The Devil's Alternative (35 page)

He stared back at the masked face but made no reply. There was a deep, seething anger inside him, growing with each passing minute, but he gave no sign of it.

“What do you want?” he growled. The terrorist glanced at the digital display clock on the wall.

It read a quarter to seven.

“We’re going to the radio room,” he said. “We talk to Rotterdam. Or rather, you talk to Rotterdam.”

Twenty-seven miles to the east, the rising sun had dimmed the great yellow flames that spout day and night from the oil refineries of the Europoort. Through the night, from the bridge of the
Freya
, it had been possible to see these flames in the dark sky above Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum, and even, far beyond them, the cool blue glow of Rotterdam’s streetlighting.

The refineries and the labyrinthine complexity of the Europoort, the greatest oil terminal in the world, lie on the south shore of the Maas Estuary. On the north shore in the Hook of Holland, with its ferry terminal and the Maas Control building, squatting beneath its whirling radar antennae.

Here at six-forty-five on the morning of April 1, duty officer Bernhard Dijkstra yawned and stretched. He would be going home in fifteen minutes for a well-earned breakfast. Later, after a sleep, he would motor back from his home at Gravenzande in his spare time to see the new supergiant tanker pass through the estuary. It should be quite a day. As if to answer his thoughts, the speaker in front of him came to life.

“Pilot Maas, Pilot Mass, this is the
Freya
.”

The supertanker was on Channel 20, the usual channel for a tanker out at sea to call up Mass Control by radiotelephone. Dijkstra leaned forward and flicked a switch.

“
Freya
, this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead.”

“Pilot Maas, this is the
Freya
. Captain Thor Larsen speaking. Where is the launch with my berthing crew?”

Dijkstra consulted a clipboard to the left of his console.

“
Freya
, this is Pilot Maas. They left the Hook over an hour ago. They should be with you in twenty minutes.”

What followed caused Dijkstra to shoot bolt-upright in his chair.

“
Freya
to Pilot Maas. Contact the launch immediately and tell them to return to port. We cannot accept them on board. Inform the Maas pilots not to take off—repeat, not to take off. We cannot accept them on board. We have an emergency—I repeat, we have an emergency.”

Dijkstra covered the speaker with his hand and yelled to his fellow duty officer to throw the switch on the tape recorder. When it was spinning to record the conversation, Dijkstra removed his hand and said carefully:

“
Freya
, this is Pilot Maas. Understand you do not wish the berthing crew to come alongside.

Understand you do not wish the pilots to take off. Please confirm.” “Pilot Maas, this is
Freya
. Confirm. Confirm.”

“
Freya
, please give details of your emergency.”

There was silence for ten seconds, as if a consultation were taking place on the
Freya’s
bridge far out at sea. Then Larsen’s voice boomed out again in the control room.

“Pilot Maas,
Freya
. I cannot give the nature of the emergency. But if any attempt is made by anyone to approach the
Freya
, people will get killed. Please stay away. Do not make any further attempt to contact the
Freya
by radio or telephone. Finally, the
Freya
will contact you again at oh- nine-hundred hours exactly. Have the chairman of the Rotterdam Port Authority present in the control room. That is all.”

The voice ended, and there was a loud click. Dijkstra tried to call back two or three times. Then he looked across at his colleague.

“What the hell did that mean?”

Officer Wilhelm Schipper shrugged in perplexity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Captain Larsen sounded as if he might be in danger.”

“He spoke of men getting killed,” said Dijkstra. “How killed? What’s he got, a mutiny? Someone run amok?”

“We’d better do what he says until this is sorted out,” said Schipper.

“Right,” said Dijkstra. “You get on to the chairman. I’ll contact the launch and the two pilots up at Schiphol.”

The launch bearing the berthing crew was chugging at a steady ten knots across the flat calm toward the
Freya
, with three miles still to go. It was developing into a beautiful spring morning, warm for the time of year. At three miles the bulk of the giant tanker was already looming large, and the ten Dutchmen who would help her berth, but who had never seen her before, were craning their necks as they came closer.

No one thought anything when the ship-to-shore radio by the helmsman’s side crackled and squawked. He took the handset off its cradle and held it to his ear. With a frown he cut the engine to idling, and asked for a repeat. When he got it, he put the helm hard a-starboard and brought the launch around in a semicircle.

“We’re going back,” he told the men, who looked at him with puzzlement. “There’s something wrong. Captain Larsen’s not ready for you yet.”

Behind them the
Freya
receded again toward the horizon as they headed back to the Hook.

Up at Schiphol Airport, south of Amsterdam, the two estuary pilots were walking toward the Port Authority helicopter that would airlift them out to the deck of the tanker. It was routine procedure; they always went out to waiting ships by whirlybird.

The senior pilot, a grizzled veteran with twenty years at sea, a master’s ticket, and fifteen years as a Maas Pilot, carried his “brown box,” the instrument that would help him steer her to within a yard of seawater if he wished to be so precise. With the
Freya
clearing twenty feet only from the shoals and the Inner Channel barely fifty feet wider than the
Freya
herself, he would need it this morning.

As they ducked underneath the whirling blades, the helicopter pilot leaned out and wagged a warning finger at them.

“Something seems to be wrong,” he yelled above the roar of the engine. “We have to wait. I’m closing her down.”

The engine cut, the blades swished to a stop.

“What the hell’s all that about?” asked the second pilot. The helicopter flier shrugged.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Just came through from Maas Control. The ship isn’t ready for you yet.”

At his handsome country house outside Vlaardingen, Dirk Van Gelder, chairman of the Port Authority, was at breakfast a few minutes before eight when the phone rang. His wife answered it. “It’s for you,” she called, and went back to the kitchen, where the coffee was perking. Van Gelder rose from the breakfast table, dropped his newspaper on the chair, and shuffled in carpet

slippers out to the hallway.

“Van Gelder,” he said into the telephone. As he listened, he stiffened, his brow furrowed. “What did he mean, killed?” he asked.

There was another stream of words into his ear.

“Right,” said Van Gelder. “Stay there. I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”

He slammed the phone down, kicked off the slippers, and put on his shoes and jacket. Two minutes later he was at his garage doors. As he climbed into his Mercedes and backed out to the gravel driveway, he was fighting back thoughts of his personal and abiding nightmare.

“Dear God, not a hijack. Please, not a hijack.”

After replacing the VHF radiotelephone on the bridge of the
Freya
, Captain Thor Larsen had been taken at gunpoint on a tour of his own ship, peering with flashlight into the forward ballast holds to note the big packages strapped far down below the waterline.

Returning down the deck, he had seen the launch with the berthing crew turn, three miles out, and head back for the shore. To seaward a small freighter had passed, heading south, and had greeted the leviathan at anchor with a cheery hoot. It was not returned.

He had seen the single charge in the center ballast tank amidships, and the further charges in the after ballast tanks close by the superstructure. He did not need to see the paint locker. He knew where it was, and could imagine how close the charges were placed.

At half past eight, while Dirk Van Gelder was striding into the Maas Control Building to listen to the tape recording, Thor Larsen was being escorted back to his day cabin. He had noted one of the terrorists, muffled against the chill, perched right up in the fo’c’sle apron of the
Freya
, watching the arc of the sea out in front of the vessel. Another was high on the top of the funnel casing, over a hundred feet up, with a commanding view of the sea around him. A third was on the bridge, patrolling the radar screens, able, thanks to the
Freya’s
own technology, to see a circle of ocean with a radius of forty-eight miles, and most of the sea beneath her.

Of the remaining four, two, the leader and another, were with him; the other two must be below decks somewhere.

The terrorist leader forced him to sit at his own table in his own cabin. The man tapped the oscillator, which was clipped to his belt.

“Captain, please don’t force me to press this red button. And please don’t think that I will not— either if there is any attempt at heroics on this ship or if my demands are not met. Now, please read this.”

He handed Captain Larsen a sheaf of three sheets of foolscap paper covered with typed writing in English. Larsen went rapidly through it.

“At nine o’clock you are going to read that message over the ship-to-shore radio to the chairman of the Port Authority of Rotterdam. No more, and no less. No breaking into Dutch or Norwegian. No supplementary questions. Just the message. Understand?”

Larsen nodded grimly. The door opened, and a masked terrorist came in. He had apparently been in the galley. He bore a tray with fried eggs, butter, jam, and coffee, which he placed on the table between them.

“Breakfast,” said the terrorist leader. He gestured toward Larsen. “You might as well eat.”

Larsen shook his head, but drank the coffee. He had been awake all night, and had risen from his bed the previous morning at seven. Twenty-six hours awake, and many more to go. He needed to stay alert, and guessed the black coffee might help. He calculated also that the terrorist across the table from him had been awake the same amount of time.

The terrorist signaled the remaining gunman to leave. As the door closed they were alone, but the broad expanse of table put the terrorist well out of Larsen’s reach. The gun lay within inches of the man’s right hand; the oscillator was at his waist.

“I don’t think we shall have to abuse your hospitality for more than thirty hours, maybe forty,” said the masked man. “But if I wear this mask during that time, I shall suffocate. You have never seen me before, and after tomorrow you will never see me again.”

With his left hand, the man pulled the black balaclava helmet from his head. Larsen found himself staring at a man in his early thirties, with brown eyes and medium-brown hair. He puzzled Larsen. The man spoke like an Englishman, behaved like one. But Englishmen did not hijack tankers, surely. Irish, perhaps? IRA? But he had referred to friends of his in prison in Germany. Arab, perhaps? There were PLO terrorists in prison in Germany. And he spoke a strange language to his companions. Not Arabic by the sound of it, yet there were scores of different dialects in Arabic, and Larsen knew only the Gulf Arabs. Again, Irish perhaps.

“What do I call you?” he asked the man whom he would never know as Andriy Drach or Andrew Drake. The man thought for a moment as he ate.

“You can call me ‘Svoboda,’ ” he said at length. “It is a common name in my language. But it is also a word. It means freedom.’ ”

“That’s not Arabic,” said Larsen. The man smiled for the first time.

“Certainly not. We are not Arabs. We are Ukrainian freedom fighters, and proud of it.” “And you think the authorities will free your friends in prison?” asked Larsen.

“They will have to,” said Drake confidently. “They have no alternative. Come, it is almost nine o’clock.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

0900 to 1300

“PILOT MAAS, Pilot Maas, this is the
Freya
.”

Captain Thor Larsen’s baritone voice echoed into the main control room at the squat building on the tip of the Hook of Holland. In the first-floor office with its sweeping picture windows gazing out over the North Sea, now curtained against the bright morning sun to give clarity to the radar screens, five men sat waiting.

Dijkstra and Schipper were still on duty, thoughts of breakfast forgotten. Dirk Van Gelder stood behind Dijkstra, ready to take over when the call came through. At another console, one of the day-shift men was taking care of the rest of the estuary traffic, bringing ships in and out, but keeping them away from the
Freya
, whose blip on the radar screen was at the limit of vision but still larger than all the others. The senior maritime safety officer of Maas Control was also present.

When the call came, Dijkstra slipped out of his chair before the speaker, and Van Gelder sat down. He gripped the stem of the table microphone, cleared his throat, and threw the “transmit” switch.

“
Freya
, this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead, please.”

Beyond the confines of the building, which looked for all the world like a chopped-off air-traffic control tower sitting on the sand, other ears were listening. During the earlier transmission, two other ships had caught part of the conversation, and there had been a bit of chitchat between ships’ radio officers in the intervening two hours. Now a dozen were listening keenly.

On the
Freya
, Larsen knew he could switch to Channel 16, speak to Scheveningen Radio, and ask for a patch-through to Maas Control for greater privacy, but the listeners would soon join him on that channel. So he stayed with Channel 20.

“
Freya
to Pilot Maas, I wish to speak personally to the chairman of the Port Authority.”

This is Pilot Maas. This is Dirk Van Gelder speaking. I am the chairman of the Port Authority.” “This is Captain Thor Larsen, master of the
Freya
.”

“Yes, Captain Larsen, your voice is recognized. What is your problem?”