Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

The refineries and the labyrinthine complexity of the Euro­poort, the greatest oil terminal in the world, lie on the south shore of the Maas Estuary. On the north shore in the Hook of Holland, with its ferry terminal and the Maas Control building, squatting beneath its whirling radar antennae.

Here at six-forty-five on the morning of April 1, duty of­ficer Bernhard Dijkstra yawned and stretched. He would be going home in fifteen minutes for a well-earned breakfast. Later, after a sleep, he would motor back from his home at Gravenzande in his spare time to see the new supergiant tanker pass through the estuary. It should be quite a day. As if to answer his thoughts, the speaker in front of him came to life.

“Pilot Maas, Pilot Mass, this is the Freya .”

The supertanker was on Channel 20, the usual channel for a tanker out at sea to call up Mass Control by radiotele­phone. Dijkstra leaned forward and flicked a switch.

“ Freya , this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead.”

“Pilot Maas, this is the Freya . Captain Thor Larsen speak­ing. Where is the launch with my berthing crew?”

Dijkstra consulted a clipboard to the left of his console.

“ Freya , this is Pilot Maas. They left the Hook over an hour ago. They should be with you in twenty minutes.”

What followed caused Dijkstra to shoot bolt-upright in his chair.

“ Freya to Pilot Maas. Contact the launch immediately and tell them to return to port. We cannot accept them on board. Inform the Maas pilots not to take off—repeat, not to take off. We cannot accept them on board. We have an emergency—I repeat, we have an emergency.”

Dijkstra covered the speaker with his hand and yelled to his fellow duty officer to throw the switch on the tape re­corder. When it was spinning to record the conversation, Dijkstra removed his hand and said carefully:

“ Freya , this is Pilot Maas. Understand you do not wish the berthing crew to come alongside. Understand you do not wish the pilots to take off. Please confirm.”

“Pilot Maas, this is Freya . Confirm. Confirm.”

“ Freya , please give details of your emergency.”

There was silence for ten seconds, as if a consultation were taking place on the Freya’s bridge far out at sea. Then Larsen’s voice boomed out again in the control room.

“Pilot Maas, Freya . I cannot give the nature of the emergency. But if any attempt is made by anyone to ap­proach the Freya , people will get killed. Please stay away. Do not make any further attempt to contact the Freya by radio or telephone. Finally, the Freya will contact you again at oh-nine-hundred hours exactly. Have the chairman of the Rotter­dam Port Authority present in the control room. That is all.”

The voice ended, and there was a loud click. Dijkstra tried to call back two or three times. Then he looked across at his colleague.

“What the hell did that mean?”

Officer Wilhelm Schipper shrugged in perplexity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Captain Larsen sounded as if he might be in danger.”

“He spoke of men getting killed,” said Dijkstra. “How killed? What’s he got, a mutiny? Someone run amok?”

“We’d better do what he says until this is sorted out,” said Schipper.

“Right,” said Dijkstra. “You get on to the chairman. I’ll contact the launch and the two pilots up at Schiphol.”

The launch bearing the berthing crew was chugging at a steady ten knots across the flat calm toward the Freya , with three miles still to go. It was developing into a beautiful spring morning, warm for the time of year. At three miles the bulk of the giant tanker was already looming large, and the ten Dutchmen who would help her berth, but who had never seen her before, were craning their necks as they came closer.

No one thought anything when the ship-to-shore radio by the helmsman’s side crackled and squawked. He took the handset off its cradle and held it to his ear. With a frown he cut the engine to idling, and asked for a repeat. When he got it, he put the helm hard a-starboard and brought the launch around in a semicircle.

“We’re going back,” he told the men, who looked at him with puzzlement. “There’s something wrong. Captain Larsen’s not ready for you yet.”

Behind them the Freya receded again toward the horizon as they headed back to the Hook.

Up at Schiphol Airport, south of Amsterdam, the two estuary pilots were walking toward the Port Authority helicopter that would airlift them out to the deck of the tanker. It was routine procedure; they always went out to waiting ships by whirlybird.

The senior pilot, a grizzled veteran with twenty years at sea, a master’s ticket, and fifteen years as a Maas Pilot, car­ried his “brown box,” the instrument that would help him steer her to within a yard of seawater if he wished to be so precise. With the Freya clearing twenty feet only from the shoals and the Inner Channel barely fifty feet wider than the Freya herself, he would need it this morning.

As they ducked underneath the whirling blades, the heli­copter pilot leaned out and wagged a warning finger at them.

“Something seems to be wrong,” he yelled above the roar of the engine. “We have to wait. I’m closing her down.”

The engine cut, the blades swished to a stop.

“What the hell’s all that about?” asked the second pilot.

The helicopter flier shrugged.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Just came through from Maas Control. The ship isn’t ready for you yet.”

At his handsome country house outside Vlaardingen, Dirk Van Gelder, chairman of the Port Authority, was at breakfast a few minutes before eight when the phone rang. His wife an­swered it.

“It’s for you,” she called, and went back to the kitchen, where the coffee was perking. Van Gelder rose from the breakfast table, dropped his newspaper on the chair, and shuffled in carpet slippers out to the hallway.

“Van Gelder,” he said into the telephone. As he listened, he stiffened, his brow furrowed.

“What did he mean, killed?” he asked.

There was another stream of words into his ear.

“Right,” said Van Gelder. “Stay there. I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”

He slammed the phone down, kicked off the slippers, and put on his shoes and jacket. Two minutes later he was at his garage doors. As he climbed into his Mercedes and backed out to the gravel driveway, he was fighting back thoughts of his personal and abiding nightmare.

“Dear God, not a hijack. Please, not a hijack.”

After replacing the VHF radiotelephone on the bridge of the Freya , Captain Thor Larsen had been taken at gunpoint on a tour of his own ship, peering with flashlight into the forward ballast holds to note the big packages strapped far down be­low the waterline.

Returning down the deck, he had seen the launch with the berthing crew turn, three miles out, and head back for the shore. To seaward a small freighter had passed, heading south, and had greeted the leviathan at anchor with a cheery hoot. It was not returned.

He had seen the single charge in the center ballast tank amidships, and the further charges in the after ballast tanks close by the superstructure. He did not need to see the paint locker. He knew where it was, and could imagine how close the charges were placed.

At half past eight, while Dirk Van Gelder was striding into the Maas Control Building to listen to the tape recording, Thor Larsen was being escorted back to his day cabin. He had noted one of the terrorists, muffled against the chill, perched right up in the fo’c’sle apron of the Freya , watching the arc of the sea out in front of the vessel. Another was high on the top of the funnel casing, over a hundred feet up, with a commanding view of the sea around him. A third was on the bridge, patrolling the radar screens, able, thanks to the Freya’s own technology, to see a circle of ocean with a radius of forty-eight miles, and most of the sea beneath her.