The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Laila saw his muscles twitching. At least, she thought, I’ve given a face to the people, to the cause, I’m pleading for.

  “You got out, Whalid,” she said. Her voice was tender; there was no hint of reproach in its tone. “You’ve been able to forget here with your new life, your wife. But how about the ones who didn’t? Are they to be a people without a home forever? Without an address? Is our own father’s body never to go home again?”

  Whalid looked at the tattoo under his watchband, glowering at it as though somehow his glare might erase its stigmata from his flesh.

  “What am I supposed to be?” His voice was an angry, sibilant hiss. “A prisoner of this skin because I was born with it? Do I have to go against my reason, against the things I believe in, just because I was born in a place called Palestine thirty-eight years ago?”

  Laila waited along and thoughtful moment before answering. “Yes, Whalid,” she said. “You do. I do. We all do.”

  * * *

  After lunch with Whalid’s wife, Frangoise, brother and sister drove back to the airport in silence. Laila went immediately to the checkin counter to register for her return flight to Paris. When she had finished, she walked across the airport lounge toward the newsstand where Whalid scanned the headlines of the evening papers. His dark eyes seemed distant and melancholy, shutters turning his vision back into some interior world of his own. He’s understood, Laila thought. He’s miserable, but he knows he has no choice. She laid a hand on his elbow. “I’ll tell them it’s all right. You’ll do it.”

  Whalid flicked the pages of a magazine on the kiosk before him, an unconscious effort to postpone a few seconds the terrible decision his sister’s words bad thrust on him.

  “No, Laila,” he said finally. “Tell them I won’t do it.”

  His sister felt her legs tremble. She thought for an instant she would retch on the airport floor.

  “Whalid,” she whispered. “You’ve got to. You have to.”

  Whalid shook his head. The sound of his own voice saying “No” had dispelled his lingering indecision. “I said ‘No,’ Laila, and I meant it.”

  Laila was pale, her eyes blinking, unfocused. He doesn’t understand, she thought. Or if he does, he doesn’t give a damn. “Whalid, you must. You must.”

  He shook his head. Laila understood. There was no appealing his decision now. To her horror, she realized that she had failed. Fingers trembling, she opened her pocketbook and took out a second envelope, this one much smaller. “They told me to give you this if you said no,” she said, pressing the envelope into her brother’s hands.

  Whalid began to open it. Her fingers closed over his. “Wait until I’ve left.” Laila pressed her cheek, damp with tears, against her brother’s. “Ma salaam,” she whispered. Then she was gone.

  * * *

  Whalid watched from the terrace of the airport as his sister crossed the tarmac to her waiting flight. She did not turn back. As she disappeared into the 727’s rear hatch, he opened the envelope clutched in his hands.

  Glancing at the single sheet of paper it contained, he staggered. He had recognized instantly both the verse from the fourth chapter of the Koran and the handwriting in which it was written.

  “And if they turn back from their vow,” it read, “take them and kill them, wherever ye find them.”

  * * *

  On Sunday, March 3, 1977, explaining to Frangoise that he had family business in Paris, Whalid Dajani boarded the Mistral, the French railroad’s crack express, for the French capital. Shortly before midnight that evening, the doorbell’s raw screech shattered the quiet of Frangoise Dajani’s darkened bedroom. At the sight of the three shadowy figures gathered on her doorstep, the identification card with its official tricolor slashes thrust sharply at her half-closed eyes, Frangoise gasped. Oh my God, she thought. There’s been an accident. He’s dead.

  The three agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire pushed abruptly past her into the living room.

  “What is it?” she cried. “Has something happened to my husband?”

  Ignoring her, two of the agents headed upstairs toward her bedroom.

  “Where are you going? What do you think you’re doing?” she shrieked after them.

  The leader of the trio, a stout florid man, grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Get dressed,” he ordered. “Immediately. Pack a bag with whatever toilet articles you will need for the next seventy-two hours.”

  Franc oise protested. The agent reached into his pocket for the only explanation he was prepared to offer her, a brief typewritten order from a juge d’instruction, authorizing the DST to detain her for seventy-two hours.

  Frangoise moved toward the telephone. “I’m going to call my father,” she announced angrily.

  The agent reached the phone first. He locked the receiver into its cradle with his hand. “No, madame, no calls.”

  * * *

  Not quite an hour later, Franeoise Dajani was led into the office of the regional director of the DST, located on the twelfth floor of a commercial office building overlooking the Vieux-Port of Marseilles.

  Outside, the mistral moaned through the deserted streets, tearing at the wooden shutters of the old buildings nearby, its violent gusts rattling the plateglass windows of the director’s office.

  The regional director, studiously ignoring her presence, scrutinized a report on his desk. Finally he pushed it aside and looked up at her with the cold, appraising air of an insurance adjuster trying to downgrade a claim. “We arrested your husband in Paris this afternoon. Together with his brother and sister.”

  “Arrested him?” Frangoise gasped. “For what?”

  “For planning to steal plutonium from the nuclear installations at Cadarache for the benefit of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

  The slender blond woman tightened the muscles around her eyes, fighting a flow of tears. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Madame, I’m not concerned whether you believe me or not. They were traced through an Israeli agent who saw your brother-in-law arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport. They were arrested with the evidence of their guilt on them. All three have confessed. My only concern is whether or not you were involved in their crime.”

  There was not even a hint of sympathy for her in the middle-aged DST agent, only the professional interrogator’s search for the revealing flicker of the eyes, the subtle shift in vocal tone, that would expose his quarry.

  “Where are you holding my husband?”

  The.director glanced at his watch. “We’re not. He’ll be landing in Beirut in two hours. And he will not return to France-ever. The government has declared him persona non grata, although, in the circumstances, he has every reason to consider himself fortunate. It has been so decided by higher authority.”

  Just how high even the DST agent did not realize. Developing the Super-Ph6nix breeder reactor for overseas sale was a cornerstone of France’s export program for the decade of the 1980s. The public revelation in a trial that a group of Palestinians had formulated a plan to steal plutonium from Cadarache could have been a devastating blow to the program in a Europe already alive with antinuclear sentiments. Rather than run that risk, the Minister of the Interior, with the President’s concurrence, had ordered the three Dajanis deported.

  Frangoise sagged in her chair. Instinctively, her fingers went to the wafer-thin gold medallion around her neck. It was a representation of the fish which, on the walls of ancient Rome’s catacombs, had symbolized the early Christians. She was a Pisces, and her father had given it to her on the eve of their marriage. She adored her father as she had never adored anyone else, even her husband. She had been a sickly child, and it was he who had nursed her, given her the strength to live. What had happened would leak out one day and then the gossip would start, the vile, vicious gossip.

  It would kill her father as surely, as cruelly, as a cancer slowly ravaging a vital organ. Beyond the director’s window, twelve stories be
low, Frangoise could see the blink of the Jardin du Pharo at the throat of the Vieux-Port. She listened to the desolate wail of the mistral, the sad music of her childhood, and saw herself as a young girl standing on the quay of the Vieux-Port with her father watching the fishing dories bobbing in the choppy blue sea. Despair, a bitter unreasoning despair at what her husband’s act would do to him, sickened her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel ill. May I have a glass of water?”

  The DST official was only a few strides from his office on his way to the toilet down the hall when he heard the shattering of his plateglass windows.

  * * *

  For just an instant there on his mother’s balcony, his eyes idly roving the long and gentle swell of the Mediterranean, Kamal Dajani was at peace. To his left were the familiar crags of Pigeon Rock, the landmark which had pointed seamen the way to Beirut harbor since the Phoenicians had first planted their venturing triremes on the outgoing tide. Below Kamal’s perch, along the coastal road, sweeping up the seashore from Al Maza Airport, was a gigantic open-air market: thousands of merchants, driven from the city center by the Lebanese civil war, hawking everything from eggs to transistor radios and Dior dresses off blankets tossed on the roadside, folding camp tables, out of automobile trunks.

  The Lebanese, Kamal thought contemptuously-the only thing they prefer to killing each other is making money. That scornful observation brought Kamal back to reality. Failure did not sit well with him, and the failure of his operation could not have been more complete. He had only one minor consolation: they had managed, thanks to his muttered Arabic injunction to the others, to conceal their Libyan connection from the French. The DST had been only too ready to accept the idea that they were in the employ of the PLO.

  Kamal’s only concern at the moment was salvaging what he could from the disaster of their failed operation. If he could not deliver to Muammar al-Qaddafi the plutonium he wanted, perhaps he could deliver something else, something which in the long run might prove far more valuable: the scientific genius of his brother.

  “fI table!”

  Kamal turned at his mother’s words. Whatever their diverse accomplishments, their violent careers, her three children still instinctively obeyed the imperious commands of Sulafa Dajani. Small wonder. She was an imposing figure, the very antithesis of the stereotyped image of the Arab woman. No veil had ever shrouded her face. Her tall, lithe figure was clothed in a black Saint-Laurent suit, its beautifully tailored lines clinging to each indentation of a body that could still command lovers closer to her children’s age than hers. A single strand of pearls set off the pale skin of her long graceful neck and the haughty cast of her chin. Her hair was black, close-cropped and curly, a few defiant streaks of gray illuminating it like flashes of light.

  To her, her children’s summary ejection from France was a reason for rejoicing. She did not need to know what their crime was. It had been committed for the cause and that was enough. Spread out on her livingroom table was a huge Arabic mezze, a tapestry of hors d’oeuvres. She poured each child a glass of arak, crystalclear licorice-flavored liquid, and raised her own in a toast.

  “To the memory of your father; to the freedom of your people; to the liberation of your land,” she said and swallowed the burning alcohol in one gulp. Not all the injunctions of Islam were to her liking.

  Laila and Kamal turned hungrily on the food. The mother thrust a samboussac, a delicate meat pastry, at her disconsolate elder son.

  * * *

  “Eat,” she commanded.

  Whalid listlessly nibbled at its crust.

  “What do you intend to do?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on what FranBoise wants to do when she gets here. If she comes. If she can forgive me for what I did.”

  “She will come,” his mother stated emphatically. “It is her duty.”

  “Whalid.” Kamal’s tone was wary. He did not know how much of his brother’s bitterness at what had happened was directed at him. “Why don’t you come to Libya with me?”

  “Waste my life in that Godforsaken place?”

  “That Godforsaken place may surprise you,” Kamal continued. “There is more happening there than you know. Or most people know.” Kamal stretched his heavy torso. “A man like you should never have a closed mind. At least come. Take a look. And then decide.”

  A telephone rang. Sulafa Dajani rose to answer it. None of her children noticed the faint glistening in her eyes when she returned and sat next to her elder son. Gently, she reached for his hand and pressed it to her lips.

  “My son, I’m so sorry. It was an officer of the French Embassy. Frangoise is dead.”

  “Dead!” Whalid gasped.

  Sulafa Dajani caressed his shaking head. “She jumped from a very high building while the police were questioning her.”

  Whalid slumped against his mother’s shoulder. “Oh my God,” he sobbed.

  “Frangoise, my poor Frangoise.”

  Kamal got up and lit a cigarette. He stared at his weeping brother.

  “I did it,” Whalid cried. “I killed her.”

  Kamal circled behind him and squeezed his shoulders with his powerful fingers. If there was any pity in his gesture it was not so much for his brother’s grief as for his stupidity.

  “Whalid, you didn’t kill her. They did.”

  Whalid looked at him, uncomprehending.

  “You don’t believe that she jumped from that window, do you?”

  Alarm and horror swept his brother’s grief-ravaged face. “The French police wouldn’t …”

  “Don’t be a poor fool! They threw her out of that window, for God’s sake.

  Those French you loved so much. You wanted to be so damn loyal to. What do you think happened?” Kamal was flinging his words in short, bitter bursts.

  “And God knows what they did to her first.”

  Whalid turned to his mother, blinking through tears of sorrow and disbelief, searching for knowledge, for consolation.

  Sulafa Dajani shrugged her graceful shoulders. “It is the way of all our enemies.” She kissed her first son’s forehead. “Go to Libya with your brother. You belong there now. B’is Allah-it is God’s will.”

  PART III

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 14:

  MIDNIGHT TO 3:27 A.M.

  “Destroy Libya.”

  The only sound reaching Muammar Al — Qaddafi’s ears was the low and mournful sigh of a distant wind. No Teleprinter’s hum, no radio’s cackle, no jangling telephone marred the perfect quiet of his desert. As was only natural, he had chosen to pass the critical hours preceding the test of his hydrogen bomb in the solitude of the spaces in which he had found his faith and nurtured his dreams.

  His command post was the symbol of that vanishing race by whose precepts he strove to reorder the future, his ever present Bedouin tent. Not a single manifestation of the technology he sought to harness intruded on its spartan precincts. There were no television screens here parading the world before his eyes, no smartly uniformed aides laying out the options available to him, no blinking panels of light to remind him of the strength of his massed armies. Qaddafi was alone with the oneness of the desert and the stillness of his soul.

  Here, he knew, there was neither the time nor the place for the useless or the complex. As the oncoming light of day stripped away the illusions of the night, so the emptiness of these expanses stripped life to its fundamentals. All here gave way to the inexorable struggle to survive.

  Since time immemorial the intensity of that struggle had made the desert the incubator of the spiritual, its inhuman solitude the catalyst that had driven men to the extreme. Moses in the Sinai, Christ in the wilderness, the Prophet on his Hegira: each, in turn, had thrust on mankind the visions engendered by their desert retreats. Others had, too: visionaries and zealots, fanatics and spiritualists, part of the unending parade of austere and alarming men that through the centuries had emerged from those trackless wastes to trouble the settled w
orld around them.

  Immersed now in the reassuring familiarity of his desert, the latest of that long and troubling line awaited the results of his test in perfect calm. If it had worked, it was now, he reasoned, in their first flash of anger, that the Americans would lash out against him. If that was God’s will, then he was ready to perish here in the surroundings that had formed him. If it had failed, he would have one course open: he would condemn the “plot” fomented within his borders, arrest a few Palestinians and stage a mock trial to mollify the anger of the Americans and the world.

  His alert ears picked up the flutter of a helicopter coming to announce the result. to return him to his capital in triumph or shame. He watched unmoved as it drew up, then fluttered to rest fifty yards from his tent. A man leaped out.

  “Ya sidi!” he shouted. “It worked!”

  His first reaction to the news was to bow his head in prayer, a prayer of awe and gratitude for the power that now rested in his hands. Woven into the multicolored strands of the prayer rug on which he bowed his head were the outlines of the Islamic sanctuary which with that power he would now claim in the name of his faith and his people, Jerusalem’s Mosque of Omar.

  * * *

  The President of the United States sat motionless at the head of the conference table in the National Military Command Center. He too had greeted the desert explosion with a prayer, a prayer for help in what he had instantly understood was the gravest crisis his nation had ever faced. Now he was staring straight ahead, his index finger pressed to his lips, every fiber of his being concentrated on the dilemma before him.

  “The first thing I would like to say,” he announced finally, “is all our actions must be based on the assumption that there is a hydrogen bomb hidden in New York,” the President continued. “And we have also got to assume that Qaddafi is deadly serious when he threatens to detonate it if any word of this gets to the public.”