Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

His problem, when he took the tape back to London for voiceprint analysis, as he knew he must, was how to cover his source. He knew if he admitted to the secret rendezvous in the forest, following the typed note in the bathing towel, the question would be asked: “Why you, Munro? How did she know you?” It would be impossible to avoid that question, and equally impossible to answer it. The only solution was to devise an alternative source, credible and uncheckable.

He had been in Moscow only six weeks, but his unsuspect­ed mastery of even slang Russian had paid a couple of divi­dends. At a diplomatic reception in the Czech Embassy two weeks earlier, he had been in conversation with an Indian at­tache when he had heard two Russians in muttered conversa­tion behind him. One of them had said, “He’s a bitter bastard. Thinks he should have had the top slot.”

He had followed the gaze of the two who had spoken, and noted they were observing and presumably talking about a Russian across the room. The guest list later confirmed the man was Anatoly Krivoi, personal aide and right-hand man to the Party theoretician, Vishnayev. So what had he got to be bitter about? Munro checked his files and came up with Krivoi’s history. He had worked in the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee; shortly after the nomi­nation of Petrov to the top job, Krivoi had appeared on Vishnayev’s staff. Quit in disgust? Personality conflict with Petrov? Bitter at being passed over? They were all possible, and all interesting to an intelligence chief in a foreign capital.

Krivoi, he mused. Maybe. Just maybe. He, too, would have access, at least to Vishnayev’s copy of the transcript, maybe even to the tape. And he was probably in Moscow; certainly his boss was. Vishnayev had been present when the East Ger­man Premier had arrived a week before.

“Sorry, Anatoly, you’ve just changed sides,” he said as he slipped the fat envelope into an inside pocket and took the stairs to see the head of Chancery.

“I’m afraid I have to go back to London with the Wednes­day bag,” he told the diplomat. “It’s unavoidable, and it can’t wait.”

Chancery asked no questions. He knew Munro’s job and promised to arrange it. The diplomatic bag, which actually is a bag, or at least a series of canvas sacks, goes from Moscow to London every Wednesday and always on the British Air­ways flight, never Aeroflot. A Queen’s Messenger, one of that team of men who constantly fly around the world from Lon­don picking up embassy bags and who are protected by the insignia of the crown and greyhound, comes out from Lon­don for it. The very secret material is carried in a hard-frame dispatch box chained to the man’s left wrist; the more routine stuff in the canvas sacks, the Messenger personally checks into the aircraft’s hold. Once there, it is on British territory. But in the case of Moscow, the Messenger is accompanied by an embassy staffer.

The escort job is sought after, since it permits a quick trip home to London, a bit of shopping, and a chance of a good night out. The Second Secretary who lost his place in the rota that week was annoyed but asked no questions.

The following Wednesday, British Airways Airbus-300B lifted out of the new, post-1980 Olympics terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport and turned its nose toward London. By Munro’s side the Messenger, a short, dapper, ex-Army major, withdrew straight into his hobby, composing crossword puzzles for a major newspaper.

“You have to do something to while away these endless airplane flights,” he told Munro. “We all have our in-flight hobbies.”

Munro grunted and looked back over the wing tip at the receding city of Moscow. Somewhere down there in the sun­drenched streets, the woman he loved was working and mov­ing among people she had betrayed. She was on her own right out in the cold.

The country of Norway, seen in isolation from its eastern neighbor, Sweden, looks like a great prehistoric fossilized hu­man hand stretching down from the Arctic toward Denmark and Britain. It is a right hand, palm downward to the ocean, a stubby thumb toward the east clenched into the forefinger. Up the crack between thumb and forefinger lies Oslo, its cap­ital.

To the north the fractured forearm bones stretch up to Tromso and Hammerfest, deep in the Arctic, so narrow that in places there are only forty miles from the sea to the Swedish border. On a relief map, the hand looks as if it has been smashed by some gigantic hammer of the gods, splinter­ing bones and knuckles into thousands of particles. Nowhere is this breakage more marked than along the west coast, where the chopping edge of the hand would be.

Here the land is shattered into a thousand fragments, and between the shards the sea has flowed in to form a million creeks, gullies, bays, and gorges—winding, narrow defiles where the mountains fall sheer to glittering water. These are the fjords, and it was from the headwaters of these that a race of men came out a thousand years ago who were the best sailors ever to set keel to the water or sail to the wind. Before their age was over, they had sailed to Greenland and Iceland, conquered Ireland, settled Britain and Normandy, navigated as far as North America. They were the Vikings, and their descendants still live and fish along the fjords of Norway.

Such a man was Thor Larsen, sea captain and ship’s mas­ter, who strode that mid-July afternoon past the royal palace in the Swedish capital of Stockholm from his company’s head office back to his hotel. People tended to step aside for him; he was six feet three inches tall, broad as the pavements of the old quarter of the city, blue-eyed, and bearded. Being ashore, he was in civilian clothes, but he was happy, because he had reason to think, after visiting the head office of the Nordia Line, which now lay behind him along the Ship Quay, that he might soon have a new command.

After six months attending a course at the company’s ex­pense in the intricacies of radar, computer navigation, and supertanker technology, he was dying to get back to sea again. The summons to the head office had been to receive from the hands of the personal secretary to the proprietor, chairman, and managing director of the Nordia Line his invi­tation to dinner that evening. The invitation also included Larson’s wife, who had been informed by telephone and was flying in from Norway on a company ticket. The Old Man was splashing out a bit, thought Larsen. There must be something in the wind.

He took his rented car from the hotel parking lot across the bridge on Nybroviken and drove the thirty-seven kilo­meters to the airport. When Lisa Larsen arrived in the con­course with her overnight bag, he greeted her with the delicacy of an excited St. Bernard, swinging her off her feet like a girl. She was small and petite, with dark, bright eyes, soft chestnut curls, and a trim figure that belied her thirty-eight years. And he adored her. Twenty years earlier, when he had been a gangling second mate of twenty-seven, he had met her one freezing winter day in Oslo. She had slipped on the ice; he had picked her up like a doll and set her back on her feet.

She had been wearing a fur-trimmed hood that almost hid her tiny, red-nosed face, and when she thanked him, he could see only her eyes, looking out of the mass of snow and fur like the bright eyes of a snow mouse in the forests of winter. Ever since, through their courtship and marriage and the years that had followed, he had called her his “little snow mouse.”

He drove her back into central Stockholm, asking all the way about their home in Alesund, far away on Norway’s western coast, and of the progress of their two teenage chil­dren. To the south a British Airways Airbus passed by on its great-circle route from Moscow to London. Thor Larsen nei­ther knew nor cared.