“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.”
Grafton eyed Yocke, who had raised his eyes and was watching the marine on the crates.
“I don’t know,” Grafton said, then listened some more.
Grafton was in civilian clothes — Yocke noticed that the trousers were none too clean. Neither was the shirt. Then he realized the clothes were Russian, not American. So were the shoes.
“I wonder if you could order some photos for me. I want satellite photos of the Russian base at Petrovsk.” He listened a moment, then spelled the name of the base. “That’s right. It’s in the footprint of the Serdobsk fallout. Should be too hot for humans. I want a shot at least a month old, one maybe last week and one now. And some of that Serdobsk nuke plant.”
The admiral listened a moment, then went on. “Well, I would like about six antiradiation suits… No, better make that ten suits, with oxygen-breathing apparatus. Fly them in on a C-141. We’ll get out to the airport somehow… Ten… Yessir… Self-contained breathing apparatus, the whole shooting match. Geiger counters, film badges, everything… Yessir, I’d like to get down to Serdobsk if I can.
“Well, I don’t think Yakolev is going to lift a finger. He’s busy trying to take over the government… Not a soul, sir. No, I don’t think he’ll do anything to obstruct us, but the worse this gets the worse Yeltsin and the democrats look… I know, that occurred to me too. That’s one reason I want to get to Serdobsk.”
Grafton fell silent for a moment and eyed Yocke. It wasn’t a pleasant look. “We’ll steal one,” he told General Land. “Send me a couple pilots that can fly anything, and I mean anything. And just to be on the safe side, could you send a marine recon team with all their gear and hot suits?”
They talked about that for a moment, then Jake said, “And one more thing, sir. I’ve had a man named Richard Harper trying to find the money trail to whoever it is here in Russia that is selling weapons. He called last night and said he has it. I asked him to write a report. He’s supposed to mail it to my wife, but I wonder if you could send someone from your office over to his house in Chevy Chase to pick it up? Make a copy for yourself and send me a copy.” Jake gave him Harper’s address.
“Thank you, sir,” he said finally and hung up the receiver. He punched buttons and the lights on the gadget went out.
“Needless to say, you don’t want me to print a word of that,” Yocke said conversationally.
“Needless to say.”
“What are you going to steal?”
“A helicopter.”
“Can I go too?”
“I’ll think about it.”
Yocke nodded. Grafton packed the com gear into a soft carrying bag. He was zipping it closed when Yocke asked, “Think Yeltsin will resign?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, by God, after—”
“He may not have a choice,” Grafton said. “In case you haven’t noticed, Russia is a Third World shithole. The rule in Third World shitholes is that the head of government serves at the pleasure of the guys with the guns.”
Jack Yocke wasn’t paying much attention. His mind was in high gear ruminating on Nikolai Demodov and the KGB general, Shmarov, who it turned out wanted to be one of the magnificent seven. And Demodov denied he had been involved in the Soviet Square rubout… Shit! Those assholes must have been biding their time, waiting for just the proper moment to dump Yeltsin. They just didn’t want that xenophobic neo-nazi Kolokoltsev around to embarrass them when the puck went down. But how could he tie those Commies to Kolokoltsev’s killing?
Grafton stood and arranged the strap of the com gear bag over his shoulder. He looked up at the Marine. “Did you hear anything, Corporal Williams?”
“Not a word, sir.”
“Fine.”
Grafton took a couple steps, then paused and looked back at Yocke. “Well, you coming or are you going to sit there in the dirt contemplating your navel?”
The reporter got up and dusted his trousers. “You oughta see my navel. Got a ruby in it. Arab belly dancer gave it to me when I was sixteen. She was my first piece of ass.”
Yocke’s attempt at humor fell flat with Jake Grafton. He too had seen the girl shot and her corpse burned. And he was trying to understand what must have moved her to pick up a bottle filled with gasoline with a burning rag stuck in the mouth and run across that street at the American embassy.
Betrayal? The Russian people had been betrayed by the Communists, all right, who had promised much and delivered little.
But the American embassy?
Perhaps she felt a profound anger at a system that for fifty years had paid any price to acquire technology, yet in the end the technology betrayed them all. The Americans were the gurus of high-tech, the master alchemists.
Musing thus, Jake was still unsure. A great disgust at technology and technicians was motivating much of the political unrest worldwide, he thought, but still…Serdobsk was a Russian reactor. Perhaps mixed with those emotions was the age-old Russian suspicion of all things foreign. The Russians weren’t as bad as the Chinese in that regard, but they did fear the outside world, some sort of a national inferiority complex that they soaked up with their mother’s milk.
He would liked to have asked that young woman, but that chance was gone forever. She was a heap of charcoal and bone now, out there on a spot of melted, charred asphalt.
Jake Grafton wondered if the dead woman had had any relatives at Serdobsk or out there in that radioactive footprint.
He was opening the door to the apartment building when Jack Yocke asked, “Did General Land say what America’s response to the meltdown was going to be?”
Now Jake saw it. He let go of the door handle and turned to face Yocke. He could almost hear her voice. You are America. You are not stupid and venal and corrupt, yet you did nothing to help us. You let the stupid, venal, corrupt men tell their lies and build their poisonous monuments to our ignorance and so destroy us, the helpless. You, America.
Jack Yocke repeated his question.
“No,” Jake Grafton muttered, shaking his head. “He didn’t.” And he turned back for the door handle.
Upstairs in the apartment, which of necessity was also Jake’s office, Yocke had more questions. “Just how much nuclear material was in that reactor, anyway?”
“About four and a half tons.”
“Tons?”
“Yeah. Maybe three or so tons of uranium and a ton and a half of plutonium.”
“Gee, that sounds like a lot. I guess I always thought those things used just a couple of hatfuls.”
“This was a fast breeder. A typical water-cooled reactor would have maybe three times that amount.”
“So this time they got off lucky?”
Jake Grafton snorted. “Not hardly. The goddamn stuff blew up, went nuclear. Probably half the core went into the atmosphere. We don’t know enough yet to even make an intelligent estimate. And a breeder like that — it figures they had three or four tons of plutonium in the pipeline, just lying around. Some of that probably got swept up into the atmosphere and scattered all over too. No, these Russians just had no luck at all.”