Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“MAT-forty-nine,” said Colonel Hohnes briefly, studying the submachine gun one of the men cradled in his arms. “It’s French.”

“Ah,” said Sir Julian, “now perhaps we have something. These blighters could be French?”

“Not necessarily,” said Holmes. “You can buy these things in the underworld. The Paris underworld is famous for its taste for submachine guns.”

At three-thirty, Sir Julian Flannery brought the meeting into recess. It was agreed to keep the Nimrod circling above the Freya until further notice. The Vice Chief of Defense Staff put forward and had accepted his proposal to divert a naval warship to take up station Just over five miles west of the Freya to watch her also, in case of an attempt by the ter­rorists to leave under cover of darkness. The Nimrod would spot them and pass their position to the Navy. The warship would easily overhaul the fishing launch still tied by the Freyda’s side.

The Foreign Office agreed to ask to be informed of any de­cision by West Germany and Israel on the terrorists’ de­mands.

“There does not, after all, appear much that Her Majesty’s government can do at the present moment,” Sir Julian pointed out. The decision is up to the Israeli Prime Minister and the West German Chancellor. Personally I cannot see what else they can do except to let these wretched young men go to Israel, repugnant though the idea of yielding to black­mail must be.”

When the men left the room, only Colonel Holmes of the Royal Marines stayed behind. He sat down again and stared at the model of the quarter-million-ton British Petroleum tanker in front of him.

“Supposing they don’t?” He said to himself.

Carefully he began to measure the distance in feet from the sea to the stern taffrail.

The Swedish pilot of the Jetstream was at fifteen thousand feet off the West Frisian Islands, preparing to let down into Schiedam airfield outside Rotterdam. He turned around and called something to the petite woman who was his passenger. She unbuckled and came forward to where he sat.

“I asked if you wanted to see the Freya ,” the pilot re­peated. The woman nodded.

The Jetstream banked away to the sea, and five minutes later tilted gently onto one wing. From her seat, face pressed to the tiny porthole, Lisa Larsen looked down. Far below in a blue sea, like a gray sardine nailed to the water, the Freya lay at anchor. There were no ships around her; she was quite alone in her captivity.

Even from fifteen thousand feet, through the clear spring air, Lisa Larsen could make out where the bridge would be, where the starboard side of that bridge was; below it she knew her husband was facing a man with a gun pointed straight at his chest, with explosive beneath his feet. She did not know whether the man with the gun was mad, brutal, or reckless. That he must be a fanatic, she knew.

Two tears welled out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. When she whispered, her breath misted the perspex disk in front of her.

“Thor, my darling, please come out of there alive.”

The Jetstream banked again and began its long drop toward Schiedam. The Nimrod, miles away across the sky, watched it go.

“Who was that?” asked the radar operator of no one in par­ticular.

“Who was what?” replied a sonar operator, having nothing to do.

“Small executive jet just banked over the Freya , had a look, and went off to Rotterdam,” said the radarman.

“Probably the owner checking on his property,” said the crew’s wit from the radio console.

On the Freya the two lookouts gazed through eyeslits after the tiny sliver of metal high above as it headed east toward the Dutch coast. They did not report it to their leader; it was well above ten thousand feet.

The West German cabinet meeting began just after three P.M. in the Chancellery Office, with Dietrich Busch in the chair as usual. He went straight to the point, as he had a habit of doing.

“Let’s be clear about one thing: this is not Mogadisho all over again. This time we do not have a German plane with a German crew and mainly German passengers on an air­strip whose authorities are prepared to be collaborative toward us. This is a Swedish vessel with a Norwegian captain in in­ternational waters; she has crewmen from five countries in­cluding the United States, an American-owned cargo insured by a British company, and her destruction would affect at least five coastal nations, including ourselves. Foreign Minister?”

Hagowitz informed his colleagues he had already received polite queries from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, and Britain regarding the kind of decision the government of the Federal Republic might come to. After all, they held Mishkin and Lazareff.

“They are being courteous enough not to exert any pressure to influence our decision, but I have no doubt they would view a refusal on our part to send Mishkin and Laz­areff to Israel with the deepest misgivings,” he said.

“Once you start giving in to this terrorist blackmail, it never ends,” put in the Defense Minister.

“Dietrich, we gave in over the Peter Lorenz affair years ago and paid for it. The very terrorists we freed came back and operated again. We stood up to them over Mogadishu and won; we stood up again over Schleyer and had a corpse on our hands. But at least those were pretty well all-German affairs. This isn’t. The lives at stake aren’t German; the property isn’t German. Moreover, the hijackers in Berlin aren’t from a German terrorist group. They’re Jews who tried to get away from Russia the only way they knew how. Frankly, it puts us in the devil of a spot,” Hagowitz con­cluded.

“Any chance that it’s a bluff, a confidence trick, that they really can’t destroy the Freya or kill her crew?” someone asked.

The Interior Minister shook his head.

“We can’t bank on that. These pictures the British have just transmitted to us show the armed and masked men are real enough. I’ve sent them along to the leader of GSG-nine to see what he thinks. But the trouble is, approaching a ship with all-around, over-and-under radar and sonar cover is not their area of expertise. It would mean divers or frogmen.”

He was referring by GSG-nine to the ultratough unit of West German commandos drawn from the Border Troops who had stormed the hijacked aircraft at Mogadisho five years earlier.

The argument continued for an hour: whether to accede to the terrorists’ demands in view of the several nationalities of the probable victims of a refusal, and accept the inevitable protests from Moscow; or whether to refuse and call their bluff; or whether to consult with the British allies about the idea of storming the Freya . A compromise view of adopting delaying tactics, stalling for time, testing the determination of the Freya’s captors, seemed to be gaining ground. At four-fif­teen, there was a quiet knock on the door. Chancellor Busch frowned; he did not like interruptions.

“ Herein ,” he called. An aide entered the room and whis­pered urgently in the Chancellor’s ear. The head of the Fed­eral Republic’s government paled.

“ Du lieber Gott ,” he breathed.

When the light aircraft, later traced as a privately owned Cessna on charter from Le Touquet airfield on the northern French coast, began to approach, she was spotted by three different air-traffic-control zones: at Heathrow, Brussels, and Amsterdam. She was flying due north, and the radars put her at five thousand feet, on track for the Freya . The ether began to crackle furiously.

“Unidentified light aircraft ... identify yourself and turn back. You are entering a prohibited area. ...”