The Fifth Horseman Read Free

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