Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

The Ukrainian refugee shook his head.

“Not if they’ve got any sense,” he said. “Not in the heart of West Berlin. The Germans might have to change their minds and send them back after all. If they believed them, which they wouldn’t because Moscow would deny Ivanenko is dead, and produce a look-alike as proof. But Moscow would believe them, and have them liquidated. The Germans, not believing them, would offer no special protection. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’ll keep silent.”

“That’s no use to us,” pointed out Krim. “The whole point of the exercise, of all we’ve gone through, was to deal a single massive humiliating blow to the whole Soviet state ap­paratus. We can’t give that press conference; we don’t have the tiny details that will convince the world. Only Mishkin and Lazareff can do that.”

“Then they have to be got out of there,” said Drake with finality. “We have to mount a second operation to get them to Tel Aviv, with guarantees of their life and liberty. Other­wise it’s all been for nothing.”

“What happens now?” repeated Kaminsky.

“We think,” said Drake. “We work out a way, we plan it, and we execute it. They are not going to sit and rot their lives away in Berlin, not with a secret like that in their heads. And we have little time; it won’t take Moscow forever to put two and two together. They have their lead to follow now; they’ll know who did the Kiev job pretty soon. Then they’ll begin to plan their revenge. We have to beat them to it.”

The chilly anger of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington paled into insignificance beside the outrage of his colleague in Bonn as the Russian diplomat faced the West German For­eign Minister two days later. The refusal of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany to hand the two crimi­nals and murderers over to either the Soviet or the East Ger­man authorities was a flagrant breach of their hitherto friendly relations and could be construed only as a hostile act, he insisted.

The West German Foreign Minister was deeply uncomfort­able. Privately he wished the Tupolev had stayed on the run­way in East Germany. He refrained from pointing out that as the Russians had always insisted West Berlin was not a part of West Germany, they ought to be addressing themselves to the Senate in West Berlin.

The Ambassador repeated his case for the third time: the criminals were Soviet citizens; the victims were Soviet cit­izens; the airliner was Soviet territory; the outrage had taken place in Soviet airspace, and the murder either on or a few feet above the runway of East Germany’s principal airport. The crime should therefore be tried under Soviet or at the very least under East German law.

The Foreign Minister pointed out as courteously as he could that all precedent indicated that hijackers could be tried under the law of the land in which they arrived, if that country wished to exercise the right. This was in no way an imputation of unfairness in the Soviet judicial procedure. ...

The hell it wasn’t, he thought privately. No one in West Ger­many from the government to the press to the public had the slightest doubt that handing Mishkin and Lazareff back would mean KGB interrogation, a kangaroo court, and the firing squad. And they were Jewish—that was another prob­lem.

The first few days of January are slack for the press, and the West German press was making a big story out of this. The conservative and powerful Axel Springer newspapers were insisting that whatever they had done, the two hijackers should receive a fair trial, and that could be guaranteed only in West Germany. The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) Party, on which the governing coalition depended, was taking the same line. Certain quarters were giving the press a large amount of precise information and lurid details about the latest KGB crackdown in the Lvov area from which the hijackers came, suggesting that escape from the ter­ror was a justifiable reaction, albeit a deplorable way of do­ing it. And lastly the recent exposure of yet another Communist agent high in the civil service would not increase the popularity of a government taking a conciliatory line toward Moscow. And with the state elections pending ...

The Minister had his orders from the Chancellor. Mishkin and Lazareff, he told the Ambassador, would go on trial in West Berlin as soon as possible, and if—or rather when—convicted, would receive salutary sentences.

The Politburo meeting at the end of the week was stormy. Once again the tape recorders were off, the stenographers ab­sent.

“This is an outrage,” snapped Vishnayev. “Yet another scandal that diminishes the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world. It should never have happened.”

He implied that it had happened only due to the ever-weakening leadership of Maxim Rudin.

“It would not have happened,” retorted Petrov, “if the Comrade Marshal’s fighters had shot the plane down over Po­land, according to custom.”

“There was a communications breakdown between ground control and the fighter leader,” said Kerensky. “A chance in a thousand.”

“Fortuitous, though,” observed Rykov coldly. Through his ambassadors he knew the Mishkin and Lazareff trial would be public and would reveal exactly how the hijackers had first mugged a KGB officer in a park for his identity papers, then used the papers to penetrate to the flight deck.

“Is there any question,” asked Petryanov, a supporter of Vishnayev, “that these two men could be the ones who killed Ivanenko?”

The atmosphere was electric.

“None at all,” said Petrov firmly. “We know those two come from Lvov, not Kiev. They were Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate. We are investigating, of course, but so far there is no connection.”

“Should such a connection emerge, we will of course be in­formed?” asked Vishnayev.

“That goes without saying, Comrade,” growled Rudin.

The stenographers were recalled, and the meeting went on to discuss the progress at Castletown and the purchase of ten million tons of feed grain. Vishnayev did not press the issue. Rykov was at pains to show that the Soviet Union was gain­ing the quantities of wheat she would need to survive the winter and spring with minimal concessions of weapons lev­els, a point Marshal Kerensky disputed. But Komarov was forced to concede the imminent arrival of ten million tons of animal winter feed would enable him to release the same tonnage from hoarded stocks immediately, and prevent wholesale slaughter. The Maxim Rudin faction, with its hair­breadth supremacy, stayed intact.

As the meeting dispersed, the old Soviet chief drew Vassili Petrov aside.

“ Is there any connection between the two Jews and the Ivanenko killing?” he inquired.

“There may be,” conceded Petrov. “We know they did the mugging in Ternopol, of course, so they were evidently prepared to travel outside Lvov to prepare their escape. We have their fingerprints from the aircraft, and they match those in their living quarters in Lvov. We have found no shoes that match the prints at the Kiev murder site, but we are still searching for those shoes. One last thing. We have an area of palmprint taken from the car that knocked down Ivanenko’s mother. We are trying to get a complete palmprint of both from inside Berlin. If they check ...”

“Prepare a plan, a contingency plan, a feasibility study,” said Rudin. “To have them liquidated inside their jail in West Berlin. Just in case. And another thing. If their identity as the killers of Ivanenko is proved, tell me, not the Politburo. We wipe them out first, then inform our comrades.”

Petrov swallowed hard. Cheating the Politburo was playing for the highest stakes in Soviet Russia. One slip and there would be no safety net. He recalled what Rudin had told him by the fire out at Usovo a fortnight earlier. With the Polit­buro tied six against six, Ivanenko dead, and two of their own six about to change sides, there were no aces left.