Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“Those fine captains out there, why won’t they help you?”

“They can’t, snow mouse. No one can help me. I have to do it myself, or no one else will.”

“I don’t trust that American captain,” she whispered. “I saw him when I came on board with Mr. Grayling. He would not look me in the face.”

“No, he cannot. Nor me. You see, he has orders to blow the Freya out of the water.”

She pulled away from him and looked up, eyes wide.

“He couldn’t,” she said. “No man would do that to other men.”

“He will if he has to. I don’t know for certain, but I sus­pect so. The guns of his ship are obviously trained on us. If the Americans thought they had to do it, they would do it Burning up the cargo would lessen the ecological damage, destroy the blackmail weapon.”

She shivered and clung to him. She began to cry.

“I hate him,” she said.

Thor Larsen stroked her hair, his great hand almost Gover­ning her small head.

“Don’t hate him,” he rumbled. “He has his orders. They all have their orders. They will all do what the men far away in the chancelleries of Europe and America tell them to do.”

“I don’t care. I hate them all.”

He laughed as he stroked her, gently reassuring.

“Do something for me, snow mouse.”

“Anything.”

“Go back home. Go back to alesund. Get out of this place. Look after Kurt and Kristina. Keep the house ready for me. When this is over, I am going to come home. You can be­lieve that.”

“Come back with me. Now.”

“You know I have to go. The time is up.”

“Don’t go back to the ship,” she begged him. “They’ll kill you there.”

She was sniffing furiously, trying not to cry, trying not to hurt him.

“It’s my ship,” he said gently. “It’s my crew. You know I have to go.”

He left her in Captain Preston’s armchair.

As he did so, the car bearing Adam Munro swung out of Downing Street, past the crowd of sightseers who hoped to catch a glimpse of the high and the mighty at this moment of crisis, and turned through Parliament Square for the Crom­well Road and the highway to Heathrow.

Five minutes later Thor Larsen was buckled by two Royal Navy seamen, their hair awash from the rotors of the Wessex above them, into the harness.

Captain Preston, with six of his officers and the four NATO captains, stood in a line a few yards away. The Wessex began to lift.

“Gentlemen,” said Captain Preston. Five hands rose to five braided caps in simultaneous salute.

Mike Manning watched the bearded sailor in the harness being borne away from him. From a hundred feet up, the Norwegian seemed to be looking down, straight at him.

He knows, thought Manning with horror. Oh, Jesus and Mary, he knows.

Thor Larsen walked into the day cabin of his own suite on the Freya with a submachine carbine at his back. The man he knew as Svoboda was in his usual chair. Larsen was di­rected into the one at the far end of the table.

“Did they believe you?” asked the Ukrainian.

“Yes,” said Larsen. “They believed me. And you were right. They were preparing an attack by frogmen after dark. It’s been called off.”

Drake snorted.

“Just as well,” he said. “If they had tried it, I’d have pressed this button without hesitation, suicide or no suicide. They’d have left me no alternative.”

At ten minutes before noon, President William Matthews laid down the telephone that had joined him for fifteen minutes to the British Premier in London, and looked at his three ad­visers. They had each heard the conversation on the Ampli-Vox.

“So that’s it,” he said. “The British are not going ahead with their night attack. Another of our options gone. That just about leaves us with the alternative of blowing the Freya to pieces ourselves. Is the warship on station?”

“In position, gun laid and loaded,” confirmed Stanislaw Poklewski.

“Unless this man Munro has some idea that would work,” suggested Robert Benson. “Will you agree to see him, Mr. President?”

“Bob, I’ll see the devil himself if he can propose some way of getting me off this hook,” said Matthews.

“One thing at least we may now be certain of,” said David Lawrence. “Maxim Rudin was not overreacting. He could do nothing other than what he has done, after all. In his fight with Yefrem Vishnayev, he, too, has no aces left. How the hell did those two in Moabit Prison ever get to shoot Yuri Ivanenko?”

“We have to assume the one who leads that group on the Freya helped them,” said Benson. “I’d dearly love to get my hands on that Svoboda.”

“No doubt you’d kill him,” said Lawrence with distaste.

“Wrong,” said Benson. “I’d enlist him. He’s tough, inge­nious, and ruthless. He’s taken ten European governments and made them dance like puppets.”

It was noon in Washington, five P.M. in London, as the late-afternoon Concorde hoisted its stiltlike legs over the concrete of Heathrow, lifted its drooping spear of a nose toward the western sky, and climbed through the sound barrier toward the sunset.

The normal rules about not creating the sonic boom until well out over the sea had been overruled by orders from Downing Street. The pencil-slim dart pushed its four scream­ing Olympus engines to full power just after takeoff, and a hundred fifty thousand pounds of thrust flung the airliner toward the stratosphere.

The captain had estimated three hours to Washington, two hours ahead of the sun. Halfway across the Atlantic he told his Boston-bound passengers with deep regret that the Con­corde would make a stopover of a few moments at Dulles In­ternational Airport, Washington, before heading back to Boston, for “operational reasons.”

It was seven P.M. in Western Europe but nine in Moscow when Yefrem Vishnayev finally got the personal and highly unusual Saturday evening meeting with Maxim Rudin for which he had been clamoring all day.

The old director of Soviet Russia agreed to meet his Party theoretician in the Politburo meeting room on the third floor of the Arsenal building.

When he arrived, Vishnayev was backed by Marshal Niko­lai Kerensky, but he found Rudin supported by his allies, Dmitri Rykov and Vassili Petrov.

“I note that few appear to be enjoying this brilliant spring weekend in the countryside,” he said acidly.

Rudin shrugged. “I was in the midst of enjoying a private dinner with two friends,” he said. “What brings you, Com­rades Vishnayev and Kerensky, to the Kremlin at this hour?”

The room was bare of secretaries and guards; it contained just the five power bosses of the Soviet Union in angry con­frontation beneath the globe lights in the high ceiling.

“Treason,” snapped Vishnayev. “Treason, Comrade Secre­tary-General.”

The silence was ominous, menacing.

“Whose treason?” asked Rudin.

Vishnayev leaned across the table and spoke two feet from Rudin’s face.

“The treason of two filthy Jews from Lvov,” he hissed. “The treason of two men now in jail in Berlin. Two men whose freedom is being sought by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea. The treason of Mishkin and Lazareff.”

“It is true,” said Rudin carefully, “that the murder last De­cember by these two of Captain Rudenko of Aeroflot consti­tutes—”

“Is it not also true,” asked Vishnayev menacingly, “that these two murderers also killed Yuri Ivanenko?”

Maxim Rudin would dearly have liked to shoot a sideways glance at Vassili Petrov by his side. Something had gone wrong. There had been a leak.

Petrov’s lips set in a hard, straight line. He, too, now con­trolling the KGB through General Abrassov, knew that the circle of men aware of the real truth was small, very small. The man who had spoken, he was sure, was Colonel Kukushkin, who had first failed to protest his master, and then failed to liquidate his master’s killers. He was trying to buy his career, perhaps even his life, by changing camps and confiding to Vishnayev.