Rita grinned and shrugged.
“Well, you ought to go back to the States. You shouldn’t even have come over here. This place is too goddamn polluted for a pregnant woman.” Herb Tenney and his binary poisons crossed his mind. “And—”
She wrapped her arms around him and pushed him backward. With her face just inches from his, she told him, “Toad Tarkington. The women you fall in love with aren’t housewives. If I become one I risk losing you. That’s a risk I have no intention of taking.”
“But—”
“But nothing! This baby is mine too. You just stifle your male instincts and start thinking up names. I’ll handle the rest of it.”
Toad tried to sort it out. Perhaps she was right, he decided. Probably. Women! If it floats, flies or fucks, rent — don’t buy! Great advice but impossible to follow. After a bit he asked, “Can you still make love?”
This question drew a giggle from the mother-to-be, who grasped him in a very intimate way and lowered her mouth onto his.
Senior Chief Holley woke Jake at five in the morning. The sun was already up. “The helicopter made it back a couple hours ago. The guys just got here.”
“Fine,” Jake said, and the senior chief closed the door behind him. Jake had left orders that he be awakened when they returned, now he had trouble getting back to sleep.
He couldn’t eat, not with Herb Tenney in the same city, and he was only getting a few hours sleep a night. This regimen wasn’t good for him — he would soon have trouble concentrating. Maybe he was already feeling the effects.
He lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling. Soon his thoughts were on Callie and Amy. What time was it in Washington? What would they be doing today?
When he came awake again the chief was shaking him. “Admiral, we have a call from General Land. I’ve set up the encrypter in the living room.”
Jake got out of bed and pulled on his pants. In the living room Jack Yocke was drinking coffee.
“What time is it?”
“Almost noon.”
“Toad up?”
“Still in bed.”
“Let him sleep.”
“Want me to leave?”
“You can stay, but everything you hear is classified. You can’t print anything.”
“I know the ground rules,” Yocke said mildly and sipped at the coffee. “Take your call. I’ll get you a cup.”
“Admiral Grafton, sir.”
“Land. I got yesterday morning’s satellite photo and the one the bird got at seven local time this morning over Petrovsk. How many empty transporters were there outside when you were there?”
“Three, sir.”
“This morning there were four. There were also two bodies there this morning.”
“Dead bodies?”
“They’re lying down. The photo interpreter’s labeled them dead. They look dead to me. One is right by a transporter, the other is near the abandoned helicopter.”
“Much cloud cover at Petrovsk this morning?”
“About thirty percent or so. There was a decent hole over the field when the bird went by.”
“We’re lucky.” Jake had asked for the daily satellite shoot, but he hadn’t expected anything this dramatic. “Sounds like someone went back to the gold mine.”
“The morning after the meltdown was overcast, so nothing that morning. The next day the transporters were there. And yesterday. This morning four.”
“Who was it?” Jack Yocke handed Jake a cup of coffee and sat down on the couch.
“An AWACS bird over the Persian Gulf picked up three transports leaving a military airfield near Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, at a few minutes after nine last night. They tracked them flying just a little west of north until they departed the area. Then three transports came back this morning a few minutes after dawn. One crashed fifty miles north of the air base, the other two landed there.”
“They didn’t have the right gear to withstand the radiation.”
“Looks that way.”
“General, somebody is going to have to destroy those missiles before any more of them are carried away. Those missiles are too big a temptation.”
“I’m going over to the White House in about fifteen minutes. I’ve already talked to the secretary of defense. He and the national security adviser will meet us there. Why don’t you be in Ambassador Lancaster’s office about an hour and a half from now? Someone will call you.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Jake hung up the phone and switched off the crypto device.
“Someone went back?” Yocke asked.
“Apparently. They carried off at least three missiles before the meltdown. That night. The radiation was supposed to cover up the fact the missiles were missing, for a while anyway. But someone got careless and left the transporters outside.”
“Why didn’t they take the transporters too?”
“Too big. Too heavy. Oh, maybe they took one or two, but they opted to leave at least three behind and take the missiles instead.”
“And someone went back last night?”
“And maybe got a couple more missiles. Left at least two dead people on the mat and one more empty transporter.”
“Satellite?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just how good are those satellites?”
“They can see something the size of a pack of cigarettes. The problem is that we only have so many satellites. Right now we’re trying to monitor every base in Russia where nukes are stored.” Jake started to add something, then just shook his head.
“So what are we going to do?”
“If you mean the United States, Land is going to see the president now.”
“Who got the missiles?”
“Saddam Hussein.”
“Oh, hell.”
“That isn’t the worst of it. Remember all those warheads stacked around? Those are highly portable. Odds are that for every missile they carried away, they took half a dozen warheads.”
Jake Grafton headed for the bathroom to shower and shave. He decided to put on his uniform. It looked like it might be that kind of day.
“What?” said Ms. Hempstead, her brows knitted.
“I expect the ambassador will be getting a call in a little while from the White House. General Land asked me to be here when it comes.”
“Have a seat, Admiral. I’ll talk to the ambassador. He’s on the telephone right now with Yeltsin’s aide, trying to arrange an appointment.” She whirled and marched for the door to the inner sanctum.
Jake Grafton picked a seat and settled in. The secretary thought she could spare him a smile, then thought better of it and went back to pounding the keyboard of her computer terminal. Jake picked up a three-month-old copy of Southern Living and began to leaf through it. There were articles there on a couple of houses he wouldn’t mind living in if he ever inherited five million dollars.
Ten minutes later he tired of the magazine. He checked his watch. The ambassador’s door was firmly closed. The secretary was pretending to work on something on her desk.
He was examining the paintings on the wall thirty minutes later when the door opened. “Would you come in, please, Admiral Grafton,” Hempstead said. She stood aside and he walked in.
The ambassador was on the telephone. He was listening. Every now and then he said, “Yessir.” Finally he said, “He’s here now with me, sir… Yessir… If you think… I’ll let you know immediately. Yessir. Good-bye.”
Lancaster hung up and looked around blinking. His eyes settled on Grafton, then moved to Hempstead. “Agatha, please use the telephone in the other room to get me an appointment with Yeltsin. Tell the aide I have an oral message from our president that I must deliver immediately. Have a seat, Admiral.” Jake did so.
When Hempstead was gone, Lancaster said, “It would have been nice if you had given me some warning about this last night.”