The Devil's Alternative (40 page)

“Not necessarily,” said Holmes. “You can buy these things in the underworld. The Paris underworld is famous for its taste for submachine guns.”

At three-thirty, Sir Julian Flannery brought the meeting into recess. It was agreed to keep the Nimrod circling above the
Freya
until further notice. The Vice Chief of Defense Staff put forward and had accepted his proposal to divert a naval warship to take up station Just over five miles west of the
Freya
to watch her also, in case of an attempt by the terrorists to leave under cover of darkness. The Nimrod would spot them and pass their position to the Navy. The warship would easily overhaul the fishing launch still tied by the
Freyda’s
side.

The Foreign Office agreed to ask to be informed of any decision by West Germany and Israel on the terrorists’ demands.

“There does not, after all, appear much that Her Majesty’s government can do at the present moment,” Sir Julian pointed out. The decision is up to the Israeli Prime Minister and the West German Chancellor. Personally I cannot see what else they can do except to let these wretched young men go to Israel, repugnant though the idea of yielding to blackmail must be.”

When the men left the room, only Colonel Holmes of the Royal Marines stayed behind. He sat down again and stared at the model of the quarter-million-ton British Petroleum tanker in front of him.

“Supposing they don’t?” He said to himself.

Carefully he began to measure the distance in feet from the sea to the stern taffrail.

The Swedish pilot of the Jetstream was at fifteen thousand feet off the West Frisian Islands, preparing to let down into Schiedam airfield outside Rotterdam. He turned around and called something to the petite woman who was his passenger. She unbuckled and came forward to where he sat.

“I asked if you wanted to see the
Freya
,” the pilot repeated. The woman nodded.

The Jetstream banked away to the sea, and five minutes later tilted gently onto one wing. From her seat, face pressed to the tiny porthole, Lisa Larsen looked down. Far below in a blue sea, like a gray sardine nailed to the water, the
Freya
lay at anchor. There were no ships around her; she was quite alone in her captivity.

Even from fifteen thousand feet, through the clear spring air, Lisa Larsen could make out where the bridge would be, where the starboard side of that bridge was; below it she knew her husband was facing a man with a gun pointed straight at his chest, with explosive beneath his feet. She did not know whether the man with the gun was mad, brutal, or reckless. That he must be a fanatic, she knew.

Two tears welled out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. When she whispered, her breath misted the perspex disk in front of her.

“Thor, my darling, please come out of there alive.”

The Jetstream banked again and began its long drop toward Schiedam. The Nimrod, miles away across the sky, watched it go.

“Who was that?” asked the radar operator of no one in particular. “Who was what?” replied a sonar operator, having nothing to do.

“Small executive jet just banked over the
Freya
, had a look, and went off to Rotterdam,” said the radarman.

“Probably the owner checking on his property,” said the crew’s wit from the radio console.

On the
Freya
the two lookouts gazed through eyeslits after the tiny sliver of metal high above as it headed east toward the Dutch coast. They did not report it to their leader; it was well above ten thousand feet.

The West German cabinet meeting began just after three P.M. in the Chancellery Office, with Dietrich Busch in the chair as usual. He went straight to the point, as he had a habit of doing.

“Let’s be clear about one thing: this is not Mogadisho all over again. This time we do not have a German plane with a German crew and mainly German passengers on an airstrip whose authorities are prepared to be collaborative toward us. This is a Swedish vessel with a Norwegian captain in international waters; she has crewmen from five countries including the United States, an American-owned cargo insured by a British company, and her destruction would affect at least five coastal nations, including ourselves. Foreign Minister?”

Hagowitz informed his colleagues he had already received polite queries from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, and Britain regarding the kind of decision the government of the Federal Republic might come to. After all, they held Mishkin and Lazareff.

“They are being courteous enough not to exert any pressure to influence our decision, but I have no doubt they would view a refusal on our part to send Mishkin and Lazareff to Israel with the deepest misgivings,” he said.

“Once you start giving in to this terrorist blackmail, it never ends,” put in the Defense Minister. “Dietrich, we gave in over the Peter Lorenz affair years ago and paid for it. The very terrorists

we freed came back and operated again. We stood up to them over Mogadishu and won; we stood up again over Schleyer and had a corpse on our hands. But at least those were pretty well all- German affairs. This isn’t. The lives at stake aren’t German; the property isn’t German. Moreover,

the hijackers in Berlin aren’t from a German terrorist group. They’re Jews who tried to get away from Russia the only way they knew how. Frankly, it puts us in the devil of a spot,” Hagowitz con- cluded.

“Any chance that it’s a bluff, a confidence trick, that they really can’t destroy the
Freya
or kill her crew?” someone asked.

The Interior Minister shook his head.

“We can’t bank on that. These pictures the British have just transmitted to us show the armed and masked men are real enough. I’ve sent them along to the leader of GSG-nine to see what he thinks. But the trouble is, approaching a ship with all-around, over-and-under radar and sonar cover is not their area of expertise. It would mean divers or frogmen.”

He was referring by GSG-nine to the ultratough unit of West German commandos drawn from the Border Troops who had stormed the hijacked aircraft at Mogadisho five years earlier.

The argument continued for an hour: whether to accede to the terrorists’ demands in view of the several nationalities of the probable victims of a refusal, and accept the inevitable protests from Moscow; or whether to refuse and call their bluff; or whether to consult with the British allies about the idea of storming the
Freya
. A compromise view of adopting delaying tactics, stalling for time, testing the determination of the
Freya’s
captors, seemed to be gaining ground. At four-fifteen, there was a quiet knock on the door. Chancellor Busch frowned; he did not like interruptions.

“
Herein
,” he called. An aide entered the room and whispered urgently in the Chancellor’s ear.

The head of the Federal Republic’s government paled. “
Du lieber Gott
,” he breathed.

When the light aircraft, later traced as a privately owned Cessna on charter from Le Touquet airfield on the northern French coast, began to approach, she was spotted by three different air- traffic-control zones: at Heathrow, Brussels, and Amsterdam. She was flying due north, and the radars put her at five thousand feet, on track for the
Freya
. The ether began to crackle furiously.

“Unidentified light aircraft ... identify yourself and turn back. You are entering a prohibited area.

...”

French and English were used; later, Dutch. They had no effect. Either the pilot had switched off his radio or he was on the wrong channel. The operators on the ground began to weep through the wave bands.

The circling Nimrod picked the aircraft up on radar and tried to contact her. On board the Cessna, the pilot turned to his passenger in despair.

“They’ll have my license,” he yelled. “They’re going mad down there.”

“Switch off,” the passenger shouted back. “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. You never heard them, okay?”

The passenger gripped his camera and adjusted the telephoto lens. He began to sight up on the approaching supertanker. In the forepeak, the masked lookout stiffened and squinted against the sun, now in the southwest. The plane was coming from due south. After watching for several seconds, he took a walkie-talkie from his anorak and spoke sharply into it.

On the bridge, one of his colleagues heard the message, peered forward through the panoramic screen, and walked hurriedly outside onto the wing. Here he, too, could hear the engine note. He reentered the bridge and shook his sleeping colleague awake, snapping several orders in Ukrainian. The man ran downstairs to the door of the day cabin and knocked.

Inside the cabin, Thor Larsen and Andrew Drake, both looking unshaven and more haggard than twelve hours earlier, were still at the table, the gun by the Ukrainian’s right hand. A foot away from him was his powerful transistor radio, picking up the latest news. The masked man

entered on his command and spoke in Ukrainian. His leader scowled and ordered the man to take over in the cabin.

Drake left the cabin quickly, raced up to the bridge and out onto the wing. As he did so, he pulled on his black mask. From the bridge he gazed up as the Cessna, banking at a thousand feet, performed one orbit of the
Freya
and flew back to the south, climbing steadily. While it turned he had seen the great zoom lens poking down at him.

Inside the aircraft, the free-lance cameraman was exultant.

“Fantastic!” he shouted at the pilot. “Completely exclusive. The magazines will pay their right arms for this.”

Drake returned to the bridge and issued a rapid stream of orders. Over the walkie-talkie he told the man up front to continue his watch. The bridge lookout was sent below to summon two men who were catching sleep. When all three returned, he gave them further instructions. When he re- turned to the day cabin, he did not dismiss the extra guard.

“I think it’s time I told those stupid bastards over there in Europe that I am not joking,” he told Thor Larsen.

Five minutes later the camera operator on the Nimrod called over the intercom to his captain. “There’s something happening down there, skipper.”

Squadron Leader Latham left the flight deck and walked back to the center section of the hull, where the visual image of what the cameras were photographing was on display. Two men were walking down the deck of the
Freya
, the great wall of superstructure behind them, the long, lonely deck ahead. One of the men, the one at the rear, was in black from head to foot, with a submachine gun. The one ahead wore sneakers, casual slacks, and a nylon-type anorak with three horizontal black stripes across its back. The hood was up against the chill afternoon breeze.

“Looks like a terrorist at the back, but a seaman in front,” said the camera operator. Latham nodded. He could not see the colors; his pictures were monochrome.

“Give me a closer look,” he said, “and transmit.” The camera zoomed down until the frame occupied forty feet of foredeck, both men walking in the center of the picture.

Captain Thor Larsen could see the colors. He gazed through the wide forward windows of his cabin beneath the bridge in disbelief. Behind him the guard with the machine gun stood well back, muzzle trained on the middle of the Norwegian’s white sweater.

Halfway down the foredeck, reduced by distance to match-stick figures, the second man, in black, stopped, raised his machine gun, and aimed at the back in front of him. Even through the glazing the crackle of the one-second burst could be heard. The figure in the pillar-box red anorak arched as if kicked in the spine, threw up its arms, pitched forward, rolled once, and came to rest, half-obscured beneath the inspection catwalk.

Thor Larsen slowly closed his eyes. When the ship had been taken over, his third mate, Danish- American Tom Keller, had been wearing fawn slacks and a light nylon wind-breaker in bright red with three black stripes across the back. Larsen leaned his forehead against the back of his hand on the glass. Then he straightened, turned to the man he knew as Svoboda, and stared at him. Drake stared back.

“I warned them,” he said angrily. “I told them exactly what would happen, and they thought they could play games. Now they know they cant.”

Twenty minutes later the still pictures showing the sequence of what had happened on the deck of the
Freya
were coming out of a machine in the heart of London. Twenty minutes after that, the details in verbal terms were rattling off a teleprinter in the Federal Chancellery in Bonn. It was four-thirty P.M.

Chancellor Busch looked at his cabinet.

“I regret to have to inform you,” he said, “that one hour ago a private plane apparently sought to take pictures of the
Freya
from close range, about a thousand feet. Ten minutes later the terrorists walked one of the crew halfway down the deck and, under the cameras of the British Nimrod above them, executed him. His body now lies half under the catwalk, half under the sky.”

There was dead silence in the room.

“Can he be identified?” asked one of the ministers in a low voice. “No, his face was partly covered by the hood of his anorak.”

“Bastards,” said the Defense Minister. “Now thirty families all over Scandinavia will be in anguish, instead of one. They’re really turning the knife.”

“In the wake of this, so will the four governments of Scandinavia, and I shall have to answer their ambassadors,” said Hagowitz. “I really don’t think we have any alternative.”

When the hands were raised, the majority were for Hagowitz’s proposal: that he instruct the German Ambassador to Israel to seek an urgent interview with the Israeli Premier and ask from him, at Germany’s request, the guarantee the terrorists had demanded. Following which, if it was given, the Federal Republic would announce that with regret it had no alternative, in order to spare further misery to innocent men and women outside West Germany, but to release Mishkin and Lazareff to Israel.

“The terrorists have given the Israeli Prime Minister until midnight to offer that guarantee,” said Chancellor Busch. “And ourselves until dawn to put these hijackers on a plane. We’ll hold our announcement until Jerusalem agrees. Without that, there is nothing we can do, anyway.”