The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  He had to call on every resource of the discipline acquired in a lifetime of military service to concentrate on the material before him, to drive from his mind the ghastly spectacle they had all witnessed. His job was to sort out the dimensions of this crisis, to lay the options the United States had before the President as concisely and as clearly as possible-even if those options were only variations of the unthinkable.

  He picked up a four-volume blue plan labeled “Federal Response to Peacetime Nuclear Emergencies.” Millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, thousands of man-hours of effort had gone into preparing that plan. After one quick perusal, Eastman tossed it aside in disgust. New York would have been reduced to a charred graveyard before he or anyone else had been able to make sense of its bureaucratic jargon.

  “The President, gentlemen,” the lieutenant colonel at the NMCC command console announced. The Chief Executive strode briskly back into the chamber and was addressing the men in it before they had had time to sit down.

  “I’ve spoken with the Chairman,” he announced. “He assures me that the Soviet Union condemns Qaddafi’s threat without reserve, and has offered to cooperate with us in any way he can. He is personally addressing a message to Qaddafi through his ambassador in Tripoli condemning what he’s done and warning him of the consesequences of his action.”

  “Mr. President?” It was the Deputy Secretary of State. “As a corollary of that I’d recommend we orchestrate along with Moscow, Peking and Paris a worldwide diplomatic assault on Qaddafi to show him that he’s absolutely isolated. Cut off from any vestige of support anywhere in the world.”

  “Do it, Bob,” the President ordered. “although I’m afraid we’re not dealing here with a man who’ll be responsive to pressures of that sort. You also had better call the Secretary back from South America.” The President remembered how effectively John F. Kennedy had used a cold to cover his return to Washington from Chicago at the beginning of the Missile Crisis.

  “Tell him to pretext some health reason.”

  “We’ve also, Mr. President,” Eastman said, “got the constitutional aspects of this thing to consider. We have to bring in the Governor and, much more important because he’s on the firing line, the Mayor.”

  “There,” mused the President, “is a potential problem.” The Mayor was a volatile, outspoken man who might go off half cocked if he wasn’t handled properly. “I think we better lay it on him face to face down here.”

  “And I think you’ll also have to brief the Congressional leadership.”

  “Yes, but we’ll hold it very, very tight. Find out exactly whom Kennedy brought into the early stages of the Missile Crisis.” The President leaned back in his chair, clasped his chin in the cradle of his forefinger and gave his National Security Assistant an appraising glance. “Jack, what plan of action do you recommend7”

  Eastman shuffled the papers in front of him for just a second. Then, with the low but commanding voice he had acquired in his years in the military, he began. “It seems to me, Mr. President, we’ve only got two practical approaches open to us to resolve this problem. The first is actually finding and disarming this device. You’ve given the brief on that to the FBI and the CIA. The second is getting to Qaddafi and convincing him that whatever his complaints against Israel are threatening to destroy New York is a totally irrational and irresponsible way of resolving them.

  “It occurs to me, Mr. President, that, as you said earlier, this is the ultimate terrorist situation. What we have here is a fanatic holding a gun to the heads of five million people. We’ve got to talk that gun out of his hand, get him into a negotiating position, which is probably what he wants anyway, just the way you’d maneuver a terrorist into a negotiating position in a hijacking situation. We’ve got a lot of people around with expertise on how to do it.

  I recommend we bring them together to give us their guidance.”

  “All right,” the President agreed. “Get the best people we have into session at the White House immediately.”

  “Mr. President?”

  This time it was the Army Chief of Staff. “I think we’re overlooking one very vital point here. I agree that as long as there’s a chance of that hydrogen device going off in New York we’ve got no military options open against Libya. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t be preparing for the possibility of military action.”

  The President’s chin thrust forward at his words.

  “Not against Libya. Against Israel.”

  “Israel?”

  “Israel, Mr. President. The bottom line of this crisis is that if that bomb or whatever it is is really in New York, you’re going to have the lives of five million Americans at risk. Against those people in those settlements over there. Who shouldn’t even be there in the first place. A bunch of far-out Zionists or New York City. It’s no deal, Mr. President, no deal at all. I recommend we alert the Eighty-second Airborne and the divisions in Germany and hold the Sixth Fleet Marine transports in the eastern Mediterranean instead of sending them toward Libya with the carriers. If we’re going to land the Marines, it’ll be in Haifa, not in Tripoli. And I recommend State open very discreet communications with the Syrians.” Just a suggestion of a smile turned the edges of the General’s mouth. “I suspect they’ll be ready to offer us landing facilities in Damascus if we need them.”

  “The General’s right.” It was the CIA’s Tap Bennington. “The fact of the matter is, those settlements over there are absolutely illegal. We’ve opposed them. You’ve opposed them. If it comes down to New York or them and the Israelis won’t get those people out of there, then we damn well better be ready to go in and get them out ourselves.”

  “Whatever we think about those settlements,” the President noted, “and you all know how I feel about them, forcing the Israelis out of them now would be yielding to Qaddafi’s blackmail. It would be showing the world that this kind of act pays.”

  “Mr. President,” Bennington answered, “that’s a very fine moral point, but I don’t think it’s going to cut much ice with those good folk up there in New York.”

  Eastman had followed the exchange in discreet silence. “One thing is clear,” he now interjected, “and that is, Israel is vitally concerned in this. The sooner we bring Mr. Begin into it, the better.”

  Just an intimation of distaste crossed the President’s composed features at the mention of the Israeli Prime Minister’s name. There was probably no political leader in the world he disliked quite so much. How many hours had he been forced to listen to his interminable lectures on the history of the Jewish people, the constant, selfimportant references to the Bible: to the Israeli’s infuriating habit of arguing forever over the most trival legal point, God, he thought, dealing with Begin had forced him to draw on reserves of patience which he had never imagined he possessed.

  “You’re right.” He sighed. “Get Mr. Begin on the phone.”

  * * *

  The early light burnished the Jerusalem limestone of the house at 3 Balfour Street to an amber glow. Just the suspicion of a breeze picked the tips of the Aleppo pines rising above the cement wall protecting the residence of the Prime Minister of Israel.

  Inside, in the somber study that adjoined the sitting room, a slight figure stared moodily out the French windows to the flowered patio beyond.

  Menachem Begin has not expected to return to this room as his nation’s prime minister. His predecessor’s assassination by a Palestinian terrorist, however, had so angered his countrymen, so reinforced the political authority of Israel’s right, that his return to leadership had become inevitable. To his left, barely one hundred yards away, was the imposing roofline of the King David Hotel. His name would be forever associated with that building. It was there in 1946 that a commando of Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi had killed ninety people, devastated a British headquarters and earned him a place in this unborn nation’s history books.

  Behind Begin, on one of the bookshelves stacked with encyclop
edias, was a photograph taken of himself in the disguise which had allowed him time and time again to slip through the streets of Tel Aviv under the noses of Britain’s soldiers: the fiat black hat, black frock coat and straggly beard of a rabbi.

  He turned and walked slowly back to the desk at which he had taken the President’s phone call. He was dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt and a dark smallpatterned tie, a reflection of a taste in clothes which, like so many other things, stamped him as a man apart in a nation in which ties were an anathema and baggy corduroys were preferred to well-pressed trousers.

  Once again he reviewed the notes he had scribbled on a yellow legal pad during the President’s phone call, punctuating his study with sips of the lukewarm tea flavored with Sucrasit, a sugar substitute, which had constituted his breakfast since his second heart attack. He uttered a silent prayer to the God of Israel. There was no question in Begin’s mind about the significance of the information the President had passed him: it represented the most fundamental shift in power relationships in the Middle East in his lifetime. The American President would perceive it, as he would have to, in terms of the horrible threat being posed to the people of New York. Begin’s duty was to perceive it in terms of the threat it posed to his people and their nation. It was mortal.

  A crisis was at hand and Begin well knew that, in that crisis, he could not count on the friendship of the President. He had long ago sensed the rising tide of the animosity the American bore him. For his part, Begin did not dislike the President; rather, he mistrusted him, just as he mistrusted most non-Jews-and, indeed, a great many of his fellow Jews. He had, his political foes charged, a ghetto mentality, a narrow, ingrown attitude ill fitting a world leader, an inability to perceive a problem in anything other than its Jewish dimension.

  That was the natural heritage of his formative years, his boyhood in the ghettos of Poland, his youth fighting as a Jewish partisan, his young manhood spent as an underground chieftain with a price on his head, struggling to drive the British from Palestine.

  One vision had driven him during those years, the vision of his tutor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose writings lined his study. It was of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel; not the truncated little Israel that his foe, David BenGurion, had accepted like a crumb from the world’s table in 1947, but the real land of Israel, the Biblical land God had promised his forebears.

  Consolidating Israel’s claims to the land captured in 1967, which he referred to as Judea and Samaria, and bringing his people peace: those had been the two fundamentally irreconcilable aims of Begin’s years as Israel’s leader. Both seemed far away this December morning. The complex, painfully arrived at Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement had proven to be a chimera. Its failure to come to grips with the Palestinian problem had left a raw and festering wound at the heart of the Middle East.

  Instead of enjoying the benefits of the peace they so desperately wanted, his countrymen were living the most painful hours of their existence.

  Inflation and the heaviest tax burden any people on the globe were forced to carry stifled their economic life. Immigration had dwindled to a trickle of the infirm and the elderly. Many more Jews left Israel each year than arrived. There seemed little promise left in the Promised Land.

  Most important, Israel’s enemies, determined to destroy a peace settlement they believed to be a fraud, were gathering once again. Iraq and Syria were united, the Palestinians resurgent. Behind them, fanatical and militant, was the new Leftist Islamic Republic in Iran with its vast arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry seized in the overthrow of the Shah.

  Turkey, where once Israel had counted many a valuable friend, was openly hostile. The oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf, menaced by the Leftist tides to the north, no longer dared to counsel caution to their Arab brothers.

  The focal point on which all their ambitions converged was Jerusalem and the Land of Judea and Samaria. Qaddafi’s mad gesture seemed to Begin the inevitable culmination of the conflict that had opposed Arab and Jew for half a century.

  Outside, he heard the rasp of approaching motorcycles. A few seconds later there was a knock on his door. His wife entered the study and placed on his desk a white envelope with a red slash across one corner. It was sealed and bore the words “Sodi Beyoter-Ultra Confidential.” Prepared a few blocks away in an austere, barracklike building identified only by a number, 28, and the sign “Center for Research and Policy Planning,” it contained the daily intelligence digest of the most important of Israel’s three intelligence services, the Mossad.

  The Prime Minister opened the envelope and smoothed the report out on his desk. At 7:01, it noted, Israel’s seismograph laboratories had detected a shock of 5.7 on the Richter scale. Its source had been established as the area of the Awbari Sand Sea in southwestern Libya, an area not noted for earthquakes.

  Reading the next paragraph, he started. At 7:31, the report continued, Mossad’s Washington representative had spoken personally to the head of the CIA. The CIA director had given him his personal assurance that the shock was an earthquake.

  Even in the most difficult hours of Israel’s relations with the United States, the bonds between the CIA and her intelligence apparatus had been warm and intimate. There was almost nothing the Israelis learned that was not immediately passed to Washington. And now, in a matter critical to Israel’s national existence, the Americans had deliberately, if perhaps only momentarily, lied to her. The implications of that were not lost on the Israeli Prime Minister.

  He looked at his wife. She knew nothing of the crisis. But she saw he had suddenly gone pale, an almost grayish pallor seeping over his features.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “This time, we are alone,” he gasped, as much to his own stunned self as to her. “Completely alone.”

  * * *

  The chimes of St. John’s Monastery of the Cross were tolling nine, Jerusalem time, when Menachem Begin’s black Dodge slipped below the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and up to the unattractive, functional building that housed the center of the nation’s government.‘A quartet of burly young men leaped out, each clutching in his left hand a black leather attache case. Dressed in something other than their blue jeans and leather jackets, they might have been stockbrokers or a group of aggressive young salesmen rushing into company headquarters with their latest orders. Instead those cases contained the tools of their calling as the Prime Minister’s bodyguards, an Uzi submachine gun, three extra magazines of 9mm. ammunition, a Colt .45 and a walkie-talkie.

  A few minutes later, Begin took his place at the center of the oval table at which his Cabinet was gathered in emergency session. None of the men at the table had even the faintest intimation of the nature of the emergency that had brought them there. Begin had confided in no one. For a moment his regard swept the room, his dark eyes rendered outsized by the glasses he wore to correct his astigmatic vision. Carefully choosing his words, he began.

  “Gentlemen, we are facing the gravest crisis in our history.” With the phenomenal memory for which be was noted, he recollected every detail of his conversation with the President.

  Nothing Begin could have told his ministers, no revelation he might have made, could have horrified them more than his words. For fifteen years their nation’s survival had reposed on two strategic pillars, the support of the United States and the knowledge that in the ultimate crisis Israel alone in the Middle East possessed atomic weapons. Now the image of a mushroom cloud rising above the Libyan desert had destroyed the strategic basis of their state.

  “We have no choice!”

  The words thundered through the stricken silence left by Begin’s speech, their impact underscored by the sound of a heavy fist smashing onto the ministerial table. They came from a barrel-chested man in an old sweater and open shirt, his suntanned face setting off a full head of pure white hair.

  “We can’t live with a madman pointing a thermonuclear gun at our heads.”

 
; Benny Ranan was one of the five authentic military heroes in the room, a former paratroop general who’d jumped at the head of his troops in the 1973

  war in the spectacular transcanal operation which had paved the way for Arik Sharon’s triumphant encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army. As Minister of Construction, or “Minister of Bulldozers” as he was referred to, he was one of the most ardent supporters of the program to throw up new Israeli settlements on the land Begin called Judea and Samaria. He rose and strode around the table with the swaying gait his paratroopers loved to mimic.

  His destination was the mural covering one wall of the room, a photograph of the Middle East taken by Walter Schirra from his Apollo 7 spaceship.

  Nothing could have illustrated more graphically the terrible vulnerability of their nation than that kaleidoscope of blues, whites and blacks, its vista sweeping from the Red to the Black Sea, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Israel was just a sliver in its immensity, a strip of land clinging precariously to one edge of the photo.

  Ranan gazed at it dramatically. “What this does is change totally the conditions of our existence. All Qaddafi has to do to destroy us is drop a bomb here-” Ranan’s thick forefinger thumped the map in the vicinity of Tel Aviv-“and here-and here. Three bombs and this nation will cease to exist.”

  He turned back to his fellow ministers. The booming parade-ground voice dropped in register to a hoarse whisper. “What would our life be worth here knowing that at any second, any minute, any hour, a fanatic who’s been screaming for our blood for years can incinerate us instantly? I couldn’t live like that. Could any of you? Could anybody?”

  He paused, aware of the impact his words were having on the men in the room. “Forty centuries of history has one lesson for us. We Jews must resist any threat to our existence with all our strength. We have to destroy him, gentlemen. Right now. Before the sun is high.”

  Ranan placed his forearms on the table so that his heavy trunk leaned forward and the lingering smell of the garlic and cheese of his breakfast hung on the air. “And we will tell the Americans what we intend to do once we’ve done it.”