The Devil's Alternative (60 page)

“Head ... of ... KGB ... dead.”

That was all he said. His mouth stopped moving; he lay on his side on the cot, sightless eyes staring at the blue uniforms in front of him.

The ringing bell brought the chief superintendent, a dozen other officers of the station staff, and the doctor, who had been drinking coffee in the police chiefs office.

The doctor examined each rapidly, searching mouths, throats, and eyes, feeling pulses and listening to chests. When he had done, he stalked from the second cell. The superintendent followed him into the corridor; he was a badly worried man.

“What the hell’s happened?” he asked the doctor.

“I can do a full autopsy later,” said the doctor, “or maybe it will be taken out of my hands. But as to what has happened, they’ve been poisoned, that’s what happened.”

“But they haven’t eaten anything,” protested the policeman. “They haven’t drunk anything.

They were just going to have supper. Perhaps at the airport ... or on the plane ...?”

“No,” said the doctor, “a slow-acting poison would not work with such speed, and simultaneously. Body systems vary too much. Each either administered to himself, or was admin- istered, a massive dose of instantaneously fatal poison, which I suspect to be potassium cyanide, within the five to ten seconds before they died.”

“That’s not possible,” shouted the police chief. “My men were outside the cells all the time. Both prisoners were thoroughly examined before they entered the cells. Mouths, anuses—the lot. There were no hidden poison capsules. Besides, why would they commit suicide? They’d soon have had their freedom.”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor, “but they both died within seconds of that poison’s hitting them.”

“I’m phoning the Prime Minister’s office at once,” said the chief superintendent grimly, and

strode off to his office.

The Prime Minister’s personal security adviser, like almost everyone else in Israel, was an ex- soldier. But the man whom those within a five-mile radius of the Knesset called simply “Barak” had never been an ordinary soldier. He had started as a paratrooper under the paracommander Rafael Eytan, the legendary Raful. Later he had transferred, to serve as a major in General Arik Sharon’s elite 101 Unit until he stopped a bullet in the kneecap during a dawn raid on a Palestinian apartment block in Beirut.

Since then he had specialized in the more technical side of security operations, using his knowledge of what he would have done to kill the Israeli Premier, and then reversing it to protect his master. It was he who took the call from Tel Aviv and entered the office where Benyamin Golen was working late, to break the news to him.

“Inside the cell itself?” echoed the stunned Premier. “Then they must have taken the poison themselves.”

“I don’t think so,” said Barak. “They had every reason to want to live.” “Then they were killed by others?”

“It looks like it, Prime Minister.” “But who would want them dead?”

“The KGB, of course. One of them muttered something about the KGB, in Russian. It seems he was saying the head of the KGB wanted them dead.”

“But they haven’t been in the hands of the KGB. Twelve hours ago they were in Moabit Prison. Then for eight hours in the hands of the British. Then two hours with us. In our hands they ingested nothing—no food, no drink, nothing. So how did they take in an instant-acting poison?”

Barak scratched his chin, a dawning gleam in his eye. “There is a way, Prime Minister. A delayed-action capsule.” He took a sheet of paper and drew a diagram.

“It is possible to design and make a capsule like this. It has two halves; one is threaded so that it screws into the other half just before it is swallowed.”

The Prime Minister looked at the diagram with growing anger. “Go on,” he commanded.

“One half of the capsule is of a ceramic substance, immune both to the acidic effects of the gastric juices of the human stomach and to the effects of the much stronger acid inside it. And strong enough not to be broken by the muscles of the throat when it is swallowed.

“The other half is of a plastic compound, tough enough to withstand the digestive juices, but not enough to resist the acid. In the second portion lies the cyanide. Between the two is a copper membrane. The two halves are screwed together; the acid begins to burn away at the copper wafer. The capsule is swallowed. Several hours later, depending on the thickness of the copper, the acid burns through. It is the same principle as certain types of acid-operated detonators.

“When the acid penetrates the copper membrane, it quickly cuts through the plastic of the second chamber, and the cyanide floods out into the body system. I believe it can be extended up to ten hours, by which time the indigestible capsule has reached the lower bowel. Once the poison is out, the blood absorbs it quickly and carries it to the heart.”

Barak had seen his Premier annoyed before, even angry. But he had never seen him white and trembling with rage.

“They send me two men with poison pellets deep inside them,” he whispered, “two walking time bombs, triggered to die when they are in our hands? Israel will not be blamed for this outrage. Publish the news of the deaths immediately. Do you understand? At once. And say a

pathology examination is under way at this very moment. That is an order.”

“If the terrorists have not yet left the
Freya
,” suggested Barak, “that news could reverse their plans to leave.”

“The men responsible for poisoning Mishkin and Lazareff should have thought of that,” snapped Premier Golen. “But any delay in the announcement and Israel will be blamed for murdering them. And that I will not tolerate.”

The fog rolled on. It thickened; it deepened. It covered the sea from the coast of East Anglia across to Walcheren. It embalmed the flotilla of tugs bearing the emulsifier that were sheltering west of the warships, and the Navy vessels themselves. It whirled around the
Cutlass
,
Sabre
, and
Scimitar
as they lay under the stern of the
Argyll
, engines throbbing softly, straining to be up and away to track down their prey. It shrouded the biggest tanker in the world at her mooring between the warships and the Dutch shore.

At six-forty-five all the terrorists but two climbed down into the larger of the inflatable speedboats. One of them, the Ukrainian-American, jumped into the old fishing launch that had brought them to the middle of the North Sea, and glanced upward.

From the rail above him, Andrew Drake nodded. The man pushed the starter button, and the sturdy engine coughed into life. The prow of the launch was pointed due west, her wheel lashed with cord to hold her steady on course. The terrorist gradually increased the power of the engine, holding her in neutral gear.

Across the water, keen ears, human and electronic, had caught the sound of the motor; urgent commands and questions flashed among the warships, and from the
Argyll
to the circling Nimrod overhead. The spotter plane looked to its radar but detected no movement on the sea below.

Drake spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, and far up on the bridge, Azamat Krim hit the
Freya’s

siren button.

The air filled with a booming roar of sound as the siren blew away the silence of the surrounding fog and the lapping water.

On his bridge on the
Argyll
, Captain Preston snorted with impatience.

“They’re trying to drown the sound of the launch engine,” he observed. “No matter; we’ll have it on radar as soon as it leaves the
Freya’s
side.”

Seconds later the terrorist in the launch slammed the gear into forward, and the fishing boat, its engine revving high, pulled violently away from the
Freya’s
stern. The terrorist leaped for the swinging rope above him, lifted his feet, and let the empty boat churn out from under him. In two seconds it was lost in the fog, plowing its way strongly toward the warships to the west.

The terrorist swung on the end of his rope, then lowered himself into the speedboat where his four companions waited. One of them jerked at the engine’s lanyard: the outboard coughed and roared. The five men in it gripped the handholds, and the helmsman pushed on the power. The inflatable dug its motor into the water, cleared the stern of the
Freya
, lifted its blunt nose high, and tore away across the calm water toward Holland.

The radar operator in the Nimrod high above spotted the steel hull of the fishing launch instantly; the rubber-compound speedboat gave no reflector signal.

“The launch is moving,” he told the
Argyll
below him. “Hell, they’re coming straight at you.” Captain Preston glanced at the radar display on his own bridge.

“Got ’em,” he said, and watched the blip separating itself from the great white blob that represented the
Freya
herself.

“He’s right, she’s boring straight at us. What the hell are they trying to do?”

On full power and empty, the fishing launch was making fifteen knots. In twenty minutes it

would be among the Navy ships, then through them and into the flotilla of tugs behind them. “They must think they can get through the screen of warships unharmed, and then lose

themselves among the tugs in the fog,” suggested the first officer, beside Captain Preston. “Shall we send the
Cutlass
to intercept?”

“I’m not risking good men, however much Major Fallon may want his personal fight,” said Preston. “Those bastards have already shot one seaman on the
Freya
, and orders from the Admiralty are quite specific. Use the guns.”

The procedure that was put into effect on the
Argyll
was smooth and practiced. The four other NATO warships were politely asked not to open fire, but to leave the job to the
Argyll
. Her fore and aft five-inch guns swung smoothly onto target and opened fire.

Even at two miles, the target was small. Somehow it survived the first salvo, though the sea around it erupted in spouts of rising water when the shells dropped. There was no spectacle for the watchers on the
Argyll
, nor for those crouched on the three patrol boats beside her. Whatever was happening out there in the fog was invisible; only the radar could see every drop of every shell, and the target boat rearing and plunging in the maddened water. But the radar could not tell its masters that no figure stood at the helm, no men crouched terrified in her stern.

Andrew Drake and Azamat Krim sat quietly in their two-man speedboat close by the
Freya
and waited. Drake held onto the rope that hung from her rail high above. Through the fog they both heard the first muffled boom of the
Argyll’s
guns. Drake nodded at Krim, who started the outboard engine. Drake released the rope, and the inflatable sped away, light as a feather, skimming the sea as the speed built up, its engine noise drowned by the roar of the
Freya’s
siren.

Krim looked at his left wrist, where a waterproof compass was strapped, and altered course a few points to south. He had calculated forty-five minutes at top speed from the
Freya
to the maze of islands that make up North and South Beveland.

At five minutes to seven, the fishing launch stopped the
Argyll’s
sixth shell, a direct hit. The explosive tore the launch apart, lifting it half out of the water and rolling both stern and aft sections over. The fuel tank blew up, and the steel-hulled boat sank like a stone.

“Direct hit,” reported the gunnery officer from deep inside the
Argyll
where he and his gunners had watched the uneven duel on radar. “She’s gone.”

The blip faded from the screen; the illuminated sweep arm went around and around but showed only the
Freya
at five miles. On the bridge, four officers watched the same display, and there were a few moments of silence. It was the first time for any of them that their ship had actually killed anybody.

“Let the
Sabre
go,” said Captain Preston quietly. “They can board and liberate the
Freya
now.”

The radar operator in the darkened hull of the Nimrod peered closely at his screen. He could see all the warships, all the tugs, and the
Freya
to the east of them. But somewhere beyond the
Freya
, shielded by the tanker’s bulk from the Navy vessels, a tiny speck seemed to be moving away to the southeast; it was so small it could almost have been missed; it was no bigger than the blip that would have been made by a medium-size tin can; in fact it was the metallic cover to the outboard engine of a speeding inflatable. Tin cans do not move across the face of the ocean at thirty knots.

“Nimrod to
Argyll
, Nimrod to
Argyll
...”

The officers on the bridge of the guided-missile cruiser listened to the news from the circling aircraft with shock. One of them ran to the wing of the bridge and shouted the information down to the sailors from Portland who waited on their patrol launches.

Two seconds later the
Cutlass
and
Scimitar
were away, the booming roar of their twin diesel marine engines filling the fog around them. Long white plumes of spray rose from their bows; the noses rose higher and higher, the sterns deeper in the wake, as the bronze screws whipped

through the foaming water.

“Damn and blast them,” shouted Major Fallon to the Navy commander who stood with him in the tiny wheelhouse of the
Cutlass
, “how fast can we go?”

“On water like this, over forty knots,” the commander shouted back.

Not enough, thought Adam Munro, both hands locked to a stanchion as the vessel shuddered and bucked like a runaway horse through the fog. The
Freya
was still five miles away, the terrorists’ speedboat another five beyond that. Even if they overhauled at ten knots, it would take an hour to come level with the inflatable carrying Svoboda to safety in the creeks of Holland, where he could lose himself. But he would be there in forty minutes, maybe less.

Cutlass
and
Scimitar
were driving blind, tearing the fog to shreds, only to watch it form behind them. In any crowded sea, it would be lunacy to use such speed in conditions of zero visibility. But the sea was empty. In the wheelhouse of each launch, the commander listened to a constant stream of information from the Nimrod via the
Argyll:
his own position and that of the other fast patrol launch: the position in the fog ahead of them of the
Freya
herself; the position of the
Sabre
, well away to their left, heading toward the
Freya
at a slower speed; and the course and speed of the moving dot that represented Svoboda’s escape.