“‘Muammar al-Qaddafi is essentially a lonely man, a man without friends or advisers,”’ Lisa Dyson read with the singsong Scandinavian speech pattern of the tiny Minnesota village in which she’d been raised. “‘In every instance, his reaction to new situations has been to retreat back to the old and the secure. He has discovered all too often that rigidity works, and he will inevitably become rigid in difficult circumstances.”’
She cleared her throat and pushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead.
“‘Most important, it is the Agency’s conviction that in a moment of great crisis he would be perfectly prepared to play the role of a martyr, to bring the roof down over his head and destroy the house if he is not allowed to have his own way.” `He likes to be unpredictable, and,”’ she concluded, ” `his favorite tactic in a crisis will be to lunge for his enemy’s weakest spot.”’
“Jesus Christ!” Eastman groaned. “He certainly found it in New York City.”
“That, gentlemen,” Lisa Dyson noted, closing her report, “is Muammar al-Qaddafi.”
Bernie Tamarkin had followed her, leaning tensely forward, elbows on his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together his knuckles glowed. He stood up and began to stride around Eastman’s office, tugging nervously at his mat of curly hair. Without being asked, he started to offer his evaluation of the material Lisa Dyson had just read.
“We’re looking at a very, very dangerous man here. First of all, he was humiliated as a kid and he’s never gotten over it. He was the dirty little Bedouin boy despised by everybody else, and he’s been out for revenge ever since. This business about keeping his family in a tent until everyone else in Libya has a house. Bullshitl He’s still punishing his father for taking him out of his desert and throwing him into that school.”
“I think there are some vital clues for us in the desert’s impact on him,”
Dr. Turner, the CIA’s Psychiatric Division head, noted. He was a big man, his bald head meticulously shaved, delicate gold-rim glasses on his nose.
“Our key to getting to him may be religion-God and the Koran.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Tamarkin was still pacing. His own reputation as a terrorist negotiator had been considerably enhanced by his skillful use of an Arab ambassador familiar with the Koran during the Kannifi Black Muslim crisis in Washington a few years before. “But I doubt it. This guy thinks he’s God. That stuff about raiding the nightclubs. The story about how he goes to the hospital disguised as a beggar asking for a doctor to come to help his dying father, then throws off his robes and orders the doctor out of the country when he tells him to give his father an aspirin. That’s omnipotence. The man is playing God. And you don’t negotiate with God.”
“Do we have to take this man at his word?” Eastman asked him. “Is he the kind of guy who really could go through with something like this? Could he be bluffing?”
“Not a chance.” There was not, Eastman noted grimly, a hint of hesitation in Tamarkin’s reply. “Don’t doubt that son of a bitch even for a second.
Don’t ever, ever question his readiness to pull that trigger, because he’ll pull it just to show you he can.” Tamarkin moved to Eastman’s desk. “The one vital, essential thing you’ve got to convey to the President or whoever’s going to deal with Qaddafi is this: don’t challenge him. We’ve got to forget our big nationalistic ego. We can’t get into one of those macho, head-on collisions, have a couple of forty-fivecaliber penises waving at each other. Do that and he’ll feel threatened. And New York will go.”
“All right,” Eastman snapped, “I’ll inform the President. But what are we supposed to do? That’s what you’re here to tell us.”
“Well, right off I’d point out that the guy who wrote the book on how to handle situations like this is a Dutchman over in Amsterdam. I’d sure as hell like to have him here in our corner when push gets to shove.”
“If he’s a Dutchman and he’s in Holland he’s not going to do us much good tonight in Washington, D.C., is be?” barked Eastman.
“Look, that’s not my problem. I’m just saying if there’s some way to get him here it would be a big help. Now, as far as Qaddafi’s concerned, the first thing I’d work on is the fact he’s a loner. Has no friends. Whoever negotiates with him has to insinuate himself into his confidence. Become his friend.”
Eastman made hurried notes on the yellow legal pad before him. “You know,”
he said to Tamarkin, “one thing that struck me in that report is the concern he’s always shown for his people. Getting them better housing, things like that. Is there a reservoir of sympathy there we can play on to get him to respond to the people up in New York?”
The psychiatrist sat up with a sudden, almost spastic reflex. His dark eyes widened as he stared incredulously at the National Security Assistant.
“Never!” he said. “This man hates New York. It’s New York he’s after, not Israel, not those settlements of theirs. New York is everything this guy loathes. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Money. Power. Wealth. Corruption. Materialism. It’s everything that’s threatening that austere, spartan desert civilization of his. It’s the moneylenders in the Temple; it’s the effete, degenerate society he despises.”
Tamarkin’s eyes darted around the room to be sure that his message was registering on everyone there. “The first thing you’ve got to understand is this: deep down inside, whether he knows it or not, what this guy really wants to do is destroy New York.”
The screaming jangle of an alarm bell galvanized the men manning the National Security Council communications center in the basement of the West Wing. The duty officer jabbed at three red buttons by his desk.
Thirty seconds later, Jack Eastman came running into the room.
“The Allen has found Qaddafi, sir!” the duty officer shouted.
Eastman grabbed the secure phone that linked the room to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.
“Where is he?”
“In a villa, by the sea, just outside Tripoli,” the admiral running the center announced. “The Allen intercepted his voice on a call half an hour ago and traced it back there. The Agency confirms it’s one of his terrorist headquarters.”
“Terrific!”
“I have just had Admiral Moore at Sixth Fleet on the blower. They can put a three-kiloton missile through the front door of that villa in thirty seconds.”
“Don’t you fucking dare!”
Eastman had the reputation of being “tight-assed,” for never flapping no matter how severe the pressures on him were, but he screamed out his order to the Pentagon admiral. “The President has made it absolutely clear there’s to be no military action in this situation without his express orders. You make damn sure everybody out there understands that.”
“Yes, sir.”
Eastman thought for a second. Should he wake the President? On his urging he had gone to sleep to husband his strength for the crisis. No, he told himself, let him get his sleep. He’ll need it.
“Tell Andrews to start one of the Doomsday planes for Libya right away.” The Doomsday planes were three converted 747s that bristled with electronic gadgetry and sensitive communications equipment.
They could stay aloft for seventy-two hours and were designed to provide the President with an airborne command post in the event of a nuclear war. “I want them to set up a secure communications channel Qaddafi can use to talk from that villa to Washington.”
Eastman paused. He was sweating. “Get State,” he ordered the duty officer beside him. “Tell them to have the charge in Tripoli get out to that villa right away. Tell him …” Eastman reflected carefully on his words. “Instruct him to inform Qaddafi that the President of the United States requests the privilege of a conversation with him.”