Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

Larsen was aware that the two biggest tankers in the world were the French Shell tankers Bellamya and Batillus , both with a capacity of just over half a million tons.

“What will be the Freya’s deadweight?” asked Larsen. “How much crude will she carry?”

“Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that,” said the old shipowner mischievously. “She’ll be carrying one million tons of crude oil.”

Thor Larsen heard a hiss of indrawn breath from his wife beside him.

“That’s big,” he said at last. “That’s very big.”

“The biggest the world has ever seen,” said Wennerstrom.

Two days later a jumbo jet arrived at London Heathrow from Toronto. Among its passengers it carried one Azamat Krim, Canadian-born son of an emigre, who, like Andrew Drake, had Anglicized his name—to Arthur Crimmins. He was one of those whom Drake had noted years before as a man who shared his beliefs completely.

Drake was waiting to meet him as he came out of the cus­toms area, and together they drove to Drake’s flat, off the Bayswater Road.

Azamat Krim was a Crimean Tatar by heritage, short, dark, and wiry. His father, unlike Drake’s, had fought in the Second World War with the Red Army rather than against it, and had been captured in combat by the Germans. His per­sonal loyalty to Russia and that of others like him had availed them nothing. Stalin had accused the entire Tatar na­tion of collaboration with the Germans, a patently unfounded charge but one that the Soviet leader employed as an excuse to deport the Tatar people to the east. Tens of thousands had died in the unheated cattle trucks, thousands more in the arid wastes of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

In a German forced-labor camp, Chingris Krim had heard of the death of his entire family. Liberated by the Canadians in 1945, he had been lucky not to be sent back to Stalin’s Russia for execution or the slave camps. He had been be­friended by a Canadian officer, a former rodeo rider from Calgary, who one day on an Austrian horse farm had ad­mired the Tatar soldier’s mastery of horses and brilliant rid­ing. The Canadian had secured Krim’s authorized emigration to Canada, where he had married and fathered a son. Azamat was the boy, now aged thirty and, like Drake, bitter against the Kremlin for the sufferings of his father’s people.

In a small flat in Bayswater, Andrew Drake explained his plan, and the Tatar agreed to join him in it. Together they put the final touches to securing the needed funds by taking out a bank in northern England.

The man Adam Munro reported to at the head office was his controller, Barry Ferndale, the head of the Soviet Section. Years before, Ferndale had done his time in the field, and had assisted in the exhaustive debriefings of Oleg Penkovsky when the Russian defector visited Britain while accompany­ing Soviet trade delegations.

He was short and rotund, pink-cheeked and jolly. He hid his keen brain and a profound knowledge of Soviet affairs be­hind mannerisms of great cheerfulness and seeming naivete.

In his office on the fourth floor of the Firm’s headquarters, he listened to the tape from Moscow from end to end. When it was over he began furiously polishing his glasses, hopping with excitement.

“Good gracious me, my dear fellow. My dear Adam. What an extraordinary affair. This really is quite priceless.”

“If it’s true,” said Munro carefully. Ferndale started, as if the thought had not occurred to him.

“Ah, yes, of course. If it’s true. Now, you simply must tell me how you got hold of it.”

Munro told his story carefully. It was true in every detail save that he claimed the source of the tape had been Anatoly Krivoi.

“Krivoi, yes, yes, know of him of course,” said Ferndale. “Well now, I shall have to get this translated into English and show it to the Master. This could be very big indeed. You won’t be able to return to Moscow tomorrow, you know, Do you have a place to stay? Your club? Excellent. First class. Well now, you pop along and have a decent dinner and stay at the club for a couple of days.”

Ferndale called his wife to tell her he would not be home to their modest house at Pinner that evening, but he would be spending the night in town. She knew his job and was accus­tomed to such absences.

Then he spent the night working on the translation of the tape, alone in his office. He was fluent in Russian, without the ultrakeen ear for tone and pitch that Munro had, which denotes the truly bilingual speaker. But it was good enough. He missed nothing of the Yakovlev report, nor of the brief but stunned reaction that had followed it among the Polit­buro members.

At ten o’clock the following morning, sleepless but shaved and breakfasted, looking as pink and fresh as he always did, Ferndale called Sir Nigel Irvine’s secretary on the private line and asked to see him. He was with the Director General in ten minutes.

Sir Nigel Irvine read the transcript in silence, put it down, and regarded the tape lying on the desk before him.

“Is this genuine?” he asked.

Barry Ferndale had dropped his bonhomie. He had known Nigel Irvine for years as a colleague, and the elevation of his friend to the supreme post and a knighthood had changed nothing between them.

“Don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s going to take a lot of checking out. It’s possible. Adam told me he met this Krivoi briefly at a reception at the Czech Embassy just over two weeks ago. If Krivoi was thinking of coming over, that would have been his chance. Penkovsky did exactly the same; met a diplomat on neutral ground and established a secret meeting later. Of course he was regarded with intense suspi­cion until his information checked out. That’s what I want to do here.”

“Spell it out,” said Sir Nigel.

Ferndale began polishing his glasses again. The speed of his circular movements with handkerchief on the lenses, so went the folklore, was in direct proportion to the pace of his thinking, and now he polished furiously.

“Firstly, Munro,” he said. “Just in case it is a trap and the second meeting is to spring the trap, I would like him to take furlough here until we have finished with the tape. The Op­position might, just might, be trying to create an incident be­tween governments.”

“Is he owed leave?” asked Sir Nigel.

“Yes, he is, actually. He was shifted to Moscow so fast at the end of May, he is owed a fortnight’s summer holiday.”

“Then let him take it now. But he should keep in touch. And inside Britain, Barry. No wandering abroad until this is sorted out.”

“Then there’s the tape itself,” said Ferndale. “It breaks down into two parts: the Yakovlev report and the voices of the Politburo. So far as I know, we have never heard Ya­kovlev speak. So no voiceprint tests will be possible with him. But what he says is highly specific. I’d like to check that out with some experts in chemical seed-dressing techniques. There’s an excellent section in the Ministry of Agriculture who deal with that sort of thing. No need for anyone to know why we want to know, but I’ll have to be convinced this accident with the lindane hopper valve is feasible.”

“You recall that file the Cousins lent us a month ago?” asked Sir Nigel. “The photos taken by the Condor satellites?”

“Of course.”

“Check the symptoms against the apparent explanation. What else?”

“The second section comes down to voiceprint analysis,” said Ferndale. “I’d like to chop that section up into bits, so no one need know what is being talked about. The language laboratory at Beaconsfield could check out phraseology, syn­tax, vernacular expressions, regional dialects, and so forth. But the clincher will be the comparison of voiceprints.”