The Presidency of the United States is a cruel burden, one to age any man, and the energetic glow of strength and purpose the President had brought to the White House had already begun to dim under the trials of his office.
The lines that crinkled the corners of his sad dark eyes were deeper and far more evident now than they had been when he entered this house, the deep auburn hair in which he took great pride was showing, at last, the gray he’d avoided for years.
Still, the nation led by the man dining in the White House this December evening remained the most powerful, the richest, the most wasteful, the most envied and imitated nation on earth, the world’s first producer of coal, steel, uranium, copper and natural gas. Her farmlands were a wonder of productivity. Nine tenths of the world’s computers, almost all its microprocessors, three quarters of its civil aircraft, a third of its automobiles came out of American factories.
All that was safeguarded by a military establishment which possessed a destructive capacity unique in human history; the most sophisticated network of satellites that technology could produce; by seven layers of electronic warning systems and radar installations so sensitive they would detect a migrating flight of ducks hundreds of miles from the U.S.
coastline. Indeed, the countrymen of the President could, that December evening, consider themselves a privileged caste, the people on earth least likely to be exposed to the horror of an enemy’s assault.
The President bad just finished the last of his soup when the phone rang in the sitting room next door. The sound was seldom heard in the living quarters of the White House. Unlike most of his predecessors, he preferred working off tightly worded pieces of paper, and his staff was trained to restrict his phone calls to only the most urgent messages. His wife rose to take it. A frown clouded her usually composed features when she came back.
“I’m sorry. It was Jack Eastman. He says he has to see you right away.”
Jack Eastman was the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, a former Air Force major general who had taken over the corner office of the White House’s West Wing made famous by Henry Kissinger.
The President dabbed his lips with his napkin and excused himself. Two minutes later he opened the door of the living quarters himself. Eastman was a lean, youthful-looking fifty-three year old, all bone and muscle, one of those men to whom an old classmate, an old Army buddy, an old mistress can exclaim after twenty years of separation, “You haven’t changed a bit”
and, for once, mean it. One glance at Eastman told the President that this was not a routine interruption of his Sunday evening. He waved him to a seat and settled himself in a comfortable apricot wing chair beside the television set.
Two kinds of men had occupied the high office Eastman now held, presiding over the flow of documents that was the great trunk artery upon which the security of the United States depended. There were those like Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, ambitious men determined to run the world for the President of the United States from their seat beside the throne; or those like Al Haig, who had served Richard Nixon, products of the military, brilliant chiefs of staff, sorting out the options, honing the recommendations down to a fine point, but always careful to leave the real decision-making in the President’s hands.
Eastman belonged to the latter group. He was all business. Calculated flamboyance, the need for attention, an obsessive preoccupation with the media were as abhorrent to him as anonymity would have been to Henry Kissinger.
He handed the President a white folder. “Sir, I think you should begin by reading this. It’s the translation of a document that was delivered to the Madison Gate at lunchtime in the form of a tape recording in Arabic.”
The President opened the folder and took out the two typewritten pages it contained.
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
File Number: 12471-136281
CONTENTS: One envelope, manila, containing one blueprint, thirty-minute BASF tape cassette, four pages of mathematical formulas. Package delivered to EPS Sergeant K. R. Mabuchi, Madison Gate, 1331, Sunday, December 13, by a female, blond, estimated age, middle thirties, wearing a beige cloth coat, identity unknown. Translation of tape prepared by E. F. Sheehan, Department of State:
“6th Jumad Al Awal, 1,401 Year of the Hegira.
“To the President of the American Republic, may this message find you, thanks to the Grace of Allah, savoring the blessings of good health. Greetings and Respectful Tidings.
“I write to you as a man of compassion concerned with justice and the sufferings of the innocent and oppressed-peoples. No people has suffered more from the oppression of the world this century than my Palestinian Arab brothers. They were driven from half of their ancestral home by an alien peo. ple, forced onto our Arab lands by your imperialistic Western powers. Then that same alien people occupied the other half of my brothers’ lands in defiance of the Charter of the United Nations in their aggressive war in 1967.
“Now that alien people systematically attempts to dispossess my Palestinian Arab brothers from the last half of their homeland by placing upon it in ever-increasing numbers their illegal settlements, settlements which even you have condemned. The ultimate aim of this Zionist conspiracy is to occupy all that land, to uproot my brothers, to banish forever from our Arab soil the Arabs who were born upon it.
“You said you wish to establish peace in the Middle East and I beg God’s Favor upon you for that, for I too am a man of peace. But there can be no peace without justice and there will be no justice for my Palestinian brothers while the Israeli, with your nation’s blessing, continues to take away their lands with their illegal settlements.
“There will be no justice for my Palestinian Arab brothers while the Israeli refuses, with your nation’s blessing, to allow them to return to their ancient home. There will be no justice for my Palestinian Arab brothers while the Israeli occupies the site of our sacred mosque in Jerusalem.
“By the grace of God, I now possess the ultimate weapon on earth. I have sent with this letter the scientific proof of my words. With a heavy heart but conscious of my responsibilities to my Palestinian Arab brothers and all the Arab peoples, I have ordered my weapon placed on New York Island. I shall cause it to explode in sixty-three hours from midnight this night, at 2100 Greenwich Mean Time, 1500 Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday, December 15, if, in the intervening time, you have not obliged your Israeli ally to:
1. Withdraw all of the illegal settlers and settlements he has established on the lands seized from the Arab nation in his 1967 War.
2. Withdraw his people from East Jerusalem and the site of the Holy Mosque.
3. Announce to the world his willingness to allow my Palestinian Arab brothers who wish to do so to return immediately to the lands taken from them in 1967 and to enjoy there their full national rights as a sovereign people.
“I must further inform you that, should you make this communication public or begin in any way to evacuate New York City, I shall feel obliged to instantly explode my weapon.
“I pray God will deliver upon you the blessings of His Compassion and Wisdom at this difficult hour.
Muammar al-Qaddafi
President
Socialist People’s Republic of Libya”
The President looked up at his adviser, consternation and astonishment on his face. “Jack, what in God’s name is this all about?”
“Sir, we just don’t know. We haven’t been able to determine whether this is really from Qaddafi or whether it’s just another hoax of some sort. But what’s of real concern is the fact that the nuclear-emergency command post at the Department of Energy out in Germantown tells us the design that came in with this thing is a very, very sophisticated piece of work. They’ve sent it on to Los Alamos for analysis. We’re waiting to hear from them now.