Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

Because the inert gases created a completely oxygen-free atmosphere, fire or spark, which requires oxygen, was ban­ished. But every tank had a one-meter circular inspection hatch let into the main deck; if a hatch were opened by an incautious visitor, he would immediately be enveloped in a carpet of inert gas reaching to above his head. He would die choking, asphyxiated in an atmosphere containing no oxygen.

“Thank you,” said the terrorist. “Who handles the breath­ing apparatus?”

“The first officer is in charge of it,” said Martinsson. “But we are all trained to use it.”

Two minutes later he was back in the paint store with the rest of the crew. It was five o’clock.

While the leader of the masked men had been in the cargo-control room with Martinsson, and another held Thor Larsen prisoner in his own cabin, the remaining five had un­loaded their launch. The ten suitcases of explosive stood on the deck amidships at the top of the courtesy ladder, awaiting the leader’s instructions for placing. These orders he gave with crisp precision. Far away on the foredeck the inspection hatches of the port and starboard ballast tanks were un­screwed and removed, revealing the single steel ladder de­scending eighty feet into the black depths of musty air.

Azamat Krim took off his mask, stuffed it in his pocket, took his flashlight, and descended into the first. Two suitcases were lowered after him on long cords. Working in the base of the hold by lamplight, he placed one entire suitcase against the outer hull of the Freya and lashed it to one of the verti­cal ribs with cord. He opened the other case and extracted its contents in two halves. One half went against the forward bulkhead, beyond which lay twenty thousand tons of oil; the other half went against the aft bulkhead, behind which was another twenty thousand tons of crude. Sandbags, also brought from the launch, were packed around the charges to concentrate the blast When he was satisfied that the deto­nators were in place and linked to the triggering device, he came back to the starlight on deck.

The same process was repeated on the other side of the Freya , and then twice again in the port and starboard ballast tanks close up to the superstructure. He had used eight of his suitcases in four ballast holds. The ninth he placed in the center ballast tank amidships, not to blast a hole for the wait­ing sea, but to help crack the spine.

The tenth was brought down to the engine room. Here in the curvature of the Freya’s hull, close up against the bulk­head to the paint locker, strong enough to break both open simultaneously, it was laid and primed. If it went off, those men in the paint locker a half-inch of steel away who sur­vived the blast would drown when the sea, under immense pressure at eighty feet below the waves, came pounding through. It was six-fifteen and dawn was breaking over the Freya’s silent decks when he reported to Andrew Drake.

“The charges are laid and primed, Andriy,” he said. “I pray to God we never set them off.”

“We won’t have to,” said Drake. “But I have to convince Captain Larsen. Only when he has seen and believed, will he convince the authorities. Then they’ll have to do as we want. They’ll have no alternative.”

Two of the crew were brought from the paint locker, made to don protective clothing, face masks, and oxygen bottles, and proceed down the deck from the fo’c’sle to the housing, opening every one of the fifty inspection hatches to the oil-cargo tanks. When the job was done, the men were returned to the paint locker. The steel door was closed and the two bolts screwed shut on the outside, not to be opened again un­til two prisoners were safe in Israel.

At six-thirty, Andrew Drake, still masked, returned to the captain’s day cabin. Wearily he sat down, facing Thor Lar­sen, and told him from start to finish what had been done. The Norwegian stared back at him impassively, held in check by the submachine gun pointing at him from the corner of the room.

When he had finished, Drake held up a black plastic in­strument and showed it to Larsen. It was no larger than two king-size cigarette packs bound together; there was a single red button on the face of it, and a four-inch steel aerial stick­ing from the top.

“Do you know what this is, Captain?” asked the masked Drake. Larsen shrugged. He knew enough about radio to recognize a small transistorized transmitter.

“It’s an oscillator,” said Drake. “If that red button is pressed, it will emit a single VHF note, rising steadily in tone and pitch to a scream that our ears could not begin to listen to. But attached to every single charge on this ship is a re­ceiver that can and will listen. As the tonal pitch rises, a dial on the receivers will show the pitch, the needles moving around the dials until they can go no further. When that hap­pens, the devices will blow their fuses and a current will be cut. The cutting of that current in each receiver will convey its message to the detonators, which will then operate. You know what that would mean?”

Thor Larsen stared back at the masked face across the table from him. His ship, his beloved Freya , was being raped, and there was nothing he could do about it. His crew was crowded into a steel coffin inches away through a steel bulk­head from a charge that would crush them all, and cover them in seconds with freezing seawater.

His mind’s eye conjured a picture of hell. If the charges blew, great holes would be torn in the port and starboard sides of four of his ballast tanks. Roaring mountains of sea would rush in, filling both the outer and the center ballast tanks in minutes. Being heavier than the crude oil, the sea-water would have the greater pressure; it would push through the other gaping holes inside the tanks to the neighboring cargo holds, spewing the crude oil upward through the in­spection hatches, so that six more holds would fill with water. This would happen right up in the forepeak, and right aft, beneath his feet. In minutes the engine room would be flooded with tens of thousands of tons of green water. The stern and the bow would drop at least ten feet, but the buoy­ant midsection would ride high, its ballast tanks untouched. The Freya , most beautiful of all the Norse goddesses, would arch her back once, in pain, and split in two. Both sections would drop straight, without rolling, twenty-five feet to the seabed beneath, to sit there with fifty inspection hatches open and facing upward. A million tons of crude would gurgle out to the surface of the North Sea.

It might take an hour for the mighty goddess to sink com­pletely, but the process would be irreversible. In such shallow water, part of her bridge might still be above the tide, but she could never be refloated. It might take three days for the last of her cargo to reach the surface, but no diver could work among fifty columns of vertically rising crude oil. No one would close the hatches again. The escape of the oil, like the destruction of his ship, would be irreversible.

He stared back at the masked face but made no reply. There was a deep, seething anger inside him, growing with each passing minute, but he gave no sign of it.

“What do you want?” he growled. The terrorist glanced at the digital display clock on the wall. It read a quarter to seven.

“We’re going to the radio room,” he said. “We talk to Rot­terdam. Or rather, you talk to Rotterdam.”

Twenty-seven miles to the east, the rising sun had dimmed the great yellow flames that spout day and night from the oil refineries of the Europoort. Through the night, from the bridge of the Freya , it had been possible to see these flames in the dark sky above Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum, and even, far beyond them, the cool blue glow of Rotterdam’s streetlighting.