The Fifth Horseman (16 page)

With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman’s villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It had, indeed, been built by a Roman, a member of the nobility of the textile trade, who had left his name on it. In the years following his death, the Villa Pietri had served as the palace of Mussolini’s Fascist Governor General of Libya, as the residence of the brother of Libya’s King Idris, and later of the commanding general of the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli. The first chief of state in modern times to employ terrorism as an instrument of national policy had taken over the noble old dwelling in 1971. It was the headquarters from which Qaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network.

The Munich Olympic Massacre had been planned in its gracious sitting room; so, too, had the assault on the Rome Airport meant to kill Henrv Kissinger in December 1973, the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers, the Entebbe skyjacking. The eucalyptus trees of the villa’s gardens concealed the antennas that radioed Qaddafi’s orders to IRA provos, West German students, Red Brigade dissidents, even Islamic zealots infiltrated into Tashkent and Turkestan. Its wine cellars which had once housed the finest Chianti classicos of the Tuscan hills had been turned into an ultramodern communications center, hooked into, among other things, Libya’s radar installations; one of its bedrooms housed a complete mock-up of the control panels of a Boeing 747 and 707 on which many of the hijackers of the early and midseventies had been trained. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: “Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good.”

Qaddafi was radiant with triumph as he drew up to the villa. “Now,” he announced to a handful of aides waiting to greet him at the villa’s doorstep, “I shall no longer have to endure being an Arab President who stands by while my Palestinian brothers are stripped of the last shreds of their homeland.”

He embraced each in turn, his Prime Minister Salam Jalloud, one of the few members of his original junta still with Qaddafi, his chief of intelligence, the commanders of his army and his air force. Then he led them into his study.

“They are criminals, these Israelis,” he declared. “The whole world has stood by watching them stealing our brothers’ lands with these settlements of theirs. Watching while a people is being systematically deprived of its homeland. This so-called peace of that coward Sadat. What a mockery! A peace, for what? To allow the Israelis to go on and on stealing our brothers’ lands. Autonomy, they said.” Qaddafi laughed. “Autonomy for what?

To let the foreigner take away your home!”

Qaddafi sighed. “I dreamt of leading a people that did not sleep at night; that spent its days in the djebels training for the reconquest of its Palestinian brothers’ lands; that respects God’s Holy Law and obeys the Koran because it wants to be an example to the rest.

“And what do I lead? A people that sleeps at night. A people that doesn’t care what happens to its brothers in Palestine. A people that dreams only of buying a Mercedes and three television sets. We trained our best young men to fly Mirage jets in the battle and what did they do? They went down to the souks to open a shop and sell Japanese air-conditioners.” The intensity on the Libyan dictator’s face mesmerized the men around him.

“Now,” he went on, “with our bomb, why do we care if we are only a small power? Let the people go on dreaming of their Mercedes. I don’t need the millions now, only the few who are ready to pay the price I ask. Did the Caliph conquer the world with the millions? No! With the few, because the few were strong and believed.”

Qaddafi contemplated the tabletop a moment, staring at the watery circles left upon it by the bottles of soda his aides had drunk waiting for the test. Although he did not say it, he knew that success would make him, overnight, the hero of the Arab world, the idol of its masses. It would secure the larger goal which lay behind his much-proclaimed hatred of the Jewish state, bringing the Arab world with its vast oil resources and the power they represented under his command.

Salam Jalloud, the Prime Minister, shifted nervously in his chair. He was the one man in the room who had opposed Qaddafi’s scheme from the outset.

“I still say, Sidi, the Americans will destroy us. Or they will plot with the Israelis to trick us, to make us think they are going to do what we ask, then strike when our guard is down.”

“Our guard must never be down.” Qaddafi indicated a small black device on his desk. It looked like a miniature dictating machine. “From now on, this is our guard.” The device, another contribution of the engineers of Nippon Electric, resembled the remote-control boxes which can open a garage door from a moving car. By tapping it with his finger, Qaddafi could send an electronic pulse to a room deep in a specially reinforced cellar of the villa. There, protected by three redbereted paratroopers of his bodyguard, was the terminal which, in response to that gesture, would send his detonation code to Oscar and the bomb hidden in New York.

“The Americans are not fools,” he continued. “Do you think five million Americans are going to die for Israel? For those settlements even they oppose? Never! They are going to force Israel to give us everything we want.”

“Besides,” he said, “we need no longer be afraid of the Americans. Until now they have been able to ignore our rights to help the Israelis trample on the nationhood of our Palestinian brothers because they were a superpower. They were immune. Well, my friends,” a thin, drawn smile appeared on his features, “they are still a superpower, but they are no longer immune.”

In Washington, the President had left the Crisis Committee’s meeting at the National Military Command Center to confer with Moscow on the red telephone line. While he was out of the room, his advisers gathered in anxious knots discussing the emergency. As unobtrusively as possible, white-jacketed Navy stewards slipped among them passing out steaming cups of freshly brewed coffee. Only Jack Eastman remained seated at the conference table, skimming through a stack of documents, most of them stamped “Top Secret.”

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.