The Red Horseman (9 page)

Jake Grafton came up to the flight deck and
visited a moment with the pilots, then stood looking
at the va/s of the sky. “It doesn’t ever get
dark at this time of year at these latitudes,” the
copilot told him.

“How many times have you guys flown this route?”
Jake asked.

“Couple dozen times for me, sir,” the pilot,
an air force major, replied. He nodded at the
copilot, a first lieutenant.

“This is his second trip.”

Cold. The sky looked bleak and cold, even
with the sun shining. The cockpit was a tiny capsule of
life adrift in an indifferent universe.

Jake shivered once, then returned to the little
passenger section. There were only eight seats and
Toad was asleep comin one of them. In the next row
the liftmaster, a senior sergeant, also snoozed.
The rest of the plane was filled with military rations
bound for orphanages and soup kitchens for the
elderly. The admiral opened the door to the cargo
r compartment and stood there looking. Overhead lights
illuminated the cargo compartment and the sea of boxes
stacked on pallets.

The incongruity of the situation appalled him,
filled him with a sadness devoid of hope that seemed
to drain the energy from him. Insanity, Callie had
said. Yes, that was the word. A nation with enough nuclear
weapons to kill half the life on earth and doom the
rest couldn’t feed its old people, its children.

Jake closed the door and sagged into a seat.

He tried to sleep but it wouldn’t come. Finally he
turned so he could look out the window at the cold,
infinite sky.

At Sheremetyevo Airport near Moscow, the
C-141 was parked next to a Soviet military
terminal across the field from the regular passenger
terminal. Jake and Toad exited the plane through the
rear cargo door after it had been opened. Although the
plane had been airborne for twelve hours and it
was 6 A.m. in Washington, it was two o’clock in the
afternoon here on a pleasant summer day. Small
puffy clouds floated in a blue sky. They stood
on the concrete ramp beside their bags and watched a
limo driving pop”

toward them. It came to a halt and a man in a
U.s. naval officer’s uniform climbed out.

“Lieutenant Dalworth, sir,” said the young
officer after he had saluted.

He pulled open the back door of the car.

As Jake and Toad climbed in he added, “You
don’t have to go through customs.”

“How come?”

“I arranged it, sir. I’ve become pretty
good friends with several of the customs and emigration
guys.”

“Jake was taken slightly aback.

“Don’t worry, sir. With diplomatic
passports, the whole deal is just a formality-
I’ve partied with those guys, given

‘them some sacks of groceri I es and gotten
drunk with them.

They know I won’t screw em.”

Three minutes later, after Jake’s and
Toad’s baggage was Joaded in the trunk,
Dalworth climbed in and got the car in motion.
Toad Tarkington mused, “Dalworth. Dalworth
…

By any chance, are you Spiro Dalworth?”

A look of discomfort crossed the young
officer’s face.

Tarkington grinned broadly and seized the
lieutenant’s hand. He pumped it heartily. “As
I live and breathe.”

Jake Grafton recognized the name too.
Lieutenant Dal worth had been assigned to the
navy’s public relations staff in New York
City when he somehow wound up on a television
talk show panel discussing “women in the modern
military.” After thirty minutes of weathering abuse
from a prominent feminist fanatic who shared the
panel with him, Dalworth lost his temper. His parting
shot at her had been, “Oh, Spiro Agnew.”

Three days later someone told the female
warrior that the former vice president’s name was an
anagram for “grow a pem.”

She charged into the navy’s cubbyhole office in the
Manhattan federal building with a television
reporter and cameraman in tow and proceeded
to assault Dalworth with an umbrella while she
hurled invective. After she shouted herself out and
departed, a stunned Dalworth told the re porter
that the feminist had a brain like a prune and a body
to match.

The episode was marvelous television.

Alas, Dalworth’s new status as a media
celebrity interfered with his work and embarrassed the
navy, still reeling from the 1991 Tailhook Convention
scandal, so now he was a very junior naval attached
at the American embassy in Moscow, eight time
zones away from the nearest militant feminist armed
with a television camera and umbrella.

“That whole thing was almost eight months ago,”
Dalworth Muttered, “You’d think people would at least
start to forget.” He was a rangy Young man, several
inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and bulging
biceps. At some point in his athletic past his
nose had been slightly rearranged, and the effect was
a memorable face. Not hand.

some, but unique.

“What an honor, SP-IRO! I sure am
pleased to meetcha,” Toad enthused. He
playfully tapped Dalworth on the shoulder.

“Did you have a good flight?” Dalworth asked.

“Terrific. Filet mignon over the North
Pole and all the free champagne we could drink.”

“The cold chicken box lunch, huh?”

“Yeah. You wonder what the air force does to the
chicken to make it taste so bad.”

“Ever been to Moscow before?”

“Neither one of us,” Toad said.

“Sleepy?”

After a glance at Grafton, Toad told him,
“Not too.”…Drive you around the downtown a little before
we go to Fort Apache. was Fort Apache, Jake
knew, was the complex behind the embassy where the
residents lived, a tag that came straight from the
movie Fort Apache, The Bronx.

“Give You the hundred-ruble tour.”

The endless rows of concrete apartment buildings were
soon in view. Nine and a half million people,
Jake knew, lived in Moscow, most of them stuffed
into tiny apartments in these crumbling mausoleums.
Yet on a sunny June day they didn’t took
bad. Almost as if he could read Jake’s thoughts,
Daiworth said, “Place looks a lot different
in the winter.

Then it’s the devil’s own refrigerator, gray
and terminally dismal.”

Soon the car was bucketing down a broad
boulevard q POW toward the center of the city, a
chip afloat in a stream of little sedans and huge
trucks, all emitting a noxious miasma that
stung the eyes and throat.

“Bad pollution, about like Delhi,
India. Sorta like Seoul without the
kimchi.dalworth piloted them into the center of the
city. Soon they were circling the brick walls and
onion-topped towers of the Kremlin.

Jake’s eye was caught by the cars on the side
of the road with their hoods up and people bending over the
engines. Someone seemed to be broken down in very
block.

Dalworth pointed out the naked pedestals where
once statues stood. “See those? They even tore
down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in front
of KGB Headquarters, presumably while the
KGB types watched out the windows.

Now I’ll show you my favorite place in
Moscow. I found this the other day when I was out
walking.”

After three more stoplights, he turned and crossed
the Moskva River and went down one of the side
streets. In one of the river channels a cruise
ship sat listing in the mud, gutted and abandoned.
Ahead across the sidewalk was a park. A dirt
road for park maintenance vehicles was blocked
by steel crowd-control railings. Dalworth drove
the car onto the sidewalk, stopped, then got out and
moved the railings. He pulled the car through,
then replaced them.

The park was young trees and grass, but the grass was
half weeds and hadn’t been mowed. Here and there women
with strollers sat taking the sun. After Dalworth
drove about a hundred yards, he pulled the car to a
stop.

Just to the left, surrounded on three sides by more
hapazardly placed crowd-control railings, stood
three huge bronze statues amid the dandelions
and grass. A smaller marble statue lay on its
side in front of the others. Behind them half-hidden
by the foliage of the trees one could glimpse rows of
apartments.

“This is where they dumped some of the statues,”
Dalworth explained. He parked the car and the three
men got out.

Jake Grafton ran his hands over the marble
defaced with swatches of paint. The lower portion of the
statue was broken off and lying in the grass. He
moved to the head and stared down into the paint-daubed
face of Josef Stalin.

“Who are these others?”

The standing bronzes were three or four times life
size.

“They look to me to be three likenesses
of the same guy, Admiral,” Dalworth said.
“Dzerzhinsky, I think, but I don’t know for
sure. Maybe Lenin with hair. For sure he was
some big Commie mucky-muck that they were tired of
looking at and hearing about. He looks sort of like a
Slavic Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t be?”

“More like Jefferson Davis,” Jake Grafton
murmured, and looked around.

“What’s that over there?” He pointed at a huge
gray concrete structure three or four stories
high a hundred yards away, beside the river. The
parking lots were empty, and even from this distance he could
see the building was shabby, the facade crumbling.

“Some kind of cultural thing. Just beyond it across that
boulevard is the entrance to Gorky Park. See that
huge gate?”

1.umm.”

Jake Grafton turned back to Stalin. He
ran his bands over the marble and looked again into the stone
eyes, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and
despair,” was Toad Tarkington said.

Lieutenant Spiro Dalworth was more
down-to-earth. “Be fun to have one of these out in the
backyard, wouldn’t it?

To piss on whenever you felt in the mood.

U.s. Ambassador Owen Lancaster was not a
career diplomat-rather he was one of those political
insiders who had been repeatedly appointed to key
embassies by both Democratic and Republican
administrations. His political affiliation was a
subject that never seemed to get mentioned by anyone,
even the press. In short, he was The Establishment
from fingertips to toenails.

And he looked it, Jake Grafton concluded.
Tall, lean, Patrician and impeccably turned
out in a tailor-made wool suit and a handmade
silk tie, Owen Lancaster looked exactly like
central casting’s idea of an heir to a
nineteenthcentury Yankee merchant’s fortune, which
he was. it pow seemed as if this room in Spaso
House were designed around him: the lighting, color
scheme, expensive furniture and carpeting-the
room was an exquisite tribute to the interior
designer’s art. God would have a living room like this
if He had the money.

In a chair to the left of the ambassador sat one
of the career diplomats, a woman in her mid
to late thirties maybe early forties-it was hard
to tell. She wore modest, expensive clothes and
no makeup that Jake could see. Her name
was His. Agatha Hempstead, with the emphasis on
the His. She hadn’t yet opened her mouth but
Jake Grafton already suspected that she was three
or four notches smarter than Old Money
Lancaster.

On the other side of the ambassador sat Herb
Tenney.

He was wearing a suit and tie this afternoon and looked
as if he had merely dropped in to pass a few
social moments.

After he had smiled and nodded pleasantly
to Jake and Toad, he devoted his attention to the
ambassador’s pleasantries.

I don’t pretend to knowjust what instructions you
have been given in Washington, Admiral,” the
ambassador was saying, “or what we Americans
can do to improve this situation. I don’t know that we
can contribute anything to the solution of this particular
problem, but it certainly won’t hurt to try. The
Russians must learn that they can cooperate with us on
matters of mutual interest and, in deed, it is in
their best interests to do so. I think that’s critical
. . .”

Jake Grafton twisted in his ornate,
polished mahogany chair. Herb Tenney
looked innocent, Jake concluded. His whole
presence radiated comfort, proclaimed to everyone who
saw him that here was a man at peace with humanity and
his conscience, a man who knew in his heart of hearts
that he had nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for,
nothing to fear.

All of which somehow irritated Jake Grafton.

We can help,” Ambassador Lancaster was
saying, solve problems in a constructive way that will
Toad Tarkington caught Jake’s eye with a warning
Sohen Coonty glance. Apparently he could see
that his boss was struggling to keep a grip on his
temper.

God! Was it that obvious?

The fact that Tenney could probably also see the
effect Of his innocent act was gasoline on the
fire. Jake felt the heat as his face flushed.

Herb Tenney and his CIA bugs … Sunday
op-ed drivel from the ambassador … if he had
to sit here in this museum exhibit of bureaucratic
good taste for another two minutes he was going to be
in a mood to strangle them both.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Jake interrupted as
he struggled to rise from the overstuffed chair. “I
didn’t get any sleep on the plane and
I’ve just spent an hour with the naval attached I
I’ve got to lie down for a few hours. Is there
anyplace can crash?”

“Oh, of course, of course. You must be rested
when you meet General Yakolev in the morning, I
should have thought of that. Would you like something to eat before you go
to bed?”

“No, thank you, sir. Perhaps a light breakfast
in the morning?”

“No problem, Admiral. We’ll talk again
then.”

Jake Grafton shook the ambassador’s hand,
nodded at His. Hempstead, then turned and
tramped out without even a glance at Tenney.

He woke up at midnight after four hours’
sleep and found he was wide awake — He turned
on the bedside light and examined his watch. What
time was it in Washington?

What the hell was the time differential? Eight
hours? Four o’clock in the afternoon in Washington. No
wonder he couldn’t sleep even though he was tired.