He twisted in his chair to face Caspar Weinberger. Civil defense fell under his sprawling Defense Department umbrella. “Do we have a plan to get these people out of New York in an emergency?”
“Mr. President, Jack Kennedy asked that question about Miami on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Weinberger sighed. “It took two hours to get the answer then, and it was no. Well, I can answer you this time in two seconds. It’s still no.”
“Don’t forget,” Eastman warned, “he’s threatening to detonate that thing if we start an evacuation. He considers those people his hostages.”
The President looked at his adviser. There was an infinity of sadness in his dark eyes.
“Do we take him at his word on that, Jack?”
“I’m afraid we have to, Mr. President.”
“Even though it might mean five million lives?”
“It could mean five million lives if we call his bluff and he’s not bluffing.”
The helicopter bearing Muammar al-Qaddafi back to his capital settled down on a landing pad concealed in a grove of Aleppo pines nineteen miles southeast of Tripoli at 7:52 Libyan time. The dictator leaped out and slid into the driver’s seat of a sky-blue Volkswagen hidden in the midst of the trees.
Four minutes later, followed by a jeepload of his redbereted Praetorian Guard, he passed through a barrier of electrified barbed wire and headed down a long alley of cypress trees leading to the Mediterranean shore. No foreign diplomat, no distinguished visitor, none of Qaddafi’s fellow Arab leaders had ever been invited into the elegant old dwelling set at the end of the drive.
With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman’s villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It had, indeed, been built by a Roman, a member of the nobility of the textile trade, who had left his name on it. In the years following his death, the Villa Pietri had served as the palace of Mussolini’s Fascist Governor General of Libya, as the residence of the brother of Libya’s King Idris, and later of the commanding general of the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli. The first chief of state in modern times to employ terrorism as an instrument of national policy had taken over the noble old dwelling in 1971. It was the headquarters from which Qaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network.
The Munich Olympic Massacre had been planned in its gracious sitting room; so, too, had the assault on the Rome Airport meant to kill Henrv Kissinger in December 1973, the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers, the Entebbe skyjacking. The eucalyptus trees of the villa’s gardens concealed the antennas that radioed Qaddafi’s orders to IRA provos, West German students, Red Brigade dissidents, even Islamic zealots infiltrated into Tashkent and Turkestan. Its wine cellars which had once housed the finest Chianti classicos of the Tuscan hills had been turned into an ultramodern communications center, hooked into, among other things, Libya’s radar installations; one of its bedrooms housed a complete mock-up of the control panels of a Boeing 747 and 707 on which many of the hijackers of the early and midseventies had been trained. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: “Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good.”
Qaddafi was radiant with triumph as he drew up to the villa. “Now,” he announced to a handful of aides waiting to greet him at the villa’s doorstep, “I shall no longer have to endure being an Arab President who stands by while my Palestinian brothers are stripped of the last shreds of their homeland.”
He embraced each in turn, his Prime Minister Salam Jalloud, one of the few members of his original junta still with Qaddafi, his chief of intelligence, the commanders of his army and his air force. Then he led them into his study.
“They are criminals, these Israelis,” he declared. “The whole world has stood by watching them stealing our brothers’ lands with these settlements of theirs. Watching while a people is being systematically deprived of its homeland. This so-called peace of that coward Sadat. What a mockery! A peace, for what? To allow the Israelis to go on and on stealing our brothers’ lands. Autonomy, they said.” Qaddafi laughed. “Autonomy for what?
To let the foreigner take away your home!”
Qaddafi sighed. “I dreamt of leading a people that did not sleep at night; that spent its days in the djebels training for the reconquest of its Palestinian brothers’ lands; that respects God’s Holy Law and obeys the Koran because it wants to be an example to the rest.
“And what do I lead? A people that sleeps at night. A people that doesn’t care what happens to its brothers in Palestine. A people that dreams only of buying a Mercedes and three television sets. We trained our best young men to fly Mirage jets in the battle and what did they do? They went down to the souks to open a shop and sell Japanese air-conditioners.” The intensity on the Libyan dictator’s face mesmerized the men around him.
“Now,” he went on, “with our bomb, why do we care if we are only a small power? Let the people go on dreaming of their Mercedes. I don’t need the millions now, only the few who are ready to pay the price I ask. Did the Caliph conquer the world with the millions? No! With the few, because the few were strong and believed.”
Qaddafi contemplated the tabletop a moment, staring at the watery circles left upon it by the bottles of soda his aides had drunk waiting for the test. Although he did not say it, he knew that success would make him, overnight, the hero of the Arab world, the idol of its masses. It would secure the larger goal which lay behind his much-proclaimed hatred of the Jewish state, bringing the Arab world with its vast oil resources and the power they represented under his command.
Salam Jalloud, the Prime Minister, shifted nervously in his chair. He was the one man in the room who had opposed Qaddafi’s scheme from the outset.
“I still say, Sidi, the Americans will destroy us. Or they will plot with the Israelis to trick us, to make us think they are going to do what we ask, then strike when our guard is down.”
“Our guard must never be down.” Qaddafi indicated a small black device on his desk. It looked like a miniature dictating machine. “From now on, this is our guard.” The device, another contribution of the engineers of Nippon Electric, resembled the remote-control boxes which can open a garage door from a moving car. By tapping it with his finger, Qaddafi could send an electronic pulse to a room deep in a specially reinforced cellar of the villa. There, protected by three redbereted paratroopers of his bodyguard, was the terminal which, in response to that gesture, would send his detonation code to Oscar and the bomb hidden in New York.
“The Americans are not fools,” he continued. “Do you think five million Americans are going to die for Israel? For those settlements even they oppose? Never! They are going to force Israel to give us everything we want.”
“Besides,” he said, “we need no longer be afraid of the Americans. Until now they have been able to ignore our rights to help the Israelis trample on the nationhood of our Palestinian brothers because they were a superpower. They were immune. Well, my friends,” a thin, drawn smile appeared on his features, “they are still a superpower, but they are no longer immune.”
In Washington, the President had left the Crisis Committee’s meeting at the National Military Command Center to confer with Moscow on the red telephone line. While he was out of the room, his advisers gathered in anxious knots discussing the emergency. As unobtrusively as possible, white-jacketed Navy stewards slipped among them passing out steaming cups of freshly brewed coffee. Only Jack Eastman remained seated at the conference table, skimming through a stack of documents, most of them stamped “Top Secret.”