The Devil's Alternative (28 page)

their own six about to change sides, there were no aces left. “Very well,” he said.

West German Chancellor Dietrich Busch received his Justice Minister in his private office in the Chancellery Building next to the old Palais Schaumberg just after the middle of the month. The government chief of West Germany was standing at his modern picture window, gazing out at the frozen snow. Inside the new, modern government headquarters overlooking Federal Chancellor Square, the temperature was warm enough for shirt sleeves, and nothing of the raw, bitter January of the riverside town penetrated.

“This Mishkin and Lazareff affair, how goes it?” asked Busch.

“It’s strange,” admitted his Justice Minister, Ludwig Fischer. “They are being more cooperative than one could hope for. They seem eager to achieve a quick trial with no delays.”

“Excellent,” said the Chancellor. “That’s exactly what we want. A quick affair. Let’s get it over with. In what way are they cooperating?”

“They were offered a star lawyer from the right wing, paid for by subscribed funds—possibly German contributions, possibly the Jewish Defense League from America. They turned him down. He wanted to make a major spectacle out of the trial, plenty of detail about the KGB terror against Jews in the Ukraine.”

“A
right
-wing lawyer wanted that?”

“All grist to their mill. Bash the Russians, and so on,” said Fischer. “Anyway, Mishkin and Lazareff want to go for an admission of guilt and plead mitigating circumstances. They insist on it If they do so, and claim the gun went off by accident when the plane hit the runway at Schönefeld, they have a partial defense. Their new lawyer is asking for murder to be reduced to culpable homicide if they do.”

“I think we can grant them that,” said the Chancellor. “What would they get?”

“With the hijacking thrown in, fifteen to twenty years. Of course, they could be paroled after serving a third of the sentence. They’re young—mid-twenties. They could be out by the time they’re thirty.”

“That’s in five years,” growled Busch. “I’m concerned about the next five months. Memories fade. In five years they’ll be in the archives.”

“Well, they admit everything, but they insist that the gun went off by accident. They claim they just wanted to reach Israel the only way they knew how. They’ll plead guilty right down the line— to culpable homicide.”

“Let them have it,” said the Chancellor. “The Russians won’t like it, but it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. They’d draw life for murder, but that’s effectively twenty years nowadays.”

“There’s one other thing. They want to be transferred after the trial to a jail in West Germany.” “Why?”

“They seem terrified of revenge by the KGB. They think they’ll be safer in West Germany than in West Berlin.”

“Rubbish,” snorted Busch. “They’ll be tried and jailed in West Berlin. The Russians would not dream of trying to settle accounts inside a Berlin jail. They wouldn’t dare. Still, we could do an internal transfer in a year or so. But not yet. Go ahead, Ludwig. Make it quick and clean, if they

wish to cooperate. But get the press off my back before the elections, and the Russian Ambassador as well.”

At Chita the morning sun glittered along the deck of the
Freya
, lying, as she had for two and a half months, by the commissioning quay. In those seventy-five days she had been transformed. Day and night she had lain docile while the tiny creatures who had made her swarmed into and out of every part of her. Hundreds of miles of lines had been laid the length and breadth of her—pipes, tubes, and electric cables. Her labyrinthine electrical networks had been connected and tested, her incredibly complex system of pumps installed and tried.

The computer-linked instruments that would fill her holds and empty them, thrust her forward or shut her down, hold her to any point of the compass for weeks on end without a hand on her helm, and observe the stars above her and the seabed below, had been set in their places.

The food lockers and deepfreezes to sustain her crew for months were fully installed; so, too, the furniture, doorknobs, lightbulbs, lavatories, galley stoves, central heating, air conditioning, cinema, sauna, three bars, two dining rooms, beds, bunks, carpets, and clothes hangers.

Her five-story superstructure had been converted from an empty shell into a luxury hotel; her bridge, radio room, and computer room from empty, echoing galleries to a low-humming complex of data banks, calculators, and control systems. When the last of the workmen picked up their tools and left her alone, she was the ultimate in size, power, capacity, luxury, and technical refinement that man could ever have set to float on water.

The rest of her crew of thirty had arrived by air fourteen days earlier to familiarize themselves with every inch of her. Besides her master, Captain Thor Larsen, they were made up of the first officer, second mate, and third mate; the chief engineer, first engineer, second engineer, and electrical engineer (who ranked as a “first”); the radio officer and chief steward (also ranked as officers) ; and twenty others, to comprise the full complement: the first cook, four stewards, three firemen, one repairman, ten able seamen, and one pumpman.

Two weeks before she was due to sail, the tugs drew her away from the quay to the center of Ise Bay. There her great twin propellers bit into the waters to bring her out to the western Pacific for sea trials. For officers and crew, as well as for the dozen Japanese technicians who went with her, it would mean two weeks of grueling hard work, testing every single system against every known or possible contingency.

There was $170 million worth of her moving out to the mouth of the bay that morning, and the small ships standing off Nagoya watched her pass with awe.

Twenty kilometers outside Moscow lies the tourist village and estate of Arkhangelskoye, complete with museum and a restaurant noted for its genuine bear steaks. In the last week of that freezing January, Adam Munro had reserved a table there for himself and a date from the secretarial pool at the British Embassy.

He always varied his dinner companions so that no one girl should notice too much, and if the young hopeful of the evening wondered why he chose to drive the distance he did over icy roads in temperatures fifteen degrees below freezing, she made no comment on it.

The restaurant in any case was warm and snug, and when he excused himself to fetch extra cigarettes from his car, she thought nothing of it. In the parking lot, he shivered as the icy blast hit him, and hurried to where the twin headlights glowed briefly in the darkness.

He climbed into the car beside Valentina, put an arm around her, drew her close and kissed her. “I hate the thought of you being in there with another woman, Adam,” she whispered as she

nuzzled his throat.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Not important. An excuse for being able to drive out here to dine without being suspected. I have news for you.”

“About us?” she asked.

“About us. I have asked my own people if they would help you to come out, and they have agreed. There is a plan. Do you know the port of Constanza on the Rumanian coast?”

She shook her head.

“I have heard of it, but never been there. I always holiday on the Soviet coast of the Black Sea.” “Could you arrange to holiday there with Sasha?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “I can take my holidays virtually where I like. Rumania is within the Socialist bloc. It should not raise eyebrows.”

“When does Sasha leave school for the spring holidays?” “The last few days of March, I think. Is that important?”

“It has to be in mid-April,” he told her. “My people think you could be brought off the beach to a freighter offshore. By speedboat. Can you make sure to arrange a spring holiday with Sasha at Constanza or the nearby Mamaia Beach in April?”

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try. April. Oh, Adam, it seems so close.”

“It is close, my love. Less than ninety days. Be patient a little longer, as I have been, and we will make it. We’ll start a whole new life.”

Five minutes later she had given him the transcription of the early January Politburo meeting and driven off into the night. He stuffed the sheaf of papers inside his waistband beneath his shirt and jacket, and returned to the warmth of the Arkhangelskoye Restaurant.

This time, he vowed, as he made polite conversation with the secretary, there would be no mistakes, no drawing back, no letting her go, as there had been in 1961. This time it would be forever.

Edwin Campbell leaned back from the Georgian table in the Long Gallery at Castletown House and looked across at Professor Sokolov. The last point on the agenda had been covered, the last concession wrung. From the dining room below, a courier had reported that the secondary conference had matched the concessions of the upper floor with trade bargains from the United States to the Soviet Union.

“I think that’s it, Ivan, my friend,” said Campbell. “I don’t think we can do any more at this stage.”

The Russian raised his eyes from the pages of Cyrillic handwriting in front of him, his own notes. For over a hundred days he had fought tooth and claw to secure for his country the grain tonnages that could save her from disaster and yet retain the maximum in weapons levels from inner space to Eastern Europe. He knew he had had to make concessions that would have been unheard of four years earlier at Geneva, but he had done the best he could in the time scale allowed.

“I think you are right, Edwin,” he replied. “Let us have the arms-reduction treaty prepared in draft form for our respective governments.”

“And the trade protocol,” said Campbell. “I imagine they will want that also.” Sokolov permitted himself a wry smile.

“I am sure they will want it very much,” he said.

For the next week the twin teams of interpreters and stenographers prepared both the treaty and the trade protocol. Occasionally the two principal negotiators were needed to clarify a point at issue, but for the most part, the transcription and translation work was left to the aides. When the two bulky documents, each in duplicate, were finally ready, the two chief negotiators departed to

their separate capitals to present them to their masters.

Andrew Drake threw down his magazine and leaned back. “I wonder,” he said.

“What?” asked Krim as he entered the small sitting room with three mugs of coffee. Drake tossed the magazine to the Tatar.

“Read the first article,” he said. Krim read in silence while Drake sipped his coffee. Kaminsky eyed them both.

“You’re crazy,” said Krim with finality.

“No,” said Drake. “Without some audacity we’ll be sitting here for the next ten years. It could work. Look, Mishkin and Lazareff come up for trial in a fortnight The outcome is a foregone conclusion. We might as well start planning now. We know we’re going to have to do it, anyway, if they are ever to come out of that jail. So let’s start planning. Azamat, you were in the paratroops in Canada?”

“Sure,” said Krim. “Five years.”

“Did you ever do an explosives course?”

“Yep. Demolition and sabotage. I was assigned for training to the Engineers for three months.” “And years ago I used to have a passion for electronics and radio,” said Drake. “Probably

because my dad had a radio repair shop before he died. We could do it. We’d need help, but we could do it.”

“How many more men?” asked Krim.

“We’d need one on the outside, just to recognize Mishkin and Lazareff on their release. That would have to be Miroslav, here. For the job, us two, plus five to stand guard.”

“Such a thing has never been done before,” observed the Tatar doubtfully. “All the more reason why it will be unexpected, therefore unprepared for.” “We’d get caught at the end of it,” said Krim.

“Not necessarily. I’d cover the pullout if I had to. And anyway, the trial would be the sensation of the decade. With Mishkin and Lazareff free in Israel, half the Western world would applaud. The whole issue of a free Ukraine would be blazoned across every newspaper and magazine outside the Soviet bloc.”

“Do you know five more who would come in on it?”

"For years I’ve been collecting names,” said Drake. “Men who are sick and tired of talking. If they knew what we’d done already, yes, I could get five before the end of the month.”

“ All right,” said Krim, “if we’re into this thing, let’s do it. Where do you want me to go?” “Belgium,” said Drake. “I want a large apartment in Brussels. We’ll bring the men there and

make the apartment the group’s base.”

On the other side of the world while Drake was talking, the sun rose over Chita and the Ishikawajima-Harima shipyard. The
Freya
lay alongside her commissioning quay, her engines throbbing.

The previous evening had seen a lengthy conference in the office of the IHI chairman, attended by both the yard’s and the company’s chief superintendents, the accountants, Harry Wennerstrom, and Thor Larsen. The two technical experts had agreed that every one of the giant tanker’s systems was in perfect working order. Wennerstrom had signed the final release document, conceding that the
Freya
was all he had paid for.

In fact, he had paid five percent of her on the signature of the original contract to build her, five percent at the keel-laying ceremony, five percent when she rode water, and five percent at official

handover. The remaining eighty percent plus interest was payable over the succeeding eight years. But to all intents and purposes, she was his. The yard’s company flag had been ceremoniously hauled down, and the silver-on-blue winged Viking helmet emblem of the Nordia Line now flut- tered in the dawn breeze.

High on the bridge, towering over the vast spread of her deck, Harry Wennerstrom drew Thor Larsen by the arm into the radio room and closed the door behind him. The room was completely soundproof with the door closed.

“She’s all yours, Thor,” he said. “By the way, there’s been a slight change of plan regarding your arrival in Europe. I’m not lightening her offshore. Not for her maiden voyage. Just this once, you’re going to bring her into the Europoort at Rotterdam fully laden.”