The Devil's Alternative (38 page)

He was also giving the press ample time to learn of the disaster, but not the terms; letting them evaluate the scale of the catastrophe if the
Freya
blew up, so that their head of steam, their capacity to pressure the authorities, would be well prepared ahead of the demands. When the demands came, they would appear mild compared to the alternative, thus subjecting the authorities to press pressure before they had considered the demands.

Larsen, who knew what the demands would be, could not see how the authorities would refuse. The alternative was too terrible for all of them. If Svoboda had simply kidnapped an industrialist or a politician, as the Baader-Meinhof people had kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer, or the Red Brigades Aldo Moro, he might have been refused his friends’ release. But he had elected to destroy five national coastlines, one sea, thirty lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars in property.

“Why are these two men so important to you?” asked Larsen suddenly. The younger man stared back.

“They’re friends,” he said.

“No,” said Larsen. “I recall from last January reading that they were two Jews from Lvov who had been refused permission to emigrate, so they hijacked a Russian airliner and forced it to land in West Berlin. How does that produce your popular uprising?”

“Never mind,” said his captor. “It is five to twelve. We return to the bridge.”

Nothing had changed on the bridge, except that there was an extra terrorist there, curled up asleep in the corner, his gun still clutched in his hand. He was masked, like the one who patrolled the radar and sonar screens. Svoboda asked the man something in the language Larsen now knew to be Ukrainian. The man shook his head and replied in the same language. At a word from Svoboda the masked man turned his gun on Larsen.

Svoboda walked over to the scanners and read them. There was a peripheral ring of clear water around the
Freya
at least to five miles on the western, southern, and northern sides. To the east, the sea was clear to the Dutch coast. He strode out through the door leading to the bridgewing, turned, and called upward. From high above, Larsen heard the man atop the funnel assembly

shout back. Svoboda returned to the bridge.

“Come,” he said to the captain, “your audience is waiting. One attempt at a trick, and I shoot one of your seamen, as promised.”

Larsen took the handset and pressed for transmit. “Maas Control, Maas Control, this is the
Freya
.”

Though he could not know it, over fifty different offices received that call. Five major intelligence services were listening, plucking Channel 20 out of the ether with their sophisticated listeners. The words were heard simultaneously by the National Security Agency in Washington, by the British SIS, the French SDECE, the West German BND, the Soviet KGB, and the various services of Holland, Belgium, and Sweden. There were ships’ radio officers listening, radio hams and journalists as well.

A voice came back from the Hook of Holland. “
Freya
, this is Maas Control. Go ahead, please.” Thor Larsen read from his sheet of paper.

“This is Captain Thor Larsen. I wish to speak personally to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.”

A new voice, speaking in English, came on the radio from the Hook.

“Captain Larsen, this is Jan Grayling. I am the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Are you all right?”

On the
Freya
, Svoboda clapped his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone.

“No questions,” he said to Larsen. “Just ask if the West German Ambassador is present, and get his name.”

“Please ask no questions, Prime Minister. I am not permitted to answer them. Is the West German Ambassador with you?”

At Maas Control, the microphone was passed to Konrad Voss. On the bridge of the
Freya
, Svoboda nodded at Larsen. “That’s right,” he said, “go ahead and read it out.”

The six men grouped around the console in Maas Control listened in silence. One premier, one ambassador, one psychiatrist, a radio engineer in case of a transmission breakdown, Van Gelder of the Port Authority, and the duty officer. All other shipping traffic had now been diverted to a spare channel. The two tape recorders whirled silently. Volume was switched high; Thor Larsen’s voice echoed in the room.

“ ‘I repeat what I told you at nine this morning. The
Freya
is in the hands of partisans. Explosive devices have been placed that would, if detonated, blow her apart. These devices can be detonated at the touch of a button. I repeat, at the touch of a button. No attempt whatever must be made to approach her, board her, or attack her in any way. In such an event the detonator button will be pressed instantly. The men concerned have convinced me they are prepared to die rather than give in.’

“I continue. ‘If any approach at all is made, by surface craft or light aircraft, one of my seamen will be executed, or twenty thousand tons of crude oil vented, or both. Here are the demands of the partisans:

“ ‘The two prisoners of conscience, David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, presently in jail at Tegel in West Berlin, are to be liberated. They are to be flown by a West German civilian jet from West Berlin to Israel. Prior to this, the Prime Minister of the State of Israel is to give a public guarantee that they will be neither repatriated to the Soviet Union, nor extradited back to West Germany, nor reimprisoned in Israel.

“ ‘Their liberation must take place at dawn tomorrow. The Israeli guarantee of safe conduct and

freedom must be given by midnight tonight. Failure to comply will place the entire responsibility for the outcome on the shoulders of West Germany and Israel. That is all. There will be no more contact until the demands have been met.’ ”

The radiotelephone went dead with a click. The silence persisted inside the control building. Jan Grayling looked at Konrad Voss. The West German envoy shrugged.

“I must contact Bonn urgently,” Voss said.

“I can tell you that Captain Larsen is under some strain,” said the psychiatrist.

“Thank you very much,” said Grayling. “So am I. Gentlemen, what has just been said cannot fail to be made public within the hour. I suggest we return to our offices. I shall prepare a statement for the one o’clock news. Mr. Ambassador, I fear the pressure will now begin to swing toward Bonn.”

“Indeed it will,” said Voss. “I must be back inside the embassy as soon as possible.”

“Then accompany me to The Hague,” said Grayling. “I have police outriders, and we can talk in the car.”

Aides brought the two tapes, and the group left for The Hague, fifteen minutes up the coast. When they were gone, Dirk Van Gelder walked up to the flat roof where Harry Wennerstrom would have held his lunch with Van Gelder’s permission, the other guests looking eagerly to seaward, as they supped on champagne and salmon sandwiches, to catch the first glimpse of the leviathan.

Now perhaps she would never come, thought Van Gelder, staring out at the blue water. He, too, had his master’s ticket, having served as a Dutch merchant navy captain until he was offered the shore job with the promise of a regular life with his wife and children. As a seaman he thought of the
Freya’s
crew, locked far beneath the waves, waiting helplessly for rescue or death. But as a seaman he would not be in charge of negotiations. It was out of his hands now. Smoother men, cal- culating in political rather than human terms, would take over. He thought of the towering Norwegian skipper, whose picture he had seen but whom he had never met, now facing madmen armed with guns and dynamite, and wondered how he would have reacted had it ever happened to him. He had warned that this could happen one day, that the supertankers were too unprotected and highly dangerous. But money had spoken louder; the more powerful argument had been the extra cost of installing the necessary devices to make tankers like banks and explosive stores, both of which in a way they were. No one had listened, and no one ever would. People were concerned about airliners because they could crash on houses, but not about tankers, which traveled out of sight of land. So the politicians had not insisted, and the merchants had not volunteered. Now, because supertankers could be taken as easily as piggy banks, a captain and his crew of twenty-nine might die like rats in a swirl of oil and water.

He ground a cigarette under his heel into the tar of the roof, and looked again at the empty horizon.

“You poor bastards,” he said, “you poor bloody bastards. If only they’d listened.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1300 to 1900

IF THE REACTION of the media to the 0900 transmission had been muted and speculative, due to the uncertainty of the reliability of their informants, the reaction to the 1200 broadcast was frantic.

From twelve o’clock onward there was no doubt whatever what had happened to the
Freya
, or what had been said by Captain Larsen on his radiotelephone to Maas Control. Too many people had been listening.

Banner headlines that had been available for the noon editions of the evening papers, prepared at ten A.M., were swept away. Those that went to press at twelve-thirty were stronger in tone and size. There were no more question marks at the ends of sentences. Editorial columns were hastily prepared, specialist correspondents in matters of shipping and the environment required to produce instant assessments within the hour.

Radio and television programs were interrupted throughout Europe’s Friday lunch hour to beam the news to listeners and viewers.

On the dot of five past twelve, a man in a motorcyclist’s helmet, with goggles and scarf drawn around the lower part of the face, had walked calmly into the lobby of 85 Fleet Street and deposited an envelope addressed to the news editor of the Press Association. No one later recalled the man; dozens of such messengers walk into that lobby every day.

By twelve-fifteen the news editor was opening the envelope. It contained a transcript of the statement read by Captain Larsen fifteen minutes earlier, though it must have been prepared well before that. The news editor reported the delivery to his editor in chief, who told the Metropolitan Police. That did not stop the text from going straight onto the wires, both of the PA and their cousins upstairs, Reuters, who put out the text across the world.

Leaving Fleet Street, Miroslav Kaminsky dumped his helmet, goggles, and scarf in a garbage can, took a taxi to Heathrow Airport, and boarded the two-fifteen plane for Tel Aviv.

By two P.M. the editorial pressure on both the Dutch and West German governments was beginning to build up. Neither had had any time to consider in peace and quiet the reactions they should make to the demands. Both governments began to receive a flood of phone calls urging them to agree to release Mishkin and Lazareff rather than face the disaster promised by the destruction of the
Freya
off their coasts.

By one o’clock the West German Ambassador to The Hague was speaking directly to his Foreign Minister in Bonn, Klaus Hagowitz, who interrupted the Chancellor at his desk lunch. The text of the 1200 broadcast was already in Bonn, once from the BND intelligence service and once on the Reuters teleprinter. Every newspaper office in Germany also had the text from Reuters, and the telephone lines to the Chancellery Press Office were jammed with calls.

At one-forty-five the Chancellery put out a statement to the effect that an emergency cabinet meeting had been called for three o’clock to consider the entire situation. Ministers canceled their plans to leave Bonn for the weekend. Lunches were ill-digested.

The governor of Tegel Jail put down his telephone at two minutes past two with a certain deference. It was not often the Federal Republic’s Justice Minister cut clean through the protocol of

communicating with the Governing Mayor of West Berlin and called him personally.

He picked up the internal phone and gave an order to his secretary. Doubtless the Berlin Senate would be in contact in due course with the same request, but so long as the Governing Mayor was out of touch at lunch somewhere, he would not refuse the Minister from Bonn.

Three minutes later, one of his senior prison officers entered the office. “Have you heard the two o’clock news?” asked the governor.

It was only five past two. The officer pointed out that he had been on his rounds when the Weeper in his breast pocket buzzed, requiring him to go straight to a wall phone and check in. No, he had not heard the news. The governor told him of the noon demand of the terrorists on board the
Freya
. The officer’s jaw dropped open.

“One for the book, isn’t it?” said the governor. “It looks as if we shall be in the news within minutes. So, batten down the hatches. I’ve given orders to the main gate: no admissions by anyone other than staff. All press inquiries to the authorities at City Hall.

“Now, as regards Mishkin and Lazareff. I want the guard on that floor, and particularly in that corridor, trebled. Cancel free periods to raise enough staff. Transfer all other prisoners in that corridor to other cells or other levels. Seal the place. A group of intelligence people are flying in from Bonn to ask them who their friends in the North Sea are. Any questions?”

The prison officer swallowed and shook his head.

“Now,” resumed the governor, “we don’t know how long this emergency will last. When were you due off duty?”

“Six o’clock tonight, sir.”

“Returning on Monday morning at eight?”

“No, sir. On Sunday night at midnight. I go on the night shift next week.”

“I’ll have to ask you to work right on through,” said the governor. “Of course, well make up the time to you later with a generous bonus. But I’d like you right on top of the job from here on. Agreed?”

“Yes, sir. Whatever you say. I’ll get on with it now.”

The governor, who liked to adopt a comradely attitude with his staff, came around the desk and clapped the man on the shoulder.

“You’re a good fellow, Jahn. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Squadron Leader Mark Latham stared down the runway, heard his takeoff clearance from the control tower, and nodded to his copilot. The younger man’s gloved hand eased the four throttles slowly open; in the wing roots, four Rolls-Royce Spey engines rose in pitch to push out forty-five thousand pounds of thrust, and the Nimrod Mark 2 climbed away from the RAF station at Kinross and turned southeast from Scotland toward the North Sea and the Channel.