The Devil's Alternative (30 page)

The court adjourned for lunch, and when it resumed, the journalist was missing from his seat. He was phoning from one of the kiosks outside the hearing room. Shortly after three, the judge reached his conclusion. Both men were required to rise, to hear themselves sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

They were led away to begin their sentences at Tegel Jail in the northern part of the city, and within minutes the courtroom had emptied. The cleaners took over, removing the brimming wastepaper baskets, carafes, and glasses. One of the middle-aged ladies occupied herself with cleaning the interior of the dock. Unobserved by her colleagues, she quietly picked up the prisoners’ two drinking glasses, wrapped each in a dustcloth, and placed them in her shopping bag beneath the empty wrappers of her sandwiches. No one noticed, and no one cared.

On the last day of the month, Vassili Petrov sought and received a private audience with Maxim Rudin in the latter’s Kremlin suite.

“Mishkin and Lazarett,” he said without preamble.

“What about them? They got fifteen years. It should have been the firing squad.”

“One of our people in West Berlin abstracted the glasses they used for water during the trial. The palmprint on one matches that from the car used in the hit-and-run affair in Kiev in October.”

“So it was them,” said Rudin grimly. “Damn them to hell! Vassili, wipe them out. Liquidate them as fast as you can. Give it to ‘Wet Affairs.’ ”

The KGB, vast and complex in its scope and organization, consists basically of four chief directorates, seven independent directorates, and six independent departments.

But the four chief directorates comprise the bulk of the KGB. One of these, the First, concerns itself exclusively with clandestine activities outside the USSR.

Deep within the heart of it is a section known simply as Department V (as in Victor), or the Executive Action Department. This is the one the KGB would most like to keep hidden from the rest of the world, inside and outside the USSR. For its tasks include sabotage, extortion, kidnapping, and assassination. Within the jargon of the KGB itself, it usually has yet another name: the department of
mokrte dyela
, or “Wet Affairs,” so called because its operations not infre- quently involve someone’s getting wet with blood. It was to this Department V of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB that Maxim Rudin ordered Petrov to hand the elimination of Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I have already done as much,” said Petrov. “I thought of giving the affair to Colonel Kukushkin, Ivanenko’s head of security. He has a personal reason to wish to succeed—to save his own skin, apart from avenging Ivanenko and his own humiliation. He’s already served his time in Wet Affairs—ten years ago. Inevitably he is already aware of the secret of what happened in Rosa Luxemburg Street—he was there. And he speaks German. He would report back only to General Abrassov or to me.”

Rudin nodded grimly.

“All right, let him have the job. He can pick his own team. Abrassov will give him everything he needs. The apparent reason will be to avenge the death of Flight Captain Rudenko. And Vassili, he had better succeed the first time. If he tries and fails, Mishkin and Lazareff could open their mouths. After a failed attempt to kill them, someone might believe them. Certainly Vishnayev would, and you know what that would mean.”

“I know,” said Petrov quietly. “He will not fail. He’ll do it himself.”

CHAPTER TEN

“IT’S THE BEST we’ll get, Mr. President,” said Secretary of State David Lawrence. “Personally, I believe Edwin Campbell has done us proud at Castletown.”

Grouped before the President’s desk in the Oval Office were the secretaries of State, Defense, and the Treasury, with Stanislaw Poklewski, and Robert Benson of the CIA. Beyond the French windows the Rose Garden was whipped by a bitter wind. The snows had gone, but March 1 was bleak and uninviting.

President William Matthews laid his hand on the bulky folder in front of him, the draft agreement wrung out of the Castletown talks.

“A lot of it is too technical for me,” he confessed, “but the digest from the Defense Department impresses me. The way I see it is this: if we reject the agreement now, after the Soviet Politburo has accepted it, there’ll be no renegotiation, anyway. The matter of grain deliveries will become academic to Russia in three months in any case. By then they’ll be starving and Rudin will be gone. Yefrem Vishnayev will get his war. Right?”

“That seems to be the unavoidable conclusion,” said David Lawrence.

“How about the other side of it—the concessions we have made?” asked the President.

“The secret trade protocol in the separate document,” said the Secretary of the Treasury, “requires us to deliver fifty-five million tons of mixed grains at production costs and nearly three billion dollars’ worth of oil, computer, and consumer industry technology, rather heavily subsidized. The total cost to the United States runs to almost four billion dollars. On the other hand, the sweeping arms reductions should enable us to claw back that much and more by reduced defense expenditures.”

“If the Soviets abide by their undertakings,” said the Secretary of Defense hastily.

“But if they do, and we have to believe they will,” countered Lawrence, “by our own experts’ calculations they could not launch a successful conventional or tactical nuclear war across the face of Europe for at least five years.”

President Matthews knew that the presidential election of 1984 would not see his candidacy. But if he could step down in January 1985, leaving behind him peace for even half a decade, with the burdensome arms race of the seventies halted in its tracks, he would take his place among the great U.S. presidents. He wanted that more than anything else this spring of 1983.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have to approve this treaty as it stands, and for once I’m confident the Senate will see it the same way. David, inform Moscow we join them in agreeing to the terms, and propose that our negotiators reconvene at Castletown to draw up the formal treaty ready for signing. While this is going on, we will permit the loading of the grain ships, ready to sail on the day of signature. That is all.”

On March 3, Azamat Krim and his Ukrainian-American collaborator clinched the deal that acquired them a sturdy and powerful launch. She was the kind of craft much favored by enthusiastic sea anglers on both the British and European coasts of the North Sea, steel-hulled, forty feet long, tough, and secondhand. She had Belgian registration, and they had found her near Ostende.

Up front, she had a cabin whose roof extended the forward third of her length. A companionway

led down to a cramped four-berth resting area, with a tiny toilet and galley. Aft of the rear bulkhead she was open to the elements, and beneath the deck lay a powerful engine capable of taking her through the wild North Sea to the fishing grounds and back.

Krim and his companion brought her from Ostende to Blankenberge, farther up the Belgian coast, and when she was moored in the marina, she attracted no attention. Spring always brings its crop of hardy sea anglers to the coasts with their boats and tackle. The American chose to live on board and work on the engine. Krim returned to Brussels to find that Andrew Drake had taken over the kitchen table as a workbench and was deeply engrossed in preparations of his own.

For the third time on her maiden voyage, the
Freya
had crossed the Equator, and March 7 found her entering the Mozambique Channel, heading south by southwest toward the Cape of Good Hope. She was still following her hundred-fathom line, leaving six hundred feet of clear ocean beneath her keel, a course that took her to seaward of the main shipping lanes. She had not seen land since coming out of the Gulf of Oman, but on the afternoon of the seventh she passed through the Comoro Islands at the north end of the Mozambique Channel. To starboard, her crew, taking advantage of the moderate winds and seas to stroll the quarter mile of forward deck or lounge beside the screened swimming pool up on C deck, saw Great Comoro Island, the peak of its densely wooded mountain hidden in clouds, the smoke from the burning undergrowth on its flanks drifting across the green water. By nightfall the skies had overcast with gray cloud, the wind turned squally. Ahead lay the heaving seas of the Cape and the final northward run to Europe and her welcome.

The following day, Moscow replied formally to the proposal of President Matthews, welcoming his agreement, with the concurrence of the United States Senate, to the terms of the draft treaty and agreeing that the chief negotiators of Castletown should reconvene jointly to draft the formal treaty while remaining in constant contact with their respective governments.

The bulk of the Soviet merchant marine fleet, Sovfracht, along with the numerous other vessels already chartered by the Soviet Union, had already sailed at the American government’s invitation for the grain ports of North America. In Moscow the first reports were coming in of excessive quantities of meat appearing in the peasant markets, indicating livestock slaughter was taking place even on the state and collective farms, where it was forbidden. The last reserves of grain for animals and humans alike were running out.

In a private message to President Matthews, Maxim Rudin regretted that for health reasons he would not personally be able to sign the treaty on behalf of the Soviet Union unless the ceremony were held in Moscow; he therefore proposed a formal signature by foreign ministers in Dublin on April 10.

The winds of the Cape were hellish; the South African summer was over, and the autumn gales thundered up from the Antarctic to batter Table Mountain. The
Freya
by March 12 was in the heart of the Agulhas Current, pushing westward through mountainous green seas, taking the gales from the southwest on her port beam.

It was bitter cold out on deck, but no one was there. Behind the double-glazing of the bridge, Captain Thor Larsen and his two officers of the watch stood with the helmsman, radio officer, and two others in shirt sleeves. Warm, safe, protected by the aura of her invincible technology, they gazed forward to where forty-foot waves impelled by the force 10 winds out of the southwest reared above the
Freya’s
port side, hovered for a moment, then crashed down to obscure her gigantic deck and its myriad pipes and valves in a swirling maelstrom of white foam. While the

waves burst, only the fo’c’sle, far ahead, was discernible, like a separate entity. As the foam receded, defeated, through the scuppers, the
Freya
shook herself and buried her bulk in another oncoming mountain. A hundred feet beneath the men, ninety thousand shaft horsepower pushed a million tons of crude oil another few yards toward Rotterdam. High above, the Cape albatrosses wheeled and glided, their lost cries unheard behind the Plexiglas. Coffee was served by one of the stewards.

Two days later, on Monday the fourteenth, Adam Munro drove out of the courtyard of the Commercial Section of the British Embassy and turned sharp right into Kutuzovsky Prospekt toward the city center. His destination was the main embassy building, where he had been summoned by the head of Chancery. The telephone call, certainly tapped by the KGB, had referred to the clarification of minor details for a forthcoming trade delegation visit from London. In fact it meant that there was a message awaiting him in the cipher room.

The cipher room in the embassy building on Maurice Thorez Embankment 5s in the basement, a secure room regularly checked by the “sweepers,” who are not looking for dust, but for listening devices. The cipher clerks are diplomatic personnel and security-checked to the highest level. Nevertheless, sometimes messages come in that bear a coding to indicate they will not and cannot be decoded by the normal decoding machines. The tag on these messages will indicate that they have to be passed to one particular cipher clerk, a man who has the right to know because he has a need to know. Occasionally a message for Adam Munro bore such a coding, as today. The clerk in question knew Munro’s real job because he needed to—if for no other reason, to protect him from those who did not.

Munro entered the cipher room, and the clerk spotted him. They withdrew to a small annex where the clerk, a precise, methodical man with bifocal glasses, used a key from his waistband to unlock a separate decoding machine. He passed the London message into it, and the machine spat out the translation. The clerk took no notice, averting his gaze as Munro moved away.

Munro read the message and smiled. He memorized it within seconds and passed it straight into a shredder, which reduced the thin paper to fragments hardly bigger than dust. He thanked the clerk and left, with a song in his heart. Barry Ferndale had informed him that with the Russian- American treaty on the threshold of signature, the Nightingale could be brought out, to a discreet but extremely generous welcome, from the coast of Rumania near Constanza, during the week of April 16-23. There were further details for the exact pickup. He was asked to consult with the Nightingale and confirm acceptance and agreement.

After receiving Maxim Rudin’s personal message, President Matthews had remarked to David Lawrence:

“Since this is more than a mere arms-limitation agreement, I suppose it really can be called a treaty. And since it seems destined to be signed in Dublin, no doubt history will call it the Treaty of Dublin.”

Lawrence had consulted with the government of the Republic of Ireland, whose officials had agreed with barely hidden delight that they would be pleased to host the formal signing ceremony between David Lawrence for the United States and Dmitri Rykov for the USSR in St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, on April 10.

On March 16, therefore, President Matthews replied to Maxim Rudin, agreeing to the proposed place and date.

There are two fairly large rock quarries in the mountains outside Ingolstadt in Bavaria. During the

night of March 18, the night watchman in one of these was attacked and tied up by two masked men, at least one of them armed with a handgun, he later told police. The men, who seemed to know what they were looking for, broke into the dynamite store, using the night watchman’s keys, and stole 250 kilograms of rock-blasting explosives and a number of electric detonators. Long before morning they were gone, and as the following day was Saturday the nineteenth, it was almost noon before the trussed night watchman was rescued and the theft discovered. Subsequent police investigations were intensive, and in view of the apparent knowledge of the layout of the quarry by the robbers, concentrated on the area of former employees. But the search was for extreme left-wingers, and the name Klimchuk, which belonged to a man who had been employed three years earlier at the quarry, attracted no particular attention, being assumed to be of Polish extraction. Actually it is a Ukrainian name. By that Saturday evening the two cars bearing the explosives had arrived back in Brussels, penetrating the German-Belgian border on the Aachen- Liège motorway. They were not stopped, weekend traffic being especially heavy.