Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“Got it, Captain. Fall point for first shell?”

“Ten meters over the bow of the Freya .”

Olsen’s pen halted above the paper of his clipboard. He started at what he had written, then raised his eyes to the Freya , five miles away.

“Captain,” he said slowly, “if you do that, she won’t just sink; she won’t just burn; she won’t just explode. She’ll va­porize.”

“Those are my orders, Mr. Olsen,” said Manning stonily. The young Swedish-American by his side was pale.

“For Christ’s sake, there are twenty-nine Scandinavian seamen on that ship.”

“Mr. Olsen, I am aware of the facts. You will either carry out my orders and lay that gun, or announce to me that you refuse.”

The gunnery officer stiffened to attention.

“I’ll load and lay your gun for you, Captain Manning,” he said, “but I will not fire it. If the fire button has to be pressed, you must press it yourself.”

He snapped a perfect salute and marched away to the fire-control station below decks.

You won’t have to, thought Manning, and I couldn’t charge you with mutiny. If the President himself orders me, I will fire it. Then I will resign my commission.

An hour later the Westland Wessex from the Argyll came overhead and winched a Royal Navy officer to the deck of the Moran . He asked to speak to Captain Manning in private and was shown to the American’s cabin.

“Compliments of Captain Preston, sir,” said the ensign, and handed Manning a letter from Preston. When he had fin­ished reading it, Manning sat back like a man reprieved from the gallows. It told him that the British were sending in a team of armed frogmen at ten that night, and all govern­ments had agreed to undertake no independent action in the meantime.

While Manning was thinking the unthinkable aboard the U.S.S. Moran , the airliner bearing Adam Munro back to the West was clearing the Soviet-Polish border.

From the toyshop on Dzerzhinsky Square, Munro had gone to a public call box and telephoned the head of Chancery at his embassy. He had told the amazed diplomat in coded language that he had discovered what his masters wanted to know, but would not be returning to the embassy. Instead, he was heading straight for the airport to catch the noon plane.

By the time the diplomat had informed the Foreign Office of this, and the FO had told the SIS, the message back to the effect that Munro should cable his news was too late. Munro was boarding.

“What the devil’s he doing?” asked Sir Nigel Irvine of Barry Ferndale in the SIS head office in London when he learned his stormy petrel was flying home.

“No idea,” replied the controller of Soviet Section. “Per­haps the Nightingale’s been blown and he needs to get back urgently before the diplomatic incident blows up. Shall I meet him?”

“When does he land?”

“One-forty-five London time,” said Ferndale. “I think I ought to meet him. It seems he has the answer to President Matthews’s question. Frankly, I’m curious to find out what the devil it can be.”

“So am I,” said Sir Nigel. “Take a car with a scrambler phone and stay in touch with me personally.”

At a quarter to twelve, Drake sent one of his men to bring the Freya’s pumpman back to the cargo-control room on A deck. Leaving Thor Larsen under the guard of another ter­rorist, Drake descended to cargo control, took the fuses from his pocket, and replaced them. Power was restored to the cargo pumps.

“When you discharge cargo, what do you do?” he asked the crewman. “I’ve still got a submachine gun pointing at your captain, and I’ll order it to be used if you play any tricks.”

“The ship’s pipeline system terminates at a single point, a cluster of pipes that we call the manifold,” said the pump­man. “Hoses from the shore installation are coupled to the manifold. After that, the main gate valves are opened at the manifold, and the ship begins to pump.”

“What’s your rate of discharge?”

“Twenty thousand tons per hour,” said the man. “During discharge, the ship’s balance is maintained by venting several tanks at different points on the ship simultaneously.”

Drake had noted that there was a slight, one-knot tide flowing past the Freya , northeast toward the West Frisian Is­lands. He pointed to a tank amidships on the Freya’s star­board side.

“Open the master valve on that one,” he said. The man paused for a second, then obeyed.

“Right,” said Drake. “When I give the word, switch on the cargo pumps and vent the entire tank.”

“Into the sea?” asked the pumpman incredulously.

“Into the sea,” said Drake grimly. “Chancellor Busch is about to learn what international pressure really means.”

As the minutes ticked away to midday of Saturday, April 2, Europe held its breath. So far as anyone knew, the terrorists had already executed one seaman for a breach of the airspace above them, and had threatened to do it again, or vent crude oil, on the stroke of noon.

The Nimrod that had replaced Squadron Leader Latham’s aircraft the previous midnight had run short of fuel by eleven A.M., so Latham was back on duty, cameras whirring as the minutes to noon ticked away.

Many miles above him, a Condor spy satellite was on sta­tion, bouncing its continuous stream of picture images across the globe to where a haggard American President sat in the Oval Office watching a television screen. On the TV the Freya inched gently into the frame from the bottom rim, like a pointing finger.

In London, men of rank and influence in the Cabinet Of­fice briefing room grouped around a screen on which was presented what the Nimrod was seeing. The Nimrod was on continuous camera roll from five minutes before twelve, her pictures passing to the Data Link on the Argyll beneath her, and from there to Whitehall.

Along the rails of the Montcalm , Breda , Brunner , Argyll , and Moran , sailors of five nations passed binoculars from hand to hand. Their officers stood as high aloft as they could get, with telescopes to eye.

On the BBC World Service, the bell of Big Ben struck noon. In the Cabinet Office two hundred yards from Big Ben and two floors beneath the street, someone shouted, “Christ, she’s venting!” Three thousand miles away, four shirt-sleeved Americans in the Oval Office watched the same spectacle.

From the side of the Freya , midships to starboard, a column of sticky, ocher-red crude oil erupted.

It was thick as a man’s torso. Impelled by the power of the Freya’s mighty pumps, the oil leaped the starboard rail, dropped twenty-five feet, and thundered into the sea. Within seconds, the blue-green water was discolored, putrefied. As the oil bubbled back to the surface, a stain began to spread, moving out and away from the ship’s hull on the tide.

For sixty minutes the venting went on, until the single tank was dry. The great stain formed the shape of an egg, broad nearest the Dutch coast and tapering near to the ship. Finally the mass of oil parted company with the Freya and began to drift. The sea being calm, the oil slick stayed in one piece, but it began to expand as the light crude ran across the sur­face of the water. At two P.M., an hour after the venting ended, the slick was ten miles long and seven miles wide at its broadest.

The Condor passed on, and the slick moved off the screen in Washington. Stanislaw Poklewski switched off the set.

“That’s just one fiftieth of what she carries,” he said. “Those Europeans will go mad.”

Robert Benson took a telephone call and turned to President Matthews.

“London just checked in with Langley,” he said. “Their man from Moscow has cabled that he has the answer to our question. He claims he knows why Maxim Rudin is threaten­ing to tear up the Treaty of Dublin if Mishkin and Lazareff go free. He’s flying personally with the news from Moscow to London, and he should land in one hour.”