The Fifth Horseman (28 page)

“Gentlemen, the Israelis were right.”

The sober faces around the NSC conference table turned to the stranger in their midst.

“You shouldn’t have stopped them. The man is an irresponsible international criminal and the Israelis had the right answer: destroy himl”

“Our first concern, Mr. Mayor,” Jack Eastman quietly noted, “has been the lives of the people in your city.”

There was no stopping the Mayor, however. “The man is another Hitler. He’s violated every single precept of international behavior there is. He’s killed, murdered and terrorized every corner of the globe to get his way.

He destroyed Lebanon with his money, which he poured into Beirut right through our good American banks, by the way. He was behind Khomeini. He’s out to kill every friend we have in the Middle East from Sadat to the Saudis and then destroy us by shutting off our oil. And we’ve sat on our asses for five years and let him get away with it like we were a bunch of Chamberlains cringing before another Hitler.” Stern’s face was red with anger, with his fury at what his city faced. He looked at the President.

“Even your own damn fool of a brother made an ass out of himself and you-running around this country licking his boots. Like those idiots in the German-American Band barking ‘Heil Hitler’ at their rallies in 1940.”

The Mayor paused just an instant to catch his breath, then was off again.

“Now he’s gone and put a bomb in my town, in the midst of my people, and you propose to get down on your hands and knees and give him what he wants?

To a Hitler? To a madman? Instead of clobbering the bastard?”

“The fact of the matter is, Mr. Mayor,” Admiral Fuller replied, “clobbering Libya isn’t going to save New York.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It happens to be the case.”

“Why?”

“Because destroying Libya isn’t going to give us any guarantee that the bomb in New York won’t go off.”

The Mayor slapped both his hands on the table. He half rose out of his seat, his eyebrows twitching in anger, as he looked down the table to the beribboned Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“You mean to sit here and tell me that after all the billions and billions and billions of dollars we’ve poured into your goddamn military machine for the last thirty years, all that money my city needed so badly and never gotafter all that, you’re telling me your navies and your armies can’t save my people, can’t save my city from a crackpot, half-mad tinhorn dictator running a country that’s nothing but a lot of sand and camel crap?”

“And oil,” someone remarked.

The Admiral’s bony face took on the mournful look of an aging bloodhound.

“There’s only one thing that can save your city for sure, Mr. Mayor, and that’s finding the bomb and defusing it.”

“Who’d they give you?”

Detective First Grade Angelo Rocchia wiped his hands on the towel rack of the FBI’s washroom as he addressed the question to his detective partner, Henry Ludwig. Ludwig gestured with his heavy hand toward a slim, curly-haired black smoking at the far end of the room. “Joe Token down there.

Who’d you get?”

Angelo gave a disdainful glance toward a young agent running a comb through his wavy blond hair a few washbasins away. He exhaled a weary breath, then leaned forward to ponder his own face in the mirror over Ludwig’s basin. He could see a few glistening traces still remaining of the antiwrinkle cream he rubbed under his eyes and around his mouth every morning. It was something he’d been doing since August, since just after he’d begun his affair with The New York Times’s Grace Knowland.

His appearance was something that had always concerned Angelo. He had learned as a young detective on Manhattan’s East Side that dress and respect went hand in hand. First you had to impress the doormen to get up to see your “clients”; then, once you got there, a little respect was just the attitude you wanted to inspire in them.

Angelo’s money, his pals joked, went two places, into his stomach and onto his back. He never gambled. Never played the ponies. Never pissed it away on the broads. This morning he was wearing a navy-blue suit, $350 marked down at F. R. Tripler, a heavy cotton shirt with the French cuffs and the initials on the pocket, a brocaded white silk tie, one of half a dozen ties he bought each year at the Customs Shop’s January clearance sale.

Angelo touched his tie and brushed his hair with his hand. “Know something, Dutchman?” he mumbled to his NYPD partner. “Something’s wrong with this one. Too heavy. FBI’s focusing in. Task Force is focusing in. I seen four Narcs. All for one shitty barrel.”

Without waiting for an answer he strolled along the row of white washbasins to the FBI agent with whom he had been assigned to work. “Terrific-looking tie you’ve got there, son,” he said, casting a pitying glance at the narrow, stringy piece of cloth dangling around the young man’s neck. “Where’d you get it?”

“Oh.” Jack Rand smiled. “Do you like it? I got it at Denver Dry Goods.”

The mention of his base station reminded the twentyeight-year-old agent of just how tired he was after his allnight flight into the city. Despite himself, he yawned sleepily. Angelo gave his partner a sour glance, then clapped a heavy hand on the agent’s shoulder. “Come on, kid. Let’s see where they want us to go.”

In a large room nearby, a dozen gray government-issue desks had been pushed into a square. At one, an agent and a senior detective handed out pier assignments. At others, men drew up duty rosters, set radio code signals, issued radios. Everyone was shouting at the same time: “We don’t have enough radios. Call the Plaza, we need more radios.” “Get us some unmarked cars. Kind that don’t look like police cars.” “We getting overtime for this?” “Who’s covering at nine tomorrow?”

A hand brushed Angelo’s elbow as he moved to the assignment desk. He turned to find himself looking into the sparkling black eyes of the Chief of Detectives. Feldman put his face close to his. “Pull out all the stops on this one, Angelo. Don’t worry about anything. Civilian complaints. Nothing. We’ll cover you.”

Without waiting for a reply, Feldman moved across the room in search of the next ear to which he could whisper his injunction.

Rand returned from the assignment desk and passed Angelo a slip of paper with their destination on it. The New Yorker looked at it, then at the knot of men crowding the desk where each team was being given an FBI radio set for their New York police car. That operation, Angelo concluded, was going to take all day. Casually, he eased his way over to the desk, stooped down, tucked a radio under his arm and began to slide away.

“Hey!” the FBI desk clerk screamed. “Where the hell do you think you’re going with that?”

“Where am I going?” Angelo growled. “To the Brooklyn Army Base piers, where I’m supposed to go. Where else would I be going? To Roosevelt Raceway?”

“You can’t do that!” The bespectacled clerk was almost beside himself with rage. “You haven’t signed the form. You gotta sign the paper. It has to be dated and signed.”

Angelo gave Rand a disgusted glance. “Would you believe that? A barrel of gas out there ready to kill a bunch of people and we have to sign a paper before we can go out and look for it?”

He grabbed the paper the frantic clerk was waving at him. “I tell you, kid, if the world was about to blow up there’d still be a fucking clerk out there somewhere, saying, ‘Hey, wait. First you gotta sign the fucking paper.”

For the first time in his life David Hannon was face to face with an American President. He removed a circular blue-and-white plastic wheel not much thicker than a dime from his breast pocket and set it on the table before him. It was a nuclear-bomb-effects computer designed by the Lovelace Foundation, the revised 1962 edition computed for sea-level conditions. Hannon was never without it. There was almost nothing he couldn’t tell you about nuclear explosions with that wheel: how many pounds pressure per square inch would break a glass window, snap a steel arch or hemorrhage your lungs; the degree of burns you’d get twenty-three miles away from a five-megaton burst; how much fallout it would take to kill you 219 miles away from an eighty-kiloton explosion; the time the fallout would need to reach you-1ind how long you’d go on living once you’d been exposed to it. He glanced at the wheel. New York, he thought reassuringly, was at sea level. There would be no need to make any adjustments in his calculations.

“Let’s get going.”

Hannon recognized the familiar face of the President’s National Security Assistant. He selfconsciously touched his wavy white hair to make sure it was in place and gave a nervous tug to his striped tie.

“Sir, in New York with a three-megaton thermonuclear explosion we’ve got a situation that is unique in the world. All those tall buildings. The thrust of our studies has always been what we can do to the Soviets, not what they can do to us. And since they don’t have any tall buildings, this is a circumstance where the data runs out, so to speak.” Little dew balls of sweat began to gleam on Hannon’s head. “The fact of the matter is, we just can’t say with total precision what this weapon is going to do to Manhattan. The damage would be so great, it’s almost inconceivable.”

Hannon rose and walked to the map of the New York area his deputy had just pinned to the display board of the conference room. A series of concentric circles, blue, red, green and black, moved out from the narrow pencil of Manhattan Island at its center. “What we’ve done is work out here our best estimate of the destruction it would cause, based on our computer calculations. Since we don’t know exactly where this device is, we’ve assumed for the purpose of our study that it’s here.” His finger indicated Times Square. “In that case, the blue circle represents Zone A from ground zero out to three miles.”

He moved his finger along its circumference, down Chambers Street in lower Manhattan in the south, over the East River by the Williamsburg Bridge, through Greenpoint in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, across upper Manhattan at Ninety-sixth Street, and, west of the Hudson, around Union City, Hoboken and parts of Jersey City. “Nothing inside this circle is going to survive in any recognizable form.”

“Nothing?” the President asked, incredulous. “Nothing at all?”

“Nothing, sir. The devastation will be total.”

“I just can’t believe that.” Tap Bennington thought of the view he had so often had of Manhattan Island driving down to the Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel: of those glittering ramparts of glass and steel stretching from the World Trade Center up through Wall Street to midtown and beyond.

That all that could be flattened by one thermonuclear device was inconceivable, the CIA director thought. This had to be an overstatement of some bureaucrat too long lost in his charts.

“Sir,” Hannon replied, “the blast wave a device like this will produce is going to generate winds unlike anything that has ever existed on earth.”

“Not even at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

“Remember we employed atomic, not hydrogen, bombs in those cities. And with comparatively low yields. The winds they creates were just summer breezes compared to what this one’s going to produce.”

The bureaucrat turned back to the slender blue ribbon twisting around the heart of Manhattan Island: Wall Street Greenwich Village, Fifth and Park Avenues, Central Park, the East and West Sides. “We know from our studies in both of those cities that modern steel and concrete buildings just disappeared. Poof!” Hannon snapped his fingers. “Like that. With the winds this is going to produce you’re going to have skyscrapers literally flying all over the landscape. Disintegrating in seconds…They’ll blow away like Long Island beach buts in a hurricane.”

Hannon turned to his audience again. He was so controlled and composed he might have been addressing a class at the War College. “If this really goes off, gentlemen, all that will be left of Manhattan Island as we know it today is a smoldering pile of debris.”

For seconds, the men at the table struggled to digest the enormity of Hannon’s words.

“How about survivors in the area?” Abe Stern asked, nodding toward the blue circle inside which were trapped, at that very moment, perhaps five million people.

“Survivors? In there?” Hannon gave the Major a look of total incredulity.

“There won’t be any.”

“Good God!” Stern gasped. For an instant he looked as though he was going to suffer a stroke.

“And fire?” asked Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense.

“The fire this will create,” Hannon replied, “will be unlike anything in human experience. If this device explodes, it’s going to release a heat burst that’ll set houses on fire all over Westchester County, New Jersey and Long Island. You’ll have tens, hundreds of thousands of wooden houses bursting into flames like matches exploding.”

Hannon glanced at his map. “Inside the first circle, what will happen first is that the thermal pulse, the heat of the fireball, will be passed little diminished through the glass sheaths of all those modern buildings in the center of Manhattan. Now, when you look inside those glass skyscrapers, what do you see? Curtains. Rugs.

Desks covered with papers. In other words, fuel. What will happen is, you’ll have a million fires lit instantly on Park Avenue. Then, of course, the blast will hit and turn the place into piles of smoking rubbish.”

“Christ!” One of the deputies along the conference room wall said. “Imagine those poor people in those glass buildings!”

“Actually,” Hannon replied, “according to our calculations, glass buildings may turn out to be less dangerous than you’d imagine, provided, of course, they’re well away from the shot. At the enormous pressure those things generate, those glass structures are going to fragment into millions of tiny pieces which are not going to have a high degree of penetration. I mean, they’ll make you look like a pincushion, but they won’t kill you.”