“Christ!” said a passerby beside him. “Just like those guys used to burn themselves over in ‘nam.”
The trooper shook his head. “Crazy broad,” he said wonderingly. “Whatever got into her? All I had her for on the radar was seven miles over the limit.”
* * *
The first instinctive reaction of most of the relieved and exhausted men in the NSC conference room at the news that the bomb had been found and defused was to urge the President to launch the missiles targeted on Libya in the nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean. It was only 6:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, two and a half hours before the extension of Qaddafi’s ultimatum was due to expire, and he would not be expecting an attack.
The President overruled his advisers. The two million Libyans the U.S.
rockets would destroy would, he argued, be as innocent victims as the citizens of New York would have been.
The Israelis, Bennington pointed out, would do it anyway. No, the President argued, they would not. Their urge to do so would be swiftly tempered by the sobering realization that Qaddafi now had deployed along his eastern frontier a string of missiles capable of causing untold destruction in Israel if an attack was launched on his country. For both Israel and Libya, a day of cold realism was dawning: their mutual possession of the weapons of mass destruction promised them no happier a salvation than possession of those weapons had offered the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for three decades-the prospect of mutual suicide.
“But for God’s sake, Mr. President,” the CIA chief protested, “we’re not going to let him get away with this?”
“No,” the President replied, “we are not.”
* * *
For Muammar al-Qaddafi and the knot of men around him in the Villa Pietri, the two-and-a-half-hour wait for the expiration of their ultimatum was a slow descent toward hell, toward the growing certainty that the gamble had failed, that they and two million of their countrymen would shortly die to pay for the error of their leader whose unbending fanaticism they had been all too ready to follow.
As the minutes rolled by after nine with nothing happening, no rockets streaking toward their shores over the radar screen, their fear and resignation turned to incomprehension. So great had the tension become that the terse message from Washington informing them the bomb had been found and defused was greeted with relief and even, by some, with satisfaction.
Two minutes later, the radio operator returned bearing a second message, marked for the eyes only of the Libyan dictator. Qaddafi paled slightly reading it. Whom was it from? The CIA? The Mossad?
He looked at the men around him, recalling their growing bitterness and disillusionment as the failure of his scheme had become evident. What did it matter whom it was from? The answer was probably here, somewhere in this circle of faces ringing him, jailing him in the consequences of his act.
He rose and left the room, headed up to the villa and down the path to the sea. For a long time he stood there by the water’s edge. Then he turned away to face inland, toward the distant solitude of his desert. As he did, the paper he clasped in his hand, the paper his radio clerk had handed him a few minutes before, dropped to the ground. The wind picked it up and sent it scurrying along the beach, until gradually it disappeared from sight. It bore just fifteen words, a prophetic message from the fourth chapter of the Koran: Wheresoever ye shall be, death will overtake you, even though you be in lofty towers.
Примечания
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Defense Condition
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The Fifth Horseman Page 55
