The Fifth Horseman (11 page)

“Since when have your Corsican friends been so interested in science?” he asked Fraguier.

“When the Russians wanted to get hold of our designs for the Concorde, what did they do?” Fraguier replied. “They went down to Marseilles and knocked on the right Corsican’s door, did they not? Perhaps that experience taught our Corsican friends the value of industrial secrets.”

Bertrand brushed the ashes from his suit. “Their asking price seems low,” he suggested in his quiet voice.

“Yes,” Fraguier agreed. “But remember, for them it’s a lot of money. They may not realize just how valuable those papers are.”

“What guarantee do we have,” asked the Minister, “that they haven’t photostated those documents and won’t try to hold us up again?”

“None whatsoever,” Fraguier answered. He paused. “But they won’t. Corsicans are honorable people. They only cheat you once.”

For a moment, the only sound in the office was the creaking of the Minister’s chair as he slowly rocked back and forth. In a sense, they had been fortunate. If they made the payoff, it would all be over. The incident would never get to the public and the secret of the scientific advance would be kept safe.

“All right, do it,” he ordered his police chief. “I’ll arrange with the Treasury for the million francs.”

A gray stain seeped along the edges of night. Dawn was about to break over the barren immensity of the desert. That period immediately preceding the emergence of the solar disc on the horizon was known to the followers of the Prophet as EI Fedji, the first dawn. It lasted only minutes, just the tune required by the Faithful to recite the first of their five sourates, the daily prayers prescribed by the Koran., Dressed in a crude shepherd’s cloak of brown and white stripes, a flowing white kafliyeh held in place by one cord on his head, a man in his late thirties emerged from his goatskin tent and spread a prayer rug on the sand. Turning east, he began to invoke the name of Allah, Master of the World, the All-Merc: ifUl and: \ll-Compassionate, the Supreme Sovereign of the Last Judgment.

He prostrated himself three times, touching his forehead to the earth each time, glorifying as he did the name of God and His Prophet. llis prayer finished, Muammar al-Qaddafi, the undisputed ruler of the Libyan nation, sat back on his rug and watch, — :d the rising sun flame the desert sky. He was a son of the desert. He had entered the world in a goatskin tent similar to the one in which he had just passed the night. His birth had been heralded by the rumble of the artillery duel fought that evening between the gunners of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and Montgomery’s Eighth Army. He had spent his boyhood wandering the desert with his tribe, maturing to the searing gusts of the siroccos, the blessings of the winter rains, the quick flowering of the pastures. From the sand seas below Cyrenaica southwest to the palm trees of Fezzan, there was not a prickly bush, a sweep of grass or a dried-out riverbed that had escaped his predator’s gaze in the nomad’s quest for pasturage for his flock.

Regularly, when he felt overwhelmed by the frustrations and disappointments of the power that was now his, he retreated back here to his desert to immerse himself again in the wellsprings of his being. Now, as he meditated on his prayer rug, his eye caught the gleam of a pair of headlights on the horizon. A white Peugeot 504 drew toward the small military encampment half a mile from his tent where his visitors were screened and the communications which tied him to Tripoli were installed. The three sentries on duty waved it to a halt and meticulously scrutinized first its driver, then his papers. When they had finished they ordered the driver out of his car. They ran a metal detector over his body. Finally, satisfied, they allowed him to set out alone, on foot, toward the Libyan dictator.

Qaddafi followed his progress across the sands. When he was a hundred yards away Qaddafi stood and walked out to met him. “Salaam alaikum!” he called out.

“Alaikum salaam,” the visitor replied.

Qaddafi advanced a few steps and embraced him on both cheeks. “Welcome, my brother,” he said. He drew back and looked at him, amused. Whalid Dajani was redfaced from the unaccustomed exertion of his half-mile walk in the desert.

“I have …” he began in an excited gasp.

Qaddafi raised his hand to interrupt him. “First, coffee, my friend,” he said. “Afterward, inch’ Allah, we will talk.”

He took Dajani by the arm and led him into the tent, where he picked up a brass coffee pot from the fire glowing in his brazier. He poured the pale Bedouin coffee into handleless porcelain cups shaped like oversized thimbles and offered the first one to his guest. They drank. Then Qaddafi lay back on the Oriental rugs thrown around the floor of his tent. The suspicion of a smile crossed his handsome face. “Now, my brother,” he said, “tell me your news.”

“The package arrived,” the visitor replied, “last night.” He took a deep breath and held it trapped in his lungs as though trying to hold back with it the rush of words ready to spill from his mouth. Finally he exhaled a breath that reeked of the dozens of peppermint Lifesavers he had gulped to kill the odor of the Chivas Regal whiskey he had been sipping all night long. Alcohol was totally banned in Qaddafi’s domain.

“I can’t believe it yet,” he said. “It’s all there. I studied it all night.” He shook his head in disbelief. Once again he saw the columns of figures plunging toward an infinity of power such as few minds had ever been privileged to contemplate.

His vision, however, was not that of the limitless reserves of energy that had enfevered the mind of the French scientist who had first looked at them barely a week before. What Dajani had glimpsed was a vision of hell, the dark underside of the dream of fusion, the terms of a Faustian compact Alain Prevost and others pursuing his dream around the world had had to strike with the capricious gods of science. For, in opening to man the vista of unlimited energy for as long as he and his planet might endure, they had also exposed the keys to a force so destructive it could set a premature end to his, and his environment’s, existence. Frozen into the endless rows of figures in the computer printout Pr6vost had been taking to his meeting at the tlysee Palace was the secret of the hydrogen bomb.

“Carlos and his people worked quickly,” Qaddafi observed. “You’re sure there’s no way this can be traced back here? Our relations with the French are vital.”

Dajani shook his head. “They copied the papers right away. Then they called the French as though they were Corsican gangsters looking for a ransom.”

“And the French believed them?”

“Apparently.”

Qaddafi rose from his carpet and moodily stirred the coals glowing in his brazier. “My brother,” he said, “when we started this operation you said the Frenchman was working on a new kind of energy.”

His visitor nodded.

“Why is it,” Qaddafi continued, “you were able to get the secret of the hydrogen bomb from what he was doing?”

“Essentially,” Dajani replied, “what they were trying to do in Paris was to make a mini-mini-hydrogen-bomb explosion. A controlled one so that they could use the energy it released. People have been trying to do that for thirty years since the Americans exploded the first hydrogen bomb.”

He paused, then reached to his temple and with a dramatic gesture plucked a single strand of hair from his balding head. He held it up before Qaddafi’s intrigued eyes. “What they were trying to do was to make a bubble no thicker than this hair explode. To do it, they had to squeeze it to one thousand times its normal density with a laser beam in a time so short the mind can’t imagine it.”

Qaddafi’s eyes widened. “But why did the secret of the hydrogen bomb come out of that?”

“Because with all experiments like this, the evolution of every ingredient is being constantly recorded by computer. For one tiny, tiny instant just before that little bubble exploded, it took on the one perfect configuration of a hydrogen bomb. Its secret, the exact relationship between its ingredients, is detailed here in the computer printout.”

Qaddafi rose and walked in silence to the entrance of the tent. He stood there scrutinizing the horizon, incarnadined now by the fast-rising sun.

For an instant he forgot what the scientist had just told him.

Instinctively, as he had every dawn in the desert since he was a boy, he studied the sky for some precursor foretelling the arrival of the Bedouin’s timeless enemy, the guebli, the searing wind that rose in the desolate expanse of the Sahara. When the guebli blew, death rode its wings, and man and beast huddled together, as often he had with his father’s herd, seeking protection against the onrushing clouds of sand under which whole tribes had been known to vanish.

This morning, though, the sky was a violent blue, not the silvery gray that heralded the guebli. He looked at it reassured, at the oneness of the vast canopy of sky and the endless horizons of his desert. The world stretching away from his tent was a cruel, harsh world; but it was a simple one in which choices and their consequences were clear: You crossed the sands in search of the well. You found the well and you survived. You did not and you died.

Perhaps now with what his visitor had brought him, he had reached his well, the one for which he had been searching for so many years. For a moment, standing there in the morning sunlight before reentering his tent, Qaddafi thought of the story his father had told him of the kettate, the tattooed fortuneteller, who had appeared at their campsite as his mother screamed in the pain that preceded his birth. She had gone to the tent in which the men of the tribe sipped tea waiting for the birth and shook out on a carpet the twenty-three rigidly prescribed oddments of her trade, an old coin, a shard of glass, a dried date kernel, a bone from a camel’s hoof. Then she proclaimed it would beg a boy. He would be an anointed of God, she announced, a man destined to stand out from all the others, to perform God’s work in the service of his people. She had barely finished when the first part of her prophecy was confirmed. The scream of the midwife rang out from the woman’s tent calling out the ritual phrase that greeted a newborn male: “Allah akhbar-God is great.”

Qaddafi turned back into the tent. From a copper pot he took a thick, creamy bowlful of leben, goat’s curd, and a black wad of dates, the Bedouin’s traditional breakfast. He set them on the carpet and bade his guest eat.

Dipping a date into his curds, Qaddafi pondered, as he often did, on the old woman’s prophecy and how favored indeed he was in Allah’s eyes. Allah had given him a mission, to bring His peoples back to God’s way, to re-awaken the Arab people to their true destiny, to right the wrongs that had been done to his brothers. And He had given him the means to accomplish it, the oil without which those who had so long exploited his people could not survive. To get it from him, the others had had to offer him the means to his vision: wealth, the arms he had bought, the technology he had acquired, the science his people had learned, and now this prospect his visitor had laid before him-the prospect of the ultimate power on earth.

“And, my brother,” he said to Dajani, “we can build this from these documents they brought you last night?”

“It’s a long, hard road with many, many problems. First we must finish our atomic program. There will be difficulties and risks-the danger the Israelis will find out what we are doing and destroy us before we can succeed.”

Qaddafi looked out to the desert stretching away from the tent, a distant gaze in his dark, brooding eyes. “My friend, there has never been greatness without danger. There has never been a great victory without great risks.”

He rose, indicating to Dajani that the conversation was over. “You have done well, my brother,” he said, his voice almost reverent, “ever since Allah sent you here to help us. Now, thanks to you, at last we shall make justice prevail.”

This time he walked his visitor back across the sands to his car. Gently he placed a hand on Whalid’s elbow. A faint, ironic smile crossed his features. “My brother,” he murmured, “perhaps you should not eat so many peppermints. Such things are bad for the good health God gave you.”

The vista laid bare to Muammar al-Qaddafi in his desert retreat was only the last, terrifying consequence of an enterprise the Libyan had pursued from the moment, almost, that he had seized power. Power was something the Bedouin dictator understood instinctively, and what better way to assert his claim to the leadership of a resurgent Arab world than to be the first Arab leader to arm his nation with the ultimate weapon?

Qaddafi had taken his first step on the road to his desert rendezvous in 1969, shortly after he had consolidated his revolution. He sent his Prime Minister, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking with an offer to buy half a dozen atomic bombs from China’s nuclear arsenal. Rebuffed by the Chinese, Qaddafi turned to Westinghouse with a proposal to purchase a 600-megawatt nuclear reactor to desalinize sea water for irrigating his desert. Since no one in the world knew how to do that at anything remotely approaching an economically justifiable cost, the implication that Qaddafi had other uses in mind for the plant was clear. The State Department refused to authorize the sale despite the protests of Westinghouse and its congressional lobby.

The Libyan then sought to buy an experimental reactor from Gulf General Atomic of San Diego. The reactor itself could not have been used to make an atomic bomb, but the fuel that Gulf General was ready to sell Qaddafi along with it-fully enriched uranium-was ideal bomb material. Henry Kissinger’s personal intervention was required to block that initiative.

Qaddafi’s program got into high gear after the 1973 war and his realization that Israel possessed atomic weapons. He himself picked the program’s code name, Seif al Islam-“The Sword of Islam”-and placed it under the direct control of Prime Minister Jalloud’s office. Three principles were to guide it. First, the weapons program would be carried out under the cover of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. Second, Libya would look primarily to Europe for its technology. Third, every effort would be made to staff the program with Arab scientists, men either recruited from universities and nuclear programs or trained at Libyan expense in the best universities in the world.