just what is it you want to know about these
prints?”

Harper flexed his fingers like a concert pianist.

‘Ah, have they been enhanced? Touched up? Whatever
the phrase is.”

“Well, the two prints are identical.”
Toad had given Harper two prints, the original
that Elizabeth Thom had handed him Friday night and
one he had made yesterday evening from the negative
at a one-hour photo shop in a suburban mall.
“I ran them through the scanner,” Harper continued, “which
looks at the light levels in little segments called
pixels and assigns a numerical value, which is
how the computer uses the information. The prints are
essentially identical with only minor, statistically
insignificant variations. Possibly caused
by dust on the negative.”

Toad grunted. “Did anybody doctor it
up?”

“Not that I can see.” Harper punched
buttons. Columns of numbers appeared on the
screen before him. “What we’re looking for are
lines, sharp variations in light values that shouldn’t be
there. Of course, with a sophisticated enough computer, those
traces could be erased, but then the resultant print
would have to be photographed to get a new
negative, and that would fuzz everything. I just don’t
think so. Maybe one chance in a hundred. Or one
in a thousand.

“What can you tell me about the picture?”

Harper’s fingers flew across the keyboard. The
photo appeared on the screen. “It’s a man
sitting at a table reading a newspaper.
Apparently at a sidewalk cafd.”

“Do you know the man?”

“No, but if you like I can access the CIA’S
data base and maybe we can match the face.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Toad Tarkington said.
“Is there anything in the photo that would indicate where
it was taken?”

The computer wizard stroked the mouse and drew a
box over the newspaper.

He clicked again on the mouse button and the boxed
area filled the screen. The headline was in English
and quite legible, but the masthead was less so.

“We’ll enhance it a little,” Harper muttered and
clicked the mouse again.

After a few seconds he announced, “The
Times.”

“New York Times?”

“The Times. The real one. London.”

“What day?”

“Can’t tell. The date is just too small. But
look at this.”

The whole photograph was brought back to the
screen and the cursor repositioned over a white
splotch on the cafd window. Now the splotch
appeared. Toad came around the counter and stared over
Harper’s shoulder. “It’s a notice of the hours the
cafe is open. You can’t read the language in this
blowup-the picture is too fuzzy-but if the
computer uses an enhancement program to fill in the
gaps it should become legible.”

His fingers danced. After a minute or two he
said, “It’s not English.

It’s Portuguese.”

“So the photo was taken in Portugal.”

“Or in front of a Portuguese cafd in
London, Berlin, Zurich, Rome, Madrid,
New York, Washing-

“How about the front page of the paper? Can you
give me a printout of that?”

“Sure.” Richard Harper clicked the mouse on
the print menu and in a moment the laser began to hum.
Toad waited until the page came out of the
printer, then examined it carefully. There was a
portion of a photo centered under the paper’s big
headline, which contained the words “Common Market
ministers.- He folded the page and put it back
into his pocket.

“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s everything.
Give me back the prints and erase everything from the
memory of your idiot box and I’ll get out of your
hair.”

Harper shrugged. He put the prints in the
envelope that had originally contained them and passed it
to Toad, who slipped the envelope into an inside
pocket. Then Harper clicked away on the mouse.
After a few seconds of activity he sat back
and said, “It’s gone.”

“I don’t want to insult you,” Toad said, “but
I should emphasize this little matter is a tippy
top secret, eyes only.

Loose lips sink ships.”

was Everything I do is classified,
Commander,” Harper said tartly. He reached for the
folder on the top of the pile in his in basket.

“No offense,” Toad muttered. “By the way,
what were those lines you were saying about ‘visions and
revisions”?”

Now Harper colored slightly and made a
vague gesture.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.”

An hour later in the media reading room in the
Madison Building of the Library of Congress
Toad found the page of the London Times that had
been captured in the photo Several weeks’
editions of the newspaper were on each roll of
microfilm. He selected the roll that included the
date Nigel Keren died, placed it on a Bell
and Howell viewing console and began to scroll through the
pages. The headline he wanted was on page
twenty-three of the scroll, the edition of November
1, 1991.

Rear Admiral Jake Grafton spent the
morning in a briefing. As usual, the subject was
nuclear weapons in the Commonwealth of Independent
States, which was the old Soviet Union. This
matter was boiling on the front burner.

The locations of the strategic nuclear
missiles-ICBM’SEA.WERE known and the political
control apparatus was more or less public knowledge. But
the Allied intelligence community had lost sight of the
tactical nuclear weapons-weapons that were
by definition mobile. They were hidden behind the pall of
smoke rising from the rubble of the Soviet Union.

Listening to experts discuss nuclear weapons as
if they were missing vases from a seedy art gallery,
Grafton’s attention wandered. He had first sat through
classified lectures on the ins and outs of
nuclear weapons technology as a very junior
A-6 pilot, before he went to Vietnam for the first
time. In those days attack plane crews were each
assigned targets under the Single Integrated
Operational Plan-SIOP. The lectures were like
something from Dr. Strangeiove’s horror
cabinet-thermal pulses, blast effects, radiation
and kill zones and the like. When the course was over he
even got a certificate suitable for framing that
proclaimed he was a qualified Nuclear
Weapons Delivery Pilot.

But the whole experience was just some weird military
mind-bender until he was handed his first target the day
after the ship sailed from Pearl Harbor on his
first cruise to Vietnam.

Shanghai.

He was assigned to drop a nuclear weapon on
the military district headquarters in Shanghai.
It wasn’t exactly downtown, but it was on the edge
of it.

Actually he was not going to drop the bomb: he was
going to toss it, throw it about forty-three thousand
feet, as he recalled. That was how far away from the
target the pull-up point was. He would cross the
initial point at five hundred knots,
exactly five hundred feet above the ground, and
push the pickle on the stick, which would start the timer
on the nuclear ordnance panel. The timer would tick
off the preset number of seconds until he
reached the calculated pull-up point-that point
forty-three thousand feet from the target. Then a tone
would sound in his ears. He was to apply smooth, steady
back-pressure on the stick so that one second after
the tone began he would have four Gs on the
aircraft. At about thirty-eight degrees
nose-up the tone would cease and the weapon would come off
the bomb rack and he would keep pulling, up and over
the top, then do a half roll going down the back
side and scoot out the way he had come in.

He had practiced the delivery on the navy’s
bombing range in Oregon.

With little, blue, twenty-eight-pound practice
bombs. The delivery method was inherently
inaccurate and the bombs were sprinkled liberally over the
countryside, sometimes a couple miles from the intended
target.

A good delivery was one in which the bomb impacted
within a half mile of where you wanted it. With a
six-hundredkiloton nuke, a miss by a mile
or two wouldn’t matter much.

“Close enough for government work,” he and his
bombardier assured each other.

Months later on an aircraft carrier
crossing the Pacific with a magazine full of
nuclear weapons, the insanity of nuclear war got
very personal.

Figuring the fuel consumption on each leg of the
run-in, working the leg times backward from the hard
target time-necessary so he and his bombardier wouldn’t be
incinerated by the blast of somebody else’s
weapon-plotting antiaircraft defenses,
examining the streets and buildings of Shanghai
while planning to incinerate every last Chinese man,
woman and child In them, he had to pinch himself.
This was like trying to figure out how to shoot your way
into hell.

But orders were orders, so he drew the lines and
cut and pasted the charts and tried to envision what it would
feel like to hurt a thermonuclear weapon
into Shanghai. The emotions he would feel as he
flew through the flak and SAM’S on the run-in,
performed the G6 turn alley-oop over a city of
ten million people, and tried to keep the airplane
upright and flying as the shock wave from the detonation
smashed the aircraft like the fist of God as he
exited tail-on to the blast–emotions were not on the
navy’s agenda.

Could he nuke Shanghai? Would he do it if
ordered to?

He didn’t know, which troubled him.

Fretting about it didn’t help. The problem was
too big, the numbers of human lives
incomprehensible, the A’s and B’s and C’s of the
equation all unknown. He had no answers.
Worse, he suspected no one did.

So he finished his planning and went back to more
mundane concerns, like wondering how he was going to stay
alive in the night skies over Vietnam.

That was twenty-three years ago.

Today listening to the experts discuss the possibility
that nuclear weapons might be seeping southward from the
Soviet republics into the Middle East, the
memories of pi arming the annihilation of half the
population of Shanghai made Jake Grafton
slightly nauseated.

The voice of the three-star army general who headed
the Defense Intelligence Agency jolted his
unpleasant reverie.

The general wanted hard intelligence and he was a
bit peeved that none seemed to be available,
“Rumor, surmises, theories … haven’t you
experts got one single fact?” he demanded of the
briefers. “Just one shabby little irrefutable
fact-that’s not too much to ask, is it?”

The three-star’s name was Albert Sidney
Brown. After thirty-plus years in the maw of a
vast bureaucracy where every middle name was
automatically ground down to an initial, he had
somehow managed to retain his. The briefer was
CIA officer Herb Tenney, who briefed
Lieutenant General Brown on a regular
basis. Today he tried to reason with the general.
“Sir, the place is bediarn.

Nobody knows what’s going on, not even
Yeltsin. The transportation system’s kaput, the
communication system is in tatters, people in the
countryside are quietly starving, armed criminal
gangs are in control of-was

“I read the newspapers,” General Brown said
acidly.

“Do you spooks know anything that the Associated
Press doesn’t?”

“Not right now,” Herb Tenney said with a hint of
regret in his voice.

Regret, Jake Grafton noted, not
apology. Tenney was several inches short of six
feet. His graying hair and square jaw with a cleft
gave him a distinguished, important look. In his
gray wool business suit with thin, subtle blue
stripes woven into the cloth he looked more like a
Wall Street buccaneer, Jake Grafton
thought, than the spy he was.

“Congress is performing major surgery on the
American military without benefit of anesthetic,”
General Brown rumbled. “Everybody east of
Omaha is tossing flowers at the Russians, and
that goddamn cesspool is in meltdown. There are
thirty thousand tactical nuclear weapons over there
just lying around loose! And the CIA doesn’t
know diddly squat.”

Jake Grafton thought he could see a tiny
sympathetic smile on Herb Tenney’s face.
His expression looked remarkably like the one on the
puss of the guy at the garage giving you the bad news
about your transmission. Or was Grafton just
imagining it? Damn that Judith Farrell’

Tenny’s expression seemed to irritate
General Brown too. “I am fed up with you people
palming off yesterday’s press clippings and
unsubstantiated gossip as news. You’re like a
bunch of old crones at a whores’ picnic. No
more!

I want facts and you spies better come up with
some. Damn quick!”

Brown’s fist descended onto the table with a
crash.

“Like yesterday! I don’t give a shit who you have
to bribe, fuck, or rob, but you’d better come up
with some hard facts about who has their grubby hands on
those goddanin bombs or I’m going to lose my
temper and start kicking ass!”

When the briefers were gone and he and Jake were
alone, Albert Sidney Brown rumbled,
“They’ll never come up with hard intelligence.
Nobody on our side knows anything.

Not a goddamn thing. Now that’s a fact.”

“We just don’t have the HUMINT resources,
General,” Jake Grafton said.

HUMINT was human intelligence, information from
spies. The CIA had never had much luck
recruiting spies in the Soviet Union.
Prior to the collapse the counter intelligence
apparatus had been too efficient. It was a
different story now, but a spy network took years
to construct.

“The world is becoming more dangerous,” General
Brown said softly. “It’s like the whole planet is
on a runaway locomotive going down a mountain,
faster and faster, closer and closer to the edge. The
big smashup is waiting around the next bend, or the
next. And those cretins in Congress are in a
dogfight to divide up the ‘peace dividend.”
Makes you want to cry.”

Jake had had numerous wide-ranging conversations
with General Brown since he reported to this job
six months ago. Brown was convinced that the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was the
most dangerous trend in an increasingly unstable
international arena. And Jake Grafton
agreed with him.

Recently the United States and other Western
nations had agreed to spend $500 million to pay for
destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but the work
wasn’t going quickly enough. “They’ve got bombs
scattered around over there like junk cars,” Brown
told Jake Grafton. “They don’t know what
they’ve got or where it is, so it’s imperative that
we get someone over there to keep an eye on the
situation and prod them in the right direction. You’re that
someone.

“The ambassador is talking to Yeltsin right
now, trying to sell military-to-military
cooperation at the absolute top level. As soon
as we get the okay, you’re on your way.

Keep your underwear packed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Jake, we have got to get a handle on this
nuclear weapons situation. I want you to get the
hard facts. Ask the Russian generals to their
faces-and don’t take no for an answer. There
isn’t time to massage bruised egos. They must be
as worried as we are. If their criminal gangs
or ragtag ethnic warriors start using nukes on
one another, Revelation is going to come true
word for word. And if those fanatics in the Middle
East get their hands on some . . .” Brown lifted
his hands skyward.

Jake Grafton finished the thought. “This planet
will be history.”

“A radioactive clinker,” Brown agreed, and
swiveled his chair toward the map of the old Soviet
Union that hung on the wall.

“The first day of November 1991,” Toad
Tarkington repeated, “just three days before Nigel
Keren went for his long swim.”

Toad fell silent. He had completed his
recital of what he learned this morning. Jake
Grafton was bent over the photograph on his
desk, staring at it through a magnifying glass.
Finally he straightened with a sigh.

“we could ask the CIA where Herb Tenney was that
week,” Toad suggested.

“No.” Jake squirmed in his chair. He
flexed his right hand several times, then let it rest
limply on the arm of the chair. “For the sake of
argument, assume that the CIA did kill Keren.
Either the president authorized it or someone in the
CIA was running his own foreign policy.

The Mossad must have concluded the
assassination was without authorization or they would not have
approached anyone in the American intelligence
community, no matter how obliquely. Assuming the
CIA did kill Keren. A rather large assumption,
but-was

“Sir, we’ve got to do something about this,” Toad
said with a slight edge in his voice.

“What is this evidence of?” Jake gestured
toward the photo. “What?”

That was the nub of it. At best this photo might
destroy one alibi.

“We’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“Do you think the CIA killed Keren?” Toad
asked.

“I have no idea. If the Mossad knows and
wanted us to believe, they could have given us real
proof. They didn’t.

Which raises another question-is Farrell still working for the
Mossad?”

Toad spent several seconds processing it.
“I can’t see her working for anyone else. She . ,
.”

Toad ran out of steam when Jake Grafton
gave him one of those cold glances. With thinning hair
and a nose a tad too large, Jake
Grafton’s face wasn’t memorable. It was just
another face among the throng. Until he’fixed
those gray eyes on you with one of those looks that could
freeze water, that is-then you got a glimpse of the
hard, determined man inside.

“Maybe they wanted to smear Herb,” Toad
added lamely.

“That’s one possibility. Another is that they
want to discredit me.”

“You?”

“I’m not going to be around here very long if I sally
forth to slay a dragon armed with nothing but a peashooter
and one pea. You see that?

The dragon will fry my batches.

And if there’s no dragon I just immolated
myself.”

Jake rooted in his desk drawer for a pack of
matches.

He found them, then dumped the trash from his
wastecan onto the floor.

One by one he lit the prints and dropped them into the
gray metal wastecan. The negative went last.

When the celluloid was consumed, Jake picked
up the trash and tossed it back into the can.

Then he picked up a file on the
Russian army and opened it. Several minutes
later Toad remembered the computer printout of the
front page of the London Times that was inside his
pocket. He wadded it up and tossed it into the
classified burn bag.

JUNE IN WASHINGTON IS VERY SIMILAR
TO EARLY SUMMER in any other large city in the
northeastern part of the United States. The days of
clouds and rain come regularly, interspersed with
periods of sunshine and balmy breezes, perfect
days when it seems the whole world is ripe,
flourishing, vibrantly alive. Weekends are for
shopping expeditions, yard work, an occasional party.

Workdays in the nation’s capital begin here like
everywhere else. Most people turn on one of the
television morning shows as they dress and drink a
cup of hot chocolate or coffee. While they
take a quick squint at the morning newspaper and
gobble a fat pill, Willard Scott tells them
about the weather and a lady having her hundredth
birthday. Why supposedly sane people choose to spend
the worst moments of the day with Willard Scott,
Bryant Gumbel and their colleagues on the other
networks is a phenomenon that will probably
intrigue archeologists of a future age.

With the kids shoved out the door to swimming lessons
or other summer activities, working people fire up
their horseless chariots and join the commuting throng.
Tooling out of the subdivision they tune in another
set of fools on their car radios. On each of the
morning “drive shows” one or two jaded disk
jockeys and one syrupy sweet, eternally cheerful
female crank out some combination of pop music,
weather and crude humor interspersed with reports from
a helicopter pilot about the traffic jams that form
every morning around stalls, wrecks and road construction
projects.

This mix is occasionally enlivened with a blow-by-blow
account of a spectacular police chase of a
freeway speeder who suddenly remembered his
thirty-two unpd parking tickets when he saw the
cop’s flashing light.

And “news,” lots of it. Usually “news” is
presented in short snippets, “sound bites,” some
of them worth the ten seconds of air time they get,
most not. To prevent the working citizen creeping through
traffic from getting too down from an overdose of
reality, the producers of these shows leaven the mix with the
inane doings of show business celebrities and the
latest risqud tidbits from the court
trials of current cretins Nothing heavy, nothing
in depth, just a once-over-lightly on items that
would only interest a heavy metal groupie or a
social scientist from planet Zork.

Jake Grafton never listened. Callie had the
television going every morning while she fixed Amy’s
breakfast. but Jake read the newspaper.

If the Washington Post ” thought an international
story was worth the front page, the American
intelligence community was going to be wrestling with it before
lunch.

In the car Jake turned off the radio the instant
it babbled to life. Amy and Callie always left the
squawk box on, he always turned it off.

Today he drove in the usual blessed silence while
he reviewed the crises of yesterday and the likely
flaps on today’s agenda. The Middle East was
boiling again: another assassination, more riots
protesting ongoing Israeli settlement in the
occupied West Bank, more terrorism and murder.

Chaos in the Balkans, another wave of
Haitians heading for Florida, the usual anarchy
in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, or
as the bureaucrats had labeled it, the
CIS’-ALL in all, this was just another day
in the 1990’s.

Normally there was little the Americans could do
to improve any international situation. Nor, as the
optimists noted, was there much they could do that would make
things worse. Still everything had to go through the gristmill
and be forwarded on to the policymakers for their information.
And in the case of the DIA, to the appropriate
units of the military to ensure they weren’t
luxuriating in blissful ignorance.

Besides the usual international crises, the top
echelons of the military and civilian
policymakers were still trying to formulate America’s
response to the shape of the postCommunist world. The world
had changed almost overnight, yet change was the
bureaucracy’s worst enemy, the crisis to which it had
the most difficulty responding.

This morning Jake Grafton thought about change.
The knee-jerk reaction had been to reorganize,
to draw more lines on the organization chart.

That had been easy, though it hadn’t been enough.
The brave new world had to be faced whether the
policymakers were comfortable or not.

They were uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Men and
women who had spent their adult lives as warriors
of the cold war now had to face the unknown without
experience or that were going to cost people their reputations,
their caperspective. Mistakes were inevitable,
grievous mistakes re ers. This sense of
dangerous uncertainty collided with the extraordinary
dynamics of the evolving geopolitical landscape
to produce a stress-filled crisis atmosphere
in which tension was almost tangible.

This situation is like war, Jake Grafton
decided. Every change in the international scene
reveals a new opportunity to the bold few and a
new pitfall to the cautious many.

He was musing along these lines when the Pentagon
came into view. It was a low, sprawling building
much larger than it looked.

As he parked the car he was wondering if there was
any place at all for nuclear weapons in this
changing world.

were they obsolete, like horse cavalry and
battleships? He also wondered if he was the only
person in the Pentagon asking that question.

“Everyone would have been better off if Russia
had had another revolution and shot all the
Communists.”

General Albert Sidney Brown delivered
himself of this opinion and stopped the strategy
conference dead. Which was perhaps what he intended. The
subject was the growth of virulent
anti-Semitism in the former Soviet states.

“General,” CIA deputy director Harvey
Schenler said wearily, “I don’t believe
fantasies of that type contribute much to our
deliberations.”

Brown snorted. “Most of the problems the new
regimes in eastern Europe and the old Soviet
Union are now facing were caused by the Communists’
grotesque mismanagement, incompetent central
planning, believing their own propaganda, lying
to everybody, including themselves, cheating, bribery,
favoritism-the list goes on for a couple dozen
pages. Now that the Commies have become the
political opposition, they’re preaching hatred of the
Jews, trying to blame them for the collapse of the
whole rotten system.