The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  To their relief, the only thing the agents found in the locker was an envelope leaning against the back of the compartment. Typed on it were the words “For the President of the United States.”

  The message it contained was brief. It said that at midnight Washington time, 6 A.M. Libyan time, at a spot 153 miles due east of the junction of the twenty-fifth parallel and the tenth longitude, at the southern tip of the Awbari Sand Sea in the southwestern corner of Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi would provide the United States with a conclusive demonstration of his ability to carry out the threat enunciated in his earlier communication. To facilitate aerial observation of the demonstration, the Libyan dictator proposed a carefully defined air corridor running south to the site from the Mediterranean Sea through which U.S. observation planes would be allowed to by unmolested.

  * * *

  There was not a sound except for the dry rustle of the rats in the darkened warehouse. The three Dajanis squatted on the cold cement loading dock, waiting. Whalid held his watch in his hand, mesmerized by the sweep of its second hand. Again, he turned his regard upwards. Somewhere up there in the infinity of space, a tiny ball of metal tumbled through the canopy of night. It was a forgotten satellite, its existence known only to a handful of amateur redio operators around the world. Among them was the head of the Libyan state. Softly Whalid began to count off the passing seconds: “Three … two … one … zero.”

  The sound of the last syllable hadn’t faded when it happened: the green light glowing on the screen of their control case blinked off. In a split second, another color replaced it in almost instantaneous response to the gesture of a man burning with hatred and fanaticism halfway around the world. It was the same ominous red glow that had appeared there a quarter of an hour ago.

  Laila gasped. Whalid slumped forward, half relieved, half horror-stricken.

  Kamal looked on in silence. The red glow faded and the words “RADIO FREQUENCY GLOBAL CONTROL: OK” appeared on the screen. Then they too faded and were replaced by the word “CONNECTION.” It was as though now that all their tests had been successfully run, the blue case before them was taking over, eliminating from the carefully elaborated chain of command any further need for the frail and uncertain intervention of human hands.

  Whalid fitted the cable running from his bomb to the olive-drab circular plug an inch in diameter that connected it to the case. The next time the light on the screen glowed red, a flash of electricity from the case’s lithium batteries would pour through those pins to detonate the thermonuclear device lying on the platform.

  Whalid stared at that black object he had created. Oh God, oh God, he thought, why did you ever give men such power?

  “What’s the matter?” his brother asked.

  Whalid started like a child in a classroom caught daydreaming by a teacher. His watch was still in his hand.

  “The red light didn’t glow a full two seconds,” he replied. “Are you sure you connected the rod up on the roof to the cable tightly?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think we better check it.” Whalid took the pencil flashlight. “I’ll go up with you and hold this while you check it.”

  The two men started for the door. Before they could get to it, Whalid doubled up in agony from the pain of his ulcer. “I can’t go,” he whispered, handing the flashlight to Laila. “You go and hold it for him.”

  By the time Laila and Kamal returned, his spasm had passed. He was sitting on the dock, anguish no longer contorting his face.

  “It’s all right,” Kamal said.

  Whalid reached over and punched a final tap onto his keyboard, striking the word “END.” The control case was now locked. Only a code known to the three Dajanis could open it again.

  “Whalid,” Kamal said, “you better spend the night here in case they’re looking for you. How about you, Laila?”

  “Don’t worry about me, Kamal,” she replied. “No one will look for me where I’m going.”

  * * *

  Shortly after eleven-thirty, the President, riding in the front seat of an unmarked Secret Service car, rode up to the river entrance of the Pentagon. The members of the Crisis Committee, moving at irregular intervals to avoid drawing attention, had preceded him. An MP saluted the Chief Executive and led him to a plain white door under an archway bearing the words “JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF.” Its only identification was a set of figures, 2$890. A pair of guards, armed with sidearms, verify both visually and electronically the identity of each visitor, even that of the President of the United States, passing through that door. In addition, a closed-circuit television system records on videotape the face of everyone who enters, the hour and the day he came in, and his reason for being there.

  There is good reason for that rigid security. Beyond that door lies an Ali Baba’s cave of the electronic age, the most mind-boggling display of technological wizardry of which twentiethcentury man is capable, the National Military Command Center of the United States.

  Seated in a leather armchair at the oval conference table dominating Room 2B890, the President can, quite literally, watch the world go by. Every communication system the United States possesses, every electronic-surveillance network, all the vast electronic gadgetry at the disposition of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, all ultimately funnel into that immaculately white room not much larger than a small movie theater.

  The newwork of KH-11 satellites girdling the globe can flash onto any one of its six movie-sized screens a live television picture of any quarter of the planet. So fine is the resolution those satellite cameras provide from ninety miles into space that the President, sitting in his armchair, can tell the difference between a Jersey and a Guernsey cow in a pasture in Nottingham, England, or note the color and make of an automobile leaving the gates of the Kremlin. He can talk to a Marine Corps lieutenant leading *a platoon on a patrol in Korea or eavesdrop on, and have instantly translated, a conversation between an airborne Russian MIG-23 fighter pilot and his air controller in Sebastapol. He could listen, thanks to the CIA, to the sound of men’s footsteps walking in certain offices in Moscow, Potsdam and Prague, overhear their most intimate conversations and clink of their vodka glasses, or count the clicks on their telephones as they dial a number.

  And, from that leather armchair, the President could be both a spectator and a participant in the ultimate tragedy. He could order a Minuteman missile launched from its site in South Dakota, then, like a spectator in a movie house, watch on one of the screens before him as the thermonuclear horror he had wrought devastated the people, the streets, the tenements of some Soviet city.

  The President settled his lanky frame into that armchair and indicated he was ready to begin. Despite his seventy odd years, there were no signs of strain or weariness on his face. On the wall opposite him, enclosed in a huge black frame to give contrast to the pictures they held, were six large screens used for displays.

  The rear admiral in charge of the center, one of the five flag officers in command of the shifts that manned it twentv-four burs a day. seven days a week, moved behind his console. He began by flashing onto his six screens, with almost bewildering speed, a portrait of the military forces of the Soviet Union as they were deployed at that very moment: nuclear submarines, every one at sea pinpointed by a blinking red light on a world map; missile sites caught in a resolution so fine the men in the conference room could watch their Soviet sentries pacing their beats; Backfire bombers on the Black Sea Coast; SS-20 missiles along the Oder.

  The Admiral plunged the screens into darkness with a button. There was nothing, he said, in the Soviet’s military posture to indicate that the Soviet’s armed forces were in an alert status beyond their normal readiness state. It was unlikely that the Soviets were involved in what was happening in Libya.

  He turned back to his console and flicked a series of controls. Now a stretch of desolate sands reddening in the first light of morning appeared on the screen. At its center, b
arely visible, was a tower.

  “There, Mr. President, is the location we were given on the note that was found in National Airport.”

  A second screen lit up. On this one was a detailed resolution of the tower on the first. It was a spindly metal assembly resembling an old-fashioned oil-drilling rig, and at its top the men in the conference room could make out the outlines of a large cylindrical object looking like a barrel and resembling very closely the description of the device on the blueprint given to them by Harold Agnew three and a half hours earlier.

  The Admiral turned again to his console. There had been, he noted, no satellites in position over Libya at the time the threat had been delivered to the White House. The precious satellites, whose orbits were set once each month by the NSC, were for the most part employed over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Since the first alert, however, three KH-lls had been shifted into fixed orbits over Libya, and the images delivered by a second satellite rose on one of the six screens. It was a. cluster of buildings, the barracks compound of Bab Azizza to which the U.S. charge d’affaires had earlier been refused admission. Watching the screen, the men around the President could see the paratroopers who had turned the charg6 away stomping their feet in the morning chill.

  The image moved as it was adjusted and stopped again, this time on a series of small buildings. A white circle popped up around one of them, indistinguishable from the others, a roof inside a little walled compound.

  “Sir,” the Admiral said, “we believe this to be Qaddafi’s residence. We’ve had it under surveillance since shortly after Los Alamos’ first alert.

  We’ve seen no evidence of any activity whatsoever or any sign that the building’s even occupied.”

  “What makes you think that’s Qaddafi’s residence?”

  The Admiral adjusted the focus of the satellite picture so that the walled compound enclosed in the white circle filled the screen. Clearly visible, in the compound yard, was a black tent and, apparently tethered to it, a camel.

  “Sir, Intelligence informs us Qaddafi keeps a tent and a camel in his yard because he likes fresh camel’s milk for breakfast. This is the only residence at Bab Azziza that meets that description.”

  The Admiral turned back to his display and called up a map of Libya’s Mediterranean Sea coast. On it, in the Gulf of Sidra, midway between Tripoli and Benghazi, was a spot of white light. Northwest of the light, not far from the island of Malta, was a blinking red light.

  The blinking red light, the Admiral explained, was the U.S.S. Allen, an electronic-surveillance ship. It was crammed with sophisticated listening devices, like those with which the CIA had peered into the heart of the Soviet Union for years from its listening posts in Iran. The white light indicated the listening station to which the Allen was steaming at twenty-seven knots. Once there, she would be able to eavesdrop on every radio communication made in Libya and all of the telephone calls carried by her modern microwave communications system. Virtually every phone call made in Libya, from a man ordering a radio for his Toyota to a mistress arguing with a jealous lover, to any call made by Qaddafi himself on anything other than a buried, secure line would be intercepted, copied and stored on shipboard computers. NSA headquarters outside Washington had already sent to the Allen voice samples of Qaddafi and five key Libyan leaders. Every intercepted call would be run past those samples by the computer so that calls made by any of the six men could be culled instantly from the hundreds of thousands of other calls being made across the country.

  The Mediterranean coast disappeared, to be replaced by a map of Libya. Down its western edge ran two closely parallel red lines, the air corridor laid down by Qaddafi in his message. Two thirds of the way down the corridor a naked eye could follow the progress of a flashing red light.

  “Sir, we ordered a Blackbird out of Adana to provide us secondary observation as soon as we received word,” commented the Admiral. A Blackbird was an SR-71, a vastly improved version of the old U-2 spy plane, this one capable of flying over two thousand mph at 85,000 feet. They carried supersensitive heat and radiation sensors developed to monitor in minute detail China’s and France’s nuclear tests.

  The President turned his attention back to the site identified in the National Airport note. Underneath the tower, in the quickening sunlight, the crisscross tracings of dozens of tire tracks were now clearly visible.

  “Harold,” the President asked his Science Adviser, “what do you make of it?”

  “It looks a lot like the pictures I’ve seen of the old Trinity test site.”

  “Trinity” was the code name for the test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. “Simple. Primitive. But efficient.”

  Brown looked at the screen like a professor studying a student’s design, hunting for its flaws. “Somewhere around there we should be picking up some sign of the command post he’d use to set this thing off.”

  “We’ve swept the area for it, sir,” the Admiral answered. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to spot anything.”

  “Of course you haven’t.” The voice was Crandell’s, a rasp almost as harsh on the ears as the sound of gravel spilling down a metal chute. “Because there isn’t any. That Arab son of a bitch is jerking us off, that’s what he’s doing. Two million people. That’s all he’s got in his country, two million people. They’re so goddamned backward, most of ‘em, they can’t even drive a car without stripping the gears.

  Know what a Frenchman told me once? He caught one of their pilots looking into the gas tank of one of those Mirage planes they sold ‘em to see if there was any gas left-with a match!”

  The Secretary of Energy roared with laughter, savoring the image of the ignorant Arab blowing himself and his aircraft to pieces in his search for gasoline. “And you really believe those people could do something like this?”

  The President ignored him. “Harold,” he said, “he’s going to be letting the world in on his secret if this works, isn’t he?”

  “Not necessarily. That’s about as remote a part of the world as you can find down there. Only a few Bedouin tribes running around. Nearest town’s well over a hundred and fifty miles away. They’ll see a hell of a flash of light all right, but not much else.”

  “What about fallout?”

  The Admiral overheard the President. On one of the screens, superimposed over a map of southeast Africa, there appeared a sausage-shaped arc thrusting across southern Libya, northern Chad, the Sudan and into the southern corner of Saudi Arabia.

  “Sir, this is the fallout pattern we’re predicting based on the strength and direction of the upper air winds over the site.”

  “No radiation monitoring devices there,” Brown noted. “They’ll be reading a four or a five on their Richter scales in Europe. Probably put it down to an earthquake if it goes off.”

  It was four minutes to midnight. There was little to do now but wait. On the clocks suspended on one wall of the room, the white numbers silently clicked off each passing sound.

  The President’s eyes concentrated not on the test site but on the screen on which Qaddafi’s bungalow lay trapped in its circle of white. The details of the house and garden were clearly visible, the reddish tiles on the roof, the purplish splash of flowers beside the house. In the garden there was what looked like a child’s playground.

  Is it really possible, he asked himself, that a man living in a pleasant little house like that, a. man with children, a man who believes in his God as devoutly as I believe in mine, could propose something as mad, as senseless, as this? What is there, he wondered, what hatred, what lust for power, what drive for revenge for a wrong that didn’t even affect him or his own people directly, that could drive him to so irrational an act? He shuddered.

  Harold Brown sensed the President’s anguish. “Well, sir,” he said, in a voice so soft only the Chief Executive beside him could hear it, “either we have a terrible problem on our hands or the cruelest hoax anyone’s ever played on a U.S. gove
rnment.”

  The President nodded. He said nothing. He continued to gaze straight ahead, concentrating totally on the screens before him.

  The numbers rolled away toward the last zero, droplets falling rhythmically to an instant past. There was no sound in the room except the whir of the ventilation system. Even the lieutenant colonels manning the consoles, as used to tension as runners are to cramps, were pale with the strain.

  Eleven fifty-nine. Four precisely aligned zeroes appeared on the clocks’

  panels. No one saw them. Every eye was on the screen along the room’s far wall, on the emptiness of the desert, on the frail tower planted on its sands like a withered tree trunk that had somehow survived there despite the ravages of time and nature.

  Five seconds, ten seconds. Nothing happened. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. The first creak of twisting armchairs indicated that the tension pent up in the room was easing. Forty-five seconds. Nothing, not even the eddying currents of a passing gust of wind, moved on the screen.

  One minute. Men at last sat back in their armchairs. A relief so intense it was almost a physical presence enveloped the room.

  “I told you the son of a bitch didn’t have it.” Satisfaction seemed to mix with the sweat sparkling on Crandell’s face.

  Tap Bennington chewed on his pipe stem. “Mr. President, we’ve now got to decide what our response to the threat should be. I think we should review immediately the range of military options we ~ can address against Libya.”

  Tap, just a minute, for God’s sake.” Warren Christopher of State was pleading. “We still have no confirmation whatsoever that Qaddafi is behind this.”

  “You mean,” a furious Crandell demanded, “you propose to let that son of a bitch get off scot free just because his goddamn bomb―“

  He never finished. A white wall of light seemed to explode from the screens of Room 2B890. So blindingly luminous was its flash, so painfully intense its glare, the men in the room flinched and shielded their eyes. Then, from ninety miles into space and a quarter of the way around the planet, the satellite cameras sucked up the fireball soaring over the Awbari Sand Sea and sent it hurtling onto the screens of the Pentagon, a roiling caldron of exploding gases: whites, reds, yellows and oranges, arranged in a dazzling kaleidoscope of light and fire.