The Fifth Horseman Read online

  For Agnew, the exaltation, the exhilaration of that great moment were as alive now as they had been then. They had known at that instant they could beat the Germans to their terrible goal. But, above all, they had shared the conviction that man had mastered at last the elements of his globe, harnessed to his own ends its most primeval force.

  The rasp of his buzzer interrupted him just as the last pale light of day was fleeing the mountainscape of New Mexico.

  “We have your call to the White House,” his deputy announced. The scientist sighed and picked up the phone.

  * * *

  The incoming call was switched to the small white squawk box in the center of the oval table so that everyone in the National Security Council conference room could hear and address the scientist at Los Alamos.

  “Mr. Agnew,” Jack Eastman declared, “have your people completed their appraisal of the atomic bomb on those blueprints?”

  The voice filtering into the room through the white plastic holes in reply seemed strangely hesitant.

  “Mr. Eastman, the drawing on the blueprint which you submitted to us is not for an atomic bomb.”

  The men in the White House emitted what seemed an almost collective sigh of relief. The distant scientist did not hear them. He continued. “It’s my very sad duty to inform you that the design on the blueprint is for something a hundred times worse.”

  A quick, nervous gasp in the distant scientist’s voice was audible to each of the men and women in the White House basement. “The blueprint is for a thermonuclear device, Mr. President, a three-megaton hydrogen bomb.”

  * * *

  Every time his bare fingertips touched the metal of the television antenna, the passenger of the Dionysos felt a numbing flash of pain spurt down his fingers to his wrists. Beneath him his feet, unaccustomed to snow and ice, slipped and skidded on the balf-frozen mounds left on the exposed rooftop by Friday’s snowstorm.

  Warily, he glanced at the buildings around him. There was no light burning in any window from which someone could see what he was doing.

  Off to his right was the river. With a compass, he fixed his television antenna at a very precise angle pointing toward its black expanse. She had followed her instructions perfectly in picking the building. There were no rooftops higher than his along the antenna’s carefully calculated line of vision, nothing that could block an incoming radio signal.

  He took the six-foot needle of phosphorated bronze, smaller than an automobile aerial but capable of discerning the weakest burst of electronic noise, and fitted it carefully into the socket prepared for it in the television antenna. Every few seconds he had to stop to blow on his numbed fingertips, to give them the sense of precision they needed to make the connection he had practiced a hundred times between the aerial and the antenna.

  When he had finished, he straightened up, stiff with cold, rubbing the aching scar on his neck as he did. Suddenly, from the street below, the clatter of voices drifted up to his rooftop. He peered down. Half a dozen people spilled out of the artist’s loft across the street. Impassively, he watched them glide off through the shadows, his ears following the crystalline ripple of the girls’ laughter as it faded in the night.

  * * *

  The President was the first person in the National Security Council conference room to break the shocked silence that had followed Harold Agnew’s revelation.

  “My God!” he gasped. “Is this really possible? That Qaddafi could have done this without our finding out what he was up to?”

  This time it was Agnew who hesitated. The hydrogen bomb represented the ultimate refinement in man’s search for the means of self-destruction.

  Unlike the atomic bomb, which depended on converting to reality a widely understood scientific theory, it depended on the most potent secret unlocked by man’s brain since the cavemen of antiquity had harnessed fire.

  It involved the one precisely perfect interweaving of the bomb’s key elements. There was only one. There was no “almost.” There was no margin whatsoever for error. That relationship was probably the most ferociously guarded secret on earth. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of qualified physicists understood the theory of the atomic bomb. Barely three hundred people, perhaps fewer, were privy to the secret of the hydrogen bomb.

  “I admit it strains credibility, sir,” Agnew replied “but the blunt fact is that this is a viable weapons design. Whether it’s from Qaddafi or someone else, someone, somewhere out there, has gotten hold of the secret of the hydrogen bomb.”

  Exploding a hydrogen bomb was a task so complex it was often compared to setting a wet log ablaze with a single match. It required putting three competing processes into perfect balance under conditions of temperature and pressure so extreme they rivaled those at the core of the sun.

  Essentially what was involved were two atomic “triggers” on either side of a mass of thermonuclear fuel enclosed in a liquid membrane of tritium.

  Their explosion allowed for the perfectly symmetrical compression of the fuel which the tritium helped to drive up to the incredible temperatures needed for ignition. The entire assembly was wrapped in a cylinder of uranium 238 which turned some of the neutrons fleeing the atomic explosion back into the device, delaying its disintegration for the microsecond required to allow the whole process to take place.

  “The device is meant to be contained in a cylinder roughly the size of an ordinary oil drum,” Agnew continued. “The length is about half again as long as a drum. We calculate it would weigh almost fifteen hundred pounds.

  There are connecting wires meant, I presume, to be hitched up to some kind of separate control panel, probably a device that could receive an incoming radio burst and release an electrical impulse into the highexplosive charge.”

  For several seconds there was not a sound in the conference room. The President cleared his throat.

  “Where in God’s name would someone like Qaddafi have gotten the information to build something like this? Could he have gotten it from those articles that were published in Wisconsin in 1979?”

  “No.” This time Agnew did not hesitate. “Those articles set out the theory behind the H bomb very completely. But they didn’t come to grips with the precise formula behind it, which is that absolutely perfect quantitive and qualitative interrelationship between its three competing elements. Without that, you’ve got no explosion.”

  “And this design has that?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, I’m sorry to have to tell you the configuration here is exact.”

  Jack Eastman leaned forward toward the squawk box. “Mr. Agnew, I want to be very precise. What we’re dealing with here is a design, a blueprint, not a device in being. Are there still imponderables in here we haven’t talked about that could prevent this from going off?”

  “Of course there are,” Agnew replied. “Everything depends, for example, on those atomic triggers exploding with perfect synchronization, and that in turn depends on detonating with absolute precision the high explosives that set them off. It’s a very, very complicated process.”

  The President Coughed. “Mr. Agnew,” he asked, “assuming for the moment this device really existed and really was in New York and really was exploded, what would its effect be?”

  For a long moment, the little squawk box in the center of the table was silent. Then, almost as though they came from some disembodied voice speaking from another world, Agnew’s words again filled the room.

  “It would mean, sir, that, for all practical purposes, New York City would be wiped off the face of the earth.”

  * * *

  “Hey, lady, got room in there for me?”

  The woman couldn’t help smiling at the speaker. He was a young Marine waiting to board the Eastern Airlines nine-o’clock shuttle from New York to Washington. Lasciviously, he eyed her figure swathed in her ankle-length red fox fur coat as she swept past him. Laila Dajani was used to men’s passes. With her long auburn hair, her black prominent eyes, the slight sens
ual pout of her wellffeshed lips, she had been attracting them since she was eighteen. She gave a casual toss to her hair and continued on to the shuttle terminal from the plane that had just flown her into the city from the nation’s capital. Her beauty, the way she invariably stood out in a crowd, was, she knew, a risk. To deliver her letter to the White House, she had worn the blond wig and an old polo coat which she had left in the second locker she had opened at National Airport.

  She moved casually to the exit, spotting at the door the dark-coated driver of the limousine service she had used regularly since she arrived in New York.

  “Nice trip, ma’am?”

  “Lovely, thank you.”

  Laila settled into the car’s comfortable upholstery. As they pulled away, she took out her compact and, pretending to adjust her makeup, scrutinized the traffic behind them in the mirror. They were not, as far as she could tell, being followed. She sank back into the seat and lit a cigarette. The car and the driver were a reflection of one of Carlos’s golden rules: a smart terrorist always travels first class. The best way to slip undetected about the world, the Venezuelan master terrorist maintained, was in that upper-middle-class spectrum which lay just below the level of the ostentatious rich, at the very heart of the society he meant to destroy.

  The cover he had invented for Laila’s two visits to the United States was ideally designed to accomplish just that. She was on a buying trip for La Rive Gauche, a boutique for wealthy Lebanese on Beirut’s Hamra Street, an institution which had survived, as such places inevitably do, all the convulsions of the Lebanese civil war.

  The shop’s elegant proprietor, the widow of a famous Druze chieftain, was a passionate supporter of the cause, an engaging woman who saw no contradiction in selling Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent and Courreges dresses by day and preaching violent revolution by night. Getting a fake Lebanese passport had been simple. Procuring stolen Lebanese passports for Palestinian terrorists was as easy in Beirut as buying postage stamps. Nor did she have the slightest difficulty in getting one of the 200,000 U.S.

  visas issued annually in the Middle East. The overworked consul who had given her her visa hadn’t even bothered to make a phone call to check on her assumed identity; the Rive Gauche letter supporting her application had been enough for him.

  * * *

  And so, as Linda Nahar, a Lebanese Christian, she had haunted the showrooms of Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta on her two trips to New York, the first in August, the second beginning in November. She had quickly become one of the newest ornaments of a certain New York world, weekending on Long Island, lunching at the Caravelle, disco dancing in the garish splendor of Studio 54.

  The driver braked to a stop in front of the Hampshire House on Central Park South. She dismissed the car, picked up three messages at the reception desk and two minutes later stepped into the charming disorder of the suite she rented by the month on the thirty-second floor. It was littered with the impedimenta of her assumed calling: fashion brochures, copies of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Women’s Wear Daily. Indeed, her photograph in Women’s Wear at Diana Vreeland’s Pageant of Chinese Dress for the Met had caused Laila a moment of anguish. Fortunately for her, Women’s Wear was not a journal scrutinized with any intensity by the CIA’s Office of Palestinian Affairs.

  She tossed her coat on a chair and mixed herself a drink. Moodily, she stepped to the window onto Central Park that constituted one of the sitting-room walls. Looking at the park in its pristine mantle of new snow, at the skaters gliding over the shell to her right, at all those proud fagades crawling with blinking pinholes of light, Laila shuddered unavoidably.

  She took a long swallow of her whiskey and thought of Carlos. He was right.

  Never think of the consequences of your mission, he warned, only of the unexpected problems that could prevent you from carrying it out. She drained her glass with two thirsty gulps and walked to her bathroom to draw a bath.

  Before stepping into the tub, she gave herself an approving glance in the mirror: the taut, flat stomach, her firm buttocks, the defiant thrust of her breasts. For a long moment she lay there, luxuriating in the bath, caressing her skin with the bath oil’s thick, bubbly film, rubbing it through her earlobes, along the passageways of her neck, massaging it playfully over her breasts until her nipples stood erect. Lazily, she lifted one leg from the bath water and rubbed the foam along her thighs and inner legs. At the sight of her crimson toenails, she smiled. Imagine, she mused, a terrorist who paints her toenails.

  She was brushing out the long mane of her hair when the phone rang. Picking it up, she heard the din of voices in the background.

  “Where the devil are you?” she asked, a flashing undertone of anger in her voice.

  “We’re having dinner at Elaine’s.” Her expression changed the instant she heard the caller’s voice. “We’re going on to the Fifty-four. Why don’t you join us?”

  What better cover could she ask for? “Can you give me an hour?” Laila asked with a husky voice.

  “An hour?” the voice answered. “I’d give you a lifetime if you’d take it.”

  * * *

  His usually bland features shrouded with concern, the President of the United States stared at the circle of advisers surrounding him. The last great crisis his nation had faced when the fanatical supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini had seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran paled beside this threat. This was the ultimate act of political terrorism, the almost too inevitable conclusion to a decade of escalating terrorism. And, he reflected bitterly, if this really was true, a nation whose citizens were living in nomad tents barely a generation ago now possessed the power to destroy the most important city on the planet. Millions of people are being held hostage, he thought, to the extravagant demands of a zealous despot. He turned to Jack Eastman. “Jack, what contingency plans do we have to handle something like this?”

  It was a question Eastman had anticipated. Locked in a safe in the West Wing were the contingency plans of the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower wrapped in its black imitation-leather jacket with gold lettering. They covered everything: the speed with which the U.S. and the Soviets could reach comparable firepower thresholds, possible Chinese reactions, NATO disagreements, the security of the sea lanes; right down to how many C rations were necessary to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division into the Panama Canal Zone or land a division of Marines on Cyprus. Their origins went back to Henry Kissinger’s days. Eastman had reviewed them an hour ago. They dealt with every imaginable world crisisevery one, that is, except the one which now confronted the President of the United States.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Eastman replied, “we don’t have any.”

  Eastman noted the flicker his words produced in the President’s dark eyes, the “laser look,” the familiar warning that he was angry. He had folded his hands on the table before him. “All right,” he said. “In any event, whether this is from Qaddafi, whether it’s from some terrorist group, some crazy scientist, or someone else, I wish to make one thing clear to you all: the fact that this threat, real or not, exists is to be kept an absolute secret.”

  The President’s words reflected a U.S. government decision, taken during the Nixon administration and consistently adhered to since them, to avoid at all costs going public with nuclear threats. The knowledge that a threat existed in a given city could provoke a panicked reaction more devastating than the threatened explosion itself. Discrediting each nuclear hoax cost at least a million dollars, and no one wanted to see the government deluged by such threats. There was the danger that an irrational, semihysterical public opinion could paralyze the government’s ability to act in such a crisis. And in this case, the President was well aware, there was yet another reason: the ominous injunction to secrecy in the threat note.

  “Well, if this really is from Qaddafi our answer’s simple.” It was Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy. “Lather those bastards from one end of Libya to the other. That
’s all. Wipe them out. Lay the Trident missiles on the subs we have on patrol in the Med on them. That’ll turn the damn place into a sea of glass in thirty seconds. There won’t be a goat left alive over there.”

  Crandell sank back, satisfied. His words had a cathartic effect on the room. It was as though the outspoken Energy Secretary had given voice to a thought all had had but no one else had been prepared to express, the brutal but reassuring affirmation that, in the final analysis, the United States possessed the power to squash a menace such as this.

  “Mr. Fundseth” There was a catch in the President’s voice as he addressed his Deputy Secretary of State, as though he, too, sought to be assured by Crandell’s brutal declaration. “What is the population of Libya?”

  “Two million, sir, give or take a hundred thousand. Census figures over there aren’t very reliable.”

  The President turned down the table toward the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Harry, how many people would we lose if a three-megaton device went off in New York? Without evacuation?”

  “Sir, it would be difficult to give you an accurate figure on that without looking at some numbers.”

  “I realize that, but give me your best estimate.”

  The Chairman reflected a moment. “Between four and five million, sir.”

  There was dead silence as the awful mathematics of Fuller’s figures registered on everyone in the room. The President sat back, lost for just a minute in a private thought no one in the room dared to interrupt. The giants of the world, the United States and the USSR, held each dither in strategic checkmate because they shared a parity of horror, an equilibrium once described with almost too perfect irony by the acronym for the philosophy on which the U.S.‘s thermonuclear strategy had been based-MAD, for “Mutual Assured Destruction.” I kill you, you kill me. It was the old Russian comedy, everybody dies.