The Fifth Horseman, Larry Collins, Dominique LaPierre

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You are bidding on this hardcover edition of The Fifth Horseman, by Larry Collins and Dominique La Pierre.  It is a first edition, but I am unsure if it is a first printing. It has a copyright date of 1980, was published by Simon and Schuster.  It is in very good condition, with very little sign of wear.  The cover is a little scuffed up, and has some slight fading around the edges.  The spine and binding are good, and all 478 pages are intact and in good condition.  It is a nice novel, and would be a great edition for any library. 


The bomb and Kamal Dajani arrive in New York City by freighter. The bomb was built by Kamal's brother Whalid, a nuclear scientist, in Libya. Although Whalid and Kamal made a Muslim vow on pain of death to avenge their father's loss of their West Bank home, Whalid had originally dedicated his life to peaceful nuclear energy at Cadarache. That was until Kamal was ready to enforce the vow. French police subsequently arrested Kamal, Whalid, and their sister Laila, and deported them to Beirut so as not to jeopardize the politics of nuclear energy. When the police questioned Whalid's French wife, she committed suicide. Kamal and their mother exploited the event for Whalid and she bade them help Gaddafi in Libya.

Laila, in disguise, personally delivers the written threat from Gaddafi to The White House,  with instructions on how to retrieve technical designs as proof from an airport locker. The President (resembling Jimmy Carter in age, religiosity, Navy service, etc.) and his team agonize over the bomb design and the final assessment by the Department of Energy that it is a three megaton H-bomb.

The nuclear search team NEST  is activated, travelling via Starlifter cargo plane from Nevada to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey. Meanwhile, combined teams of New York City police and FBI, including New York Police detective Angelo Rocchia and FBI agent Mike Rand, conduct a shoe-leather investigation field research on the incoming shipment, the false and stolen documents, and the three terrorists, moving ever closer to the truth in a logical progression, to look for "a barrel of chlorine gas."

It looks bleak for NEST. Its equipment can only look so far down from the air and only so far up from the street. Even a water bed could neutralize the radioactive emissions of the bomb. Also, other terrorists help to confuse NEST, by attaching radioactive pellets to the legs of pigeons and setting them loose.

It also looks bleak for New York City, whose mayor, Abe Stern, is summoned to the White House under false pretenses and told face-to-face by the President of the nuclear threat. Not only has evacuation been ruled out by Gaddafi, but some fallout shelters are loaded with junk, susceptible to flooding, or badly stocked, with no supplies or rotten supplies. New York City's air raid sirens were literally falling down. New York City did have a good radio / TV public address system for the mayor, but it was unmistakably clear that up to eight million people in and around the city would die of burns, blast, flying debris, or radiation, and New England would get the fallout immediately after. New York City officials contemplate evacuation plans but scrap them because few people have cars, and train operators cannot be counted on to work in a crisis...(Wikipedia**)




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