Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

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.”

Rudin stared back at him, face impassive. Slowly he lifted his glass of milk and took a sip.

“You see, sir, one of those two has let something slip al­ready,” said Munro. He was forced, to strengthen his argu­ment, to let Rudin know that he, too, was aware of what had happened to Ivanenko. But he could not indicate he had learned it from someone inside the Kremlin hierarchy, just in case Valentina was still free.

“Fortunately,” he went on, “it was to one of our people, and the matter has been taken care of.”

“Your people?” mused Rudin. “Ah, yes, I think I know who your people are. How many others know?”

“The Director General of my organization, the British Prime Minister, President Matthews, and three of his senior advisers. No one who knows has the slightest intention of re­vealing this for public consumption. Not the slightest.”

Rudin seemed to ruminate for a while.

“Can the same be said for Mishkin and Lazareff?” he asked.

“That is the problem,” said Munro. “That has always been the problem since the terrorists—who are Ukrainian emigres, by the way—stepped onto the Freya .”

“I told William Matthews, the only way out of this is to destroy the Freya . It would cost a handful of lives, but save a lot of trouble.”

“It would have saved a lot of trouble if the airliner in which those two young killers escaped had been shot down,” rejoined Munro.

Rudin looked at him keenly from under beetle eyebrows.

“That was a mistake,” he said flatly.

“Like the mistake tonight in which two MIG-twenty-fives almost shot down the plane in which I was flying?”

The old Russian’s head jerked up.

“I did not know,” he said. For the first time, Munro be­lieved him.

“I put it to you, sir, that destroying the Freya would not work. That is, it would not solve the problem. Three days ago Mishkin and Lazareff were two insignificant escapees and hi­jackers, serving fifteen years in jail. Now they are already ce­lebrities. But it is assumed their freedom is being sought for its own sake. We know different.