Puzzled and angry, John Booth followed the steady cackle of NEST’s ultra-high-transmission network. The normally phlegmatic NEST director was as distraught as a man who has just been told his wife is expecting triplets. Three times since he had gotten back to his Seventh Regiment Armory headquarters, his helicopters overflying lower Manhattan had reported high radiation readings only to see them mysteriously disappear when his foot search teams moved in.
Like everything else in NEST, the radio facility set up in the locker rooms used by the tennis players who usually employed the armory’s main floor was designed to be independent and self-contained. Everything from batteries, spare parts and screwdrivers to hand-held transceivers and mobile transceivers for the trucks and helicopters had been flown in from Las Vegas. That way Both could feel reasonably certain that local CB fans, newsnapers or TV stations wouldn’t pick up any indication of what was going on by eavesdropping on his transmissions.
On the wall of the locker room were huge color aerialsurvey maps of New York’s five boroughs, maps whose resolution was so fine you could identify with a loupe the color of a hat on a woman walking down Fifth Avenue. Thev were part of a file of maps of 170 U.S. cities held available twentyfour hours a day at NEST’s Washington offices.
Suddenly Booth heard an excited call rise over the chatter on the network.
“Feather Three to base. I have a positive.” Feather Three was one of the trio of New York Airways helicopters Both had pressed into service.
Jesus Christ, Booth prayed, please don’t let this be another false alarm, I’ll go crazy.
The technician and the pilot were back on the air, pinning their reading down to a hotel two doors from Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, when one of them shouted. “Son of’ a bitch, it’s fading!” A few seconds passed and his voice was back. “No, it’s not, John. It’s moving! It’s moving up Sixth Avenue!”
Booth hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. Of course, that was it!
The clever bastards had hidden the bomb in the back of a truck and were circulating through the city.
Trembling with nervous excitement, Booth and the men in the command post followed the steady progress of the target up Sixth Avenue, across Thirtyfourth Street. Suddenly the chopper, whose pilot had been trying to get some idea of which truck in the maze of traffic below was giving off radiation, came back on the air. “Target no longer moving.”
“Where is he?”
“Seems to be at Bryant Park, Sixth and Forty-second!”
Booth ordered half a dozen NEST vans and FBI cars to converge on the intersection.
“I’ve got it!” shouted the technician in the first van to reach the scene.
“Where are you?” Booth demanded.
“Just down Fifth from the corner,” came the answer, “right in front of the New York Public Library.”
The numerals on the bar clock hung on the wood-paneled wall of the National Security Council conference room read 1428. A sense of helplessness infused the room. Coffee cups, half-eaten sandwiches, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs littered the table along with piles of top-secret cables from CIA, State and Pentagon. Nothing in those cables or the messages delivered to the room over its sophisticated communications network had brought its occupants any solace, any promise of a satisfactory resolution to the crisis. Barely twenty-four hours before the expiration of the ultimatum of the zealot of Tripoli they were, as Harold Brown had so bitterly observed, the “pitiful giant” once mockingly described by Mao Tse-tung, all the vast panoply of U.S.
resources useless. Little by little as they had followed the progress of the search for the bomb in New York in regular hourly reports from the city, one thing had become appallingly clear: so frightening were the dimensions of the task, so painfully slow the manner in which it had to be carried out, there was no hope of finding the device in the time Qaddafi had allocated them. As for the secret messages that had reached the White House from every major world capital and leader, they all, without exception, urged the President to remain firm in the face of Qaddafi’s menace. None of them, however, had offered the slightest specific suggestion on how to do that without imperiling New York and its people. It was the Iranian crisis all over again. America’s allies were free with their advice but notably timorous when it came to help or action.
Just after half past two, a Navy chief petty officer interrupted a CIA report from Paris with the announcement that the last of the Sixth Fleet’s ships had reached the one-hundred-kilometer limit set down earlier by Qaddafi. The President greeted the news with a mixture of relief and concern. Fundamentally, he was certain all their hopes came down to the enterprise he could now begin: trying to reason with a man four thousand miles away, a man who, only a generation ago, would have been just the inconsequential ruler of a lot of sand, but who, thanks to oil, the technological genius of twentieth-century man and his own countrymen’s madness in hurling their most precious knowledge into the public domain, now had the power to force his zealot’s vision on the world. Mankind could afford tyrants in the day of the sword, the President reflected. Not anymore.
While the white squawk box buzzed with the spaceage jargon of the Doomsday jet reestablishing the communications link to Tripoli, he gave a last glance at the yellow legal pad before him. On it were the notes he had made listening to the psychiatrists’ advice: Flatter him; play up to his vanity as a world leader.
He’s a loner. Must become his friend. Show him I’m the person who can help him out of the corner into which he’s painted himself.
Voice always soft, nonthreatening.
Never give him the impression I don’t take him seriously.
Keep him in a position of fundamental uncertainty; he must never know exactly where he’s at.
Good maxims for a police negotiator. But were they really going to be any help to him? He swallowed, feeling the tension constrict his throat. Then he turned to Eastman and indicated he was ready.
“Mr. Qaddafi,” he began, once he had confirmed that the Libyan had followed the fleet’s withdrawal. “I want to address the very grave problem posed by your letter. I understand how ardently you want to see justice done for your fellow Arabs in Palestine. I want you to know that I share those sentiments, Mr. Qaddafi, I=’
The Libyan cut into his speech. His voice was as gentle as it had been two hours before, but his words were no more encouraging than they had been then.
“Please, Mr. President, do not waste my time or yours with speeches. Have the Israelis begun to evacuate the occupied territories or have they not?”
“No stress reading at all,” the CIA technician monitoring the voice stress analyzer reported. “He’s perfectly relaxed.”
“Mr. Qaddafi,” the President pressed on, striving to control his own emotions, “I understand your impatience to reach a settlement. I share it.
But we must lay together the basis for a durable peace, one that will satisfy all parties conoerned, not one forced on the world by a threat such as the one you have made to New York.”
“Words, Mr. President.” The Libyan, to the Chief Executive’s irritation, had interrupted him again. “The same kind of hollow, hypocritical words you have been feeding my Palestinian brothers for thirty years.”
“I assure you I speak with the utmost sincerity,” the President rejoined — to no avail. Qaddafi, ignoring him, was continuing. “Your Israeli allies bomb and shell Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with American planes and guns, kill Arab women and children with American bullets, and what do you offer in return? Words-while you go right on selling the Israelis more arms so that they can go on killing more of our people. Every time the Israelis seize my brothers’ lands with their illegal settlements, what do you do? You give us more of your pious words, your spokesmen wringing their hands in public in Washington. But have you ever done anything to stop the Israelis? No! Never!