The Fifth Horseman Read online

  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 COUNCIL

  File Number: 12471-136281

  CONTENTS: 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-Qaddafi

  President

  Socialist 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.

  Before it bad, however, his predecessors in the White House had to ask themselves whether they should — or could — evacuate the city — and not a word had ever leaked to the Bostonians whose lives might have been at stake.

  “Sir?”

  The President started as he turned to look at his adviser. He had paled noticeably. He was holding the telephone with one hand cupped over its mouthpiece. “Los Alamos just called in a preliminary analysis of the blueprint. They say it’s a viable weapons design.”

  * * *

  Across the Potomac River from the White House an elegant auburn-haired young woman in her middle thirties hurried through the waiting room of National Airport and down the stairs leading toward the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. She stopped in front of a bank of gray metallic left-luggage lockers and chose one at random. She placed a small white envelope inside, rolled two quarters into the slot commanding its lock and removed the key. Then she opened a second and deposited a bulky shopping bag inside. It contained a blond wig and a tan polo coat. This time she did not remove the key. Her task completed, she crossed the hall to a telephone booth and swiftly dialed a number. When her party replied, she mumbled only two words into the receiver, the number of the key she held up before her: “K six-oh-two.”

  Seconds later, she was rushing toward the terminal and the eight-o’clock shuttle to New York.

  * * *

  The man who had taken her telephone call carefully noted the numerals K602 on a slip of paper on which a telephone number, 202-456-1414, was already written. It was the number of the White House switchboard. He tucked the paper into the side pocket of his sheepskin coat and stepped out of his public telephone booth into the early-evening crowd flowing through New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He was in his late thirties, a florid-faced man with a thin black moustache and a tendency to corpulence that his bulky coat effectively concealed.

  He sauntered through the waiting room, then hurried up the station steps and out into the cold. A few moments later he was at the corner of Broadway and forty-second Street, the edge of Times Square, savoring once again the torrents of light that had so impressed him years ago on his first visit to New York. No energy crisis here, he thought, staring at the glowing marquees, the garishly lit store windows, the advertising panels, sparkling carpets of color stretched out along the walls of night.

  With the deliberate pace of a man who is looking for something, he crossed the street and started up Broadway. The spectacle on those sidewalks was even more grotesque, more Breughelian, than he had remembered. At Forty-third, a Salvation Army band and chorus, shivering in their blue uniforms, struggled through “O Come All Ye Faithful,” only a few yards away from a gaggle of whores in satin hot pants, the shiny fabrics of their trousers clinging so tightly to their hips and upper thighs that every detail of the wares they offered was available for inspection.

  You found every face in the world in that crowd, he mused. Gawking tourists; well-dressed theatergoers indifferent to the throngs around them; black pimps in leather greatcoats and high-heeled shoes; slum kids down from uptown screeching at each other like migrating starlings; shuffling winos, hats held out for a couple of coins; potbellied cops, pickpockets scanning the crowd for a victim, soldiers and sailors, their faces so young, so trusting.

  At Forty-sixth Street a Santa Claus so emaciated no amount of padding could disguise him adequately for his role listlessly tolled his bell before an empty alms bucket. Just behind him, a pair of black transvestites in hip-high leather boots and peroxided wigs called out from a doorway, the timbre of their falsettos leaving no doubt about their sex.

  Crossing the street, sensing the vibrancy, the palpable, dynamic human dimension of those throngs, he felt a sharp twinge of pain cramp his stomach. The ulcer. He turned into a Howard Johnson and ordered a glass of milk. Then he renewed his march up Broadway.

  Suddenly, the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few, too few to mention” told him he bad found what he was looking for. He entered a brightly lit radio and record shop, walked down its lines of albums and tapes to the banks of empty cassettes. Anxiously, nervously, he picked through them, looking for the one he wanted.

  “Say, my friend,” the clerk announced, “we got a special on Sonys. Three for four ninety-nine.”

  “No,” he replied. “I need a BASF, a thirtyminute BASF.”

  The clerk shrugged and reached for a box on the shelf behind him. He threw three BASF tapes on the counter. “There you go. Three for five ninety-five.”

  His customer picked one up. “Thanks,” he said, a hesitant, almost forced smile on his face, “but I only need one.”

  * * *

  A few blocks away from Times Square, at the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street, the Daughters of Charity of the Order of Saint Vincent de Paul prepared to open a spectacle of a vastly different sort. Gently, as unobtrusively as possible, they shepherded their children toward the tinseled brilliance of the Christmas tree beckoning to them like a lighthouse of hope from the center of the auditorium.

  The spastic uncertainty of the children’s movements, the slant of their eyes, the heavy tongues that rolled around their half-open mouths, all bore witness to the curse which lay upon their little bodies. They were mongoloids.

  The mother superior motioned to the children to sit down, took an electric cord and plugged it into a socket. At the sight of the sparkling tissue of light inflaming the tree, a pathetic babble of discordant sound rose from the wondering faces around it.

  The mother superior stepped toward their parents gathered around the room.

  “Maria Rocchia,” she announced, “is going to open our program by singing for us the first lines of `O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”

  She reached into the circle of uplifted faces and took the hand of a ten-year-old with black hair tied in pigtails that tumbled to her shoulder blades. Gently, the superior coaxed her toward the center of the circle.

  The child stood there a moment, terrified. Finally she opened her mouth.

  The only sound which escaped was a raucous bleat. Her head began to shake violently, sending her pigtails swirling about her. She stamped her feet in fury and frustration.

  In the first row, a middle-aged man, his heavy torso wrapped in a well-pressed gray suit, reached a hand upward and plucked nervously at the collar of his white shirt. Each gesture of the child, each incoherent sound she emitted, sent a tremor of anguish through his heavy body. She was his only child. Since his wife had died of lymphatic cancer three years before, she ha
d been in the nuns’ care.

  Angelo Rocchia stared at his daughter as though somehow the intensity of the love radiating from his ruddy face might calm the tempest shaking her frail figure. Finally she stopped. A first hesitant sound, then another and another flowed from her mouth. The tone was harsh, yet the rhythm underlying it was perfect.

  “O little town of Bethlehem,

  How still we see thee lie…’

  Angelo Rocchia dabbed with relief at the sweat sparkling on his temple just where the retreating skin of his forehead met the mass of his wavy gray hair. He unbuttoned the jacket of his suit and let his chest sag. As he did, one of the attributes of his calling became visible on his right hip.

  It was a Smith and Wesson .38 heavy-barrel service revolver. He was a detective first grade of the New York Police Department.

  * * *

  Twenty-three miles from the White House, deep in the Maryland countryside, a man in an underground cocoon reached for a telephone at the same time the little girl in New York was concluding her carol. He was the duty officer of the Department of Energy’s Germantown, Maryland, nuclear-emergency command post, one of the dozens of steel-and-concrete moleholes, some secret, some not so secret, from which the United States would be run in an emergency or a nuclear war.

  On the order flashed to him by Jack Eastman in the White House, minutes after Los Alamos’ preliminary analysis of the weapons design had come in, he was about to set into motion the most effective response the U.S.

  government had been able to devise to the menace of nuclear terrorism. His gray telephone gave him access to the U.S. government’s “Autodin-Autovon”

  closed military communications circuit, a global network whose five-digit numbers were listed in a seventy-four-page green volume that was probably the most secret telephone book in the world.