The Devil's Alternative (26 page)

You poor old man, he thought. What this must be costing you.

When the peroration was over, Edwin Campbell rose and gravely thanked the professor for his statement, which on behalf of the United States of America he had listened to with the utmost care and attention. He moved an adjournment while the U.S. government considered its position. Within an hour he was in the Dublin embassy to begin transmitting Sokolov’s extraordinary speech to David Lawrence.

Some hours later in Washington’s State Department, David Lawrence lifted one of his telephones and called President Matthews on his private line.

“I have to tell you, Mr. President, that six hours ago in Ireland the Soviet Union conceded six major points at issue. They concern total numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen-bomb warheads, through conventional armor, to disengagement of forces along the Elbe River.”

“Thanks, David,” said Matthews. “That’s great news. You were right. I think we should let them have something in return.”

The area of birch and larch forest lying southwest of Moscow where the Soviet elite have their country dachas covers little more than a hundred square miles. They like to stick together. The roads in this area are bordered mile after mile by green-painted steel railings, enclosing the private estates of the men at the very top. The fences and the driveway gates seem largely abandoned, but anyone trying to scale the first or drive through the second will be intercepted within moments by guards who materialize out of the trees.

Lying beyond Uspenskoye Bridge, the area centers on a small village called Zhukovka, usually known as Zhukovka Village. This is because there are two other and newer settlements nearby: Sovmin Zhukovka, where the Party hierarchs have their weekend villas; and Akademik Zhukovka, which groups the writers, artists, musicians, and scientists who have found favor in Party eyes.

But across the river lies the ultimate, the even more exclusive, settlement of Usovo. Nearby, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Politburo, retires to a sumptuous mansion set in hundreds of acres of rigorously guarded forest.

Here on the night before Christmas, a feast he had not recognized in more than fifty years, Maxim Rudin sat in his favorite button-back leather chair, feet toward the enormous fireplace in rough-cut granite blocks where meter-long logs of split pine crackled. It was the same fireplace that had warmed Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev before him.

The bright yellow glare of the flames flickered on the paneled walls of the study and illuminated the face of Vassili Petrov, who faced him across the fire. By Rudin’s chair arm, a small coffee table held an ashtray and half a tumbler of Armenian brandy, which Petrov eyed askance. He knew his aging protector was not supposed to drink. Rudin’s inevitable cigarette was clipped between first finger and thumb.

“What news of the investigation?” asked Rudin.

“Slow,” said Petrov. “That there was outside help is beyond doubt. We now know the night- sight was bought commercially in New York. The Finnish rifle was one of a consignment exported from Helsinki to Britain. We don’t know which shop it came from, but the export order was for sporting rifles; therefore it was a private-sector commercial order, not an official one.

“The footprints at the building site have been checked out against the boots of all the workers at the place, and there are two sets of footprints that cannot be traced. There was damp in the air that night and a lot of cement dust lying around, so the prints are clear. We are reasonably certain there were two men.”

“Dissidents?” asked Rudin. “Almost certainly. And quite mad.”

“No, Vassili, keep that for the Party meetings. Madmen take potshots, or sacrifice themselves. This was planned over months by someone. Someone out there, inside or outside Russia, who has got to be silenced, once and for all, with his secret untold. Whom are you concentrating on?”

“The Ukrainians,” said Petrov. “We have all their groups in Germany, Britain, and America completely penetrated. No one has heard a rumor of such a plan. Personally, I still think they are in the Ukraine. That Ivanenko’s mother was used as bait is undeniable. So who would have known she
was
Ivanenko’s mother? Not some slogan-dauber in New York. Not some armchair nationalist in Frankfurt. Not some pamphleteer in London. Someone local, with contacts outside. We are concentrating on Kiev. Several hundred former detainees who were released and returned to the Kiev area are under interrogation.”

“Find them, Vassili, find them and silence them.” Maxim Rudin changed the subject, as he had a habit of doing without a change of tone. “Anything new from Ireland?”

“The Americans have resumed talking but have not responded to our initiative,” said Petrov.

Rudin snorted. “That Matthews is a fool. How much further does he think we can go before we have to pull back?”

“He has those Soviet-hating senators to contend with,” said Petrov, “and that Catholic fascist Poklewski. And of course he cannot know how close things are for us inside the Politburo.”

Rudin grunted. “If he doesn’t offer us something by the New Year, we won’t carry the Politburo in the first week of January.”

He reached out and took a draft of brandy, exhaling with a satisfied sigh.

“Are you sure you should be drinking?” asked Petrov. “The doctors forbade you five years ago.” “To hell with the doctors,” said Rudin. “That’s what I really called you here for. I can inform you

beyond any doubt that I am not going to die of alcoholism or liver failure.” “I’m glad to hear it,” said Petrov.

There’s more. On April thirtieth I am going to retire. Does that surprise you?”

Petrov sat motionless, alert. He had twice seen the supremos go down. Khrushchev in flames, ousted and disgraced, to become a nonperson. Brezhnev on his own terms. He had been close enough to feel the thunder when the most powerful tyrant in the world gives way to another. But never this close. This time he wore the mantle unless others could snatch it from him.

“Yes,” he said carefully, “it does.”

“In April I am calling a meeting of the full Central Committee,” said Rudin. “To announce to

them my decision to go on April thirtieth. On May Day there will be a new leader at the center of the line on the Mausoleum. I want it to be you. In June the plenary Party Congress is due. The leader will outline the policy from then on. I want it to be you. I told you that weeks ago.”

Petrov knew he was Rudin’s choice, since that meeting in the old leader’s private suite in the Kremlin when the dead Ivanenko had been with them, cynical and watchful as ever. But he had not known it would be so fast.

“I won’t get the Central Committee to accept your nomination unless I can give them something they want. Grain. They’ve all known the position for a long time. If Castletown fails, Vishnayev will have it all.”

“Why so soon?” asked Petrov.

Rudin held up his glass. From the shadows the silent Misha appeared and poured brandy into it. “I got the results of the tests from Kuntsevo yesterday,” said Rudin. “They’ve been working on tests for months. Now they’re certain. Not cigarettes and not Armenian brandy. Leukemia. Six to twelve months. Let’s just say I won’t see a Christmas after this one. And if we have a nuclear war,

neither will you.

“In the next hundred days we have to secure a grain agreement from the Americans and wipe out the Ivanenko affair once and for all time. The sands are running out, and too damn fast. The cards are on the table, face up, and there are no more aces to play.”

On December 28, the United States formally offered the Soviet Union a sale, for immediate delivery and at commercial rates, of ten million tons of animal feed grains, to be considered as being outside any terms still being negotiated at Castletown.

On New Year’s Eve, an Aeroflot twin-jet Tupolev-134 took off from Lvov airport, bound for Minsk on an internal flight. Just north of the border between the Ukraine and White Russia, high over the Pripet Marshes, a nervous-looking young man rose from his seat and approached the stewardess, who was several rows back from the steel door leading to the flight deck, speaking with a passenger.

Knowing the toilets were at the other end of the cabin, she straightened as the young man approached her. As she did so, the young man spun her around, clamped his left forearm across her throat, drew a handgun, and jammed it into her ribs. She screamed. There was a chorus of shouts and yells from the passengers. The hijacker began to drag the girl backward to the locked door to the flight deck. On the bulkhead next to the door was the intercom enabling the stewardess to speak to the flight crew, who had orders to refuse to open the door in the event of a hijack.

From midway down the fuselage, one of the passengers rose, automatic in hand. He crouched in the aisle, both hands clasped around his gun, pointing it straight at the stewardess and the hijacker behind her.

“Hold it!” he shouted. “KGB. Hold it right there.” “Tell them to open the door,” yelled the hijacker.

“Not a chance!” shouted the armed flight guard from the KGB back to the hijacker. “If they don’t, I’ll kill the girl,” screamed the man holding the stewardess.

The girl had a lot of courage. She lunged backward with her heel, caught the gunman in the shin, broke his grip, and made to run toward the police agent. The hijacker sprang after her, passing three rows of passengers. It was a mistake. From an aisle seat, one of them rose, turned, and slammed a fist into the nape of the hijacker’s neck. The man fell, face downward; before he could move, his assailant had snatched the man’s gun and was pointing it at him. The hijacker turned, sat up, looked at the gun, put his face in his hands, and began to moan softly.

From the rear the KGB agent stepped past the stewardess, gun still at the ready, and approached the rescuer.

“Who are you?” he asked. For answer, the rescuer reached into an inside pocket, produced a card, and flicked it open.

The agent looked at the KGB card. “You’re not from Lvov,” he said.

“Ternopol,” said the other. “I was going home on leave in Minsk, so I had no sidearm. But I have a good right fist.” He grinned.

The agent from Lvov nodded.

“Thanks, Comrade. Keep him covered.” He stepped to the intercom and talked rapidly into it.

He was relating what had happened and asking for a police escort at Minsk. “Is it safe to have a look?” asked a metallic voice from behind the door. “Sure,” said the KGB agent. “He’s safe enough now.”

There was a clicking behind the door, and it opened to show the head of the engineer, somewhat frightened and intensely curious.

The agent from Ternopol acted very strangely. He turned from the man on the floor, crashed the revolver into the base of his colleague’s skull, shoved him aside, and thrust his foot in the space between the door and jamb before it could close. In a second he was through it, pushing the engineer backward onto the flight deck. The man on the floor behind him rose, grabbed the flight guard’s own automatic, a standard KGB Tokarev nine-millimeter, followed through the steel door, and slammed it behind him. It locked automatically.

Two minutes later, under the guns of David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, the Tupolev turned due west for Warsaw and Berlin, the latter being the ultimate limit of their fuel supply. At the controls Captain Mikhail Rudenko sat white-faced with rage; beside him his copilot, Sergei Vatutin, slowly answered the frantic requests from the Minsk control tower regarding the change of course.

By the time the airliner had crossed the border into Polish airspace, Minsk tower and four other airliners on the same wavelength knew the Tupolev was in the hands of hijackers. When it bored clean through the center of Warsaw’s air-traffic-control zone, Moscow already knew. A hundred miles west of Warsaw, a flight of six Polish-based Soviet MIG-23 fighters swept in from starboard and formatted on the Tupolev. The flight leader was jabbering rapidly into his mask.

At his desk in the Defense Ministry on Frunze Street, Moscow, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky took an urgent call on the line linking him to Soviet Air Force headquarters.

“Where?” he barked.

“Passing over Poznán,” was the answer. “Three hundred kilometers to Berlin. Fifty minutes’ flying time.”

The marshal considered carefully. This could be the scandal that Vishnayev had demanded. There was no doubt what should be done. The Tupolev should be shot down, with its entire passenger and crew complement. Later the version given out would be that the hijackers had fired within the fuselage, hitting a main fuel tank. It had happened twice in the past decade.

He gave his orders. A hundred meters off the airliner’s wing tip, the commander of the MIG flight listened five minutes later.

“If you say so, Comrade Colonel,” he told his base commander. Twenty minutes later, the airliner passed across the Oder-Niesse Line and began its descent into Berlin. As it did so, the MIGs peeled gracefully away and slipped down the sky toward their home base.

“I have to tell Berlin we’re coming in,” Captain Rudenko appealed to Mishkin. “If there’s a plane on the runway, we’ll end up as a ball of fire.”

Mishkin stared ahead at the banks of steel-gray winter clouds. He had never been in an airplane

before, but what the captain said made sense.

“Very well,” he said, “break silence and tell Tempelhof you are coming in. No requests, just a flat statement.”

Captain Rudenko was playing his last card. He leaned forward, adjusted the channel selection dial, and began to speak.

“Tempelhof, West Berlin. Tempelhof, West Berlin. This is Aeroflot flight three-five-one. ...”

He was speaking in English, the international language of air traffic control. Mishkin and Lazareff knew almost none of it, apart from what they had picked up on broadcasts in Ukrainian from the West. Mishkin jabbed his gun into Rudenko’s neck.

“No tricks,” he said in Ukrainian.

In the control tower at East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, the two controllers looked at each other in amazement. They were being called on their own frequency but being addressed as Tempelhof. No Aeroflot plane would dream of landing in West Berlin—apart from which, Tempelhof had not been West Berlin’s civil airport for ten years. Tempelhof had reverted to a U.S. Air Force base when Tegel took over as the civil airport. One of the East Germans, faster than the other, snatched the microphone.