On that note Collins felt silent. When Jake failed to ask any more questions, Collins had a question of his own. “What do you want me to do with Dalworth, Admiral?”
“Did he tell you about the fracas in the park?”
“Yessir. And about whispering to Herb Tenney.”
It was Jake’s turn to shrug. “Don’t do anything.”
Collins picked at a discolored place on his uniform trousers.
“Did Dalworth tell you those two guys we killed were CIA?”
“Uh, yessir.”
“I may need Dalworth,” Jake said slowly. “I don’t know what the hell Herb Tenney is up to, but whatever it is, it’s going to get him burned. I intend to light the fire.”
16
What was Herb Tenney up to? Jake worried the question as he lay inert on a couch with a throbbing headache. He had downed four aspirin and now had a wet washcloth draped across his forehead. Droplets of water trickled through his hair and wet the miserably thin pillow.
It was hard to keep the proper perspective. Somehow, some way, a group within the CIA was embedded in this Russian mess up to its hidden microphones. Perhaps Toad’s reaction was the proper one — absolute outrage. But Toad would surrender to that emotion and lose sight of the other aspects. That was the thing about Toad…passionate sincerity was the steal buried under that flippant shell he wore to ward off the bumps and abrasions of everyday life.
He still loved Judith Farrell, Jake was positive of that. Toad had given himself to her once, years ago, and he was the type of man for whom there could never be any emotional retreat. Love once bestowed could never be withdrawn. Oh, he could love another woman, and did — he was desperately in love with Rita Moravia. Now he must hide the hurt of the loss to avoid injuring another — only the Toad-man would get himself into that predicament. And Jake could only guess how badly he was hurting.
Yakolev, Shmarov… He had met those two and come away confused. Yakolev at least wore the face he thought the foreigners wanted to see: maybe all he did was wear it. Shmarov looked like some hideous apparition from a Boris Karloff movie, ready to jerk out fingernails and slice off testicles.
Money. Somehow he had missed the money connection between Nigel Keren and the Mossad, and it was right there in plain sight. Billionaire publisher and industrialist Nigel Keren… Money, money, money…
Richard Harper said he had it. But what did he have? Is money the connection between the CIA and the KGB?
The salient feature of communism that made it different from every other system of government man has yet devised was that it made everyone poor. All one could hope for under communism was access to more perks, to the right schools, a dacha in the Lenin Hills, a car, shopping in the party stores, party hospitals, and a plot in a party cemetery when the party doctors could do no more. But money? No. Today Boris Yeltsin was only paid the ruble equivalent of a hundred dollars a month.
What do desperate comrades do when the tide goes out and leaves them stranded on a mud bar?
What have they done?
Everyone must be dead at the Petrovsk Rocket Base. Collins said it was in the center of the fallout pattern, a mere eighty miles downwind. The men and women there must have died quickly, almost in their tracks. Perhaps the people in the clean rooms lasted a little longer. Perhaps not.
But the missiles and their warheads would be unaffected. They would be sitting there in the hangars on their transports and the clean room would be full of partially disassembled warheads.
How do you dispose of plutonium warheads? This was the question that had bedeviled the foreign experts and the Russian military. Simply taking them apart wasn’t the answer — they could be assembled again by anyone with the know-how.
Atomic weapons were the ultimate curse, Jake told himself once again. Their very existence warped space and time and human affairs like little black holes.
There must be some solution, something that rendered the warheads incapable of harming anyone. But what?
“Admiral. Admiral Grafton.”
It was Senior Chief Holley.
“Commander Tarkington called on the scrambled hand-held.” At least the marines had brought com equipment! “They’ve found some choppers. He said to tell you it’ll be a couple more hours before they’re fueled and checked out.”
“Thanks, Senior Chief.”
He tried again to turn off the muscles, to relax completely into sleep. So Toad found some choppers…
He was drifting in a late afternoon sky filled with giant white clouds over a blue landscape, clouds with tops shot with fire and bases hidden in deepening shadow.
He saw the clouds the other day from the window of the jet as they flew back to Moscow from the missile base, saw them from above, from the angle that God sees them. What does He think, watching the clouds drift across the landscape, watching the humans grapple in the mud, poisoning one another in the deep purple shadows?
The question flitted across a tired mind, then was gone, leaving only the clouds and the blue land below and the dark shadows of the coming night.
They looked like garbagemen in the one-size-fits-all baggy NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits. American servicemen called these things hot suits because there was no provision to cool the wearer. Britain’s Jocko West helped the French and German officers into their suits, then donned his own. The Italian officer, Colonel Galvano, couldn’t be reached at his hotel or the Italian embassy.
Although normally the suits merely provided filtered air, these were the latest models with a limited self-contained oxygen supply. When the oxygen was gone they would have to go on filtered air, and in an environment as hot as the one Tom Collins predicted, the filters were going to get quickly contaminated.
Before they came out to the airport, a heliport on the southeastern side of the city, Jake had spent twenty minutes talking with General Hayden Land on the scrambled telephone. “Do what you think best,” Land said. What else could he have said?
“Can you fly this…thing?” Jake asked Lieutenant Justin “Goober” Groelke, one of the pilots who came to Russia with Rita and the marines. Goober was already decked out in his hot suit.
“I think so, sir. I got a couple thousand hours in big choppers.”
“How much fuel do we have?”
“Not enough. We’ll all ride in this one. Toad’s loaded the other machine with fuel in drums. All we could find was a hand pump. We’ll fly in formation as far southeast as we can, land the other machine in a clean area. Then we’ll refuel this chopper and fly on. When we come back from the hot zone we’ll fuel up again.”
“Or abandon this machine.”
“Yessir. If it’s too contaminated.”
“What kind of condition are these machines in?”
Here Groelke paused. “These are fairly new machines, Aeroflot Mi-8s, with very low times on the tachs. They’ve been sitting outside without engine covers for a couple months, apparently. We cleaned the dirt and bird shit out of the intakes as best we could, drained the sumps, checked all the systems we could, all the fluid levels, the hubs… The hydraulic fluid may have some water in it and the engine oil doesn’t look good on either machine. The batteries were dead. We used a power cart to start the engines and we hovered both machines. There’s no telling how much dirt was in the engines before we turned them up. I assumed that you were willing to run some risks…” His voice trailed off as Jake’s head bobbed once.
Both men were professional aviators — they well knew the risks of flying in unknown machines that had been essentially abandoned. The weeds were now flattened by the 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.