The Fifth Horseman (2 page)
The man looked at him, his eyes as expressionless as they had been earlier on the bridge of the Dionysos. Then he relaxed.
“Hey,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. “Come in. Have a drink. I’ve got to celebrate my arrival with someone.”
* * *An hour after sunset, his checked hat pulled tightly down over his ears, the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the cutting wind off the harbor, the passenger drifted out of the Brooklyn Ocean Terminal in the midst of a cluster of the Dionysos’ crewmen heading for a night’s drinking on the Brooklyn waterfront. No one made any effort to verify the identity of any of the seamen leaving the docks. He walked off alone down the ill-lit streets, past the burned-out tenements and barred windows of one of America’s worst slums, disappearing into the Brooklyn night.
The following morning, several hours after the Dionysos had sailed, a pair of bums cooking a fish-scrap stew by the Fulton Fish Market noticed a body bobbing in the East River. Fortyeight hours later, a DD13, missing — person or unidentified — DOA form, recorded the incident in the archives of the New York City Police Department. The deceased was described as a Caucasian male, six feet two inches tall, weighing 172
pounds, between twenty-seven and thirty years of age, with brown eyes and a shaved skull. Cause of death was listed, according to the coroner’s report, as a ruptured trachea provoked by a severe karatelike blow to the windpipe.
PART 1SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13:
7 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT
“This will change the world.”
The unseasonably cold December day drew to a close. Mounds of still-fresh snow, the heritage of the unexpected storm which had swept up the eastern seaboard seventy two hours before, lined the streets of the nation’s capital. That snow, and the freezing weather which had followed it, had kept most of the city’s 76,000 inhabitants indoors this Sunday afternoon, December 13.
The family dwelling behind the familiar faqade of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had left their living quarters only once, to walk through the streets around their dwelling, savouring as they did the surprise of the few countrymen they passed at finding their chief executive in their midst. Now the somber strains of Sibelius’ Finlandia filled the White House living quarters, a reminder of the pleasure the President of the United States found in the works of classical composers like Bach, Vivaldi and Wagner. In the dining-room fireplace a birch log fire cracked, giving the room a cozy, almost snug air. It also reminded the President of the place he preferred above all others, the sitting-room of his rambling ranch house with its huge stone fireplace. He could sit there before it for hours, thinking and dreaming.
Precisely at seven o’clock, the President and his family sat down to supper. On this December evening that family included his wife and two of their four children. Theirs could not have been a more informal group nor, appropriately enough, one more typical of a certain image of the two hundred and thirty million Americans over whom the man at the head of the table presided. Both he and his wife were wearing well-washed jeans. As she usually did on Sundays, she’d ordered the chef to prepare her husband’s favorite meal, gazpacho, chili and barbecued spareribs. The President invited his daughter to offer grace, and the four people joined hands around the table while she asked the Lord’s blessing on the simple meal they were about to eat. Then, with a smile for his wife, the President attacked his gazpacho.
The Presidency of the United States is a cruel burden, one to age any man, and the energetic glow of strength and purpose the President had brought to the White House had already begun to dim under the trials of his office.
The lines that crinkled the corners of his sad dark eyes were deeper and far more evident now than they had been when he entered this house, the deep auburn hair in which he took great pride was showing, at last, the gray he’d avoided for years.
Still, the nation led by the man dining in the White House this December evening remained the most powerful, the richest, the most wasteful, the most envied and imitated nation on earth, the world’s first producer of coal, steel, uranium, copper and natural gas. Her farmlands were a wonder of productivity. Nine tenths of the world’s computers, almost all its microprocessors, three quarters of its civil aircraft, a third of its automobiles came out of American factories.
All that was safeguarded by a military establishment which possessed a destructive capacity unique in human history; the most sophisticated network of satellites that technology could produce; by seven layers of electronic warning systems and radar installations so sensitive they would detect a migrating flight of ducks hundreds of miles from the U.S.
coastline. Indeed, the countrymen of the President could, that December evening, consider themselves a privileged caste, the people on earth least likely to be exposed to the horror of an enemy’s assault.
The President bad just finished the last of his soup when the phone rang in the sitting room next door. The sound was seldom heard in the living quarters of the White House. Unlike most of his predecessors, he preferred working off tightly worded pieces of paper, and his staff was trained to restrict his phone calls to only the most urgent messages. His wife rose to take it. A frown clouded her usually composed features when she came back.
“I’m sorry. It was Jack Eastman. He says he has to see you right away.”
Jack Eastman was the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, a former Air Force major general who had taken over the corner office of the White House’s West Wing made famous by Henry Kissinger.
The President dabbed his lips with his napkin and excused himself. Two minutes later he opened the door of the living quarters himself. Eastman was a lean, youthful-looking fifty-three year old, all bone and muscle, one of those men to whom an old classmate, an old Army buddy, an old mistress can exclaim after twenty years of separation, “You haven’t changed a bit”
and, for once, mean it. One glance at Eastman told the President that this was not a routine interruption of his Sunday evening. He waved him to a seat and settled himself in a comfortable apricot wing chair beside the television set.
Two kinds of men had occupied the high office Eastman now held, presiding over the flow of documents that was the great trunk artery upon which the security of the United States depended. There were those like Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, ambitious men determined to run the world for the President of the United States from their seat beside the throne; or those like Al Haig, who had served Richard Nixon, products of the military, brilliant chiefs of staff, sorting out the options, honing the recommendations down to a fine point, but always careful to leave the real decision-making in the President’s hands.
Eastman belonged to the latter group. He was all business. Calculated flamboyance, the need for attention, an obsessive preoccupation with the media were as abhorrent to him as anonymity would have been to Henry Kissinger.
He handed the President a white folder. “Sir, I think you should begin by reading this. It’s the translation of a document that was delivered to the Madison Gate at lunchtime in the form of a tape recording in Arabic.”
The President opened the folder and took out the two typewritten pages it contained.
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCILFile Number: 12471-136281CONTENTS: One envelope, manila, containing one blueprint, thirty-minute BASF tape cassette, four pages of mathematical formulas. Package delivered to EPS Sergeant K. R. Mabuchi, Madison Gate, 1331, Sunday, December 13, by a female, blond, estimated age, middle thirties, wearing a beige cloth coat, identity unknown. Translation of tape prepared by E. F. Sheehan, Department of State:“6th Jumad Al Awal, 1,401 Year of the Hegira.“To the President of the American Republic, may this message find you, thanks to the Grace of Allah, savoring the blessings of good health. Greetings and Respectful Tidings.“I write to you as a man of compassion concerned with justice and the sufferings of the innocent and oppressed-peoples. No people has suffered more from the oppression of the world this century than my Palestinian Arab brothers. They were driven from half of their ancestral home by an alien peo. ple, forced onto our Arab lands by your imperialistic Western powers. Then that same alien people occupied the other half of my brothers’ lands in defiance of the Charter of the United Nations in their aggressive war in 1967.“Now that alien people systematically attempts to dispossess my Palestinian Arab brothers from the last half of their homeland by placing upon it in ever-increasing numbers their illegal settlements, settlements which even you have condemned. The ultimate aim of this Zionist conspiracy is to occupy all that land, to uproot my brothers, to banish forever from our Arab soil the Arabs who were born upon it.“You said you wish to establish peace in the Middle East and I beg God’s Favor upon you for that, for I too am a man of peace. But there can be no peace without justice and there will be no justice for my Palestinian brothers while the Israeli, with your nation’s blessing, continues to take away their lands with their illegal settlements.“There will be no justice for my Palestinian Arab brothers while the Israeli refuses, with your nation’s blessing, to allow them to return to their ancient home. There will be no justice for my Palestinian Arab brothers while the Israeli occupies the site of our sacred mosque in Jerusalem.“By the grace of God, I now possess the ultimate weapon on earth. I have sent with this letter the scientific proof of my words. With a heavy heart but conscious of my responsibilities to my Palestinian Arab brothers and all the Arab peoples, I have ordered my weapon placed on New York Island. I shall cause it to explode in sixty-three hours from midnight this night, at 2100 Greenwich Mean Time, 1500 Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday, December 15, if, in the intervening time, you have not obliged your Israeli ally to:1. Withdraw all of the illegal settlers and settlements he has established on the lands seized from the Arab nation in his 1967 War.2. Withdraw his people from East Jerusalem and the site of the Holy Mosque.3. Announce to the world his willingness to allow my Palestinian Arab brothers who wish to do so to return immediately to the lands taken from them in 1967 and to enjoy there their full national rights as a sovereign people.“I must further inform you that, should you make this communication public or begin in any way to evacuate New York City, I shall feel obliged to instantly explode my weapon.“I pray God will deliver upon you the blessings of His Compassion and Wisdom at this difficult hour.Muammar al-QaddafiPresidentSocialist People’s Republic of Libya”
The President looked up at his adviser, consternation and astonishment on his face. “Jack, what in God’s name is this all about?”
“Sir, we just don’t know. We haven’t been able to determine whether this is really from Qaddafi or whether it’s just another hoax of some sort. But what’s of real concern is the fact that the nuclear-emergency command post at the Department of Energy out in Germantown tells us the design that came in with this thing is a very, very sophisticated piece of work. They’ve sent it on to Los Alamos for analysis. We’re waiting to hear from them now.
I’ve convened a Crisis Committee to deal with it for eight o’clock in the West Wing, and I thought you should know about it.”
The President pressed the index finger of his left hand to his lips, thinking hard.
“How about the Libyans?” he softly inquired. “Surely they don’t confirm the authenticity of this?”
“We haven’t been able to raise any of their people either here or in New York, Mr. President. But they have so few people stationed here it could just be a coiRcidence.”
“And our people in Tripoli?”
“State’s onto them. But it’s in the middle of the night over there, and getting hold of someone in authority in Tripoli in a hurry is always a problem.”
“Has someone run a voice analysis on the tape?”
“The Agency has, sir. Unfortunately, the result was inconclusive. There seems to be too much background noise on their comparison tapes.”
The President knotted his eyebrows in displeasure. The shortcomings of the CIA were one of his constant concerns.
“Jack.” His mind was moving forward now. “It seems to me highly unlikely that this is from Qaddafi. No head of a sovereign nation is going to try to blackmail us by hiding an atomic bomb in New York. At the very worst it would kill twenty, thirty thousand people. A man like Qaddafi has got to know we have the capacity to utterly destroy him and his entire nation in retaliation. He’d be mad to do something like that.”
Behind the President, through the room’s graceful windows, Eastman could see the lights of the White House Christmas tree, bright golden sparks flung against the December night.
“I agree, sir. I’m inclined to think it’s a hoax of some sort or, at the worst, a terrorist group masquerading behind Qaddafi for some reason.”
The President nodded. He had reread not so long ago the FBI’s 1977 study on the menace of nuclear terrorism and remembered clearly its conclusions: there was no danger of such an act from any of the identified and localized terrorist groups with one exception, the Palestinians. In the event of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement which left the Palestinian movement embittered and desperate, there were, the report warned, elements among them with the sophistication required for acts of nuclear terror.
The telephone rang. “Excuse me,” Eastman said. “It’s probably for me. I told the switchboard I was with you.”
As his National Security Assistant moved to the telephone, the President stared moodily out the window. He was not, he knew, the first American President to face the possibility that terrorists had hidden a nuclear device in an American city. That had been Gerald Ford. The year had been 1974, the city Boston, and that threat too had involved the intransigent Palestinian problem. It had come from a group of Palestinian terrorists who threatened to detonate an atomic device in the Massachusetts capital if eleven of their fellows held in Israeli jails were not released. Like all of the sixty-odd nuclear threats made against U.S. cities or institutions in the decade of the seventies, that one had turned out to be a hoax.
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