“Well, for God’s sake, can’t your Air Force blow that damn thing out of the sky with one of our missiles?” Crandell asked.
“Del, just a minute.” Jack Eastman bridled at yet another of Crandell’s proposals for instant, ill-thought-out action. “We have every reason to assume this bomb is programmed to detonate automatically if it doesn’t receive a countersignal. Blow that thing out of the skies and how will Qaddafi stand it down if somehow we’re able to convince him not to detonate it before his ultimatum expires?”
“Jack, when in hell are you going to wake up to the fact that the man is not going to compromise?”
The President interrupted his quarreling advisers with a weary wave of his hand. He turned to the Air Force colonel. “For the time being at least,” he asked, “can you blanket all transmission out of that satellite? Shut it down completely?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then do it.”
Mesmerized and uncomprehending, the three Dajanis sat in front of the television set in the den of their rented house in upstate New York.
There were only minutes left, yet the screen before them contained no image of the President announcing a new Middle East settlement or a national emergency, no frenzied Mayor telling New Yorkers to flee their city, no humbled Menachem Begin proclaiming that his nation was withdrawing from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Instead, the screen flickered with the interminable images of a soap opera featuring a psychiatrist trapped in an adulterous relationship with a patient.
Laila was close to hysteria. “It’s gone wrong!” she sniffled. “It hasn’t worked. It’s going to explode!”
Whalid set his half-filled whiskey glass on the TV set and put an arm around her shoulders. “They must be talking in secret. Who knows? Maybe he’s going to extend the ultimatum.” On the floor of the den was a blue metallic case, similar to the detonation case attached to Whalid’s bomb except that it contained none of the protective devices the Japanese had built into the original. It too was connected to a slender needle rising almost invisibly above the TV antenna on the roof. “If he is, we’ll find out soon enough.”
“What time is it?” Kamal asked for the third time in five minutes.
“Four minutes to three,” Whalid replied Kamal got up and walked to the window onto the quiet, deserted suburban street. “Maybe the Americans refused, after all. Will we hear it explode up here?” he asked his brother.
He was talking about an event that was going to cause the deaths of six million people, yet he put the question to Whalid as though he were asking him if they would be able to hear a door slam across the street.
“No,” Whalid replied. “There might be a flash of light. Or if you were out in the street you might feel the heat. There would be a cloud, the mushroom cloud.
That we’d see.” Whalid pointed to the window behind Kamal. “The weather’s clear enough.”
On the television set, the announcer droned a final tease about the next day’s episode of the soap opera while an image of the sun setting to the throb of violins faded from the screen. It was replaced by that of a man marching past the shelves of a supermarket extolling the virtues of a can of spaghetti with real Italian-style meat sauce.
“Look!” Laila shrieked, pointing at the screen. “It’s three o’clock and they’re showing that! It’s failed! It’s gone all wrong!”
Kamal turned from the window. He studied their silent radio receiver, then the television set. “Calm yourself,” he ordered his sister. “Do you have no dignity?” He turned and with his gliding walk stalked through the hall, out of the front door and onto the snow-covered lawn.
Whalid watched him through the window as Kamal marched slowly up and down, eyes fixed on the distant horizon, as purposeful, as determined, as a beast waiting by a water hole for a lesser animal to appear. The scientist glanced at his watch. Three minutes past three. If something had happened, the signal would have arrived on their radio by now.
Whalid Dajani shuddered, reached for the whiskey bottle and with a shaking hand poured a large dollop into his glass.
Laila remained on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chest in a trance of horror and ill-comprehension. There had never been any question this was going to happen. The logic of their act was irrefutable, overwhelming. It had been evident from the beginning that the Americans would have to give them what they wanted. Yet, clearly, they had not, and now they were paying the price that was never supposed to be paid.
Suddenly she sat up, her finger thrust at the television set. “Wait a minute,” she cried. “That station is in New York and it’s still on!”
“That’s right.”
It was Kamal standing in the doorway to the den. He looked at Laila, at his brother slumped in his chair, one hand on his whiskey glass on the table beside him, at their silent radio receiver. “It’s seven minutes past three. We had no word of an extension of the ultimatum. Clearly, the bomb was meant to explode and did not. Why?”
Thirty-five miles away in New York City, the frightened men at the Sixth Precinct had one eye on the clock, the other on the stain spreading all too slowly over the map of the area they were searching. Al Feldman, at the center of the room, wanted to cry out in frustration. Why hadn’t they found it? Why was it taking so long? Three times Washington had called on the direct line they had installed here, urging them to hurry, warning them that there would be no extension this time, that after nine o’clock there was nothing, only the void.
Up until now there had been no panic, no hysteria, nobody breaking down.
That was because they still had time, and time was hope, tangible, palpable hope. But what was going to happen at six o’clock if they hadn’t found it?
At seven, at eight when there was just one more hour remaining? Would they hold then? Or would they panic like the frightened animals they would be, rush to the door, stampede for cars, for the telephones, shriek the news of the coming disaster to friends and relatives? It would take only one or two people then to break and it would all collapse. One voice shouting “Fire!”
in the dark and crowded theater. There would be a hundred voices screaming “Fire,” Feldman realized, all of them in this building. We don’t have six hours, the Chief suddenly understood. We probably don’t even have five. At seven o’clock it will all be over. The news will break and five million human beings will become five million rabbits trying to run before the flames of a forest fire.
The cackle of the squawk box linking them to the NSC conference room in the White House interrupted his baleful meditation. “Any progress to report?”
Jack Eastman’s voice asked.
Normally Feldman honored the formality of the chain of command in a crisis as religiously as a priest guards the secrets of his confessional. Now, however, he leaned past the Commissioner and Dewing to address the squawk himself. “No, none,” he answered, his voice so hoarse he could have been a perfect candidate for an antismoking commercial. “Is the President there?”
“Yes,” came the familiar soft voice.
“Mr. President, this is Al Feldman, the Chief of Detectives up here. I have got to tell you, sir, there is no way we are going to find that bomb before nine o’clock tonight. Either you got to get us more time, Mr. President, or you got to tell the people what’s happening. You can’t let them die trapped up here like rats.”
Kamal Dajani was perched on the imitation-mahogany cabinet of the now silent TV set, his arms folded, studying his brother with a steady, imperturbable gaze.