The Devil's Alternative (54 page)

Within the cockpit, the aircraft’s own refrigeration system kept its occupants comfortably cool in their g-suits.

“Can I talk?” asked Munro. “Sure,” said the pilot laconically. “Where are we now?”

“Over the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” said O’Sullivan, “heading for Newfoundland.” “How many miles to Moscow?”

“From Andrews, four thousand eight hundred fifty-six miles.” “How long for the flight?”

“Three hours and fifty minutes.”

Munro calculated. They had taken off at six P.M. Washington time, eleven P.M. European time. That would be one A.M. in Moscow on Sunday, April 3. They would touch down at around five

A.M. Moscow time. If Rudin agreed to his plan, and the Blackbird could bring him back to Berlin, they would gain two hours by flying the other way. There was just time to make Berlin by dawn.

They had been flying for just under one hour when Canada’s last landfall at Cape Harrison drifted far beneath them and they were over the cruel North Atlantic, bound for the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.

“Mr. President Rudin, please hear me out,” said William Matthews. He was speaking earnestly into a small microphone on his desk, the so-called hot line, which in fact is not a telephone at all. From an amplifier to one side of the microphone, the listeners in the Oval Office could hear the mutter of the simultaneous translator speaking in Russian into Rudin’s ear in Moscow.

“Maxim Andreevich, I believe we are both too old in this business, that we have worked too hard and too long to secure peace for our peoples, to be frustrated and cheated at this late stage by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea.”

There was silence for a few seconds; then the gruff voice of Rudin came on the line, speaking in Russian. By the President’s side a young aide from the State Department rattled off the translation in a low voice.

“Then, William, my friend, you must destroy the tanker, take away the weapon of blackmail, for I can do no other than I have done.”

Bob Benson shot the President a warning look. There was no need to tell Rudin the West already knew the real truth about Ivanenko.

“I know this,” said Matthews into the mike. “But I cannot destroy the tanker, either. To do so would destroy me. There may be another way. I ask you with all my heart to receive this man who is even now airborne from here and heading for Moscow. He has a proposal that may be the way out for us both.”

“Who is this American?” asked Rudin.

“He is not American, he is British,” said President Matthews. “His name is Adam Munro.” There was silence for several moments. Finally the voice from Russia came back grudgingly.

“Give my staff the details of his flight plan—height, speed, course. I will order that his airplane be allowed through, and will receive him personally when he arrives.
Spakoinyo notch
, William.”

“He wishes you a peaceful night, Mr. President,” said the translator.

“He must be joking,” said William Matthews. “Give his people the Blackbird’s flight path, and tell Blackbird to proceed on course.”

On board the
Freya
, it struck midnight. Captives and captors entered their third and last day. Before another midnight struck, Mishkin and Lazareff would be in Israel, or the
Freya
and all aboard her would be dead.

Despite his threat to choose a different cabin, Drake was confident there would be no night attack from the Marines, and elected to stay where he was.

Thor Larsen faced him grimly across the table in the day cabin. For both men the exhaustion was almost total. Larsen, fighting back the waves of weariness that tried to force him to place his head in his arms and go to sleep, continued his solo game of seeking to keep Svoboda awake, too, pinpricking the Ukrainian to make him reply.

The surest way of provoking Svoboda, he had discovered, the surest way of making him use up his last remaining reserve of nervous energy, was to draw the conversation to the question of Russians.

“I don’t believe in your popular uprising, Mr. Svoboda,” he said. “I don’t believe the Russians will ever rise against their masters in the Kremlin. Bad, inefficient, brutal they may be; but they have only to raise the specter of the foreigner, and they can rely on that limitless Russian patriotism.”

For a moment it seemed the Norwegian might have gone too far. Svoboda’s hand closed over the butt of his gun; his face went white with rage.

“Damn and blast their patriotism!” he shouted, rising to his feet “I am sick and tired of hearing Western writers and liberals go on and on about this so-called marvelous Russian patriotism.

“What kind of patriotism is it that can feed only on the destruction of other people’s love of homeland? What about
my
patriotism, Larsen? What about the Ukrainians’ love for their enslaved homeland? What about Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians? Are they not allowed any patriotism? Must it all be sublimated to this endless and sickening love of Russia?

“I hate their bloody patriotism. It is mere chauvinism, and always has been, since Peter and Ivan.

It can exist only through the conquest and slavery of other, surrounding nations.”

He was standing over Larsen, halfway around the table, waving his gun, panting from the exertion of shouting. He took a grip on himself and returned to his seat. Pointing the gun barrel at Thor Larsen like a forefinger, he told him:

“One day, maybe not too long from now, the Russian empire will begin to crack. One day soon, the Rumanians will exercise
their
patriotism, and the Poles and Czechs. Followed by the East Germans and Hungarians. And the Balts and Ukrainians, the Georgians and Armenians. The

Russian empire will crack and crumble, the way the Roman and British empires cracked, because at last the arrogance of their mandarins became insufferable.

“Within twenty-four hours I am personally going to put the cold chisel into the mortar and swing one gigantic hammer onto it. And if you or anyone else gets in my way, you’ll die. And you had better believe it.”

He put the gun down and spoke more softly.

“In any case, Busch has acceded to my demands, and this time he will not go back on his promise. This time, Mishkin and Lazareff
will
reach Israel.”

Thor Larsen observed the younger man clinically. It had been risky; he had nearly used his gun. But he had also nearly lost his concentration; he had nearly come within range. One more time, one single further attempt, in the sad hour just before dawn ...

Coded and urgent messages had passed all night between Washington and Omaha, and from there to the many radar stations mat make up the eyes and ears of the Western alliance in an electronic ring around the Soviet Union. Distant eyes had seen the shooting star of the blip from the Blackbird moving east of Iceland toward Scandinavia on its route to Moscow. Forewarned, the watchers raised no alarm.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, messages out of Moscow alerted the Soviet watchers to the presence of the incoming plane. Forewarned, no fighters scrambled to intercept it. An air highway was cleared from the Gulf of Bothnia to Moscow, and the Blackbird stuck to its route.

But one fighter base had apparently not heard the warning; or hearing it, had not heeded it; or had been given a secret command from somewhere deep inside the Defense Ministry, countermanding the Kremlin’s orders.

High in the Arctic, east of Kirkenes, two Mig-25s clawed their way from the snow toward the stratosphere on an interception course. These were the 25-E versions, ultramodern, better powered and armed than the older version of the seventies and the 25-A.

They were capable of 2.8 times the speed of sound, and of a maximum altitude of eighty thousand feet. But the six Acrid air-to-air missiles that each had slung beneath its wings would roar on, another twenty thousand feet above that They were climbing on full power with afterburner, leaping upward at over ten thousand feet per minute.

The Blackbird was over Finland, heading for Lake Ladoga and Leningrad, when Colonel O’Sullivan grunted into the microphone.

“We have company.”

Munro came out of his reverie. Though he understood little of the technology of the SR-71, the small radar screen in front of him told its own story. There were two small blips on it, approaching fast.

“Who are they?” he asked, and for a moment a twinge of fear moved in the pit of his stomach. Maxim Rudin had given his personal clearance. He wouldn’t revoke it, surely. But would someone else?

Up front, Colonel O’Sullivan had his own duplicate radar scanner. He watched the speed of approach for several seconds.

“Mig-twenty-fives,” he said. “At sixty thousand feet and climbing fast. Those goddam Rooshians. Knew we should never have trusted them.”

“You turning back to Sweden?” asked Munro.

“Nope,” said the colonel. “President of the U.S. of A. said to git you to Moscow, Limey, and you are going to Moscow.”

Colonel O’Sullivan threw his two afterburners into the game; Munro felt a kick as from a mule in

the base of the spine as the power increased. The Mach counter began to move upward, toward and finally through the mark representing three times the speed of sound. On the radar screen the approach of the blips slowed and halted.

The nose of the Blackbird rose slightly; in the rarefied atmosphere, seeking a tenuous lift from the weak air around her, the aircraft slid through the eighty-thousand-foot mark and kept climbing.

Below them, Major Pyotr Kuznetsov, leading the two-plane detail, pushed his two Tumansky single-shaft jet engines to the limit of performance. His Soviet technology was good, the best available, but he was producing five thousand fewer pounds of thrust with his two engines than the twin American jets above him. Moreover, he was carrying external weaponry, whose drag was acting as a brake on his speed.

Nevertheless, the two Migs swept through seventy thousand feet and approached rocket range.

Major Kuznetsov armed his six missiles and snapped an order to his wingman to follow suit.

The Blackbird was nudging ninety thousand feet, and Colonel O’Sullivan’s radar told him his pursuers were over seventy-five thousand feet and nearly within rocket range. In straight pursuit they could not hold him on speed and altitude, but they were on an intercept course, cutting the corner from their flight path to his.

“If I thought they were escorts,” he said to Munro, “I’d let the bastards come close. But I just never did trust Rooshians.”

Munro was sticky with sweat beneath his thermal clothing. He had read the Nightingale file; the colonel had not.

“They’re not escorts,” he said. “They have orders to see me dead.”

“You don’t say,” came the drawl in his ear. “Goddam conspiring bastards. President of the U.S. of A. wants you alive, Limey. In Moscow.”

The Blackbird pilot threw on the whole battery of his electronic countermeasures. Rings of invisible jamming waves radiated out from the speeding black jet, filling the atmosphere for miles around with the radar equivalent of a bucket of sand in the eyes.

The small screen in front of Major Kuznetsov became a seething snowfield, like a television set when the main tube blows out. The digital display showing him he was closing with his victim and when to fire his rockets was still fifteen seconds short of firing time. Slowly it began to unwind, telling him he had lost his target somewhere up there in the freezing stratosphere.

Thirty seconds later the two hunters keeled onto their wing tips and dropped away down the sky to their Arctic base.

Of the five airports that surround Moscow, one of them, Vnukovo II, is never seen by foreigners. It is reserved for the Party elite and their fleet of jets maintained at peak readiness by the Air Force. It was here, at five A.M. local time, that Colonel O’Sullivan put the Blackbird onto Russian soil.

When the cooling jet reached the parking bay, it was surrounded by a group of officers wrapped in thick coats and fur hats, for early April is still bitter in Moscow before dawn. The Arizonan lifted the cockpit canopy on its hydraulic struts and gazed at the surrounding crowd with horror.

“Rooshians,” he breathed. “Messing all over my bird.” He unbuckled and stood up. “Hey, get your mother-loving hands off this machine, ya hear?”

Adam Munro left the desolate colonel trying to prevent the Russian Air Force from finding the flush caps leading to the refueling valves, and was whisked away in a black limousine, accompanied by two bodyguards from the Kremlin staff. In the car he was allowed to peel off his g-suit and dress again in his trousers and jacket, both of which had spent the journey rolled up between his knees and looked as if they had just been machine-washed.

Forty-five minutes later the Zil, preceded by the two motorcycle outriders who had cleared the

roads into Moscow, shot through the Borovitsky Gate into the Kremlin, skirted the Great Palace, and headed for the side door to the Arsenal Building. At two minutes to six, Adam Munro was shown into the private apartment of the leader of the USSR, to find an old man in a dressing gown, nursing a cup of warm milk. He was waved to an upright chair. The door closed behind him.

“So you are Adam Munro,” said Maxim Rudin. “Now, what is this proposal from President Matthews?”

Munro sat in the straight-backed chair and looked across the desk at Maxim Rudin. He had seen him several times at state functions, but never this close. The old man looked weary and strained.

There was no interpreter present, Rudin spoke no English. In the hours while he had been in the air, Munro realized, Rudin had checked his name and knew perfectly well he was a diplomat from the British Embassy who spoke Russian.

“The proposal, Mr. Secretary-General,” Munro began in fluent Russian, “is a possible way whereby the terrorists on the supertanker
Freya
can be persuaded to leave that ship without having secured what they came for.”

“Let me make one thing clear, Mr. Munro. There is to be no more talk of the liberation of Mishkin and Lazareff.”

“Indeed not, sir. In fact, I had hoped we might talk of Yuri Ivanenko.”