The Fifth Horseman (49 page)

“We offer Begin some kind of ironclad guarantee of his state inside the ‘sixty-seven borders if he’ll agree to get out of the West Bank. Get the Soviets to subscribe to it, which they certainly will. It’s the only reasonable solution to that damn mess out there anyway.” The President waited for his friend and adviser’s reaction.

“It is.” Eastman shook his head. “But in these circumstances? I just don’t see Begin agreeing. Not unless you’re prepared to pull out all the stops.

Remember what General Ellis said last night? Are you ready to go in there and get those people out if he refuses? Or at least threaten to?”

Again the President was silent. The implications of what Eastman had just said were not pleasant to contemplate. But, he thought grimly, contemplating the thermonuclear destruction of New York was far worse.

“I’ve got no choice, Jack. I’ve got to go after him. Let’s get back to the conference room.”

William Webster of the FBI was just hanging up his phone when they returned.

“What’s up?” Eastman asked.

“It was New York. There’s a bomb up there all right. They just picked up traces of radioactivity around a house out in Queens where it was apparently hidden for a few hours last Friday.”

By the standards of the city he administered, the office of the Mayor of New York was miniscule, smaller than that of many a secretary in the great glass sheaths of Wall Street and mid-Manhattan. Abe Stern sat in it now, staring at the oil of Fiorello La Guardia on the wall opposite him, fighting to control the anger and frustration surging through his nervous system. Just as the President was, he too was making a determined effort to put on a fagade of normality. For the past thirty minutes it had consisted of talking to the City Hall press corps gathered like a swarm of angry hornets around his antique cherry-wood desk, trying to explain the logistics of snow removal. He saw with relief the last of the reporters disappear and ordered in his next visitor, the Manager of his Budget Bureau. “What do you want?” he snapped at the mildmannered, bespectacled CPA.

“The Police Commissioner wants to mobilize his force for some kind of emergency, Your Honor.”

“Well, let him.”

“But,” the Budget Manager protested nervously, “that means we’ll have to pay them overtime.”

“So what? Pay it.” Stern was beside himself with exasperation.

“But, my goodness, do you realize what that will do to the budget?”

“I don’t give a damn!” Stern was almost shouting. “Give the Commissioner what he asks for, for God’s sake!”

“All right, all right,” the intimidated accountant said, opening his briefcase, “but, in that case, I’ve got to have your signature on the authorization.”

Stern grabbed the paper from his hand and stabbed at it with his pen, shaking his head in dismay. The last man on earth, he thought, the very last, will be a bureaucrat.

As the man left, Stern turned his back on him and looked out across the snow-covered lawn of City Hall down to the old Tweed Courthouse, an enduring monument to the potential for graft inherent in his office. I can’t stand this anymore, he thought. He jabbed at one of the buttons on his telephone console. “Michael,” he asked, “where the hell is that guy who was going to tell us how to evacuate this place?

“Tell him to wait,” the Mayor ordered when he heard the answer. “I’m coming, too.” In a flash, Stern was into the pantry beside his office-its refrigerator stocked with tomato juice, the only drink he consumed-down a flight of stairs and out of the building by his semisecret side entrance.

Five minutes later, he was being buckled into a helicopter on top of Police Plaza, Oglethorpe beside him, the Police Commissioner and Lieutenant Walsh in the back. Entranced, he watched as slowly his city took shape below him in pace with the chopper’s thudding ascent into the afternoon sky. He could see the tight cluster of Chinatown, so closely woven together that it looked as if it had been constructed with Tinker Toys; the Fulton Fish Market and the brownish-gray wakes of the shipping along the East River; then Wall Street and Exchange Place, and all around them, reflecting back the glory of the afternoon sun, the proud glass-and-steel cylinders of lower Manhattan. This city’s got so much going for it, Stern thought, so much energy, such strength and vitality. His eyes studied the rectangular canyons below, the yellow forms of the cabs clogging the streets, the scurrying figures of his people on the sidewalks, recklessly darting through traffic. Ahead, he caught a glimpse of a Staten Island ferry scuttling like a sand crab over the slate-gray surface of the harbor. It just wasn’t possible, Abe Stern told himself, it wasn’t possible that some distant fanatic would destroy all this. He blinked, feeling the sting in his eyes, hearing as he did the jabbering of the Civil Defense expert beside him interrupting his nightmare.

“The subways are apparently going to be a problem,” Oglethorpe was remarking, “unless we can find a way to run the evacuation without telling people what’s going on.”

“Not tell people what’s going on?” The Mayor started to shout and not just to make himself heard over the thump of the rotors. “Are you crazy? You can’t do anything in this town without telling people what’s going on. I want to use those subways, I gotta tell the head of the Transit Workers his people got to do special shifts. ‘Emergency?’ he’s going to say to me.

‘What’s the emergency?’ And then he’s going to say, ‘Hey, listen, I gotta tell Vic Gottbaum and the Municipal Workers.’ And Gottbaum’s gonna say, ‘Listen, I can’t keep this from Al Shanker and the teachers.’ “

The Police Commissioner leaned forward. “That’s his problem, Abe. At that point we haven’t got a train driver left in the city, you realize that?”

Stern spun angrily around to confront his Police Commissioner. He was about to yell something, then stopped himself. Instead, he turned back and crumpled dejectedly into his seat.

“Our only hope is a highway mode evacuation.” Oglethorpe was looking down at the Battery. “But down here we’ve got some real problems. The Holland and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels, our best escape routes, only have two lanes each. We figure the best you can do is seven hundred fifty vehicles per lane hour, calculate five people to a vehicle, that’s fifteen thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe stopped. “We’ve got about a million people down here to clear. It’s going to be a terrible scene. You’ll have to have awfully good police control. I mean, your officers will have to be ready to shoot the people who want to break the line and disrupt things.”

Do that, Walsh thought grimly, and you’ll have to shoot nine tenths of the people in the city. And some of them are going to shoot right back.

They were skimming up the Hudson now, passing midtown. “Up here we’re in better shape,” Oglethorpe offered hopefully. “We’ve got six lanes in the Lincoln Tunnel, nine on the George Washington Bridge and twelve between the Major Deegan and Bruckner Expressways. That would give us an outflow of about a hundred thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe was getting hoarse from shouting over the rotors; yet he plowed on, a determined slave to his facts and figures, to all those years down there in Washington making things work on the charts and computers. “We’ll need plenty of police to handle the movement on the ramps. Helicopters to monitor the traffic flow.”

Abe Stern wasn’t listening anymore. He turned again in his seat to face the Police Commissioner. His old friend’s face mirrored what he had expected to see, the reflection of his own despair.

“It isn’t going to work, is it, Michael?”

“No, Abe, it’s not.” Bannion looked down at the rooftops of the tenements crowding the Upper West Side, the snow-filled sweep of the park. “Maybe thirty, forty years ago. A different time. A different city. Maybe we would have had the discipline then, I don’t know. Now?” Sadly he shook his head.

“Now, there’s no way we can do it. We’ve all changed too much.”

Oglethorpe, ignoring their exchange, rattled on about the need for good, disciplined crowd control, about the right system to manage the flow to the bridges.

“Oh, shut up!” Stern barked. The jolted bureaucrat blushed. “The whole thing is crazy. We’re wasting our time. We’re not going to evacuate this city. I’m going back to tell the President to forget it. We’re stuck here and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.” He leaned forward and gave a sharp jab to the pilot. “Turn this thing around,” he ordered. “Take us back to the plaza.”

The helicopter pivoted in a tight arc. As it did, the panorama of Manhattan Island below them seemed to tilt end on end for an instant, rising up to meet the horizon, a flashing insight, Abe Stern reflected, into the upside-down world they were living in.

On the surface the scene in the spacious sitting room six thousand eight hundred seventy-five miles from New York City was one of touching domestic tranquility. Menachem Begin’s youngest daughter, Hassia, sat at the grand piano of his official residence entertaining her father with the crystalline notes of a Chopin etude. A menorah, two of its eight candle branches flickering was set in the window. Begin himself had lit the candles just an hour earlier to mark the first night of Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights.

He was sitting now in a leather wing chair, legs crossed, chin resting in the cat’s cradle of his folded fingers, apparently wholly absorbed in his daughter’s music. In fact his mind was miles away, where it had been all day, on the crisis confronting his nation. His armed forces were on alert.

Just before he sat down he had talked with the military governor of the West Bank and the embassy in Washington. The West Bank was quiet; if the Palestinians who were to benefit from Qaddafi’s appalling initiative were aware of what was going on, they gave no indication of it. So, too, was Washington. Nothing, the embassy reported, had leaked out to indicate to the United States’s public the crisis at hand. Of even greater concern to the Israeli Prime Minister was the fact that the embassy’s usually reliable sources inside the White House had revealed nothing of the debates in the government’s inner councils.

His daughter finished her etude with a flourish. Begin rose, walked to the piano and kissed her gently on the forehead. As he did, his wife appeared in the doorway.

“Menachem,” she announced, “the President of the United States is calling.”

Hassia saw her father stiffen the way he often did when he was about to review a guard of honor, then march from the room. He settled into the office where he had taken the President’s first call and listened in stolid silence to his proposal for a solution to the crisis. He would call an emergency joint session of Congress. The United States would offer Israel the ironclad guarantee of its nuclear umbrella inside the 1967 frontiers.

The Chairman of the Central Committee had already agreed to associate the Soviet Union publicly and formally with the U.S. declaration. In return, the Israeli government would announce its immediate, unilateral decision to withdraw its forces, administration and settlements from the occupied territories and return them to Arab jurisdiction. Begin paled visibly listening to the President, but otherwise he appeared completely composed.

“In other words, Mr. President,” he said when the American had finished, “you are asking me and my people to yield to a tyrant’s blackmail.”

“Mr. Begin,” the President rejoined, “what I am asking you to do is to accept the only reasonable solution to the gravest international crisis the world has ever faced.”

“The only reasonable solution was the one we were prevented from carrying out this morning by the Soviet Union-with, or without, your nation’s complicity.” Again the Jewish leader pronounced the words without heat, nothing in his manner indicating the interior storm shaking him.

“If that were a reasonable solution,” the President replied, “I could — and would — have invoked it hours ago. But my first consideration in this crisis, Mr. Begin, is to save lives, the lives of six million innocent people in New York — and, indeed, the lives of two million equally innocent Libyans.”

“But you are asking us to abandon the fundamentals of our national sovereignty in response to an action which is criminal, which is without precedent in history, which you yourself told me this morning jeopardizes the very foundations of world peace and international order.”

“My proposal doesn’t impinge on your nation’s sovereignty, Mr. Begin.” The Prime Minister could sense the American’s exasperation. “Israel has no claims to sovereignty over the West Bank and it never has had. Those lands were given to the Arabs of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947 at the same time your people were given a state.”

“I’m sorry, the United Nations did not give those lands, or any other lands, to the Jewish people.” There was a confidence born of belief, of deep conviction, in the Israeli leader’s voice. “Those lands were given to the Jewish people by the God of our forefathers, once and forever.”

“Surely, Mr. Begin,” the President protested, “you cannot as a responsible leader of the twentieth century, of the thermonuclear age, be pretending to order the world on the basis of a forty-century-old religious legend?”

Begin adjusted his tie and leaned back in his chair. “That legend, as you call it, has sustained us, nourished, preserved us, united as a distinct people, for four thousand years. However difficult it may be for you to comprehend, Mr. President, for a Jew to have the right to settle on this land, on any part of it, is as indispensable an attribute of his nation’s sovereignty as an American’s right to travel from New York to California.”

“To settle on another people’s land? Land that has been theirs for two thousand years? To deprive them of the very right of national existence for which your own people claimed and fought for so many generations? All that in the name of an event, a religious moment, which may, or may not, have ever taken place? Surely you can’t be serious?”