The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  The search turned up barrels of every description: old wine kegs, beer barrels, barrels of chemicals and motor oil, of old rags; even, in a cellar on Washington Place, three barrels of hoarded gasoline left from World War II. Every one had to be carefully, meticulously scrutinized and eliminated by NEST’s scientists.

  Each move made out on the streets was carefully, painstakingly logged at the Sixth Precinct on huge maps, on great sheets of photos now covering one whole wall of the station house. Feldman studied the stain of the area searched. It was like a glob of heavy liquid slowly, ever so slowly, spreading over the map. They were in a race between the tantalizing slowness of its advance and the clock, and for the moment, the despairing Chief of Detectives realized, the clock was winning.

  * * *

  In the NSC conference room, the same Air Force colonel who had briefed the President and his advisers shortly after Qaddafi’s threat came in Sunday night stood once again before his charts. “The man has been extremely clever in his choice of a satellite to handle his transmission, Mr. President,” he declared. “He’s using an absolutely forgotten bird up there called Oscar. It was designed for amateur radio enthusiasts and put up by NASA. Quite frankly, once it was hung up there, everybody simply forgot about it. We don’t even carry it in our classified listing of all the satellites currently in space.”

  The colonel cleared his throat in nervous acknowledgment of his service’s shortcomings. “And I’ve also got to say that for his purposes it’s the perfect bird. Since these ham radio operators it was designed for can’t afford a lot of expensive equipment, there’s a lot of power in its down leg back to earth. A relatively small receiver could pick up a coded communication like this with no trouble at all.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, can’t your Air Force blow that damn thing out of the sky with one of our missiles?” Crandell asked.

  “Del, just a minute.” Jack Eastman bridled at yet another of Crandell’s proposals for instant, ill-thought-out action. “We have every reason to assume this bomb is programmed to detonate automatically if it doesn’t receive a countersignal. Blow that thing out of the skies and how will Qaddafi stand it down if somehow we’re able to convince him not to detonate it before his ultimatum expires?”

  “Jack, when in hell are you going to wake up to the fact that the man is not going to compromise?”

  The President interrupted his quarreling advisers with a weary wave of his hand. He turned to the Air Force colonel. “For the time being at least,” he asked, “can you blanket all transmission out of that satellite? Shut it down completely?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then do it.”

  * * *

  Mesmerized and uncomprehending, the three Dajanis sat in front of the television set in the den of their rented house in upstate New York.

  There were only minutes left, yet the screen before them contained no image of the President announcing a new Middle East settlement or a national emergency, no frenzied Mayor telling New Yorkers to flee their city, no humbled Menachem Begin proclaiming that his nation was withdrawing from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Instead, the screen flickered with the interminable images of a soap opera featuring a psychiatrist trapped in an adulterous relationship with a patient.

  Laila was close to hysteria. “It’s gone wrong!” she sniffled. “It hasn’t worked. It’s going to explode!”

  Whalid set his half-filled whiskey glass on the TV set and put an arm around her shoulders. “They must be talking in secret. Who knows? Maybe he’s going to extend the ultimatum.” On the floor of the den was a blue metallic case, similar to the detonation case attached to Whalid’s bomb except that it contained none of the protective devices the Japanese had built into the original. It too was connected to a slender needle rising almost invisibly above the TV antenna on the roof. “If he is, we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “What time is it?” Kamal asked for the third time in five minutes.

  “Four minutes to three,” Whalid replied Kamal got up and walked to the window onto the quiet, deserted suburban street. “Maybe the Americans refused, after all. Will we hear it explode up here?” he asked his brother.

  * * *

  He was talking about an event that was going to cause the deaths of six million people, yet he put the question to Whalid as though he were asking him if they would be able to hear a door slam across the street.

  “No,” Whalid replied. “There might be a flash of light. Or if you were out in the street you might feel the heat. There would be a cloud, the mushroom cloud.

  That we’d see.” Whalid pointed to the window behind Kamal. “The weather’s clear enough.”

  On the television set, the announcer droned a final tease about the next day’s episode of the soap opera while an image of the sun setting to the throb of violins faded from the screen. It was replaced by that of a man marching past the shelves of a supermarket extolling the virtues of a can of spaghetti with real Italian-style meat sauce.

  “Look!” Laila shrieked, pointing at the screen. “It’s three o’clock and they’re showing that! It’s failed! It’s gone all wrong!”

  Kamal turned from the window. He studied their silent radio receiver, then the television set. “Calm yourself,” he ordered his sister. “Do you have no dignity?” He turned and with his gliding walk stalked through the hall, out of the front door and onto the snow-covered lawn.

  Whalid watched him through the window as Kamal marched slowly up and down, eyes fixed on the distant horizon, as purposeful, as determined, as a beast waiting by a water hole for a lesser animal to appear. The scientist glanced at his watch. Three minutes past three. If something had happened, the signal would have arrived on their radio by now.

  Whalid Dajani shuddered, reached for the whiskey bottle and with a shaking hand poured a large dollop into his glass.

  Laila remained on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chest in a trance of horror and ill-comprehension. There had never been any question this was going to happen. The logic of their act was irrefutable, overwhelming. It had been evident from the beginning that the Americans would have to give them what they wanted. Yet, clearly, they had not, and now they were paying the price that was never supposed to be paid.

  Suddenly she sat up, her finger thrust at the television set. “Wait a minute,” she cried. “That station is in New York and it’s still on!”

  “That’s right.”

  It was Kamal standing in the doorway to the den. He looked at Laila, at his brother slumped in his chair, one hand on his whiskey glass on the table beside him, at their silent radio receiver. “It’s seven minutes past three. We had no word of an extension of the ultimatum. Clearly, the bomb was meant to explode and did not. Why?”

  * * *

  Thirty-five miles away in New York City, the frightened men at the Sixth Precinct had one eye on the clock, the other on the stain spreading all too slowly over the map of the area they were searching. Al Feldman, at the center of the room, wanted to cry out in frustration. Why hadn’t they found it? Why was it taking so long? Three times Washington had called on the direct line they had installed here, urging them to hurry, warning them that there would be no extension this time, that after nine o’clock there was nothing, only the void.

  Up until now there had been no panic, no hysteria, nobody breaking down.

  That was because they still had time, and time was hope, tangible, palpable hope. But what was going to happen at six o’clock if they hadn’t found it?

  At seven, at eight when there was just one more hour remaining? Would they hold then? Or would they panic like the frightened animals they would be, rush to the door, stampede for cars, for the telephones, shriek the news of the coming disaster to friends and relatives? It would take only one or two people then to break and it would all collapse. One voice shouting “Fire!”

  in the dark and crowded theater. There would be a hundred voices screaming “Fire,” Feldman realized, all of them in this b
uilding. We don’t have six hours, the Chief suddenly understood. We probably don’t even have five. At seven o’clock it will all be over. The news will break and five million human beings will become five million rabbits trying to run before the flames of a forest fire.

  The cackle of the squawk box linking them to the NSC conference room in the White House interrupted his baleful meditation. “Any progress to report?”

  Jack Eastman’s voice asked.

  Normally Feldman honored the formality of the chain of command in a crisis as religiously as a priest guards the secrets of his confessional. Now, however, he leaned past the Commissioner and Dewing to address the squawk himself. “No, none,” he answered, his voice so hoarse he could have been a perfect candidate for an antismoking commercial. “Is the President there?”

  “Yes,” came the familiar soft voice.

  “Mr. President, this is Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives up here. I have got to tell you, sir, there is no way we are going to find that bomb before nine o’clock tonight. Either you got to get us more time, Mr. President, or you got to tell the people what’s happening. You can’t let them die trapped up here like rats.”

  * * *

  Kamal Dajani was perched on the imitation-mahogany cabinet of the now silent TV set, his arms folded, studying his brother with a steady, imperturbable gaze.

  “What are you looking at me for?” Whalid took an anxious gulp of his whiskey. “Get yourself a drink. Celebrate. We won. The Israelis must be moving out of the West Bank right now. They’ll probably announce it tonight.”

  Kamal remained as immobile as an actor caught in the concluding freeze frame of a police serial on the TV set his legs concealed.

  Whalid lurched to his feet. “We got to get going.” He looked at Laila.

  “Your things ready? We’re going home. To Jerusalem.”

  He started toward the door. Kamal didn’t budge. Whaled turned back to him.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” he demanded. His face was flushed, his voice beginning to thicken under the impact of strain and whiskey.

  “Why didn’t the bomb go off, Whaled?”

  “Kamal, you damn fool.” Whalid swayed in the doorway like a sapling hit by a gust of wind. “Can’t you understand anything? That bomb was never meant to go off. You knew that. Qaddafi knew that. It was just a threat, a way to right a wrong, to get us justice.”

  His brother glared at him with sullen probing eyes.

  “And you wanted to be sure of that, did you?”

  “The trouble with you, Kamal, is you’re still back there in your training camp in Damascus playing with your chunks of plastic.” Whalid was beginning to shout. “You thought this was going to be like ambushing a bus full of kids, or hijacking some people in a plane, didn’t you? But this is five million people. We can’t go home to Palestine over the bodies of five million innocent people, you damn fooll There has to be another way.”

  Whalid grasped at the top of the sofa for support. “I didn’t build a bomb to kill five million people. I built it to make us even with the rest of the world. The Jews have it. The Americans have it. The French have it. The Chinese have it. The Russians have it. The English have it. Now, thanks to me, we have it. And we’re going to get our homes back with it. They must be finishing up their agreement right now. That’s why we haven’t heard anything.”

  “Oh no, Whalid. I don’t believe that’s why we haven’t heard anything.” The words were as soft, as gentle, as a kitten’s purr. “I believe Qaddafi wanted that bomb to explode and the reason it didn’t is you did something to it while we were up on the roof Sunday fixing the aerial. That’s why you’ve been so relaxed since then. That’s why you started to treat your ulcer with whiskey again, isn’t it?”

  Whalid was silent. His breath was coming in shortening bursts, an oil slick of nervous sweat beginning to clot the pores of his temple.

  “You’re a traitor. A drunk and a traitor!” Kamal rose, each of his limbs seeming to follow his action individually like the legs of a folding bridge table snapping out one by one. “What did you do, Whalid?”

  Whalid stood immobile before his younger brother’s advance. His lower jaw trembled slightly as he tried unsuccessfully to give sound to the words fear had trapped in his throat.

  “What did you do, Whalid?”

  Kamal’s right hand flicked out like a rattlesnake’s tongue. The calloused ridges below his little finger, the ridge of flesh that had chopped the life from Alain Prevost in the Bois de Boulogne, crashed against his brother’s cheekbone. Whalid shrieked in pain as the bone cracked. His scream was choked off by the fingertips of Kamal’s left hand driving a wedge into the recess of his solar plexus. The breath burst from Whalid’s mouth as air explodes from a punctured balloon. He tottered backward, hit a chair, then crashed into the maple table the house’s owner had once used as a desk. Dishes, his whiskey bottle, the framed portraits of the dead banker’s grandchildren cascaded to the ground in a clatter of breaking glass and splintering wood.

  “You know what’s happening now because of you? The Americans are preparing to destroy Qaddafi. They’re going to wipe him out because he’s at their mercy, because of you, because of whatever you did to that bomb.”

  Whalid was choking, trying almost to bite the air in his effort to bring the breath back to his lungs. He gagged.

  “I want to know what you did to it.”

  “No I”

  Kamal’s foot drove with crushing force into his brother’s crotch. Whalid screamed in agony as the tip of Kamal’s shoe crushed his testicles against the flesh of his groin.

  “Kaman” It was Laila. “For God’s sake, stop it. He’s your brother!”

  “He’s a traitor. He’s a filthy dirty traitorl” Kamal’s foot lashed out once more, a swift vicious stroke to the base of his brother’s spine. “Tell me what you did to it, you bastard.”

  “No.”

  Again the foot smashed forward, this time into the kidneys of the figure crumpled in the fetal position on the floor.

  “Tell me!”

  Kamal hadn’t seen his sister pick up the whiskey bottle. Yet, instinctively, he sensed the swish of air as it descended toward him. He moved forward enough, just enough, so that instead of smashing it against his skull she crashed it down onto the vertebrae at the head of his spine.

  He buckled under the blow, then, off balance, stumbled back against the sofa.

  Whalid rolled over, reaching for his pocket. He had his gun in his wavering, untrained hand as his brother flung himself at him. His first shot exploded just over Kamal’s shoulder. There was no second. The fingers of Kamal’s right hand, pressed together into a wedge of flesh and bone, smashed against his trachea just below his Adam’s apple, forcing it backward against the bone of his neck until its delicate membranes snapped apart like elastic bands stretched beyond their breaking point.

  A look of surprise melting swiftly into horror spread over Whalid’s face.

  His mouth and jaws contorted in a grotesque and futile effort to inhale the air that would never again reach his lungs.

  Kamal stood over him, rubbing the ridge of his right hand almost meditatively in his left palm. Laila was transfixed, her mouth agape with horror, still not quite comprehending what had happened.

  “What did you do to him?” she gasped.

  “What a traitor deserves. I killed him.”

  Kamal knelt down beside his brother. Whalid’s face was grayish purple, his eyes bulging, whites protruding from their sockets, imploring them silently for some stay of the death he realized was overtaking him.

  “It takes a couple of minutes for them to die,” Kamal announced matter-of-factly. With a quick heave, he rolled his brother onto his stomach as a calloused vet might turn over the still-warm body of a dog. “I want the checklist.”

  He patted the hip pockets of Whalid’s trousers. There was something hard in the left one. Kamal reached in and thrust the object he pulled out up to his sister.
It was a thirtyminute BASF tape, and both of them recognized instantly the tiny red crescent in its upper righthand corner.

  “That’s why it didn’t go off. The bastard put another tape in there while we were up on the roof.”

  Furiously, Kamal rolled his brother back over onto his back again. His face was bluish purple now, the eyes slightly less protruding, the hysteria of a moment ago replaced by a fearing resignation to the death that was only seconds away. Kamal bent down and pressed his lips against his brother’s ear, shouting to make sure his dying brain would record the message, would send the angry curse spinning around him as he stumbled toward the void.

  “Your bomb is going to go off!” he yelled. “Because I’m going to set it off. You lost, traitor!”

  * * *

  Dorothy Burns had been about to leave for the Tuesday-afternoon tea of her Aquinas discussion group when she thought she heard a shot. Never, except on the television programs that comforted the lonely nights of her widowhood, had Dorothy heard a gunshot. Anxiously she rushed to her bedroom window and stared at the house next door. She was about to turn away again when she saw the man, almost pulling the woman behind him, burst from the front door and run to the garage. Then she saw the car back recklessly down the driveway and go careening off up the street.

  Dorothy shuddered. Every since poor Tom’s boy had told her he had rented his father’s house to foreigners for Christmas, she had wondered what kind of people they were. Was this the answer? There was only a second’s hesitation before she picked up the phone.