The Fifth Horseman (43 page)

“Well, say we’re afraid there’s a nuclear bomb in Manhattan. Or the Russians are coming.”

The chief thought awhile, then stood and peered down at the system’s map.

“Okay. The first thing you’d want to think about are the trains already moving in the system when you sound your alert. I guess you keep ‘em going all the way through. Take an IRT number five going into Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. Give the motorman an announcement, ‘We have to evacuate Manhattan because of an emergency threat.’ Then tell him to run straight up to Dyre Avenue nonstop and dump his load.”

Oglethorpe was frantically noting down his words.

“Now,” the trainman continued, “that might be a little difficult. New Yorkers don’t like being told what to do very much.” He gave a little laugh. “You’ll want some help there in the Bronx. Some of those people aren’t going to want to get off the train.

They’ll insist on going back to get their wives or their kids, or their mothers-in-law. Or their pet canaries. We’d have to devise a loop. Up to the Bronx. Drop them. Out to Brooklyn,” he continued.

“Why all the way to Brooklyn?” Oglethorpe queried.

“Because we can’t turn trains around in the middle of the system. You’d use the local track to load and go onto the express track once they’re loaded.

Run ‘em nonstop right up to the Bronx and start all over again.”

“Terrific!” Oglethorpe was almost trembling with excitement. Obviously, this was the answer. With a little order, a little control. “Now tell me,”

he said, “on the basis you’ve outlined here, allowing for the minor problems that always crop up, how much time do you think it would take under this plan to clear Manhattan?”

“Probably four to six hours. Maybe a bit more.”

“And if we asked you to take people out of Queens and Brooklyn too?”

“Then we’ve got a much bigger problem.”

Oglethorpe sat down, studying his notes, going through the papers of his SRI study. He was beaming. He looked at Walsh, the smile on his face almost triumphant. “I told you this was the answer. Now look, Chief, if you started right now, with any help you wanted, could you get this plan down on paper for me, everything, logistics, signaling systems, timing, everything, in two hours?”

“I think so.”

“Terrific.” Oglethorpe looked again at Walsh. “We’re going to have a terrific plan.”

“Sure, you’ll have a terrific plan, mister,” the chief agreed. His voice was low and cool, so fully controlled he might have been an anchor man reading out the evening news. “And there’ll only be one thing wrong with it.”

“What’s that?”

“It won’t work.”

“Won’t work?” Oglethorpe looked as though he’d just received a blow in the stomach. “What do you mean it won’t work?”

“Who do you think are going to drive those trains for you?”

“Why,” Oglethorpe replied, “your motormen. Who else?” “Not if they know there’s an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island, my friend. They’ll take their first train up to Dyre Avenue all right. And then they’ll be out of the station door with everyone else. The switchmen, the yardsmen you need to turn the trains around-they’ll be gone, too.”

“Well,” Oglethorpe muttered, “we won’t tell them. We’ll say it’s a practice.”

The chief laughed, a rich, warm laugh from deep in his overextended stomach. “You’re going to clear three and a half million people off Manhattan Island and try to make them believe you’re doing it for fun? For some kind of exercise?” The pitch of his laughter skirted upward at the thought of how ludicrous it all was. “Mister, there’s not a New Yorker alive who’d believe horseshit like that. I tell you, half an hour after you start this, every car in the system’ll be laid down on the tracks up there in the Bronx and every motorman in town’ll be running for the bills.”

Oglethorpe listened in dismayed silence, one hand clutching his carefully written notes and the papers of his SRI study.

“You can’t evacuate this city with the subways,” the chief said, “or any other way, for that matter.” He looked sadly at the papers in Oglethorpe’s fingers. “All you got there, mister, is a handful of dreams.”

Puzzled and angry, John Booth followed the steady cackle of NEST’s ultra-high-transmission network. The normally phlegmatic NEST director was as distraught as a man who has just been told his wife is expecting triplets. Three times since he had gotten back to his Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, his helicopters overflying lower Manhattan had reported high radiation readings only to see them mysteriously disappear when his foot search teams moved in.

Like everything else in NEST, the radio facility set up in the locker rooms used by the tennis players who usually employed the armory’s main floor was designed to be independent and self-contained. Everything from batteries, spare parts and screwdrivers to hand-held transceivers and mobile transceivers for the trucks and helicopters had been flown in from Las Vegas. That way Both could feel reasonably certain that local CB fans, newsnapers or TV stations wouldn’t pick up any indication of what was going on by eavesdropping on his transmissions.

On the wall of the locker room were huge color aerialsurvey maps of New York’s five boroughs, maps whose resolution was so fine you could identify with a loupe the color of a hat on a woman walking down Fifth Avenue. Thev were part of a file of maps of 170 U.S. cities held available twentyfour hours a day at NEST’s Washington offices.

Suddenly Booth heard an excited call rise over the chatter on the network.

“Feather Three to base. I have a positive.” Feather Three was one of the trio of New York Airways helicopters Both had pressed into service.

Jesus Christ, Booth prayed, please don’t let this be another false alarm, I’ll go crazy.

The technician and the pilot were back on the air, pinning their reading down to a hotel two doors from Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, when one of them shouted. “Son of’ a bitch, it’s fading!” A few seconds passed and his voice was back. “No, it’s not, John. It’s moving! It’s moving up Sixth Avenue!”

Booth hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. Of course, that was it!

The clever bastards had hidden the bomb in the back of a truck and were circulating through the city.

Trembling with nervous excitement, Booth and the men in the command post followed the steady progress of the target up Sixth Avenue, across Thirtyfourth Street. Suddenly the chopper, whose pilot had been trying to get some idea of which truck in the maze of traffic below was giving off radiation, came back on the air. “Target no longer moving.”

“Where is he?”

“Seems to be at Bryant Park, Sixth and Forty-second!”

Booth ordered half a dozen NEST vans and FBI cars to converge on the intersection.

“I’ve got it!” shouted the technician in the first van to reach the scene.

“Where are you?” Booth demanded.

“Just down Fifth from the corner,” came the answer, “right in front of the New York Public Library.”

The numerals on the bar clock hung on the wood-paneled wall of the National Security Council conference room read 1428. A sense of helplessness infused the room. Coffee cups, half-eaten sandwiches, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs littered the table along with piles of top-secret cables from CIA, State and Pentagon. Nothing in those cables or the messages delivered to the room over its sophisticated communications network had brought its occupants any solace, any promise of a satisfactory resolution to the crisis. Barely twenty-four hours before the expiration of the ultimatum of the zealot of Tripoli they were, as Harold Brown had so bitterly observed, the “pitiful giant” once mockingly described by Mao Tse-tung, all the vast panoply of U.S.

resources useless. Little by little as they had followed the progress of the search for the bomb in New York in regular hourly reports from the city, one thing had become appallingly clear: so frightening were the dimensions of the task, so painfully slow the manner in which it had to be carried out, there was no hope of finding the device in the time Qaddafi had allocated them. As for the secret messages that had reached the White House from every major world capital and leader, they all, without exception, urged the President to remain firm in the face of Qaddafi’s menace. None of them, however, had offered the slightest specific suggestion on how to do that without imperiling New York and its people. It was the Iranian crisis all over again. America’s allies were free with their advice but notably timorous when it came to help or action.

Just after half past two, a Navy chief petty officer interrupted a CIA report from Paris with the announcement that the last of the Sixth Fleet’s ships had reached the one-hundred-kilometer limit set down earlier by Qaddafi. The President greeted the news with a mixture of relief and concern. Fundamentally, he was certain all their hopes came down to the enterprise he could now begin: trying to reason with a man four thousand miles away, a man who, only a generation ago, would have been just the inconsequential ruler of a lot of sand, but who, thanks to oil, the technological genius of twentieth-century man and his own countrymen’s madness in hurling their most precious knowledge into the public domain, now had the power to force his zealot’s vision on the world. Mankind could afford tyrants in the day of the sword, the President reflected. Not anymore.

While the white squawk box buzzed with the spaceage jargon of the Doomsday jet reestablishing the communications link to Tripoli, he gave a last glance at the yellow legal pad before him. On it were the notes he had made listening to the psychiatrists’ advice: Flatter him; play up to his vanity as a world leader.

He’s a loner. Must become his friend. Show him I’m the person who can help him out of the corner into which he’s painted himself.

Voice always soft, nonthreatening.

Never give him the impression I don’t take him seriously.

Keep him in a position of fundamental uncertainty; he must never know exactly where he’s at.

Good maxims for a police negotiator. But were they really going to be any help to him? He swallowed, feeling the tension constrict his throat. Then he turned to Eastman and indicated he was ready.

“Mr. Qaddafi,” he began, once he had confirmed that the Libyan had followed the fleet’s withdrawal. “I want to address the very grave problem posed by your letter. I understand how ardently you want to see justice done for your fellow Arabs in Palestine. I want you to know that I share those sentiments, Mr. Qaddafi, I=’

The Libyan cut into his speech. His voice was as gentle as it had been two hours before, but his words were no more encouraging than they had been then.

“Please, Mr. President, do not waste my time or yours with speeches. Have the Israelis begun to evacuate the occupied territories or have they not?”

“No stress reading at all,” the CIA technician monitoring the voice stress analyzer reported. “He’s perfectly relaxed.”

“Mr. Qaddafi,” the President pressed on, striving to control his own emotions, “I understand your impatience to reach a settlement. I share it.

But we must lay together the basis for a durable peace, one that will satisfy all parties conoerned, not one forced on the world by a threat such as the one you have made to New York.”

“Words, Mr. President.” The Libyan, to the Chief Executive’s irritation, had interrupted him again. “The same kind of hollow, hypocritical words you have been feeding my Palestinian brothers for thirty years.”

“I assure you I speak with the utmost sincerity,” the President rejoined — to no avail. Qaddafi, ignoring him, was continuing. “Your Israeli allies bomb and shell Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with American planes and guns, kill Arab women and children with American bullets, and what do you offer in return? Words-while you go right on selling the Israelis more arms so that they can go on killing more of our people. Every time the Israelis seize my brothers’ lands with their illegal settlements, what do you do? You give us more of your pious words, your spokesmen wringing their hands in public in Washington. But have you ever done anything to stop the Israelis? No! Never!

“Well, Mr. President, from now on you and the other leaders of your country can save your words. The time for them has passed. At last the Arab people of Palestine have the means of obtaining the justice that should have been theirs long ago, and they are going to get it, Mr. President, because if they do not, millions of your people are going to die to pay for the injustices that have been committed against them.”

The impact of Qaddafi’s words was heightened by the flat, monotonous voice in which he uttered them, a voice so devoid of passion it seemed to Eastman that the Libyan leader could have been a broker reading off stock quotations to a client, or a pilot going through his preflight checklist.

For Tamarkin and Jagerman, the precise, well-controlled voice was the final confirmation of something each had suspected: this man would not hesitate to carry out his threat.

“I cannot really believe, Mr. Qaddafi,” the President continued, “that a man like you. a man so proud of having carried out his revolution without bloodshed, a man of compassion and charity, can really be serious about employing this satanic device, this instrument of hell, to kill and maim millions and millions of innocent men and women.”

“Mr. President.” For the first time, there was a slight undercurrent of stridency in Qaddafi’s tone. “Why can’t you believe it?”

The President was staggered that the man could even ask the question. “It’s totally irrational, a wholly irresponsible act, sir. It’s—”

“Such as your act when you Americans dropped a similar weapon on the Japanese? Where was the compassion and charity in that? It’s all right to kill, burn, maim thousands of yellow Asiatics or Arabs or Africans, but not clean, white Americans. Is that it? Who created this satanic device, as you call it, in the first place? German Jews. Who are the only people who have ever used it? White Christian Americans. Who are the nations that stockpile these engines that can destroy the world? Your civilized, advanced, industrial societies. They are products of your world, Mr. President, not mine. And now it is we of the other world who are going to use them to right the injustices you have committed against us.”