The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Toweling himself dry, he reviewed for the hundredth time the terrifyingly few assets and options the United States possessed to meet Qaddafi’s threat, hoping against all reason to discover somewhere in the recesses of his mind the one solution they had overlooked. Amin, Khomeini and now this man: zealots menacing the whole fragile balance of international conduct and behavior. And why? He couldn’t help thinking of the words he had read trying to force sleep onto his racing mind last night, a fragment of Aeschylus he’d found in the Wisdom of the Ages he kept by his bedside:

  So in the Libyan fable it is told

  That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,

  Said when he saw the fashion of the shaft,

  With our own feathers, not by others’ hands,

  Are we now smitten.

  How prophetic, he told himself again. Because it is with our feathers that their arrows are made, all the arms, the science, the technology we in the West have thrust at Qaddafi and everyone else who wanted them in our gluttonous, uncontrollable appetite for energy and capital.

  His mess steward had set his usual breakfast on his bedroom desk: coffee, grapefruit, two softboiled eggs and a slice of wholewheat toast. He gulped the juice and the coffee and ignored the rest. He had no stomach for food this morning. Then he punched the remote-control panel that allowed him to watch, simultaneously, the three television sets at the foot of his bed.

  Listening to the opening sequences of Good Morning America, The Today Show and The CBS Morning News, he noted with relief that no hint of the crisis had leaked to the media-despite the notorious permeability of his capital.

  Before going downstairs, he opened the door to his wife’s bedroom and tiptoed to the bed where she lay crumpled in sleep. He bent down and kissed her, savoring as he did the comforting warmth of her sleeping body.

  Her eyes blinked open. She reached for his hand. “Darling,” she whispered, “are you all right?”

  The President nodded grimly.

  “Is there anything new?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  With his hand, she patted the sheets by the side of the bed. Gratefully almost, the Chief Executive sat down beside her. There was no one, not even Eastman, in whose wisdom and judgment the President had greater confidence.

  Half a dozen times since the crisis had begun, he had unburdened himself to her here in this bedroom or the sitting room next door, relieved in those intimate instants of the need of maintaining the stern, composed faBade he felt forced to give to his advisers.

  For a moment he was silent, his hands clasped between his knees, his shoulders slumping forward. Then he shuddered, depressed by the weight of his thoughts.

  “What is it, my love?”

  The President reached for his wife’s hands. She could see, despite the dimness of her bedroom, the patina of tears in his eyes. She pressed his flesh to her. He began to tremble, ever so faintly, like the ground tremor provoked by a distant explosion.

  “I’m afraid,” he whispered. “My God, I’m so afraid it’s going to go wrong.”

  His wife sat up and wordlessly slipped out from under her bedcovers. For an instant she sat beside him, a comforting arm thrown around his shoulders.

  Then, with her husband beside her, she turned and slipped to her knees.

  There, in his wife’s darkened bedroom, his face in his hands, the President began a private, desperate prayer for the strength he would need in the hours ahead.

  * * *

  In New York, it was 7:15 A.M. when Abe Stern, numb with exhaustion, sat down at the dining-room table in Gracie Mansion and began to poke at the scrambled eggs his housekeeper had set before him. Next to his plate was a one-page summary of the events of the last four hours. One word would have been sufficient “nothing.” Stern had returned at 3 A.M. to the Federal mansion that had sheltered New York’s mayors since 1942. He might just as well have stayed downtown-like the President, he hadn’t been able to sleep.

  The discovery of traces of radiation, first out in Queens, then in the truck that had picked up the missing barrel, the knowledge that two Palestinians involved in Qaddafi’s nuclear program had picked up the Dionysos’ cargo, had shattered the one hope Stern had clung to all during the desperate hours of Monday, the illusion that somehow, maybe just somehow, the bomb wasn’t there.

  From the transistor beside him the WNYC Travelers’ Timetable droned out early traffic advisories for the first commuters heading into his city.

  Stern sickened listening to them. Three million people heading into the city, perhaps to die, totally ignorant of the menace threatening them. That had led to the bitterest argument he had had with the President since the crisis had begun. Confronted with the certainty that there was a thermonuclear device in Manhattan, he had asked the White House at midnight for permission to seal off Manhattan to incoming traffic, close down every bridge, tunnel, and railroad line into the city.

  The military bad backed him up; barring New York’s three million commuters from the city would have brought the potential American loss from the explosion of Qaddafi’s bomb much closer to the even-tradeoff point at which the Libyan would lose the advantage he held. The President and the rest of the Crisis Committee had all opposed him. There was no way Manhattan Island could be cut off from the rest of the world in silence, and the risk that the implacable zealot in Tripoli would detonate his device as soon as he found out what was happening was too great to be acceptable. You could not, the President had argued once again, take the chance of condemning five million New Yorkers to death to save three million commuters. Everyone threatened by this terrifying end act of political terrorism would have to share the risks equally, the President had ruled.

  And so right now, Abe Stern thought, in the cold morning air in Darien and Greenwich, White Plains and Red Bank, New Jersey, people were gathering in bus stations and along train platforms, or lingering over a cup of coffee as they waited for the honk of a carpool driver. Soon they would be flooding into New York over the railroads and bridges he had wanted to cut, innocently heading for another day’s work and very possibly their deaths.

  He pushed his eggs away, unable to eat. Should I have agreed? he asked himself again. How the hell can a man decide where his obligations lie in such a horrible dilemma?

  His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of his wife in the doorway, her gaunt figure wrapped in the faded rose satin dressing gown she had bought at Abraham and Strauss fifteen years before.

  “Why are you up so early?” he asked.

  Wordlessly, she moved to the sideboard, poured herself a glass of orange juice from the pitcher there, and sat down beside him. “What’s the matter?

  You didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Stern rejoined irritably. “I couldn’t sleep, is all.”

  His wife pointed a reproachful finger toward his plate. “How come you’re eating eggs for breakfast? You know Mort told you eggs were bad for your cholesterol.”

  “So what? What is he anyway, some kind of genius because he went to Harvard?” Stern thrust his knife angrily at the butter dish, cut a thick slab and spread it defiantly on a piece of toast he had no appetite to eat. “I get a heart attack, it’s not going to be from eating eggs, believe me. What time’s your plane?”

  Ruth was due to leave, as she did every year at this time, to spend the holidays in Miami with their daughter and son-in-law. She’d planned her departure two weeks ago, and the knowledge that she, at least, would be spared, not by any violation of his trust but by fate, had made Abe Stern’s anguish just a little easier to bear in the past few hours.

  “I don’t know if I’m going.”

  “What do you mean, not going?” There was an intimation of panic in the Mayor’s astonished reply. “You got to go.ţ

  “Why are you in such a hurry I should leave town? You got a girl or something?”

  “Ruth! Look at me! Thirty-two years we’ve been married. Have I ever done some
thing like that to you? What girl would want me anyway? Get the plane.”

  Ruth poured herself a cup of black coffee and sipped it thoughtfully. She was a year younger than Abe, her hair thin and white now, clinging to her head like sad wisps of angel’s beard left behind on an old Christmas tree abandoned in the back yard. “I was kidding, Abe. About the girl.” Her dark eyes gazed at her husband over the rim of the coffee cup she held before her lips. “But something’s wrong, Abe. You’ve got something on your mind.

  Must be a big problem.”

  Stern sighed. After so many years of marriage there were no secrets anymore. “Yeah,” he answered, “I got a problem all right. But I can’t tell you about it. Please, Ruth, get the plane. Go down to Miami-for me.”

  His wife got up and moved behind him, letting her arms hang down until she could cradle Stern’s cheeks in her aged and arthritic fingers. “Don’t tell me, Abe. It’s all right. But, you got a problem, this is where I belong.

  Not in Miami.”

  Stern reached up and clasped her bony hands. Outside, through the dining-room windows, the first gleamings of dawn were reflected off the dark channel of Hell Gate, creeping across Ward’s Island and onto the tenements of Queens.

  How lovely it all is, the Mayor of New York reflected, his hands tightening around those of his wife, how lovely it is.

  * * *

  At the underground command post where Abe Stern had spent most of his sleepless night, the whole thrust of the mammoth search effort had now taken on a new dimension. All the manpower available was now concentrated on the most extensive manhunt any American city had ever known, the pursuit of Whalid, Kamal and Laila Dajani.

  Al Feldman had been up all night coordinating the NYPD’s contribution to the search. With three identified suspects in hand, the decision had been taken to throw the full resources of the 24,000-man police force into the search. The Dajanis were being described, to keep the secret of the bomb, as cop killers. Right now in every station house, in every precinct in the five boroughs, the patrolmen coming onto the day shift were being handed photos of the Dajanis, part of the thousands printed overnight. The men coming off the night shift were put into civilian clothes, given photos and held on duty. The headquarters switchboard was ordering the men and women of the four-to-twelve to report to their precincts at 10 A.M. so that by midday every police officer in New York City would be out looking for the three Palestinians. Forget everything, they were being ordered: burglars, traffic and parking violations, purse snatchers, junkies, whores, fighting drunks. Just find some trace of the neighborhood in which the three alleged cop killers had last been seen.

  Feldman had laid down basic guidelines for the search pattern, based on the conviction that no matter how hard they had tried to avoid it, the Dajanis would have had to come into contact with certain aspects of New York life.

  Every newsstand vendor, every druggist, every counterman, cashier and short-order cook at every hamburger joint, fast-food franchise, pancake house, soda fountain, pizza parlor and Hero sandwich shop in the city was to be shown the Dajanis’ photos. So, too, were the owners, clerks, salesmen and checkout-counter operators of every food store in town from the crummiest mom-and-pop store in Sheepshead Bay to the biggest Grand Union supermarket in Queens. Pushcart operators selling soft drinks and sandwiches off the sidewalks were to be queried, the attendants in all the big public lavatories, in the city’s Turkish baths.

  The vice cops were all brought in and ordered to check the city’s countless prostitutes, massage parlors, “contact” centers, fieabag hotels to see if the Dajanis had patronized any of them. A similar effort against the city’s dope dealers was assigned to the Narcotics Squad.

  Patrolmen were assigned to all the toll booths, inbound and outbound, at all the bridges and tunnels with orders to scrutinize the passengers of every car passing through them. The three thousand men of the Transit Police were fully mobilized and assigned to watch every turnstile and station entrance in the subway system. The muggers might have a field day in New York’s subways this Tuesday, December 15, but the Dajanis would have no better than a fifty-fifty chance of using them without getting caught.

  The thousands of FBI agents freed from the pier and personnel searches were assigned to cover every hotel, roominghouse and car-rental agency in the city. Others were assigned New York’s real-estate agencies with orders to validate every lease that had been signed in the past six months, looking for the place where the bomb might be hidden. Still others were teamed with the crimeprevention specialists in each of the NYPD’s precincts, telephoning contacts and names on each precinct’s business index file for any indication from shopowners and small merchants of new, suspicious activities in their neighborhoods. FBI agents paired with NEST scientists with hand-held Geiger counters were instructed to comb methodically all the city’s abandoned buildings.

  There had been a bitter debate just before dawn over the potential use of the media. Feldman had urged giving the Dajanis’ photos and the cop-killer cover story to the papers and television stations. That way they could have mobilized most of the city’s population in the search. He had been overruled by Eastman in Washington. The National Security Assistant’s mistrust of Qaddafi after the scanner incident was total; there was every chance one or all of the Dajanis were kamikaze volunteers baby-sitting the bomb, and the sight of their photos on television might cause them to panic and set it off.

  Now, with his orders out, his plans set, the Chief had nothing to do but think and wait. For ten minutes he had been doing just that, sipping black coffee and trying to remember what he might have overlooked. Only by the greatest act of will was he able to keep himself from picking up the phone on his desk, calling his home out in Forest Hills and quietly but firmly telling his wife to get the hell out of there.

  He was thinking about doing just that when he saw the Police Commissioner, red-eyed and exhausted, standing over him. I wonder how Bannion is dealing with this one, Feldman asked himself. The Commissioner had ostentatiously moved back to Manhattan from the Island after his appointment to “demonstrate a sense of solidarity with the people of New York.” I’ll bet, the Chief told himself maliciously, Marie Bannion’s demonstrating her solidarity with the people of New York right now barrel-assing through Yonkers in an unmarked police car.

  Then, looking into his Commissioner’s blue eyes alight with the same fright he felt, Feldman was ashamed.

  “What do you think, Chief?” Bannion asked. “Can we make it?”

  Feldman took a swallow of his bitter black coffee and stared up at Bannion.

  For a moment he sat there looking at him, thinking, appraising both the situation and his answer. Why lie? the Chief told himself. Why con him or myself or anybody else?

  “No, Commissioner,” he answered, “not in the time we got left, no way.”

  * * *

  Angry and frustrated, Angelo Rocchia stalked the huge parking area of the Hertz Rent-A-Truck agency at 354 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, its expanse filled with a motley collection of trucks painted not in the familiar Hertz yellow and blue but in the commercial colors of the agency’s leasing clients: the Omaha Hotel Supply Company, Junior’s Restaurant, Sabrett’s Kosher Frankfurters, F. Rabinowitz Caterers.

  It was already close to midmorning, and, as he had expected he was going to be, he was nothing more than a glorified gofer for the FBI forensic experts pulling apart the truck the Dajanis had used to pick up their load of barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal pier only a few blocks away. In fact, he wasn’t even a gofer. The FBI men were so studiously absorbed in their work they had completely ignored him.

  The truck was lying in a hundred pieces on the floor of one of the agency’s three garages. It had been sealed off to its curious employees and turned into a miniature crime laboratory. Even Angelo had to admire the thoroughness of the FBI effort. Every one of the thirty-seven bumps, scrapes, indentations on the truck’s body and fenders, some so small they were barely visible,
had been circled in red. Spectrographic-analysis equipment had been flown up from Washington and set up to examine paint chips from each, hoping to find one that would reveal some clue as to where the truck had gone when the Dajanis had rented it on Friday. The young couple who had taken it out Saturday had been brought in and grilled to see if the Dajanis had left anything behind, a matchbox, a restaurant napkin or carton, a map, anything that might have suggested where they had been.

  The tires had been pulled apart, every speck of dirt and grime impregnated in their treads vacuumed out and studied for the one peculiarity that might indicate a particular place in which the truck had been parked. The floor mat had been carefully vacuumed and the results studied in the search for a speck of soil from the Dajanis’ shoes that might indicate the kind of ground over which they had been walking.

  Nothing was too outlandish. The FBI had learned that painters had been working on Friday on the Willis Avenue Bridge linking the Bronx and Lipper Manhattan. They had gone over the van’s roof with microscopes to see if even a speck of paint could be found there to establish that the truck had used that route into the city. Someone had been through the computers at the Parking Violations Bureau at Park Avenue South and Thirty-first looking for unpaid parking tickets. That was SUP in New York since the Son of Sam murders.

  It was marvelous, Angelo thought, precise, scientific and marvelous; yet he knew very well that up until now the whole staggering FBI effort had revealed virtually nothing. The FBI had rapidly determined with photographs that the rental had indeed been made by Kamal and Whalid just before ten Friday morning. They had explained that they were going to move some furniture to a new apartment. That in itself indicated that someone had briefed them on rental procedures, because had they said they were going to make a pickup of commercial goods from the docks their stolen driver’s license wouldn’t have worked. They would have needed a commercial license. Their whole effort would have ended there. The desk clerk in the trailer that served as the renting office had remembered that Whalid had inquired about the load the Econoline van they’d been offered could carry and had seemed relieved to learn it could handle five thousand pounds with no problems.