The technician and the pilot were back on the air, pinning their reading down to a hotel two doors from Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, when one of them shouted. “Son of’ a bitch, it’s fading!” A few seconds passed and his voice was back. “No, it’s not, John. It’s moving! It’s moving up Sixth Avenue!”
Booth hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. Of course, that was it!
The clever bastards had hidden the bomb in the back of a truck and were circulating through the city.
Trembling with nervous excitement, Booth and the men in the command post followed the steady progress of the target up Sixth Avenue, across Thirtyfourth Street. Suddenly the chopper, whose pilot had been trying to get some idea of which truck in the maze of traffic below was giving off radiation, came back on the air. “Target no longer moving.”
“Where is he?”
“Seems to be at Bryant Park, Sixth and Forty-second!”
Booth ordered half a dozen NEST vans and FBI cars to converge on the intersection.
“I’ve got it!” shouted the technician in the first van to reach the scene.
“Where are you?” Booth demanded.
“Just down Fifth from the corner,” came the answer, “right in front of the New York Public Library.”
* * *
The numerals on the bar clock hung on the wood-paneled wall of the National Security Council conference room read 1428. A sense of helplessness infused the room. Coffee cups, half-eaten sandwiches, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs littered the table along with piles of top-secret cables from CIA, State and Pentagon. Nothing in those cables or the messages delivered to the room over its sophisticated communications network had brought its occupants any solace, any promise of a satisfactory resolution to the crisis. Barely twenty-four hours before the expiration of the ultimatum of the zealot of Tripoli they were, as Harold Brown had so bitterly observed, the “pitiful giant” once mockingly described by Mao Tse-tung, all the vast panoply of U.S.
resources useless. Little by little as they had followed the progress of the search for the bomb in New York in regular hourly reports from the city, one thing had become appallingly clear: so frightening were the dimensions of the task, so painfully slow the manner in which it had to be carried out, there was no hope of finding the device in the time Qaddafi had allocated them. As for the secret messages that had reached the White House from every major world capital and leader, they all, without exception, urged the President to remain firm in the face of Qaddafi’s menace. None of them, however, had offered the slightest specific suggestion on how to do that without imperiling New York and its people. It was the Iranian crisis all over again. America’s allies were free with their advice but notably timorous when it came to help or action.
Just after half past two, a Navy chief petty officer interrupted a CIA report from Paris with the announcement that the last of the Sixth Fleet’s ships had reached the one-hundred-kilometer limit set down earlier by Qaddafi. The President greeted the news with a mixture of relief and concern. Fundamentally, he was certain all their hopes came down to the enterprise he could now begin: trying to reason with a man four thousand miles away, a man who, only a generation ago, would have been just the inconsequential ruler of a lot of sand, but who, thanks to oil, the technological genius of twentieth-century man and his own countrymen’s madness in hurling their most precious knowledge into the public domain, now had the power to force his zealot’s vision on the world. Mankind could afford tyrants in the day of the sword, the President reflected. Not anymore.
While the white squawk box buzzed with the spaceage jargon of the Doomsday jet reestablishing the communications link to Tripoli, he gave a last glance at the yellow legal pad before him. On it were the notes he had made listening to the psychiatrists’ advice: Flatter him; play up to his vanity as a world leader.
He’s a loner. Must become his friend. Show him I’m the person who can help him out of the corner into which he’s painted himself.
Voice always soft, nonthreatening.
Never give him the impression I don’t take him seriously.
Keep him in a position of fundamental uncertainty; he must never know exactly where he’s at.
* * *
Good maxims for a police negotiator. But were they really going to be any help to him? He swallowed, feeling the tension constrict his throat. Then he turned to Eastman and indicated he was ready.
“Mr. Qaddafi,” he began, once he had confirmed that the Libyan had followed the fleet’s withdrawal. “I want to address the very grave problem posed by your letter. I understand how ardently you want to see justice done for your fellow Arabs in Palestine. I want you to know that I share those sentiments, Mr. Qaddafi, I=’
The Libyan cut into his speech. His voice was as gentle as it had been two hours before, but his words were no more encouraging than they had been then.
“Please, Mr. President, do not waste my time or yours with speeches. Have the Israelis begun to evacuate the occupied territories or have they not?”
“No stress reading at all,” the CIA technician monitoring the voice stress analyzer reported. “He’s perfectly relaxed.”
“Mr. Qaddafi,” the President pressed on, striving to control his own emotions, “I understand your impatience to reach a settlement. I share it.
But we must lay together the basis for a durable peace, one that will satisfy all parties conoerned, not one forced on the world by a threat such as the one you have made to New York.”
“Words, Mr. President.” The Libyan, to the Chief Executive’s irritation, had interrupted him again. “The same kind of hollow, hypocritical words you have been feeding my Palestinian brothers for thirty years.”
“I assure you I speak with the utmost sincerity,” the President rejoined — to no avail. Qaddafi, ignoring him, was continuing. “Your Israeli allies bomb and shell Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with American planes and guns, kill Arab women and children with American bullets, and what do you offer in return? Words-while you go right on selling the Israelis more arms so that they can go on killing more of our people. Every time the Israelis seize my brothers’ lands with their illegal settlements, what do you do? You give us more of your pious words, your spokesmen wringing their hands in public in Washington. But have you ever done anything to stop the Israelis? No! Never!
“Well, Mr. President, from now on you and the other leaders of your country can save your words. The time for them has passed. At last the Arab people of Palestine have the means of obtaining the justice that should have been theirs long ago, and they are going to get it, Mr. President, because if they do not, millions of your people are going to die to pay for the injustices that have been committed against them.”
The impact of Qaddafi’s words was heightened by the flat, monotonous voice in which he uttered them, a voice so devoid of passion it seemed to Eastman that the Libyan leader could have been a broker reading off stock quotations to a client, or a pilot going through his preflight checklist.
For Tamarkin and Jagerman, the precise, well-controlled voice was the final confirmation of something each had suspected: this man would not hesitate to carry out his threat.
“I cannot really believe, Mr. Qaddafi,” the President continued, “that a man like you. a man so proud of having carried out his revolution without bloodshed, a man of compassion and charity, can really be serious about employing this satanic device, this instrument of hell, to kill and maim millions and millions of innocent men and women.”
“Mr. President.” For the first time, there was a slight undercurrent of stridency in Qaddafi’s tone. “Why can’t you believe it?”
The President was staggered that the man could even ask the question. “It’s totally irrational, a wholly irresponsible act, sir. It’s—”
“Such as your act when you Americans dropped a similar weapon on the Japanese? Where was the compassion and charity in that? It’s all right to kill, burn, maim thousands of
yellow Asiatics or Arabs or Africans, but not clean, white Americans. Is that it? Who created this satanic device, as you call it, in the first place? German Jews. Who are the only people who have ever used it? White Christian Americans. Who are the nations that stockpile these engines that can destroy the world? Your civilized, advanced, industrial societies. They are products of your world, Mr. President, not mine. And now it is we of the other world who are going to use them to right the injustices you have committed against us.”
The President was frantically scrutinizing his yellow legal pad. How inappropriate the words he had written there seemed to him now that he was actually confronted by this man. “Mr. Qaddafi.” The usually stern and confident baritone wavered. “No matter how strongly you may feel about the injustices done to the Palestinians, surely you will acknowledge that it’s not my innocent countrymen in New York who are responsible-the blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Puerto Ricans, the millions of ordinary, hard-working men and women struggling there to make a living?”
“Oh yes, they are responsible, Mr. President,” came the reply. “All of them. Who is responsible for creating Israel in the first place? You Americans are. Who provided them with the arms they used in four wars against us? You Americans did. Whose money keeps them alive? Yours.”
“Do you suppose that, even if the Israelis should agree, temporarily, to withdraw, they would let you get away with this?” the President asked.
“What guarantees can you hope to have that this solution of yours can last?”
Clearly, the President’s question was one for which the Libyan was prepared. “Order your satellites that are observing my country now to study our desert along our eastern border from the seacoast to Al-Kufra. Perhaps you will find some new constructions there. My SCUD missiles are not like yours, Mr. President, they cannot travel around the world and strike a pin as yours can, but they can fly a thousand kilometers and find the coast of Israel. That is all they have to do. They are all the guarantee I will need when this is done.”
My God, the President thought, it’s even worse than I had imagined. He doodled frantically on his legal pad, hoping for some magic thought that would strike the responsive chord he had thus far been unable to find.
“Mr. Qaddafi, I have followed the progress of your revolution with genuine admiration. I know how well you’ve used your great oil wealth to bring your people material progress and prosperity.” He was groping and he knew it.
“Whatever your feelings are about New York, surely you don’t want to see your nation and your people destroyed in a thermonuclear holocaust?”
“My people are prepared to die for the cause if necessary, Mr. President, just as I am.” Again the Libyan had lapsed into English to shorten the exchange.
“Mao Tse-tung accomplished the greatest revolution in history with a minimum of bloodshed,” the President rejoined. That was a lie, but it reflected the psychiatrists’ advice. Invoke Mao, they had said, he sees himself as an Arabic Mao. “You have the same opportunity if you will be reasonable, remove your threat to New York and work with me toward a just and lasting Middle East peace.”
“Be reasonable, Mr. President?” came the answer. “Being reasonable to you means that Palestinian Arabs can be driven from their homes, can be forced to live in refugee camps for thirty years. Being reasonable means that Palestinian Arabs should stand by and watch the creeping annexation of their homeland by these Israeli settlements. Being reasonable means that we Arabs should let you Americans and your Israeli allies go on preventing the Palestinians from enjoying their God-given right to a homeland, a nation, while we continue selling you the oil to run your factories and your cars, to heat your homes. All that is reasonable. But when my brothers and I tell you, who are responsible for their misery, `Give us the justice you have denied us so long, or we will strike,’ suddenly that is unreasonable.
Suddenly, because we ask for justice, we are fanatics. You cannot understand just as you couldn’t understand when the Iranian people turned their wrath on you.”
As Qaddafi was speaking, Jagerman slipped a piece of paper up the table to the President. On it he had written the words “The greater-goal tactic?”
The phrase summarized a maneuver the Dutchman had suggested earlier: trying to persuade Qaddafi to drop his threat to New York by getting him to associate with the President on some specific plan to achieve an even greater goal than the one he was seeking. Escalate his ambitions into something beyond those he had defined. Unfortunately, no one in the National Security Council conference room had been able to suggest a practical way of applying the theory. Suddenly, as he looked at the note, an idea struck the President. It was so bold, so dramatic, it might capture Qaddafi’s imagination.
“Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, unable to conceal the excitement in his voice. “I have a proposal to make to you. Release the millions of my fellow Americans in New York from your dire menace and I will fly to Libya immediately, unescorted, in Air Force One. I, the President of the United States, will allow you to hold me as your hostage while together we work, hand in hand, to find a plan to give the world and your Palestinian brothers something even greater than what you have proposed-a real, durable peace, acceptable to all. We will do it together, and yours will be a glory greater than Saladdin’s, because it will have been won without bloodshed.”
The President’s wholly unexpected proposal stunned his advisers. Eastman was aghast. It was absolutely unthinkable: the President of the United States becoming the hostage of an Arab oil despot, locked up in some desert oasis like a commercial traveler kidnapped for ransom by the Barbary Coast pirates two hundred years ago.
Finally, Qaddafi’s voice once again filled the room. “Mr. President, I admire you for your offer. I respect you for it. But it is not necessary.
My letter is clear. Its terms are clear. That is all that we ask. There is no need for any further discussion between you and me either here or anywhere else.”
“Mr. Qaddafi.” The President almost interrupted the Libyan. “I cannot urge you strongly enough to accept my proposal. We have been in contact in the last two hours with every major leader in the world. And all your fellow Arab leaders: President Sadat, Mr. Assad, King Hussein, King Khalid, even Yassir Arafat.
All of them, without exception, condemn your initiative. You are alone, isolated as you will not be if you agree to my proposal.”
“I do not speak in their names, Mr. President.” The Libyan’s Arabic continued to flow into the room in the slow, unmodulated cadence he had employed almost from the beginning. “I speak for the people, the Arab people. It is their brothers who have been dispossessed, not those of our leaders and kings rotting in their palaces.” Suddenly there was a shift in Qaddafi’s tone, a stirring of impatience and irritation. “All this talk is useless, Mr. President. What must be done must be done.”
“We’re getting some strain,” the technician manning the voice analyzer announced.
“You had thirty years to do justice to my people and you did nothing. Now you have twentyfour hours.”
Anger seized the President in a swift, uncontrollable tide. “Mr. Qaddafi!”
To the psychiatrists’ dismay he was virtually shouting. “We will not be blackmailed. We will not be coerced by your unreasonable, impossible demands, by your outrageous action!”
A long, ominous silence followed his outburst. Then Qaddafi’s voice returned as calm and as unhurried as it had been earlier. “Mr. President, there is nothing impossible about my demands. I am not asking for Israel’s destruction. I only ask for what is just-that my Palestinian brothers have the home God meant for all people to have on the land He gave them. We Arabs were in the right for thirty years, but neither war nor political methods allowed us to achieve our objective, because we did not have the strength. Now we do, Mr. President, and either you will force the Israelis to give us the justice that is ours or, like Samson in your Bible, we will pull down the roof of the temple on ourselves and all the others th
at are in it.”
* * *
While Muammar al-Qaddafi was delivering his threat to the President, one of the terrorists he counted on to help carry it out if necessary was getting ready to make love in a bedroom in New York City. Why am I here?
Laila Dajani asked herself. She knew the answer. Because I’m weak. Because I lack the steel in my soul the others have, that steel Carlos always said was the one indispensable ingredient of a revolutionary. I’m fatally prone to the terrorist’s mortal sin, she admitted. I think too much.
The door opened and Michael walked in, a bath towel knotted around his slender waist, a glass of white wine in each hand. He bent down, kissed her gently, handed her her glass, then lay down on the bed beside her. For a moment they lay there in silence, Michael’s hand slowly, distractedly almost, running over the surface of her breasts.
“Michael?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Come to Quebec tomorrow.”
Michael propped himself up on his elbow and stared down at Laila. Even in the half-light of his bedroom, he could see the sorrow on her face, the nascent sparkle of tears rising in her eyes.
“Linda, for Christ’s sake, what is it with this Quebec thing? You’re obsessed with it.”
Laila rolled over, squashed out her cigarette, pulled a new one from her pack and lit it. “Michael, I told you I was superstitious, didn’t I?”
Michael let his head sink back onto his pillow. So that’s it, he thought.
“There’s an old Egyptian fortuneteller I go to over in Brooklyn. An incredible place. Once you get inside you’d think you were on the banks of the Nile. His wife is all done up in black like a Bedouin woman. Her face is tattooed. She brings you a cup of masbout, Arabic coffee.” She paused.
“He takes your cup and holds it. He asks your name, your mother’s name, your date of birth. Then he goes into a kind of trance, praying. You’re not allowed to smoke or cross your legs or your arms-that cuts the current between you. Every so often, he stops praying and talks to you.”
The Fifth Horseman Page 34