The Devil's Alternative (48 page)

“He can’t ask me to do that,” he breathed. “No man can ask a sailor to do that.”

But the message did, and it was unequivocal: “In the event the West German government seeks to release the hijackers in Berlin unilaterally, the U.S.S.
Moran
is to sink the supertanker
Freya
by shellfire, using all possible measures to ignite cargo and minimize environmental damage. This action will be taken on receipt by U.S.S.
Moran
of the signal THUNDERBOLT repeat THUNDERBOLT. Destroy message.”

Mike Manning was forty-three years old, married, with four children who lived with their mother outside Norfolk, Virginia. He had been an officer in the United States Navy for twenty-one years and had never yet thought to question a superior’s order.

He walked to the porthole and looked across the five miles of ocean to the low outline between himself and the climbing sun. He thought of his magnesium-based starshells slamming into her unprotected skin, penetrating the volatile crude oil beneath. He thought of twenty-eight men, crouched deep beneath the waterline, eighty feet beneath the waves, in a steel coffin, waiting for

rescue, thinking of their own families. He crumpled the paper in his hand. “Mr. President,” he whispered, “I don’t know if I can do that.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

0800 to 1500

DETSKY MIR means “Children’s World” and is Moscow’s premier toyshop—four stories of dolls and playthings, puppets and games. Compared to a Western equivalent, the layout is drab and the stock shabby, but it is the best the Soviet capital has, apart from the hard-currency Beriozka shops, where mainly foreigners go.

By an unintended irony it is across Dzerzhinsky Square from the KGB headquarters, which is definitely not a children’s world. Adam Munro was at the ground-floor soft-toys counter just before ten A.M. Moscow time, two hours later than North Sea time. He began to examine a nylon bear as if debating whether to buy it for his offspring.

Two minutes after ten, someone moved to the counter beside him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she was pale, her normally full lips drawn, tight, the color of cigarette ash.

She nodded. Her voice was pitched, like his own, low, conversational, uninvolved. “I managed to see the transcript, Adam. It’s serious.”

She picked up a hand puppet shaped like a small monkey in artificial fur, and told him quietly what she had discovered.

“That’s impossible,” he muttered. “He’s still convalescing from a heart attack.”

“No. He was shot dead last October thirty-first in the middle of the night on a street in Kiev.”

Two salesgirls leaning against the wall twenty feet away eyed them without curiosity and returned to their gossip. One of the few advantages of shopping in Moscow is that one is guaranteed complete privacy from assistance by the sales staff.

“And those two in Berlin were the ones?” asked Munro.

“It seems so,” she said dully. “The fear is that if they escape to Israel they will hold a press conference and inflict an intolerable humiliation on the Soviet Union.”

“Causing Maxim Rudin to fall,” breathed Munro. “No wonder he will not countenance their release. He cannot. He, too, has no alternative. And you—are you safe, darling?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There were suspicions. Unspoken, but they were there. Soon there will be a report from the man on the telephone switchboard about your call; the gateman will report about my drive in the small hours. It will come together.”

“Listen, Valentina, I will get you out of here. Quickly, in the next few days.”

For the first time, she turned and faced him. He saw that her eyes were brimming.

“It’s over, Adam. I’ve done what you asked of me, and now it’s too late.” She reached up and kissed him briefly, before the astonished gaze of the salesgirls. “Good-bye, Adam, my love. I’m sorry.”

She turned, paused for a moment to collect herself, and walked away, through the glass doors to the street, back through the gap in the Wall into the East. From where he stood with a plastic-faced milkmaid doll in his hand, he saw her reach the pavement and turn out of sight. A man in a gray trench coat, who had been wiping the windshield of a car, straightened, nodded to a colleague behind the windshield, and strolled after her.

Adam Munro felt the grief and the anger rising in his throat like a ball of sticky acid. The sounds of the shop muted as a roaring invaded his ears. His hand closed around the head of the doll,

crushing, cracking, splintering the smiling pink face beneath the lace cap. A salesgirl appeared rapidly at his side.

“You’ve broken it,” she said. That will be four rubles.”

Compared with the whirlwind of public and media concern that had concentrated on the West German Chancellor the previous afternoon, the recriminations that poured upon Bonn that Saturday morning were more like a hurricane.

The Foreign Ministry received a continual stream of requests couched in the most urgent terms from the embassies of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Holland, and Belgium, asking that their ambassadors be received. Each wish was granted, and each ambassador asked in the courteous phraseology of diplomacy the same question: What the hell is going on?

Newspapers, television, and radio operations called in all their staffers from weekend leave and tried to give the affair saturation coverage, which was not easy. There were no pictures of the
Freya
since the hijacking, save those taken by the French free-lance, who was under arrest and his pictures confiscated. In fact the same pictures were under study in Paris, but the shots from the successive Nimrods were just as good, and the French government was receiving them, anyway.

For lack of hard news, the papers hunted anything they could go for. Two enterprising Englishmen bribed the Hilton Hotel staff in Rotterdam to lend them their uniforms, and tried to reach the penthouse suite where Harry Wennerstrom and Lisa Larsen were under siege.

Others sought out former prime ministers, cabinet officeholders, and tanker captains for their views. Extraordinary sums were waved in the faces of the wives of the crewmen, almost all of whom had been traced, to be photographed praying for their husbands’ deliverance.

One former mercenary commander offered to storm the
Freya
alone for a million-dollar fee; four archbishops and seventeen parliamentarians of varying persuasions and ambitions offered themselves as hostages in exchange for Captain Larsen and his crew.

“Separately, or in job lots?” snapped Dietrich Busch when he was informed. “I wish William Matthews were on board instead of those good sailors. I’d hold out till Christmas.”

By midmorning, the leaks to the two German stars of press and radio were beginning to have their effect. Their respective comments on German radio and television were picked up by the news agencies and Germany-based correspondents and given wider coverage. The view began to percolate that Dietrich Busch had in fact been acting in the hours before dawn under massive American pressure.

Bonn declined to confirm this, but refused to deny it, either. The sheer evasiveness of the government spokesman there told the press its own story.

As dawn broke over Washington, five hours behind Europe, the emphasis switched to the White House. By six A.M. in Washington the White House press corps was clamoring for an interview with the President himself. They had to be satisfied, but were not, with a harassed and evasive official spokesman. The spokesman was evasive only because he did not know what to say; his repeated appeals to the Oval Office brought only further instructions that he tell the newshounds the matter was a European affair and the Europeans must do as they thought best. Which threw the affair back into the lap of an increasingly outraged German Chancellor.

“How much longer can this go on?” shouted a thoroughly shaken William Matthews to his advisers as he pushed away a plate of scrambled eggs just after six A.M. Washington time.

The same question was being asked, but not answered, in a score of offices across America and Europe that unquiet Saturday morning.

From his office in Texas, the owner of the one million tons of Mubarraq crude lying dormant but dangerous beneath the
Freya’s
deck was on the line to Washington.

“I don’t care what the hell time of the morning it is,” he shouted to the party campaign manager’s secretary. “You get him on the line and tell him this is Clint Blake, you hear?”

When the campaign manager of the political party to which the President belonged finally came on the line, he was not a happy man. When he put the receiver back in its cradle, he was downright morose. A man who all but controls more than a hundred delegates to the national convention is no small potatoes, and Clint Blake’s threat to do a John Connelly and switch parties was no joke.

It seemed to matter little to Blake that the cargo was fully insured against loss by Lloyd’s. He was one very angry Texan that morning.

Harry Wennerstrom was on the line most of the morning to Stockholm, calling every one of his friends and contacts in shipping, banking, and government to bring pressure on the Swedish Premier. The pressure was effective, and it was passed on to Bonn.

In London, the chairman of Lloyd’s, Sir Murray Kelso, found the Permanent Under Secretary to the Department of the Environment still at his desk in Whitehall. Saturday is not normally a day when the senior members of Britain’s civil service are to be found at their desks, but this was no normal Saturday. Sir Rupert Mossbank had driven hastily back from his country home before dawn when the news came from Downing Street that Mishkin and Lazareff were not to be re- leased. He showed his visitor to a chair.

“Damnable business,” said Sir Murray. “Perfectly appalling,” agreed Sir Rupert.

He preferred the Butter Osbornes, and the two knights sipped their tea.

“The thing is,” said Sir Murray at length, “the sums involved are really quite vast. Close to a billion dollars. Even if the victim countries of the oil spillage if the
Freya
blows up were to sue West Germany rather than us, we’d still have to carry the loss of the ship, cargo, and crew. That’s about four hundred million dollars.”

“You’d be able to cover it, of course,” said Sir Rupert anxiously. Lloyd’s was more than just a company, it was an institution, and as Sir Rupert’s department covered merchant shipping, he was concerned.

“Oh, yes, we would cover it. Have to,” said Sir Murray. “Thing is, it’s such a sum it would have to be reflected in the country’s invisible earnings for the year. Probably tip the balance, actually. And what with the new application for another International Monetary Fund Loan ...”

“It’s a German question, you know,” said Mossbank. “Not really up to us.”

“Nevertheless, one might press the Germans a bit over this one. Hijackers are bastards, of course, but in this case, why not just let those two blighters in Berlin go? Good riddance to them.”

“Leave it to me,” said Mossbank. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Privately, he knew he could do nothing. The confidential file locked in his safe told him Major Fallon was going in by kayak in eleven hours, and until then the Prime Minister’s orders were that the line had to hold.

Chancellor Dietrich Busch received the news of the intended underwater attack in a midmorning face-to-face interview with the British Ambassador. He was slightly mollified.

“So that’s what it’s all about,” he said when he had examined the plan unfolded before him. “Why could I not have been told of this before?”

“We were not sure whether it would work before,” said the Ambassador smoothly. Those were his instructions. “We were working on it through the afternoon of yesterday and last night. By dawn we were certain it was perfectly feasible.”

“What chance of success do you give yourselves?” asked Dietrich Busch.

The Ambassador cleared his throat.

“We estimate the odds at three to one in our favor,” he said. “The sun sets at seven-thirty.

Darkness is complete by nine. The men are going in at ten tonight.”

The Chancellor looked at his watch. Twelve hours to go. If the British tried and succeeded, much of the credit would go to their frogmen, but much also to him for keeping his nerve. If they failed, theirs would be the responsibility.

“So it all depends now on this Major Fallon. Very well, Ambassador, I will continue to play my part until ten tonight.”

Apart from her batteries of guided missiles, the U.S.S.
Moran
was armed with two five-inch Mark 45 naval guns, one forward, one aft. They were of the most modern type available, radar-aimed and computer-controlled.

Each could fire a complete magazine of twenty shells in rapid succession without reloading, and the sequence of various types of shell could be preset on the computer.

The old days when naval guns’ ammunition had to be manually hauled out of the deep magazine, hoisted up to the gun turret by steam power, and rammed into the breech by sweating gunners, were long gone. On the
Moran
the shells would be selected by type and performance from the stock in the magazine by the computer, the shells brought to the firing turret automatically, the five-inch guns loaded, fired, voided, reloaded, and fired again, without a human hand.

The aiming was by radar; the invisible eyes of the ship would seek out the target according to the programmed instructions, adjust for wind, range, and the movement of either target or firing platform, and once locked on, hold that aim until given fresh orders. The computer would work together with the eyes of radar, absorbing within fractions of a second any tiny shift of the
Moran
herself, the target, or the wind strength between them. Once locked on, the target could begin to move, the
Moran
could go anywhere she liked; the guns would simply move on silent bearings, keeping their deadly muzzles pointed to just where the shells should go. Wild seas could force the
Moran
to pitch and roll; the target could yaw and swing; it made no difference, the computer compensated. Even the pattern in which the homing shells should fall could be preset.