Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“I am calling Maxim Rudin,” he said. “But if he will not take my call or declines to give me an explanation, we will have to assume he is himself under intolerable pressures of some kind within his own circle. So while I am waiting for the call, I am going to entrust Mrs. Carpenter with the secret of what has just happened here and ask for her help through Sir Nigel Irvine and the Nightingale. In the last resort I will call Chancellor Busch in Bonn and ask him to give me more time.”

When the caller asked for Ludwig Jahn personally, the switchboard operator at Tegel Jail was prepared to cut him off. There had been numerous press calls seeking to speak with specific officers on the staff in order to elicit details on Mishkin and Lazareff. The operator had her orders: no calls.

But when the caller explained he was Jahn’s cousin and that Jahn was to have attended his daughter’s wedding the following day at noon, the operator softened. Family was dif­ferent. She put the call through; Jahn took it from his office.

“I think you remember me,” the voice told Jahn.

The officer remembered him well—the Russian with the la­bor-camp eyes.

“You shouldn’t have called me here,” he whispered hoarse­ly. “I can’t help you. The guards have been trebled, the shifts changed. I am on shift permanently now, sleeping here in the office until further notice—those are the orders. They are unapproachable now, those two men.”

“You had better make an excuse to get out for an hour,” said the voice of Colonel Kukushkin. “There’s a bar four hundred meters from the staff gate.” He named the bar and gave its address. Jahn did not know it, but he knew the street. “In one hour,” said the voice. There was a click.

It was eight P.M. in Berlin, and quite dark.

The British Prime Minister had been taking a quiet supper with her husband in the private apartments atop 10 Downing Street when she was summoned to accept a personal call from President Matthews. She was back at her desk when the call came through. The two government leaders knew each other well, and had met a dozen times since Britain’s first woman premier came to office. Face-to-face they used Chris­tian names, but even though the super-secure call across the Atlantic could not be eavesdropped, there was an official record made, so they stayed with formalities.

In careful, succinct terms. President Matthews explained the message he had received from Maxim Rudin via his Am­bassador in Washington. Joan Carpenter was stunned.

“In heaven’s name, why?” she asked.

“That’s my problem, ma’am,” came the Southern drawl from across the Atlantic. “There is no explanation. None at all. Two more things. Ambassador Kirov advised me that if the content of Rudin’s message ever became public knowledge, the same consequences to the Treaty of Dublin would still apply. I may count on your discretion?”

“Implicitly,” she replied. “The second thing?”

“I’ve tried to call Maxim Rudin on the hot line. He is un­available. Now, from that, I have to assume he has his prob­lems right in the heart of the Kremlin and he can’t talk about them. Frankly, that has put me in an impossible position. But about one thing I am absolutely determined. I cannot let that treaty be destroyed. It is far too important to the whole of the Western world. I have to fight for it. I cannot let two hi­jackers in a Berlin jail destroy it; I cannot let a bunch of ter­rorists on a tanker in the North Sea unleash an armed conflict between East and West such as would ensue.”

“I entirely agree with you, Mr. President,” said the Premier from her London desk. “What do you want from me? I imagine you would have more influence with Chancellor Busch than I.”

“It’s not that, ma’am. Two things. We have a certain amount of information about the consequences to Europe of the Freya’s blowing up, but I assume you have more. I need to know every conceivable possible consequence and option in the event the terrorists aboard do their worst.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Carpenter, “during the whole of today our people have put together an in-depth study of the ship, her cargo, the chances of containing the spillage, and so on. So far, we haven’t examined the idea of storming her. Now we may have to. I will have all our information on those as­pects on their way to you within the hour. What else?”

“This is the hard one, and I scarcely know how to ask it,” said William Matthews. “We believe there has to be an ex­planation of Rudin’s behavior, and until we know it, we are groping in the dark. If I am to handle this crisis, I have to see some daylight. I have to have that explanation. I need to know if there is a third option. I would like you to ask your people to activate the Nightingale one last time and get that answer for me.”

Joan Carpenter was pensive. She had always made it a pol­icy not to interfere with the way Sir Nigel Irvine ran his serv­ice. Unlike several of her predecessors, she had steadily declined to poke around in the intelligence services to satisfy her curiosity. Since coming to office she had doubled the budgets of both her directors, of SIS and MI5, had chosen hard-core professionals for the posts, and had been rewarded by their unswerving loyalty. Secure in that loyalty, she trusted them not to let her down. And neither had.

“I will do what I can,” she said at length. “But we are talk­ing about something in the very heart of the Kremlin, and a matter of hours. If it is possible, it will be done. You have my word on it.”

When the telephone was back in its cradle, she called her husband to tell him not to wait for her, she would be at her desk all night. From the kitchen she ordered a pot of coffee. The practical side of things arranged, she called Sir Julian Flannery at his home, told him simply over the line that a fresh crisis had arisen, and asked him to return at once to the Cabinet Office. Her last call was not on an open line; it was to the duty officer at the head office of the Firm. She asked for Sir Nigel Irvine to be contacted wherever he was, and to be asked to come immediately to No. 10. While waiting, she switched on the office television and caught the start of the nine o’clock BBC news. The long night had begun.

Ludwig Jahn slipped into the booth and sat down, sweating gently. From across the table the Russian regarded him coldly. The plump prison guard could not know that the fear­some Russian was fighting for his own life; the man gave no hint.

He listened impassively as Jahn explained the new pro­cedures, instituted since two that afternoon. In point of fact, Kukushkin had no diplomatic cover; he was hiding out in an SSD safe house in West Berlin as a guest of his East German colleagues.

“So you see,” concluded Jahn, “there is nothing I can do. I could not possibly get you into that corridor. There are three on duty, as a minimum figure, night and day. Passes have to be shown every time one enters the corridor, even by me, and we all know each other. We have worked together for years. No new face would be admitted without a check call to the governor.”

Kukushkin nodded slowly. Jahn felt relief rising in his chest. They would let him go; they would leave him alone; they would not hurt his family. It was over.

“You enter the corridor, of course,” said the Russian. “You may enter the cells.”

“Well, yes, I am the Oberachmeister. At periodic intervals I have to check that they are all right.”

“At night they sleep?”

“Maybe. They have heard about the matter in the North Sea. They lost their radios just after the noon broadcasts, but one of the other prisoners in solitary shouted the news across to them before the corridor was cleared of all other prisoners. Perhaps they will sleep, perhaps not.”