Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“Not too humiliating, I hope,” murmured Ivanenko. “We have only a seven-to-six majority in the Politburo, and I for one would like to hold onto it.”

“That is precisely my problem,” growled Rudin. “Sooner or later I have to send Dmitri Rykov into the negotiating chamber to fight for us, and I don’t have a single damned weapon to give him.”

On the last day of the month, Andrew Drake flew from Lon­don to Athens to begin his search for a ship heading toward Odessa.

The same day, a small van, converted into a two-bunk mo­bile home such as students like to use for a roving Continen­tal holiday, left London for Dover on the Channel coast, and thence to France and Athens by road. Concealed beneath the floor were the guns, ammunition, and image intensifier. For­tunately, most drug consignments head the other way, from the Balkans toward France and Britain. Customs checks were perfunctory at Dover and Calais.

At the wheel was Azamat Krim with his Canadian passport and international driving license. Beside him, with new, albeit not quite regular, British papers, was Miroslav Kaminsky.

CLOSE BY THE BRIDGE across the Moscow River at Uspenskoye is a restaurant called the Russian Isba. It is built in the style of the timber cottages in which Russian peasants dwell, and which are called isbas. Both interior and exterior are of split nine tree trunks, nailed to timber uprights. The gap between is traditionally filled with river clay, in a fashion not unlike the manner in which North American log cabins are insulated.

These isbas may look primitive, and from the point of view of sanitation often are, but they are much warmer than brick or concrete structures through the freezing Russian winters. The Isba restaurant is snug and warm inside, divided into a dozen small private dining rooms, many of which will seat only one dinner party. Unlike the restaurants of central Mos­cow, it is permitted a profit incentive linked to staff pay, and as a result, and in even more stark contrast to the usual run of Russian eateries, it has tasty food and fast and willing service.

It was here that Adam Munro had set up his next meeting with Valentina, scheduled for Saturday, September 4. She had secured a dinner date with a male friend and had per­suaded him to take her to this particular restaurant. Munro had invited one of the embassy secretaries to dinner, and had booked the table in her name, not in his own. The written reservations record would not, therefore, show that either Munro or Valentina had been present that evening.

They dined in separate rooms, and on the dot of nine o’clock each made the excuse of going to the toilet and left the table. They met in the parking lot, and Munro, whose own car would have been too noticeable with its embassy plates, followed Valentina to her own private Zhiguli sedan. She was subdued and puffed nervously at a cigarette.

Munro had handled two Russian defectors-in-place and knew the incessant strahl that begins to wear at the nerves af­ter a few weeks of subterfuge and secrecy.

“I got my chance,” she said at length. “Three days ago. The meeting of early July. I was nearly caught.”

Munro was tense. Whatever she might think about her being trusted within the Party machine, no one, no one at all, is ever really trusted in Moscow politics. She was walking a high wire; they both were. The difference was, he had a net: his diplomatic status.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Someone came in. A guard. I had just switched off the copying machine and was back at my typewriter. He was per­fectly friendly. But he leaned against the machine. It was still warm. I don’t think he noticed anything. But it frightened me. That’s not all that frightened me. I couldn’t read the transcript until I got home. I was too busy feeding it into the copier. Adam, it’s awful.”

She took her car keys, unlocked the glove compartment, and extracted a fat envelope, which she handed to Munro. The moment of handover is usually the moment when the watchers pounce, if they are there; the moment when the feet pound on the gravel, the doors are torn open, the occupants dragged out. Nothing happened.

Munro glanced at his watch. Nearly ten minutes. Too long. He put the envelope in his inside breast pocket.

“I’m going to try for permission to bring you out,” he said. “You can’t go on like this forever, even for much longer. Nor can you simply settle back to the old life, not now. Not knowing what you know. Nor can I carry on, knowing you are out in the city, knowing that we love each other. I have a leave break next month. I’m going to ask them in London then.”

This time she made no demur, a sign that her nerve was showing the first signs of breaking.

“All right,” she said. Seconds later, she was gone into the darkness of the parking lot. He watched her enter the pool of light by the open restaurant door and disappear inside. He gave her two minutes, then returned to his own impatient companion.

It was three in the morning before Munro had finished read­ing Plan Aleksandr, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky’s scenario for the conquest of Western Europe. He poured himself a double brandy and sat staring at the papers on his sitting-room table. Valentina’s jolly, kindly Uncle Nikolai, he mused, had cer­tainly laid it on the line. He spent two hours staring at a map of Europe, and by sunrise was as certain as Kerensky himself that in terms of conventional warfare the plan would work. Secondly, he was sure that Rykov, too, was right: thermonu­clear war would ensue. And thirdly, he was convinced there was no way of convincing the dissident members of the Polit­buro of this, short of the holocaust’s actually happening.

He rose and went to the window. Daylight was breaking in the east, out over the Kremlin spires; an ordinary Sunday was beginning for the citizens of Moscow, as it would in two hours for the Londoners and five hours later for the New Yorkers.

All his adult life the guarantee that summer Sundays would remain just plain ordinary had been dependent on a fine balance—a balance of belief in the might and willpower of the opponent superpower, a balance of credibility, a bal­ance of fear, but a balance for all that. He shivered, partly from the chill of morning, more from the realization that the papers behind him proved that at last the old nightmare was coming out of the shadows; the balance was breaking down.

The Sunday sunrise found Andrew Drake in far better hu­mor, for his Saturday night had brought information of a dif­ferent kind.

Every area of human knowledge, however small, however arcane, has its experts and its devotees. And every group of these appear to have one place where they congregate to talk, discuss, exchange their information, and impart the newest gossip.

Shipping movements in the eastern Mediterranean hardly form a subject on which doctorates are earned, but they do form a subject of great interest to out-of-work seamen in that area, such as Andrew Drake was pretending to be. The in­formation center about such movements is a small hotel called the Cavo d’Oro, standing above a yacht basin in the port of Piraeus.

Drake had already observed the offices of the agents, and probable owners, of the Salonika Line, but he knew the last thing he should do was to visit them.

Instead, he checked into the Cavo d’Oro Hotel and spent his time at the bar, where captains, mates, bosuns, agents, dockland gossips, and job seekers sat over drinks to exchange what tidbits of information they had. On Saturday night Drake found his man, a bosun who had once worked for the Salonika Line. It took half a bottle of retsina to extract the information.

“The one that visits Odessa most frequently is the M/V Sanadria ,” he was told. “She is an old tub. Captain is Nikos Thanos. I think she’s in harbor now.”