The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “Operator,” she said, “please give me the police.”

  * * *

  Al Feldman’s despairing plea for time had affected everyone in the NSC conference room from the President to the twenty-five-year-old Vassar girl responsible for keeping track of the classified documents flowing in and out of the chamber. It was as if the exhausted, desperate Chief of Detective’s voice had suddenly incarnated for each man and woman in the room the five million New Yorkers whose lives were at risk because of the decision they had made. Bennington of the CIA was the first to break the stricken silence.

  “Mr. President,” he said. “I have a suggestion. It’s a tactic that might allow us to convert the limited extension of his ultimatum into an indefinite one. Let’s get Begin. Tell him we want to go ahead with our West Bank operation. Except it will be mutually agreed it’s just a show to gain us time to let New York find the device. He’ll certainly agree to that.

  Then we’ll tell Qaddafi we’re going in. Invite him to send observers from his embassy in Damascus along with our forces to verify that we really are doing it. Just landing and deploying our forces and moving them up to the West Bank is going to take close to ten hours. If it comes to it, we can actually move in, fight a couple of sham battles with the Israelis. The important thing is, if we can get him to agree to this, then we, not Qaddafi, will be controlling the time element in the crisis.”

  The President looked around the room, a first glimmer of hope registering in his face. “Caspar,” he asked the Secretary of Defense, “what do you think?”

  “Mr. President, try it. With so much at stake, it’s worth trying anything.”

  * * *

  A police car bearing two uniformed officers of the Spring Valley police screeched to a stop in front of Dorothy Bums’s home three minutes after her call. Visibly excited, she confided to them what she had seen and heard.

  “Probably been watching too many TV programs lately,” the first officer whispered to his partner as they trudged through the snow to the house next door. When there was no answer at the front door, they circled the house looking for telltale signs of a forced entry. There were none. They returned to the front door and decided to give it a try. It was open.

  The first officer drew his pistol and poked his head inside. “Anybody home?” he shouted.

  Silence followed his cry. “We’d better have a look,” he said, advancing down the hallway. He paused at the door of the den and looked inside.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelled back to his deputy. “Get the State Policel The old lady wasn’t kidding!”

  * * *

  An atmosphere as despairing, as hopeless, as that in the NSC conference room gripped Qaddafi’s command post in the basement of the Villa Pietri.

  As always, even when he was in a crowded room, Qaddafi was alone, slouched at the head of the table, morose and withdrawn. The men around him murmured their exchanges in restrained little ripples of noise that would not intrude on their chieftain’s silence.

  The passing hours had brought to the Libyan and the men around him the growing certitude that their ghastly gamble was failing. Each understood full well what the consequences of failure would be. As the time had passed with no sign of Israeli acquiescence to their demands, Qaddafi had withdrawn, spiritually, from their gathering. He was a man of dark and unpredictable moods, capable of temper tantrums so violent he could, literally, smash the furniture of his office and roll on the floor in rage.

  Once he had personally shaved the head of his Prime Minister, Salam Jalloud, because the latter had violated the puritanical standards of his revolution by consorting with bar girls in Rome. And there were his periodic retreats to the desert, pilgrimages to his past in which be sought in the austerity and loneliness of the sands the strength to confront a world he did not always choose to understand.

  The dark, brooding eyes studied the men around him now. Like most revolutions, his had been nourished by the blood of its makers. Of the band of brothers that had overthrown Libya’s King Idris in 1969, only Jalloud remained. The others were dead, disgraced or in exile, replaced by a new generation of followers of more certain loyalty and less menacing demeanor. Qaddvtfi pondered each face in turn. Which among them would remain loyal to the end of this trial? And which among them would be the first to raise the dagger, to accuse their leader of the dictator’s unforgivable sin-failure?

  A shout from the communications center next door interrupted his meditation. “Ya sidi!” a clerk cried. “It is the American airplane. The President wishes to talk to you. The Americans have accepted your terms!”

  The men in the room let out a collective jubilant roar of triumph; they did, that is, with one exception-Qaddafi. He remained motionless and unsmiling, fixed in the position he had been in for hours. Finally he raised a finger.

  “Tell the President this time I will talk to him,” he intoned.

  * * *

  Three police cars of the New York State Police, C Troop, their red rooftop lights slowly revolving, lined the road in front of the house in which Whalid Dajani had been killed. An ambulance, its doors open, stood in the driveway. Across the street, a circle of neighbors and of kids who had interrupted their afternoon walk home from school looked on in shock and concern. Murder was not an everyday occurrence in the quiet byways of Spring Valley.

  In the den, the police hovered around Whalid’s body. The impact of his errant bullet was circled in red on the wall. A fingerprinting team was already dusting for prints while a trooper with a piece of chalk traced out the exact position of his corpse on the floor. Above him, a police photographer recorded the scene from every angle.

  “Take his prints down at the morgue,” the captain in charge of the investigation ordered, “and tell the coroner to run an autopsy on him.” He looked at the broken fifth of Johnnie Walker on the floor, then cast a scornful glance at Whalid’s corpse. “I’ll bet he’ll find enough alcohol in there to open a distillery. Come on,” he said, squatting down beside the body, “let’s see if he’s got any ID on him.”

  While he started through Whalid’s pants, another trooper picked up the suit coat. He pulled out Whalid’s passport and flicked it open. “Hey, Charlie,” he said to the captain, “he’s a fucking Arab.”

  The captain held the passport photo up beside Whalid’s face, still contorted by the agony of his dying struggle for air. He grunted, satisfied at the matchup, then went through its pages until he found what he was looking for: the entry stamp an INS officer at JFK had placed on it. “Poor bastard, didn’t have time to do much Christmas shopping,” he said, noting the date, December 9. “I’ll go down to the car and call this in.”

  The captain, unaware of the emergency in New York, sauntered out of the house, stopping as he did to order the ambulance men to pick up the body.

  At the curb he lit a cigarette, then finally picked up the speaker of his car radio. “Okay,” he said when his headquarters replied. “I have the details on this stiff “we got up here in Spring Valley.”

  * * *

  Muammar al-Qaddafi listened impassively to the President’s recital of his proposed U.S. movement into the West Bank. No such restraint fettered the men around him. They were already preparing to celebrate the enormity of the triumph their leader’s gamble had won.

  “Mr. President,” the Libyan replied when the American had finished, “your terms are unacceptable.”

  His advisers looked at him aghast, but Qaddafi ignored them. “I do not intend to substitute an American occupation of my brothers’ lands for an Israeli one. The terms of my letter were simple. I want Begin to renounce to the world and his people publicly and forever Israel’s claims to our lands. And then I want the Israelis to leave immediately their settlements and East Jerusalem. There is no need to extend my ultimatum for that. All that I have asked can be accomplished in one hour. No more.”

  As his interpreter began to translate his words, Qaddafi’s circle of advisers erupted in protest. “You can’t do th
is,” Jalloud protested. “We’ve won. They’re giving us what we want.”

  Qaddafi smashed his fist into the table. “Fool!” he shouted. “Have you no vision? It is a trick to lull us, to win time for them.”

  The President was back on the Doomsday circuit again.

  He spoke very slowly this time, his tone as void of emotion as his adversary’s had so often been. “Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, “understand this, I beg you. There are, at this moment, thirtytwo Poseidon missiles targeted on your nation. They can destroy every living creature on Libyan soil. I will give the order to fire those missiles, even if it means the destruction of the finest city on earth, if you have not agreed to extend your ultimatum and end this unacceptable attempt to blackmail another nation by eight o’clock tonight. I pray God, sir, you believe my words.”

  The Libyan did not stir on hearing them. Nor did he choose to measure the horror and dismay they caused in the men around him as the finality of what they were heading to had registered on them.

  “I cannot and I will not live in a world without justtice for my brothers,”

  he answered. “I and my people are ready to die for the justice you deny us.”

  His intelligence chief exploded at his words. “Nol” he shouted. “We are not. You have no right. You have no right to sacrifice us and our children, a whole nation, for this. You can’t go through with it.”

  Qaddafi did not look at the man when he replied. His dark unfathomable eyes were riveted to some distant vision whose outlines only they could perceive.

  “I can, my brother,” he whispered, “and I have.”

  * * *

  As Qaddafi lapsed into an impenetrable silence, a third of the way around the world in the city he menaced three men stared at a map of Greenwich Village. Al Feldman had held Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand at his Sixth Precinct search headquarters as part of his mobile reserve.

  “Something isn’t right,” he told them, studying the areas they had already searched. “We should have found the damn thing by now.”

  Angelo shuddered. “Christ,” he said, “you don’t suppose I could have been wrong, do you?”

  He was interrupted by a shout to Feldman from across the room. “Hey, Chief,” an officer called, “they want you on the amplifier to the other command post.”

  Among the underground headquarters’ many communication circuits was a copy of the New York State Police’s intelligence network, and Feldman’s caller had just torn a routine allpoints bulletin from its Teleprinter.

  “Chief,” he said, “they got a DOA up in Spring Valley. Suspected murder.

  The guy’s an Arab and his ident is close to one of those guys we’re looking for.”

  “Read it to me,” Feldman ordered.

  The officer read:

  “1532 Code 71 Caucasian Male discovered DOA, 32 High Farms Road by Spring Valley PD. NYSP Troop C, McManus IC, dispatched. Victim’s height approx. 5‘10”. Weight 185. ID given by Lebanese Passport 234671 issued Beirut November 22, 1979, as Ibrahim Abboud. Electronic Engineer born Beirut September 12, 1941. Entered USA JFK International Airport in December this year. Probable cause of death: violent assault. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Identifying marks or features: brown moustache. Tattoo inside right forearm of dagger, snake and heart.”

  “Tattool Jesus Christ, did you say tattoo?” Feldman was shouting with excitement. “Get me that file the French sent us last night,” he screamed at Dewing. He rummaged through it until he found what he was looking for.

  “That’s him!” he screamed. Everyone in the crowded top floor of the Six Precinct froze at his shout. “That’s one of the guys we’re looking forl”

  * * *

  At almost the same moment, Art Gelb of the Times was accepting a collect call from Las Vegas.

  “Mr. Gelb,” came a distant and timid voice. “This is your Reno stringer.

  I’m sorry it took a while to get the information you wanted about that guy McClintock.”

  “Oh yeah, that guy in Safeguards out there. Some kind of chemical safeguards, I suppose.”

  “No, Mr. Gelb,” the stringer replied. “He’s assigned to one of those hush-bush government-organizations that work in a restricted area out at McCarran Airport. It’s called NEST, for Nuclear Explosive Search Teams.

  They’re meant to go out and look for hidden radioactive materials, stuff that might be stolen from a nuclear power plant. Eventually, even a hidden atomic bomb.”

  The stringer continued, but Gelt wasn’t listening anymore. He had gone suddenly limp. Oh, my God, he thought, how they’ve lied to us!

  * * *

  The officer of the New York State Police Troop C in charge of investigating Whalid Dajani’s murder raced toward his squad car.

  “Hurry, Captain,” his deputy shouted. “It’s an emergency.”

  The captain grabbed the radio out of his hands, listened to Al Feldman a minute, then turned to his deputy. “Quick. Get that lady in there who saw them take off.”

  Flushed and excited by her sudden prominence, Dorothy Burns was bundled out of her house and down to the squad car by two burly state policemen. Miles away, bursting with strain and excitement, Dewing and Feldman interrogated her in the chaos and confusion of their Sixth Precinct search headquarters.

  They already had the time her call had been logged in by the Spring Valley police, 1532. From the overwrought woman they drew out two other vital pieces of information, a description of the man and woman she had seen running out of the house and the color of the car, dark green, in which they had raced off.

  “It’s the other two!” Feldman said, listening to her. “It’s got to be.”

  Bannion, Hudson and the CIA’s Salisbury were gathered around the Chief’s desk following the conversation. “Where the hell would they be racing off to?” Feldman asked the state trooper. “Are you near any big arterial highways up there?”

  “Yeah,” the trooper replied. “There’s an entrance to the New York State Thruway about half a mile down the road.”

  “In the direction they were going?”

  * * *

  Feldman looked at the men around him. “That’s it!” he shouted. “They’re taking off! They’re heading north before it explodes.” He turned back to the squawk box which linked him to the squad car in Spring Valley.

  “Captain,” he yelled, “get a car up to the toll gates just as fast as you can drive! Try to get me a confirmation from the guys that collect the tolls that that’s where they went.”

  The captain shouted an order. One of the three cars turned around and screeched off, its siren shrieking.

  * * *

  In New York Feldman shouted for a map of New York State. A dozen cops ran through the building looking for one. Finally a patrolman rushed up with an old Esso road map he had found in the glove compartment of his car.

  Hastily, Feldman spread the map on his desk.

  “They must be going north, right?” He checked his watch. “We know they took off thirty-seven minutes ago. They couldn’t have done more than fifty miles in that time.” He made a quick calculation, then jabbed the map north of Kingston. “They’ve got to be between Spring Valley and here. We’ve got to seal off that Thruway right away. Get police cars to close off every exit ramp. Have the State Police throw up roadblocks at Newburgh and Kingston.

  Flood the highway with cars. Stop every green vehicle they see. We’ve got to take these bastards!”

  * * *

  Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of The New York Times, stared at his deputy managing editor. The usually volatile, animated Gelb had a face on him as grim as a Florentine death mask.

  “What the hell is the matter with you, Art?” Rosenthal asked. “Are you sick or something?”

  Gelb closed Rosenthal’s office door to be sure that no one could overhear him, then repeated what his Las Vegas stringer had said. This time, it was Rosenthal who paled. He was a disheveled roly-poly man in his late fifties, sometimes described by his subordinat
es behind his back as a rumpled teddy bear. The description was inept. There was no Winnie-the-Pooh geniality in Abe Rosenthal. Without a word to Gelb he picked up his phone and called Police Plaza.

  “I don’t give a damn where he is or what he’s doing,” he snarled at the Police Commissioner’s harassed detective-secretary. “I want to talk to him immediately and I’ll hold on here until you get him.”

  It took several minutes to patch the call through the improvised lines to the Sixth Precinct, then to get Michael Bannion into a quiet corner away from the distress and turmoil of the search center.

  * * *

  Rosenthal wasted no time in chitchat when he heard the Commissioner’s voice. “I understand you told one of my editors your people are out looking for a barrel of chlorine gas hidden in this city, Commissioner?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right, Mr. Rosenthal, and I can’t tell you how much we’d appreciate your help at the Times in keeping this from the public until we’ve been able to locate and neutralize it.”

  “Hidden by some Palestinian terrorists, I understand?”

  “That is correct.” Despite the strain under which he had been living, Bannion’s baritone was as resonant, as commanding as ever.

  “Commissioner, you’re a goddamn liar. There’s an atomic bomb in that barrel. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people in this city at risk and you’re refusing to tell them their lives are in danger.

  You don’t expect The New York Times to go along with that, do you? To stand by silent, after we’ve been lied to, knowing that thousands of the people we serve are threatened with death?”

  A stunned silence followed his words. At the Sixth Precinct, Bannion had clapped his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. He was waving frantically at an aide. “Get Washingtonl” he shouted. “Get the President! The secret’s out!”

  * * *