The Fifth Horseman (36 page)

“We’ve got to maintain an orderly flow of cars out of the city. There are lots of ways. We can do it alphabetically. Broadcast the instructions on radio and TV: `Vehicles registered in the names of people beginning with A through D leave now!’ Or odd-even license plates. Do it by zip codes. Start with the high-risk zip codes at the Manhattan core and roll our risk out.”

“Look,” the Police Commissioner pointed out, “this place is an island. Cars are going to break down, overheat, run out of gas and jam the tunnels and bridges up. People are going to overload them with their families and their belongings. Remember those pictures of the people on the roads in France in 1940? Pushing baby carriages full of pots and pans?”

“Yes,” Oglethorpe agreed, “but our psychologists assure us that if a family has a car, they’ll use it. It gives them mobility and provides them with a sense of security.”

Timothy Walsh stirred uncomfortably. I think I’m dreaming here, he told himself. All these beautiful charts, these maps, these nice ideas. He looked at the Mayor and the Police Commissioner, so desperately attentive it was almost as though they were silently wishing that somehow all this could really be done.

“Look, mister,” Walsh said, “I don’t want to throw sour grapes around here, but I’m not sure you understand some of the facts of life in this town. You want to evacuate alphabetically? Tell Mr. Abbott to get in his car and go first? And you think Mr. Rodriguez up there in Spanish Harlem is going to sit around and watch him go tooling off? Sure he is. What Mr. Rodriguez is going to do is to be down there on the street corner with his Saturday-night special and he’s going to tell Mr. Abbott to get the fuck out of his car and walk. He’s riding.”

“That’s what the police are for. To maintain order and prevent that sort of thing.”

“The police?” Walsh couldn’t help laughing. “What makes you think the cops are going to obey? I tell you half of them are going to be out there on the street corner with their thirty-eights. Right beside Mr. Rodriguez. They are going to take over the first car they see and head for the hills, too.”

Walsh shrugged at the impracticality of it all. “All this stuff is great if you’ve got a bunch of trained soldiers. But you haven’t got any soldiers here. Just a bunch of scared people.”

“All right, Walsh,” the Police Commissioner barked angrily, “that’s enough of that.” Yet, despite his irate words, a sickening voice inside him told him that the lieutenant was probably right. He looked at Abe Stern. There was no expression on the Mayor’s face, no hint of what he really thought of all this.

“We will rely on TV and radio as an instant channel to communicate with the population,” Oglethorpe continued, grateful for the Police Commissioner’s support. “I’d close the banks immediately and announce you’ve done it.

Otherwise, everyone will rush to draw out their savings.”

A sudden burst of inspiration registered on Oglethorpe’s face like a tide of sunlight flooding out from behind a storm cloud. “For radio and TV, I recommend we employ an old scheme of ours called CHAT.” He smiled, almost condescendingly. “That’s an acronym for Crisis Home Alert Technique.

Unfortunately, the FCC would never let us use it.

“What you do is have all the radio and TV stations announce an important message from the President — in this case, the Mayor. As soon as he goes on, all the radio and television stations reduce their modulation to sixty percent of normal. That way, everybody has to turn the volume way, way up to hear him. As part of his speech, he tells everybody to leave their radios and televisions on all the time to receive instructions. Now, when you have something important to announce, you tell the stations to move their modulation back to normal. I can tell you the noise that will come out of these TV sets will shake the house down. Of course,” Oglethorpe added apologetically, “it’s not very much help if you’re deaf.”

Oh boy, Walsh thought. Still, there was one reassuring thing in what Oglethorpe had said-use radio and television. Because one thing you sure as hell weren’t going to use if you wanted to alert anybody was the old Civil Defense siren system. Once in the fifties there had been 750 sirens in the city, tested once a week, audible to ninety-five percent of the population.

Now, Walsh knew, there were barely three hundred that worked, and most of those were crumbling in disrepair. The siren system’s most recent contribution to the city welfare had come in Herald Square when one had toppled into the street, almost killing a lady shopper heading for Macy’s.

“It’s very important,” Oglethorpe was saying, “that all the messages we give the public over TV are very supportive. The public must be assured that we have a plan, that everything’s been worked out and they’ll be taken care of when they get to where they’re going. Our plans must be precise enough and credible enough to reassure the people and prevent panic.”

He turned next to a chart on one of his stands. Its heading was one word, “TAKE.” “We can show this chart on the television at intervals so that people will take the right things with them.”

Walsh looked at the list. Extra socks, a thermos of water, a can opener, candles, matches, transistor, toothbrush and toothpaste, Kotex, toilet paper, special medicine, Social Security card, credit cards.

Oglethorpe turned the page. The one beneath was headed “DO NOT TAKE.” It listed firearms, narcotics, alcohol.

The man is a genius, Walsh thought. He’s managed to find the three items nobody in this town is going to go anywhere without in an emergency.

“What we’ve got to do is get on top of it and stay on top of it,”

Oglethorpe declared. “I’d like to devote the next three hours to a helicopter survey of your access routes to confirm our SRI information.

Then I’d like to get over to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters on Jay Street in the Bronx with your people to set up a subway plan.”

Oh my God, thought Walsh. Jay Street’s in Brooklyn! This guy’s going to save New York and he doesn’t even know the difference between Brooklyn and the Bronx!

“Just a minute.” It was Abe Stern’s authoritative voice. “It seems to me we’re overlooking one of the most important elements in the whole damn picture here. This city has, or at least it used to have when Rockefeller was governor, one of the best systems of air-raid shelters in the world.

Why the hell aren’t we using them?”

Oglethorpe beamed. No one needed to remind an old Civil Defense warhorse like him of Rockefeller’s program. In the late fifties and early sixties, thanks to Rockefeller’s zealousness, New York’s shelter program had been the pride of the whole Civil Defense establishment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the city’s Public Works Department had selected and licensed sixteen thousand shelters designed to accommodate 6.5 million people in cellars and at the core of the city’s buildings. The yellow-and-black fallout-shelter sign had become as familiar a part of the city’s landscape as the white and red “WALK” and “DON’T WALK” signs introduced at about the same time. Millions of city and matching federal dollars had been employed to stock the shelters with the basic ingredients that would allow their occupants to survive underground for fourteen days: carbohydrate candy, protein crackers wrapped in individual packs in wax paper, twelve crackers per individual three times a day providing the minimum survival ration of 750 calories; medical kits, penicillin, drinking water, the containers convertible into chemical toilets, chemical toilet paper, Kotex and miniature Geiger counters so that survivors could peridocially crawl outside and check the level of radioactivity in the rubble above their heads.

“Of course, Your Honor,” Oglethorpe replied. “Those shelters should be a vital part of our program.”

“Walsh,” the Police Commissioner growled, “just what sort of condition are they in?”

That was not a question Walsh was anxious to answer. The people the shelters were accommodating most frequently these days were teenage junkies. They had discovered the phenobarb pills in the medical kits and it was now a race to see who could get them out first, the junkies or Walsh’s men. The junkies were winning.

“The Department of General Services’ Division of Public Structures is responsible for them, sir. I believe they look at them periodically.” Like about once every ten years, Walsh thought.

“And those crackers and all that stuff, are they still good?”

“Uh, there may be a little problem with them, sir.”

“What kind of problem, Walsh?”

“Well, you see, when they had that big hurricane and flood in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1975, we pulled a bunch of them out and sent them down to the people down there.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Everybody who ate them got sick.”

It was a few minutes before half past four, Paris time, when General Henri Bertrand, the director of France’s intelligence service, returned to his office from his interview with PaulHenri de Serre, the man who had installed Libya’s French reactor. The initiatives he had ordered earlier in the day after his first contact with the CIA’s Paris station chief had borne fruit. On his desk were four attache cases belonging to the DST, France’s internal-security agency. They contained the dossiers of all the Frenchmen assigned to work on the Libyan reactor and transcripts of all the telephone calls they had made to France.

The transcripts represented only a miniscule part of the material swept from the atmosphere each day by the DST in its communications laboratory on the top floor of its Rue de Saussaies headquarters, just behind the Ministry of the Interior. There white-smocked technicians functioning in a controlled, dust-free environment employed oscilloscopes, high-speed computers, ultrasensitive direction finders and listening devices to record every transmission and international telephone call originating on French soil, then stored them up on the computers from which they had been patiently culled. It was the ultimate transposition of the old concierge-as-watchdog system to the technology of the twentieth century.

Bertrand was still signing for the DST’s documents when his phone rang. It was his scientific adviser, Patrick Cornedeau. “Chief,” he said, “the inspection reports came in from Vienna an hour ago. I’ve just finished going through them and there’s something I should see you about right away.”

Cornedeau brought a file of papers three inches thick enclosed in a blue-and-white folder stamped with the seal of the United Nations into the General’s office. Bertrand gasped looking at it.

“Dear Lord! Did you have to wade through all that?”

“I did,” replied Cornedeau, scratching his bald pate, “and I’m confused.”

“Good,” his superior replied. “I prefer confusion to certitude in my operatives.”

Cornedeau placed the reports on Bertrand’s desk and began to thumb through them.

“On May seventh, the Libyans informed the IAEA in Vienna they had found radioactivity in their reactor’s cooling system. They said they had concluded they had a faulty fuel charge and they were shutting down the reactor to take out the fuel.”

Cornedeau pointed to his report. “The IAEA immediately sent a team of three inspectors to Libya. A Jap, a Swede and a Nigerian. Good people. They were present while the fuel was taken out and put into the storage pond. They installed their sealed cameras I told you about this morning around the pond. They’ve run two inspections since.”

“To what result?”

“Everything is perfect. The cameras’ records are complete. They saw no sign whatsoever of any attempt to take out the fuel. And at each inspection they checked the level of radioactivity coming out of the fuel in the pond with their gamma-ray analyzers. It was perfect.”

“In that case,” the General remarked, “I don’t see the reason for your confusion.”

“It’s this.” Cornedeau got up and returned to his blackboard. “To make a bomb, you want very, very pure plutonium 239. Normally, the plutonium you’d get out of the fuel burned up in a reactor like this one contains a very high percentage of another isotope, plutonium 240. You can make bombs with it, but it’s a tricky business.”

“Interesting,” Bertrand commented, “but what’s the relevance here?”

“Time,” Cornedeau continued. “The shorter the time the fuel is in the reactor, the more plutonium 239 it’s going to contain.”

Bertrand squirmed apprehensively in his chair. “And how much would there be in the fuel they took out?”

“That’s what concerns me.” Cornedeau turned to the blackboard to reconfirm the calculations he had already made in his head. “If you wanted to get ideal, ninetyseven-percent weapons-grade plutonium out of this reactor’s fuel, you’d leave it in the reactor exactly twenty-seven days.”

He turned back to Bertrand. “Chief, that happens to be just how long they kept the fuel in that reactor down there.”

The idea for the meeting was Quentin Dewing’s. Every ninety minutes, the FBI’s assistant director for investigation had decreed that the principals running the New York search effort would gather around his desk at the underground command post to review their progress. He looked at them now, coughed nervously and pointed to the FBI assistant director in charge of the effort to locate every Arab who had come into the area in the past six months.

“All the names we’re after have come in from Washington or JFK and are on the computer next door,” the man announced. “There are 18,372 of them.”

The dimension of his figure sent a shock wave through the room. “I’ve got two thousand people out there running them down. They’ve already cleared 2,102 names. Those they can’t locate on first effort but which seem okay we’re putting into Category Blue on the computer. Those who were unavailable but who looked doubtful are going into Category Green. Clear cases of infiltration we’re putting into Category Red.”

“How many of those have you got?” Dewing asked.

“Right now, two.”