“This is my own home, my own people and they don’t trust me!” he roared.
There was a world of feeling in his shout, of fear and rage, bitterness and humiliation, the savage, wounded pride of the stag at bay. “You, a halfass kid out of a Louisiana law school, doesn’t even have two years in the Bureau, they trust, but me, a guy with thirty years on his ticket, me they don’t trust. All those fucking years and when they got something like this they still don’t trust youl”
He stomped so hard on his accelerator, the car fishtailed forward over the rutted snow and ice, its spinning tires shrieking in protest. The yardman he had quizzed earlier looked on, amazed. Man, he thought, he never going to get where he going driving like that.
* * *
Three hours. With a glance at the clock in the NSC conference room, the President measured once again how imminent was the horror facing them.
It was six minutes to noon. Exactly three hours and six minutes remained before the expiration of Qaddafi’s ultimatum. Men cling to hopes in a crisis as a dying believer clings to his faith, and the President still strove to cling to his despite the remorseless, inexorable pressures wringing them from his soul. At least in the last great American crisis in Iran, the United States had not had to decide its actions in the face of an ultimatum, an ultimatum laid down by a man the President had no doubt was ready to wreak the nuclear holocaust on six million innocent people.
Suddenly he interrupted the desultory flow of conversation around him. He had had an idea. It wasn’t much of an idea, but, in the situation, anything was worthwhile. “Jack,” he told his National Security Assistant. “I want to talk to Abe Stern.”
“Abe,” he said when he got the Mayor on their tie line to New York, “the sands are running down. In a short while, a very short while, we are going to have to act, and once we do there will be no turning back.”
“I understand, Mr. President,” Stern replied. “What do you propose to do?”
“The advance elements of the Rapid Deployment Force are on the ground in Germany now, refueled and ready to move on to the Middle East. We received secret assurance from President Assad in Syria half an hour ago that they’ll be allowed to land in Damascus. The Sixth Fleet Amphibious Marine Landing Force would land in Lebanon simultaneously with their arrival. The two would hook up, then move into the West Bank to clear out the settlements.”
“The Israelis will fight, Mr. President.”
“I know, Abe.” The President’s words came in a soft groan. “But I will make our very limited objectives clear to them, and the rest of the world, before we go in.”
“It may not be enough, Mr. President. Don’t forget, they have nuclear weapons, too.”
“I think I know how we can contain that threat. I’ll ask the Russians to make it clear to them what the consequences of their employing nuclear weapons would be. They might not believe that from us, but they’ll believe it from them all right. Before we get to that, though, Abe, there’s one other card we can play. You.”
“Me?”
“You. Call Begin yourself, Abe. Plead with him. Try to make him see the madness in not pulling out of those settlements.”
“Can I tell him you’re ready to-“
“Abe,” the President interrupted, “tell him anything you want. Just get him to agree to go on the air and announce that those damn settlements are coming out.”
* * *
Angelo Rocchia parked his Chevrolet at 189 Christopher Street in approximately the same spot in which the Procter & Gamble salesman’s car had been parked Friday morning. The detective was still seething with rage. He slumped againt the car seat, a walkie-talkie in one hand, a detailed block-by-block map of the neighborhood he had gotten at the Sixth Precinct spread on his knees. Twenty men were already combing the area he had designated on that map, from the river on the west over to Hudson Street on the east, two blocks north and south, knocking on every door, calling on every shop, interrogating every passerby, trying to find the author of the note.
Angelo wondered how much time they had. They’d probably lie to you if you asked them about that, too, he thought bitterly. Suddenly, a terrible urge swept through him, a single desire so terrible he trembled with feeling: to clasp in his arms the one person in the world he bad left, the frail figure he could talk to only with his eyes, to grab her, hug her misshapen body to his. And to get her as far away from this city as he could.
He was so lost in his recollections of her pathetic efforts to babble out the words of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” that he didn’t see the plainclothesman draw up to the car. He was followed by a young man in his midtwenties, his legs in black denims so close-fitting they might have been a ballet dancer’s tights, his bleached blond hair heaped high, Elvis Presley style, on his head. He had a coppercolored boxer on a leash. Angelo got out of the car.
“Would you repeat to Detective Rocchia here what you just told me?” the plainclothesman ordered.
“Oh yes, certainly, of course. I was walking Ashoka here, I have to walk him a lot, he needs the outdoors so, poor thing, he just can’t stand being cooped up all day in my little flat, can you, darling?” The young man bent down to pat the animal as Angelo scowled. “And I was right over there.” He gestured to the other side of the street. “And I heard this awful scraping noise. I looked up and I just saw this yellow truck starting up and going up Christopher Street. So I went across the street and I saw they’d scraped some poor man’s fender-“
“And you left the note?”
“Yes.”
“Was it a Hertz truck?”
“Oh, well,” the young man was perplexed. “I don’t know, it could have been, but it was going up the street and I didn’t see that much. And trucks and me, well…’
“Terrific. You’re a big help.”
“Was there anybody else around here might have seen it?”
“Well, there were two of those simply ghastly cruiser types that hang out down here right there.” He indicated a storefront almost adjacent to Angelo’s Chevrolet.
“You know them?”
The young man blushed. “I have nothing to do with that type of person. They hang our across the street=’ he gestured toward the river-“in that old pier there”
Angelo beckoned to Rand. “Come on,” he growled. “We gotta find these two.”
* * *
The President of the United States had been right. There had been no need to inform the Israelis about the U.S. military preparations to move into the West Bank. Israeli intelligence had discerned the basic outlines of the U.S. moves almost from the moment they began. A source inside the U.S. Rhine Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt, Germany, had informed the embassy in Bonn of the arrival of the C-5As of the Rapid Deployment Force. Radar had picked up the movements of the Sixth Fleet’s Marine Amphibious Force, and its ships had been kept under discreet aerial surveillance as they moved up the Lebanese seacoast toward Junieh Bay.
The most revealing and complete portrait of U.S. intentions, however, had been provided by a Mossad “asset” inside King Hussein’s Amman Palace, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Jordanian Air Force attached to the King’s personal staff. Yusi Avidar, the intelligence chief whose secret call had alerted the CIA to Israel’s plans for a preemptive strike at Libya, reviewed the information his agent bad sent across the Allenby Bridge. Like their American counterparts, the Israelis had been in a quasi-permanent crisis session for over twenty-four hours; their nerves were strained, their tempers on edge.
* * *
“So, gentlemen,” General Avidar concluded. “There is no question about it: the Americans are coming.”
“Let’s leak it to the world press right away,” Benny Ranan suggested. “That will stop the Americans in their tracks. Public opinion will force the President to attack Qaddafi.”
Yigal Yadin looked at the man, appalled. “Have you gone mad, Benny?” he asked. “If the Americans discover six million people in New York may get killed becaus
e of our settlements, there won’t be a single American alive who won’t back the President in coming in here and taking them out themselves.”
“Damn it!” It was General Avidar. “Can’t this nation ever acknowledge it was wrong? Are we going to another holocaust because we can’t admit a mistake and pull them out ourselves, for God’s sake?”
“Our mistake was not carrying through our strike on Libya yesterday,” Ranan said.
* * *
Begin, calm as ever, turned to the intelligence chief. “The original mistake was in your intelligence service’s failure to find out what this man was doing so that we could destroy him and his project before he got his bombs.”
The General began to protest, but Begin cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I read the reports. You never took him seriously, even after we found the Pakistani connection. He didn’t have the technological resources, you maintained, the infrastructure. He was just a pompous boaster. He=’
An aide interrupted. “Excuse me,” he said to the Prime Minister. “The Mayor of New York wants to speak to you urgently.”
* * *
The spectacle sickened Angelo: the filthy, debrislittered old pier, the gloomy office, probably once the Customs shed, the man half naked cowering in the corner like some frightened animal, the two “cruisers” in leather jackets, one dangling a studded belt from his hand. The detective started to go into the dimness, then stopped, disgusted. Let them come to me, he thought.
“Hey, you,” he barked at the cruiser with the belt, “come out here. I want to talk to you.”
The youth edged sullenly toward the doorway and Angelo’s bulky figure.
“Hey, listen, what is this?” he protested. “He’s a consenting adult, for Christ’s sake. We got civil rights now, don’t you know that?”
“Forget it,” Angelo snarled. “I’m not interested in what you’re doing in there. Friday your friend over here sees a yellow truck scrape a guy’s Pontiac over there on Christopher Street. He says you saw it, too”
“Yeah,” the young man replied. His sidekick was just behind him now, glaring hostilely over his shoulder, arrogantly whacking his belt in his palm. Their client was crouched in the recesses of the darkened office, hiding his head in his hands, sobbing, convinced, probably, that he was about to be arrested and his career ruined.
“So what?”
“I just want to know if you remember anything about the truck, is all.”
“Hertz truck. One of them vans there. What about it?”
“You sure it was a Hertz truck?”
“Yeah, sure. It had them blue stripes on it”
Angelo took a Hertz sales brochure from his pocket. Pictured on it was the spectrum of Hertz trucks rented in the New York area. “Do you suppose you could show me which model it was?”
“Right here.” The youth’s forefinger stabbed at the photo of the Econoline van. Angelo glanced at Rand, then back at the youth.
“Thanks, kid,” he said. “Give you a good-conduct medal one of these days.”
He turned and, with Rand behind him, ran out of the pier, dodged across the West Street traffic and raced for his car.
* * *
As Angelo Rocchia scrambled into his Chevrolet, just twelve blocks away in front of a hardware store at 74 West Eighth Street another man slipped into the front seat of a car pausing at the curb. Kamal Dajani noted that his sister had on her blond wig. It changed her so completely that she looked, sitting there beside him, like a total stranger.
No policeman, even one equipped with a picture of her, could identify her now, he thought with satisfaction.
She headed into MacDougal Street and then, through Waverly Place, over to Sixth Avenue, letting the car glide in and out of the traffic with a deft and gentle touch. At Fourteenth she moved into the outside lane, waiting to turn left, stopping as she did at the red light.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed.
“Of course everything is all right.”
“There’s been no news on the radio.”
“I know,” Kamal replied, his own eyes scrutinizing the throngs rushing to beat the “Don’t Walk” sign. “I have a transistor.”
“You don’t suppose there’s any possibility the Americans won’t agree, do you?”
Kamal remained silent, staring at the crowds thronging the sidewalks, at the Christmas decorations and the white slashes of the advertising banners promising “Clearance Sale: Everything Must Go” and “All Stock Reduced.”
Nothing there, he realized, to indicate that anyone in this city even suspected the enormity of the threat under which they were living.
Nervously, Laila lit a cigarette, struggling to concentrate on her driving, painfully aware that this was not the moment to bang somebody’s fender the way Kamal had done with his truck.
“How do you feel about it, Kama]?” she asked, stopping for another light.
“Feel about what?”
“About this, for God’s sake! The bomb. About what’s going to happen if the Americans don’t agree. Don’t you feel anything? Triumph or vengeance or remorse or something?”
“No, Laila, I don’t feel a damn thing. I learned not to feel a long time ago.”
He lapsed into his dour silence again, staring straight ahead toward the grayish stain of the Hudson. Then, almost as though his body had been struck by a muscle spasm, he sat up and turned to his sister.
“No,” he said. “That was wrong. I do feel something.
Hate. I used to think I was doing this for Palestine or the cause or Father or whatever. But I realized last night the real reason I’m doing it is because I hate these people and the world they made for us to live in with their television and their movies and their banks and their cars and their goddamn tourists in their white shirts and their straw hats and their cameras, climbing all over our monuments, running the world the way they wanted it run for the last thirty years-my thirty years!”
“My Godl” His sister shuddered. “Why do you hate them so much?”
“Hatred doesn’t need reasons, Laila,” Kamal replied. “That’s the trouble with people like you and Whalid. You always need reasons.” Angrily, he grabbed at the map of New York on the seat. They were in the outgoing tide of traffic now, moving up the West Side of the city. “Don’t go the way you did the last time,” he ordered.
“My?”
“Because I don’t want to go through any toll gates in the city. If they’re looking for us, that’s where they’ll be.”
* * *
Of all the pleas and threats, boasts and arguments Menachem Begin had heard since the President’s first telephone call, none had moved him quite as much as that articulated by the Mayor of New York. Begin had met the Mayor twice-once on a visit to New York for a fund-raising banquet, later when the Mayor had brought a group of New York Zionists to visit Israel.
He was listening to the Mayor at his desk, staring at the exquisitely peaceful vista of the Judean hills, dark welts gilded with the ghostly patina of a full moon, under those December stars which once were to have promised mankind a better world in which to live. How do I respond to this man, he asked himself, how do I answer the unanswerable?
“Look, Mr. Begin,” Stern was saying, “I’m pleading with you on behalf of every single man, woman and child in this city, Italian, Irish, black, Puerto Rican, whatever. But why do you think he put this bomb here and not in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington? Because he knows there are three million Jews here, more than there are in Israel, that’s why.”
“Ah,” Begin interrupted. “That is the essence of this terrible tragedy, Mr. Mayor. A tyrant has succeeded in pitting brother against brother, friend against friend, as Roman emperors once forced their captives to slaughter each other in the arenas for their entertainment.”
“The essence of this tragedy, Mr. Begin;” the Mayor’s distant voice was tremulous with anger and concern, “is no
t that at all. It’s your government’s refusal to take a handful of Jewish people off land which belonged to us two thousand years ago and hasn’t belonged to us since. And your mistake in putting them there in the first place.”
“My dear friend,” Begin pleaded with the Mayor, “please believe me when I tell you I share every one of your concerns, your fears, your angers. They have been ours since this terrible ordeal began. But what you and the President are talking about is not those settlements. It is the very life of this nation. You are asking us to commit national suicide by handing this land over to a people who are sworn to destroy us. Our people, Mr. Stern, that part of us which is here, were in the camps. We were on the road to Jerusalem in 1948. We were in Sinai in 1956. We were on the Golan in ‘67. We were on the canal in ‘73. Our sacrifices, our blood on those battlefields, gave a dignity to our existence-and yours as well. They also gave us the right to survive, Mr. Stern, and that is a right we cannot and will not surrender.”
“Look, Mr. Begin, all that is fine, but no one is asking you to commit suicide. All we are asking you to do is get the hell off land that doesn’t belong to you anyway. Let the poor Palestinians have their place in the sun, too. That’s going to satisfy Qaddafi and it’s going to save my people.
We’ll deal with Qaddafi afterwards, but I’ve got to save my people. That is the number-one priority, people. If I’ve learned nothing else in the hell of these hours, it’s that. The people come first. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mayor.” Begin had set his glasses on his desk and was rubbing the bridge of his nose in fatigue and strain. “But the rest does matter. The principles do count. If we destroy the principles by which we live through cowardice or expediency or fear or whatever reason, we will destroy the basis of our existence. For all its faults, we were bequeathed a civilized order by our fathers. Are we going to bequeath our children chaos and the jungle?”
* * *
A few doors away from the room in which Abe Stern was completing his telephone call to Jerusalem, the handful of men directing the search operation gathered around the FBI’s Quentin Dewing’s table for a hastily called conference. For the first time there was an undercurrent of hysteria in their gathering, the first stirrings of panic before the enormity of their failure. Their concerns were worsened by the calls coming every fifteen minutes now from the White House, frantic demands for news, making it painfully clear how close the center of government was to panic, too.
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