As the translator rattled this off Jake studied the Iraqi’s face. It had gone white. Beads of sweat were coalescing into little rivulets that ran down beside Hussein’s nose and dripped off his mustache. Stains were rapidly spreading across his shirt from under each armpit.
“You’ve seen cowboy movies, haven’t you? Let’s shoot it out, you simple, filthy son of a bitch.”
Hussein sat frozen. He didn’t even glance at the automatic within his grasp.
“Pick it up,” Jake Grafton roared.
Hussein sat silently while Jake regained his composure. He took several deep breaths, then said, “This is your last chance to go out like a man. The next time you will get the same chance you gave your minister of health, the same chance you give the people you send your thugs to kill, the same chance you were going to give the people those bombs out there were meant for, which is none at all. This is your only chance!”
Seconds passed. A tic developed in Hussein’s left eyelid. As the twitching became worse, he raised his hands and rubbed his eye. Finally he lowered his hands back to his lap.
Jake reached for the revolver. As he grasped it the Iraqi started visibly. The admiral rose from his chair, and holding the revolver in his right hand, retrieved the automatic. He stuck it into his belt.
After one last look at the dictator, Jake Grafton turned and left the room.
Jack Yocke had stood throughout this exchange. Now he pulled a chair away from the table and dropped into it. He got out his notebook and mechanical pencil and very carefully wrote the date on a clean sheet of paper. Beside it he wrote the dictator’s name.
He looked at Hussein, who was staring at the open door. An armed American soldier stood there gazing back at him.
Jack Yocke cleared his throat and caught the attention of the interpreter, who had also pulled up a chair. “I was wondering, Mr. President,” Yocke said, “if you’d care to grant me an interview for the Washington Post.”
Fifteen minutes later Jake Grafton came back through that door, followed by the two Russian generals. Captain Iron Mike McElroy was behind them, cradling a submachine gun in his arms. Then came a television reporter and cameraman and two technicians with lights and cables in coils over their shoulders.
Jack Yocke got out of his chair and leaned against a wall. Toad Tarkington eased in beside him, but he said nothing. Then Jack realized that Toad was holding a pistol in his hand, down beside his leg, hidden from sight.
Spiro Dalworth was also there. As the television reporter gave orders to his cameraman and the technicians discussed where to put the lights, Yocke heard Jake say to Dalworth, “Ask General Yakolev if Lieutenant Vasily Lutkin is still alive.”
“Lutkin?”
“Lutkin, the helicopter pilot. Ask him.”
Dalworth stepped over to where the general sat and asked the question in a low voice. Yakolev glanced at Jake, then shook his head from side to side. Mikhailov, Yocke noted, sat staring at the top of the table in front of him.
The television types opened a discussion of lighting and camera angles. Later, when he tried to recall exactly what had happened, Jack Yocke was never sure of the sequence. He remembered that someone else from a television crew came in carrying a floodlight and several people began looking for plugs. Another cameraman came in and his helper began unrolling cable.
The television reporter was talking to Admiral Grafton about the possibility of moving the news conference out into the hangar bay so they could use one of the missiles for a backdrop when Toad went over to where General Yakolev sat. Yocke caught that out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t pay much attention.
Toad must have laid the pistol on the table in front of Yakolev, because he was standing there opening a pocketknife — probably to cut the plastic ties around the Russian’s wrists — when Yakolev elbowed him hard and he fell away, off balance.
“No!” Yocke yelled, almost as the first shot hammered his eardrums. Mikhailov’s head went sideways — a bullet right above the ear. Then Yakolev was shooting at Saddam Hussein.
Boom, boom, boom — the pistol’s trip-hammer reports were painfully magnified in the confines of the room.
The Iraqi dictator came half out of his chair on the first shot into Mikhailov, so he took the next three standing up, at a distance of about ten feet. A burst of silenced submachine gun fire followed the pistol shots almost instantly. Yakolev went face forward onto the table as Saddam Hussein fell back into his chair and the chair and the body went over backward with a crash. The whole sequence didn’t take more than three or four seconds.
“Shit, I think they’re all dead.” Tarkington’s voice. He stood and slowly looked around.
Jake Grafton got up from the floor and examined the Russians. Yocke tried to recall when Jake went down and couldn’t.
“Yakolev is dead,” Jake said. “Mikhailov is still breathing. One right above the left ear. I don’t think he’s gonna make it, but…Dalworth, go get a medic.”
Yocke pushed by the horrified Iraqi interpreter, who stood frozen with his hands half-raised. Toad was bending over the body of the dictator, which was lying on its side. Toad rolled him over. Saddam had three holes in his chest, one in the left shoulder, one dead center, and the other a little lower down. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Toad released a wrist and announced, “No pulse.”
Saddam Hussein was as dead as Petty Officer Murphy…and that Iraqi Jack Yocke had knifed in Samarra, the soldier with the rifle he had mowed down. Dead.
Toad Tarkington stood looking down at Saddam’s face as he folded his pocketknife and dropped it into a pocket. He held the pistol Yakolev had used with his left hand wrapped around the action, so the barrel and butt were both visible. That looks like Saddam’s pistol, Yocke thought, but he couldn’t be sure.
Toad glanced up and met the reporter’s gaze.
Jack Yocke took a last look at the Iraqi dictator, then walked for the door. McElroy was replacing the magazine in his weapon. He didn’t bother to look at Yocke as he went by.
Out in the hangar bay the reporter ran into another television crew, this one still shooting footage of soldiers loading nuclear warheads onto pallets and the pallets into helicopters.
“Were those shots we heard in there? What happened?” The reporter shoved a microphone at him.
“Saddam Hussein is dead,” Jack Yocke said slowly. “A Russian general killed him.”
“Holy…! C’mon, Harry, grab the lights. Ladies and gentlemen, we are broadcasting live from the Iraqi base at Samarra and we have just learned that Saddam Hussein is dead! Stay with us while—”
Yocke walked on through the hangar and went outside. One of the Sky Cranes was lifting off with a Russian missile slung beneath.
The rotors created a terrific wind that almost lifted Yocke’s helmet off. He watched the machine transition into forward flight and disappear into the darkness.
26
Jake Grafton was asleep when he heard the knocking on the door. “Just a minute.” He pulled on his trousers and opened it.
Yocke walked in lugging his computer. “I’ve written a story and I need to phone it into the paper. You’ll have to read it on the computer.”
He turned on the desk lamp and set up the machine.
Jake seated himself in front of the screen and put on his reading glasses. “You push the buttons.”
“Okay.”
As Jake finished each page, he nodded and Yocke brought up the next one. The story was an eyewitness account of the air assault on Samarra, the recovery of the nuclear weapons, and the death of Saddam Hussein. Yocke got down to cases on the third page.