The Fifth Horseman (3 page)

Before it bad, however, his predecessors in the White House had to ask themselves whether they should — or could — evacuate the city — and not a word had ever leaked to the Bostonians whose lives might have been at stake.

“Sir?”

The President started as he turned to look at his adviser. He had paled noticeably. He was holding the telephone with one hand cupped over its mouthpiece. “Los Alamos just called in a preliminary analysis of the blueprint. They say it’s a viable weapons design.”

Across the Potomac River from the White House an elegant auburn-haired young woman in her middle thirties hurried through the waiting room of National Airport and down the stairs leading toward the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. She stopped in front of a bank of gray metallic left-luggage lockers and chose one at random. She placed a small white envelope inside, rolled two quarters into the slot commanding its lock and removed the key. Then she opened a second and deposited a bulky shopping bag inside. It contained a blond wig and a tan polo coat. This time she did not remove the key. Her task completed, she crossed the hall to a telephone booth and swiftly dialed a number. When her party replied, she mumbled only two words into the receiver, the number of the key she held up before her: “K six-oh-two.”

Seconds later, she was rushing toward the terminal and the eight-o’clock shuttle to New York.

The man who had taken her telephone call carefully noted the numerals K602 on a slip of paper on which a telephone number, 202-456-1414, was already written. It was the number of the White House switchboard. He tucked the paper into the side pocket of his sheepskin coat and stepped out of his public telephone booth into the early-evening crowd flowing through New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He was in his late thirties, a florid-faced man with a thin black moustache and a tendency to corpulence that his bulky coat effectively concealed.

He sauntered through the waiting room, then hurried up the station steps and out into the cold. A few moments later he was at the corner of Broadway and forty-second Street, the edge of Times Square, savoring once again the torrents of light that had so impressed him years ago on his first visit to New York. No energy crisis here, he thought, staring at the glowing marquees, the garishly lit store windows, the advertising panels, sparkling carpets of color stretched out along the walls of night.

With the deliberate pace of a man who is looking for something, he crossed the street and started up Broadway. The spectacle on those sidewalks was even more grotesque, more Breughelian, than he had remembered. At Forty-third, a Salvation Army band and chorus, shivering in their blue uniforms, struggled through “O Come All Ye Faithful,” only a few yards away from a gaggle of whores in satin hot pants, the shiny fabrics of their trousers clinging so tightly to their hips and upper thighs that every detail of the wares they offered was available for inspection.

You found every face in the world in that crowd, he mused. Gawking tourists; well-dressed theatergoers indifferent to the throngs around them; black pimps in leather greatcoats and high-heeled shoes; slum kids down from uptown screeching at each other like migrating starlings; shuffling winos, hats held out for a couple of coins; potbellied cops, pickpockets scanning the crowd for a victim, soldiers and sailors, their faces so young, so trusting.

At Forty-sixth Street a Santa Claus so emaciated no amount of padding could disguise him adequately for his role listlessly tolled his bell before an empty alms bucket. Just behind him, a pair of black transvestites in hip-high leather boots and peroxided wigs called out from a doorway, the timbre of their falsettos leaving no doubt about their sex.

Crossing the street, sensing the vibrancy, the palpable, dynamic human dimension of those throngs, he felt a sharp twinge of pain cramp his stomach. The ulcer. He turned into a Howard Johnson and ordered a glass of milk. Then he renewed his march up Broadway.

Suddenly, the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few, too few to mention” told him he bad found what he was looking for. He entered a brightly lit radio and record shop, walked down its lines of albums and tapes to the banks of empty cassettes. Anxiously, nervously, he picked through them, looking for the one he wanted.

“Say, my friend,” the clerk announced, “we got a special on Sonys. Three for four ninety-nine.”

“No,” he replied. “I need a BASF, a thirtyminute BASF.”

The clerk shrugged and reached for a box on the shelf behind him. He threw three BASF tapes on the counter. “There you go. Three for five ninety-five.”

His customer picked one up. “Thanks,” he said, a hesitant, almost forced smile on his face, “but I only need one.”

A few blocks away from Times Square, at the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street, the Daughters of Charity of the Order of Saint Vincent de Paul prepared to open a spectacle of a vastly different sort. Gently, as unobtrusively as possible, they shepherded their children toward the tinseled brilliance of the Christmas tree beckoning to them like a lighthouse of hope from the center of the auditorium.

The spastic uncertainty of the children’s movements, the slant of their eyes, the heavy tongues that rolled around their half-open mouths, all bore witness to the curse which lay upon their little bodies. They were mongoloids.

The mother superior motioned to the children to sit down, took an electric cord and plugged it into a socket. At the sight of the sparkling tissue of light inflaming the tree, a pathetic babble of discordant sound rose from the wondering faces around it.

The mother superior stepped toward their parents gathered around the room.

“Maria Rocchia,” she announced, “is going to open our program by singing for us the first lines of `O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”

She reached into the circle of uplifted faces and took the hand of a ten-year-old with black hair tied in pigtails that tumbled to her shoulder blades. Gently, the superior coaxed her toward the center of the circle.

The child stood there a moment, terrified. Finally she opened her mouth.

The only sound which escaped was a raucous bleat. Her head began to shake violently, sending her pigtails swirling about her. She stamped her feet in fury and frustration.

In the first row, a middle-aged man, his heavy torso wrapped in a well-pressed gray suit, reached a hand upward and plucked nervously at the collar of his white shirt. Each gesture of the child, each incoherent sound she emitted, sent a tremor of anguish through his heavy body. She was his only child. Since his wife had died of lymphatic cancer three years before, she had been in the nuns’ care.

Angelo Rocchia stared at his daughter as though somehow the intensity of the love radiating from his ruddy face might calm the tempest shaking her frail figure. Finally she stopped. A first hesitant sound, then another and another flowed from her mouth. The tone was harsh, yet the rhythm underlying it was perfect.

Angelo Rocchia dabbed with relief at the sweat sparkling on his temple just where the retreating skin of his forehead met the mass of his wavy gray hair. He unbuttoned the jacket of his suit and let his chest sag. As he did, one of the attributes of his calling became visible on his right hip.

It was a Smith and Wesson .38 heavy-barrel service revolver. He was a detective first grade of the New York Police Department.

Twenty-three miles from the White House, deep in the Maryland countryside, a man in an underground cocoon reached for a telephone at the same time the little girl in New York was concluding her carol. He was the duty officer of the Department of Energy’s Germantown, Maryland, nuclear-emergency command post, one of the dozens of steel-and-concrete moleholes, some secret, some not so secret, from which the United States would be run in an emergency or a nuclear war.

On the order flashed to him by Jack Eastman in the White House, minutes after Los Alamos’ preliminary analysis of the weapons design had come in, he was about to set into motion the most effective response the U.S.

government had been able to devise to the menace of nuclear terrorism. His gray telephone gave him access to the U.S. government’s “Autodin-Autovon”

closed military communications circuit, a global network whose five-digit numbers were listed in a seventy-four-page green volume that was probably the most secret telephone book in the world.

“National Military Command Center, Major Evans,” came a voice answering his call from another underground command post, this one far below the Pentagon.

“Department of Energy, Emergency Operations Center,” the warrant officer continued. He had no need to corroborate his identity or the source of his call since he was talking over a direct, secure line. “We have a nuclear emergency, code priority `Broken Arrow.”’

He suppressed a shiver speaking those words. They were the code for the highest priority assigned to a peacetime nuclear crisis by the Department of Energy.

“Emergency site New York City. We require airlift facilities for a full mobilization of our dedicated personnel and equipment.”

Those words were sending into action one of the most secret organizations under the control of the U.S. government, a collection of scientists and technicians kept on twenty-four-hour alert at the Department of Energy’s Germantown headquarters, at the nuclear-weapons laboratories in Los Alamos and in Livermore, California, and at the old nuclear testing ranges north of Las Vegas.

Inevitably the group was known officially by an acronym, “NEST” for “Nuclear Explosives Search Teams.” With their ultrasensitive neutron and gamma-ray detectors, their carefully refined and highly secret search techniques, the NEST teams represented the best scientific answer the United States had for the threat posed by the envelope delivered earlier in the day to the White House gate.

At the Pentagon, Major Evans pushed a series of code numbers onto the computer terminal at his communications console. In a second, the essential details of the emergency he had been requested to handle appeared on the television screen in front of him. He saw he would have to stage an airlift of two hundred men and their equipment out of Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and Travis Air Force Base in northern California. The screen also showed him that the Military Air Command at Scott Air Force Base outside St. Louis had orders to assign an emergency of this sort top priority.

The major’s computer console provided a last injunction: the planes must be routed to the Air Force base nearest the emergency site to allow the government to run the coming operation in strict secrecy, as far from civilian eyes as possible. He flicked another query into his computer terminal.

“Your assembly area,” he told the warrant officer in Germantown, “will be McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey.” Eighteen miles southeast of Trenton, an hour’s fast driving from the Lincoln Tunnel, McGuire was the closest base to New York that could handle Starlifters. The Pentagon major looked at the clock overhead. As he was talking, his deputy beside him had already been in contact with the Scott Air Force Base operations desk.

“I mark nineteen fifty-nine Eastern,” he told Germantown. “Your first designated aircraft will reach Kirkland at eighteen-thirty Mountain.”

High in the night sky over Kansas, a C-141 carrying a load of spare engines to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas had just shifted course and was droning southwest to Albuquerque.

Hunched over his chart table, its navigator was already working out the details of the flight plan he would follow on his trip back to New York.

It was precisely eight o’clock when the President of the United States entered the National Security Council conference room in the West Wing of the White House. The men and women in the room rose the instant his familiar figure appeared in the doorway. To even his most sophisticated advisers, there was always a special aura about the personage of the President, some intimation of the crushing dimensions of the problems he bore, of the awesome power that was his, of the responsibilities which made the holder of his office unique among men. He motioned to them to sit, while he remained standing, biting his lower lip as he often did when he was trying to concentrate. Before coming down from his living quarters, he’d changed into a suit and tie, a reflection of the respect he, too, felt for the high office he held.

“I want to thank you all for being here tonight,” he said in the studied, mannered tone he liked to employ for dramatic effect, “and ask you to pray with me that what’s brought us here is just a hoax because …” his voice trailed off “… because if it’s not, we’ve got a long, long night ahead of us.”

He took his place in one of the inexpensive chairs upholstered in rust fabric ringing the oval conference table. The room was as unprepossessing, as unimaginative a place as the board room of a medium-sized Middle Western manufacturer of cardboard containers. Yet it was here that the thermonuclear Armageddon had been envisaged during the Cuban Missile Crisis; that the decisions which sent half a million Americans to fight and die in Vietnam had been debated; the plight of the fifty U.S. hostages seized by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini pondered.

Its banal appearance was deceptive. At the touch of a button a massive screen came down from one wall. Another button swept aside a set of curtains to reveal an electronic mapboard. Beside each seat was a drawer containing a secure red telephone. Most important were the facilities of the White House Communications Center just beyond, holding the room in an Ifshaped embrace. There, banks of communications consoles with television-like screens linked the room and the White House to every vital nerve center of the U.S. government: the Pentagon, the CIA, State, the National Security Agency, the Strategic Air Command, NORAD’s National Command Center in Colorado Springs. A call coming out of that conference room could be dispatched to any U.S. military base in the world, to the gunnery officer of a guided-missile destroyer cruising off GuantAanamo Bay in Cuba, to most U.S. military aircraft in flight.