The Fifth Horseman (62 page)

Harold Brown’s elbows were resting on the table, his shoulders drooping as though he was crushed by the implications of what he was about to say. He was a nuclear physicist, one of that high priesthood that had nurtured and furthered for mankind the scourge and the blessing of the shattered atom.

With growing alarm he had watched as the civilized world had drifted, indolent and uncaring, to this inevitable end when a zealot with a bomb could impose his will by the threat of violence so terrible it brooked no opposition.

“Mr. President.” He took a deep breath as he began. “The last crisis I lived through in this room was the Iranian crisis, and the events of those days are still painfully embedded in my mind. This country needed friends badly in those days, Mr. President, and may I remind you we had only one, Israel. When the chips were down, it was they alone who were ready to stand with us. The Saudis and the Egyptians, perhaps, in their way. But, above all, it was the Israelis who answered the call.

“Our supposed allies the Germans, the French, when we needed them, when we asked them to stand up and be counted, they turned their backs. They were so concerned about their oil, they were prepared to see this nation humiliated and humbled, our diplomats executed, provided we did nothing to disturb the tranquil pattern of their existence. Those are moments I cannot forget, Mr. President. Are we now to turn our arms on the one people who stood by us when we needed them? At the behest of a dictator who loathes us, our nation and everything we stand for?”

“I share the feelings of everyone about those settlements, about the Israelis’ intransigence on so many points. But what is at issue here transcends those settlements, Mr. President. There are moral issues that are beyond debate and discussion, and this is one of them. There is a point beyond which a nation, like a man, cannot go and still maintain its dignity and self-respect. I say we are at that point.”

Silence, a silence of pain and anguish, stilled the room when Brown had finished. The President rose. He looked at the clock on the wall opposite.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I should like to meditate in the Rose Garden for a moment on what you have said.”

Al Feldman caught up with Angelo a few feet from the exit of the command post. He threw his arms around the detective and tugged him to the guards’ quarters in which he had laughed at the fake Civil Defense poster.

“Angelo,” he murmured, sitting him down in the midst of a row of green metal lockers, their inside doors covered with Playboy centerfolds, “you were right. Those guys did lie to you. They had to.” Patiently, the Chief explained the details of Qaddafi’s threat. “Dewing didn’t mean to blow up at you like that, but you got to understand the strain we’re all living under.”

Angelo looked into his boss’s frightened eyes. “I’m sorry, Chief. It wasn’t him. It’s my fault. Some other things have been working on me the past couple of days.”

“Where were you running off to?”

“The Kennedy Center. See the kid.”

The Chief pulled a Camel from his battered pack, lit it and exhaled his first drag with a sympathetic sigh. Angelo’s attachment to his mongoloid daughter was well known in the Division. “And get her out of here?”

“Yeah.”

Feldman rose and placed a trembling hand on his detective’s shoulder. He squeezed it tightly. “Okay, Angelo. Go get her. Anybody earned a ticket up to Connecticut, it’s you. Just keep your mouth shut, okay? I’m going back in there and sell them on your idea, because I think you’re right.”

The two men walked to the exit side by side. Angelo reached for Feldman’s hand. “Thanks, Chief,” he said. Then he turned right, past the guards, toward the stairs and safety.

The men around Dewing’s table were still debating Angelo’s idea when Feldman slipped back into the room. He made a discreet gesture toward Bannion to indicate that the situation was contained, then eased back into his place. He was still attempting to pick up the threads of the argument when a.plainclothesman entered the room and placed a slip of paper in front of him.

“Jesus Christ!” he roared as he read it. “Rocchia was rightl”

He jumped from his chair and almost ran to the map of the city.

“One of our vice cops just interrogated a teenage wbore who works out of a brownstone right here.” The startled men around him watched as he hammered the map. “At 27 West Eighth. She identified one of these three Arabs, the one they call Kamal, as one of her clients last night.”

“Is she sure?” Bannion asked. “Those girls see a lot of traffic down there.”

“Absolutely. Apparently he’s a sadistic bastard, and he banged the life out of her while he was doing it.” Feldman’s gaze went back to the map. “That’s almost at Fifth. Right in the corner of the area Rocchia gave us.”

His words had a galvanic effect on the men in the room. Hudson felt like standing up and cheering. Bannion had the smile on his face of an Irish racetrack tout who has just had a hundred-to-one shot come in.

“Chief,” Dewing asked, “how long would it take us to search out that area your man gave us?”

Feldman scrutinized the map. “We better push the search area east to Broadway to be sure.” He paused, making his calculations. “Twelve hours.

Give me twelve hours and we’ll find the goddamn thing, I promise you.”

But on this Tuesday, December 15, there were not twelve hours left. There were only two. For five agonizing moments, the men in the National Security Council conference room had sat in silence waiting for their leader’s return. Only Jack Eastman had gone upstairs with him. He too, however, had left him at the Oval Office door. He had stood there watching as, all alone, the President had paced the driveway beyond, hands in his pockets, his head sunk almost into his chest, meditating, praying, doing whatever it was that great leaders must do in the unbearable loneliness of the exercise of power. He had not uttered a word to Eastman when he came back in.

Now he stood at the head of the table, his fists still thrust deep into his pockets, calm yet clearly resolute, trying to find just the words he wanted.

“Gentlemen,” he said finally, his voice barely a whisper, “I have reached a decision. It is certainly the worst any man who has held my office has ever had to make, but I am deeply, unshakably convinced that it is the one I must make. I am for better or worse the President of two hundred and thirty million Americans, and however deeply concerned I am about the fate of New York City and all of its people, my responsibility is to all of this country and all of its people. We are confronted with what is, finally, an act of war against this nation. If we cower before that threat, if we bow to blackmail and agree to blackmail in turn one of this country’s surest allies, we will abandon our birthright and condemn ourselves sooner or later to destruction as surely as the sun will set this night.”

He paused to catch the breath for which he was straining. “It is now one o’clock. Qaddafi’s ultimatum expires at three. Admiral Fuller, I want the Poseidon missiles on the Mediterranean submarines targeted on Libya. All of them. Do everything you can to minimize fallout from their explosion on Egypt and Tunsia.

“Alex,” he said to his Secretary of State, “prepare flash messages for the Chairmen of the CPs of the Soviet Union and China and for Mr. Begin, Giscard, Helmut Schmidt and Mrs. Thatcher, informing them of the reasons for our action. Make it clear to all of them that in this crisis we expect their full support. Release them coincidentally with our action.”

He looked down the table to his ashen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Admiral’s fingertips trembled visibly on the tabletop.

“If by two-thirty our time we have not found and defused that bomb or Qaddafi has not agreed to extend his ultimatum, then, Admiral Fuller, you will destroy Libya with those missiles.”

“Why, Mr. Rocchia! What a pleasant surpise!” The little nun of the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul looked at the detective in the hallway of the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street with pleasure and amazement. “Whatever brings you here at this time of the day? Not bad news, I hope?”

“No, it’s not that, Sister.” Angelo shifted his weight from foot to foot in nervous embarrassment. “I got to take Maria away for a couple of days.

To see some of the family up in Connecticut.”

“Well, really, Inspector, that’s a very unusual procedure. I don’t know if Mother Superior-“

Angelo interrupted. “It’s urgent, Sister. This sister of my wife, she came East for two days. She’s never met Maria.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Look, I’m in a hurry here. Would you get her things together, please?”

“Can’t you leave her for the rest of the afternoon at least?”

“No, Sister.” The irritation was easing back into the detective’s voice. “I told you I’m in a hurry.”

“All right,” she said. “Why don’t you wait by the playground window while I get her and her things?”

She took the detective into the center, to a bay window giving onto an interior playground. Every time Angelo looked through that window he felt tears rise in his eyes. It was a playground like any other in the city, seesaws and swings, a jungle gym and sandboxes. The children playing there now were a little younger than Maria, probably the class below hers. He watched them, his heart aching for them, sensing the agony in the distorted faces, the pain in their deformed mouths, the frustration raging in those little bodies against fingers that refused a mind’s commands, at legs that tottered uncertainly with each effort at movement. He could read the passing spasms of sadness in those bright eyes, the silent barometer of their revolt against life’s injustices. How often had he seen it in his own daughter’s eyes?

The children inside had seen Angelo, and some of them gathered around in a semicircle beyond the window, gawking at him, bodies twitching under the impact of the gestures of curiosity and greeting they could not perform. He was going to be able to get Maria away, but they were going to stay. And from the moment he had sensed the frenzied, almost hysterical air in the command post he’d realized that this time maybe everything wasn’t going to turn out all right like it did on television, catch the guy in the last two minutes and tune in next week for another episode. Maybe there was not going to be a next week for this town or for those kids.

Five minutes after she’d left, the min returned, clutching Maria’s hand in hers. Angelo was no longer by the playground window. She took Maria into the entry hall, but he wasn’t there either. Impatiently, she went to the door onto Sixty-seventh Street and looked down to the place where he always parked, illegally, his Chevrolet. It was gone.

Far up into the dairy and timber country of northern Minnesota, just a few miles south of the Canadian border near the town of Great Falls, there is a small U.S. government reservation. Its gate is discreetly guarded by armed men identified as belonging to the Department of Forests and Fisheries, and the reservation itself consists of acres of gently rolling land, some wooded, some planted, some, apparently, intended as pasture land; all of it enclosed in a barbed-wire fence.

The guards are in fact employees of the Department of Defense, and those miles of barbed-wire fence are an enormous transmitting aerial servicing the radio from which the thermonuclear-missile-bearing submarines of the U.S. Navy are commanded. It is in a state of constant transmission employing low-frequency, extremely lowwave radio bands, well below 10 HRZ because such long waves are uniquely capable of penetrating water to the great depths at which the submarines lie. Each submarine on station on the ocean floor trails its own aerial, a thin strip of wire as long as the two-mile barbed-wire fence in northern Minnesota from which it receives its messages.

At exactly 1304, less than ninety seconds after the President had issued his order. two submarines, the U.S.S. Henry Clay and the U.S.S. Daniel Webster. one twenty miles southwest of Cyprus, the other buried in a deep ocean trough below Sicily, reacted to a modification in the constantly varied pattern emitted by the fence. The radio operator on each sub brought the signal, automatically decoded by the boat’s computers, to his duty officer, who, in turn, delivered it to the submarine’s captain.

The captains and the executive officers, employing matching keys, unlocked their subs’ war safes and took out preprogrammed IBM punch cards which they inserted into the computers that commanded each ship’s sixteen Poseidon missiles. Those IBM cards bore all the data the submarines’ firing mechanisms would need to launch their missiles and the fourteen warheads each contained onto the Libyan targets set out on them, with an accuracy so precise that none of them would fall more than a hundred feet from its selected impact point. That task completed, the officers, joined now by their gunnery officers, opened their firing control systems with ten rigorously defined fail-safe measures. Seconds later, at 1307, each submarine flashed a return message to Minnesota. “Missiles Armed and Targeted,” it read. “Vessel in DEFCON
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Red.” “DEFCON Red” was the highest alert posture of the U.S. armed forces, the conditions of readiness that indicated that a state of war was at hand.

At the same time that the submarines’ messages were flashing through the ether, another message was arriving in the White House communications center over the twin Teleprinters linking it to the Pentagon’s terminal of the red line to Moscow.

As always, the communication came in two languages, the first in the original Russian, the second in English as translated in Moscow by a Soviet linguist. In view of the urgency of the crisis, the President rushed into the communications center himself to follow the message as it came in. A State Department Russian expert was beside him, responsible for verifying the accuracy of the Soviet translation and for pointing out to the President any subtle nuances in meaning or language.