Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

In fact it ended after two minutes; Thor Larsen pulled one hand free, grasped the head of the struggling Ukrainian, and slammed it into the leg of the table. Drake went rigid for half a second, then slumped limply. From just below his hairline a thin trickle of blood seeped down his forehead.

Panting with weariness, Thor Larsen raised himself from the floor and looked at the unconscious man. Carefully he eased the oscillator from the Ukrainian’s belt, held it in his left hand, and crossed to the one window in the starboard side of his cabin that was secured closed with butterfly-headed bolts. One-handed, he began to unwind them. The first one flicked open; he started on the second. A few more seconds, a single long throw, and the oscillator would sail out of the porthole, across the intervening ten feet of steel deck, and into the North Sea.

On the floor behind him, the young terrorist’s hand inched over the carpet to where his discarded gun lay. Larsen had the second bolt undone and was swinging the brass-framed window inward when Drake lined himself painfully onto one shoulder, reached around the table, and fired.

The crash of the gun in the enclosed cabin was earsplitting. Thor Larsen reeled back against the wall by the open window and looked first at his left hand, then at Drake. From the floor the Ukrainian stared back in disbelief.

The single shot had hit the Norwegian captain in the palm of his left hand—the hand that held the oscillator—driving shards of plastic and glass into the flesh. For ten seconds both men stared at each other, waiting for the series of rumbling explosions that would mark the end of the Freya .

They never came. The soft-nosed slug had fragmented the detonator device into small pieces, and, in shattering, it had not had time to reach the tonal pitch needed to trigger the detonators in the bombs below decks.

Slowly the Ukrainian climbed to his feet, holding onto the table for support. Thor Larsen looked at the steady stream of blood running from his broken hand down to the carpet. Then he looked across at the panting terrorist.

“I have won, Mr. Svoboda. I have won. You cannot destroy my ship and my crew.”

“You may know that, Captain Larsen,” said the man with the gun, “and I may know that. But they”—he gestured to the open porthole and the lights of the NATO warships in the predawn gloom across the water—“they don’t know that. The game goes on. Mishkin and Lazareff will reach Israel.”

MOABIT PRISON in West Berlin comprises two sections. The older part predates the Second World War. But during the sixties and early seventies, when the Baader-Meinhof gang spread a wave of terror over Germany, a new section was added. Into it were built ultramodern security systems, the toughest steel and concrete, television scanners, electroni­cally controlled doors and grilles.

On the upper floor, David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin were awakened in their separate cells by the governor of Moabit at six A.M. on the morning of Sunday, April 3, 1983.

“You are being released,” he told them brusquely. “You are being flown to Israel this morning. Takeoff is scheduled for eight o’clock. Get ready to depart; we leave for the air­field at seven-thirty.”

Ten minutes later the military commandant of the British Sector was on the telephone to the Governing Mayor of West Berlin.

“I’m terribly sorry, Herr Burgomeister,” he told the Ber­liner, “but a takeoff from the civil airport at Tegel is out of the question. For one thing, the aircraft, by agreement be­tween our governments, will be a Royal Air Force jet, and the refueling and maintenance facilities for our aircraft are far better at our own airfield at Gatow. For a second reason, we are trying to avoid the chaos of an invasion by the press, which we can easily prevent at Gatow. It would be hard for you to do this at Tegel Airport.”

Privately, the Governing Mayor was somewhat relieved. If the British took over the whole operation, any possible disas­ters would be their responsibility.

“So what do you want us to do, General?” he asked.

“London has asked me to suggest to you that these blighters be put in a closed and armored van inside Moabit, and be driven straight into Gatow. Your chaps can hand them over to us in privacy inside the wire, and of course we’ll sign for them.”

The press was less than happy. Over four hundred report­ers and cameramen had camped outside Moabit Prison since the announcement from Bonn the previous evening that their release would take place at eight. They desperately wanted pictures of the pair leaving for the airport. Other teams of newsmen were staking out the civil airport at Tegel, seeking vantage points for their telephoto lenses high on the observa­tion terraces of the terminal building. They were all destined to be frustrated.

The advantage of the British base at Gatow is that it occu­pies one of the most outlying and isolated sites inside the fenced perimeter of West Berlin, situated on the western side of the broad Havel River, close up against the border with Communist East Germany, which surrounds the beleaguered city on all sides.

Inside the base there had been controlled activity for hours before dawn. Between three and four o’clock an RAF version of the HS-125 executive jet, known as the Dominie, had flown in from Britain. It was fitted with long-range fuel tanks that would extend its range to give it ample reserves to fly from Berlin to Tel Aviv over Munich, “Venice, and Athens without ever entering Communist airspace. Its 500-mile-per-hour cruising speed would enable the Dominie to complete the 2,200-mile journey in just over four hours.

Since landing, the Dominie had been towed to a quiet hangar, where it had been serviced and refueled.

So keen were the press on watching Moabit and the airport at Tegel that no one noticed a sleek black SR-71 sweep over the East Germany-West Berlin border in the extreme corner of the city and drop onto the main runway at Gatow at just three minutes after seven o’clock. This aircraft, too, was quickly towed to an empty hangar, where a team of mechan­ics from the U.S. Air Force at Tempelhof hurriedly closed the doors against prying eyes and began to work on it. The SR-71 had done its job. A relieved Colonel O’Sullivan found himself at last surrounded by his fellow countrymen; next destination: his beloved U.S. of A.

His passenger left the hangar and was greeted by a youth­ful RAF squadron leader waiting with a Land Rover.

“Mr. Munro?”

“Yes.” Munro produced his identification, which the Air Force officer scanned closely.

“There are two gentlemen waiting to see you in the mess, sir.”

The two gentlemen could, if challenged, have proved that they were low-grade civil servants attached to the Ministry of Defense. What neither would have cared to concede was that they were concerned with experimental work in a very se­cluded laboratory, whose findings, when such were made, went immediately into a top-secret classification.

Both men were neatly dressed and carried attache cases. One wore rimless glasses and had medical qualifications, or had had until he and the profession of Hippocrates had parted company. The other was his subordinate, a former male nurse.

“You have the equipment I asked for?” asked Munro with­out preamble.

For an answer, the senior man opened his attache case and extracted a flat box no larger than a cigar case. He opened it and showed Munro what nestled on a bed of cotton inside.

“Ten hours,” he said. “No more.”

“That’s tight,” said Munro. “Very tight.”

It was seven-thirty on a bright, sunny morning.

The Nimrod from Coastal Command still turned and turned fifteen thousand feet above the Freya . Apart from observing the tanker, its duties also included that of watching the oil slick of the previous noon. The gigantic stain was still moving sluggishly on the face of the water, still out of range of the emulsifier-spraying tugs, which were not allowed to enter the area immediately around the Freya herself.