The Fifth Horseman (19 page)

Forty miles away on the Tel Aviv sea front, the telephone rang in the office of the second political counselor of the U.S. Embassy.

Three blasts of a siren almost shook the halfdozen young men out of the leather easy chairs in which they sprawled watching closed-circuit television. Three blasts was the signal for an air-to-ground mission for those pilots of the Israeli Air Force; two would have signaled an air-to-air alert.

Grabbing their helmets and orange life jackets, they ran out of their ready room, across a graveled courtyard to the one-story bungalow from which their squadron was commanded. As they did, the first assembled nuclear bombs were already being fitted into their Phantom jets hidden in concrete abutments slotted into the desert floor so carefully they were practically invisible.

The pre-attack briefing was short. It concentrated on the radio frequencies they would employ in an emergency, the codes they would have to follow with total precision to be sure their assault was perfectly coordinated.

As one of the senior airmen in Israel, the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Giora Lascov, was assigned to the huge Uba bin Nafi Air Base, formerly the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli, as his target.

Like three quarters of Israel’s pilots, the thirty-fiveyear-old Lascov was a kibbutznik. In his fifteen years as a member of the elite of Israel’s armed forces, he had fought in two wars and accumulated over three thousand hours of flight time. So highly trained, so programmed was he to respond to a crisis that the sudden revelation that this was not an exercise and that he would, in a very brief time, be dropping a twenty-kiloton nuclear bomb on an enemy target barely jarred his composure.

Because they had the greatest distance to cover, he and his wing man had the first launch. As he rose to head to the jeep outside waiting to speed him down the flight line to his Phantom, the full enormity of what he was about to do struck Lascov.

He turned to look back at the young pilots of his squadron. Their faces reflected the horror that had suddenly engulfed him. He stood there trying to find in his mind some words, some phrase, to leave his men. Then he understood that there were no words to fit so terrible a moment. Silently, Lascov turned to his jeep. Seconds later, he was racing toward his Phantom.

It was 9:52. Exactly thirty-four minutes had elapsed since General Dorit had stepped out of the Cabinet Room and picked up the phone linking him to “The Hole.”

Menachem Begin removed his steel-rimmed glasses. He lowered his head into the cradle of his left hand, slowly massaging his bushy eyebrows with his thumb and middle finger. There was a world of agony in that simple gesture, the reflection of a weariness so crushing that Israel’s Prime Minister felt numb.

He looked at the terse communication on the paper before him. How had they found out? he wondered. Since 1973, every detail of Israel’s nuclear strategy had been reviewed, pondered again and again, to be sure that no revealing detail of a coming attack could be picked up by a passing satellite, that no compromising communication could be intercepted by electronic surveillance. Yet, two minutes ago, he had received a phone call from the French ambassador. His voice hesitant with concern, the Frenchman had relayed the threat from the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: if Israel went through with her nuclear strike against Libya, Soviet rockets would instantly annihilate their nation.

Were the Soviets bluffing? Were they just rattling their rockets the way Khrushchev had done at Suez? Did he have the right to risk the nation’s existence on the possibility that they were?

Begin glanced at his watch. In twelve minutes the Phantoms would be arriving on target. No time to reconvene the Cabinet. The decision was his, and his alone.

He got up and walked to the window. Pale and trembling, the “Polish gentleman,” as he was often described, studied the ageless sweep of the Judean hills, the monuments of modern Israel, the Knesset, the Hebrew University, the Israel Museum sparkling in the sunshine.

On a rise just beyond his line of vision was the one which meant more to Begin than any of the others, the white marble canopy of a “Tent of Remembrance” under which burned an eternal flame in memory of the six million victims of the holocaust-and most of his own family.

Begin had sworn on the altar of those six million dead that never again would his people live another holocaust. Would they if he went through with this? The Soviet threat was so devastatingly simple and direct. Yet Ranan was right. How could Israel exist constantly menaced with destruction at Qaddafi’s hands?

Everything had depended on speed, on annihilating Libya and explaining why afterward. In the terrible chess game of global terror, there was only one move left that could check the Russians now, and it was the Americans who had to play it. Their counterthreat might stay the Russians’ hand. But, Begin asked himself, were the Americans going to risk that when they discovered he had acted on his own, that he had not hesitated to imperil the city of New York to save his nation?

In a flash, Begin understood. The Russians hadn’t found out. No one had.

The Americans hadn’t trusted them. They had realized that their own threat mightn’t be enough to stay Israel’s hand, to freeze her in position while they handled the crisis, so they had turned to the Soviets.

A phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry V111, “naked to mine enemies,” flashed through his mind. That was Israel now, naked and vulnerable. He stared at his telephone. He had only to wait for it to ring now, for the start of the terrible pressures he knew would soon be on him, to abandon a dream, to break his nation’s will, to dissemble its capital. Shrunken and suddenly aged, Menachem Begin turned back toward his telephone console.

Far below his streaking Phantom, Lieutenant Colonel Lascov could see the blue waters of the Mediterranean. His eyes swept incessantly over his instrument panel, looking for any flaw in the electronically controlled flight program hurling him toward the Libyan coast at almost twice the speed of sound. On his radar screen, he could already discern the outlines of the African shore. In nine minutes he would be climbing into the Tripolitan sky to prepare his bombing run.

Suddenly, a sharp buzz rose in his earphones. “Shadrock. Shadrock.

Shadrock.” Lascov tensed. Then, frantically, he began fingering his controls, swinging his plane in a 180-degree arc. The coastline of Africa faded from his radar screen. Operation Maspha had been stood down.

In the capital of the United States it was just after 3:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Monday, December 14. Three and a half hours had gone by since the explosion of Qaddafi’s bomb, yet on the surface nothing in the sleeping capital indicated the crisis at hand. Beneath the surface, however, the best technological resources of the U.S. government were already in action in response to the orders that had been pouring out of the Pentagon since midnight.

Eight miles off the I-87 linking Baltimore and Washington, in the outskirts of Olney, Maryland, a red brick building vaguely resembling a submarine’s conning tower peeped above the snow-covered pastures. Buried five floors below those frozen fields was the National Warning Center. Its heart was a communications console on which rested a round black dialing block slightly larger than the dialing block of an old cradle phone. Its face bore only three digits-0, 1 and 3. That phone was tied to 2,300 warning points across the United States and through them to every air-raid siren in the country.

Twenty-four hours a day a man sat in front of it ready to dial double three for Armageddon, the numbers that would warn the United States that a nuclear attack was hurtling toward its cities.

One floor below was an enormous computer programmed to count the pieces which would be left over after Armageddon. The havoc that would be wreaked on each metropolitan area in the United States by any imaginable range of nuclear weapons was stored on the computer. Now, in response to a query from its technicians, it was spewing out an appallingly precise compilation of the devastation a three-megaton blast would cause in New York.

A few miles away at Fort Meade, Maryland, some of the twenty thousand employees of the National Security Agency skimmed through the most complex and sophisticated computer facilities in the world. Stored on them were the harvest of the NSA’s worldwide eavesdropping systems, global electronic vacuum cleaners that scooped radio transmissions and telephone calls from the atmosphere, broke them down into key categories for rapid retrieval, then dumped them onto the NSA’s computer. The information stored there had already allowed the NSA to foil a major terrorist operation on United States soil. Now the heirs to cryptologists who had broken Japan’s naval code in World War 11 hunted for the word, the phrase, the message that would allow the FBI to foil this one.

At the FBI and across the Potomac River at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, orders were flowing around the world instructing FBI agents and CIA station chiefs to undertake a relentless effort to find out who had delivered to Qaddafi the secret of the hydrogen bomb, how he had built it, and who might have been in charge of an effort to hide it in New York.

At the underground emergency command post in the Maryland countryside where the NEST nuclear-explosive search teams had been ordered into action, half a dozen tense officials prepared for the most complex and deadly search their organization had ever been asked to undertake.

Six times in its short history, NEST had rushed its teams into the streets of an American city. No one had found out about them. In a few hours, two hundred men and their detection equipment were scheduled to be prowling the streets of Manhattan in postal vans and rented Hertz, Ryder and Avis trucks and no one would know they were there or what they were looking for.

Two NEST aircraft, a Beechcraft King Air 100 twin jet and an H-500 helicopter, both bearing markings that could not be traced to the U.S. government, had already landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, with an advance party of twenty men, a closed communicalions circuit for two hundred and a dozen boron trifiuoride neutron detectors. From NEST’s Western headquarters on Highland Street, Las Vegas, just two blocks from the Sahara Hotel and the neon glitter of the Strip, dozens of detection devices stored at the old Nevada nuclear testing ranges were being flown into McGuire by a unique facility at NEST’s disposal-the largest fleet of rental jets in the United States, kept in Las Vegas for the city’s high-rolling clients.

The man who would have the terrifying responsibility of leading the search was approaching New York on the New Jersey Turnpike in an unmarked government car. John Booth looked the quintessential Westerner: lean and muscled, well over six feet tall, with the coarse, grainy complexion of a man whose face was often exposed to the elements. As usual, he was wearing cowboy boots, a checkered shirt and, around his neck, a silver-andturquoise Navajo charm suspended on a rawhide thong.

Booth’s emergency call had caught him, as inevitably such a summons would, on a winter’s weekend, skiing off the bowls of Copper Mountain, Colorado.

Now, rushing toward the city ahead, Booth felt the nervous inroads of what he called his “but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling” knotting his intestines.

It was always there, that angry, half-nauseous sensation, whenever Booth’s beeper called him to lead his NEST nuclear search teams into the streets of an American community. Those teams were Booth’s brainchild. Long before the first novelist had written the first atomic-bombin-Manhattan thriller, Booth had seen the menace of nuclear terrorism coming. His first, apocalyptic vision of that possibility had come in the most unlikely of places, amidst the silvery-green olive groves and terraced fields of a little Spanish fishing village called Palomares.

He had been sent there with a team of fellow scientists and weapons designers in 1964 to try to find the nuclear weapons jettisoned by a crashing B-52. They had the best detection devices, the most sophisticated techniques available, at their disposal. And they couldn’t find the missing bomb.

If they couldn’t find a full-fledged bomb in the open countryside, it didn’t require much imagination on John Booth’s part to realize how terrifyingly difficult it would be to find a nuclear weapon hidden by a group of terrorists in an attic or a cellar of some city.

From the moment he had returned to Los Alamos, where he was a senior weapons designer, he had fought to prepare the United States for the crisis he knew would beset an American city one day. Yet, despite all his efforts, Booth was all too well aware of something few laymen would have even suspected looking at the sophisticated equipment his teams employed: how dreadfully inadequate they were, how tragically limited was their ability to perform the task for which they were intended. The problem was taking that equipment into the builtup downtown area of a big city. There the tightly packed blocks, the highrise forests of glass and steel provided an abundance of natural screening to smother the telltale emissions that could lead his men to a hidden bomb as a scent takes a bloodhound to his quarry.

Outside, the sulfurous fumes, the roseate glow of the burn-off fires of the Jersey refineries flickered like the flames of a technological hell as they fell away behind his speeding car. He climbed up the Jersey Heights, then started the long loop down toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Suddenly, there it was before him across the black sweep of the Hudson: the awesome grandeur of Manhattan Island. Booth thought of something Scott Fitzgerald had once written, a phrase that had struck him years ago as an undergraduate at Cornell. To see Manhattan like that, from afar, was to catch it “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”