The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Read Free Book Online Page B

President was well aware, there was yet another reason: the ominous injunction to secrecy in the threat note.
    “Well, if this really is from Qaddafi our answer’s simple.” It was Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy. “Lather those bastards from one end of Libya to the other. That’s all. Wipe them out. Lay the Trident missiles on the subs we have on patrol in the Med on them. That’ll turn the damn place into a sea of glass in thirty seconds. There won’t be a goat left alive over there.”
    Crandell sank back, satisfied. His words had a cathartic effect on the room. It was as though the outspoken Energy Secretary had given voice to a thought all had had but no one else had been prepared to express, the brutal but reassuring affirmation that, in the final analysis, the United States possessed the power to squash a menace such as this.
    “Mr. Fundseth” There was a catch in the President’s voice as he addressed his Deputy Secretary of State, as though he, too, sought to be assured by Crandell’s brutal declaration. “What is the population of Libya?”
    “Two million, sir, give or take a hundred thousand. Census figures over there aren’t very reliable.”
    The President turned down the table toward the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Harry, how many people would we lose if a three-megaton device went off in New York? Without evacuation?”
    “Sir, it would be difficult to give you an accurate figure on that without looking at some numbers.”
    “I realize that, but give me your best estimate.”
    The Chairman reflected a moment. “Between four and five million, sir.”
    There was dead silence as the awful mathematics of Fuller’s figures registered on everyone in the room. The President sat back, lost for just a minute in a private thought no one in the room dared to interrupt. The giants of the world, the United States and the USSR, held each dither in strategic checkmate because they shared a parity of horror, an equilibrium once described with almost too perfect irony by the acronym for the philosophy on which the U.S.‘s thermonuclear strategy had been based-MAD, for “Mutual Assured Destruction.” I kill you, you kill me. It was the old Russian comedy, everybody dies.
    But this, if it was true, was the terrible alteration in the rules of the game, that had haunted responsible world leaders for years, the end game in the struggle against nuclear proliferation for which his precedessor had fought so hard-and, characteristically, with so little success.
* * *
    Detective First Grade Angelo Rocchia watched with pride the woman advancing through the restaurant, noting approvingly each head that turned for a second glimpse at the lithe movements of her figure. Men always had a second look at Grace Knowland. Her fluffy black hair was clipped in a pageboy bob that set off her higharched cheekbones, her dark eyes and her pert mouth. She was not quite medium height, but she was so well proportioned, so finely muscled, that her clothes, like the simple white blouse and beige skirt she was wearing tonight, always seemed molded to her body. Above all, Grace radiated a fresh, engaging vitality that belied the fact that she was thirtyfive, the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy, and had led a life not noteworthy for its placidity.
    “Hi, darling,” she said, brushing his forehead with a quick, moist kiss.
    “Not late, am I?”
    She slid onto the red velvet seat beside him, right under his favorite oil of the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius. Forlini’s was, as Angelo liked to say, “the kind of place where things transpire.” A few blocks away from City Hall, it bad been for years a favorite hangout of top cops, judges, politicians, men from the DA’s office and minor Mafiosi.
    He handed Grace a Campari and soda and raised his Black Label on the rocks to her. Angelo Rocchia drank very little, but he was fastidious about what he drank: “sipping scotch” and good wines, preferably the littleknown Chianti