The Devil's Alternative (32 page)

The remaining seven men left port and cruised sedately up the coast to lose themselves in the islands of Walcheren and North Beveland, just across the border with Holland. There, with their fishing rods much in evidence, they hove to and waited. On a powerful radio down in the cabin, Andrew Drake sat hunched, listening to the wavelength of Maas Estuary Control and the endless calls of the ships heading into or out of the Europoort and Rotterdam.

“Colonel Kukushkin is going into Tegel Jail to do the job early in the morning of April fourth,” Vassili Petrov told Maxim Rudin in the Kremlin that same Sunday morning. “There is a senior guard who will let him in, bring him to the cells of Mishkin and Lazareff, and let him out of the jail by the staff doorway when it is over.”

“The guard is reliable? One of our people?” asked Rudin.

“No, but he has family in East Germany. He has been persuaded to do as he is told. Kukushkin reports that he will not contact the police. He is too frightened.”

“Then he knows already whom he is working for. Which means he knows too much.” “Kukushkin will silence him also, just as he steps out of the doorway. There will be no trace,”

said Petrov.

“Eight days,” grunted Rudin. “He had better get it right.”

“He will,” said Petrov. “He, too, has a family. By a week from tomorrow Mishkin and Lazareff will be dead, and their secret with them. Those who helped them will keep silent to save their own lives. Even if they talk, it will be disbelieved. Mere hysterical allegations. No one will believe them.”

When the sun rose on the morning of the twenty-ninth, its first rays picked up the mass of the
Freya
twenty miles west of Ireland, cutting north by northeast through the eleven-degree longitude on a course to skirt the Outer Hebrides.

Her powerful radar scanners had picked up the fishing fleet in the darkness an hour before, and her officer of the watch noted them carefully. The nearest to her was well to the east, or landward side, of the tanker.

The sun glittered over the rocks of Donegal, a thin line on the eastward horizon to the men on the bridge with their advantage of eighty feet of altitude. It caught the small fishing smacks of the men from Killybegs, drifting out in the western seas for mackerel, herring, and whiting. And it caught the bulk of the
Freya
herself, like a moving landmass, steaming out of the south past the drifters and their gently bobbing nets.

Christy O’Byrne was in the tiny wheelhouse of the smack he and his brother owned, the
Bernadette
. He blinked several times, put down his cocoa mug, and stepped the three feet from the wheelhouse to the rail. His vessel was the nearest to the passing tanker.

From behind him, when they saw the
Freya
, the fishermen tugged on the horn lanyards, and a chorus of thin whoops disturbed the dawn. On the bridge of the
Freya
, Thor Larsen nodded to his junior officer; seconds later the bellowing bull roar of the
Freya
answered the Killybegs fleet.

Christy O’Byrne leaned on the rail and watched the
Freya
fill the horizon, heard the throb of her power beneath the sea, and felt the
Bernadette
begin to roll in the widening wake of the tanker.

“Holy Mary,” he whispered, “would you look at the size of her.”

On the eastern shore of Ireland, compatriots of Christy O’Byrne were at work that morning in Dublin Castle, for seven hundred years the seat of power of the British. As a tiny boy perched on his father’s shoulder, Martin Donahue had watched from outside as the last British troops marched out of the castle forever, following the signing of a peace treaty. Sixty-one years later, on the verge of retirement from government service, he was a cleaner, pushing a Hoover back and forth over the electric-blue carpet of St Patrick’s Hall.

He had not been present when any of Ireland’s successive presidents had been inaugurated beneath Vincent Waldré’s magnificent 1778 painted ceiling, nor would he be present in twelve days when two superpowers signed the Treaty of Dublin below the motionless heraldic banners of the long-gone Knights of St. Patrick. For forty years he had just kept it dusted for them.

Rotterdan, too, was preparing, but for a different ceremony. Harry Wennerstrom arrived on the thirtieth and installed himself in the best suite at the Hilton Hotel.

He had come by his private executive jet, now parked at Schiedam municipal airport just outside the city. Throughout the day four secretaries fussed around him, preparing for the Scandinavian and Dutch dignitaries, the tycoons from the worlds of oil and shipping, and the scores of press people who would attend his reception on the evening of April 1 for Captain Thor Larsen and his officers.

A select party of notables and members of the press would be his guests on the flat roof of the modern Maas Control building, situated on the very tip of the sandy shore at the Hook of Holland. Well protected against the stiff spring breeze, they would watch from the north shore of the Maas Estuary as the six tugs pulled and pushed the
Freya
those last few kilometers from the estuary into the Caland Kanaal, from there to the Beer Kanaal, and finally to rest by Clint Blake’s new oil refinery in the heart of the Europoort.

While the
Freya
closed down her systems during the afternoon, the group would come back by cavalcade of limousines to central Rotterdam, forty kilometers up the river, for an evening reception. A press conference would precede this, during which Wennerstrom would present Thor Larsen to the world’s press.

Already, he knew, newspapers and television had leased helicopters to give the last few miles of the
Freya
and her berthing complete camera coverage.

Harry Wennerstrom was a contented old man.

By the early hours of March 30 the
Freya
was well through the channel between the Orkneys and the Shetlands. She had turned south, heading down the North Sea. As soon as she entered the crowded lanes of the North Sea, the
Freya
had reported in, contacting the first of the shore-based area traffic-control officers at Wick on the coast of Caithness in the far north of Scotland.

Because of her size and draft, she was a “hampered vessel.” She had reduced speed to ten knots and was following the instructions fed to her from Wick by VHF radiotelephone. All around her, unseen, the various control centers had her marked on their high-definition radars, manned by qualified pilot operators. These centers are equipped with computerized support systems capable of rapid assimilation of weather, tide, and traffic-density information.

Ahead of the
Freya
as she crawled down the southbound traffic lane, smaller ships were crisply informed to get out of her way. At midnight she passed Flamborough Head on the coast of

Yorkshire, now moving farther east, away from the British coast and toward Holland. Throughout her passage she had followed the deepwater channel, a minimum of twenty fathoms. On her bridge, despite the constant instructions from ashore, her officers watched the echo-sounder readings, observing the banks and sandbars that make up the floor of the North Sea slide past on either side of her.

Just before sundown of March 31, at a point exactly fifteen sea miles due east of the Outer Gabbard Light, now down to her bare steerage speed of five knots, the giant swung gently eastward and moved to her overnight position, the deep-draft anchorage located at fifty-two degrees north. She was twenty-seven sea miles due west of the Maas Estuary, twenty-seven miles from home and glory.

It was midnight in Moscow. Adam Munro had decided to walk home from the diplomatic reception at the embassy. He had been driven there by the commercial counselor, so his own car was parked by his flat off Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

Halfway over the Serafimov Bridge, he paused to gaze down at the Moscow River. To his right he could see the illuminated cream-and-white stucco facade of the embassy; to his left the dark red walls of the Kremlin loomed above him, and above them the upper floor and dome of the Great Kremlin Palace.

It had been roughly ten months since he had flown from London to take up his new appointment. In that time he had pulled off the greatest espionage coup for decades, running the only spy the West had ever operated inside the heart of the Kremlin. They would savage him for breaking training, for not telling them all along who she was, but they could not diminish the value of what he had brought out.

Three weeks more and she would be out of this place, safe In London. He would be out, too, resigning from the service to start a new life somewhere else with the only person in the world he loved, ever had loved, or ever would.

He would be glad to leave Moscow, with its secrecy, its endless furtiveness, its mind-numbing drabness. In ten days the Americans would have their arms-reduction treaty, the Kremlin its grain and technology, the service its thanks and gratitude from Downing Street and the White House alike. A week more and he would have his wife-to-be, and she her freedom. He shrugged deeper into his thick, fur-collared coat and walked on across the bridge.

Midnight in Moscow is ten P.M. in the North Sea. By 2200 hours the
Freya
was motionless at last. She had steamed 7,085 miles from Chita to Abu Dhabi and a further 12,015 miles from there to where she now lay. She lay motionless along the line of the tide; from her stem a single anchor chain streamed out and down to the seabed, with five shackles on deck. Each link of the chain needed to hold her was nearly a yard long, and the steel thicker than a man’s thigh.

Because of her “hampered” state, Captain Larsen had brought her down from the Orkneys himself, with two navigating officers to assist him, as well as the helmsman. Even at the overnight anchorage he left his first officer, Stig Lundquist, his third mate, Tom Keller (a Danish-American), and an able seaman on the bridge through the night. The officers would maintain constant anchor watch; the seaman would carry out periodic deck inspection.

Though the
Freya’s
engines were closed down, her turbines and generators hummed rhythmically, churning out the power to keep her systems functioning.

Among these were constant input of tide and weather, of which the latest reports were heartening.

He could have had March gales; instead, an unseasonal area of high pressure almost stationary

over the North Sea and the English Channel had brought a mild early spring to the coasts. The sea was almost a flat calm; a one-knot tide ran northeastward from the vessel toward the West Frisians. The sky had been a near-cloudless blue all day, and despite a touch of frost that night, bade fair to be so again on the morrow.

Bidding his officers goodnight, Captain Larsen left the bridge and descended one floor to D deck. Here, on the extreme starboard side, he had his suite. The spacious and well-appointed day cabin carried four windows looking forward down the length of the vessel, and two looking out to starboard. Aft of the day cabin were his bedroom and bathroom. The sleeping cabin also had two windows, both to starboard. All the windows were sealed, save one in the day cabin that was closed but with screw bolts that could be manually undone.

Outside his sealed windows to forward, the facade of the superstructure fell sheer to the deck; to starboard the windows gave onto ten feet of steel landing, beyond which was the starboard rail, and beyond it the sea. Five flights of steel ladders ran from the lowest A deck up five floors to the bridge-wing above his head, each stage of the ladders debouching onto a steel landing. All these sets of ladders and landings were open to the sky, exposed to the elements. They were seldom used, for the interior stairwells were heated and warm.

Thor Larsen lifted the napkin off the plate of chicken and salad the chief steward had left him, looked longingly at the bottle of Scotch in his liquor cabinet, and settled for coffee from the percolator. After eating he decided to work the night away on a final run-through of the channel charts for the morning’s berthing. It was going to be tight, and he wanted to know that channel as well as the two Dutch pilots who would arrive by helicopter from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at seven-thirty to take her over. Prior to that, he knew, a gang of ten men from ashore, the extra hands, called “riggers,” who were needed for the berthing operation, would arrive by launch at 0700.

As midnight struck, he settled at the broad table in his day cabin, spread his charts, and began to study.

At ten minutes before three in the morning, it was frosty but clear outside. A half-moon caused the rippling sea to glitter. Inside the bridge Stig Lundquist and Tom Keller shared a companionable mug of coffee. The able seaman prowled the flowing screens along the bridge console.

“Sir,” he called, “there’s a launch approaching.”

Tom Keller rose and crossed to where the seaman pointed at the radar screen. There were a score of blips—some stationary, some moving, but all well away from the
Freya
. One tiny blip seemed to be approaching from the southeast.

“Probably a fishing boat making sure of being ready on the fishing grounds by sunrise,” said Keller.

Lundquist was looking over his shoulder. He flicked to a lower range. “She’s coming very close,” he said.

Out at sea, the launch had to be aware of the mass of the
Freya
. The tanker carried anchor lights above the fo’c’sle and at the stern. Besides, her deck was floodlit and her superstructure was lit like a Christmas tree by the lights in the accommodation. The launch, instead of veering away, began to curve in toward the stern of the
Freya.

“She looks as if she’s going to come alongside,” said Keller.

“She can’t be the berthing crew,” said Lundquist. “They’re not due till seven.” “Perhaps they couldn’t sleep, wanted to be well on time,” said Keller.

“Go down to the head of the ladder,” Lundquist told the seaman, “and tell me what you see. Put on the headset when you get there, and stay in touch.”

The accommodation ladder on the ship was amidships. On a big vessel it is so heavy that steel cables powered by an electric motor either lower it from the ship’s rail to the sea level or raise it to lie parallel to the rail. On the
Freya
, even full-laden, the rail was nine meters above the sea, an impossible jump, and the ladder was fully raised.