The Devil's Alternative (57 page)

Munro reentered Mishkin’s cell. He helped the young man into a sitting position on his bed, back to the wall.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said Mishkin, and smiled. They were speaking in Russian, but Mishkin would never remember it.

Munro opened his flat tin box, extracted two halves of a long, torpedo-shaped capsule called a spansule, such as is often used as a cold remedy, and screwed the two ends together.

“I want you to take this pill,” he said, and held it out with a glass of water. “Sure,” said Mishkin, and swallowed it without demur.

From his attaché case Munro took a battery-operated wall clock and adjusted a timer at the back. Then he hung it on the wall. The hands read eight o’clock but were not in motion. He left Mishkin sitting on his bed, and returned to the cell of the other man. Five minutes later the job was finished. He repacked his bag and left the cell corridor.

“They’re to remain in isolation until the aircraft is ready for them,” he told the MP sergeant at the orderly room desk as he passed through. “No one to see them at all. Base commander’s orders.”

For the first time Andrew Drake was speaking in his own voice to the Dutch Premier, Jan Grayling. Later, English linguistics experts, analyzing the tape recording made of the conversation, would place the accent as having originated within a twenty-mile radius of the city of Bradford, England, but by then it would be too late.

“These are the terms for the arrival of Mishkin and Lazareff in Israel,” said Drake. “I shall expect no later than one hour after the takeoff from Berlin an assurance from Premier Golen that they will be fulfilled. If they are not, I shall regard the agreement as null and void.

“One: the two are to be led from the aircraft on foot and at a slow pace past the observation terrace on top of the main terminal building at Ben-Gurion Airport.

“Two: access to that terrace is to be open to the public. No controls of identity or screening of the public is to take place by the Israeli security force.

“Three: if there has been any switch of the prisoners, if any look-alike actors are playing their part, I shall know within hours.

“Four: three hours before the airplane lands at Ben-Gurion, the Israeli radio is to publish the time of its arrival and inform everyone that any person who wishes to come and witness their arrival is welcome to do so. The broadcast is to be in Hebrew and English, French and German. That is all.”

“Mr. Svoboda,” Jan Grayling cut in urgently, “all these demands have been noted and will be passed immediately to the Israel! government. I am sure they will agree. Please do not cut contact. I have urgent information from the British in West Berlin.”

“Go ahead,” said Drake curtly.

“The RAF technicians working on the executive Jet in the hangar at Gatow airfield have reported a serious electrical fault developed this morning in one of the engines during testing. I implore you to believe this is no trick. They are working frantically to put the fault right. But there will be a delay of an hour or two.”

“If this is a trick, it’s going to cost your beaches a deposit of one hundred thousand tons of crude oil,” snapped Drake.

“It is not a trick,” said Grayling urgently. “All aircraft occasionally suffer a technical fault. It is disastrous that this should happen to the RAF plane right now. But it has, and it will be mended— is being mended, even as we speak.”

There was silence for a while as Drake thought.

“I want takeoff witnessed by four différent national radio reporters, each in live contact with his head office. I want live reports by each of that takeoff. They must be from the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, the BBC, and France’s ORTF. All in English and all within five minutes of takeoff.”

Jan Grayling sounded relieved.

“I will ensure the RAF personnel at Gatow permit these four reporters to witness the takeoff,” he said.

“They had better,” said Drake. “I am extending the venting of the oil by three hours. At noon we start pumping one hundred thousand tons into the sea.”

There was a click as the line went dead.

Premier Benyamin Golen was at his desk in his office in Jerusalem that Sunday morning. The Sabbath was over, and it was a normal working day; it was also past ten o’clock, two hours later

than in Western Europe.

The Dutch Prime Minister was barely off the telephone before the small unit of Mossad agents who had established themselves in an apartment in Rotterdam were relaying the message from the
Freya
back to Israel. They beat the diplomatic channels by more than an hour.

It was the Premier’s personal adviser on security matters who brought him the transcript of the

Freya
broadcast and laid it silently on his desk. Golen read it quickly. “What are they after?” he inquired.

“They are taking precautions against a switch of the prisoners,” said the adviser. “It would have been an obvious ploy—to make up two young men to pass for Mishkin and Lazareff at first glance, and effect a substitution.”

“Then who is going to recognize the real Mishkin and Lazareff here in Israel?” The security adviser shrugged.

“Someone on that observation terrace,” he said. “They have to have a colleague here in Israel who can recognize the men on sight—more probably someone whom Mishkin and Lazareff themselves can recognize.”

“And after recognition?”

“Some message or signal will presumably have to be passed to the media for broadcasting, to confirm to the men on the
Freya
that their friends have reached Israel safely. Without that message, they will think they have been tricked and go ahead with their deed.”

“Another of them? Here in Israel? I’m not having that,” said Benyamin Golen. “We may have to play host to Mishkin and Lazareff, but not to any more. I want that observation terrace put under clandestine scrutiny. If any watcher on that terrace receives a signal from these two when they arrive, I want him followed. He must be allowed to pass his message, then arrest him.”

On the
Freya
the morning ticked by with agonizing slowness. Every fifteen minutes Andrew Drake, scanning the wave bands of his portable radio, picked up English-language news broadcasts from the Voice of America or the BBC World Service. Each bore the same message: there had been no takeoff. The mechanics were still working on the faulty engine of the Dominie.

Shortly after nine o’clock the four radio reporters designated as the witnesses to the takeoff were admitted to the Gatow Air Base and escorted by Military Police to the officers’ mess, where they were offered coffee and biscuits. Direct telephone facilities were established to their Berlin offices, whence radio circuits were held open to their native countries. None of them met Adam Munro, who had borrowed the base commander’s private office and was speaking to London.

In the lee of the cruiser
Argyll
the three fast patrol boats
Cutlass
,
Sabre
, and
Scimitar
waited at their moorings. On the
Cutlass
Major Fallon had assembled his group of twelve Special Boat Service commandos.

“We have to assume the powers-that-be are going to let the bastards go,” he told them. “Sometime in the next couple of hours they’ll take off from West Berlin for Israel. They should arrive about four and a half hours later. So, during this evening or tonight, if they keep their word, those terrorists are going to quit the
Freya.

“Which way they’ll head, we don’t know yet, but probably toward Holland. The sea is empty of ships on that side. When they are three miles from the
Freya
, and out of possible range for a small, low-power transmitter-detonator to operate the explosives, Royal Navy experts are going to board the
Freya
and dismantle the charges. But that’s not our job.

“We’re going to take those bastards, and I want that man Svoboda. He’s mine, got it?”

There was a series of nods, and several grins. Action was what they had been trained for, and they had been cheated of it. The hunting instinct was high.

“The launch they’ve got is much slower than ours,” Fallon resumed. “They’ll have an eight-mile start, but I reckon we can take them three to four miles before they reach the coast. We have the Nimrod overhead, patched in to the
Argyll
. The
Argyll
will give us the directions we need. When we get close to them, we’ll have our searchlights. When we spot them, we take them out. London says no one is interested in prisoners. Don’t ask me why; maybe they want them silenced for rea- sons we know nothing about. They’ve given us the job, and we’re going to do it.”

A few miles away, Captain Mike Manning was also watching the minutes tick away. He, too, waited on news from Berlin that the mechanics had finished their work on the engine of the Dominie. The news in the small hours of the morning, while he sat sleepless in his cabin awaiting the dreaded order to fire his shells and destroy the
Freya
and her crew, had surprised him. Out of the blue, the United States government had reversed its attitude of the previous sundown; far from objecting to the release of the men from Moabit, far from being prepared to wipe out the
Freya
to prevent that release, Washington now had no objection. But his main emotion was relief, waves of pure relief that his murderous orders had been rescinded, unless. ... Unless something could still go wrong. Not until the two Ukrainian Jews had touched down at Ben-Gurion Airport would he be completely satisfied that his orders to shell the
Freya
to a funeral pyre had become part of history.

At a quarter to ten, in the cells below Alexander Barracks at Gatow airfield, Mishkin and Lazareff came out from the effects of the narcotic they had ingested at eight o’clock. Almost simultaneously the clocks Adam Munro had hung on the wall of each cell came to life. The sweep hands began to move around the dials.

Mishkin shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He felt sleepy, slightly muzzy in the head. He put it down to the broken night, the sleepless hours, the excitement. He glanced at the clock on the wall; it read two minutes past eight. He knew that when he and David Lazareff had been led through the orderly room toward the cells, the clock there had said eight exactly. He stretched, swung himself off the bunk, and began to pace the cell. Five minutes later, at the other end of the corridor, Lazareff did much the same.

Adam Munro strolled into the hangar where Warrant Officer Barker was still fiddling with the starboard engine of the Dominie.

“How is it going, Mr. Barker?” asked Munro.

The long-service technician withdrew himself from the guts of the engine and looked down at the civilian with exasperation.

“May I ask, sir, how long I am supposed to keep up this playacting? The engine’s perfect.” Munro glanced at his watch.

“Ten-thirty,” he said. “In one hour exactly, I’d like you to telephone the aircrew room and the officers’ mess and report that she’s fit and ready to fly.”

“Eleven-thirty it is, sir,” said Warrant Officer Barker.

In the cells, David Lazareff glanced again at the wall clock. He thought he had been pacing for thirty minutes, but the clock said nine. An hour had gone by, but it had seemed a very short one. Still, in isolation in a cell, time plays strange tricks on the senses. Clocks, after all, are accurate. It never occurred to him or Mishkin that their clocks were moving at double speed to catch up on the missing hundred minutes in their lives, or that they were destined to synchronize with the clocks outside the cells at eleven-thirty precisely.

At eleven, Premier Jan Grayling in The Hague was on the telephone to the Governing Mayor of

West Berlin.

“What the devil is going on, Herr Burgomeister?”

“I don’t know,” shouted the exasperated Berlin official. “The British say they are nearly finished with their damn engine. Why the hell they can’t use a British Airways airliner from the civil airport I don’t understand. We would pay for the extra cost of taking one out of service to fly to Israel with two passengers only.”

“Well, I’m telling you that in one hour those madmen on the
Freya
are going to vent a hundred thousand tons of oil,” said Jan Grayling, “and my government will hold the British responsible.”

“I entirely agree with you,” said the voice from Berlin. “The whole affair is madness.”

At eleven-thirty Warrant Officer Barker closed the cowling of the engine and climbed down. He went to a wall phone and called the officers’ mess. The base commander came on the line.

“She’s ready, sir,” said the technician.

The RAF officer turned to the men grouped around him, including the governor of Moabit Prison and four radio reporters holding telephones linked to their offices.

“The fault has been put right,” he said. “She’ll be taking off in fifteen minutes.”

From the windows of the mess they watched the sleek little executive jet being towed out into the sunshine. The pilot and copilot climbed aboard and started both engines.

The prison governor entered the cells of the prisoners and informed them they were about to take off. His watch said eleven-thirty-five. So did the wall clocks.

Still in silence, the two prisoners were marched to the MP Land Rover and driven with the German prison official across the tarmac to the waiting jet. Followed by the air quartermaster sergeant who would be the only other occupant of the Dominie on its flight to Ben-Gurion, they went up the steps without a backward glance and settled into their seats.

At eleven-forty-five, Wing Commander Peter Jarvis opened both the throttles and the Dominie climbed away from the runway of Gatow airfield. On instructions from the air-traffic controller, it swung cleanly into the southbound air corridor from West Berlin to Munich and disappeared into the blue sky.

Within two minutes, all four radio reporters were speaking to their audiences live from the officers’ mess at Gatow. Their voices went out across the world to inform their listeners that forty- eight hours after the demands were originally made from the
Freya
, Mishkin and Lazareff were airborne and on their way to Israel and freedom.