The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “I have …” he began in an excited gasp.

  Qaddafi raised his hand to interrupt him. “First, coffee, my friend,” he said. “Afterward, inch’ Allah, we will talk.”

  He took Dajani by the arm and led him into the tent, where he picked up a brass coffee pot from the fire glowing in his brazier. He poured the pale Bedouin coffee into handleless porcelain cups shaped like oversized thimbles and offered the first one to his guest. They drank. Then Qaddafi lay back on the Oriental rugs thrown around the floor of his tent. The suspicion of a smile crossed his handsome face. “Now, my brother,” he said, “tell me your news.”

  “The package arrived,” the visitor replied, “last night.” He took a deep breath and held it trapped in his lungs as though trying to hold back with it the rush of words ready to spill from his mouth. Finally he exhaled a breath that reeked of the dozens of peppermint Lifesavers he had gulped to kill the odor of the Chivas Regal whiskey he had been sipping all night long. Alcohol was totally banned in Qaddafi’s domain.

  “I can’t believe it yet,” he said. “It’s all there. I studied it all night.” He shook his head in disbelief. Once again he saw the columns of figures plunging toward an infinity of power such as few minds had ever been privileged to contemplate.

  His vision, however, was not that of the limitless reserves of energy that had enfevered the mind of the French scientist who had first looked at them barely a week before. What Dajani had glimpsed was a vision of hell, the dark underside of the dream of fusion, the terms of a Faustian compact Alain Prevost and others pursuing his dream around the world had had to strike with the capricious gods of science. For, in opening to man the vista of unlimited energy for as long as he and his planet might endure, they had also exposed the keys to a force so destructive it could set a premature end to his, and his environment’s, existence. Frozen into the endless rows of figures in the computer printout Pr6vost had been taking to his meeting at the tlysee Palace was the secret of the hydrogen bomb.

  “Carlos and his people worked quickly,” Qaddafi observed. “You’re sure there’s no way this can be traced back here? Our relations with the French are vital.”

  Dajani shook his head. “They copied the papers right away. Then they called the French as though they were Corsican gangsters looking for a ransom.”

  “And the French believed them?”

  “Apparently.”

  Qaddafi rose from his carpet and moodily stirred the coals glowing in his brazier. “My brother,” he said, “when we started this operation you said the Frenchman was working on a new kind of energy.”

  His visitor nodded.

  “Why is it,” Qaddafi continued, “you were able to get the secret of the hydrogen bomb from what he was doing?”

  “Essentially,” Dajani replied, “what they were trying to do in Paris was to make a mini-mini-hydrogen-bomb explosion. A controlled one so that they could use the energy it released. People have been trying to do that for thirty years since the Americans exploded the first hydrogen bomb.”

  He paused, then reached to his temple and with a dramatic gesture plucked a single strand of hair from his balding head. He held it up before Qaddafi’s intrigued eyes. “What they were trying to do was to make a bubble no thicker than this hair explode. To do it, they had to squeeze it to one thousand times its normal density with a laser beam in a time so short the mind can’t imagine it.”

  Qaddafi’s eyes widened. “But why did the secret of the hydrogen bomb come out of that?”

  “Because with all experiments like this, the evolution of every ingredient is being constantly recorded by computer. For one tiny, tiny instant just before that little bubble exploded, it took on the one perfect configuration of a hydrogen bomb. Its secret, the exact relationship between its ingredients, is detailed here in the computer printout.”

  Qaddafi rose and walked in silence to the entrance of the tent. He stood there scrutinizing the horizon, incarnadined now by the fast-rising sun.

  For an instant he forgot what the scientist had just told him.

  Instinctively, as he had every dawn in the desert since he was a boy, he studied the sky for some precursor foretelling the arrival of the Bedouin’s timeless enemy, the guebli, the searing wind that rose in the desolate expanse of the Sahara. When the guebli blew, death rode its wings, and man and beast huddled together, as often he had with his father’s herd, seeking protection against the onrushing clouds of sand under which whole tribes had been known to vanish.

  This morning, though, the sky was a violent blue, not the silvery gray that heralded the guebli. He looked at it reassured, at the oneness of the vast canopy of sky and the endless horizons of his desert. The world stretching away from his tent was a cruel, harsh world; but it was a simple one in which choices and their consequences were clear: You crossed the sands in search of the well. You found the well and you survived. You did not and you died.

  Perhaps now with what his visitor had brought him, he had reached his well, the one for which he had been searching for so many years. For a moment, standing there in the morning sunlight before reentering his tent, Qaddafi thought of the story his father had told him of the kettate, the tattooed fortuneteller, who had appeared at their campsite as his mother screamed in the pain that preceded his birth. She had gone to the tent in which the men of the tribe sipped tea waiting for the birth and shook out on a carpet the twenty-three rigidly prescribed oddments of her trade, an old coin, a shard of glass, a dried date kernel, a bone from a camel’s hoof. Then she proclaimed it would beg a boy. He would be an anointed of God, she announced, a man destined to stand out from all the others, to perform God’s work in the service of his people. She had barely finished when the first part of her prophecy was confirmed. The scream of the midwife rang out from the woman’s tent calling out the ritual phrase that greeted a newborn male: “Allah akhbar-God is great.”

  Qaddafi turned back into the tent. From a copper pot he took a thick, creamy bowlful of leben, goat’s curd, and a black wad of dates, the Bedouin’s traditional breakfast. He set them on the carpet and bade his guest eat.

  Dipping a date into his curds, Qaddafi pondered, as he often did, on the old woman’s prophecy and how favored indeed he was in Allah’s eyes. Allah had given him a mission, to bring His peoples back to God’s way, to re-awaken the Arab people to their true destiny, to right the wrongs that had been done to his brothers. And He had given him the means to accomplish it, the oil without which those who had so long exploited his people could not survive. To get it from him, the others had had to offer him the means to his vision: wealth, the arms he had bought, the technology he had acquired, the science his people had learned, and now this prospect his visitor had laid before him-the prospect of the ultimate power on earth.

  “And, my brother,” he said to Dajani, “we can build this from these documents they brought you last night?”

  “It’s a long, hard road with many, many problems. First we must finish our atomic program. There will be difficulties and risks-the danger the Israelis will find out what we are doing and destroy us before we can succeed.”

  Qaddafi looked out to the desert stretching away from the tent, a distant gaze in his dark, brooding eyes. “My friend, there has never been greatness without danger. There has never been a great victory without great risks.”

  He rose, indicating to Dajani that the conversation was over. “You have done well, my brother,” he said, his voice almost reverent, “ever since Allah sent you here to help us. Now, thanks to you, at last we shall make justice prevail.”

  This time he walked his visitor back across the sands to his car. Gently he placed a hand on Whalid’s elbow. A faint, ironic smile crossed his features. “My brother,” he murmured, “perhaps you should not eat so many peppermints. Such things are bad for the good health God gave you.”

  * * *

  The vista laid bare to Muammar al-Qaddafi in his desert retreat was only the last, terrifying consequence of an e
nterprise the Libyan had pursued from the moment, almost, that he had seized power. Power was something the Bedouin dictator understood instinctively, and what better way to assert his claim to the leadership of a resurgent Arab world than to be the first Arab leader to arm his nation with the ultimate weapon?

  Qaddafi had taken his first step on the road to his desert rendezvous in 1969, shortly after he had consolidated his revolution. He sent his Prime Minister, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking with an offer to buy half a dozen atomic bombs from China’s nuclear arsenal. Rebuffed by the Chinese, Qaddafi turned to Westinghouse with a proposal to purchase a 600-megawatt nuclear reactor to desalinize sea water for irrigating his desert. Since no one in the world knew how to do that at anything remotely approaching an economically justifiable cost, the implication that Qaddafi had other uses in mind for the plant was clear. The State Department refused to authorize the sale despite the protests of Westinghouse and its congressional lobby.

  The Libyan then sought to buy an experimental reactor from Gulf General Atomic of San Diego. The reactor itself could not have been used to make an atomic bomb, but the fuel that Gulf General was ready to sell Qaddafi along with it-fully enriched uranium-was ideal bomb material. Henry Kissinger’s personal intervention was required to block that initiative.

  Qaddafi’s program got into high gear after the 1973 war and his realization that Israel possessed atomic weapons. He himself picked the program’s code name, Seif al Islam-“The Sword of Islam”-and placed it under the direct control of Prime Minister Jalloud’s office. Three principles were to guide it. First, the weapons program would be carried out under the cover of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. Second, Libya would look primarily to Europe for its technology. Third, every effort would be made to staff the program with Arab scientists, men either recruited from universities and nuclear programs or trained at Libyan expense in the best universities in the world.

  By the mid-seventies, the CIA began picking up indications that Libya was trying to recruit European nuclear engineers by dangling large Swiss-banked sums of money in front of them. One indication of how far the program’s tentacles could reach was the dismissal of Dr. Klaus Traube, manager of Germany’s Interatom Company responsible for research on the fast breeder reactor. Traube was revealed to have had a close relationship with Hans Joachim Klein, a young Libyan-trained terrorist who participated along with “Carlos” in the Vienna kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in December 1975.

  It was, however, to the explosion of India’s atomic “device” in the Rajasthan desert on May 19, 1974, that the Libyan owed his access to the secret of the atom. Pakistan’s Zulficar Ali Bhutto vowed that night that his countrymen would one day possess nuclear weapons to rival his neighbors’ even if they had “to eat grass” to get them. Given the impoverished state of Pakistan’s treasury, his might have been an idle boast had it not been for a secret deal Bhutto negotiated with Qaddafi. Its terms were simple: in return for Libya’s financing Pakistan’s purchase of a plutonium-reprocessing plant and several reactors from France, Qaddafi would receive some of the plutonium the Pakistanis intended to divert from the plant and access to their advanced nuclear technology.

  That arrangement ultimately collapsed when the French, under pressure from the United States, agreed to abandon the sale.

  In the meantime, Bhutto’s overthrow and subsequent execution had brought a brief chill to Libyan-Pakistani relations. The combination of Libyan financing and Pakistani technology was too promising, however, to be lost in a clash of personalities, and the original collaboration was renewed in General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq’s pursuit of the “Islamic Bomb.”

  While his cooperative effort with Pakistan continued, Qaddafi also pursued his attempts to set up a purely national program. In 1976 he persuaded Jacques Chirac, then France’s Prime Minister, to sell him the nuclear reactor for desalinizing sea water the Americans had earlier refused him.

  President Giscard d’Estaing quietly let the project fade until, under the pressures on France’s balance of payments created by the 1979-80 oil price rises, he reluctantly authorized the reactor’s sale.

  The most dramatic confrontation in Qaddafi’s long pursuit of the atomic bomb, however, had for its setting a place as remote from the goatskin tents in which he enjoyed resting as could be imagined. It was an ornate salon in the Palace of the Czars, the Kremlin. Qaddafi’s interlocutor that December day in 1976 was not a Russian but the proudest industrial baron of the nation that had once colonized Qaddafi’s people. Who could have better symbolized the unsettled and indulgent world whose way of life was menaced by the austere visionary emerging from his deserts than Gianni Agnelli: aristocrat, playboy, heir to a technological complex as sophisticated and as powerful as any in the world, the Fiat Motor Company.

  Agnelli was the supplicant that day. He had come to Moscow in secret because he needed something Qaddafi had to offer, money. Qaddafi already owned ten percent of his firm, purchased a few months before for $415

  million, more than triple the market value of the shares. To an astonished Agnelli, he proposed to buy even more or release to him large investment sums if Agnelli could convert part of his company, with Soviet help, into an advanced weapons industry, including a major branch devoted to nuclear research and development.

  It was a diabolical proposition. Agnelli was being asked to set an unstable nation just across the Mediterranean from his homeland on the road to weapons of mass destruction in return for the funds that might save his industrial giant from collapse. The Italian’s readiness to consider the proposition, however briefly, was one more confirmation of the premise underlying Qaddafi’s enterprise: that the day would come when, under the pressure of the energy crisis, there would be nothing in the West that was not for sale.

  * * *

  Whalid Dajani drove along the eucalyptus-and laurel-lined highway leading to the Libyan capital, sweating profusely, his mind still back in the desert, on the harrowing hours he’d lived since they’d brought him the transcript of Prevost’s phone call a week ago. He could feel in his stomach the ache of the ulcer his doctor had warned him he was developing.

  A man is dead because of me, he thought. A man like me, who had the ideals I once had. My God, he reflected, how far I’ve come, how far away I am from what I set out to be. He saw ahead, not the highway into Tripoli, but the other terrible road on which he was embarked.

  “Since Allah sent you here to help us,” Qaddafi had said. Whalid smiled bitterly. Allah had had nothing to do with it. It had been his brother Kamal and it had all begun that morning in January 1977 when Kamal had arrived in Paris.

  * * *

  The debarking passengers of Austrian Airlines Flight 705 from Vienna to Paris mounted the futuristic walkway of Charles de Gaulle Airport and clustered around the passport-control desk of Gate 26. Kamal Dajani was wearing a beige suede jacket and blue jeans, an Austrian Airlines carry-on bag hanging from his shoulder. A dark suntan, the product, presumably, of the ski slopes of the Tyrol, burnished his lean face and emphasized the delicate blue of his eyes.

  He presented the passport oflicer at the desk an Austrian passport identifying him as Fredi Mueller, an agricultural-machinery salesman from Linz, then strolled casually into the lobby and on to the nearest men’s room.

  He hesitated a moment before entering the last stall in line. He locked the door and set his airline bag on the floor. An instant later, a hand pulled it into the adjacent stall, then slid an absolutely identical bag back to his feet.

  Kamal opened it up and methodically checked its contents: a Walther P-38 automatic; three magazines of 9mm. ammunition; two U.S. Army fragmentation grenades; a switchblade knife; a red guide, Paris par Arrondissement, on which he could locate his destination and the safe house whose address he had committed to memory; another set of identity papers, these French, identifying him as Mohammed Yaacef, an Algerian postgraduate student studying in France; a small vial of liquid; and, finally, five thousand French fr
ancs in assorted notes and coins. As he passed the toilet attendant on the way out, he sent a one-franc coin clattering into the saucer beside her. No need, he thought, to give her any reason to glare at him.

  Forty minutes later, he got out of a taxicab at the junction of the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain at the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. He crossed the Place du Luxembourg and strolled along the iron fence of the Luxembourg Gardens down to the Rue d’Assas. There he turned left until he reached number 89 at the corner of the Rue Tavard opposite the Tarnier Maternity Clinic. The building’s ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and as Kamal climbed to the first floor he savored the odor of warm bread and fresh croissants that seemed to impregnate the dark stairwell.

  He knocked at the first door on the left. Inside, he heard the thump of bare feet on wood, then felt someone staring at him through the door’s peephole. “It’s me,” he whispered in Arabic, “Kamal.”

  His sister Laila opened the door. For an instant brother and sister looked at each other. Then, with half-stifled cries, they fell into each other’s arms.

  “Five years,” Laila whispered. “Why so long?”

  “I had no choice,” Kamal replied.

  She beckoned him inside. Before closing the door, she glanced down the stairwell, making sure he had not been followed. Then she fixed the door with a double lock.

  “Show me what they did to you,” Laila demanded as soon as they reached the sitting room. She was a year younger than Kamal, yet she had always managed to treat him with an air of superiority as though somehow the mere fact of having been born a female had given her a head start in life.

  Grudgingly, Kamal removed his jacket and shirt. The scar along his neck ran down to an ugly tangle of scar tissue planted like the imprint of a tiger’s claw below his left shoulder blade.

  Laila gasped at the sight of that most visible heritage of the career her brother had begun crawling under a screen of machine-gun fire at a training camp for commandos of the Refusal Front on a windswept plateau above Damascus.