The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  They had left, according to the time automatically punched onto the rental agreement, at 9:57. Kamal had returned the truck, alone, at 6:17, after the rental office had closed. The only other precise thing they had on it was the time, 11:22, that the guard at the gate down on the pier had signed them out with their load on his dispatch sheet.

  Angelo stared across Fourth Avenue to the kids playing in an open schoolyard, the red brick outline of Engine Company 23 and the spire of the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas. He knew this area. Forty, fifty years ago, the two-and three-story turn-of-the-century tenements had housed an Italian neighborhood, heavy Mob turf. He was lost in his recollections when he heard a voice beside him hissing, “Hey, what are you guys looking for in there? A murderer?”

  “Yeah,” Angelo answered. He recognized the yardman who had checked in the van. “A murderer who hasn’t got around to murdering anybody yet.” Casually he draped a friendly arm around the man’s shoulders. “Listen, let’s just go through what happened last Friday night one more time.”

  “Hey.” The man’s irritation was evident. “I told them guys in there already. Friday this place”-he gestured at the cluttered yard-“was a goddamn ice-skating rink. What the hell am I going to do, waste my time talking to some guy checking in a van when I gotta clean this place up? Angelo resumed his pacing and his recollections. Suddenly he stopped. Snow and ice. It was a proven fact. You could look it up on the computer.

  Snowstorms were hell on the accident rate, particularly the first snowstorm of the year. And what, he asked himself, do Arabs know about driving on snow? They didn’t know snow from shit.

  * * *

  The men waiting for the President in the NSC conference room were as exhausted as he was. A few had managed to catnap an hour or two in a chair; most were living on coffee and their dwindling reserves of nervous energy. As soon as he sat down, Eastman reviewed the one substantial development of the last two hours. The Chairman of the Central Committee had just sent a report from the Russian ambassador in Tripoli. On Soviet insistence he had pleaded with Qaddafi to resume negotiations with Washington. The Libyan had been absolutely unyielding.

  “At least, for once we’re getting some help from our Soviet friends,” the President noted grimly. “What I’m interested in now is the status of the Rapid Deployment Force,” he told Eastman. “Get the military in here.”

  Three major generals of the Army, the Air Force and the Marines appeared at Eastman’s side at the summons of the buzzer. They were responsible for planning the forcible removal of the Israeli settlements from the West Bank. The Marine took charge of the briefing. The 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the Second Armored Brigade in Fort Hood, Texas, he reported, had been mobilized during the night. At dawn, men and equipment had been loaded onto their waiting C-5As and were airborne now in twelve separate flights en route to Germany. The lead flight was already far out over the Atlantic Ocean.

  The Marine stepped forward and pushed a button that lifted the covering from one of the television sets on the wall. On the screen was an image showing the position of the Sixth Fleet Marine Amphibious Force, two helicopter carriers and four attack transports. They were twenty nautical miles from the Lebanese seacoast, just northeast of Beirut.

  “Mr. President,” Admiral Fuller, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “we’ve got some decisions to make right now. The first concerns those flights from Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. Do we keep them en route to their restaging bases in Germany or do we turn them back? The first flights are coming up to their stop-or-go line.”

  “We’ve received Chancellor Schmidt’s clearance to use our fields in Germany for restaging and refueling,” the Secretary of State reported. The President had expected Schmidt’s approval, but it was still a formality which had to be honored.

  “The second decision involves landing the Marines,” Fuller said. “General, explain.”

  The Marine stepped to the television set and indicated the map of the Mediterranean shoreline that now appeared there. “We have three possible landing areas, Mr. President. Here in southern Lebanon at Tyre, north of Beirut at lunieh Bay where the Christian Separatist movement is centered or up in Latakia in Syria. Tyre is closest to the scene, but if the Israelis oppose us from the outset we’ll have a grave problem giving our beachhead adequate air cover. Our current plan is to use the aircraft from the Sixth Fleet on a shuttle basis, putting them down at Jordanian airports to refuel.”

  “Mr. President.” Again it was the Secretary of State. “We’ve discussed this with King Hussein and he has agreed to let us use his airfields and has promised absolute secrecy until our decision is taken.”

  “How about the units of the RDF?” the President asked. “Where would you propose to put them in?”

  “The only feasible spot, sir, is Damascus,” Admiral Fuller replied.

  “They’ve got the airfield facilities we’d need for our heavy equipment, and it’s astride the ground communications to the West Bank.”

  “Has this been discussed with Assad?”

  “No, sir,” the Secretary of State answered. “We thought that had better wait for your go-ahead. We don’t have the same confidential relationship with him that we have with the King. Although, in the circumstances, it’s hardly likely he’ll object.”

  “All right.” The President sat forward in his chair. “Move the RDF units on to Germany. Hold them on alert status ready to go on to the Middle East as soon as we give the orders. Brief the ambassador in Damascus on the situation and what we’ll want from Assad, but tell him not to contact him until he receives the order.”

  He glanced at the Marine Corps General. “Set your planning up to put our forces into Junieh Bay. They can count on a friendly reception there, and if we decide to go ahead with this, cutting down on casualties is going to be a lot more important than a few hours’ time.” He was pensive a moment, then turned to the Secretary of State. “Prepare a message to be sent to the Chairman on the red line to Moscow over my signature telling him what we’re doing and why. Ask him to see that it’s relayed to Qaddafi.

  Do the same thing via our charge in Tripoli. We don’t want Qaddafi to have any misconceptions about these moves that would lead him to act precipitously. And tell the Chairman we would welcome his putting maximum pressure on Qaddafi to at least extend his ultimatum.”

  “How about the Israelis, Mr. President?” the Secretary of State asked.

  “Shouldn’t we tell them too? If they realize we’re not bluffing they might be more amenable to the idea of getting those settlements out of there themselves and avoiding this whole ghastly mess.”

  “Sir,” Admiral Fuller countered, “if we’re going to have a showdown with them, I’d sure hate to tell them eight or ten hours ahead of time what we’re going to do.”

  His words were followed by an awkward silence as everyone in the room waited for the President to reply.

  “Don’t worry, Admiral,” he said firmly. “We don’t have to tell them.

  They’ll find out for themselves.”

  * * *

  A pair of military policemen escorted Grace Knowland down the broad wooden staircase of New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory toward a lean officer in khakis waiting at the foot of the stairs.

  “Major McAndrews, First Army PIO,” he said, his face radiant with the studied congeniality of a seasoned PR man. “We’re certainly grateful to you for the interest you’re taking in what we are doing here.”

  He led her along the basement corridor to a well-lit office. “This is Major Calhoun,” he said, introducing her to a bespectacled man rising to greet her from behind his desk. “He’s our operations officer.”

  The two men offered Grace a chair. “How do you like your coffee?” McAndrews asked jovially.

  “Black. Straight up.”

  * * *

  While McAndrews hurried off to get it, Calhoun casually put his feet on his desk, lit a cigarette and waved at the maps spread
over his office walls.

  “Basically,” he began, “what we’re doing here is having a look at the resources we have in the First Army area which can provide federal military relief assistance to New York in the event of natural disasters, such as the snowstorm you had here last week. Or a power failure or a hurricane.

  Essentially, we’re making an inventory of our capabilities to provide rapid federal disaster assistance to the city.”

  The major got up, took a pointer and began to tick off on the maps the First Army’s military installations.

  “We begin with McGuire Air Force Base down here in New Jersey,” he said.

  “They can handle Starlifters, but, of course, they’re not much help in getting snow off the streets, are they?” The major laughed at his little joke and continued his well-rehearsed briefing. It had been carefully prepared at Federal Plaza and designed to last half an hour, long enough, the FBI had calculated, to exhaust the journalistic possibilities inherent in snow removal.

  “Any questions?” he asked, concluding.

  “Yes,” Grace answered. “I’d like to go in and talk to your people actually working on the exercise.”

  The officer coughed nervously. “Well, that’s a little bit difficult at the moment. They’re all working, and since reaction time is an important factor in our calculations, we wouldn’t want to interrupt them. It might skewer our results, so to speak. Tell you what I’ll do, though. If you come back at three tomorrow when we wind up, I’ll see to it you have all the time with them you want.”

  “Exclusively?”

  “No one else is in on it.”

  “Fair enough.” Grace gave the officer a satisfied smile and closed the steno pad she had used for her notes.

  McAndrews offered to escort her out of the armory. As they passed through the huge assembly area where her son played tennis, something odd struck her. A panel of rope netting, high enough to stop everything but the wildest of lobs, sealed off the tennis courts from the rest of the armory’s main floor. There was nothing unusual about that. The net was always there to keep stray balls from bouncing around among the olive-drab vehicles of the National Guard unit that used the armory. Except this morning there were no olive-drab vehicles behind it, only half a dozen rented Avis, Hertz and Ryder trucks.

  “What are all those rented trucks doing here?” she asked McAndrews. “Are they part of your exercise?”

  “Yes,” the Major answered. “We used them to bring some material in. Infrastructure support.”

  “Since when,” Grace inquired, “is the Army so wealthy it can afford to go out and rent trucks with the taxpayers’ money instead of using its own vehicles?”

  Major McAndrews gave another nervous little laugh.

  “Well, ma’am, our military vehicles are pretty cumbersome to maneuver around crowded cities like Manhattan. They’re apt to tie up traffic something fierce. So we use these rented trucks. To avoid inconveniencing the civilian population, so to speak.” The FBI agent masquerading as as an Army major smiled, immensely pleased by the nimbleness of his reply.

  “I see.” Grace offered him her hand. “Oh, by the way, there’s a young MP lieutenant here named Daly who was very kind to my son last night. I promised I’d have a cup of coffee with him if I came back to do a story. Do you suppose someone could find him for me?”

  * * *

  “How many Hertz trucks you figure there are moving in New York on any given day?” Angelo Rocchia addressed his question to the young Irishman running the Fourth Avenue truckrental agency.

  “We’re doing thirty-five to forty a day right here, and we got two other Brooklyn locations. You add in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens. Man, I don’t know. Four, five hundred at the least. Maybe more on a big day. Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  Angelo was sitting in the manager’s cramped office. Through an interior window he could follow the activities of the FBI forensic people in the garage. They’re doing everything they can with that truck, he thought, but I don’t think you can count on it. Not unless we get more time to find this barrel of gas than I think we do. Before him was the steadily thickening accumulation of reports of the FBI’s operation. One file was missing.

  Classified, the head of the FBI forensic team had told him.

  What was so important in this that the government had to classify it, wouldn’t let the people who had to find the barrel know what it was? Angelo grabbed a peanut from his pocket and flipped it into his mouth, pondering that, then once again the idea that had struck him a few minutes before in the yard popped into his head. Far out, he thought, really far out. Still, I got nothing to do here except wait for some son of a bitch from the FBI to ask me to run out for coffee. A bunch of telephone calls is all, he told himself. What else do I have to do?

  He took out his notepad and picked up the telephone.

  “First Precinct?” he asked. “Give me your I-24 man.” The I-24 man was the precinct desk clerk, the officer in charge of the station-house blotter which recorded the daily flow of crimes in each of the seventy-two precincts of the New York Police Department from wife beatings and drunken brawls to murders.

  “Hey,” he said when he had identified himself. “Pull out your sheets for last Friday and tell me if you got any Sixty-ones on there for leaving the scene.”

  * * *

  Grace Knowland smiled affectionately at the earnest young officer opposite her. They were sipping coffee on the stools of a Madison Avenue drugstore, the lieutenant shyly telling Grace about himself and just as shyly hinting at how much he’d like to see her again.

  “Of course, I’m not really an MP,” Lieutenant Daly said. “I’m infantry.

  This is temporary duty.”

  “Well, you were lucky to get it. It must be tremendous to be assigned to New York just like that.”

  “Not as tremendous as you’d think. I mean, they moved us here in such a hurry, we have to sleep on the floor in there in sleeping bags and live off cold C rations.”

  “What!” Grace’s anger was that of a million mothers listening to their soldier son’s woes. “You mean the U.S. Army can afford to rent a bunch of Hertz and Avis trucks and leave them sitting around that armory all day long and they can’t afford to give you boys a hot meal?”

  “Oh, those aren’t Army trucks.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No. It’s the civilians running that exercise in there that use them.”

  “Civilians? Why should they want trucks like that to. study snow removal?”

  “Beats me. They have some kind of technical equipment they put in there.

  Then they go out and drive around for hours. Probably measuring something.

  Pollution, maybe.”

  Grace swallowed the last sips of her coffee, reflecting thoughtfully on his words. “Probably. Here.” She reached for the check. “Let me have that.

  Damn!” she groaned, picking her loose change from her pocketbook. “I think I left my compact down in the major’s office. Could you escort me back down to look for it?”

  Ten minutes later she gave the young officer a friendly kiss on the cheek and ran down the armory steps, waving to a taxi moving up Park.

  As she slipped into the back seat, she pulled out her notebook and scribbled a number on its cover. It was for that scrap of information, not a missing compact, that she had returned to the armory. The number was the New Jersey license of one of the rented Avis trucks parked on the armory floor.

  * * *

  Abe Stern surveyed the frightened and dismayed men around him at the underground command post below Foley Square as Quentin Dewing began their now hourly review of the situation. It was already 10:30 A.M. and the almost jubilant atmosphere that had accompanied the dispatch of thousands of New York police officers with their photographs of the three Dajanis onto the sidewalks of the city had disappeared as the minutes had ticked by without a single conclusive lead or sighting.

  The Mayor tried hard to concent
rate on the reports of the men at the conference table, but he couldn’t. All he could think about were the people, the people for whose lives he was responsible walking on the streets above the command post, going into the courthouses, the subways, sitting in offices, in City Hall Park, up in the towers of the World Trade Center or the crowded flats of the Alfred E. Smith housing project. Down here they were going to live if that awful device, wherever it was, went off. They had provisions, real provisions, not the rotten and inedible protein crackers in the shelters. They would allow them to survive.

  Eventually, they would be able to crawl out of here into whatever satanic landscape was left on the ground above them.

  What about the people up there? What, Abe Stern had kept asking himself, is my moral obligation to them? He had at his disposal a facility that was unique in the United States. It was called Line 1,000 and had originally been set up by John Lindsay in the hot and fearful summers of the sixties.

  It was a direct radio and television link from his desk at City Hall and his study at Gracie Mansion to the control desk of WNYC, the city’s broadcasting station. On his order, the WNYC desk man would make three calls to the three primary Emergency Broadcasting System stations, WNBG, WCBS and WABC. All three stations on receiving that call would push an emergency alert button which set an alarm bell ringing in the control room of every radio and television station in the New York area. When it went off, those stations were required by law to interrupt their regular programming and request their audiences to stand by for an emergency message. Within two minutes of picking up Line 1,000 the Mayor’s voice could be heard live on over one hundred radio and television stations. Not even the President could address his countrymen so rapidly in an emergency.