The Devil's Alternative (52 page)

“Go back home. Go back to Ålesund. Get out of this place. Look after Kurt and Kristina. Keep the house ready for me. When this is over, I am going to come home. You can believe that.”

“Come back with me. Now.”

“You know I have to go. The time is up.”

“Don’t go back to the ship,” she begged him. “They’ll kill you there.” She was sniffing furiously, trying not to cry, trying not to hurt him. “It’s my ship,” he said gently. “It’s my crew. You know I have to go.” He left her in Captain Preston’s armchair.

As he did so, the car bearing Adam Munro swung out of Downing Street, past the crowd of sightseers who hoped to catch a glimpse of the high and the mighty at this moment of crisis, and turned through Parliament Square for the Cromwell Road and the highway to Heathrow.

Five minutes later Thor Larsen was buckled by two Royal Navy seamen, their hair awash from the rotors of the Wessex above them, into the harness.

Captain Preston, with six of his officers and the four NATO captains, stood in a line a few yards away. The Wessex began to lift.

“Gentlemen,” said Captain Preston. Five hands rose to five braided caps in simultaneous salute.

Mike Manning watched the bearded sailor in the harness being borne away from him. From a hundred feet up, the Norwegian seemed to be looking down, straight at him.

He knows, thought Manning with horror. Oh, Jesus and Mary, he knows.

Thor Larsen walked into the day cabin of his own suite on the
Freya
with a submachine carbine at his back. The man he knew as Svoboda was in his usual chair. Larsen was directed into the one at the far end of the table.

“Did they believe you?” asked the Ukrainian.

“Yes,” said Larsen. “They believed me. And you were right. They were preparing an attack by frogmen after dark. It’s been called off.”

Drake snorted.

“Just as well,” he said. “If they had tried it, I’d have pressed this button without hesitation, suicide or no suicide. They’d have left me no alternative.”

At ten minutes before noon, President William Matthews laid down the telephone that had joined him for fifteen minutes to the British Premier in London, and looked at his three advisers. They had each heard the conversation on the Ampli-Vox.

“So that’s it,” he said. “The British are not going ahead with their night attack. Another of our options gone. That just about leaves us with the alternative of blowing the
Freya
to pieces ourselves. Is the warship on station?”

“In position, gun laid and loaded,” confirmed Stanislaw Poklewski.

“Unless this man Munro has some idea that would work,” suggested Robert Benson. “Will you agree to see him, Mr. President?”

“Bob, I’ll see the devil himself if he can propose some way of getting me off this hook,” said Matthews.

“One thing at least we may now be certain of,” said David Lawrence. “Maxim Rudin was not overreacting. He could do nothing other than what he has done, after all. In his fight with Yefrem Vishnayev, he, too, has no aces left. How the hell did those two in Moabit Prison ever get to shoot Yuri Ivanenko?”

“We have to assume the one who leads that group on the
Freya
helped them,” said Benson. “I’d dearly love to get my hands on that Svoboda.”

“No doubt you’d kill him,” said Lawrence with distaste.

“Wrong,” said Benson. “I’d enlist him. He’s tough, ingenious, and ruthless. He’s taken ten European governments and made them dance like puppets.”

It was noon in Washington, five P.M. in London, as the late-afternoon Concorde hoisted its stiltlike legs over the concrete of Heathrow, lifted its drooping spear of a nose toward the western sky, and climbed through the sound barrier toward the sunset.

The normal rules about not creating the sonic boom until well out over the sea had been overruled by orders from Downing Street. The pencil-slim dart pushed its four screaming Olympus engines to full power just after takeoff, and a hundred fifty thousand pounds of thrust flung the airliner toward the stratosphere.

The captain had estimated three hours to Washington, two hours ahead of the sun. Halfway across the Atlantic he told his Boston-bound passengers with deep regret that the Concorde would make a stopover of a few moments at Dulles International Airport, Washington, before heading back to Boston, for “operational reasons.”

It was seven P.M. in Western Europe but nine in Moscow when Yefrem Vishnayev finally got the personal and highly unusual Saturday evening meeting with Maxim Rudin for which he had been clamoring all day.

The old director of Soviet Russia agreed to meet his Party theoretician in the Politburo meeting room on the third floor of the Arsenal building.

When he arrived, Vishnayev was backed by Marshal Nikolai Kerensky, but he found Rudin supported by his allies, Dmitri Rykov and Vassili Petrov.

“I note that few appear to be enjoying this brilliant spring weekend in the countryside,” he said acidly.

Rudin shrugged. “I was in the midst of enjoying a private dinner with two friends,” he said. “What brings you, Comrades Vishnayev and Kerensky, to the Kremlin at this hour?”

The room was bare of secretaries and guards; it contained just the five power bosses of the Soviet Union in angry confrontation beneath the globe lights in the high ceiling.

“Treason,” snapped Vishnayev. “Treason, Comrade Secretary-General.” The silence was ominous, menacing.

“Whose treason?” asked Rudin.

Vishnayev leaned across the table and spoke two feet from Rudin’s face.

“The treason of two filthy Jews from Lvov,” he hissed. “The treason of two men now in jail in Berlin. Two men whose freedom is being sought by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea. The treason of Mishkin and Lazareff.”

“It is true,” said Rudin carefully, “that the murder last December by these two of Captain Rudenko of Aeroflot constitutes—”

“Is it not also true,” asked Vishnayev menacingly, “that these two murderers also killed Yuri Ivanenko?”

Maxim Rudin would dearly have liked to shoot a sideways glance at Vassili Petrov by his side.

Something had gone wrong. There had been a leak.

Petrov’s lips set in a hard, straight line. He, too, now controlling the KGB through General Abrassov, knew that the circle of men aware of the real truth was small, very small. The man who had spoken, he was sure, was Colonel Kukushkin, who had first failed to protest his master, and then failed to liquidate his master’s killers. He was trying to buy his career, perhaps even his life, by changing camps and confiding to Vishnayev.

“It is certainly suspected,” said Rudin carefully. “Not a proven fact.”

“I understand it
is
a proven fact,” snapped Vishnayev. “These two men have been positively identified as the killers of our dear comrade, Yuri Ivanenko.”

Rudin reflected on how intensely Vishnayev had loathed Ivanenko and wished him dead and gone.

“The point is academic,” said Rudin. “Even for the killing of Captain Rudenko, the two murderers are destined to be liquidated inside their Berlin jail.”

“Perhaps not,” said Vishnayev with well-simulated outrage. “It appears they may be released by West Germany and sent to Israel. The West is weak; it cannot hold out for long against the terrorists on the
Freya
. If those two reach Israel alive, they will talk. I think, my friends—oh, yes, I truly think we all know what they will say.”

“What are you asking for?” said Rudin.

Vishnayev rose. Taking his example, Kerensky rose, too.

“I am
demanding
,” said Vishnayev, “an extraordinary plenary meeting of the full Politburo here in this room tomorrow night at this hour, nine o’clock. On a matter of exceptional national urgency. That is my right, Comrade Secretary-General?”

Rudin nodded slowly. He looked up at Vishnayev from under his eyebrows. “Yes,” he growled, “that is your right.”

“Then until this hour tomorrow,” snapped the Party theoretician, and stalked from the chamber. Rudin turned to Petrov.

“Colonel Kukushkin?” he asked.

“It looks like it. Either way, Vishnayev knows.”

“Any possibility of eliminating Mishkin and Lazareff inside Moabit?” Petrov shook his head.

“Not by tomorrow. No chance of mounting a fresh operation under a new man in that time. Is there any way of pressuring the West not to release them at all?”

“No,” said Rudin shortly. “I have brought every pressure on Matthews that I know how. There is nothing more I can bring to bear on him. It is up to him now, him and that damned German Chancellor in Bonn.”

“Tomorrow,” said Rykov soberly, “Vishnayev and his people will produce Kukushkin and demand that we hear him out. And if by then Mishkin and Lazareff are in Israel ...”

At eight P.M. European time, Andrew Drake, speaking through Captain Thor Larsen from the

Freya
, issued his final ultimatum.

At nine A.M. the following morning, in thirteen hours, the
Freya
would vent one hundred thousand tons of crude oil into the North Sea unless Mishkin and Lazareff were airborne and on

their way to Tel Aviv. At eight P.M., unless they were in Israel and identified as genuine, the
Freya

would blow herself apart.

“That’s positively the last straw!” shouted Dietrich Busch when he heard the ultimatum ten minutes after it was broadcast from the
Freya
. “Who does William Matthews think he is? No one— absolutely no one—is going to force the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany to carry on with this charade. It is over!”

At twenty past eight, the West German government announced that it was unilaterally releasing Mishkin and Lazareff the following morning at eight A.M.

At eight-thirty, a personal coded message arrived on the U.S.S.
Moran
for Captain Mike Manning. When decoded, it read simply: “Prepare for fire order seven A.M. tomorrow.”

He screwed it into a ball in his fist and looked out through the porthole toward the
Freya
. She was lit like a Christmas tree, flood and arc lights bathing her towering superstructure in a glare of white light. She sat on the ocean five miles away, doomed, helpless; waiting for one of her two executioners to finish her off.

While Thor Larsen was speaking on the
Freya’s
radiotelephone to Maas Control, the Concorde bearing Adam Munro swept over the perimeter fence at Dulles International Airport, flaps and undercarriage hanging, nose high, a delta-shaped bird of prey seeking to grip the runway.

The bewildered passengers, like goldfish peering through the tiny windows, noted only that she did not taxi toward the terminal building, but simply hove to, engines running, in a parking bay beside the taxi track. A gangway was waiting, along with a black limousine.

A single passenger, carrying no mackintosh and no hand luggage, rose from near the front, stepped out of the open door, and ran down the steps. Seconds later the gangway was withdrawn, the door closed, and the apologetic captain announced that they would take off at once for Boston.

Adam Munro stepped into the limousine beside the two burly escorts and was immediately relieved of his passport. The two Secret Service agents studied it intently as the car swept across the expanse of tarmac to where a small helicopter stood in the lee of a hangar, rotors whirling.

The agents were formal, polite. They had their orders. Before he boarded the helicopter, Munro was exhaustively frisked for hidden weapons. When they were satisfied, they escorted him aboard and the whirlybird lifted off, beading across the Potomac for Washington and the spreading lawns of the White House. It was half an hour after touchdown at Dulles, three-thirty on a warm Washington spring afternoon, when they landed, barely a hundred yards from the Oval Office windows.

The two agents escorted Munro across the lawns to where a narrow street ran between the big gray Executive Office Building, a Victorian monstrosity of porticos and columns intersected by a bewildering variety of different types of window, and the much smaller, white West Wing, a squat box partly sunken below ground level.

It was to a small door at the basement level that the two agents led Munro. Inside, they identified themselves and their visitor to a uniformed policeman sitting at a tiny desk. Munro was surprised; this was all a far cry from the sweeping facade of the front entrance to the residence on Pennsylvania Avenue, so well-known to tourists and beloved of Americans.

The policeman checked with someone by house phone, and a woman secretary came out of an elevator several minutes later. She led the three past the policeman and down a corridor, at the end of which they mounted a narrow staircase. One floor up, they were at ground level, stepping through a door into a thickly carpeted hallway, where a male aide in a charcoal-gray suit glanced with raised eyebrows at the unshaven, disheveled Englishman.

“You’re to come straight through, Mr. Munro,” he said, and led the way. The two Secret Service

agents stayed with the woman.

Munro was led down the corridor, past a small bust of Abraham Lincoln. Two staffers coming the other way passed in silence. The man leading him veered to the left and confronted another uniformed policeman sitting at a desk outside a white, paneled door, set flush with the wall. The policeman examined Munro’s passport again, looked at his appearance with evident disapproval, reached under his desk and pressed a button. A buzzer sounded, and the aide pushed at the door. When it opened, he stepped back and ushered Munro past him. Munro took two paces forward and found himself in the Oval Office. The door clicked shut behind him.

The four men in the room were evidently waiting for him, all four staring toward the curved door now set back in the wall where he stood. He recognized President William Matthews, but this was a President as no voter had ever seen him: tired, haggard, ten years older than the smiling, confident, mature but energetic image on the posters.

Robert Benson rose and approached him.

“I’m Bob Benson,” he said. He drew Munro toward the desk. William Matthews leaned across and shook hands. Munro was introduced to David Lawrence and Stanislaw Poklewski, both of whom he recognized from their newspaper pictures.