Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

French and English were used; later, Dutch. They had no effect. Either the pilot had switched off his radio or he was on the wrong channel. The operators on the ground began to weep through the wave bands.

The circling Nimrod picked the aircraft up on radar and tried to contact her.

On board the Cessna, the pilot turned to his passenger in despair.

“They’ll have my license,” he yelled. “They’re going mad down there.”

“Switch off,” the passenger shouted back. “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. You never heard them, okay?”

The passenger gripped his camera and adjusted the telephoto lens. He began to sight up on the approaching super­tanker. In the forepeak, the masked lookout stiffened and squinted against the sun, now in the southwest. The plane was coming from due south. After watching for several seconds, he took a walkie-talkie from his anorak and spoke shar­ply into it.

On the bridge, one of his colleagues heard the message, peered forward through the panoramic screen, and walked hurriedly outside onto the wing. Here he, too, could hear the engine note. He reentered the bridge and shook his sleeping colleague awake, snapping several orders in Ukrainian. The man ran downstairs to the door of the day cabin and knocked.

Inside the cabin, Thor Larsen and Andrew Drake, both looking unshaven and more haggard than twelve hours ear­lier, were still at the table, the gun by the Ukrainian’s right hand. A foot away from him was his powerful transistor ra­dio, picking up the latest news. The masked man entered on his command and spoke in Ukrainian. His leader scowled and ordered the man to take over in the cabin.

Drake left the cabin quickly, raced up to the bridge and out onto the wing. As he did so, he pulled on his black mask. From the bridge he gazed up as the Cessna, banking at a thousand feet, performed one orbit of the Freya and flew back to the south, climbing steadily. While it turned he had seen the great zoom lens poking down at him.

Inside the aircraft, the free-lance cameraman was exultant.

“Fantastic!” he shouted at the pilot. “Completely exclusive. The magazines will pay their right arms for this.”

Drake returned to the bridge and issued a rapid stream of orders. Over the walkie-talkie he told the man up front to continue his watch. The bridge lookout was sent below to summon two men who were catching sleep. When all three returned, he gave them further instructions. When he re­turned to the day cabin, he did not dismiss the extra guard.

“I think it’s time I told those stupid bastards over there in Europe that I am not joking,” he told Thor Larsen.

Five minutes later the camera operator on the Nimrod called over the intercom to his captain.

“There’s something happening down there, skipper.”

Squadron Leader Latham left the flight deck and walked back to the center section of the hull, where the visual image of what the cameras were photographing was on display. Two men were walking down the deck of the Freya , the great wall of superstructure behind them, the long, lonely deck ahead. One of the men, the one at the rear, was in black from head to foot, with a submachine gun. The one ahead wore sneak­ers, casual slacks, and a nylon-type anorak with three horizontal black stripes across its back. The hood was up against the chill afternoon breeze.

“Looks like a terrorist at the back, but a seaman in front,” said the camera operator. Latham nodded. He could not see the colors; his pictures were monochrome.

“Give me a closer look,” he said, “and transmit.” The camera zoomed down until the frame occupied forty feet of foredeck, both men walking in the center of the pic­ture.

Captain Thor Larsen could see the colors. He gazed through the wide forward windows of his cabin beneath the bridge in disbelief. Behind him the guard with the machine gun stood well back, muzzle trained on the middle of the Norwegian’s white sweater.

Halfway down the foredeck, reduced by distance to match-stick figures, the second man, in black, stopped, raised his machine gun, and aimed at the back in front of him. Even through the glazing the crackle of the one-second burst could be heard. The figure in the pillar-box red anorak arched as if kicked in the spine, threw up its arms, pitched forward, rolled once, and came to rest, half-obscured beneath the inspection catwalk.

Thor Larsen slowly closed his eyes. When the ship had been taken over, his third mate, Danish-American Tom Kel­ler, had been wearing fawn slacks and a light nylon wind-breaker in bright red with three black stripes across the back. Larsen leaned his forehead against the back of his hand on the glass. Then he straightened, turned to the man he knew as Svoboda, and stared at him. Drake stared back.

“I warned them,” he said angrily. “I told them exactly what would happen, and they thought they could play games. Now they know they cant.”

Twenty minutes later the still pictures showing the se­quence of what had happened on the deck of the Freya were coming out of a machine in the heart of London. Twenty minutes after that, the details in verbal terms were rattling off a teleprinter in the Federal Chancellery in Bonn. It was four-thirty P.M.

Chancellor Busch looked at his cabinet.

“I regret to have to inform you,” he said, “that one hour ago a private plane apparently sought to take pictures of the Freya from close range, about a thousand feet. Ten minutes later the terrorists walked one of the crew halfway down the deck and, under the cameras of the British Nimrod above them, executed him. His body now lies half under the cat­walk, half under the sky.”

There was dead silence in the room.

“Can he be identified?” asked one of the ministers in a low voice.

“No, his face was partly covered by the hood of his an­orak.”

“Bastards,” said the Defense Minister. “Now thirty families all over Scandinavia will be in anguish, instead of one. They’re really turning the knife.”

“In the wake of this, so will the four governments of Scan­dinavia, and I shall have to answer their ambassadors,” said Hagowitz. “I really don’t think we have any alternative.”

When the hands were raised, the majority were for Hagowitz’s proposal: that he instruct the German Ambassa­dor to Israel to seek an urgent interview with the Israeli Pre­mier and ask from him, at Germany’s request, the guarantee the terrorists had demanded. Following which, if it was given, the Federal Republic would announce that with regret it had no alternative, in order to spare further misery to innocent men and women outside West Germany, but to release Mishkin and Lazareff to Israel.

“The terrorists have given the Israeli Prime Minister until midnight to offer that guarantee,” said Chancellor Busch. “And ourselves until dawn to put these hijackers on a plane. We’ll hold our announcement until Jerusalem agrees. Without that, there is nothing we can do, anyway.”

By agreement among the NATO allies concerned, the RAF Nimrod remained the only aircraft in the sky above the Freya , circling endlessly, watching and noting, sending pic­tures back to base whenever there was anything to show—pictures that went immediately to London and to the capitals of the concerned countries.

At five P.M. the lookouts were changed, the men from the fo’c’sle and funnel top, who had been there for ten hours, being allowed to return, chilled and stiff, to the crew’s quarters for food, warmth, and sleep. For the night watch, they were replaced by others, equipped with walkie-talkies and powerful flashlights.

But the allied agreement on the Nimrod did not extend to surface ships. Each coastal nation wanted an on-site observer from its own Navy. During the late afternoon the French light cruiser Montcalm stole quietly out of the south and hove lo, just over five nautical miles from the Freya . Out of the north, where she had been cruising off the Frisians, came the Dutch missile frigate Breda , which stopped six nautical miles to the north of the helpless tanker.