Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

Prior to 1980, the main airport of Moscow, Sheremetyevo, had been a small, drab, and shabby affair. But for the Olym­pics the Soviet government had commissioned a grand new airport terminal there, and Drake had done some research on it.

The facilities in the new terminal, which handled all long­-distance flights out of Moscow, were excellent. There were numerous plaques praising the achievements of Soviet tech­nology all over the airport; conspicuous by its absence was any mention that Moscow had had to commission a West German firm to build the place because no Soviet construc­tion company could have achieved the standard or the com­pletion date. The West Germans had been handsomely paid in hard currency, but their contract had had rigorous penalty clauses in the case of noncompletion by the start of the 1980 Olympics. For this reason, the Germans had used only two local Russian ingredients—sand and water. Everything else had been trucked in from West Germany in order to be cer­tain of delivery on time.

In the great transit lounge and departure lounges, they had built letter boxes to handle the mail of anyone forgetting to post his last picture postcards from inside Moscow before leaving. The KGB monitors every single letter, postcard, cable, or phone call coming into or leaving the Soviet Union. Massive though the task may be, it gets done. But the new departure lounges at Sheremetyevo were used both for inter­national flights and for long-distance internal Soviet Union flights.

Krim’s postcard, therefore, had been acquired at the Aero­flot offices in London. Modern Soviet stamps sufficient for a postcard at the internal rate had been openly bought from the London stamp emporium Stanley Gibbons. On the card, which showed a picture of the Tupolev-144 supersonic pas­senger jet, was written in Russian the message: “Just leaving with our factory’s Party group for the expedition to Kha­barovsk. Great excitement. Almost forgot to write you. Many happy returns for your birthday on the eleventh. Your cousin, Ivan.”

Khabarovsk being in the extreme southeast of Siberia, close to the Sea of Japan, a group leaving by Aeroflot for that city would leave from the same terminal building as a flight leav­ing for Japan. The card was addressed to David Mishkin at his address in Lvov.

Azamat Krim took the Aeroflot flight from London to Mos­cow and changed planes there for the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Narita Airport, Tokyo. He had an open-dated re­turn. He also had a two-hour wait in the transit lounge in Moscow. Here he dropped the card in the letter box and went on to Tokyo. Once there, he changed to Japan Air Lines and flew back to London.

The card was examined by the KGB postal detail at Mos­cow’s airport, assumed to be from a Russian to a Ukrainian cousin, both living and working inside the USSR, and sent on. It arrived in Lvov three days later.

While the tired and very jet-lagged Crimean Tatar was flying back from Japan, a small jet of the Norwegian internal air­line Braethens-Safe banked high over the fishing town of alesund and began to let down to the municipal airport on the flat island across the bay. From one of its passenger win­dows Thor Larsen looked down with the thrill of excitement that he felt whenever he returned to the small community that had raised him and that would always be home.

He had arrived in the world in 1935, in a fisherman’s cot­tage in the old Buholmen quarter, long since demolished to make way for the new highway. Buholmen before the war had been the fishing quarter, a maze of wooden cottages in gray, blue, and ocher. From his father’s cottage a yard had run down, like all the others along the row, from the back stoop to the sound. Here were the rickety wooden jetties where the independent fishermen like his father had tied their small vessels when they came home from the sea; here the smells of his childhood had been of pitch, resin, paint, salt, and fish.

As a child he had sat on his father’s jetty, watching the big ships moving slowly up to berth at the Storneskaia, and he had dreamed of the places they must visit, far away across the western ocean. By the age of seven he could manage his own small skiff several hundred yards off the Buholmen shore to where old Sula Mountain cast her shadow from across the fjord on the shining water.

“He’ll be a seaman,” said his father, watching with satis­faction from his jetty. “Not a fisherman, staying close to these waters, but a seaman.”

He was five when the Germans came to alesund, big, gray-coated men who tramped around in heavy boots. It was not until he was seven that he saw the war. It was summer, and his father had let him come fishing during the holidays from Norvoy School. With the rest of the alesund fishing fleet, his father’s boat was far out at sea under the guard of a German uboat. During the night he awoke because men were moving about. Away to the west were twinkling lights, the mastheads of the Orkneys fleet.

There was a small rowboat bobbing beside his father’s vessel, and the crew were shifting herring boxes. Before the child’s astounded gaze, a young man, pale and exhausted, emerged from beneath the boxes in the hold and was helped into the rowboat. Minutes later it was lost in the darkness, heading for the Orkneys men. Another radio operator from the Resistance was on his way to England for training. His father made him promise never to mention what he had seen. A week later in alesund there was a rattle of rifle fire one evening, and his mother told him he should say his prayers extra hard because the schoolmaster was dead.

By the time he was in his early teens, growing out of clothes faster than his mother could make them, he, too, had become obsessed with radio and in two years had built his own transmitter-receiver. His father gazed at the apparatus in wonderment; it was beyond his comprehension. Thor was six­teen when, the day after Christmas of 1951, he picked up an SOS message from a ship in distress in the mid-Atlantic. She was the Flying Enterprise . Her cargo had shifted, and she was listing badly in heavy seas.

For sixteen days the world and a teenage Norwegian boy watched and listened with baited breath as the Danish-born American captain, Kurt Carlsen, refused to leave his sinking ship and nursed her painfully eastward through the gales toward the south of England. Sitting in his attic hour after hour with his headphones over his ears, looking out through the dormer window at the wild ocean beyond the mouth of the fjord, Thor Larsen had willed the old freighter to make it home to port. On January 10, 1952, she finally sank, just fifty-seven miles off Falmouth harbor.

Larsen heard her go down, listened to the shadowing tugs tell of her death and of the rescue of her indomitable cap­tain. He took off his headphones, laid them down, and de­scended to his parents, who were at the table.

“I have decided,” he told them, “what I am going to be. I am going to be a sea captain.”

A month later he entered the merchant marine.

The plane touched down and rolled to a stop outside the small, neat terminal with its goose pond by the parking lot. His wife, Lisa, was waiting for him with the car; with her were Kristina, his sixteen-year-old daughter, and Kurt, his fourteen-year-old son. The pair chattered like magpies on the short drive across the island to the ferry, and across the sound to alesund, and all the way home to their comfortable ranch-style house in the secluded suburb of Bogneset.

It was good to be home. He would go fishing with Kurt out on the Borgund Fjord, as his father had taken him fishing there in his youth; they would picnic in the last days of the summer on their little cabin cruiser or on the knobby green islands that dotted the sound. He had three weeks of leave; then Japan, and in February the captaincy of the biggest ship the world had ever seen. He had come a long way from the wooden cottage in Buholmen, but alesund was still his home and for this descendant of Vikings there was nowhere in the world quite like it.