Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

Two minutes later they were gone. They took their photos with them. There was no evidence left It did not matter. Jahn could see every detail in his nightmares.

By March 23 over two hundred fifty ships, the first wave of the waiting merchant fleet, were docked in the major grain ports from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. There was still ice in the St. Lawrence, but it was shattered to mosaic by the icebreakers, aware of its defeat as the grain ships moved through it to berth by the grain elevators.

A fair proportion of these ships were of the Russian Sovfracht fleet, but the next largest numbers were flying the U.S. flag, for one of the conditions of the sale had been that American carriers take the prime contracts to move the grain.

Within ten days they would begin moving east across the Atlantic, bound for Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic, Leningrad at the head of the Gulf of Finland, and the warm-water ports of Odessa, Sevastopol, and Novorossisk on the Black Sea. Flags of ten other nations mingled with them to effect the biggest single dry-cargo movement since the Sec­ond World War. Elevators from Duluth to Houston spewed a golden tide of wheat, barley, oats, rye, and com into their bellies, all destined within a month for the hungry millions of Russia.

On the twenty-sixth, Andrew Drake rose from his work at the kitchen table of an apartment in the suburbs of Brussels and pronounced that he was ready.

The explosives had been packed into ten fiber suitcases, the submachine guns rolled in towels and stuffed into haversacks. Azamat Krim kept the detonators bedded in cotton in a cigar box that never left him. When darkness fell, the cargo was carried in relays down to the group’s secondhand, Belgian-registered panel van, and they set off for Blankenberge.

The little seaside resort facing the North Sea was quiet, the harbor virtually deserted, when they transferred their equip­ment under cover of darkness to the bilges of the fishing launch. It was a Saturday, and though a man walking his dog along the quay noticed them at work, he thought no more of it. Parties of sea anglers stocking up for a weekend’s fishing were common enough, even though it was a mite early in the year and still chilly.

On Sunday the twenty-seventh, Miroslav Kaminsky bade them good-bye, took the van, and drove back to Brussels. His job was to clean the Brussels flat from top to bottom and end to end, to abandon it, and to drive the van to a prearranged rendezvous in the polders of Holland. There he would leave it, with its ignition key in an agreed place, then take the ferry from the Hook back to Harwich and London. He had his itinerary well rehearsed and was confident he could carry out his part of the plan.

The remaining seven men left port and cruised sedately up the coast to lose themselves in the islands of Walcheren and North Beveland, just across the border with Holland. There, with their fishing rods much in evidence, they hove to and waited. On a powerful radio down in the cabin, Andrew Drake sat hunched, listening to the wavelength of Maas Es­tuary Control and the endless calls of the ships heading into or out of the Europoort and Rotterdam.

“Colonel Kukushkin is going into Tegel Jail to do the job early in the morning of April fourth,” Vassili Petrov told Maxim Rudin in the Kremlin that same Sunday morning. “There is a senior guard who will let him in, bring him to the cells of Mishkin and Lazareff, and let him out of the jail by the staff doorway when it is over.”

“The guard is reliable? One of our people?” asked Rudin.

“No, but he has family in East Germany. He has been per­suaded to do as he is told. Kukushkin reports that he will not contact the police. He is too frightened.”

“Then he knows already whom he is working for. Which means he knows too much.”

“Kukushkin will silence him also, just as he steps out of the doorway. There will be no trace,” said Petrov.

“Eight days,” grunted Rudin. “He had better get it right.”

“He will,” said Petrov. “He, too, has a family. By a week from tomorrow Mishkin and Lazareff will be dead, and their secret with them. Those who helped them will keep silent to save their own lives. Even if they talk, it will be disbelieved. Mere hysterical allegations. No one will believe them.”

When the sun rose on the morning of the twenty-ninth, its first rays picked up the mass of the Freya twenty miles west of Ireland, cutting north by northeast through the eleven-degree longitude on a course to skirt the Outer Hebrides.

Her powerful radar scanners had picked up the fishing fleet in the darkness an hour before, and her officer of the watch noted them carefully. The nearest to her was well to the east, or landward side, of the tanker.

The sun glittered over the rocks of Donegal, a thin line on the eastward horizon to the men on the bridge with their ad­vantage of eighty feet of altitude. It caught the small fishing smacks of the men from Killybegs, drifting out in the western seas for mackerel, herring, and whiting. And it caught the bulk of the Freya herself, like a moving landmass, steaming out of the south past the drifters and their gently bobbing nets.

Christy O’Byrne was in the tiny wheelhouse of the smack he and his brother owned, the Bernadette . He blinked several times, put down his cocoa mug, and stepped the three feet from the wheelhouse to the rail. His vessel was the nearest to the passing tanker.

From behind him, when they saw the Freya , the fishermen tugged on the horn lanyards, and a chorus of thin whoops disturbed the dawn. On the bridge of the Freya , Thor Larsen nodded to his junior officer; seconds later the bellowing bull roar of the Freya answered the Killybegs fleet.

Christy O’Byrne leaned on the rail and watched the Freya fill the horizon, heard the throb of her power beneath the sea, and felt the Bernadette begin to roll in the widening wake of the tanker.

“Holy Mary,” he whispered, “would you look at the size of her.”

On the eastern shore of Ireland, compatriots of Christy O’Byrne were at work that morning in Dublin Castle, for seven hundred years the seat of power of the British. As a tiny boy perched on his father’s shoulder, Martin Donahue had watched from outside as the last British troops marched out of the castle forever, following the signing of a peace treaty. Sixty-one years later, on the verge of retirement from government service, he was a cleaner, pushing a Hoover back and forth over the electric-blue carpet of St Patrick’s Hall.

He had not been present when any of Ireland’s successive presidents had been inaugurated beneath Vincent Waldre’s magnificent 1778 painted ceiling, nor would he be present in twelve days when two superpowers signed the Treaty of Dub­lin below the motionless heraldic banners of the long-gone Knights of St. Patrick. For forty years he had just kept it dusted for them.

Rotterdan, too, was preparing, but for a different ceremony. Harry Wennerstrom arrived on the thirtieth and installed himself in the best suite at the Hilton Hotel.

He had come by his private executive jet, now parked at Schiedam municipal airport just outside the city. Throughout the day four secretaries fussed around him, preparing for the Scandinavian and Dutch dignitaries, the tycoons from the worlds of oil and shipping, and the scores of press people who would attend his reception on the evening of April 1 for Captain Thor Larsen and his officers.

A select party of notables and members of the press would be his guests on the flat roof of the modern Maas Control building, situated on the very tip of the sandy shore at the Hook of Holland. Well protected against the stiff spring breeze, they would watch from the north shore of the Maas Estuary as the six tugs pulled and pushed the Freya those last few kilometers from the estuary into the Caland Kanaal, from there to the Beer Kanaal, and finally to rest by Clint Blake’s new oil refinery in the heart of the Europoort.