Harold Brown sensed the President’s anguish. “Well, sir,” he said, in a voice so soft only the Chief Executive beside him could hear it, “either we have a terrible problem on our hands or the cruelest hoax anyone’s ever played on a U.S. government.”
The President nodded. He said nothing. He continued to gaze straight ahead, concentrating totally on the screens before him.
The numbers rolled away toward the last zero, droplets falling rhythmically to an instant past. There was no sound in the room except the whir of the ventilation system. Even the lieutenant colonels manning the consoles, as used to tension as runners are to cramps, were pale with the strain.
Eleven fifty-nine. Four precisely aligned zeroes appeared on the clocks’
panels. No one saw them. Every eye was on the screen along the room’s far wall, on the emptiness of the desert, on the frail tower planted on its sands like a withered tree trunk that had somehow survived there despite the ravages of time and nature.
Five seconds, ten seconds. Nothing happened. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. The first creak of twisting armchairs indicated that the tension pent up in the room was easing. Forty-five seconds. Nothing, not even the eddying currents of a passing gust of wind, moved on the screen.
One minute. Men at last sat back in their armchairs. A relief so intense it was almost a physical presence enveloped the room.
“I told you the son of a bitch didn’t have it.” Satisfaction seemed to mix with the sweat sparkling on Crandell’s face.
Tap Bennington chewed on his pipe stem. “Mr. President, we’ve now got to decide what our response to the threat should be. I think we should review immediately the range of military options we ~ can address against Libya.”
Tap, just a minute, for God’s sake.” Warren Christopher of State was pleading. “We still have no confirmation whatsoever that Qaddafi is behind this.”
“You mean,” a furious Crandell demanded, “you propose to let that son of a bitch get off scot free just because his goddamn bomb―“
He never finished. A white wall of light seemed to explode from the screens of Room 2B890. So blindingly luminous was its flash, so painfully intense its glare, the men in the room flinched and shielded their eyes. Then, from ninety miles into space and a quarter of the way around the planet, the satellite cameras sucked up the fireball soaring over the Awbari Sand Sea and sent it hurtling onto the screens of the Pentagon, a roiling caldron of exploding gases: whites, reds, yellows and oranges, arranged in a dazzling kaleidoscope of light and fire.
For seconds, too stunned to react or speak, the two dozen men in the room stared, thanks to those cameras, at a sight no human eye had ever beheld, the bowels of hell, the incandescent heart of a thermonuclear explosion.
The first sound to intrude on the room came from seventy thousand feet over the site, from the pilot of the SR-71. Mechanically, indifferent to the spectacle below him, he read off the swiftly changing measurements of his instrument panels: a tide of thermal X rays, gamma rays, beta particles rushing past his detectors. His figures meant nothing to most of the men in the room. It did not matter. Everything they needed to know was right there on the screen before them, in the unsurpassable beauty and horror of a fireball rising from the desert floor.
The President squeezed Harold Brown’s forearm in his fingers. He had paled and his mouth hung half open, his lower lip curling downward with dismay.
Watching, mesmerized, he could think of only one thing: John the Divine’s Revelation of the Apocalypse: “… behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
Now, he thought, a Fifth Horseman has emerged from the entrails of hell to scourge humanity with terror, with arms so terrible even John’s hallucinating imagination could not have conceived them.
“My God,” he whispered to the man beside him. “Oh my God, Harold, how did he ever do it?”
PART II
The answer to an anguished President’s question could be traced back to a November afternoon in Paris not quite one year before the Libyan’s threat message had been delivered to the White House gate.
France’s President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, punctual as usual, entered the Cabinet Room of his Elysee Palace precisely at four o’clock that afternoon.
He circled the table to greet first the Prime Minister, then the Ministers of Finance, Industry, Foreign Affairs, the Interior and Defense. When he got to Pierre Foucault, Chairman of France’s Atomic Energy Commission, a broad smile broke out on his composed features.
“Bravo, mon cher,” he said to his old friend and schoolmate.
Foucault’s reply was a glance at the empty chair beside his. The scientist he had summoned to this restricted and secret meeting was late.
A slight flaring of his nostrils betrayed Giscard’s irritation. “We shall proceed as planned,” he said. He took his seat at the head of the table and, in — that slow, precise enunciation he reserved for particularly solemn occasions, began.
“Messieurs,” he declared, “I have asked you here today to inform you of an event that is certain to have an overwhelming impact on the destiny of our nation. A team of French scientists working at our laser fusion research center at Fontenay-aux-Roses has succeeded within the past week in solving one of the most formidable scientific challenges in man’s history. Indeed, they have done something scientists around the world have been trying to do for thirty years-produce energy from fusion. The results of their work will ultimately permit this country, and indeed the entire world, to resolve the most intransigent problem we all face, the global energy crisis.”
He paused to allow the impact of his words to register. “We have asked the man responsible for our success, Monsieur Alain Pr6vost, to join us, but he has apparently been held up in traffic, so I shall ask Monsieur Foucault to begin.”
The President nodded to his Atomic Energy Chairman, who picked up the carafe in front of him and filled his water glass. He took a sip. Then he held up the glass as though he were about to propose a toast.
“Messieurs,” he began, “the meaning of our breakthrough is that the water in this glass …” he paused an instant for dramatic effect, swirling the water in his upraised glass, allowing it to glisten in the pale sunlight, “is now a source of energy capable of lighting the lamps of mankind. It means that there is now in this glass of water alone enough energy to meet the power requirements of the entire city of Paris and all its inhabitants for fortyeight hours.”
Foucault brought the glass back to the ministerial table with a sharp crash. The men around him gasped. He paused, savoring the shock his words had produced. Then he began again, his voice softer. “Until now, man has met his energy needs by exploiting the heritage of the past, the coal, oil, gas and uranium buried in the earth’s crust. His long-term survival on this planet has depended, however, on finding a new source of energy, one that is by its very nature virtually inexhaustible. There are only two, the sun-and water.
“With water,” he said, “we begin with the most abundant resource on the planet. It is, after all, everywhere. All water contains one of the simplest atoms on earthdeuterium, or, as we say, ‘heavy hydrogen.’ This water glass is full of them. If we can bang two of these atoms together hard enough so that they meld-that is, fusethe result is a release of energy so enormous it staggers the mind.
“Let me give you an example. One kilogram of the petroleum we now purchase at such an exorbitant cost in the Persian Gulf releases thirteen kilowatt hours of energy when it burns. One kilogram of heavy hydrogen, properly fused, will release …” again Poucault paused, measuring each word for dramatic effect, “ninety-one million kilowatt hours of energy.”