Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“That might not be wise, Adam old son,” said Ferndale. “You can’t just walk in on the P.M., you know. Even the Master has to make an appointment.”

“Then ask him to make one,” said Munro, gesturing to the telephone.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to,” said Ferndale quietly. It was a pity to see a talented man blow his career to bits, but Munro had evidently reached the end of his tether. Ferndale was not going to stand in his way; the Master had told him to stay in touch. He did exactly that.

Ten minutes later, Mrs. Joan Carpenter listened carefully to the voice of Sir Nigel Irvine on the scrambler telephone.

“To give the answer to me personally, Sir Nigel?” she asked. “Isn’t that rather unusual?”

“Extremely so, ma’am. In fact, it’s unheard of. I fear it has to mean Mr. Munro and the service’s parting company. But short of asking the specialists to require the information out of him, I can hardly force him to tell me. You see, he’s lost an agent who seems to have become a personal friend over the past nine months, and he’s just about at the end of his tether.”

Joan Carpenter thought for several moments.

“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of so much distress,” she said. “I would like to apologize to your Mr. Munro for what I had to ask him to do. Please ask his driver to bring him to Number Ten. And join me yourself, immedi­ately.”

The line went dead. Sir Nigel Irvine stared at the receiver for a while. That woman never ceases to surprise me, he thought. All right Adam, you want your moment of glory, son, you’ll have it. But it’ll be your last. After that, it’s pas­tures new for you. Can’t have prima donnas in the Firm.

As he descended to his car, Sir Nigel reflected that how­ever interesting the explanation might be, it was academic, or soon would be. In seven hours Major Simon Fallon would steal aboard the Freya with three companions and wipe out the terrorists. After that, Mishkin and Lazareff would stay where they were for fifteen years.

At two o’clock, back in the day cabin, Drake leaned forward toward Thor Larsen and told him:

“You’re probably wondering why I set up this conference on the Argyll . I know that while you are there you will tell them who we are and how many we are. What we are armed with and where the charges are placed. Now listen carefully because this is what you must also tell them if you want to save your crew and ship from instant destruction.”

He talked for over thirty minutes. Thor Larsen listened im­passively, drinking in the words and their implications.

When he had finished, the Norwegian captain said, “I’ll tell them. Not because I aim to save your skin, Mr. Svoboda, but because you are not going to kill my crew and my ship.”

There was a trill from the intercom in the soundproof cabin. Drake answered it and looked out through the win­dows to the distant fo’c’sle. Approaching from the seaward side, very slowly and carefully, was the Wessex helicopter from the Argyll , the Royal Navy markings clear along her tail.

Five minutes later, under the eyes of cameras that beamed their images across the world, watched by men and women in subterranean offices hundreds and even thousands of miles away, Captain Thor Larsen, master of the biggest ship ever built, stepped out of her superstructure into the open air. He had insisted on donning his black trousers, and over his white sweater had buttoned his merchant navy jacket with the four gold rings of a sea captain. On his head was the braided cap with the Viking helmet emblem of the Nordia Line. He was in the uniform he would have worn the previous evening to meet the world’s press for the first time. Squaring his broad shoulders, he began the long, lonely walk down the vast ex­panse of his ship to where the harness and cable dangled from the helicopter a third of a mile in front of him.

SIR NIGEL IRVINE’S personal limousine, bearing Barry Ferndale and Adam Munro, arrived at 10 Downing Street a few seconds before three o’clock. When the pair were shown into the anteroom leading to the Prime Minister’s study, Sir Nigel himself was already there. He greeted Munro coolly.

“I do hope this insistence on delivering your report to the P.M. personally will have been worth all the effort, Munro,” he said.

“I think it will, Sir Nigel,” replied Munro.

The Director General of the SIS regarded his staffer quizzi­cally. The man was evidently exhausted, and had had a rough deal over the Nightingale affair. Still, that was no excuse for breaking discipline. The door to the private study opened and Sir Julian Flannery appeared.

“Do come in, gentlemen,” he said.

Adam Munro had never met the Prime Minister person­ally. Despite not having slept for two days, she appeared fresh and poised. She greeted Sir Nigel first, then shook hands with the two men she had not met before, Barry Ferndale and Adam Munro.

“Mr. Munro,” she said, “let me state at the outset my deep regret that I had to cause you both personal hazard and pos­sible exposure to your agent in Moscow. I had no wish to do so, but the answer to President Matthews’s question was of truly international importance, and I do not use that phrase lightly.”

“Thank you for saying so, ma’am,” replied Munro.

She went on to explain that, even as they talked, the cap­tain of the Freya , Thor Larsen, was landing on the afterdeck of the cruiser Argyll for a conference; and that, scheduled for ten that evening, a team of SBS frogmen was going to attack the Freya in an attempt to wipe out the terrorists and their detonator.

Munro’s face was set like granite when he heard.

“If, ma’am,” he said clearly, “these commandos are suc­cessful, then the hijacking will be over, the two prisoners in Berlin will stay where they are, and the probable exposure of my agent will have been in vain.”

She had the grace to look thoroughly uncomfortable.

“I can only repeat my apology, Mr. Munro. The plan to storm the Freya was only devised in the small hours of this morning, ten hours after Maxim Rudin delivered his ultima­tum to President Matthews. By then you were already con­sulting the Nightingale. It was impossible to call that agent back.”

Sir Julian entered the room and told the Premier, “They’re coming on patch-through now, ma’am.”

The Prime Minister asked her three guests to be seated. A box speaker had been placed in the corner of her office, and wires led from it to a neighboring anteroom.

“Gentlemen, the conference on the Argyll is beginning. Let us listen to it, and then we will learn from Mr. Munro the reason for Maxim Rudin’s extraordinary ultimatum.”

As Thor Larsen stepped from the harness onto the afterdeck of the British cruiser at the end of his dizzying five-mile ride through the sky beneath the Wessex, the roar of the engines above his head was penetrated by the shrill welcome of the bosun’s pipes.

The Argyll’s captain stepped forward, saluted, and held out his hand.

“Richard Preston,” said the Royal Navy captain. Larsen returned the salute and shook hands.

“Welcome aboard, Captain,” said Preston.

“Thank you,” said Larsen.

“Would you care to step down to the wardroom?”

The two captains descended from the fresh air into the largest cabin in the cruiser, the officers’ wardroom. There Captain Preston made the formal introductions.

“The Right Honorable Jan Grayling, Prime Minister of the Netherlands. You have spoken on the telephone already, I believe. ... His Excellency Konrad Voss, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany. Captain Desmoulins of the French Navy, de Jong of the Dutch Navy, Hasselmann of the German Navy, and Manning of the United States Navy.”