Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

There’s more. On April thirtieth I am going to retire. Does that surprise you?”

Petrov sat motionless, alert. He had twice seen the supre­mos go down. Khrushchev in flames, ousted and disgraced, to become a nonperson. Brezhnev on his own terms. He had been close enough to feel the thunder when the most power­ful tyrant in the world gives way to another. But never this close. This time he wore the mantle unless others could snatch it from him.

“Yes,” he said carefully, “it does.”

“In April I am calling a meeting of the full Central Com­mittee,” said Rudin. “To announce to them my decision to go on April thirtieth. On May Day there will be a new leader at the center of the line on the Mausoleum. I want it to be you. In June the plenary Party Congress is due. The leader will outline the policy from then on. I want it to be you. I told you that weeks ago.”

Petrov knew he was Rudin’s choice, since that meeting in the old leader’s private suite in the Kremlin when the dead Ivanenko had been with them, cynical and watchful as ever. But he had not known it would be so fast.

“I won’t get the Central Committee to accept your nomi­nation unless I can give them something they want. Grain. They’ve all known the position for a long time. If Castletown fails, Vishnayev will have it all.”

“Why so soon?” asked Petrov.

Rudin held up his glass. From the shadows the silent Misha appeared and poured brandy into it.

“I got the results of the tests from Kuntsevo yesterday,” said Rudin. “They’ve been working on tests for months. Now they’re certain. Not cigarettes and not Armenian brandy. Leukemia. Six to twelve months. Let’s just say I won’t see a Christmas after this one. And if we have a nuclear war, nei­ther will you.

“In the next hundred days we have to secure a grain agree­ment from the Americans and wipe out the Ivanenko affair once and for all time. The sands are running out, and too damn fast. The cards are on the table, face up, and there are no more aces to play.”

On December 28, the United States formally offered the So­viet Union a sale, for immediate delivery and at commercial rates, of ten million tons of animal feed grains, to be con­sidered as being outside any terms still being negotiated at Castletown.

On New Year’s Eve, an Aeroflot twin-jet Tupolev-134 took off from Lvov airport, bound for Minsk on an internal flight. Just north of the border between the Ukraine and White Rus­sia, high over the Pripet Marshes, a nervous-looking young man rose from his seat and approached the stewardess, who was several rows back from the steel door leading to the flight deck, speaking with a passenger.

Knowing the toilets were at the other end of the cabin, she straightened as the young man approached her. As she did so, the young man spun her around, clamped his left forearm across her throat, drew a handgun, and jammed it into her ribs. She screamed. There was a chorus of shouts and yells from the passengers. The hijacker began to drag the girl backward to the locked door to the flight deck. On the bulk­head next to the door was the intercom enabling the steward­ess to speak to the flight crew, who had orders to refuse to open the door in the event of a hijack.

From midway down the fuselage, one of the passengers rose, automatic in hand. He crouched in the aisle, both hands clasped around his gun, pointing it straight at the stewardess and the hijacker behind her.

“Hold it!” he shouted. “KGB. Hold it right there.”

“Tell them to open the door,” yelled the hijacker.

“Not a chance!” shouted the armed flight guard from the KGB back to the hijacker.

“If they don’t, I’ll kill the girl,” screamed the man holding the stewardess.

The girl had a lot of courage. She lunged backward with her heel, caught the gunman in the shin, broke his grip, and made to run toward the police agent. The hijacker sprang af­ter her, passing three rows of passengers. It was a mistake. From an aisle seat, one of them rose, turned, and slammed a fist into the nape of the hijacker’s neck. The man fell, face downward; before he could move, his assailant had snatched the man’s gun and was pointing it at him. The hijacker turned, sat up, looked at the gun, put his face in his hands, and began to moan softly.

From the rear the KGB agent stepped past the stewardess, gun still at the ready, and approached the rescuer.

“Who are you?” he asked. For answer, the rescuer reached into an inside pocket, produced a card, and flicked it open.

The agent looked at the KGB card.

“You’re not from Lvov,” he said.

“Ternopol,” said the other. “I was going home on leave in Minsk, so I had no sidearm. But I have a good right fist.” He grinned.

The agent from Lvov nodded.

“Thanks, Comrade. Keep him covered.” He stepped to the intercom and talked rapidly into it. He was relating what had happened and asking for a police escort at Minsk.

“Is it safe to have a look?” asked a metallic voice from be­hind the door.

“Sure,” said the KGB agent. “He’s safe enough now.”

There was a clicking behind the door, and it opened to show the head of the engineer, somewhat frightened and in­tensely curious.

The agent from Ternopol acted very strangely. He turned from the man on the floor, crashed the revolver into the base of his colleague’s skull, shoved him aside, and thrust his foot in the space between the door and jamb before it could close. In a second he was through it, pushing the engineer backward onto the flight deck. The man on the floor behind him rose, grabbed the flight guard’s own automatic, a standard KGB Tokarev nine-millimeter, followed through the steel door, and slammed it behind him. It locked automatically.

Two minutes later, under the guns of David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, the Tupolev turned due west for Warsaw and Berlin, the latter being the ultimate limit of their fuel supply. At the controls Captain Mikhail Rudenko sat white-faced with rage; beside him his copilot, Sergei Vatutin, slowly an­swered the frantic requests from the Minsk control tower re­garding the change of course.

By the time the airliner had crossed the border into Polish airspace, Minsk tower and four other airliners on the same wavelength knew the Tupolev was in the hands of hijack­ers. When it bored clean through the center of Warsaw’s air-traffic-control zone, Moscow already knew. A hundred miles west of Warsaw, a flight of six Polish-based Soviet MIG-23 fighters swept in from starboard and formatted on the Tupolev. The flight leader was jabbering rapidly into his mask.

At his desk in the Defense Ministry on Frunze Street, Mos­cow, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky took an urgent call on the line linking him to Soviet Air Force headquarters.

“Where?” he barked.

“Passing over Poznan,” was the answer. “Three hundred kilometers to Berlin. Fifty minutes’ flying time.”

The marshal considered carefully. This could be the scan­dal that Vishnayev had demanded. There was no doubt what should be done. The Tupolev should be shot down, with its entire passenger and crew complement. Later the version given out would be that the hijackers had fired within the fuselage, hitting a main fuel tank. It had happened twice in the past decade.

He gave his orders. A hundred meters off the airliner’s wing tip, the commander of the MIG flight listened five minutes later.

“If you say so, Comrade Colonel,” he told his base com­mander. Twenty minutes later, the airliner passed across the Oder-Niesse Line and began its descent into Berlin. As it did so, the MIGs peeled gracefully away and slipped down the sky toward their home base.

“I have to tell Berlin we’re coming in,” Captain Rudenko appealed to Mishkin. “If there’s a plane on the runway, we’ll end up as a ball of fire.”