Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

She was in harbor, and Drake found her by midmorning. She was a five-thousand-ton-deadweight, tween-deck Mediter­ranean trader, rusty and none too clean, but if she was head­ing into the Black Sea and up to Odessa on her next voyage, Drake would not have minded if she had been full of holes.

By sundown he had found her captain, having learned that Thanos and all his officers were from the Greek island of Chios. Most of these Greek-run traders are almost family af­fairs, the master and his senior officers usually being from the same island, and often interrelated. Drake spoke no Greek, but fortunately English was the lingua franca of the interna­tional maritime community, even in Piraeus, and just before sundown he found Captain Thanos.

Northern Europeans, when they finish work, head for home, wife, and family. Eastern Mediterraneans head for the coffeehouse, friends, and gossip. The mecca of the coffee­house community in Piraeus is a street alongside the water­front called Akti Miaouli; its vicinity contains little else but shipping offices and coffeehouses.

Each frequenter has his favorite, and they are always crammed. Captain Thanos hung out when he was ashore at an open-fronted affair called Miki’s, and there Drake found him, sitting over the inevitable thick black coffee, tumbler of cold water, and shot glass of ouzo. He was short, broad, and nut-brown, with black curly hair and several days of stubble.

“Captain Thanos?” asked Drake. The man looked up in suspicion at the Englishman and nodded.

“Nikos Thanos, of the Sanadria ?” The seaman nodded again. His three companions had fallen silent, watching. Drake smiled.

“My name is Andrew Drake. Can I offer you a drink?” Captain Thanos used one forefinger to indicate his own glass and those of his companions. Drake, still standing, sum­moned a waiter and ordered five of everything. Thanos nodded to a vacant chair, the invitation to join them. Drake knew it would be slow, and might take days. But he was not going to hurry. He had found his ship.

The meeting in the Oval Office five days later was far less relaxed. All eight members of the ad hoc committee of the National Security Council were present, with President Mat­thews in the chair. All had spent half the night reading the transcript of the Politburo meeting in which Marshal Kerensky had laid out his plan for war and Vishnayev had made his bid for power. All eight men were shaken. The focus was on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Craig.

“The question is, General,” President Matthews asked, “is it feasible?”

“In terms of a conventional war across the face of Western Europe from the Iron Curtain to the Channel ports, even in­volving the use of tactical nuclear shells and rockets, yes, Mr. President, it’s feasible.”

“Could the West, before next spring, increase her defenses to the point of making it completely unworkable?”

“That’s a harder one, Mr. President. Certainly we in the United States could ship more men, more hardware, over to Europe. That would give the Soviets ample excuse to beef up their own levels, if they ever needed such an excuse. But as to our European allies, they don’t have the reserves we have; for over a decade they have run down their manpower levels, arms levels, and preparation levels to a point where the im­balance in conventional manpower and hardware between the NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact forces is at a stage that cannot be recouped in a mere nine months. The training that the personnel would need, even if recruited now, the produc­tion of new weapons of the necessary sophistication—these cannot be achieved in nine months.”

“So they’re back to 1939 again,” said the Secretary of the Treasury gloomily.

“What about the nuclear option?” asked Bill Matthews qui­etly. General Craig shrugged.

“If the Soviets attack in full force, it’s inescapable. Fore­warned may be forearmed, but nowadays armament pro­grams and training programs take too long. Forewarned as we are, we could slow up a Soviet advance westward, spoil Kerensky’s time scale of a hundred hours. But whether we could stop him dead—the whole damn Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force—that’s another matter. By the time we knew the answer, it would probably be too late, anyway. Which makes our use of the nuclear option inescapable. Unless, of course, sir, we abandon Europe and our three hundred thou­sand men there.”

“David?” asked the President.

Secretary of State David Lawrence tapped the file in front of him.

“For about the first time in my life, I agree with Dmitri Rykov. It’s not just a question of Western Europe. If Europe goes, the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, Iran, and the Arabian states cannot hold. Ten years ago, five per­cent of our oil was imported; five years ago, the total had risen to fifty percent. Now it’s running at sixty-two percent, and rising. Even the whole of the Western Hemisphere can­not fulfill more than fifty-five percent of our needs at max­imum production. We need the Arabian oil. Without it we are as finished as Europe, without a shot fired.”

Suggestions, gentlemen?” asked the President.

“The Nightingale is valuable, but not indispensable, not now,” said Stanislaw Poklewski. “Why not meet with Rudin and lay it on the table? We now know about Plan Aleksandr; we know the intent. And we will take steps to head off that intent to make it unworkable. When he informs his Politburo of that, they’ll realize the element of surprise is lost, that the war option won’t work anymore. It’ll be the end of the Night­ingale, but it will also be the end of Plan Aleksandr.”

Bob Benson of the CIA shook his head vigorously.

“I don’t think it’s that simple, Mr. President. As I read it, it’s not a question of convincing Rudin or Rykov. There’s a vicious faction fight now going on inside the Politburo, as we know. At stake is the succession to Rudin. And the famine is hanging over them.

“Vishnayev and Kerensky have proposed- a limited war as a means both of obtaining the food surpluses of Western Eu­rope and of imposing war discipline on the Soviet peoples. Revealing what we know to Rudin would change nothing. It might even cause him to fall. Vishnayev and his group would take over; they are completely ignorant of the West and the way we Americans react to being attacked. Even with the ele­ment of surprise gone, with the grain famine pending they could still try the war option.”

“I agree with Bob,” said David Lawrence. “There is a par­allel here with the Japanese position forty years ago. The oil embargo caused the fall of the moderate Konoye faction. In­stead, we got General Tojo, and that led to Pearl Harbor. If Maxim Rudin is toppled now, we could get Yefrem Vishnayev in his place. And on the basis of these papers, that could lead to war.”

“Then Maxim Rudin must not fall,” said President Mat­thews.

“Mr. President, I protest,” said Poklewski heatedly. “Am I to understand that the efforts of the United States are now to be bent toward saving the skin of Maxim Rudin? Have any of us forgotten what he did, the people liquidated under his regime, for him to get to the pinnacle of power in Soviet Russia?”

“Stan, I’m sorry,” said President Matthews with finality. “Last month I authorized a refusal by the United States to supply the Soviet Union with the grain it needs to head off a famine. At least until I knew what the perspectives of that famine would be. I can no longer pursue that policy of rejec­tion, because I think we now know what those perspectives entail.

“Gentlemen, I am going this night to draft a personal letter to President Rudin, proposing that David Lawrence and Dmi­tri Rykov meet on neutral territory to confer together. And that they confer on the subject of the new SALT Four arms-limitation treaty and any other matters of interest .”