The Fifth Horseman (56 page)

Then, looking into his Commissioner’s blue eyes alight with the same fright he felt, Feldman was ashamed.

“What do you think, Chief?” Bannion asked. “Can we make it?”

Feldman took a swallow of his bitter black coffee and stared up at Bannion.

For a moment he sat there looking at him, thinking, appraising both the situation and his answer. Why lie? the Chief told himself. Why con him or myself or anybody else?

“No, Commissioner,” he answered, “not in the time we got left, no way.”

Angry and frustrated, Angelo Rocchia stalked the huge parking area of the Hertz Rent-A-Truck agency at 354 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, its expanse filled with a motley collection of trucks painted not in the familiar Hertz yellow and blue but in the commercial colors of the agency’s leasing clients: the Omaha Hotel Supply Company, Junior’s Restaurant, Sabrett’s Kosher Frankfurters, F. Rabinowitz Caterers.

It was already close to midmorning, and, as he had expected he was going to be, he was nothing more than a glorified gofer for the FBI forensic experts pulling apart the truck the Dajanis had used to pick up their load of barrels at the Brooklyn Army Terminal pier only a few blocks away. In fact, he wasn’t even a gofer. The FBI men were so studiously absorbed in their work they had completely ignored him.

The truck was lying in a hundred pieces on the floor of one of the agency’s three garages. It had been sealed off to its curious employees and turned into a miniature crime laboratory. Even Angelo had to admire the thoroughness of the FBI effort. Every one of the thirty-seven bumps, scrapes, indentations on the truck’s body and fenders, some so small they were barely visible, had been circled in red. Spectrographic-analysis equipment had been flown up from Washington and set up to examine paint chips from each, hoping to find one that would reveal some clue as to where the truck had gone when the Dajanis had rented it on Friday. The young couple who had taken it out Saturday had been brought in and grilled to see if the Dajanis had left anything behind, a matchbox, a restaurant napkin or carton, a map, anything that might have suggested where they had been.

The tires had been pulled apart, every speck of dirt and grime impregnated in their treads vacuumed out and studied for the one peculiarity that might indicate a particular place in which the truck had been parked. The floor mat had been carefully vacuumed and the results studied in the search for a speck of soil from the Dajanis’ shoes that might indicate the kind of ground over which they had been walking.

Nothing was too outlandish. The FBI had learned that painters had been working on Friday on the Willis Avenue Bridge linking the Bronx and Lipper Manhattan. They had gone over the van’s roof with microscopes to see if even a speck of paint could be found there to establish that the truck had used that route into the city. Someone had been through the computers at the Parking Violations Bureau at Park Avenue South and Thirty-first looking for unpaid parking tickets. That was SUP in New York since the Son of Sam murders.

It was marvelous, Angelo thought, precise, scientific and marvelous; yet he knew very well that up until now the whole staggering FBI effort had revealed virtually nothing. The FBI had rapidly determined with photographs that the rental had indeed been made by Kamal and Whalid just before ten Friday morning. They had explained that they were going to move some furniture to a new apartment. That in itself indicated that someone had briefed them on rental procedures, because had they said they were going to make a pickup of commercial goods from the docks their stolen driver’s license wouldn’t have worked. They would have needed a commercial license. Their whole effort would have ended there. The desk clerk in the trailer that served as the renting office had remembered that Whalid had inquired about the load the Econoline van they’d been offered could carry and had seemed relieved to learn it could handle five thousand pounds with no problems.

They had left, according to the time automatically punched onto the rental agreement, at 9:57. Kamal had returned the truck, alone, at 6:17, after the rental office had closed. The only other precise thing they had on it was the time, 11:22, that the guard at the gate down on the pier had signed them out with their load on his dispatch sheet.

Angelo stared across Fourth Avenue to the kids playing in an open schoolyard, the red brick outline of Engine Company 23 and the spire of the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas. He knew this area. Forty, fifty years ago, the two-and three-story turn-of-the-century tenements had housed an Italian neighborhood, heavy Mob turf. He was lost in his recollections when he heard a voice beside him hissing, “Hey, what are you guys looking for in there? A murderer?”

“Yeah,” Angelo answered. He recognized the yardman who had checked in the van. “A murderer who hasn’t got around to murdering anybody yet.” Casually he draped a friendly arm around the man’s shoulders. “Listen, let’s just go through what happened last Friday night one more time.”

“Hey.” The man’s irritation was evident. “I told them guys in there already. Friday this place”-he gestured at the cluttered yard-“was a goddamn ice-skating rink. What the hell am I going to do, waste my time talking to some guy checking in a van when I gotta clean this place up? Angelo resumed his pacing and his recollections. Suddenly he stopped. Snow and ice. It was a proven fact. You could look it up on the computer.

Snowstorms were hell on the accident rate, particularly the first snowstorm of the year. And what, he asked himself, do Arabs know about driving on snow? They didn’t know snow from shit.

The men waiting for the President in the NSC conference room were as exhausted as he was. A few had managed to catnap an hour or two in a chair; most were living on coffee and their dwindling reserves of nervous energy. As soon as he sat down, Eastman reviewed the one substantial development of the last two hours. The Chairman of the Central Committee had just sent a report from the Russian ambassador in Tripoli. On Soviet insistence he had pleaded with Qaddafi to resume negotiations with Washington. The Libyan had been absolutely unyielding.

“At least, for once we’re getting some help from our Soviet friends,” the President noted grimly. “What I’m interested in now is the status of the Rapid Deployment Force,” he told Eastman. “Get the military in here.”

Three major generals of the Army, the Air Force and the Marines appeared at Eastman’s side at the summons of the buzzer. They were responsible for planning the forcible removal of the Israeli settlements from the West Bank. The Marine took charge of the briefing. The 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the Second Armored Brigade in Fort Hood, Texas, he reported, had been mobilized during the night. At dawn, men and equipment had been loaded onto their waiting C-5As and were airborne now in twelve separate flights en route to Germany. The lead flight was already far out over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Marine stepped forward and pushed a button that lifted the covering from one of the television sets on the wall. On the screen was an image showing the position of the Sixth Fleet Marine Amphibious Force, two helicopter carriers and four attack transports. They were twenty nautical miles from the Lebanese seacoast, just northeast of Beirut.

“Mr. President,” Admiral Fuller, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “we’ve got some decisions to make right now. The first concerns those flights from Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. Do we keep them en route to their restaging bases in Germany or do we turn them back? The first flights are coming up to their stop-or-go line.”

“We’ve received Chancellor Schmidt’s clearance to use our fields in Germany for restaging and refueling,” the Secretary of State reported. The President had expected Schmidt’s approval, but it was still a formality which had to be honored.

“The second decision involves landing the Marines,” Fuller said. “General, explain.”

The Marine stepped to the television set and indicated the map of the Mediterranean shoreline that now appeared there. “We have three possible landing areas, Mr. President. Here in southern Lebanon at Tyre, north of Beirut at lunieh Bay where the Christian Separatist movement is centered or up in Latakia in Syria. Tyre is closest to the scene, but if the Israelis oppose us from the outset we’ll have a grave problem giving our beachhead adequate air cover. Our current plan is to use the aircraft from the Sixth Fleet on a shuttle basis, putting them down at Jordanian airports to refuel.”

“Mr. President.” Again it was the Secretary of State. “We’ve discussed this with King Hussein and he has agreed to let us use his airfields and has promised absolute secrecy until our decision is taken.”

“How about the units of the RDF?” the President asked. “Where would you propose to put them in?”

“The only feasible spot, sir, is Damascus,” Admiral Fuller replied.

“They’ve got the airfield facilities we’d need for our heavy equipment, and it’s astride the ground communications to the West Bank.”

“Has this been discussed with Assad?”

“No, sir,” the Secretary of State answered. “We thought that had better wait for your go-ahead. We don’t have the same confidential relationship with him that we have with the King. Although, in the circumstances, it’s hardly likely he’ll object.”

“All right.” The President sat forward in his chair. “Move the RDF units on to Germany. Hold them on alert status ready to go on to the Middle East as soon as we give the orders. Brief the ambassador in Damascus on the situation and what we’ll want from Assad, but tell him not to contact him until he receives the order.”

He glanced at the Marine Corps General. “Set your planning up to put our forces into Junieh Bay. They can count on a friendly reception there, and if we decide to go ahead with this, cutting down on casualties is going to be a lot more important than a few hours’ time.” He was pensive a moment, then turned to the Secretary of State. “Prepare a message to be sent to the Chairman on the red line to Moscow over my signature telling him what we’re doing and why. Ask him to see that it’s relayed to Qaddafi.

Do the same thing via our charge in Tripoli. We don’t want Qaddafi to have any misconceptions about these moves that would lead him to act precipitously. And tell the Chairman we would welcome his putting maximum pressure on Qaddafi to at least extend his ultimatum.”

“How about the Israelis, Mr. President?” the Secretary of State asked.

“Shouldn’t we tell them too? If they realize we’re not bluffing they might be more amenable to the idea of getting those settlements out of there themselves and avoiding this whole ghastly mess.”

“Sir,” Admiral Fuller countered, “if we’re going to have a showdown with them, I’d sure hate to tell them eight or ten hours ahead of time what we’re going to do.”

His words were followed by an awkward silence as everyone in the room waited for the President to reply.

“Don’t worry, Admiral,” he said firmly. “We don’t have to tell them.

They’ll find out for themselves.”

A pair of military policemen escorted Grace Knowland down the broad wooden staircase of New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory toward a lean officer in khakis waiting at the foot of the stairs.

“Major McAndrews, First Army PIO,” he said, his face radiant with the studied congeniality of a seasoned PR man. “We’re certainly grateful to you for the interest you’re taking in what we are doing here.”

He led her along the basement corridor to a well-lit office. “This is Major Calhoun,” he said, introducing her to a bespectacled man rising to greet her from behind his desk. “He’s our operations officer.”

The two men offered Grace a chair. “How do you like your coffee?” McAndrews asked jovially.

“Black. Straight up.”

While McAndrews hurried off to get it, Calhoun casually put his feet on his desk, lit a cigarette and waved at the maps spread over his office walls.

“Basically,” he began, “what we’re doing here is having a look at the resources we have in the First Army area which can provide federal military relief assistance to New York in the event of natural disasters, such as the snowstorm you had here last week. Or a power failure or a hurricane.

Essentially, we’re making an inventory of our capabilities to provide rapid federal disaster assistance to the city.”

The major got up, took a pointer and began to tick off on the maps the First Army’s military installations.

“We begin with McGuire Air Force Base down here in New Jersey,” he said.

“They can handle Starlifters, but, of course, they’re not much help in getting snow off the streets, are they?” The major laughed at his little joke and continued his well-rehearsed briefing. It had been carefully prepared at Federal Plaza and designed to last half an hour, long enough, the FBI had calculated, to exhaust the journalistic possibilities inherent in snow removal.

“Any questions?” he asked, concluding.

“Yes,” Grace answered. “I’d like to go in and talk to your people actually working on the exercise.”

The officer coughed nervously. “Well, that’s a little bit difficult at the moment. They’re all working, and since reaction time is an important factor in our calculations, we wouldn’t want to interrupt them. It might skewer our results, so to speak. Tell you what I’ll do, though. If you come back at three tomorrow when we wind up, I’ll see to it you have all the time with them you want.”

“Exclusively?”

“No one else is in on it.”

“Fair enough.” Grace gave the officer a satisfied smile and closed the steno pad she had used for her notes.

McAndrews offered to escort her out of the armory. As they passed through the huge assembly area where her son played tennis, something odd struck her. A panel of rope netting, high enough to stop everything but the wildest of lobs, sealed off the tennis courts from the rest of the armory’s main floor. There was nothing unusual about that. The net was always there to keep stray balls from bouncing around among the olive-drab vehicles of the National Guard unit that used the armory. Except this morning there were no olive-drab vehicles behind it, only half a dozen rented Avis, Hertz and Ryder trucks.