The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  Other agents were going through the files of the Maritime Association of the Port of New York looking for ships that had called at Tripoli, Benghazi, Latakia, Beirut, Basra or Aden in the past six months and subsequently dropped off cargo on the Atlantic seaboard. A similar operation was under way at the air freight terminal of every international airport between Maine and Washington, D.C.

  Finally, Dewing had ordered a check run on every American who held, or had ever held, a “cosmic top secret” clearance for access to the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was typical of the thoroughness with which Dewing’s bureau worked that shortly after 8 P.M. Mountain Time an FBI car turned into 1822 Old Santa Fe Trail, a twisting highway leading northeast out of the capital of New Mexico along the route over which the wagon trains of the old Santa Fe trail had once rolled. With its silver RFD mailbox, the yellow metallic newspaper tube with the words New Mexican on its side, the one-story adobe house at the end of the drive was a supremely average American home.

  There was nothing average about the Polish-American mathematician who lived inside. Stanley Ulham was the man whose brain had unlocked the secret of the hydrogen bomb. It was one of the supreme ironies in history that on the spring morning in 1951 when he had made his fateful discovery, Stanley Ulham was trying to demonstrate with mathematical certainty that it was impossible to make the bomb based on the premise that had underlain years of scientific effort. He did. But in doing so, he uncovered the glimmering of an alternative approach that just might work.

  * * *

  He could have wiped that terrible knowledge from his blackboard with a swipe of his eraser, but he would not have been the scientist he was if he had. Chain-smoking Pall Malls, flailing feverishly at his blackboard with stubs of chalk, he laid bare the secret of the H bomb in one frantic hour of thought.

  The FBI agent did not require even that much time to clear the father of the H bomb of any possible complicity in the threat to New York. Standing in his doorway, watching the agent drive away, Ulham couldn’t help remembering the words he had uttered to his wife on that fateful morning when he had made his discovery: “This will change the world.”

  * * *

  A gray veil of cigarette smoke hung over the National Security Council conference room despite the continuous functioning of the building’s intensive aircirculation system. It was a few minutes past ten; not quite two hours remained before the ultimatum period contained in the threat message was due to begin. Paper cups and plates littered with the remains of the cheese sandwiches and black-bean soup the President had ordered the White House kitchen to send in to the conferees were scattered along the table and by the 15ase of the room’s paneled walls.

  At the far end of the room, three Air Force colonels finished assembling a group of charts and maps. The senior officer, a youthful-looking colonel with a tapestry of freckles covering his face, stepped forward.

  “Mr. President, gentlemen, we’ve been asked how Qaddafi or a terrorist group could transmit a radio signal from Tripoli to New York to detonate the device on the blueprint we’ve been shown, and what technological resources we possess to prevent such a signal from coming in.

  “Basically, there are three ways you can detonate this. The first is a kamikaze volunteer who baby-sits the bomb with orders to set it off at a certain time if he doesn’t get a counterorder.”

  “Colonel,” Bennington interjected, “if this threat is really from Qaddafi, that is very much the last method he’d use. He’d want absolute control over this himself.”

  “Right, sir,” the colonel replied. “In that case, there are two ways to do it, by telephone or radio.” The room was still, all eyes fixed on the speaker. “To attach the power pack you’d require for this to the ordinary telephone is a very simple matter. Just a question of opening the telephone and connecting a couple of wires. That way the pulse of an incoming call is routed into a preprogrammed signature detector. The pulse opens a circuit into a microprocessor in which a preprogrammed code has been stored. The microprocessor automatically compares it with the code, and if the two match it releases a five-volt charge of electricity into the bomb.

  “The beauty of this is a wrong number can’t set it off by mistake; and all a man has to do to explode the bomb is call that number from anywhere in the world and feed it his signal.”

  “It’s as easy as that?” the President, jarred, asked.

  “Yes, sir, I’m afraid it is.”

  “Can New York be isolated, absolutely sealed off from all incoming telephone calls?” the President asked.

  “No, sir,” the Colonel replied. “I’m afraid that’s a technological impossibility.”

  He turned authoritatively back to his briefing charts. “It is our judgment, however, that in a situation such as the one we’ve been given, Qaddafi or a terrorist group would choose radio to detonate the device. It would offer more flexibility and is completely independent of existing communications systems. For a transmission over this distance, he’d have to use long waves which bounce off the ionosphere and come back down to earth. That means low frequencies.”

  “How many frequencies would be available to him for something like this?”

  the President asked.

  “From Tripoli to New York, a megahertz. One million cycles.”

  “Ore million!” The President rubbed the stub of his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Could we jam all one million of those frequencies?”

  “Sir, if you did that you’d wipe out all our own communications. We’d close down the police, the FBI, the military, the fire departments, everything we’d need in an emergency.”

  “Never mind. Suppose I gave the order, could we do it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “We simply don’t have the transmitter capacity.”

  “How about all our jamming devices in Europe?”

  “They’re useless in this case. Too far away.”

  “He’s going to need something to receive this radio signal in New York,”

  Bennington remarked. “Some kind of directional antenna.”

  “Yes, sir, the easiest thing would be to put one in a standard television antenna on a rooftop and connect it to a pre-amplifier. Then the signal could be picked up and transmitted to his bomb wherever it is in the building over the television antenna cable.”

  “Surely you could put a fleet of helicopters over Manhattan and scan the frequencies he might use. Get his device to answer back, then pick it up by direction finders, triangulation?”

  “Yes, sir, we have the capacity to do that. But it would work only if his system is programmed to respond. If it’s only programmed to receive, we’d get no reply.”

  “Well, there’s another way to do it if it turns out to be from Qaddafi,”

  Bennington said. His pipe was out and everyone in the room had to hang attendant on his words while he struck a match. “Explode half a dozen nukes in the atmosphere over Libya. That’ll set up an electromagnetic blanket that will smother any radio communications out of there for at least two hours. Shut them down completely.”

  “Mr. President.” It was Eastman. “For my part I don’t believe this threat is really from Qaddafi; but in the unlikely event that it is, we’re going to have to make some assumptions, and the first one I would make is. that he’s not going to expose himself to such evident retaliation. He’ll have a fail-safe system like a ship hidden somewhere out there in the Atlantic”-he waved at the vast blue stain on the map behind the colonel-“from which he or someone else can always detonate the bomb if we lay a preventive strike on Libya.”

  The President nodded in agreement and looked back at the briefing officer.

  “The basic question to which we need an answer, Colonel, is this: Do we or do we not have any technological devices, systems or whatever which can guarantee that we can prevent a radio signal from being beamed into New York to detonate this thing if, in fact, it actually exists and it’s really in New York?”<
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  The colonel tensed nervously at his question. “No, sir,” he replied. “I’m afraid that given the present state of the art, trying to intercept or stop an incoming signal like this is scientifically impossible. It’s like trying to catch the right snowflake in the middle of a blizzard.”

  As he was speaking, the red light on the telephone at Eastman’s elbow flashed. It was the Army Signal Corps warrant officer in charge of the White House switchboard. Eastman stiffened listening to him.

  “Mr. President,” he announced, “the switchboard’s just received a telephone message from an anonymous caller. He hung up before they could trace the call. He said there was a message for you of the utmost importance in locker K602 in the luggage containers next to the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal at National Airport.”

  * * *

  One fly-specked light bulb dangling from an overhead cord lit the garage.

  Its pale cone of light left pools of untouched shadow clinging to the garage’s walls and corners. At the back of the garage, a six-foot-wide cement loading dock rose above the black curds of oil and grease staining the floor. The dock’s back wall was a thin partition separating the garage from the abandoned warehousing area to the rear. Through it, a faint scraping sound drifted into the garage. Laila Dajani shuddered, listening to it. It was the sound of rats scurrying through the deserted warehouse.

  Her brother Kamal sat on a cot set up at the end of the platform, near a forklift truck. The passenger of the Dionysos twisted an air pistol in one hand. To his right, against the wall, were his latest victims, a pair of dead rats.

  Laila’s second brother, the eldest of the trio, had just entered the garage. Whalid Dajani was in agony. His face was pale; specks of sweat sparkled at his temples.

  “Why don’t you take another pill?” Laila demanded, her tone almost peevish.

  “I’ve already taken five. That’s all I’m supposed to take.” He showed his sister the package of Tagamet pills she had gotten for him to ease the pain of the ulcer for which he’d earlier gulped his glass of milk on Broadway.

  “It says so on here.” His eyes turned away to the far end of the platform.

  It was there, just inside the shadows, a long, dark form like that of a shark lurking below the surface of the water. It was painted black.

  Stenciled in white around the barrel’s waist were the name and address of the import-export firm to which it had been destined. Cords kept it firmly lashed to the pallet on which it had arrived.

  He dabbed at his damp brow. Don’t think, they had told him. Don’t think of anything but your mission. But how did you not think? How did you force from your mind what you’d seen: the faces, the seas and seas of faces, young faces, faces of misery and indifference, faces of laughter and happiness? The faces of little girls on their sleds in Central Park; of the black policeman telling him where to get off the subway; of the newsstand vendor, half snarling, half laughing “Good morning,” selling him his paper.

  How could he not see the crowds, the buildings, the rushing cars, the lights that represented so many lives? Behind him, Whalid heard the cot creak as his brother got up. “I’m thirsty,” he mumbled. “Anyone want a Coke?”

  Dazed, Whalid shook his head. Kamal stepped to a carton by the wall and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey. “Maybe this is the medicine you need.”

  “God, no.” Whalid grimaced. “Not while my ulcer’s bothering me like this.”

  Laila stirred impatiently. “How much time do we have left?”

  “Enough,” Kamal answered. He picked a piece of cold pizza from a flat cardboard box by his cot. As he did, his sister noticed the name and address of the restaurant where he’d bought it printed on the carton.

  “Are you sure no one’s going to be able to identify you in those places?” she asked.

  Kamal gave her an angry glance. The constant boss. “Let’s set up our firing circuits,” he said.

  “Why?” Whalid protested. “We still have plenty of time.”

  “Because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

  Whalid sighed and walked over to a gray metal case the size of a large attach6 case resting on the floor beside his bomb. Nothing could have looked more innocent, more benign, than that case. Decals from TWA, Lufthansa, half a dozen of Europe’s best hotels were stuck to it. Indeed, the Customs officer at JFK had stopped Whalid as he was entering the country with it on Thursday bearing a Lebanese passport identifying him as Ibrahim Abboud, an electrical engineer.

  “It’s a microprocessor tester,” Whalid had explained, “to check to see if computers are working properly.”

  “Ah,” the Customs officer had remarked admiringly, closing the case that was designed to help destroy his city, “complicated, isn’t it?”

  Just how complicated he could not have imagined. The case had-indeed been adapted from a microprocessor tester, a U.S.-made Testline Adit 1000. One blazing summer’s day in July, the technical director of the Libyan telephone system had showed a Testline 1000 to Ishui Kamaguchi, the resident director of Nippon Electric, the Japanese firm which had installed Libya’s telephones. What he wanted, he had explained, was an adaptation of the device which would offer a means of remote radio control of an electrical discharge, a system that would be both infallible and absolutely inviolable.

  Six weeks later, Kamaguchi had presented the Libyans the case now on the garage floor and a bill for $165,000. Only the genius of the Japanese for miniaturization could have produced the array of fail-safe devices built into the case to frustrate any attempt to tamper with its functioning. It was equipped with a magnetic-field detector that would order it to detonate instantly if it picked up any indication of an attempt to burn out its electronic circuitry with a magnetic field. There were static filters to counter any efforts to jam its radio receiver. Three tiny tubes sensitive to pressure changes protected it against the danger of gunfire or an explosion. Once it was hooked up, the pressure change caused by a New York telephone book falling toward the case would be sufficient to activate its circuits.

  While his brother watched intently, Whalid opened its triple locking system and folded back the case cover to reveal a pale-blue control panel. On it was a cathodetube screen, a keyboard and five keys bearing specific commands: END, AUTO, INIT, DATA, TEST. There was also a locked cassette player. Fixed into it was a thirtyminute BASF tape, a small red crescent in its upperright-hand corner. Programmed in Tripoli, it contained instructions for the case’s minicomputer.

  Two connecting cords were neatly coiled inside the cover. One was designed to be hooked up to Whalid’s bomb, the other to the cable running pp to the antenna Kamal had installed on the roof. Each was equipped with a “dead man control.” If any effort was made to disengage them once they had been hooked up they would automatically activate the firing system. Hidden below the panel’s blue surface was a radio receiver, a microprocessor, the minicomputer and a brace of powerful, long-lasting lithium batteries.

  As the two brothers watched, the cathodetube screen lit up with a green glow. The words “STAND BY” formed on the screen. Whalid glanced at them, then punched the key marked nrIT. The word “IDENTIFICATION” appeared on the screen.

  Carefully, Whalid punched the code OIC2 onto the keyboard. The word “CORRECT” appeared on the screen. Had his code been wrong, “INCORRECT” would have appeared there and Whalid would have had exactly thirty seconds to correct his mistake or the case would have autodestructed.

  On the screen, the words “STORAGE DATA” appeared. Whalid looked at the checklist in his sister’s hands, then punched F19A onto his keyboard.

  Through the tape player’s window he could see the BASF cassette begin to spin. It turned for just under a minute, transmitting its program to the minicomputer’s memory bank. The tape stopped and the words “STORAGE DATA: OK” arose on the screen.

  Whalid methodically punched three successive code numbers onto the keyboard, following each by tapping the key TEST. There was a pau
se after each code, then a phrase appeared on the screen: “COMPUTER CONTROL: OK”; “MICROPROCESSOR OK”; “RADIO FREQUENCY SIMULATION: OK.”

  “All right,” Whalid said, “everything’s working properly. Now we’ll test the manual firing system.”

  Fundamentally, the case had been designed to fire the bomb in response to a radio signal. It contained, however, a manually operated backup firing capability which any one of the three could operate if something went wrong. Whalid carefully formed the number 0636 on the keyboard. Those numbers had been chosen for their firing code because none of the Dajanis would ever forget them. They represented the date of the Battle of Yarmuk when the Arab warriors of Omar, the successor to the Prophet, defeated the Byzantines by the Sea of Galilee and established Arab domain over their lost homeland. As Whalid’s finger tapped the second “6,” the green light on the screen blinked off. For two seconds, it was replaced by a bright-red glow.

  “It works.” Whalid shuddered. “We can detonate from here if we have to.” He glanced at his watch, then up at the ceiling. “We’ve got seventeen minutes to go.”

  * * *

  In Washington, D.C.‘s, National Airport, a tight police cordon screened off several dozen late-evening travelers stretching and straining to follow the progress of the FBI’s capital Bomb Squad. Cautiously, the agents scanned the bank of gray metal luggage lockers with Geiger counters, looking for radioactivity. They found none. Then three German shepherds trained to detect the scent of high explosives were led along the locker ranks. Finally, a pair of agents employing a touch as delicate, as precise as that of Japanese women assembling the circuitry of a computer chip unscrewed the door to locker K602 and gently eased it from its hinges.