When he could stand it no longer he picked up the telephone and dialed. “Captain, this is Toad. Heard anything?”
Then he hung up and went back to pacing, and fidgeting, and gazing gloomily at Herb Tenney and Jack Yocke.
“What did Collins say?” Yocke asked.
“Nothing.”
“What are you going to do if Grafton and Rita don’t come back?”
Toad didn’t answer. He didn’t want even to acknowledge the possibility out loud, let alone discuss it with Jack Yocke. Jake Grafton and Rita Moravia were the two most important people in his life. He felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a vast, dark abyss. Every minute that passed made the gaping horror more probable, and more unspeakable.
After a while Yocke said, “Surely we ought to discuss it.”
“They’ll be back.” End of conversation.
They were on the ground somewhere. Tactical jets carry a limited supply of fuel, and when it’s exhausted…no one ever ran out of gas and floated around up there unable to get down. So where were they? In the fallout zone? Shot down? Why hadn’t they called? Any way you figured it, something had gone seriously wrong. And our boy Herb probably had something to do with that something.
Toad found himself glowering at the CIA agent asleep on the couch. Sleeping! He forced himself to look away.
By six o’clock in the evening Toad had reached the breaking point. For lack of something better to do, he decided to go find Collins. “I’m going out,” he announced to Jack Yocke, who looked up from the paperback novel he was reading. “Keep an eye on Herb.” Toad hoisted himself erect and walked toward the door.
“Aren’t you going to give me your pistol?” Yocke asked.
“Nah. There’s marines outside.”
“Outside?”
“In the hallway. You have any trouble, just shout and they’ll come running.”
The reporter was speechless.
Toad pulled the Browning from his waistband. “This thing wouldn’t do you any good anyway.” He thumbed off the safety and pulled the trigger. Click. “It’s empty.”
Yocke found his voice. “Empty!”
One of Jack Yocke’s endearing qualities — and he had precious few, in Toad’s opinion — was that sometimes he was extraordinarily slow on the uptake. Maybe it was an act. Whatever, Toad Tarkington savored the moment. “You don’t think I’m stupid enough to give a loaded gun to a trigger-happy thrill-killer like you, do ya? If you didn’t shoot off your own toe, you’d probably go berserk and murder everybody north of the Moskva.”
“You dirty, rotten, slimy, retarded stumblebum, you—”
That was the high point in a long, dreary day of merciless tension and uncertainty. Toad stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him before Jack Yocke got really wound up. He mumbled a greeting to the marine sitting at the top of the stairs as he went by.
It was after 7 P.M. when a pale, exhausted Rita Moravia sagged onto the floor beside Jake. Her flight suit reeked of vomit.
“How is that sick man?” Jake asked.
“Dead. Radiation poisoning, dehydration I think — oh, I don’t know. His heart stopped and we just…gave up.” She brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes and hugged her knees.
Several platitudes occurred to Jake, but he held his tongue.
“How did you evade those fighters this morning?” Rita asked. “This morning! God, it seems like another lifetime ago.”
“One guy stalled and went in, I shot down the others.”
“You were lucky.”
“That’s all life is: luck — some good, some bad, most indifferent. Some of it you make yourself, most of it you just have to take as it comes.”
“What’s going on here, Admiral? Why did the Russians blow up their own reactor?”
“To hide the fact that nuclear weapons were gone.”
“You aren’t serious?”
“Oh, but I am. Somebody — let’s postulate a small group of somebodys — collected a lot of money from Saddam Hussein for some nuclear weapons. Saddam took delivery at Petrovsk the evening before the reactor blew up. Everyone there who wasn’t in on the sale was killed. Then the reactor exploded and the usual prevailing wind delivered a lethal concentration of fallout on Petrovsk. Eventually someone would visit Petrovsk, but the way things work in Russia, that visit was a long way off. Maybe years. When it eventually came to pass, our small group of somebodys were sure they could control the dissemination of the news of what happened at Petrovsk because long before then Boris Yeltsin would be driven from power. And they would be in.”
“How could they be sure of that?”
“The reactor explosion would cause a political crisis. They would escalate the event to a crisis if it didn’t happen naturally. And they had done their homework with Saddam’s money. A lot of money. Real money, hard currency. The people at the top in Russia are just like the people at the top everywhere else — they want good food, nice clothes, adequate housing, an education for their kids, decent medical care. The Communist party used to deliver all that, but those days are gone. Whoever can deliver that life-style to the people in power will rule.”
“Money.”
“Hard currency — U.S. dollars. For bribes. To dole out to the faithful. To buy votes in the legislature. There’s a flourishing dollar economy in Moscow — just how on earth does an honest Russian come by dollars?”
“Oh, my God,” Rita whispered. “To murder all those people! I can’t believe it.”
“This is Russia,” Jake told her, his voice low. “Even the stones are guilty. See that old man over there, the one with the campaign ribbons on his lapel? He’s a veteran of World War II. He probably has a hundred stories about how he and his fellow soldiers fought to the last ditch and saved Russia from Hitler. What he won’t tell you about are the penal battalions — every division had one. These were unarmed battalions of political prisoners — Russians who had said something unwise about Stalin or the NKVD, people who appeared to be less than happy living in the new Communist paradise. The men in the penal battalions were herded ahead of the tanks before every attack to step on the land mines and clear the way. And German machine gunners slaughtered them and revealed their positions to the Red Army troops. Then the tanks and gallant soldiers like that old man killed Nazis and won glorious victories. They saved Mother Russia. Ah yes, that old man is proud of his ribbons.
“Yet this is the amazing part—the Commies never ran out of recruits for the penal battalions. That maniac Hitler gassed and shot and starved his domestic enemies — all at his cost. Stalin killed his enemies just as dead but he turned a nice profit doing it. And Stalin didn’t bother cremating the corpses: he let the body parts rot right where they lay to fertilize the soil.
“Yes, Rita, a group of ambitious people intentionally blew up the Serdobsk reactor. If a half million humans had to die to get them to the top, so be it. Like that old man over there with the ribbons, these people have paid their dues. They have created a hell on earth and they are going to rule it.”
“Stalin’s children,” Rita murmured.
Twenty minutes later the train entered the outskirts of Moscow. “Where’s Dalworth?” Jake asked Rita.
“I don’t know. He wandered off when that man died.”
“Find him. We’re going to have to hop off this train fast and try for a taxi. If our luck is in, no one will be looking for us at the railroad station.”
She was very tired. “You sent that helicopter pilot off to be shot down.” It was just a statement of fact, without inflection.