The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  The children inside had seen Angelo, and some of them gathered around in a semicircle beyond the window, gawking at him, bodies twitching under the impact of the gestures of curiosity and greeting they could not perform. He was going to be able to get Maria away, but they were going to stay. And from the moment he had sensed the frenzied, almost hysterical air in the command post he’d realized that this time maybe everything wasn’t going to turn out all right like it did on television, catch the guy in the last two minutes and tune in next week for another episode. Maybe there was not going to be a next week for this town or for those kids.

  Five minutes after she’d left, the min returned, clutching Maria’s hand in hers. Angelo was no longer by the playground window. She took Maria into the entry hall, but he wasn’t there either. Impatiently, she went to the door onto Sixty-seventh Street and looked down to the place where he always parked, illegally, his Chevrolet. It was gone.

  * * *

  Far up into the dairy and timber country of northern Minnesota, just a few miles south of the Canadian border near the town of Great Falls, there is a small U.S. government reservation. Its gate is discreetly guarded by armed men identified as belonging to the Department of Forests and Fisheries, and the reservation itself consists of acres of gently rolling land, some wooded, some planted, some, apparently, intended as pasture land; all of it enclosed in a barbed-wire fence.

  The guards are in fact employees of the Department of Defense, and those miles of barbed-wire fence are an enormous transmitting aerial servicing the radio from which the thermonuclear-missile-bearing submarines of the U.S. Navy are commanded. It is in a state of constant transmission employing low-frequency, extremely lowwave radio bands, well below 10 HRZ because such long waves are uniquely capable of penetrating water to the great depths at which the submarines lie. Each submarine on station on the ocean floor trails its own aerial, a thin strip of wire as long as the two-mile barbed-wire fence in northern Minnesota from which it receives its messages.

  At exactly 1304, less than ninety seconds after the President had issued his order. two submarines, the U.S.S. Henry Clay and the U.S.S. Daniel Webster. one twenty miles southwest of Cyprus, the other buried in a deep ocean trough below Sicily, reacted to a modification in the constantly varied pattern emitted by the fence. The radio operator on each sub brought the signal, automatically decoded by the boat’s computers, to his duty officer, who, in turn, delivered it to the submarine’s captain.

  The captains and the executive officers, employing matching keys, unlocked their subs’ war safes and took out preprogrammed IBM punch cards which they inserted into the computers that commanded each ship’s sixteen Poseidon missiles. Those IBM cards bore all the data the submarines’ firing mechanisms would need to launch their missiles and the fourteen warheads each contained onto the Libyan targets set out on them, with an accuracy so precise that none of them would fall more than a hundred feet from its selected impact point. That task completed, the officers, joined now by their gunnery officers, opened their firing control systems with ten rigorously defined fail-safe measures. Seconds later, at 1307, each submarine flashed a return message to Minnesota. “Missiles Armed and Targeted,” it read. “Vessel in DEFCON [1] Red.” “DEFCON Red” was the highest alert posture of the U.S. armed forces, the conditions of readiness that indicated that a state of war was at hand.

  * * *

  At the same time that the submarines’ messages were flashing through the ether, another message was arriving in the White House communications center over the twin Teleprinters linking it to the Pentagon’s terminal of the red line to Moscow.

  As always, the communication came in two languages, the first in the original Russian, the second in English as translated in Moscow by a Soviet linguist. In view of the urgency of the crisis, the President rushed into the communications center himself to follow the message as it came in. A State Department Russian expert was beside him, responsible for verifying the accuracy of the Soviet translation and for pointing out to the President any subtle nuances in meaning or language.

  There was none in this case. The message was brief and to the point.

  Scanning it, the President felt his legs tremble. He placed a hand on the shoulder of the stunned State Department official at his side.

  “Thank God!” he gasped.

  * * *

  In the New York command post six men were on the telephone at the same time, each shouting to make his voice heard over the din of the others. Bannion was in the process of commandeering the Sixth Precinct station house on the Lower West Side as a subheadquarters for the upcoming search effort. Feldman was beside him assembling the men and material they would require. A few chairs away the usually imperturbable Booth was roaring at the NEST’s Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, asking for every available man, scientist and detection device. Harvey Hudson was mobilizing a team of federal judges to issue a flood of search warrants that would justify entry into closed apartments, offices, buildings or the dwellings of civil-rights-conscious New Yorkers who would otherwise refuse to let a detective or an FBI agent past their front door.

  So chaotic were the conditions in the room that, for a few seconds, no one heard the sound coming from the squawk box on the conference-room table. To his horror, Abe Stern suddenly realized the President was talking and not a person in the room was listening.

  He grabbed the phone before him and told the switchboard to feed the President’s call onto his line. “Mr. President,” he apologized, “I’m sorry, but we’re in a state of near-hysteria here. We think we’ve got a fix on where it is.”

  The President, still shaken by the events and decisions of the past twenty minutes, wasn’t listening.

  “Abe,” he said, “I’ve just had the Soviets on the red line. They’ve forced Qaddafi to extend the deadline in his ultimatum by six hours-until nine o’clock tonight.”

  PART VIII

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15:

  1:11 P.M. TO 9:17 P.M.

  “Ten-thirteen. Assist patrolman.”

  The area in which the men of the underground command post had decided Qaddafi’s thermonuclear device had to be hidden consisted of a rectangular slice of the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

  It covered the major part of Greenwich Village, a jumble of 2,579 miles of streets, 25,000 buildings of every description: brownstones, restored Federal homes, apartment houses, co-ops, condos, converted lofts, rotting piers, abandoned warehouses, small industries, garages, bars, restaurants, dives and discos.

  There were the collapsing piers along the Hudson where once, in the twenties and thirties, luxury liners had berthed. There was the Gansevoort Meat Market; a touch of Little Italy in the southern area surrounding Bleecker and Carmine Streets; big middle-class developments like Washington Square Village and the West Village Houses; upper-middle-class apartments and homes north of Washington Square; the vast New York University complex around the square. Close to the river there was a conglomeration of transient businesses, repair shops, artisans’ ateliers and the gay SM area where the Proctor & Gamble salesman had been visiting when his fender was scraped. And, above all, from Seventh Avenue South over to Broadway and from West Third up to West Eighth, there was the tourist center of Greenwich Village with its nightclubs, jazz joints, theaters, bars, cafes, restaurants, whores, dope peddlers, hustlers, chess players, poets, con men, bums and tourists by the thousands, a transient, storied area graced with one of the highest crime rates in New York City.

  Once again Quentin Dewing laid out the general approach for the search, setting it up in a rigorously orderly fashion, like a military operation.

  First he intended to send teams of NEST and FBI men through the area. They would “walk” every building in blue Con Edison overalls, surveying it from top to bottom, but they wouldn’t actually enter offices or apartments unless they hit a hot reading. Twentyfive of the FBI’s New York agents and twentyfive detectives would be standing by as a strategic reserve, ready to
rush out whenever they found radiation.

  Following the NEST teams would come a slower, more methodical door-to-door, room-to-room search for the barrel. Three thousand FBI agents and all the NYPD’s available plainsclothesmen would be assigned to the task. Dewing’s idea was to run them in teams of two, two teams to a building, so that there would be a backup in case of trouble. Because of the barrel’s weight, they would limit their search to the first two floors in buildings with no elevators and would pay particular attention to garages and cellars.

  Bannion had turned up an idea to conceal what was happening from the public. One man would identify himself as a police officer, the other as an official of the gas company. Lieutenant Hogan’s Office of Civil Preparedness delivered to the precinct hundreds of pencillike yellow Geiger counters-removed from the air-raid shelters-which the search officers could identify to the unsuspecting public as gas detectors.

  One question remained to be decided: where to begin. Dewing, Hudson and Feldman gathered in front of a huge map of the area.

  “I would say right off the bat,” Feldman said, “that there are two places in there it won’t be. The first’s the meat market. Very law-abiding area, one of the lowest crime rates in the city.” He bestowed an angelic smile on Dewing. “It’s completely run by the Mob. And that tightly structured old Italian neighborhood. Unless these guys speak Arab with a big Italian accent, they’d set off alarm bells just walking down the street in there.

  “Since we got an ID on this guy at Eighth near Fifth from that hooker,”

  Feldman continued, “I’d say start around Washington Square. Then maybe move up, cover Eighth to Fourteenth and Broadway to Sixth Avenue.

  After that, work back toward the river.

  “Except for one thing,” the Chief concluded. “I’d get people into those piers right away. That’s got to be the perfect place to hide something.”

  “All right,” Dewing agreed. “We’ll proceed on the basis you’ve outlined.”

  Feldman had just started back to the desk Dewing had assigned him when the familiar hulking figure drifted up beside him.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Feldman demanded. “I figured you’d be in New Haven by now.”

  Angelo shrugged. “Got anything for me to do?” he asked.

  * * *

  Laila Dajani drove down the quiet Spring Valley street to the house she had rented as a temporary hideaway for her brother and herself. It had belonged to an elderly widowed vice-president of the Chemical Bank who had died of cancer in October. His son and heir, who lived fifty miles away in Connecticut, had been delighted to rent it to Laila for a month during the holidays. As had been the case with the retired stockbroker from whom she had rented the house in Queens that they had used as a cover for their import firm, their transaction had been simple: a letter of agreement and two thousand dollars in cash, half for a month’s rent, half as deposit.

  Laila turned into the driveway and continued into the open garage, thinking again what perfect concealment the bland sameness of this street offered.

  Kamal did not agree. He paused a moment, leaving the garage to scrutinize the houses of their neighbors, each house set on its plot of a quarter of an acre.

  “It’s not good,” be said. “Too many people.”

  Laila did not answer. She opened the front door and stepped inside. Whalid was in the den off the entry hall, sprawled on a sofa in his stockinged feet, a bottle of whiskey, a quarter of it gone, on the table beside him.

  She continued to the kitchen. It was littered with unwashed dishes left over from her brother’s breakfast and supper. Tossed into the wastebasket was an empty bottle. So, she thought, that bottle in the den isn’t his first.

  Kamal was looking scornfully at Whalid’s Johnnie Walker bottle when she returned to the study. “Taking care of your ulcer?” he asked his brother.

  Whalid ignored him. “Why go on waiting around here? Why don’t we get going now?” he asked.

  “Because our orders are to wait here until the announcement is made or the bomb explodes.”

  “For God’s sake, Kamal, don’t be such a fool! That bomb’s never going to explode.”

  “Never? Why not?” Kamal’s blue eyes were chill and lusterless as they contemplated his brother.

  “Because the Americans are going to agree. They haven’t got any choice. You know that.”

  “There is only one thing I know for sure, my brother.” Whalid squirmed uncomfortably listening to the flat, menacing tone of Kamal’s voice. “That is that we have orders and I will see we follow them. All of us.”

  * * *

  “We found it!”

  The jubilant shout echoed through the silent chamber, as jarring, as discordant, as a shout in a library. The room in which it rang out was the operational center of the United States’s ultrasecret communications intelligence agency, the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  The scores of men and women hunched over the blinking lights of individual computer terminals in the room were searching for what an Air Force colonel had earlier described to the President as the right snowflake in a blizzard an electronic blizzard. Their computer terminals flashed out the distinctive print of every sound, phone call, radio message, Morse-code transmission moving in and out of the East Coast of the United States. They were being compared with the sounds captured by the U.S.S. Allen that had come out of Libya and had been relayed to the NSA’s computers. From the instant Qaddafi agreed to extend his ultimatum, the search had been on for the signal the Agency was sure he would have had to send to reprogram the detonator of his bomb.

  The man who had found it, a balding forty-two-yearold Ph.D. from MIT, leaped from his console. The signal was nothing more than a 1.2-second burst of noise, a string of zeroes and ones, the binary system of transmission in which all international communications, even those of the human voice, were made. But it matched up perfectly with a burst caught by the Allen coming from the Libyan seacoast a few miles from the Villa Pietri a few hundredths of a second before the NSA’s scanners had intercepted it hurtling toward Manhattan.

  The MIT scientist took his data to another computer bank and, employing triangulation and electronic devices, some so secret their existence was unknown outside of the NSA headquarters, wrested a vital secret from the overpopulated orbital plane of the earth: he discovered which of the thousands of satellites littering the skies Qaddafi was using to transmit his signals.

  * * *

  By the time the Dajanis had settled into their upstate safe house, the search for their hidden bomb was already well under way. On the waterfront, the NEST and FBI teams sweeping the rotting piers protuding into the Hudson found rats, garbage, winos, the battered desks and upturned chairs of Customs officers who had once, in the heyday of those docks, swept through steamer trunks from Vuitton and matched leather baggage from Mark Cross. They found frightened stockbrokers from Pelham, aspiring lawyers from Sullivan and Cromwell, CPAs from Price Waterhouse, layout artists from Jackson, McGee, a fashion designer apprenticed to Charley Cole cowering in the shadows of the piers’ “reception rooms,”

  some nearly hysterical with fright; everything, in short, except a trace of the bomb for which they were searching.

  Across town, progress was slower. The NEST-FBI teams in their Con Ed overalls were able to move quickly, but the door-to-door police follow-up was a nightmare. Dozens of apartments in the area were unoccupied at the time; owners away at work. The police could have used their battering rams on them, but that, Abe Stern and the Commissioner knew, would provoke unbelievable problems. They would have to station a precious policeman at every opened door to stand guard. Otherwise New York’s litigious citizenry, Stern pointed out, would be certain to sue the city for millions in real or imagined losses-assuming there would be a city left for them to sue. At the police teams’ recommendation, a list was made of all unoccupied apartments for a follow-up effort if the first full sweep of the search area failed to t
urn up Qaddafi’s device.

  And there were those determinedly civil-rights-conscious New Yorkers who were not going to let a police officer across their threshold without a search warrant, even if he was ostensibly trying to save them from escaping gas. In that case, a call for a warrant went back to the Sixth Precinct.

  There a team of federal judges and U.S. attorneys ordered to duty by the President filled in the protesting citizen’s name and address on a pre-drafted warrant and authorized entry by walkie-talkie.

  At 156 Bleecker Street, a pair of detectives burst into a junkies’ shooting gallery. Half a dozen addicts lay around the room on mattresses, some cooking up their next shot, others spaced out in the euphoria of an earlier hit. The detectives kicked over the junkies’ cooker, smashed their hypodermic needles, flushed their dope down the toilet, then left, leaving the uncomprehending addicts to gape at the door slamming shut behind them.

  In three different places, search teams stumbled on burglars busting a flat. Having no time to waste on petty thievery, they ordered the astonished burglars to drop their loot and run for the front door.

  At Quintana’s Bar in the West Village, the sight of the agents’ shield brought a shower of goodies onto the floor: knives, brass knuckles, pills, coke, pot, heroin; any piece of evidence that the collection of petty crooks in the bar wanted to get rid of before the shakedown they were sure was coming. The agents pocketed the knives, flushed away the pills and the pot, searched the cellar, then stalked out, leaving the bar’s unsearched clients spluttering in rage. There were lovers whose coupling was interrupted or fights momentarily calmed, delinquent muggers routed out of stairwells. In a garret on Cornelia Street police found the decaying corpse of a suicide hanging from the rafter to which he had tied himself, and on Thompson Street the body of an elderly woman who had apparently died of the cold in her unheated flat.