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

15ase of the room’s paneled walls.
    At the far end of the room, three Air Force colonels finished assembling a group of charts and maps. The senior officer, a youthful-looking colonel with a tapestry of freckles covering his face, stepped forward.
    “Mr. President, gentlemen, we’ve been asked how Qaddafi or a terrorist group could transmit a radio signal from Tripoli to New York to detonate the device on the blueprint we’ve been shown, and what technological resources we possess to prevent such a signal from coming in.
    “Basically, there are three ways you can detonate this. The first is a kamikaze volunteer who baby-sits the bomb with orders to set it off at a certain time if he doesn’t get a counterorder.”
    “Colonel,” Bennington interjected, “if this threat is really from Qaddafi, that is very much the last method he’d use. He’d want absolute control over this himself.”
    “Right, sir,” the colonel replied. “In that case, there are two ways to do it, by telephone or radio.” The room was still, all eyes fixed on the speaker. “To attach the power pack you’d require for this to the ordinary telephone is a very simple matter. Just a question of opening the telephone and connecting a couple of wires. That way the pulse of an incoming call is routed into a preprogrammed signature detector. The pulse opens a circuit into a microprocessor in which a preprogrammed code has been stored. The microprocessor automatically compares it with the code, and if the two match it releases a five-volt charge of electricity into the bomb.
    “The beauty of this is a wrong number can’t set it off by mistake; and all a man has to do to explode the bomb is call that number from anywhere in the world and feed it his signal.”
    “It’s as easy as that?” the President, jarred, asked.
    “Yes, sir, I’m afraid it is.”
    “Can New York be isolated, absolutely sealed off from all incoming telephone calls?” the President asked.
    “No, sir,” the Colonel replied. “I’m afraid that’s a technological impossibility.”
    He turned authoritatively back to his briefing charts. “It is our judgment, however, that in a situation such as the one we’ve been given, Qaddafi or a terrorist group would choose radio to detonate the device. It would offer more flexibility and is completely independent of existing communications systems. For a transmission over this distance, he’d have to use long waves which bounce off the ionosphere and come back down to earth. That means low frequencies.”
    “How many frequencies would be available to him for something like this?”
    the President asked.
    “From Tripoli to New York, a megahertz. One million cycles.”
    “Ore million!” The President rubbed the stub of his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Could we jam all one million of those frequencies?”
    “Sir, if you did that you’d wipe out all our own communications. We’d close down the police, the FBI, the military, the fire departments, everything we’d need in an emergency.”
    “Never mind. Suppose I gave the order, could we do it?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Why?”
    “We simply don’t have the transmitter capacity.”
    “How about all our jamming devices in Europe?”
    “They’re useless in this case. Too far away.”
    “He’s going to need something to receive this radio signal in New York,”
    Bennington remarked. “Some kind of directional antenna.”
    “Yes, sir, the easiest thing would be to put one in a standard television antenna on a rooftop and connect it to a pre-amplifier. Then the signal could be picked up and transmitted to his bomb wherever it is in the building over the television antenna cable.”
    “Surely you could put a fleet of helicopters over Manhattan and scan the frequencies he might use. Get his device to answer back, then pick it up by direction finders, triangulation?”
    “Yes, sir, we have the capacity to do that. But it would work only if his system is programmed