The Devil's Alternative (42 page)

When the pair joined the Secretary of State in the Oval Office, Matthews explained the burden of the visit from Ambassador Kirov.

“What the hell are they up to?” demanded the President.

None of his three principal advisers could come up with an answer. Various suggestions were put forward, notably that Maxim Rudin had suffered a reverse within his own Politburo and could not proceed with the Treaty of Dublin, and the
Freya
affair was simply his excuse for getting out of signing.

The idea was rejected by mutual consent. Without the treaty the Soviet Union would receive no grain, and they were at their last few truckloads. It was suggested the dead Aeroflot pilot, Captain Rudenko, represented the sort of loss of face the Kremlin could not stomach. This, too, was reject- ed. International treaties are not torn up because of dead pilots.

The Director of Central Intelligence summed up the feelings of everybody after an hour.

“It just doesn’t make sense, and yet it must. Maxim Rudin would not react like a madman unless he had a reason, a reason we don’t know.”

“That still doesn’t get us out from between two appalling alternatives,” said President Matthews. “Either we let the release of Mishkin and Lazareff go through, and lose the most important disarmament treaty of our generation, and witness war within a year, or we use our clout to block that release, and subject Western Europe to the biggest ecological disaster of this generation.”

“We have to find a third choice,” said David Lawrence. “But in God’s name, where?”

“There is only one place to look,” replied Poklewski. “Inside Moscow. The answer lies inside Moscow somewhere. I do not believe we can formulate a policy aimed at avoiding both the alternative disasters unless we know why Maxim Rudin has reacted in this way.”

“I think you’re referring to the Nightingale,” Benson cut In. “There just isn’t the time. We’re not talking about weeks, or even days. We have only hours. I believe, Mr. President, that you should seek to speak personally with Maxim Rudin on the direct line. Ask him, as President to President, why he is taking this attitude over two Jewish hijackers.”

“And if he declines to give his reason?” asked Lawrence. “He could have given a reason through Kirov. Or sent a personal letter. ...”

President Matthews made up his mind.

“I am calling Maxim Rudin,” he said. “But if he will not take my call or declines to give me an explanation, we will have to assume he is himself under intolerable pressures of some kind within his own circle. So while I am waiting for the call, I am going to entrust Mrs. Carpenter with the secret of what has just happened here and ask for her help through Sir Nigel Irvine and the Nightingale. In the last resort I will call Chancellor Busch in Bonn and ask him to give me more time.”

When the caller asked for Ludwig Jahn personally, the switchboard operator at Tegel Jail was prepared to cut him off. There had been numerous press calls seeking to speak with specific officers on the staff in order to elicit details on Mishkin and Lazareff. The operator had her orders: no calls.

But when the caller explained he was Jahn’s cousin and that Jahn was to have attended his daughter’s wedding the following day at noon, the operator softened. Family was different. She put the call through; Jahn took it from his office.

“I think you remember me,” the voice told Jahn.

The officer remembered him well—the Russian with the labor-camp eyes.

“You shouldn’t have called me here,” he whispered hoarsely. “I can’t help you. The guards have been trebled, the shifts changed. I am on shift permanently now, sleeping here in the office until further notice—those are the orders. They are unapproachable now, those two men.”

“You had better make an excuse to get out for an hour,” said the voice of Colonel Kukushkin. “There’s a bar four hundred meters from the staff gate.” He named the bar and gave its address. Jahn did not know it, but he knew the street. “In one hour,” said the voice. There was a click.

It was eight P.M. in Berlin, and quite dark.

The British Prime Minister had been taking a quiet supper with her husband in the private apartments atop 10 Downing Street when she was summoned to accept a personal call from President Matthews. She was back at her desk when the call came through. The two government leaders knew each other well, and had met a dozen times since Britain’s first woman premier came to office. Face-to-face they used Christian names, but even though the super-secure call across the Atlantic could not be eavesdropped, there was an official record made, so they stayed with formalities.

In careful, succinct terms. President Matthews explained the message he had received from Maxim Rudin via his Ambassador in Washington. Joan Carpenter was stunned.

“In heaven’s name, why?” she asked.

“That’s my problem, ma’am,” came the Southern drawl from across the Atlantic. “There is no explanation. None at all. Two more things. Ambassador Kirov advised me that if the content of Rudin’s message ever became public knowledge, the same consequences to the Treaty of Dublin would still apply. I may count on your discretion?”

“Implicitly,” she replied. “The second thing?”

“I’ve tried to call Maxim Rudin on the hot line. He is unavailable. Now, from that, I have to assume he has his problems right in the heart of the Kremlin and he can’t talk about them. Frankly, that has put me in an impossible position. But about one thing I am absolutely determined. I cannot let that treaty be destroyed. It is far too important to the whole of the Western world. I have to fight for it. I cannot let two hijackers in a Berlin jail destroy it; I cannot let a bunch of terrorists on a tanker in the North Sea unleash an armed conflict between East and West such as would ensue.”

“I entirely agree with you, Mr. President,” said the Premier from her London desk. “What do you want from me? I imagine you would have more influence with Chancellor Busch than I.”

“It’s not that, ma’am. Two things. We have a certain amount of information about the consequences to Europe of the
Freya’s
blowing up, but I assume you have more. I need to know every conceivable possible consequence and option in the event the terrorists aboard do their worst.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Carpenter, “during the whole of today our people have put together an in-

depth study of the ship, her cargo, the chances of containing the spillage, and so on. So far, we haven’t examined the idea of storming her. Now we may have to. I will have all our information on those aspects on their way to you within the hour. What else?”

“This is the hard one, and I scarcely know how to ask it,” said William Matthews. “We believe there has to be an explanation of Rudin’s behavior, and until we know it, we are groping in the dark. If I am to handle this crisis, I have to see some daylight. I have to have that explanation. I need to know if there is a third option. I would like you to ask your people to activate the Nightingale one last time and get that answer for me.”

Joan Carpenter was pensive. She had always made it a policy not to interfere with the way Sir Nigel Irvine ran his service. Unlike several of her predecessors, she had steadily declined to poke around in the intelligence services to satisfy her curiosity. Since coming to office she had doubled the budgets of both her directors, of SIS and MI5, had chosen hard-core professionals for the posts, and had been rewarded by their unswerving loyalty. Secure in that loyalty, she trusted them not to let her down. And neither had.

“I will do what I can,” she said at length. “But we are talking about something in the very heart of the Kremlin, and a matter of hours. If it is possible, it will be done. You have my word on it.”

When the telephone was back in its cradle, she called her husband to tell him not to wait for her, she would be at her desk all night. From the kitchen she ordered a pot of coffee. The practical side of things arranged, she called Sir Julian Flannery at his home, told him simply over the line that a fresh crisis had arisen, and asked him to return at once to the Cabinet Office. Her last call was not on an open line; it was to the duty officer at the head office of the Firm. She asked for Sir Nigel Irvine to be contacted wherever he was, and to be asked to come immediately to No. 10. While waiting, she switched on the office television and caught the start of the nine o’clock BBC news. The long night had begun.

Ludwig Jahn slipped into the booth and sat down, sweating gently. From across the table the Russian regarded him coldly. The plump prison guard could not know that the fearsome Russian was fighting for his own life; the man gave no hint.

He listened impassively as Jahn explained the new procedures, instituted since two that afternoon. In point of fact, Kukushkin had no diplomatic cover; he was hiding out in an SSD safe house in West Berlin as a guest of his East German colleagues.

“So you see,” concluded Jahn, “there is nothing I can do. I could not possibly get you into that corridor. There are three on duty, as a minimum figure, night and day. Passes have to be shown every time one enters the corridor, even by me, and we all know each other. We have worked together for years. No new face would be admitted without a check call to the governor.”

Kukushkin nodded slowly. Jahn felt relief rising in his chest. They would let him go; they would leave him alone; they would not hurt his family. It was over.

“You enter the corridor, of course,” said the Russian. “You may enter the cells.”

“Well, yes, I am the Oberachmeister. At periodic intervals I have to check that they are all right.” “At night they sleep?”

“Maybe. They have heard about the matter in the North Sea. They lost their radios just after the noon broadcasts, but one of the other prisoners in solitary shouted the news across to them before the corridor was cleared of all other prisoners. Perhaps they will sleep, perhaps not.”

The Russian nodded somberly.

“Then,” he said, “you will do the job yourself.” Jahn’s jaw dropped.

“No, no,” he babbled. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t use a gun. I couldn’t kill anyone.”

For answer the Russian laid two slim tubes like fountain pens on the table between them.

“Not guns,” he said. “These. Place the open end, here, a few centimeters from the mouth and nose of the sleeping man. Press the button on the side, here. Death occurs within three seconds. Inhalation of hydrogen cyanide gas causes instantaneous death. Within an hour the effects are identical to those of cardiac arrest. When it is done, close the cells, return to the staff area, wipe the tubes clean, and place them in the locker of another guard with access to the same pair of cells. Very simple, very clean. And it leaves you in the clear.”

What Kukushkin had laid before the horrified gaze of the senior officer was an updated version of the same sort of poison-gas pistols with which the “Wet Affairs” department of the KGB had assassinated the two Ukrainian nationalist leaders Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet in Germany two decades earlier. The principle was still simple, the efficiency of the gas increased by further research. Inside the tubes, glass globules of prussic acid rested. The trigger impelled a spring, which worked on a hammer, which crushed the glass. Simultaneously the acid was vaporized by a compressed-air canister, activated in the same motion of pressing the trigger button. Impelled by the compressed air, the gas vapor shot out of the tube into the breathing passages in an invisible cloud. An hour later the telltale bitter almond smell of prussic acid was gone, the muscles of the corpse relaxed again; the symptoms were those of heart attack.

No one would believe two simultaneous heart attacks in two young men; a search would be made. The gas guns, found in the locker of a guard, would incriminate the man almost completely.

“I ... I cant do that,” whispered Jahn.

“But I can, and will, see your entire family in an Arctic labor camp for the rest of their lives,” murmured the Russian. “A simple choice, Herr Jahn. The overcoming of your scruples for a brief ten minutes, against all their lives. Think about it.”

Kukushkin took Jahn’s hand, turned it over, and placed the tubes in the palm.

“Think about it,” he said, “but not too long. Then walk into those cells and do it That’s all.”

He slid out of the booth and left. Minutes later Jahn closed his hand around the gas guns, slipped them in his raincoat pocket, and went back to Tegel Jail. At midnight, in three hours, he would relieve the evening-shift supervisor. At one A.M. he would enter the cells and do it. He knew he had no alternative.

As the last rays of the sun left the sky, the Nimrod over the
Freya
had switched from her daytime f/126 camera to her nighttime f/135 version. Otherwise, nothing had changed. The night-vision camera, peering downward with its infrared sights, could pick out most of what was happening fifteen thousand feet beneath. If the Nimrod’s captain wanted, he could take still pictures with the aid of the f/135’s electronic flash, or throw the switch on his aircraft’s million-candle-power searchlight.

The night camera failed to notice the figure in the anorak, lying prostrate since midafternoon, slowly begin to move, crawling under the inspection catwalk, and from there inching its way back toward the superstructure. When the figure finally crawled over the sill of the half-open doorway and stood up in the interior, no one noticed. At dawn it was supposed the body had been thrown into the sea.

The man in the anorak went below to the galley, rubbing hands and shivering repeatedly. In the galley he found one of his colleagues and helped himself to a piping mug of coffee. When he had finished he returned to the bridge and sought out his own clothes, the black tracksuit and sweater he had come aboard with.

“Jeez,” he told the man on the bridge in his American accent, “you sure didn’t miss. I could feel the wadding from those blanks slapping into the back of the windbreaker.”

The bridge watch grinned.

“Andriy said to make it good,” he replied. “It worked. Mishkin and Lazareff are coming out at eight tomorrow morning. By afternoon they’ll be in Tel Aviv.”

“Great,” said the Ukrainian-American. “Let’s hope Andriy’s plan to get us off this ship works as well as the rest.”