The Fifth Horseman

PART III

The only sound reaching Muammar Al — Qaddafi’s ears was the low and mournful sigh of a distant wind. No Teleprinter’s hum, no radio’s cackle, no jangling telephone marred the perfect quiet of his desert. As was only natural, he had chosen to pass the critical hours preceding the test of his hydrogen bomb in the solitude of the spaces in which he had found his faith and nurtured his dreams.

His command post was the symbol of that vanishing race by whose precepts he strove to reorder the future, his ever present Bedouin tent. Not a single manifestation of the technology he sought to harness intruded on its spartan precincts. There were no television screens here parading the world before his eyes, no smartly uniformed aides laying out the options available to him, no blinking panels of light to remind him of the strength of his massed armies. Qaddafi was alone with the oneness of the desert and the stillness of his soul.

Here, he knew, there was neither the time nor the place for the useless or the complex. As the oncoming light of day stripped away the illusions of the night, so the emptiness of these expanses stripped life to its fundamentals. All here gave way to the inexorable struggle to survive.

Since time immemorial the intensity of that struggle had made the desert the incubator of the spiritual, its inhuman solitude the catalyst that had driven men to the extreme. Moses in the Sinai, Christ in the wilderness, the Prophet on his Hegira: each, in turn, had thrust on mankind the visions engendered by their desert retreats. Others had, too: visionaries and zealots, fanatics and spiritualists, part of the unending parade of austere and alarming men that through the centuries had emerged from those trackless wastes to trouble the settled world around them.

Immersed now in the reassuring familiarity of his desert, the latest of that long and troubling line awaited the results of his test in perfect calm. If it had worked, it was now, he reasoned, in their first flash of anger, that the Americans would lash out against him. If that was God’s will, then he was ready to perish here in the surroundings that had formed him. If it had failed, he would have one course open: he would condemn the “plot” fomented within his borders, arrest a few Palestinians and stage a mock trial to mollify the anger of the Americans and the world.

His alert ears picked up the flutter of a helicopter coming to announce the result. to return him to his capital in triumph or shame. He watched unmoved as it drew up, then fluttered to rest fifty yards from his tent. A man leaped out.

“Ya sidi!” he shouted. “It worked!”

His first reaction to the news was to bow his head in prayer, a prayer of awe and gratitude for the power that now rested in his hands. Woven into the multicolored strands of the prayer rug on which he bowed his head were the outlines of the Islamic sanctuary which with that power he would now claim in the name of his faith and his people, Jerusalem’s Mosque of Omar.

The President of the United States sat motionless at the head of the conference table in the National Military Command Center. He too had greeted the desert explosion with a prayer, a prayer for help in what he had instantly understood was the gravest crisis his nation had ever faced. Now he was staring straight ahead, his index finger pressed to his lips, every fiber of his being concentrated on the dilemma before him.

“The first thing I would like to say,” he announced finally, “is all our actions must be based on the assumption that there is a hydrogen bomb hidden in New York,” the President continued. “And we have also got to assume that Qaddafi is deadly serious when he threatens to detonate it if any word of this gets to the public.”

In a strange way, the President thought, he may have done us a serivce. If word of this ever got out, we’d probably have an outburst of public opinion that would close down every option we have except forcing the Israelis out of the West Bank. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the table, letting his glance travel over his advisers ranged around the table, then the military men at their command consoles. “I don’t think I need remind any of you of the moral obligation this places on everyone here. There are certainly some of us who have persons very close to us who may be threatened by this. But each of us has got to remember that the lives of five million of our countrymen may depend on keeping it a secret.”

“Jack”-he glanced at his National Security Assistant-“do you have any specifics to recommend on that?”

“Well, sir, it goes without saying, only use secure telephones when talking about it.” It was well known in Washington that the Soviets intercepted microwave calls in and out of the White House-just as the United States monitored those going to the Kremlin. “And no secretaries. If anyone has to write anything, write it by hand. With no carbons.”

“How do we keep this from the press?” Bennington asked.

It was a vital question. There were two thousand journalists accredited to the White House. Forty or fifty of them were in almost constant attendance on its grounds during the day, the most able among them convinced on arising each morning that the government would lie to them at least once before sundown. Leaks were a way of life in the capital, and gossip on government secrets the main topics of conversation at its cocktail parties and dinners and the lunches at the Sans Souci and Jean Pierre’s where its luminaries picked each other’s brains as assiduously as they picked their Maryland soft-shelled crab.

“Should we tell the press secretary?” the President asked.

“I’m not sure,” Eastman replied. “If we don’t, his reaction will be more natural if he gets any queries on it. But if we do tell him, he’d damn well better be prepared to lie, stonewall and deny this damn thing right into the ground.”

“If we do tell him,” William Webster of the FBI drawled, “he can tell us right away if anyone in the media’s focusing in on it.”

“Don’t worry,” Eastman said, “if anyone in the media starts to focus in, we’ll hear about it fast enough. The most important thing is to hold this as close as possible. The Kennedy people held on to the Missile Crisis for a week because only fifteen people in the government knew about it. You’re also going to have to maintain the fagade of a normal existence. That’s the best way to keep the press off the track.”

The President indicated his agreement, then shifted his attention to the admiral commanding the center. He ordered him to begin their stock-taking with the traditional appraisal of the military situation and the options open to the U.S. armed forces.

The Admiral stepped back to the speaker’s stand. Eastman could not suppress a smile. Even at a moment like this, the Admiral moved automatically into his Pentagon “briefer’s stance,” feet a rigid six inches apart, left hand in the small of his back, his right wielding the absolute end in briefer’s sex, a collapsible aluminum pointer with a glowing light on its tip with which he once again reviewed the Soviet’s military posture. Nothing had changed. Noting that, Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, intervened.

“Mr. President. I would suggest our first action should be to alert the Soviets to what has happened. However strained our relations are, I think that in this we can count on their help in bringing Qaddafi to ground. Furthermore, they should be made aware that any military moves we make are not being directed against them.

The President agreed. “Open up the Red Line,” he commanded Eastman, “and inform the Soviets I’d like to speak with the Chairman.”

“Sir,” Bob Fundseth, the Deputy Secretary of State, said, “I think it’s also essential we coordinate with our allies any actions we take and keep them informed of this at the highest level. I’d like authorization to get off ‘Eyes Only’ messages to Mrs. Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt and, above all, President Giscard. We’ve got to assume the source of Qaddafi’s plutonium for the atomic trigger of that bomb was his French reactor. The French may be able to turn up information for us on the people Qaddafi has involved in this that will help the Bureau run them down.”

The President gave his approval, then ordered the Admiral to resume his briefing. This time a series of bright-red lights on the semidarkened screen indicated the positions of all the ships of the Sixth Fleet, most of them gathered off Crete on an anti-submarine-warfare exercise. They represented the U.S. forces closest to Libya, and, the Admiral told the assembly, they could be ordered to start southwest immediately.

Harry Fuller, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, broke into his briefing.

“Mr. President, I think there’s one point that needs to be clarified right away. There is no viable military solution to this crisis. Sure, we can destroy Libya. Instantly. But that’s not going to give us any guarantee whatsoever that his bomb-if it’s in New York — won’t explode. And that, in my judgment, precludes our taking any military action against Qaddafi for the time being.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with that,” the President noted grimly. “What do you recommend we do, then?”

“Every move we make,” the Admiral declared in a voice that boomed through the room like a Navy klaxon sounding general quarters, “has got to be designed to remind Qaddafi of the potential consequences of his action.

He’s got to be kept aware every hour, every minute, every second of this damned crisis that we can thermonuclearize him in the blink of an eye. Let him live, eat and breathe that and see how he likes it.”

The Admiral waved a hand at the red lights flashing on the screen. “I agree we should send the Sixth Fleet hell for leather for the Libyan coast. If they’ve got any liberty parties ashore, they’ll just have to leave them on the beach. Once they get there, I’d put them right up against his coastline where his radar’s sure to pick them up. Run a high-altitude aerial screen up and down the coastline from the carriers and tell the pilots to talk in the clear so he’s constantly reminded they’re carrying enough missiles to turn that goddamn country of his into an instant ruin.” A dour smile appeared on the Admiral’s face. “The deployment of force in a situation like this is designed to alter your enemy’s perception of his actions. Maybe this will alter his.”

“Mr. President.” There it was again, that rasping drawl of Crandell’s.

“You’re not going to like what I’m going to say, but I’m going to say it anyway. Destroy Qaddafi. Right now.”

The Chief Executive gave his Energy Secretary a look of ill-concealed exasperation. It did nothing to staunch the flow of his unsolicited advice.

“The great mistake we made in Iran was not acting the very first day they took those hostages. The whole world would have understood us if we had. We waited and what happened? Everybody was holding us by the coattails. `Don’t do anything rash. Think about our oil. Think about the Russians.’ “

“Mr. Crandell, we’re not talking about fifty hostages in an embassy.” The President almost spat the words at his Energy Secretary. Despite the placid surface he turned to the public, he was, in private, a man of considerable temper. “We’re talking about five million people and New York City.”

“We’re talking about this country, Mr. President, and a man who’s declared war on us. We’ve got to show him and everybody else on this globe that there’s a limit beyond which we aren’t going to be pushed. Mark my words, if you don’t respond to this man, challenge right now, tell him he’s got five minutes to tell you where that bomb’s hidden or he and his country are dead”-Crandell was waving a pudgy finger across the table=`then before this night is over you’ll be ready to betray this nation’s friends to satisfy a blackmailer.”

“Crandell.” The President had paled under his efforts to rein in his temper. “When I want military advice from you I’ll call for it. I’m not going to put the lives of five million of our people at risk until I’ve exhausted every possible avenue of saving them and this world from an unspeakable catastrophe.”

“By talking, Mr. President, and once you’ve started talking you’ll start compromising. Everybody always does.”

The President turned angrily away from his Energy Secretary. To lose his temper, whatever the provocation, in front of his advisers at this moment would be a disaster.

Crandell looked at him, slowly shaking his head. Just like that it was a nuclear shot and want to know what we’ve face he thinks it’s raining.

At the far end of the table, Bennington had just picked up his telephone.

The CIA head listened for a moment. “Excuse me, sir, but it looks like we’ve got another problem on our hands.”

Every eye in the room turned on the New Englander. “Mossad’s just got onto the Agency. They picked up the explosion on their seismographs. They’re very suspicious that it was a nuclear shot and want to know what we’ve got on it.”

“Christ!” someone groaned from the end of the table. “If they find out what Qaddafi’s done, they’ll take him out on their own and we may lose New York.”

The President frowned. It had been almost inevitable that the Israelis would pick up the shock waves. As long as they didn’t spot the fallout, though, they’d have doubts, and none of the fallout was heading their way.

Right now what he needed was time, time to get the planning in order, time to get a grip on the problem before them.

“Stall,” be ordered Bennington. “Tell them it looks like an earthquake.

Tell them we’re checking it out and we’ll keep them informed.”

On the wall opposite the President, the bank of clocks showed it was 12:30

A.M., 7:30 in Jerusalem and Tripoli. They.had thirty-eight and a half hours left, and every minute of them had to be made to count.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “let’s try to define the areas we’ve got to address ourselves to in order of their importance. First in New York: what do we do about it?”

He twisted in his chair to face Caspar Weinberger. Civil defense fell under his sprawling Defense Department umbrella. “Do we have a plan to get these people out of New York in an emergency?”

“Mr. President, Jack Kennedy asked that question about Miami on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Weinberger sighed. “It took two hours to get the answer then, and it was no. Well, I can answer you this time in two seconds. It’s still no.”

“Don’t forget,” Eastman warned, “he’s threatening to detonate that thing if we start an evacuation. He considers those people his hostages.”

The President looked at his adviser. There was an infinity of sadness in his dark eyes.

“Do we take him at his word on that, Jack?”

“I’m afraid we have to, Mr. President.”

“Even though it might mean five million lives?”

“It could mean five million lives if we call his bluff and he’s not bluffing.”

The helicopter bearing Muammar al-Qaddafi back to his capital settled down on a landing pad concealed in a grove of Aleppo pines nineteen miles southeast of Tripoli at 7:52 Libyan time. The dictator leaped out and slid into the driver’s seat of a sky-blue Volkswagen hidden in the midst of the trees.

Four minutes later, followed by a jeepload of his redbereted Praetorian Guard, he passed through a barrier of electrified barbed wire and headed down a long alley of cypress trees leading to the Mediterranean shore. No foreign diplomat, no distinguished visitor, none of Qaddafi’s fellow Arab leaders had ever been invited into the elegant old dwelling set at the end of the drive.

With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman’s villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It had, indeed, been built by a Roman, a member of the nobility of the textile trade, who had left his name on it. In the years following his death, the Villa Pietri had served as the palace of Mussolini’s Fascist Governor General of Libya, as the residence of the brother of Libya’s King Idris, and later of the commanding general of the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli. The first chief of state in modern times to employ terrorism as an instrument of national policy had taken over the noble old dwelling in 1971. It was the headquarters from which Qaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network.

The Munich Olympic Massacre had been planned in its gracious sitting room; so, too, had the assault on the Rome Airport meant to kill Henrv Kissinger in December 1973, the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers, the Entebbe skyjacking. The eucalyptus trees of the villa’s gardens concealed the antennas that radioed Qaddafi’s orders to IRA provos, West German students, Red Brigade dissidents, even Islamic zealots infiltrated into Tashkent and Turkestan. Its wine cellars which had once housed the finest Chianti classicos of the Tuscan hills had been turned into an ultramodern communications center, hooked into, among other things, Libya’s radar installations; one of its bedrooms housed a complete mock-up of the control panels of a Boeing 747 and 707 on which many of the hijackers of the early and midseventies had been trained. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: “Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good.”

Qaddafi was radiant with triumph as he drew up to the villa. “Now,” he announced to a handful of aides waiting to greet him at the villa’s doorstep, “I shall no longer have to endure being an Arab President who stands by while my Palestinian brothers are stripped of the last shreds of their homeland.”

He embraced each in turn, his Prime Minister Salam Jalloud, one of the few members of his original junta still with Qaddafi, his chief of intelligence, the commanders of his army and his air force. Then he led them into his study.

“They are criminals, these Israelis,” he declared. “The whole world has stood by watching them stealing our brothers’ lands with these settlements of theirs. Watching while a people is being systematically deprived of its homeland. This so-called peace of that coward Sadat. What a mockery! A peace, for what? To allow the Israelis to go on and on stealing our brothers’ lands. Autonomy, they said.” Qaddafi laughed. “Autonomy for what?

To let the foreigner take away your home!”

Qaddafi sighed. “I dreamt of leading a people that did not sleep at night; that spent its days in the djebels training for the reconquest of its Palestinian brothers’ lands; that respects God’s Holy Law and obeys the Koran because it wants to be an example to the rest.

“And what do I lead? A people that sleeps at night. A people that doesn’t care what happens to its brothers in Palestine. A people that dreams only of buying a Mercedes and three television sets. We trained our best young men to fly Mirage jets in the battle and what did they do? They went down to the souks to open a shop and sell Japanese air-conditioners.” The intensity on the Libyan dictator’s face mesmerized the men around him.

“Now,” he went on, “with our bomb, why do we care if we are only a small power? Let the people go on dreaming of their Mercedes. I don’t need the millions now, only the few who are ready to pay the price I ask. Did the Caliph conquer the world with the millions? No! With the few, because the few were strong and believed.”

Qaddafi contemplated the tabletop a moment, staring at the watery circles left upon it by the bottles of soda his aides had drunk waiting for the test. Although he did not say it, he knew that success would make him, overnight, the hero of the Arab world, the idol of its masses. It would secure the larger goal which lay behind his much-proclaimed hatred of the Jewish state, bringing the Arab world with its vast oil resources and the power they represented under his command.

Salam Jalloud, the Prime Minister, shifted nervously in his chair. He was the one man in the room who had opposed Qaddafi’s scheme from the outset.

“I still say, Sidi, the Americans will destroy us. Or they will plot with the Israelis to trick us, to make us think they are going to do what we ask, then strike when our guard is down.”

“Our guard must never be down.” Qaddafi indicated a small black device on his desk. It looked like a miniature dictating machine. “From now on, this is our guard.” The device, another contribution of the engineers of Nippon Electric, resembled the remote-control boxes which can open a garage door from a moving car. By tapping it with his finger, Qaddafi could send an electronic pulse to a room deep in a specially reinforced cellar of the villa. There, protected by three redbereted paratroopers of his bodyguard, was the terminal which, in response to that gesture, would send his detonation code to Oscar and the bomb hidden in New York.

“The Americans are not fools,” he continued. “Do you think five million Americans are going to die for Israel? For those settlements even they oppose? Never! They are going to force Israel to give us everything we want.”

“Besides,” he said, “we need no longer be afraid of the Americans. Until now they have been able to ignore our rights to help the Israelis trample on the nationhood of our Palestinian brothers because they were a superpower. They were immune. Well, my friends,” a thin, drawn smile appeared on his features, “they are still a superpower, but they are no longer immune.”

In Washington, the President had left the Crisis Committee’s meeting at the National Military Command Center to confer with Moscow on the red telephone line. While he was out of the room, his advisers gathered in anxious knots discussing the emergency. As unobtrusively as possible, white-jacketed Navy stewards slipped among them passing out steaming cups of freshly brewed coffee. Only Jack Eastman remained seated at the conference table, skimming through a stack of documents, most of them stamped “Top Secret.”

He had to call on every resource of the discipline acquired in a lifetime of military service to concentrate on the material before him, to drive from his mind the ghastly spectacle they had all witnessed. His job was to sort out the dimensions of this crisis, to lay the options the United States had before the President as concisely and as clearly as possible-even if those options were only variations of the unthinkable.

He picked up a four-volume blue plan labeled “Federal Response to Peacetime Nuclear Emergencies.” Millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, thousands of man-hours of effort had gone into preparing that plan. After one quick perusal, Eastman tossed it aside in disgust. New York would have been reduced to a charred graveyard before he or anyone else had been able to make sense of its bureaucratic jargon.

“The President, gentlemen,” the lieutenant colonel at the NMCC command console announced. The Chief Executive strode briskly back into the chamber and was addressing the men in it before they had had time to sit down.

“I’ve spoken with the Chairman,” he announced. “He assures me that the Soviet Union condemns Qaddafi’s threat without reserve, and has offered to cooperate with us in any way he can. He is personally addressing a message to Qaddafi through his ambassador in Tripoli condemning what he’s done and warning him of the consesequences of his action.”

“Mr. President?” It was the Deputy Secretary of State. “As a corollary of that I’d recommend we orchestrate along with Moscow, Peking and Paris a worldwide diplomatic assault on Qaddafi to show him that he’s absolutely isolated. Cut off from any vestige of support anywhere in the world.”

“Do it, Bob,” the President ordered. “although I’m afraid we’re not dealing here with a man who’ll be responsive to pressures of that sort. You also had better call the Secretary back from South America.” The President remembered how effectively John F. Kennedy had used a cold to cover his return to Washington from Chicago at the beginning of the Missile Crisis.

“Tell him to pretext some health reason.”

“We’ve also, Mr. President,” Eastman said, “got the constitutional aspects of this thing to consider. We have to bring in the Governor and, much more important because he’s on the firing line, the Mayor.”

“There,” mused the President, “is a potential problem.” The Mayor was a volatile, outspoken man who might go off half cocked if he wasn’t handled properly. “I think we better lay it on him face to face down here.”

“And I think you’ll also have to brief the Congressional leadership.”

“Yes, but we’ll hold it very, very tight. Find out exactly whom Kennedy brought into the early stages of the Missile Crisis.” The President leaned back in his chair, clasped his chin in the cradle of his forefinger and gave his National Security Assistant an appraising glance. “Jack, what plan of action do you recommend7”

Eastman shuffled the papers in front of him for just a second. Then, with the low but commanding voice he had acquired in his years in the military, he began. “It seems to me, Mr. President, we’ve only got two practical approaches open to us to resolve this problem. The first is actually finding and disarming this device. You’ve given the brief on that to the FBI and the CIA. The second is getting to Qaddafi and convincing him that whatever his complaints against Israel are threatening to destroy New York is a totally irrational and irresponsible way of resolving them.

“It occurs to me, Mr. President, that, as you said earlier, this is the ultimate terrorist situation. What we have here is a fanatic holding a gun to the heads of five million people. We’ve got to talk that gun out of his hand, get him into a negotiating position, which is probably what he wants anyway, just the way you’d maneuver a terrorist into a negotiating position in a hijacking situation. We’ve got a lot of people around with expertise on how to do it.

I recommend we bring them together to give us their guidance.”

“All right,” the President agreed. “Get the best people we have into session at the White House immediately.”

“Mr. President?”

This time it was the Army Chief of Staff. “I think we’re overlooking one very vital point here. I agree that as long as there’s a chance of that hydrogen device going off in New York we’ve got no military options open against Libya. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t be preparing for the possibility of military action.”

The President’s chin thrust forward at his words.

“Not against Libya. Against Israel.”

“Israel?”

“Israel, Mr. President. The bottom line of this crisis is that if that bomb or whatever it is is really in New York, you’re going to have the lives of five million Americans at risk. Against those people in those settlements over there. Who shouldn’t even be there in the first place. A bunch of far-out Zionists or New York City. It’s no deal, Mr. President, no deal at all. I recommend we alert the Eighty-second Airborne and the divisions in Germany and hold the Sixth Fleet Marine transports in the eastern Mediterranean instead of sending them toward Libya with the carriers. If we’re going to land the Marines, it’ll be in Haifa, not in Tripoli. And I recommend State open very discreet communications with the Syrians.” Just a suggestion of a smile turned the edges of the General’s mouth. “I suspect they’ll be ready to offer us landing facilities in Damascus if we need them.”

“The General’s right.” It was the CIA’s Tap Bennington. “The fact of the matter is, those settlements over there are absolutely illegal. We’ve opposed them. You’ve opposed them. If it comes down to New York or them and the Israelis won’t get those people out of there, then we damn well better be ready to go in and get them out ourselves.”

“Whatever we think about those settlements,” the President noted, “and you all know how I feel about them, forcing the Israelis out of them now would be yielding to Qaddafi’s blackmail. It would be showing the world that this kind of act pays.”

“Mr. President,” Bennington answered, “that’s a very fine moral point, but I don’t think it’s going to cut much ice with those good folk up there in New York.”

Eastman had followed the exchange in discreet silence. “One thing is clear,” he now interjected, “and that is, Israel is vitally concerned in this. The sooner we bring Mr. Begin into it, the better.”

Just an intimation of distaste crossed the President’s composed features at the mention of the Israeli Prime Minister’s name. There was probably no political leader in the world he disliked quite so much. How many hours had he been forced to listen to his interminable lectures on the history of the Jewish people, the constant, selfimportant references to the Bible: to the Israeli’s infuriating habit of arguing forever over the most trival legal point, God, he thought, dealing with Begin had forced him to draw on reserves of patience which he had never imagined he possessed.

“You’re right.” He sighed. “Get Mr. Begin on the phone.”

The early light burnished the Jerusalem limestone of the house at 3 Balfour Street to an amber glow. Just the suspicion of a breeze picked the tips of the Aleppo pines rising above the cement wall protecting the residence of the Prime Minister of Israel.

Inside, in the somber study that adjoined the sitting room, a slight figure stared moodily out the French windows to the flowered patio beyond.

Menachem Begin has not expected to return to this room as his nation’s prime minister. His predecessor’s assassination by a Palestinian terrorist, however, had so angered his countrymen, so reinforced the political authority of Israel’s right, that his return to leadership had become inevitable. To his left, barely one hundred yards away, was the imposing roofline of the King David Hotel. His name would be forever associated with that building. It was there in 1946 that a commando of Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi had killed ninety people, devastated a British headquarters and earned him a place in this unborn nation’s history books.

Behind Begin, on one of the bookshelves stacked with encyclopedias, was a photograph taken of himself in the disguise which had allowed him time and time again to slip through the streets of Tel Aviv under the noses of Britain’s soldiers: the fiat black hat, black frock coat and straggly beard of a rabbi.

He turned and walked slowly back to the desk at which he had taken the President’s phone call. He was dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt and a dark smallpatterned tie, a reflection of a taste in clothes which, like so many other things, stamped him as a man apart in a nation in which ties were an anathema and baggy corduroys were preferred to well-pressed trousers.

Once again he reviewed the notes he had scribbled on a yellow legal pad during the President’s phone call, punctuating his study with sips of the lukewarm tea flavored with Sucrasit, a sugar substitute, which had constituted his breakfast since his second heart attack. He uttered a silent prayer to the God of Israel. There was no question in Begin’s mind about the significance of the information the President had passed him: it represented the most fundamental shift in power relationships in the Middle East in his lifetime. The American President would perceive it, as he would have to, in terms of the horrible threat being posed to the people of New York. Begin’s duty was to perceive it in terms of the threat it posed to his people and their nation. It was mortal.

A crisis was at hand and Begin well knew that, in that crisis, he could not count on the friendship of the President. He had long ago sensed the rising tide of the animosity the American bore him. For his part, Begin did not dislike the President; rather, he mistrusted him, just as he mistrusted most non-Jews-and, indeed, a great many of his fellow Jews. He had, his political foes charged, a ghetto mentality, a narrow, ingrown attitude ill fitting a world leader, an inability to perceive a problem in anything other than its Jewish dimension.

That was the natural heritage of his formative years, his boyhood in the ghettos of Poland, his youth fighting as a Jewish partisan, his young manhood spent as an underground chieftain with a price on his head, struggling to drive the British from Palestine.

One vision had driven him during those years, the vision of his tutor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose writings lined his study. It was of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel; not the truncated little Israel that his foe, David BenGurion, had accepted like a crumb from the world’s table in 1947, but the real land of Israel, the Biblical land God had promised his forebears.

Consolidating Israel’s claims to the land captured in 1967, which he referred to as Judea and Samaria, and bringing his people peace: those had been the two fundamentally irreconcilable aims of Begin’s years as Israel’s leader. Both seemed far away this December morning. The complex, painfully arrived at Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement had proven to be a chimera. Its failure to come to grips with the Palestinian problem had left a raw and festering wound at the heart of the Middle East.

Instead of enjoying the benefits of the peace they so desperately wanted, his countrymen were living the most painful hours of their existence.

Inflation and the heaviest tax burden any people on the globe were forced to carry stifled their economic life. Immigration had dwindled to a trickle of the infirm and the elderly. Many more Jews left Israel each year than arrived. There seemed little promise left in the Promised Land.

Most important, Israel’s enemies, determined to destroy a peace settlement they believed to be a fraud, were gathering once again. Iraq and Syria were united, the Palestinians resurgent. Behind them, fanatical and militant, was the new Leftist Islamic Republic in Iran with its vast arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry seized in the overthrow of the Shah.

Turkey, where once Israel had counted many a valuable friend, was openly hostile. The oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf, menaced by the Leftist tides to the north, no longer dared to counsel caution to their Arab brothers.

The focal point on which all their ambitions converged was Jerusalem and the Land of Judea and Samaria. Qaddafi’s mad gesture seemed to Begin the inevitable culmination of the conflict that had opposed Arab and Jew for half a century.

Outside, he heard the rasp of approaching motorcycles. A few seconds later there was a knock on his door. His wife entered the study and placed on his desk a white envelope with a red slash across one corner. It was sealed and bore the words “Sodi Beyoter-Ultra Confidential.” Prepared a few blocks away in an austere, barracklike building identified only by a number, 28, and the sign “Center for Research and Policy Planning,” it contained the daily intelligence digest of the most important of Israel’s three intelligence services, the Mossad.

The Prime Minister opened the envelope and smoothed the report out on his desk. At 7:01, it noted, Israel’s seismograph laboratories had detected a shock of 5.7 on the Richter scale. Its source had been established as the area of the Awbari Sand Sea in southwestern Libya, an area not noted for earthquakes.

Reading the next paragraph, he started. At 7:31, the report continued, Mossad’s Washington representative had spoken personally to the head of the CIA. The CIA director had given him his personal assurance that the shock was an earthquake.

Even in the most difficult hours of Israel’s relations with the United States, the bonds between the CIA and her intelligence apparatus had been warm and intimate. There was almost nothing the Israelis learned that was not immediately passed to Washington. And now, in a matter critical to Israel’s national existence, the Americans had deliberately, if perhaps only momentarily, lied to her. The implications of that were not lost on the Israeli Prime Minister.

He looked at his wife. She knew nothing of the crisis. But she saw he had suddenly gone pale, an almost grayish pallor seeping over his features.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“This time, we are alone,” he gasped, as much to his own stunned self as to her. “Completely alone.”

The chimes of St. John’s Monastery of the Cross were tolling nine, Jerusalem time, when Menachem Begin’s black Dodge slipped below the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and up to the unattractive, functional building that housed the center of the nation’s government.‘A quartet of burly young men leaped out, each clutching in his left hand a black leather attache case. Dressed in something other than their blue jeans and leather jackets, they might have been stockbrokers or a group of aggressive young salesmen rushing into company headquarters with their latest orders. Instead those cases contained the tools of their calling as the Prime Minister’s bodyguards, an Uzi submachine gun, three extra magazines of 9mm. ammunition, a Colt .45 and a walkie-talkie.

A few minutes later, Begin took his place at the center of the oval table at which his Cabinet was gathered in emergency session. None of the men at the table had even the faintest intimation of the nature of the emergency that had brought them there. Begin had confided in no one. For a moment his regard swept the room, his dark eyes rendered outsized by the glasses he wore to correct his astigmatic vision. Carefully choosing his words, he began.

“Gentlemen, we are facing the gravest crisis in our history.” With the phenomenal memory for which be was noted, he recollected every detail of his conversation with the President.

Nothing Begin could have told his ministers, no revelation he might have made, could have horrified them more than his words. For fifteen years their nation’s survival had reposed on two strategic pillars, the support of the United States and the knowledge that in the ultimate crisis Israel alone in the Middle East possessed atomic weapons. Now the image of a mushroom cloud rising above the Libyan desert had destroyed the strategic basis of their state.

“We have no choice!”

The words thundered through the stricken silence left by Begin’s speech, their impact underscored by the sound of a heavy fist smashing onto the ministerial table. They came from a barrel-chested man in an old sweater and open shirt, his suntanned face setting off a full head of pure white hair.

“We can’t live with a madman pointing a thermonuclear gun at our heads.”

Benny Ranan was one of the five authentic military heroes in the room, a former paratroop general who’d jumped at the head of his troops in the 1973

war in the spectacular transcanal operation which had paved the way for Arik Sharon’s triumphant encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army. As Minister of Construction, or “Minister of Bulldozers” as he was referred to, he was one of the most ardent supporters of the program to throw up new Israeli settlements on the land Begin called Judea and Samaria. He rose and strode around the table with the swaying gait his paratroopers loved to mimic.

His destination was the mural covering one wall of the room, a photograph of the Middle East taken by Walter Schirra from his Apollo 7 spaceship.

Nothing could have illustrated more graphically the terrible vulnerability of their nation than that kaleidoscope of blues, whites and blacks, its vista sweeping from the Red to the Black Sea, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Israel was just a sliver in its immensity, a strip of land clinging precariously to one edge of the photo.

Ranan gazed at it dramatically. “What this does is change totally the conditions of our existence. All Qaddafi has to do to destroy us is drop a bomb here-” Ranan’s thick forefinger thumped the map in the vicinity of Tel Aviv-“and here-and here. Three bombs and this nation will cease to exist.”

He turned back to his fellow ministers. The booming parade-ground voice dropped in register to a hoarse whisper. “What would our life be worth here knowing that at any second, any minute, any hour, a fanatic who’s been screaming for our blood for years can incinerate us instantly? I couldn’t live like that. Could any of you? Could anybody?”

He paused, aware of the impact his words were having on the men in the room. “Forty centuries of history has one lesson for us. We Jews must resist any threat to our existence with all our strength. We have to destroy him, gentlemen. Right now. Before the sun is high.”

Ranan placed his forearms on the table so that his heavy trunk leaned forward and the lingering smell of the garlic and cheese of his breakfast hung on the air. “And we will tell the Americans what we intend to do once we’ve done it.”

Again, quiet muffled the room. The Deputy Prime Minister struck a match and thoughtfully lit his pipe. Yigal Yadin’s bushy moustache and his bald head were as much a part of Israel’s political scene as Ranan’s bulky figure. He was an archaeologist, a humanistic warrior who was the architect of Israel’s victory in the first war she had had to fight with her Arab neighbors, in 1948.

“For the moment, Benny,” be noted, “the people who are menaced by Qaddafi’s bomb are not here. They’re in New York.”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is destroying Qaddafi before he can react. The Americans will thank us for doing it.”

“And suppose Qaddafi still manages to detonate that bomb and destroy New York? How much gratitude do you suppose that will inspire in the Americans?”

Ranan sighed. “That would be a tragedy. An appalling, ghastly tragedy. But it’s a risk we’re forced to take.

What would be a greater tragedy-the destruction of New York or the destruction of our nation?”

“For whom, Benny?” Yadin asked. “Us or the Americans?”

“There are three million Jews in New York,” noted Rabbi Yehuda Orent, leader of the religious party that was a part of Begins ruling coalition, “more than there are here.”

“This is where they belong.” Ranan shook his head. “What’s at stake here is more important than any number of Jews. We’re the expression of the eternal vocation of the Jewish people. If we disappear, the Jewish people will cease to exist as a people. We’ll condemn our seed to another two thousand years in the wilderness, in the ghettos, in dispersion and hate.”

“Benny,” the Prime Minister noted, “I must remind you the Americans have asked us to avoid taking any unilateral action against Qaddafi.”

“The Americans?” Ranan gave a growling, scornful laugh. “Let me tell you something, the Americans are going to sell us out. That’s what they’re going to do.” His hand waved toward a bank of black telephones in one corner of the room. “They’re on the phone trying to talk to Qaddafi right now. Dealing away our land, our people, behind our backs.”

“And suppose we do negotiate over those settlements.”

Those words from the mouth of General Yusi Avidar, head of Shimbet, Israel’s military intelligence agency, stunned the room. At the head of his tank battalion in 1967 he had defeated the Arab Legion in the crucial battle for the West Bank. “Giving them up won’t mean the end of Israel. Most of the people in this country didn’t want them there in the first place.”

“What’s at stake is not those settlements.” Ranan’s answering voice was deep and controlled. “Or New York. It’s whether this nation can exist beside a Muammar Qaddafi armed with thermonuclear weapons. I say it cannot.”

“And for that you’re ready to run the risk of seeing five million innocent Americans slaughtered, of making enemies of the one people whose support and help we need?”

“I am.”

“You’re mad.” Avidar sighed. “It’s insane. It’s this damnable, sick Massada complex driving us to destruction and suicide again.”

Ranan was totally composed. “Every minute we waste talking brings us closer to our own destruction. We have to act right now, before the world can organize to stop us. If we wait, we’ll have no West Bank, no Jerusalem, Yassir Arafat and his thugs on our doorstep, our hands tied behind our backs by the Americans, and Qaddafi posed to slaughter us. We will have no more will or reason to exist.”

Menachem Begin had followed the argument without intervening, anxious to let every opinion enter into the debate. Now, softly, he spoke to his Defense Minister. “Does this nation have any military option to stop Qaddafi other than an all-out preemptive nuclear attack on Libya?”

The burly former fighter pilot who was the architect of Israel’s Air Force slowly, despairingly almost, moved his head from side to side. “I can see none. We have no resources to mount and sustain an attack across hundreds of miles of open water.”

Begin glanced at his hands, folded on the table before him. “I have lived through one holocaust. I cannot live under the threat of another. I believe we have no choice. I pray God the bomb in New York doesn’t explode.”

“Good God!” General Avidar gasped. “We won’t have a friend left in the world.”

Begin’s face was set in a tragic, melancholy mask. “We have no friends now.

We never have. From Pharaoh to Hitler we have been a people condemned by God and history to dwell alone.”

He called for a vote. Scanning the raised hands, he remembered the May afternoon in 1948 when the leaders of the Jewish people had decided to proclaim their state — by just one vote. That was the margin before himone vote. He turned to General Dorit. “Destroy Libya,” he ordered.

No people in the world were better trained or better equipped to move fast in a crisis than the Israelis. Speed of reaction was a life-or-death reflex in a nation whose principal city could count on only two minutes’ warning of an enemy attack from its northern borders, five minutes’ from the south. As a result, the Israelis possessed probably the most highly perfected command communications network in the world, and on this December morning the speed with which it went into action was dazzling.

As soon as the Cabinet’s decision was taken, General Dorit got up and went to a special telephone in the anteroom. That phone gave him a direct link to “The Hole,” Israel’s underground command post 160 feet below her Pentagon at Hakyria between Tel Aviv’s Kaplan and Leonardo da Vinci Streets.

“The walls of Jericho,” he said to the major sitting at the command console in “The Hole.” His code phrase activated the command net which linked every one of Israel’s twenty-seven senior military officers day and night.

Whether they were jogging along the Tel Aviv waterfront, hoeing their garden, making love to a wife or a girl friend, or simply going to the toilet, each of those twenty-seven men was required to have a telephone or an ultrasophisticated portable shortwave, two-way radio transmitter within an arm’s length of his person at all times. They were all assigned code names that were changed on the fourth day of the month by a computer at Hakyria, the new names being selected at random from an assigned category such as flowers or fruits.

Dorit ran out of the government headquarters, toward one of the two completely duplicated communications trucks which always traveled with his gray Plymouth. By the time he had settled into its seat, all twenty-six of his key subordinates were on line, standing by for his orders. Exactly three minutes had elapsed since Menachem Begin had given the order to destroy Libya.

In “The Hole,” an Israeli female soldier, her khaki miniskirt clinging to her buttocks, unlocked the safe next to the command console. Inside were banks of envelopes, two for every potential enemy Israel possessed. The Israelis well knew there would be no time for planning once a crisis started, and those envelopes contained alternative sets of plans for a nuclear assault on any nation apt to menace her existence. Option A was designed to maximize the effect of the strike on the countries’ population centers, Option B to maximize the effects on military targets. The clerk plucked out the envelopes for “AmberLibya” and set them on the command console before the major who coordinated communications.

He quickly reviewed them by radio with Dorit. Everything the commander needed to know was contained in those envelopes: the radar frequencies; strike times calculated down to the last second; a complete description of Libya’s radar and aircraft defense; the best attack routes to each target; up-to-date aerial-reconnaissance photographs. In addition, duplicates of those envelopes were on file at the Israeli air bases where the pilots who would have to execute the plans they contained waited.

Dorit ordered Option B prepared. It would pose some spectacular problems: the commanding general wanted all targets struck simultaneously to heighten surprise. Because of the length of Libya’s coastline, the planes hitting Tripoli would have to cover 1,250 miles; those striking the eastern borders, half that distance.

As Libya was beyond the range of Israel’s Jericho B rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads six hundred miles, the strike would have to be delivered by her fleet of F-4 Phantom jets. Even more important was keeping the attack off unfriendly radar screens until the Phantoms were over their targets. Libya’s radar was not a serious problem. But the radars of the U.S. Sixth Fleet steaming west from Crete were. Dorit ordered BenGurion Airport to prepare Hassida for takeoff. “Hassida,” Hebrew for “stork,” was the code word for a Boeing 707. From the outside, it resembled a jet of Israel’s national airline, El Al. The resemblance ended at the cabin door.

Inside was a forest of electronic equipment.

Israel had pioneered the techniques of “masking” an aircraft’s flight pattern from enemy radar with the material the plane contained. It was thanks to such Israeli skills that the planes bearing Egypt’s commando assault team had been able to land at Nicosia airport undetected by Cypriot radar during their illfated effort to rescue a group of hostages held by Palestinian gunmen. In flight, that 707 would create a series of electronic “tunnels” through which the attacking Phantoms would streak, undetected, to their targets.

By the time Dorit’s truck had reached the Monastery of Latrun, halfway to Tel Aviv, be had finished. In less than twenty minutes, enveloped by the olive groves, the ageless hills of Judea, he had planned the first preemptive nuclear attack in history.

One task remained; choosing a code name for the strike. The major manning the command console proposed one. Dorit accepted it immediately. It was “Operation Maspha,” for the Biblical site where the thunder of Yahweh had routed the Philistines.

On every side the low and level sands stretched far away. Only the black stain of a herd of goats, the bleached white stone of a nomad’s tomb or the bat-wing profile of a Bedouin’s tent intruded on the endless ochre seas. Once the caravans of antiquity had passed by here; so, too, probably had the Children of Israel struggling homeward from their Egyptian exile. And here, under those Negev wastes, in three widely separated underground passageways, the children of modern Israel had stored for more than a decade the terrible weapons that were their nation’s arms of last resort, a score of atomic bombs.

Instants after General Dorit’s first alert had reached “The Hole,” a series of red lights had erupted in a coded burst on the control panel of each tunnel, activating at the same time the wail of a klaxon siren.

At the sound, a score of technicians in each tunnel leaped from desks, bunks and backgammon boards and raced down the brightly lit corridors to the nuclear vaults. On one side of each tunnel, in airless containers, were shiny silver balls not much larger than the grapefruits grown in the orchards of the kibbutzim a few miles away. They were the plutonium cores of Israel’s latest generation of nuclear weapons. As one team removed them from the containers, another was wheeling in the high explosive cladding, the jacket into which each was designed to fit.

Their separation was a strategem. Since an atomic bomb existed only when these two halves were assembled, Israel had always been able to maintain publicly that she had not introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

It was a subterfuge similar to that employed by the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet whenever they visited Japanese ports. Assembling them was a precise, delicate process, but those technicians spent hours every month rehearsing it until, like infantry soldiers breaking down and reassembling a rifle, they could do it blindfolded.

Only once before had those bombs been assembled with the terrible knowledge that they might have to be used. It was in the predawn hours of October 9, 1973, barely seventy-two hours after the outbreak of the 1973 war. Earlier that night, the Syrians had pierced the last Israeli defenses standing in their path on the northern front. The heartland of Israel, the rich plains of Galilee, lay exposed and undefended before their columns.

Moshe Dayan, in a state of extreme nervous agitation, had warned Golda Meir with an ancient Hebrew phrase that their nation faced a catastrophe comparable to the destruction of ancient Israel’s Second Temple by Rome’s rampaging legions.

Dismayed, dangerously close to suicide, she had responded with the order she had prayed she would never have to give, the order to prepare Israel’s nuclear weapons for use against her enemies. The Syrians did not attack, however, and the crisis passed, but not before the Soviets had rushed a shipload of nuclear warheads from their Black Sea naval base of Nikolaev to Alexandria to be incorporated into their Scud missiles already in Egypt.

CIA gamma-ray detectors hidden along the Bosporus picked them up as they transited the waterway. That knowledge, in turn, led to Richard Nixon’s global alert of U.S. forces.

Now, in their brilliantly illuminated tunnels, Israel’s technicians prepared those bombs once again. In the control room of each tunnel, a high-speed Teleprinter gave the setting for each bomb’s pressure detonator, fixing a few for ground-level burst, ordering the majority primed to explode at medium or high altitude to maximize their destructive radius.

As each was readied it was fitted into a special trolley designed to carry four fully armed bombs. The first trolleys were rolling down the corridors just eight minutes and forty-three seconds after the klaxon’s first warning wail.

The atomic bombs speeding toward their elevators represented the final fruits of a program almost as old as the state of Israel itself. The man who had originally proposed it was Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President and a brilliant scientist whose work in naval gunpowder for the British in 1914 had helped open Palestine for Jewish immigration with the Balfour Declaration. Over the objections of a number of his colleagues, David BenGurion, the warrior-philosopher who presided over the state in its formative years, had committed Israel to the nuclear program in the early 1950s.

Israel’s first allies in the search were the French, embarked in defiance of their Anglo-American allies on a nuclear-arms program of their own. Cut off from access to computer technology by the Americans, the French turned to the minds of the Weizmann Institute outside Tel Aviv for help in the interminable calculations the bomb project required. The Israelis also introduced the French to a technique they had developed to produce heavy water. In return, the French gave the Israelis access to their program and let them participate in the Sahara tests of their first bomb design, a gesture which relieved Israel of the need to test herself. Finally, in late 1957, the French agreed to sell her an experimental reactor fueled with natural uranium, a reactor that both nations’ scientists knew could one day be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

BenGurion himself chose the site for his atomic installation, a desolate strip of desert easily isolated and protected twenty miles south of his home kibbutz of Sde Boker. It was called Dimona, the name of a Biblical town that had existed there in the time of the Nabataeans. When Israeli engineers moved in to prepare the center, the government decided to conceal its real purpose by labeling it a textile plant. Thereafter, as the reactor’s dome gradually began to rise above the desert floor, it was referred to by Israeli cognoscenti as “BenGurion’s pants factory.”

A year later, the arrival of Charles de Gaulle in power in France in May 1958 put an abrupt halt to FrancoIsraeli nuclear cooperation. For the nationalist de Gaulle, France’s nuclear program was no one’s business but France’s. Israel found herself with the theoretical knowledge she needed to build a bomb and, until Dimona was ready, nothing to build it with. She found what she needed in the unlikeliest of locations, a shabby factory complex on the outskirts of Apollo, Pennsylvania, thirtyfive miles northeast of Pittsburgh on Route 66. There the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC)-found in 1957 by Dr. Zalman Shapiromade nuclear fuel and recovered highly enriched uranium from scraps of leftover fuel from the U.S. nuclearsubmarine program. Between 1960 and 1967 an unbelievable 572 pounds of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium disappeared from NUMEC. Well over half of it, the CIA later discovered, at least enough for a score of bombs, wound up in the Negev.

That NUMEC uranium fueled Israel’s first generation of atomic bombs. The second generation was made from plutonium separated out of the burnt fuel of the Dimona reactor. Those efforts had left Israel, by the end of the seventies, far more than just the seventh nuclear power on the globe. The bombs rising out of their desert hiding places constituted part of a nuclear strike force which some intelligence agencies rated as good as England’s and superior to China’s.

“Stop here. I want to get some cigarettes.” Yusi Avidar, the director of military intelligence, waved his driver to a halt on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road. He got out and walked to the tobacco shop just around the corner, where he bought a pack of Europa cigarettes.

When he came out, instead of returning to his car, he drifted up the street to the public telephone booth thirty yards away. No one recognized him there, fumbling through his address book for a telephone number. No one ever recognized Israeli intelligence directors; their faces and functions were carefully concealed from the public.

Avidar was not in fact looking for a number; he knew by heart the number he was thinking of calling. His hand trembled as he lit one of the cigarettes he had just bought. His face paled, and, standing there, pretending to study his address book, he felt his knees shake. His hand, a coin between his fingers, rose toward the phone. It stopped halfway. He turned to leave the booth, then stopped again. Swiftly, in one continuous movement designed almost to reach its culmination before any other impulse could stop him, he dropped the coin into the slot and dialed the number.

Forty miles away on the Tel Aviv sea front, the telephone rang in the office of the second political counselor of the U.S. Embassy.

Three blasts of a siren almost shook the halfdozen young men out of the leather easy chairs in which they sprawled watching closed-circuit television. Three blasts was the signal for an air-to-ground mission for those pilots of the Israeli Air Force; two would have signaled an air-to-air alert.

Grabbing their helmets and orange life jackets, they ran out of their ready room, across a graveled courtyard to the one-story bungalow from which their squadron was commanded. As they did, the first assembled nuclear bombs were already being fitted into their Phantom jets hidden in concrete abutments slotted into the desert floor so carefully they were practically invisible.

The pre-attack briefing was short. It concentrated on the radio frequencies they would employ in an emergency, the codes they would have to follow with total precision to be sure their assault was perfectly coordinated.

As one of the senior airmen in Israel, the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Giora Lascov, was assigned to the huge Uba bin Nafi Air Base, formerly the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli, as his target.

Like three quarters of Israel’s pilots, the thirty-fiveyear-old Lascov was a kibbutznik. In his fifteen years as a member of the elite of Israel’s armed forces, he had fought in two wars and accumulated over three thousand hours of flight time. So highly trained, so programmed was he to respond to a crisis that the sudden revelation that this was not an exercise and that he would, in a very brief time, be dropping a twenty-kiloton nuclear bomb on an enemy target barely jarred his composure.

Because they had the greatest distance to cover, he and his wing man had the first launch. As he rose to head to the jeep outside waiting to speed him down the flight line to his Phantom, the full enormity of what he was about to do struck Lascov.

He turned to look back at the young pilots of his squadron. Their faces reflected the horror that had suddenly engulfed him. He stood there trying to find in his mind some words, some phrase, to leave his men. Then he understood that there were no words to fit so terrible a moment. Silently, Lascov turned to his jeep. Seconds later, he was racing toward his Phantom.

It was 9:52. Exactly thirty-four minutes had elapsed since General Dorit had stepped out of the Cabinet Room and picked up the phone linking him to “The Hole.”

Menachem Begin removed his steel-rimmed glasses. He lowered his head into the cradle of his left hand, slowly massaging his bushy eyebrows with his thumb and middle finger. There was a world of agony in that simple gesture, the reflection of a weariness so crushing that Israel’s Prime Minister felt numb.

He looked at the terse communication on the paper before him. How had they found out? he wondered. Since 1973, every detail of Israel’s nuclear strategy had been reviewed, pondered again and again, to be sure that no revealing detail of a coming attack could be picked up by a passing satellite, that no compromising communication could be intercepted by electronic surveillance. Yet, two minutes ago, he had received a phone call from the French ambassador. His voice hesitant with concern, the Frenchman had relayed the threat from the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: if Israel went through with her nuclear strike against Libya, Soviet rockets would instantly annihilate their nation.

Were the Soviets bluffing? Were they just rattling their rockets the way Khrushchev had done at Suez? Did he have the right to risk the nation’s existence on the possibility that they were?

Begin glanced at his watch. In twelve minutes the Phantoms would be arriving on target. No time to reconvene the Cabinet. The decision was his, and his alone.

He got up and walked to the window. Pale and trembling, the “Polish gentleman,” as he was often described, studied the ageless sweep of the Judean hills, the monuments of modern Israel, the Knesset, the Hebrew University, the Israel Museum sparkling in the sunshine.

On a rise just beyond his line of vision was the one which meant more to Begin than any of the others, the white marble canopy of a “Tent of Remembrance” under which burned an eternal flame in memory of the six million victims of the holocaust-and most of his own family.

Begin had sworn on the altar of those six million dead that never again would his people live another holocaust. Would they if he went through with this? The Soviet threat was so devastatingly simple and direct. Yet Ranan was right. How could Israel exist constantly menaced with destruction at Qaddafi’s hands?

Everything had depended on speed, on annihilating Libya and explaining why afterward. In the terrible chess game of global terror, there was only one move left that could check the Russians now, and it was the Americans who had to play it. Their counterthreat might stay the Russians’ hand. But, Begin asked himself, were the Americans going to risk that when they discovered he had acted on his own, that he had not hesitated to imperil the city of New York to save his nation?

In a flash, Begin understood. The Russians hadn’t found out. No one had.

The Americans hadn’t trusted them. They had realized that their own threat mightn’t be enough to stay Israel’s hand, to freeze her in position while they handled the crisis, so they had turned to the Soviets.

A phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry V111, “naked to mine enemies,” flashed through his mind. That was Israel now, naked and vulnerable. He stared at his telephone. He had only to wait for it to ring now, for the start of the terrible pressures he knew would soon be on him, to abandon a dream, to break his nation’s will, to dissemble its capital. Shrunken and suddenly aged, Menachem Begin turned back toward his telephone console.

Far below his streaking Phantom, Lieutenant Colonel Lascov could see the blue waters of the Mediterranean. His eyes swept incessantly over his instrument panel, looking for any flaw in the electronically controlled flight program hurling him toward the Libyan coast at almost twice the speed of sound. On his radar screen, he could already discern the outlines of the African shore. In nine minutes he would be climbing into the Tripolitan sky to prepare his bombing run.

Suddenly, a sharp buzz rose in his earphones. “Shadrock. Shadrock.

Shadrock.” Lascov tensed. Then, frantically, he began fingering his controls, swinging his plane in a 180-degree arc. The coastline of Africa faded from his radar screen. Operation Maspha had been stood down.