“There, Mr. President, is the location we were given on the note that was found in National Airport.”
A second screen lit up. On this one was a detailed resolution of the tower on the first. It was a spindly metal assembly resembling an old-fashioned oil-drilling rig, and at its top the men in the conference room could make out the outlines of a large cylindrical object looking like a barrel and resembling very closely the description of the device on the blueprint given to them by Harold Agnew three and a half hours earlier.
The Admiral turned again to his console. There had been, he noted, no satellites in position over Libya at the time the threat had been delivered to the White House. The precious satellites, whose orbits were set once each month by the NSC, were for the most part employed over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Since the first alert, however, three KH-lls had been shifted into fixed orbits over Libya, and the images delivered by a second satellite rose on one of the six screens. It was a. cluster of buildings, the barracks compound of Bab Azizza to which the U.S. charge d’affaires had earlier been refused admission. Watching the screen, the men around the President could see the paratroopers who had turned the charg6 away stomping their feet in the morning chill.
The image moved as it was adjusted and stopped again, this time on a series of small buildings. A white circle popped up around one of them, indistinguishable from the others, a roof inside a little walled compound.
“Sir,” the Admiral said, “we believe this to be Qaddafi’s residence. We’ve had it under surveillance since shortly after Los Alamos’ first alert.
We’ve seen no evidence of any activity whatsoever or any sign that the building’s even occupied.”
“What makes you think that’s Qaddafi’s residence?”
The Admiral adjusted the focus of the satellite picture so that the walled compound enclosed in the white circle filled the screen. Clearly visible, in the compound yard, was a black tent and, apparently tethered to it, a camel.
“Sir, Intelligence informs us Qaddafi keeps a tent and a camel in his yard because he likes fresh camel’s milk for breakfast. This is the only residence at Bab Azziza that meets that description.”
The Admiral turned back to his display and called up a map of Libya’s Mediterranean Sea coast. On it, in the Gulf of Sidra, midway between Tripoli and Benghazi, was a spot of white light. Northwest of the light, not far from the island of Malta, was a blinking red light.
The blinking red light, the Admiral explained, was the U.S.S. Allen, an electronic-surveillance ship. It was crammed with sophisticated listening devices, like those with which the CIA had peered into the heart of the Soviet Union for years from its listening posts in Iran. The white light indicated the listening station to which the Allen was steaming at twenty-seven knots. Once there, she would be able to eavesdrop on every radio communication made in Libya and all of the telephone calls carried by her modern microwave communications system. Virtually every phone call made in Libya, from a man ordering a radio for his Toyota to a mistress arguing with a jealous lover, to any call made by Qaddafi himself on anything other than a buried, secure line would be intercepted, copied and stored on shipboard computers. NSA headquarters outside Washington had already sent to the Allen voice samples of Qaddafi and five key Libyan leaders. Every intercepted call would be run past those samples by the computer so that calls made by any of the six men could be culled instantly from the hundreds of thousands of other calls being made across the country.
The Mediterranean coast disappeared, to be replaced by a map of Libya. Down its western edge ran two closely parallel red lines, the air corridor laid down by Qaddafi in his message. Two thirds of the way down the corridor a naked eye could follow the progress of a flashing red light.
“Sir, we ordered a Blackbird out of Adana to provide us secondary observation as soon as we received word,” commented the Admiral. A Blackbird was an SR-71, a vastly improved version of the old U-2 spy plane, this one capable of flying over two thousand mph at 85,000 feet. They carried supersensitive heat and radiation sensors developed to monitor in minute detail China’s and France’s nuclear tests.
The President turned his attention back to the site identified in the National Airport note. Underneath the tower, in the quickening sunlight, the crisscross tracings of dozens of tire tracks were now clearly visible.
“Harold,” the President asked his Science Adviser, “what do you make of it?”
“It looks a lot like the pictures I’ve seen of the old Trinity test site.”
“Trinity” was the code name for the test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. “Simple. Primitive. But efficient.”
Brown looked at the screen like a professor studying a student’s design, hunting for its flaws. “Somewhere around there we should be picking up some sign of the command post he’d use to set this thing off.”
“We’ve swept the area for it, sir,” the Admiral answered. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to spot anything.”
“Of course you haven’t.” The voice was Crandell’s, a rasp almost as harsh on the ears as the sound of gravel spilling down a metal chute. “Because there isn’t any. That Arab son of a bitch is jerking us off, that’s what he’s doing. Two million people. That’s all he’s got in his country, two million people. They’re so goddamned backward, most of ‘em, they can’t even drive a car without stripping the gears.
Know what a Frenchman told me once? He caught one of their pilots looking into the gas tank of one of those Mirage planes they sold ‘em to see if there was any gas left-with a match!”
The Secretary of Energy roared with laughter, savoring the image of the ignorant Arab blowing himself and his aircraft to pieces in his search for gasoline. “And you really believe those people could do something like this?”
The President ignored him. “Harold,” he said, “he’s going to be letting the world in on his secret if this works, isn’t he?”
“Not necessarily. That’s about as remote a part of the world as you can find down there. Only a few Bedouin tribes running around. Nearest town’s well over a hundred and fifty miles away. They’ll see a hell of a flash of light all right, but not much else.”
“What about fallout?”
The Admiral overheard the President. On one of the screens, superimposed over a map of southeast Africa, there appeared a sausage-shaped arc thrusting across southern Libya, northern Chad, the Sudan and into the southern corner of Saudi Arabia.
“Sir, this is the fallout pattern we’re predicting based on the strength and direction of the upper air winds over the site.”
“No radiation monitoring devices there,” Brown noted. “They’ll be reading a four or a five on their Richter scales in Europe. Probably put it down to an earthquake if it goes off.”
It was four minutes to midnight. There was little to do now but wait. On the clocks suspended on one wall of the room, the white numbers silently clicked off each passing sound.
The President’s eyes concentrated not on the test site but on the screen on which Qaddafi’s bungalow lay trapped in its circle of white. The details of the house and garden were clearly visible, the reddish tiles on the roof, the purplish splash of flowers beside the house. In the garden there was what looked like a child’s playground.
Is it really possible, he asked himself, that a man living in a pleasant little house like that, a. man with children, a man who believes in his God as devoutly as I believe in mine, could propose something as mad, as senseless, as this? What is there, he wondered, what hatred, what lust for power, what drive for revenge for a wrong that didn’t even affect him or his own people directly, that could drive him to so irrational an act? He shuddered.