The Devil's Alternative (46 page)

seems to me this will not happen before nightfall, which gives us about sixteen hours.” “Why nightfall, Colonel?” asked Sir Julian.

“Because, sir, unless they are all suicide candidates, which they may be, one must assume that they will seek their own escape in the confusion. Now, if they wish to try to live, they may well leave the ship and operate their remote-control detonator at a certain distance from the ship’s side.”

“And your proposal, Colonel?”

“Twofold, sir. Firstly, their launch. It is still moored beside the courtesy ladder. As soon as darkness falls, a diver could approach that launch and attach a delayed-action explosive device to it. If the
Freya
were to blow up, nothing within a half-mile radius would be safe. Therefore I propose a charge detonated by a mechanism operated by water pressure. As the launch moves away from the ship’s side, the forward thrust of the launch will cause water to enter a funnel beneath the keel. This water will operate a trigger, and sixty seconds later the launch will blow up, before the terrorists have reached a point half a mile from the
Freya
, and therefore before they can operate their own detonator.”

“Would the exploding of their launch not detonate the charges on the
Freya
?” asked someone. “No. If they have a remote-control detonator, it must be electronically operated. The charge

would blow the launch carrying the terrorists to smithereens. No one would survive.”

“But if the detonator sank, would not the water pressure depress the button?” asked one of the scientists.

“No. Once under the water, the remote-control detonator would be safe. It could not beam its radio message to the larger charges in the ship’s tanks.”

“Excellent,” said Sir Julian. “Can this plan not operate before darkness falls?”

“No, it cannot,” answered Holmes. “A frogman diver leaves a trail of bubbles. In stormy weather this might not be noticed, but on a flat sea it would be too obvious. One of the lookouts could spot the bubbles rising. It would provoke what we are trying to avoid.”

“After dark it is, then,” said Sir Julian.

“Except for one thing, which is why I oppose the idea of sabotaging their escape launch as the only ploy. If, as may well happen, the leader of the terrorists is prepared to die with the
Freya
, he may not leave the ship with the rest of his team. So I believe we may have to storm the ship during a night attack and get to him before he can use his device.”

The Cabinet Secretary sighed.

“I see. Doubtless you have a plan for that as well?”

“Personally, I do not. But I would like you to meet Major Simon Fallon, commanding the Special Boat Service.”

It was all the stuff of Sir Julian Flannery’s nightmares. The Marine major was barely five feet eight inches tall, but he seemed about the same across the shoulders and was evidently of that breed of men who talk about reducing other humans to their component parts with the same ease that Lady Flannery talked of dicing vegetables for one of her famous Provençal salads.

In at least three encounters the peace-loving Cabinet Secretary had had occasion to meet officers from the SAS, but this was the first time he had seen the commander of the other, smaller specialist unit, the SBS. They were, he observed to himself, of the same breed.

The SBS had originally been formed for conventional war, to act as specialists in attacks from the sea on coastal installations. That was why they were drawn from the Marine commandos. As a basic requirement they were physically fit to a revolting degree, experts in swimming, canoeing, diving, climbing, marching, and fighting.

From there they went on to become proficient in parachuting, explosives, demolition, and the

seemingly limitless techniques of cutting throats or breaking necks with knife, wire loop, or simply bare hands. In this, and in their capacity for living in self-sufficiency on, or rather off, the countryside for extended periods and leaving no trace of their presence, they simply shared the skills of their cousins in the SAS.

It was in their underwater skills that the SBS men were different. In frogman gear they could swim prodigious distances and lay explosive charges, or drop their swimming gear while treading water without a ripple and emerge from the sea with their arsenal of special weapons wrapped about them.

Some of their weaponry was fairly routine: knives and cheese wire. But since the start of that rash of outbreaks of terrorism in the late sixties, they had acquired fresh toys that delighted them.

All were expert marksmen with their high-precision, hand-tooled Finlanda rifle, a Norwegian- made piece that had been evaluated as perhaps the best rifle in the world. It could be, and usually was, fitted with an image intensifier, a sniperscope as long as a bazooka, and a completely effective silencer and flash guard.

For taking doors away in half a second, they tended, like the SAS, toward short-barreled pump- action shotguns firing solid charges. These they never aimed at the lock, for there could be other bolts behind the door; they fired two simultaneously to take off both hinges, kicked the door down, and opened fire with the silenced Ingram machine pistols.

Also in the arsenal that had helped the SAS assist the Germans at Mogadishu were their flash- bang-crash grenades, a sophisticated development of the “stun” grenades. These do more than just stun; they paralyze. With a half-second delay after pulling the pin, these grenades, thrown into a confined space containing both terrorists and hostages, have three effects. The flash blinds anyone looking in that direction for at least thirty seconds, the bang blows the eardrums out, causing instant pain and a certain loss of concentration, and the crash is a tonal sound that enters the middle ear and causes a ten-second paralysis of all muscles. (During tests, one of their own men once tried to pull the trigger of a gun pressed into a companion’s side while the grenade went off. It was impossible. Both “terrorist” and “hostage” lost their eardrums. But eardrums can grow again; dead hostages cannot.)

While the paralytic effect lasts, the rescuers spray bullets four inches over head height while their colleagues dive for the hostages, dragging them to the floor. At this point, the fixers drop their aim by six inches.

The exact position of hostage and terrorist in a closed room can be determined by the application of an electronic stethoscope to the outside of the door. Speech inside the room is not necessary; breathing can be heard and located accurately. The rescuers communicate in an elaborate sign lan- guage that permits of no misunderstanding.

Major Fallon placed the model of the
Princess
on the conference table, aware he had the attention of everyone present.

“I propose,” he began, “to ask the cruiser
Argyll
to turn herself broadside on to the
Freya
, and then before dawn park the assault boats containing my men and equipment close up in the lee of the
Argyll
, where the lookout, here, on top of the
Freya’s
funnel, cannot see them, even with binoculars. That will enable us to make our preparations, unobserved, through the afternoon. In case of airplanes hired by the press, I would like the sky cleared, and any emulsifier-spraying tugs within visual range of what we are doing to keep silent.”

There was no dissent to that. Sir Julian made two notes.

“I would approach the
Freya
with four two-man kayaks, halting at a range of three miles, in darkness, before the rising of the moon. Her radar will not spot kayaks. They are too small, too low in the water; they are of wood and canvas construction, which does not effectively register on

radar. The paddlers will be in rubber, leather, wool undervests, and so on, and all buckles will be plastic. Nothing should register on the
Freya’s
radar.

“The men in the rear seats will be frogmen; their oxygen bottles have to be of metal, but at three miles will not register larger than a floating oil drum, not enough to cause alarm on the
Freya’s
bridge. At a range of three miles the divers take a compass bearing on the
Freya’s
stern, which they can see because it is illuminated, and drop overboard. They have luminescent wrist compasses, and swim by these.”

“Why not go for the bow?” asked the RAF group captain. “It’s darker there.”

“Partly because it would mean eliminating the man on lookout high up on the fo’c’sle, and he may be in walkie-talkie contact with the bridge,” said Fallon. “Partly because it’s a hell of a long walk down that deck, and they have a spotlight operable from the bridge. Partly because the superstructure, approached from the front, is a steel wall five stories high. We would climb it, but it has windows to cabins, some of which may be occupied.

“The four divers, one of whom will be me, rendezvous at the stern of the
Freya
. There should be a tiny overhang of a few feet. Now, there’s a man on top of the funnel, a hundred feet up. But people a hundred feet up tend to look outward rather than straight down. To help him in this, I want the
Argyll
to start flashing her searchlight to another nearby vessel, creating a spectacle for the man to watch. We will come up the stern from the water, having shed flippers, masks, oxygen bottles, and weighted belts. We will be bareheaded, barefoot, in rubber wet suits only. All weaponry carried in wide webbing belts round the waist.”

“How do you get up the side of the
Freya
carrying forty pounds of metal after a three-mile swim?” asked one of the ministry men.

Fallon smiled.

“It’s only thirty feet at most to the taffrail,” he said. “While practicing on the North Sea oil rigs, we’ve climbed a hundred sixty feet of vertical steel in four minutes.”

He saw no point in explaining the details of the fitness necessary for such a feat, nor of the equipment that made it possible.

The boffins had long ago developed for the SBS some remarkable climbing gear. Included among it were magnetic climbing clamps. These were like dinner plates, fringed with rubber so that they could be applied to metal without making a sound. The plate itself was rimmed with steel beneath the rubber, and this steel ring could be magnetized to enormous strength.

The magnetic force could be turned on or off by a thumb switch pressed by the man holding the grip on the back of the plate. The electrical charge came from a small but reliable nickel-cadmium battery inside the climbing plate.

The divers were trained to come out of the sea, reach upward and affix the first plate, then turn on the current. The magnet jammed the plate to the steel structure. Hanging on this, they reached higher and hung the second plate. Only when it was secure did they unlock the first disk, reach higher still, and reaffix it. Hand over hand, hanging on by fist grip, wrist, and forearm, they climbed out of the sea and upward—body, legs, feet, and equipment swinging free, pulling against the hands and wrists.

So strong were the magnets, so strong also the arms and shoulders, that the commandoes could climb an overhang of forty-five degrees if they had to.

“The first man goes up with the special clamps,” said Fallon, “trailing a rope behind him. If it is quiet on the poop deck, he fixes the rope, and the other three can be on deck inside ten seconds. Now, here, in the lee of the funnel assembly, this turbine housing should cast a shadow in the light thrown by the lamp above the door to the superstructure at A deck level. We group in this shadow. We’ll have black wet suits; black hands, feet, and faces.

“The first major hazard is getting across this patch of illuminated afterdeck from the shadow of the turbine housing to the main superstructure with all its living quarters.”

“So how do you do it?” asked the vice admiral, fascinated by this return from technology to the days of Nelson.

“We don’t, sir,” said Fallon. “We will be on the side of the funnel assembly away from where the
Argyll
is stationed. We hope the lookout atop the funnel will be looking at the
Argyll
, away from us. We move across from the shadow of the turbine housing, round the corner of the superstructure to this point here, outside the window of the dirty-linen store. We cut the plate- glass window in silence with a miniature blowtorch working off a small gas bottle, and go in through the window. The chances of the door of such a store being locked are pretty slim. No one pinches dirty linen, so no one locks such doors. By this time we will be inside the superstructure, emerging to a passage a few yards from the main stairway leading up to B, C, and D decks, and the bridge.”

“Where do you find the terrorist leader,” asked Sir Julian Flannery, “the man with the detonator?”

“On the way up the stairs we listen at every door for sounds of voices,” said Fallon. “If there are any, we open the door and eliminate everyone in the room with silenced automatics. Two men entering the cabin; two men outside on guard. All the way up the structure. Anyone met on the stairs, the same thing. That should bring us to D deck unobserved. Here we have to take a calculated gamble. One choice is the captain’s cabin; one man will take that choice. Open the door, step inside, and shoot without any question. Another man will take the chief engineer’s cabin on the same floor, other side of the ship. Same procedure. The last two men will cover the first officer’s and chief steward’s cabins and take the bridge itself; one man with grenades, the second with an Ingram. It’s too big an area, that bridge, to pick targets. Well just have to sweep it with the Ingram and take everybody in the place after the grenades have paralyzed them.”

“What if one of them is Captain Larsen?” asked a ministry man. Fallon studied the table.

“I’m sorry, there’s no way of identifying targets,” he said.

“Suppose none of the cabins or the bridge contains the leader? Suppose the man with the remote-control detonator is somewhere else? Out on deck taking the air? In the lavatory? Asleep in another cabin?”

Simon Fallon shrugged. “Bang,” he said, “big bang.”

“There are twenty-eight crewmen locked down below,” protested a scientist. “Can’t you get them out? Or at least up on deck where they could have a chance to swim for it?”