The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “We didn’t have to. We had the printouts from the faked meters which we then set back to their zero setting. We had the lab results. And the fuel itself was so radioactive, who would want to get near it?”

  “And they didn’t suspect that you were faking?”

  “The only thing they got suspicious about was the fact that all three of the reactor’s fuel charges went bad at the same time. You see, the fuel is loaded into three completely sealed-off compartments. But the fuel had all come from the same source, so it was conceivable. Barely, but conceivable.”

  “And how did you get the fuel rods out of the storage pond after they’d left their cameras there taking pictures every fifteen minutes?”

  “The Libyans had worked that out. The cameras the IAEA use are Austrian-made, Psychotronics. The Libyans bought half a dozen of them through an intermediary. Each camera has two lenses, a wide-angle and a normal, and they are set to go off in a sequence. The Libyans listened to the IAEA’s cameras with very sensitive stethoscopes until they had worked out the sequence. Then with their own cameras they shot the same scene the IAEA’s cameras were shooting from exactly the same spot. They blew up big prints and placed them in front of the IAEA’s cameras, so what those cameras were doing, in effect, was taking a picture of a picture.”

  “And so they took out the fuel rods at their leisure.” Again Bertrand thought back to his conversation with his scientific adviser. “But how did they fool the inspectors when they came back to see if the rods were still there?”

  “Quite simply. When they took the real fuel rods out they put dummy rods treated with cobalt 60 back into the pond. They give off the same bluish glow, the Czerinkon effect, that the real fuel rods do. And they give an identical reading on the gamma-ray detectors the IAEA inspectors put into the pond to check what’s in there.”

  Bertrand could not suppress a glimmer of admiration for the Libyans’

  ingenuity. “How did they separate out the plutonium?” The hostility had left his voice now, replaced by a sympathy for the shattered man before him.

  “I wasn’t involved in that at all. I only saw the place where they did it once. It was in an agricultural substation fifteen miles up the seacoast from the plant. They had a set of designs for a small reprocessing plant they got in the United States. A company over there, Phillips Petroleum, circulated them in the sixties. They contained very detailed sketches and designs of all the components in the process. They had made shortcuts.

  Neglected quite a number of basic safety precautions. But the fact is, everything you need to build a plant like that is available on the world market. There is nothing that’s required that’s so exotic as to be unobtainable.”

  “Isn’t all that terribly dangerous?” The director of the SDECE thought back to his young scientist’s warning in the morning about radiation.

  De Serre was suddenly distracted by the stench of the vomit on his dinner jacket, an acrid reminder of the nightmare through which he had just passed. “God, I’ve got to get out of these clothes,” he said. “Look, they were volunteers, all of them. Palestinians. I shouldn’t wish to write an insurance policy on their lives. In five, ten years …” De Serre shrugged. “But they got their plutonium.”

  “How many bombs would they be able to make with it?”

  “They told me they were reprocessing two kilograms of plutonium a day.

  Enough for two bombs a week. That was back in June. Altogether, allowing for error, I should say they should have been able to get enough for forty bombs out of there.”

  Bertrand whistled softly, spilling as he did the ashes of his Davidoff.

  “Mon Dieu! Could you recognize any of those people in a photograph?”

  “Perhaps. The man I dealt with was a Palestinian, not a Libyan. Heavy fellow with a moustache. Spoke perfect French.”

  “Get out of those clothes,” Bertrand ordered. “You’re coming to the Boulevard Mortier with me.”

  The scientist staggered to his feet, vomit dripping from his filth-covered pants, and started for the door. “I’ll go and change.”

  Bertrand followed him. “I trust,” he said, “that in the circumstances you won’t mind if I accompany you.”

  * * *

  There comes a time in every international crisis when the President of the United States feels the need to get away for a few moments from his formal circle of advisers, to isolate himself with the one or two intimates with whom he feels totally at ease, in whose judgment and candor his confidence is total. In the dark moments after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt inevitably turned to the frail figure of Harry Hopkins. The voice that Jack Kennedy listened to in the White House corridors during the Cuban Missile Crisis was that of his brother Bobby. Now, in the aftermath of his disastrous phone call with Qaddafi, the President was alone with Jack Eastman, pacing slowly up and down the colonnaded terrace linking the West Wing to the Executive Mansion.

  The afternoon sun was still warm, and all around them melting snowdrops pattered to the ground with the gentle rustle of a light rain. The President was silent, his hands thrust into his pockets. At the end of the colonnade, a Secret Service agent, arms folded across his chest, kept a discreet watch.

  “You know, Jack,” the President said finally, “I got the feeling we’re like a guy who’s got some obscure virus and none of the miracle drugs his doctor recommends seem to do anything for it.” He stopped and looked across the White House gardens toward the Ellipse. Somewhere down there was the national Christmas tree he was supposed to light in a couple of hours, a reassuring annual demonstration of hope, an affirmation of the constancy of certain values his nation liked to think it stood for in good times and bad. Hope, it occurred to him, was in precious short supply at the moment.

  He stopped and threw an arm around Eastman’s shoulder. “Where do we go from here?”

  Eastman had been waiting for the question. “Well, one place I don’t think we go is back to him. You’d have to crawl. And despite what the doctors say, I don’t think he’s going to be reasoned out of this. Not after listening to him.”

  “Neither do I―” The President withdrew his hand and ran it through his wavy hair. “That leaves us Begin, doesn’t it?”

  “Begin or those people in New York finding that damn thing., The two men resumed their pacing.

  “We offer Begin some kind of ironclad guarantee of his state inside the ‘sixty-seven borders if he’ll agree to get out of the West Bank. Get the Soviets to subscribe to it, which they certainly will. It’s the only reasonable solution to that damn mess out there anyway.” The President waited for his friend and adviser’s reaction.

  “It is.” Eastman shook his head. “But in these circumstances? I just don’t see Begin agreeing. Not unless you’re prepared to pull out all the stops.

  Remember what General Ellis said last night? Are you ready to go in there and get those people out if he refuses? Or at least threaten to?”

  Again the President was silent. The implications of what Eastman had just said were not pleasant to contemplate. But, he thought grimly, contemplating the thermonuclear destruction of New York was far worse.

  “I’ve got no choice, Jack. I’ve got to go after him. Let’s get back to the conference room.”

  William Webster of the FBI was just hanging up his phone when they returned.

  “What’s up?” Eastman asked.

  “It was New York. There’s a bomb up there all right. They just picked up traces of radioactivity around a house out in Queens where it was apparently hidden for a few hours last Friday.”

  * * *

  By the standards of the city he administered, the office of the Mayor of New York was miniscule, smaller than that of many a secretary in the great glass sheaths of Wall Street and mid-Manhattan. Abe Stern sat in it now, staring at the oil of Fiorello La Guardia on the wall opposite him, fighting to control the anger and frustration surging through his nervous system. Just as the President was, he too was making a de
termined effort to put on a fagade of normality. For the past thirty minutes it had consisted of talking to the City Hall press corps gathered like a swarm of angry hornets around his antique cherry-wood desk, trying to explain the logistics of snow removal. He saw with relief the last of the reporters disappear and ordered in his next visitor, the Manager of his Budget Bureau. “What do you want?” he snapped at the mildmannered, bespectacled CPA.

  “The Police Commissioner wants to mobilize his force for some kind of emergency, Your Honor.”

  “Well, let him.”

  “But,” the Budget Manager protested nervously, “that means we’ll have to pay them overtime.”

  “So what? Pay it.” Stern was beside himself with exasperation.

  “But, my goodness, do you realize what that will do to the budget?”

  “I don’t give a damn!” Stern was almost shouting. “Give the Commissioner what he asks for, for God’s sake!”

  “All right, all right,” the intimidated accountant said, opening his briefcase, “but, in that case, I’ve got to have your signature on the authorization.”

  Stern grabbed the paper from his hand and stabbed at it with his pen, shaking his head in dismay. The last man on earth, he thought, the very last, will be a bureaucrat.

  As the man left, Stern turned his back on him and looked out across the snow-covered lawn of City Hall down to the old Tweed Courthouse, an enduring monument to the potential for graft inherent in his office. I can’t stand this anymore, he thought. He jabbed at one of the buttons on his telephone console. “Michael,” he asked, “where the hell is that guy who was going to tell us how to evacuate this place?

  “Tell him to wait,” the Mayor ordered when he heard the answer. “I’m coming, too.” In a flash, Stern was into the pantry beside his office-its refrigerator stocked with tomato juice, the only drink he consumed-down a flight of stairs and out of the building by his semisecret side entrance.

  Five minutes later, he was being buckled into a helicopter on top of Police Plaza, Oglethorpe beside him, the Police Commissioner and Lieutenant Walsh in the back. Entranced, he watched as slowly his city took shape below him in pace with the chopper’s thudding ascent into the afternoon sky. He could see the tight cluster of Chinatown, so closely woven together that it looked as if it had been constructed with Tinker Toys; the Fulton Fish Market and the brownish-gray wakes of the shipping along the East River; then Wall Street and Exchange Place, and all around them, reflecting back the glory of the afternoon sun, the proud glass-and-steel cylinders of lower Manhattan. This city’s got so much going for it, Stern thought, so much energy, such strength and vitality. His eyes studied the rectangular canyons below, the yellow forms of the cabs clogging the streets, the scurrying figures of his people on the sidewalks, recklessly darting through traffic. Ahead, he caught a glimpse of a Staten Island ferry scuttling like a sand crab over the slate-gray surface of the harbor. It just wasn’t possible, Abe Stern told himself, it wasn’t possible that some distant fanatic would destroy all this. He blinked, feeling the sting in his eyes, hearing as he did the jabbering of the Civil Defense expert beside him interrupting his nightmare.

  “The subways are apparently going to be a problem,” Oglethorpe was remarking, “unless we can find a way to run the evacuation without telling people what’s going on.”

  “Not tell people what’s going on?” The Mayor started to shout and not just to make himself heard over the thump of the rotors. “Are you crazy? You can’t do anything in this town without telling people what’s going on. I want to use those subways, I gotta tell the head of the Transit Workers his people got to do special shifts. ‘Emergency?’ he’s going to say to me.

  ‘What’s the emergency?’ And then he’s going to say, ‘Hey, listen, I gotta tell Vic Gottbaum and the Municipal Workers.’ And Gottbaum’s gonna say, ‘Listen, I can’t keep this from Al Shanker and the teachers.’ “

  The Police Commissioner leaned forward. “That’s his problem, Abe. At that point we haven’t got a train driver left in the city, you realize that?”

  Stern spun angrily around to confront his Police Commissioner. He was about to yell something, then stopped himself. Instead, he turned back and crumpled dejectedly into his seat.

  “Our only hope is a highway mode evacuation.” Oglethorpe was looking down at the Battery. “But down here we’ve got some real problems. The Holland and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels, our best escape routes, only have two lanes each. We figure the best you can do is seven hundred fifty vehicles per lane hour, calculate five people to a vehicle, that’s fifteen thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe stopped. “We’ve got about a million people down here to clear. It’s going to be a terrible scene. You’ll have to have awfully good police control. I mean, your officers will have to be ready to shoot the people who want to break the line and disrupt things.”

  Do that, Walsh thought grimly, and you’ll have to shoot nine tenths of the people in the city. And some of them are going to shoot right back.

  * * *

  They were skimming up the Hudson now, passing midtown. “Up here we’re in better shape,” Oglethorpe offered hopefully. “We’ve got six lanes in the Lincoln Tunnel, nine on the George Washington Bridge and twelve between the Major Deegan and Bruckner Expressways. That would give us an outflow of about a hundred thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe was getting hoarse from shouting over the rotors; yet he plowed on, a determined slave to his facts and figures, to all those years down there in Washington making things work on the charts and computers. “We’ll need plenty of police to handle the movement on the ramps. Helicopters to monitor the traffic flow.”

  Abe Stern wasn’t listening anymore. He turned again in his seat to face the Police Commissioner. His old friend’s face mirrored what he had expected to see, the reflection of his own despair.

  “It isn’t going to work, is it, Michael?”

  “No, Abe, it’s not.” Bannion looked down at the rooftops of the tenements crowding the Upper West Side, the snow-filled sweep of the park. “Maybe thirty, forty years ago. A different time. A different city. Maybe we would have had the discipline then, I don’t know. Now?” Sadly he shook his head.

  “Now, there’s no way we can do it. We’ve all changed too much.”

  Oglethorpe, ignoring their exchange, rattled on about the need for good, disciplined crowd control, about the right system to manage the flow to the bridges.

  “Oh, shut up!” Stern barked. The jolted bureaucrat blushed. “The whole thing is crazy. We’re wasting our time. We’re not going to evacuate this city. I’m going back to tell the President to forget it. We’re stuck here and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.” He leaned forward and gave a sharp jab to the pilot. “Turn this thing around,” he ordered. “Take us back to the plaza.”

  The helicopter pivoted in a tight arc. As it did, the panorama of Manhattan Island below them seemed to tilt end on end for an instant, rising up to meet the horizon, a flashing insight, Abe Stern reflected, into the upside-down world they were living in.

  * * *

  On the surface the scene in the spacious sitting room six thousand eight hundred seventy-five miles from New York City was one of touching domestic tranquility. Menachem Begin’s youngest daughter, Hassia, sat at the grand piano of his official residence entertaining her father with the crystalline notes of a Chopin etude. A menorah, two of its eight candle branches flickering was set in the window. Begin himself had lit the candles just an hour earlier to mark the first night of Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights.

  He was sitting now in a leather wing chair, legs crossed, chin resting in the cat’s cradle of his folded fingers, apparently wholly absorbed in his daughter’s music. In fact his mind was miles away, where it had been all day, on the crisis confronting his nation. His armed forces were on alert.

  Just before he sat down he had talked with the military governor of the West Bank and the embassy in Washington. The West Bank was quiet; if the Palestinians who
were to benefit from Qaddafi’s appalling initiative were aware of what was going on, they gave no indication of it. So, too, was Washington. Nothing, the embassy reported, had leaked out to indicate to the United States’s public the crisis at hand. Of even greater concern to the Israeli Prime Minister was the fact that the embassy’s usually reliable sources inside the White House had revealed nothing of the debates in the government’s inner councils.

  His daughter finished her etude with a flourish. Begin rose, walked to the piano and kissed her gently on the forehead. As he did, his wife appeared in the doorway.

  “Menachem,” she announced, “the President of the United States is calling.”

  Hassia saw her father stiffen the way he often did when he was about to review a guard of honor, then march from the room. He settled into the office where he had taken the President’s first call and listened in stolid silence to his proposal for a solution to the crisis. He would call an emergency joint session of Congress. The United States would offer Israel the ironclad guarantee of its nuclear umbrella inside the 1967 frontiers.

  The Chairman of the Central Committee had already agreed to associate the Soviet Union publicly and formally with the U.S. declaration. In return, the Israeli government would announce its immediate, unilateral decision to withdraw its forces, administration and settlements from the occupied territories and return them to Arab jurisdiction. Begin paled visibly listening to the President, but otherwise he appeared completely composed.

  “In other words, Mr. President,” he said when the American had finished, “you are asking me and my people to yield to a tyrant’s blackmail.”

  “Mr. Begin,” the President rejoined, “what I am asking you to do is to accept the only reasonable solution to the gravest international crisis the world has ever faced.”

  “The only reasonable solution was the one we were prevented from carrying out this morning by the Soviet Union-with, or without, your nation’s complicity.” Again the Jewish leader pronounced the words without heat, nothing in his manner indicating the interior storm shaking him.