The Fifth Horseman (8 page)

The President nodded in agreement and looked back at the briefing officer.

“The basic question to which we need an answer, Colonel, is this: Do we or do we not have any technological devices, systems or whatever which can guarantee that we can prevent a radio signal from being beamed into New York to detonate this thing if, in fact, it actually exists and it’s really in New York?”

The colonel tensed nervously at his question. “No, sir,” he replied. “I’m afraid that given the present state of the art, trying to intercept or stop an incoming signal like this is scientifically impossible. It’s like trying to catch the right snowflake in the middle of a blizzard.”

As he was speaking, the red light on the telephone at Eastman’s elbow flashed. It was the Army Signal Corps warrant officer in charge of the White House switchboard. Eastman stiffened listening to him.

“Mr. President,” he announced, “the switchboard’s just received a telephone message from an anonymous caller. He hung up before they could trace the call. He said there was a message for you of the utmost importance in locker K602 in the luggage containers next to the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal at National Airport.”

One fly-specked light bulb dangling from an overhead cord lit the garage.

Its pale cone of light left pools of untouched shadow clinging to the garage’s walls and corners. At the back of the garage, a six-foot-wide cement loading dock rose above the black curds of oil and grease staining the floor. The dock’s back wall was a thin partition separating the garage from the abandoned warehousing area to the rear. Through it, a faint scraping sound drifted into the garage. Laila Dajani shuddered, listening to it. It was the sound of rats scurrying through the deserted warehouse.

Her brother Kamal sat on a cot set up at the end of the platform, near a forklift truck. The passenger of the Dionysos twisted an air pistol in one hand. To his right, against the wall, were his latest victims, a pair of dead rats.

Laila’s second brother, the eldest of the trio, had just entered the garage. Whalid Dajani was in agony. His face was pale; specks of sweat sparkled at his temples.

“Why don’t you take another pill?” Laila demanded, her tone almost peevish.

“I’ve already taken five. That’s all I’m supposed to take.” He showed his sister the package of Tagamet pills she had gotten for him to ease the pain of the ulcer for which he’d earlier gulped his glass of milk on Broadway.

“It says so on here.” His eyes turned away to the far end of the platform.

It was there, just inside the shadows, a long, dark form like that of a shark lurking below the surface of the water. It was painted black.

Stenciled in white around the barrel’s waist were the name and address of the import-export firm to which it had been destined. Cords kept it firmly lashed to the pallet on which it had arrived.

He dabbed at his damp brow. Don’t think, they had told him. Don’t think of anything but your mission. But how did you not think? How did you force from your mind what you’d seen: the faces, the seas and seas of faces, young faces, faces of misery and indifference, faces of laughter and happiness? The faces of little girls on their sleds in Central Park; of the black policeman telling him where to get off the subway; of the newsstand vendor, half snarling, half laughing “Good morning,” selling him his paper.

How could he not see the crowds, the buildings, the rushing cars, the lights that represented so many lives? Behind him, Whalid heard the cot creak as his brother got up. “I’m thirsty,” he mumbled. “Anyone want a Coke?”

Dazed, Whalid shook his head. Kamal stepped to a carton by the wall and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey. “Maybe this is the medicine you need.”

“God, no.” Whalid grimaced. “Not while my ulcer’s bothering me like this.”

Laila stirred impatiently. “How much time do we have left?”

“Enough,” Kamal answered. He picked a piece of cold pizza from a flat cardboard box by his cot. As he did, his sister noticed the name and address of the restaurant where he’d bought it printed on the carton.

“Are you sure no one’s going to be able to identify you in those places?” she asked.

Kamal gave her an angry glance. The constant boss. “Let’s set up our firing circuits,” he said.

“Why?” Whalid protested. “We still have plenty of time.”

“Because I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

Whalid sighed and walked over to a gray metal case the size of a large attach6 case resting on the floor beside his bomb. Nothing could have looked more innocent, more benign, than that case. Decals from TWA, Lufthansa, half a dozen of Europe’s best hotels were stuck to it. Indeed, the Customs officer at JFK had stopped Whalid as he was entering the country with it on Thursday bearing a Lebanese passport identifying him as Ibrahim Abboud, an electrical engineer.

“It’s a microprocessor tester,” Whalid had explained, “to check to see if computers are working properly.”

“Ah,” the Customs officer had remarked admiringly, closing the case that was designed to help destroy his city, “complicated, isn’t it?”

Just how complicated he could not have imagined. The case had-indeed been adapted from a microprocessor tester, a U.S.-made Testline Adit 1000. One blazing summer’s day in July, the technical director of the Libyan telephone system had showed a Testline 1000 to Ishui Kamaguchi, the resident director of Nippon Electric, the Japanese firm which had installed Libya’s telephones. What he wanted, he had explained, was an adaptation of the device which would offer a means of remote radio control of an electrical discharge, a system that would be both infallible and absolutely inviolable.

Six weeks later, Kamaguchi had presented the Libyans the case now on the garage floor and a bill for $165,000. Only the genius of the Japanese for miniaturization could have produced the array of fail-safe devices built into the case to frustrate any attempt to tamper with its functioning. It was equipped with a magnetic-field detector that would order it to detonate instantly if it picked up any indication of an attempt to burn out its electronic circuitry with a magnetic field. There were static filters to counter any efforts to jam its radio receiver. Three tiny tubes sensitive to pressure changes protected it against the danger of gunfire or an explosion. Once it was hooked up, the pressure change caused by a New York telephone book falling toward the case would be sufficient to activate its circuits.

While his brother watched intently, Whalid opened its triple locking system and folded back the case cover to reveal a pale-blue control panel. On it was a cathodetube screen, a keyboard and five keys bearing specific commands: END, AUTO, INIT, DATA, TEST. There was also a locked cassette player. Fixed into it was a thirtyminute BASF tape, a small red crescent in its upperright-hand corner. Programmed in Tripoli, it contained instructions for the case’s minicomputer.

Two connecting cords were neatly coiled inside the cover. One was designed to be hooked up to Whalid’s bomb, the other to the cable running pp to the antenna Kamal had installed on the roof. Each was equipped with a “dead man control.” If any effort was made to disengage them once they had been hooked up they would automatically activate the firing system. Hidden below the panel’s blue surface was a radio receiver, a microprocessor, the minicomputer and a brace of powerful, long-lasting lithium batteries.

As the two brothers watched, the cathodetube screen lit up with a green glow. The words “STAND BY” formed on the screen. Whalid glanced at them, then punched the key marked nrIT. The word “IDENTIFICATION” appeared on the screen.

Carefully, Whalid punched the code OIC2 onto the keyboard. The word “CORRECT” appeared on the screen. Had his code been wrong, “INCORRECT” would have appeared there and Whalid would have had exactly thirty seconds to correct his mistake or the case would have autodestructed.

On the screen, the words “STORAGE DATA” appeared. Whalid looked at the checklist in his sister’s hands, then punched F19A onto his keyboard.

Through the tape player’s window he could see the BASF cassette begin to spin. It turned for just under a minute, transmitting its program to the minicomputer’s memory bank. The tape stopped and the words “STORAGE DATA: OK” arose on the screen.

Whalid methodically punched three successive code numbers onto the keyboard, following each by tapping the key TEST. There was a pause after each code, then a phrase appeared on the screen: “COMPUTER CONTROL: OK”; “MICROPROCESSOR OK”; “RADIO FREQUENCY SIMULATION: OK.”

“All right,” Whalid said, “everything’s working properly. Now we’ll test the manual firing system.”

Fundamentally, the case had been designed to fire the bomb in response to a radio signal. It contained, however, a manually operated backup firing capability which any one of the three could operate if something went wrong. Whalid carefully formed the number 0636 on the keyboard. Those numbers had been chosen for their firing code because none of the Dajanis would ever forget them. They represented the date of the Battle of Yarmuk when the Arab warriors of Omar, the successor to the Prophet, defeated the Byzantines by the Sea of Galilee and established Arab domain over their lost homeland. As Whalid’s finger tapped the second “6,” the green light on the screen blinked off. For two seconds, it was replaced by a bright-red glow.

“It works.” Whalid shuddered. “We can detonate from here if we have to.” He glanced at his watch, then up at the ceiling. “We’ve got seventeen minutes to go.”

In Washington, D.C.‘s, National Airport, a tight police cordon screened off several dozen late-evening travelers stretching and straining to follow the progress of the FBI’s capital Bomb Squad. Cautiously, the agents scanned the bank of gray metal luggage lockers with Geiger counters, looking for radioactivity. They found none. Then three German shepherds trained to detect the scent of high explosives were led along the locker ranks. Finally, a pair of agents employing a touch as delicate, as precise as that of Japanese women assembling the circuitry of a computer chip unscrewed the door to locker K602 and gently eased it from its hinges.

To their relief, the only thing the agents found in the locker was an envelope leaning against the back of the compartment. Typed on it were the words “For the President of the United States.”

The message it contained was brief. It said that at midnight Washington time, 6 A.M. Libyan time, at a spot 153 miles due east of the junction of the twenty-fifth parallel and the tenth longitude, at the southern tip of the Awbari Sand Sea in the southwestern corner of Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi would provide the United States with a conclusive demonstration of his ability to carry out the threat enunciated in his earlier communication. To facilitate aerial observation of the demonstration, the Libyan dictator proposed a carefully defined air corridor running south to the site from the Mediterranean Sea through which U.S. observation planes would be allowed to by unmolested.

There was not a sound except for the dry rustle of the rats in the darkened warehouse. The three Dajanis squatted on the cold cement loading dock, waiting. Whalid held his watch in his hand, mesmerized by the sweep of its second hand. Again, he turned his regard upwards. Somewhere up there in the infinity of space, a tiny ball of metal tumbled through the canopy of night. It was a forgotten satellite, its existence known only to a handful of amateur redio operators around the world. Among them was the head of the Libyan state. Softly Whalid began to count off the passing seconds: “Three … two … one … zero.”

The sound of the last syllable hadn’t faded when it happened: the green light glowing on the screen of their control case blinked off. In a split second, another color replaced it in almost instantaneous response to the gesture of a man burning with hatred and fanaticism halfway around the world. It was the same ominous red glow that had appeared there a quarter of an hour ago.

Laila gasped. Whalid slumped forward, half relieved, half horror-stricken.

Kamal looked on in silence. The red glow faded and the words “RADIO FREQUENCY GLOBAL CONTROL: OK” appeared on the screen. Then they too faded and were replaced by the word “CONNECTION.” It was as though now that all their tests had been successfully run, the blue case before them was taking over, eliminating from the carefully elaborated chain of command any further need for the frail and uncertain intervention of human hands.

Whalid fitted the cable running from his bomb to the olive-drab circular plug an inch in diameter that connected it to the case. The next time the light on the screen glowed red, a flash of electricity from the case’s lithium batteries would pour through those pins to detonate the thermonuclear device lying on the platform.

Whalid stared at that black object he had created. Oh God, oh God, he thought, why did you ever give men such power?

“What’s the matter?” his brother asked.

Whalid started like a child in a classroom caught daydreaming by a teacher. His watch was still in his hand.

“The red light didn’t glow a full two seconds,” he replied. “Are you sure you connected the rod up on the roof to the cable tightly?”

“Of course.”

“I think we better check it.” Whalid took the pencil flashlight. “I’ll go up with you and hold this while you check it.”

The two men started for the door. Before they could get to it, Whalid doubled up in agony from the pain of his ulcer. “I can’t go,” he whispered, handing the flashlight to Laila. “You go and hold it for him.”

By the time Laila and Kamal returned, his spasm had passed. He was sitting on the dock, anguish no longer contorting his face.

“It’s all right,” Kamal said.

Whalid reached over and punched a final tap onto his keyboard, striking the word “END.” The control case was now locked. Only a code known to the three Dajanis could open it again.

“Whalid,” Kamal said, “you better spend the night here in case they’re looking for you. How about you, Laila?”