The Devil's Alternative (13 page)

He had been in Moscow only six weeks, but his unsuspected mastery of even slang Russian had paid a couple of dividends. At a diplomatic reception in the Czech Embassy two weeks earlier, he

had been in conversation with an Indian attaché when he had heard two Russians in muttered conversation behind him. One of them had said, “He’s a bitter bastard. Thinks he should have had the top slot.”

He had followed the gaze of the two who had spoken, and noted they were observing and presumably talking about a Russian across the room. The guest list later confirmed the man was Anatoly Krivoi, personal aide and right-hand man to the Party theoretician, Vishnayev. So what had he got to be bitter about? Munro checked his files and came up with Krivoi’s history. He had worked in the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee; shortly after the nomination of Petrov to the top job, Krivoi had appeared on Vishnayev’s staff. Quit in disgust? Personality conflict with Petrov? Bitter at being passed over? They were all possible, and all interesting to an intelligence chief in a foreign capital.

Krivoi, he mused. Maybe. Just maybe. He, too, would have access, at least to Vishnayev’s copy of the transcript, maybe even to the tape. And he was probably in Moscow; certainly his boss was. Vishnayev had been present when the East German Premier had arrived a week before.

“Sorry, Anatoly, you’ve just changed sides,” he said as he slipped the fat envelope into an inside pocket and took the stairs to see the head of Chancery.

“I’m afraid I have to go back to London with the Wednesday bag,” he told the diplomat. “It’s unavoidable, and it can’t wait.”

Chancery asked no questions. He knew Munro’s job and promised to arrange it. The diplomatic bag, which actually
is
a bag, or at least a series of canvas sacks, goes from Moscow to London every Wednesday and always on the British Airways flight, never Aeroflot. A Queen’s Messenger, one of that team of men who constantly fly around the world from London picking up embassy bags and who are protected by the insignia of the crown and greyhound, comes out from London for it. The very secret material is carried in a hard-frame dispatch box chained to the man’s left wrist; the more routine stuff in the canvas sacks, the Messenger personally checks into the aircraft’s hold. Once there, it is on British territory. But in the case of Moscow, the Messenger is accompanied by an embassy staffer.

The escort job is sought after, since it permits a quick trip home to London, a bit of shopping, and a chance of a good night out. The Second Secretary who lost his place in the rota that week was annoyed but asked no questions.

The following Wednesday, British Airways Airbus-300B lifted out of the new, post-1980 Olympics terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport and turned its nose toward London. By Munro’s side the Messenger, a short, dapper, ex-Army major, withdrew straight into his hobby, composing crossword puzzles for a major newspaper.

“You have to do something to while away these endless airplane flights,” he told Munro. “We all have our in-flight hobbies.”

Munro grunted and looked back over the wing tip at the receding city of Moscow. Somewhere down there in the sundrenched streets, the woman he loved was working and moving among people she had betrayed. She was on her own right out in the cold.

The country of Norway, seen in isolation from its eastern neighbor, Sweden, looks like a great prehistoric fossilized human hand stretching down from the Arctic toward Denmark and Britain. It is a right hand, palm downward to the ocean, a stubby thumb toward the east clenched into the forefinger. Up the crack between thumb and forefinger lies Oslo, its capital.

To the north the fractured forearm bones stretch up to Tromsø and Hammerfest, deep in the Arctic, so narrow that in places there are only forty miles from the sea to the Swedish border. On a relief map, the hand looks as if it has been smashed by some gigantic hammer of the gods, splinter-

ing bones and knuckles into thousands of particles. Nowhere is this breakage more marked than along the west coast, where the chopping edge of the hand would be.

Here the land is shattered into a thousand fragments, and between the shards the sea has flowed in to form a million creeks, gullies, bays, and gorges—winding, narrow defiles where the mountains fall sheer to glittering water. These are the fjords, and it was from the headwaters of these that a race of men came out a thousand years ago who were the best sailors ever to set keel to the water or sail to the wind. Before their age was over, they had sailed to Greenland and Iceland, conquered Ireland, settled Britain and Normandy, navigated as far as North America. They were the Vikings, and their descendants still live and fish along the fjords of Norway.

Such a man was Thor Larsen, sea captain and ship’s master, who strode that mid-July afternoon past the royal palace in the Swedish capital of Stockholm from his company’s head office back to his hotel. People tended to step aside for him; he was six feet three inches tall, broad as the pavements of the old quarter of the city, blue-eyed, and bearded. Being ashore, he was in civilian clothes, but he was happy, because he had reason to think, after visiting the head office of the Nordia Line, which now lay behind him along the Ship Quay, that he might soon have a new command.

After six months attending a course at the company’s expense in the intricacies of radar, computer navigation, and supertanker technology, he was dying to get back to sea again. The summons to the head office had been to receive from the hands of the personal secretary to the proprietor, chairman, and managing director of the Nordia Line his invitation to dinner that evening. The invitation also included Larson’s wife, who had been informed by telephone and was flying in from Norway on a company ticket. The Old Man was splashing out a bit, thought Larsen. There must be something in the wind.

He took his rented car from the hotel parking lot across the bridge on Nybroviken and drove the thirty-seven kilometers to the airport. When Lisa Larsen arrived in the concourse with her overnight bag, he greeted her with the delicacy of an excited St. Bernard, swinging her off her feet like a girl. She was small and petite, with dark, bright eyes, soft chestnut curls, and a trim figure that belied her thirty-eight years. And he adored her. Twenty years earlier, when he had been a gangling second mate of twenty-seven, he had met her one freezing winter day in Oslo. She had slipped on the ice; he had picked her up like a doll and set her back on her feet.

She had been wearing a fur-trimmed hood that almost hid her tiny, red-nosed face, and when she thanked him, he could see only her eyes, looking out of the mass of snow and fur like the bright eyes of a snow mouse in the forests of winter. Ever since, through their courtship and marriage and the years that had followed, he had called her his “little snow mouse.”

He drove her back into central Stockholm, asking all the way about their home in Ålesund, far away on Norway’s western coast, and of the progress of their two teenage children. To the south a British Airways Airbus passed by on its great-circle route from Moscow to London. Thor Larsen neither knew nor cared.

The dinner that evening was to be in the famous Aurora Cellar, built below ground in the cellar- storerooms of an old palace in the city’s medieval quarter. When Thor and Lisa Larsen arrived and were shown down the narrow steps to the cellar, the proprietor, Leonard, was waiting for them at the bottom.

“Mr. Wennerstrom is already here,” he said, and showed them into one of the private rooms, a small, intimate cavern, arched in five-hundred-year-old brick, spanned by a thick table of glittering, ancient timber, and lit by candles in cast-iron holders. As they entered, Larsen’s employer, Harald Wennerstrom, lumbered to his feet, embraced Lisa, and shook hands with her husband.

Harald (“Harry”) Wennerstrom was something of a legend in his own lifetime among the seafaring people of Scandinavia. He was now seventy-five, grizzled and craggy, with bristling eyebrows. Just after the Second World War, when he returned to his native Stockholm, he had inherited from his father half a dozen small cargo ships. In thirty-five years he had built up the biggest independently owned fleet of tankers outside the hands of the Greeks and the Hong Kong Chinese, The Nordia Line was his creation, diversifying from dry-cargo ships to tankers in the mid-fifties, laying out the money, building the ships for the oil needs of the sixties, backing his own judgment, often going against the grain.

They sat and ate, and Wennerstrom talked only of small things, asking after the family. His own forty-year marriage had ended with the death of his wife four years earlier; they had had no children. But if he had had a son, he would have liked him to be like the big Norwegian across the table from him, a sailor’s sailor; and he was particularly fond of Lisa.

The salmon, cured in brine and dill in the Scandinavian way, was delicious, the tender duck from the Stockholm salt marshes excellent It was only when they sat finishing their wine— Wennerstrom unhappily sipping at his balloon glass of water (“All the bloody doctors will allow me nowadays”)—that he came to business.

“Three years ago, Thor, back in 1979, I made three forecasts to myself. One was that by the end of 1982 the solidarity of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, would have broken down. The second was that the American President’s policy of curbing the United States consumption of oil energy and by-products would have failed. The third was that the Soviet Union would have changed from a net oil exporter to a net oil importer. I was told I was crazy, but I was right.”

Thor Larsen nodded. The formation of OPEC and its quadrupling of oil prices in the winter of 1973 had produced a world slump that had nearly broken the economies of the West. It had also, paradoxically, sent the oil-tanker business into a seven-year decline, with millions of tons of tanker space partially built, laid up, useless, uneconomic, loss-making. It was a bold spirit who could have seen three years earlier the events between 1979 and 1982: the breakup of OPEC as the Arab world split into feuding factions; the revolutionary takeover in Iran; the disintegration of Nigeria; the rush by the radical oil-producing nations to sell oil at any price to finance arms-buying sprees; the spiraling increase in U.S. oil consumption based on the ordinary American’s conviction of his God-given right to rape the globe’s resources for his own comforts; and the Soviet native oil industry peaking at such a low production figure through poor technology and forcing Russia to become once again an oil importer. The three factors had produced the tanker boom into which they were now, in the summer of 1982, beginning to move.

“As you know,” Wennerstrom resumed, “last September I signed a contract with the Japanese for a new supertanker. Down in the marketplace they all said I was mad; half my fleet laid up in Strömstad Sound, and I order a new one. But I’m not mad. You know the story of the East Shore Oil Company?”

Larsen nodded again. A small Louisiana-based oil company in America ten years before, it had passed into the hands of the dynamic Clint Blake. In ten years it had grown and expanded until it was on the verge of joining the Seven Sisters, the mastodons of the world oil cartels.

“Well, in the summer of next year, 1983, Clint Blake is invading Europe. It’s a tough, crowded market, but he thinks he can crack it. He’s putting several thousand service stations across the motorways of Europe, marketing his own brand of gasoline and oil. And for that he’ll need tanker tonnage. And I’ve got it. A seven-year contract to bring crude from the Middle East to Western Europe. He’s already building his own refinery at Rotterdam, alongside Esso, Mobil, and Chevron. That is what the new tanker is for. She’s big and she’s ultramodern and she’s expensive, but she’ll

pay. She’ll make five or six runs a year from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam, and in five years she’ll amortize the investment. But that’s not the reason I’m building her. She’s going to be the biggest and the best; my flagship, my memorial. And you’re going to be her skipper.”

Thor Larsen sat in silence. Lisa’s hand stole across the table and laid itself on top of his, squeezing gently. Two years before, Larsen knew, he could never have skippered a Swedish-flag vessel, being himself a Norwegian. But since the Göteborg Agreement of the previous year, which Wennerstrom had helped to push through, a Swedish shipowner could apply for honorary Swedish citizenship for exceptional Scandinavian but non-Swedish officers in his employ, so that they could be offered captaincies. He had applied successfully on behalf of Larsen.

The coffee came, and they sipped it appreciatively.

“I’m having her built at the Ishikawajima-Harima yard in Japan,” said Wennerstrom. “It’s the only yard in the world that can take her. They have the dry dock.”

Both men knew the days of ships being built on slipways and then being allowed to slide into the water were long past. The size and weight factors were too great. The giants were now built in enormous dry docks, so that when they were ready for launching, the sea was let in through dock sluices and the ships simply floated off their blocks and rode water inside the dock.

“Work began on her last November fourth,” Wennerstrom told them. “The keel was laid on January thirtieth. She’s taking shape now. She’ll float next November first, and after three months at the fitting-out berth and sea trials, she’ll sail on February second. And you’ll be on her bridge, Thor.”

“Thank you,” said Larsen. “What are you calling her?

“Ah, yes. I’ve thought of that. Do you remember the sagas? Well, we’ll name her to please Niorn, the god of the sea.” He was gripping his glass of water, staring at the flame of the candle in its cast- iron holder before him. “For Niorn controls the fire and the water, the twin enemies of a tanker captain, the explosion and the sea herself.”

The water in his glass and the flame of the candle reflected in the old man’s eyes, as once fire and water had reflected in his eyes as he sat helpless in a lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic in 1942, four cables from his blazing tanker, his first command, watching his crew fry in the sea around him.