The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Somewhere up in the darkness he heard a dog bark. Oh shit, he thought, not that. Don’t let there be a dog around here. He stopped to listen for voices to see if more than one person were in there. He heard none. For a second he considered what his moves should be when he reached the door, now ten feet away. The guy in there had killed his own brother a couple of hours ago. And that thing he had could blow the whole Village away. You wouldn’t want to just tap on the door and say, “Hello-police,” at a time like this.

  He resumed his advance. His pistol was pointing down, his finger outside the trigger guard. It was hard to see there, but he could whip it up and get off a fast hip shot if he had to. It was a heavy-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 because Angelo knew well the longer the barrel, the more accuracy you got. And it was a very impressive weapon if you ever had to face off anybody.

  Inside, the word “CORRECT” gleamed in the reading window of the bomb’s control case. Kamal tapped on the keyboard the code to open the case, then removed the blank thirty-minute BASF tape his brother had placed inside. He picked up the original tape bearing its firing instructions for the bomb preprogrammed in Tripoli. As he did, a strange, incongruous memory overwhelmed him. It took him back several years to a windswept plateau above Damascus. His squad of fedayeen, out on a training mission, had stumbled on a bird’s nest filled with newborn birdlings. The squad leader had placed one in each of his recruits’ hands. Crush them, he ordered, crush them with one swift, brutal gesture. That, he had explained, was how a fedayee had to learn to stifle his emotions: coldly, completely, at the first stirrings of life.

  It was a lesson Kamal Dajani had never forgotten. He could almost feel once again in his palm the slick pulp of the life he had snuffed out that day as slowly, deliberately, he fitted the original tape back into its sprockets in the detonation case.

  * * *

  Angelo was at the door. He froze. Outside, the wail of sirens was drawing closer. He cursed himself. Why didn’t I tell them to come in silently?

  They’ll scare the guy. He inched forward and peeped inside. He could see a man’s head, bent over, and there it was right in front of him, the barrel they were all looking for, a long black object in the shadows. Despite his efforts to keep himself under control, he trembled sighting it.

  He could barely see the figure behind its dark form. The guy was down there on his hands and knees working. All he was giving him was a head shot. And there was the barrel. You’d have to aim high so you didn’t hit that. The thing to do, Angelo understood, was to try to move him away from the barrel, then hold him away from it until help came up.

  Angelo eased himself flat against the wall inside the doorway to narrow the angle of the return shot the guy could fire at him. Slowly he drew up his gun, pressing it to the wall for support. Angelo was no gun buff, you’d never find him out at a shooting range Sunday afternoons like some guys, but he was good reliable shot, in the nineties when he shot for the record twice a year at the police range up at Rodman’s Neck. He took his halfbreath, then roared the stock phrase that was drilled into every police officer in the city: “Police-don’t move!”

  Kamal was so concentrated on the bomb’s detonation box that Angelo’s shout took him completely by surprise. Instinctively, he dove to the floor behind the barrel. Angelo fired.

  He missed. The shot went high, just over the barrel. Kamal’s flashlight, jarred from his hand in his sudden fall, rolled down the loading ramp and tumbled with a thud onto the floor, two feet below. He reached for his own weapon, a Browning 9mm. fifteen-shot automatic. As he was falling, he had glimpsed the American in the doorway. Kamal stretched until he could peer around the end of the barrel at the vague outline of the doorway. Swiftly he sent a burst of fire tearing into the darkness toward the door, a pattern of six shots stitching it up and down.

  Angelo wasn’t there. He was sprawled flat on the floor, his eyes clenched in fright, listening to the rounds roar past his head, then the whir of the ricochets bouncing around the doorway. He had dropped to the floor the instant he fired his first round, reacting without thinking, changing his stance from the one Kamal had seen at the instant he looked up in response to his shout.

  He tried to lie still, his face pressed against the damp concrete, hoping the guy would think he’d killed him and make another move. Outside he heard footsteps racing down the corridor, then Rand’s voice shouting, “Angelo, Angelo, are you okay?”

  In the street outside, two parked cars and the first Emergency Service truck screeched to a halt. The Emergency Service men, giants in helmets and bulletproof vests, leaped out, grabbing their shotguns from the long green boxes in the van of their truck, throwing shells of double-O buck into them as they charged for the door.

  “Who’s in there?” they shouted at the first patrolman who had reached the scene.

  “Two of our guys,” he answered. “Big guy in a gray topcoat, a guy in a gabardine raincoat.”

  At the end of the corridor, Rand was drawing up to the doorway. Again Angelo could hear him shouting, “Angelo, are you okay?”

  Don’t move into that doorway, kid! Angelo wanted to scream the warning. He lay there forcing himself into the floor, listening for the first warning rustle, watching for the first movement behind the barrel.

  “You all right?”

  For Christ’s sake, kid. It was as though Angelo was trying to shriek his thought to Rand by mental telepathy across the wall separating them: Don’t step into that fucking doorwayl

  “Angelol”

  Lying in the cement and filth, Angelo heard the two quick steps. Then everything happened at once: the head rising behind the barrel, the automatic banging away in the dark, five quick shots tearing over his head as he raised the Smith and Wesson in both hands and fired. The head behind the barrel jerked up, then tumbled backward. From behind him, Angelo heard a strange voice shouting, “Police-don’t movel” A burst of light from the Emergency Service lanterns flooded the room, and with it came the terrible boom of exploding shotgun barrels, two of them riddling Kamal Dajani’s body with double-O buckshot.

  Angelo rolled over, limp with fear and spent emotion. He staggered to one knee. Rand was just behind him, crumpled against the back wall of the corridor where the force of Dajani’s bullets had hurled his body. The detective lurched to him. “Get an ambulancel” he yelled. “Get an ambulancel”

  He knelt down beside Rand. One of Kamal’s shots had torn into his face just below the nose, turning his handsome features into a mush of blood and bone. Two other shots had hit him in the upper body, and blood oozed over his shirt, his jacket and his raincoat. Angelo cupped an arm behind Rand’s neck and lifted the bloody, unrecognizable face toward his, realizing as he did that they wouldn’t be needing an ambulance for Jack Rand. He pressed the lifeless head against his chest like a mother consoling a weeping child, only it was he who was weeping.

  “How could I tell you, kid?” he cried. “Why couldn’t you figure it out? Why did you have to go by that goddamn book?”

  Two Emergency Service men rushed into the room, stepping over Angelo and Rand’s body as they did. One had a Geiger counter. He ran it along the barrel, then looked aghast at his readings.

  “Christi” he exclaimed. “Where are the scientists?”

  * * *

  The scientists were already there, alerted by Angelo’s first call, racing down the hall, John Booth at their head. The burly nuclear physicist saw the blue firing case and almost toppled an Emergency Service man leaping away from it.

  “Who was here when this happened?”

  An Emergency Service lieutenant pointed to Angelo.

  “What was he doing?” Booth asked, indicating Kamal’s corpse. “Was he right next to that blue box?”

  He gave a grateful sigh at Angelo’s reply. His first concern had been that the case was protected by a proximity detector that will trigger an automatic response if someone approaches it.

  “Okay,” he said to the Emergency Service officer. “T
wo men on the door.

  Everybody else out.”

  With Jack Delaney, his mountain-climbing friend from the Livermore Laboratories, Booth squatted down on the floor beside the blue box. He saw the word “CORRECT” glowing on its screen. The dead terrorist, he realized, had been trying either to open the box or to give his computer new instructions. He scrutinized the olive-drab plugs linking the case to the aerial and the bomb. He understood instantly there was no question of disconnecting them.

  “What do you think, Jack?” Delaney was an expert on firing mechanisms. “Do we try to get in there with the laser cannon?”

  “Suppose it’s pressurized with inert gas.”

  Booth nodded thoughtfully. That was a classic technique. Stuff the thing with helium or azote to protect it. If the case was opened and the gas started to escape, a gauge detected the drop in pressure and triggered the firing mechanism.

  “We’ll punch a pinhole in it first. Go down to a hundredth of a millimeter and take a reading for escaping gas. If there’s any in there we’ll melt the plastic around the hole with the laser and seal it back up.”

  “It’s a risk,” Delaney said, “but we could try it.”

  A special NEST truck packed with sophisticated defusing devices accompanied Booth’s teams every time they went into action. Over a dozen times, his anonymous beige van had been flown by Booth’s aircraft from Las Vegas to some menaced U.S. city. Never before, however, had he and his fellow scientists had to use the equipment it contained.

  Delaney and his two aides rushed in the truck’s highpowered laser gun with its independent power supply and set it up on the floor beside the case.

  Booth sprawled flat on his stomach, aiming the gun at the flank of the case like a kid in a shooting gallery taking aim at a target. He marked with a speck of white paint the point at which he intended to punch a hole in the case, so that Delaney could install just below it his gas-detection device.

  Booth took a breath and held it to still the nervous fluttering of his hands. He pressed the gun’s button and sent at the case one powerful jolt of light energy thinner than a pin but powerful enough to cut through the wall of a steel safe. Delaney’s eyes were fixed on the gas detector. The two men waited, not speaking, for thirty, forty-five seconds.

  “It’s clean,” Delaney said finally.

  Booth exuded an enormous sigh of relief and altered the firing mechanism of the gun to expand his beam. Employing it like a remotely controlled knife, be sliced four cuts two inches long in the form of a square into the case’s side wall. Delaney crept over and inserted a razor-thin scalpel into the top cuts. As delicately as a brain surgeon cutting a tumor from a vital nerve, he tugged on it until the plastic plaque tumbled to the ground.

  Booth crawled over and with a high-intensity light peered into the transistored jungle of wiring inside. “My God,” he gasped, “how did the Libyans ever get access to something like this?”

  Toward the rear of the case he spotted a pair of wires, one red, one blue.

  They were thicker than the wires running into the heart of the box from the keyboard. The positive and negative lead from the power supply, he realized. They could slice them with the laser. He hesitated. No, he cautioned himself. Suppose it’s set to detonate if there’s a sudden drop in the current?

  He returned to his slow, thoughtful study of the case’s interior. There was only one way to do it: burn out the computer’s memory bank. You could try to do it with an electromagnetic burst. Or flood it with ultraviolet rays.

  Booth rolled over on his back, away from the case. He and Delaney weighed the alternatives. This was not something about which you would want to make a mistake.

  “Ultraviolet,” Delaney said finally. “There might be some sensing device in there to pick up an electromagnetic beam.”

  Again they sent to the truck outside for their specialized equipment.

  Carefully, Booth aligned the objective of the ray’s beam-caster on a clump of plaques of resin covered with a forest of wires, the microprocessor chips that stored the computer’s memory. The two Emergency Service men guarding the door watched, their feelings a mixture of terror and fascination.

  Finally Booth pulled back. “Jackl” he ordered. “You double-check that alignment.”

  Delaney looked along the objective’s line of fire, studying its projected path intently. The transfixed Emergency Service men watched in horrified silence.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I think we’ve got it.”

  Booth activated the machine. For fifteen interminable seconds there was not a sound in the room. Then suddenly a beep-beep-beep came from the case. It was faint and shrill, but to the tense men in the garage it sounded like a roar of gunfire.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” shrieked one of the Emergency Service men, furiously blessing himself. “It’s going off!”

  Booth rolled over, the release of tension so great he broke into hysterical laughter.

  “It’s not going to do anything anymore. It’s all over!” he roared. “The computer’s gone crazy.” Now he knew there was not even a million-in-one chance it could find its firing instructions.

  * * *

  Outside, the crowds, attracted by the shooting, by the dozen police vehicles cluttering Charles Street, were already pushing up against the police lines, gawking, exchanging excited speculation on what had happened. The media were there, the TV stations with the trucks setting up their cameras and their lights right in front of the warehouse doors, ready to record the statement Patricia McGuire, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, was completing in the front seat of the Commissioner’s car.

  A police ambulance pulled away from the curb, and four patrolmen opened a path in the crowd so that it could get out to West Street. It contained the bodies of Jack Rand and Kamal Dajani, riding off side by side on their last journey, to the police morgue.

  Angelo slumped against the side of one of the Emergency Service trucks. He was pale and panting, hyperventilating, skirting along the edge of hysteria where tears and laughter are inextricably mingled. Over and over again he thought of Rand. What could I have done, he kept asking himself, how could I have kept him out of that doorway?

  A young black patrolman came up to him, eyes sparkling with admiration.

  “Hey,” he said, “terrific job. Hear you really blew that prick away.”

  Angelo looked at him blankly, thinking as he did of the other body riding off to the morgue beside Rand. It had been the first time in thirty years as a New York police officer that he had to kill someone in the line of duty.

  Bannion pushed through the circle of admirers around the detective and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. “Great work,” he enthused.

  “Wonderful. You’ll get a citation for this. I’m going to try to swing you Chief of the Telegraph Bureau.

  Get you inspector’s money for what you did.”

  The officer in charge of the Emergency Service Squad joined them. “Excuse me, Commissioner,” he said, “but shouldn’t we put some of those yellow-and-black radiation warning signs around the area?”

  Twenty feet away, in the circle of television lights, the three men could hear the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information reading her prepared text for the press: “… explosive charge attached to the barrel of chlorine gas has now been deactivated. The barrel will shortly be transported in a bomb-disposal vehicle to the explosives range at Rodman’s Neck for further analysis and ultimate disposal.”

  The Commissioner turned back to the Emergency Squad officer.

  “No,” he replied. “Just put out the usual `Crime Scene’ signs.”

  * * *

  Every fiber of Laila Dajani’s being was concentrated on the concrete ribbon of the Saw Mill River Parkway slipping past the wheels of her car.

  It was as if it was only now, in this final determined flight, that she had mastered the injunction of her terror master, Carlos: don’t think.

  Instead of the doubt and hes
itation that had plagued her for days, her mind was focused on one simple, overwhelming desire: to survive, to get to Canada, to Vancouver and home.

  So intent was she on her driving that she did not see the blinking red lights or hear the first burst of the siren. When she finally saw the yellow New York State Police car moving up behind her in her rearview mirror, she did not hesitate. Somehow they had found her, traced the car.

  But she was not going to let the Americans catch her, not now. She drove the accelerator to the floor.

  Behind her, the New York State policeman saw her car bound forward. His instructions were strict. In a case like this you didn’t play the macadam cowboy, try to force the fleeing car off the road like they did in the movies. You kept the fleeing car in sight while you called in help. He reached for his radio.

  Laila saw her speedometer register 90, 95, 100, 110. She held the accelerator on the floorboard, trying to squeeze a few last thrusts of force from her car’s straining engine. The police car had dropped back a bit, now its red lights perhaps half a mile behind her. A little bit more, she thought, and she could risk leaving the highway, trying to lose him somehow in the open country.

  Her mind was so wrapped up in her flight that she did not see the black stain of ice spreading like an ink blot from the shoulder of the highway, the surface glistening faintly in the path of her headlights. For just an instant as her front wheels hit it, she sensed a gentle, almost euphoric sense of helplessness as the car went into a skid. Then she hit the guard rail. The car flipped like a toy, somersaulted into the southbound lane and crashed upside down. The cascade of sparks from steel scraping concrete that drifted up as it skidded over the highway found in seconds the spillings of her ruptured gas tank.

  By the time the state trooper reached the site, the car was an orange ball of flame, too hot to approach. Through their gusting swirls, he caught a quick glimpse of Laila’s corpse, a black stick figure in an orange fog.