The Fifth Horseman (44 page)

The President was frantically scrutinizing his yellow legal pad. How inappropriate the words he had written there seemed to him now that he was actually confronted by this man. “Mr. Qaddafi.” The usually stern and confident baritone wavered. “No matter how strongly you may feel about the injustices done to the Palestinians, surely you will acknowledge that it’s not my innocent countrymen in New York who are responsible-the blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Puerto Ricans, the millions of ordinary, hard-working men and women struggling there to make a living?”

“Oh yes, they are responsible, Mr. President,” came the reply. “All of them. Who is responsible for creating Israel in the first place? You Americans are. Who provided them with the arms they used in four wars against us? You Americans did. Whose money keeps them alive? Yours.”

“Do you suppose that, even if the Israelis should agree, temporarily, to withdraw, they would let you get away with this?” the President asked.

“What guarantees can you hope to have that this solution of yours can last?”

Clearly, the President’s question was one for which the Libyan was prepared. “Order your satellites that are observing my country now to study our desert along our eastern border from the seacoast to Al-Kufra. Perhaps you will find some new constructions there. My SCUD missiles are not like yours, Mr. President, they cannot travel around the world and strike a pin as yours can, but they can fly a thousand kilometers and find the coast of Israel. That is all they have to do. They are all the guarantee I will need when this is done.”

My God, the President thought, it’s even worse than I had imagined. He doodled frantically on his legal pad, hoping for some magic thought that would strike the responsive chord he had thus far been unable to find.

“Mr. Qaddafi, I have followed the progress of your revolution with genuine admiration. I know how well you’ve used your great oil wealth to bring your people material progress and prosperity.” He was groping and he knew it.

“Whatever your feelings are about New York, surely you don’t want to see your nation and your people destroyed in a thermonuclear holocaust?”

“My people are prepared to die for the cause if necessary, Mr. President, just as I am.” Again the Libyan had lapsed into English to shorten the exchange.

“Mao Tse-tung accomplished the greatest revolution in history with a minimum of bloodshed,” the President rejoined. That was a lie, but it reflected the psychiatrists’ advice. Invoke Mao, they had said, he sees himself as an Arabic Mao. “You have the same opportunity if you will be reasonable, remove your threat to New York and work with me toward a just and lasting Middle East peace.”

“Be reasonable, Mr. President?” came the answer. “Being reasonable to you means that Palestinian Arabs can be driven from their homes, can be forced to live in refugee camps for thirty years. Being reasonable means that Palestinian Arabs should stand by and watch the creeping annexation of their homeland by these Israeli settlements. Being reasonable means that we Arabs should let you Americans and your Israeli allies go on preventing the Palestinians from enjoying their God-given right to a homeland, a nation, while we continue selling you the oil to run your factories and your cars, to heat your homes. All that is reasonable. But when my brothers and I tell you, who are responsible for their misery, `Give us the justice you have denied us so long, or we will strike,’ suddenly that is unreasonable.

Suddenly, because we ask for justice, we are fanatics. You cannot understand just as you couldn’t understand when the Iranian people turned their wrath on you.”

As Qaddafi was speaking, Jagerman slipped a piece of paper up the table to the President. On it he had written the words “The greater-goal tactic?”

The phrase summarized a maneuver the Dutchman had suggested earlier: trying to persuade Qaddafi to drop his threat to New York by getting him to associate with the President on some specific plan to achieve an even greater goal than the one he was seeking. Escalate his ambitions into something beyond those he had defined. Unfortunately, no one in the National Security Council conference room had been able to suggest a practical way of applying the theory. Suddenly, as he looked at the note, an idea struck the President. It was so bold, so dramatic, it might capture Qaddafi’s imagination.

“Mr. Qaddafi,” he said, unable to conceal the excitement in his voice. “I have a proposal to make to you. Release the millions of my fellow Americans in New York from your dire menace and I will fly to Libya immediately, unescorted, in Air Force One. I, the President of the United States, will allow you to hold me as your hostage while together we work, hand in hand, to find a plan to give the world and your Palestinian brothers something even greater than what you have proposed-a real, durable peace, acceptable to all. We will do it together, and yours will be a glory greater than Saladdin’s, because it will have been won without bloodshed.”

The President’s wholly unexpected proposal stunned his advisers. Eastman was aghast. It was absolutely unthinkable: the President of the United States becoming the hostage of an Arab oil despot, locked up in some desert oasis like a commercial traveler kidnapped for ransom by the Barbary Coast pirates two hundred years ago.

Finally, Qaddafi’s voice once again filled the room. “Mr. President, I admire you for your offer. I respect you for it. But it is not necessary.

My letter is clear. Its terms are clear. That is all that we ask. There is no need for any further discussion between you and me either here or anywhere else.”

“Mr. Qaddafi.” The President almost interrupted the Libyan. “I cannot urge you strongly enough to accept my proposal. We have been in contact in the last two hours with every major leader in the world. And all your fellow Arab leaders: President Sadat, Mr. Assad, King Hussein, King Khalid, even Yassir Arafat.

All of them, without exception, condemn your initiative. You are alone, isolated as you will not be if you agree to my proposal.”

“I do not speak in their names, Mr. President.” The Libyan’s Arabic continued to flow into the room in the slow, unmodulated cadence he had employed almost from the beginning. “I speak for the people, the Arab people. It is their brothers who have been dispossessed, not those of our leaders and kings rotting in their palaces.” Suddenly there was a shift in Qaddafi’s tone, a stirring of impatience and irritation. “All this talk is useless, Mr. President. What must be done must be done.”

“We’re getting some strain,” the technician manning the voice analyzer announced.

“You had thirty years to do justice to my people and you did nothing. Now you have twentyfour hours.”

Anger seized the President in a swift, uncontrollable tide. “Mr. Qaddafi!”

To the psychiatrists’ dismay he was virtually shouting. “We will not be blackmailed. We will not be coerced by your unreasonable, impossible demands, by your outrageous action!”

A long, ominous silence followed his outburst. Then Qaddafi’s voice returned as calm and as unhurried as it had been earlier. “Mr. President, there is nothing impossible about my demands. I am not asking for Israel’s destruction. I only ask for what is just-that my Palestinian brothers have the home God meant for all people to have on the land He gave them. We Arabs were in the right for thirty years, but neither war nor political methods allowed us to achieve our objective, because we did not have the strength. Now we do, Mr. President, and either you will force the Israelis to give us the justice that is ours or, like Samson in your Bible, we will pull down the roof of the temple on ourselves and all the others that are in it.”

While Muammar al-Qaddafi was delivering his threat to the President, one of the terrorists he counted on to help carry it out if necessary was getting ready to make love in a bedroom in New York City. Why am I here?

Laila Dajani asked herself. She knew the answer. Because I’m weak. Because I lack the steel in my soul the others have, that steel Carlos always said was the one indispensable ingredient of a revolutionary. I’m fatally prone to the terrorist’s mortal sin, she admitted. I think too much.

The door opened and Michael walked in, a bath towel knotted around his slender waist, a glass of white wine in each hand. He bent down, kissed her gently, handed her her glass, then lay down on the bed beside her. For a moment they lay there in silence, Michael’s hand slowly, distractedly almost, running over the surface of her breasts.

“Michael?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Come to Quebec tomorrow.”

Michael propped himself up on his elbow and stared down at Laila. Even in the half-light of his bedroom, he could see the sorrow on her face, the nascent sparkle of tears rising in her eyes.

“Linda, for Christ’s sake, what is it with this Quebec thing? You’re obsessed with it.”

Laila rolled over, squashed out her cigarette, pulled a new one from her pack and lit it. “Michael, I told you I was superstitious, didn’t I?”

Michael let his head sink back onto his pillow. So that’s it, he thought.

“There’s an old Egyptian fortuneteller I go to over in Brooklyn. An incredible place. Once you get inside you’d think you were on the banks of the Nile. His wife is all done up in black like a Bedouin woman. Her face is tattooed. She brings you a cup of masbout, Arabic coffee.” She paused.

“He takes your cup and holds it. He asks your name, your mother’s name, your date of birth. Then he goes into a kind of trance, praying. You’re not allowed to smoke or cross your legs or your arms-that cuts the current between you. Every so often, he stops praying and talks to you.”

Laila sat up, leaning against the backrest of the bed, smoking intently.

“Michael, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you some of the things this man has predicted for me.”

“Like a secret rendezvous in Quebec?”

She ignored him.

“I went to him this morning. At the end, just before I left, he tensed up as though something terrible was happening. He said, `There is someone very close to you. A man. A young blond man.’ He said in Arabic, `He’s a messawarati.” Michael, do you know what a messawarati is?”

Michael rolled his head on his pillow. “A lecherous infidel?”

“Please, darling. Be serious. A photographer: How could he possibly have known that, Michael? He said, `He’s in very great danger here. Very soon.

Tomorrow. He must leave New York before tomorrow.”’

Laila clasped his hand, awed by the chance she was taking. “Michael, please. Go to Quebec tomorrow.”

Michael rose up again on one elbow, looking at her sorrowful face, at the two tears glistening on her cheekbones. What ridiculous, superstitious creatures women can be, he thought.

Tenderly, he kissed away each teardrop. “You’re sweet, my darling,” he said, “to think of me like that.” Then he laughed softly. “But realty I haven’t got room in my life for the prophecies of old Arab fortunetellers.”

Laila rolled over on top of him, her back and shoulders raised so that the long swirls of her hair hung down around his face, enclosing it in an auburn canopy. I tried, she thought, gazing solemnly at her lover, God knows I tried.

“Too bad, Michael,” she whispered. “Oh, too bad!”

In Washington, the President was trembling. Qaddafi’s reference to Samson’s destruction of the Temple had shaken him as nothing had since he’d watched the Libyan’s fireball exploding on the Pentagon’s screens at midnight.

“Jack,” he ordered, his words coming in a hoarse whisper. “Tell the Doomsday to arrange for some communications problems over the next few minutes. I want some time to think about this.”

When the squawk box fell silent the Chief Executive studied the faces around the table. They too were aghast. It was as if the full measure of the drama they faced had only just become apparent in the obduracy and fanaticism of the man in Libya.

“Gentleman,” the President asked, “what do you think?”

At the end of the table, Admiral Fuller seemed to pull his head down into his shirt collar like a wizened old sea turtle withdrawing into his shell.

“Sir, I think he’s only going to leave us one option-military action.”

“I don’t agree.” The Secretary of State, had intervened almost before the Admiral had finished. “There is another option, and I think we should make a decision to act on it very quickly. Instead of going on trying to reason with a very unreasonable man, we must use the precious time we have left to force some kind of an accommodation out of the Israelis that will satisfy him and save New York.”

“That, at least, has the advantage of being an initiative that requires very little time,” Bennington noted sarcastically. “Only the thirty seconds it’s going to take Begin to say no. The Agency has been pointing out for the last five years that those damn settlements were a menace to peace and were going to land us in serious trouble one day. Unfortunately, no other agency in the government wanted to do anything about them.”

For just a second, listening to his advisers, the President yearned to unleash a primal scream. Was there no crisis so terrible it couldn’t shake the agencies of the U.S. government out of their stereotyped pattern of response: the Pentagon urging us to blow the bastard to bits; State recommending we back down; the CIA trying to cover its ass the way it has been ever since Iran?

“Jack?” he said wearily to his National Security Assistant.

“I come back to what I said half an hour ago, Mr. President. The essence of this crisis is time. If we can get the Israelis to come up with some kind of concession, then maybe we can use it to get Qaddafi to lift his threat.

Or at least extend his deadline so we’ll have a better chance of finding this damn thing in New York before our time runs out.”

The President’s eyes passed over Delbert Crandell. He had no desire to read the intimation of a prophecy fulfilled that he knew he’d find on the Energy Secretary’s face. “What do you people read into this?” he asked the psychiatrists.