Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“Mr. President,” he whispered, “I don’t know if I can do that.”

DETSKY MIR means “Children’s World” and is Moscow’s premier toyshop—four stories of dolls and playthings, pup­pets and games. Compared to a Western equivalent, the lay­out is drab and the stock shabby, but it is the best the Soviet capital has, apart from the hard-currency Beriozka shops, where mainly foreigners go.

By an unintended irony it is across Dzerzhinsky Square from the KGB headquarters, which is definitely not a chil­dren’s world. Adam Munro was at the ground-floor soft-toys counter just before ten A.M. Moscow time, two hours later than North Sea time. He began to examine a nylon bear as if debating whether to buy it for his offspring.

Two minutes after ten, someone moved to the counter beside him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she was pale, her normally full lips drawn, tight, the color of cigarette ash.

She nodded. Her voice was pitched, like his own, low, con­versational, uninvolved.

“I managed to see the transcript, Adam. It’s serious.”

She picked up a hand puppet shaped like a small monkey in artificial fur, and told him quietly what she had discovered.

“That’s impossible,” he muttered. “He’s still convalescing from a heart attack.”

“No. He was shot dead last October thirty-first in the middle of the night on a street in Kiev.”

Two salesgirls leaning against the wall twenty feet away eyed them without curiosity and returned to their gossip. One of the few advantages of shopping in Moscow is that one is guaranteed complete privacy from assistance by the sales staff.

“And those two in Berlin were the ones?” asked Munro.

“It seems so,” she said dully. “The fear is that if they escape to Israel they will hold a press conference and inflict an intolerable humiliation on the Soviet Union.”

“Causing Maxim Rudin to fall,” breathed Munro. “No wonder he will not countenance their release. He cannot. He, too, has no alternative. And you—are you safe, darling?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There were suspicions. Un­spoken, but they were there. Soon there will be a report from the man on the telephone switchboard about your call; the gateman will report about my drive in the small hours. It will come together.”

“Listen, Valentina, I will get you out of here. Quickly, in the next few days.”

For the first time, she turned and faced him. He saw that her eyes were brimming.

“It’s over, Adam. I’ve done what you asked of me, and now it’s too late.” She reached up and kissed him briefly, be­fore the astonished gaze of the salesgirls. “Good-bye, Adam, my love. I’m sorry.”

She turned, paused for a moment to collect herself, and walked away, through the glass doors to the street, back through the gap in the Wall into the East. From where he stood with a plastic-faced milkmaid doll in his hand, he saw her reach the pavement and turn out of sight. A man in a gray trench coat, who had been wiping the windshield of a car, straightened, nodded to a colleague behind the wind­shield, and strolled after her.

Adam Munro felt the grief and the anger rising in his throat like a ball of sticky acid. The sounds of the shop muted as a roaring invaded his ears. His hand closed around the head of the doll, crushing, cracking, splintering the smiling pink face beneath the lace cap. A salesgirl appeared rapidly at his side.

“You’ve broken it,” she said. That will be four rubles.”

Compared with the whirlwind of public and media concern that had concentrated on the West German Chancellor the previous afternoon, the recriminations that poured upon Bonn that Saturday morning were more like a hurricane.

The Foreign Ministry received a continual stream of re­quests couched in the most urgent terms from the embassies of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Holland, and Belgium, asking that their ambassadors be received. Each wish was granted, and each ambassador asked in the courteous phraseology of diplomacy the same question: What the hell is going on?

Newspapers, television, and radio operations called in all their staffers from weekend leave and tried to give the affair saturation coverage, which was not easy. There were no pic­tures of the Freya since the hijacking, save those taken by the French free-lance, who was under arrest and his pictures con­fiscated. In fact the same pictures were under study in Paris, but the shots from the successive Nimrods were just as good, and the French government was receiving them, anyway.

For lack of hard news, the papers hunted anything they could go for. Two enterprising Englishmen bribed the Hilton Hotel staff in Rotterdam to lend them their uniforms, and tried to reach the penthouse suite where Harry Wennerstrom and Lisa Larsen were under siege.

Others sought out former prime ministers, cabinet office­holders, and tanker captains for their views. Extraordinary sums were waved in the faces of the wives of the crewmen, almost all of whom had been traced, to be photographed praying for their husbands’ deliverance.

One former mercenary commander offered to storm the Freya alone for a million-dollar fee; four archbishops and seventeen parliamentarians of varying persuasions and ambi­tions offered themselves as hostages in exchange for Captain Larsen and his crew.

“Separately, or in job lots?” snapped Dietrich Busch when he was informed. “I wish William Matthews were on board instead of those good sailors. I’d hold out till Christmas.”

By midmorning, the leaks to the two German stars of press and radio were beginning to have their effect. Their respec­tive comments on German radio and television were picked up by the news agencies and Germany-based correspondents and given wider coverage. The view began to percolate that Dietrich Busch had in fact been acting in the hours before dawn under massive American pressure.

Bonn declined to confirm this, but refused to deny it, ei­ther. The sheer evasiveness of the government spokesman there told the press its own story.

As dawn broke over Washington, five hours behind Eu­rope, the emphasis switched to the White House. By six A.M. in Washington the White House press corps was clamoring for an interview with the President himself. They had to be satisfied, but were not, with a harassed and evasive official spokesman. The spokesman was evasive only because he did not know what to say; his repeated appeals to the Oval Office brought only further instructions that he tell the newshounds the matter was a European affair and the Europeans must do as they thought best. Which threw the affair back into the lap of an increasingly outraged German Chancellor.

“How much longer can this go on?” shouted a thoroughly shaken William Matthews to his advisers as he pushed away a plate of scrambled eggs just after six A.M. Washington time.

The same question was being asked, but not answered, in a score of offices across America and Europe that unquiet Sat­urday morning.

From his office in Texas, the owner of the one million tons of Mubarraq crude lying dormant but dangerous beneath the Freya’s deck was on the line to Washington.

“I don’t care what the hell time of the morning it is,” he shouted to the party campaign manager’s secretary. “You get him on the line and tell him this is Clint Blake, you hear?”

When the campaign manager of the political party to which the President belonged finally came on the line, he was not a happy man. When he put the receiver back in its cradle, he was downright morose. A man who all but controls more than a hundred delegates to the national convention is no small potatoes, and Clint Blake’s threat to do a John Connelly and switch parties was no joke.