Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“It is certainly suspected,” said Rudin carefully. “Not a proven fact.”

“I understand it is a proven fact,” snapped Vishnayev. “These two men have been positively identified as the killers of our dear comrade, Yuri Ivanenko.”

Rudin reflected on how intensely Vishnayev had loathed Ivanenko and wished him dead and gone.

“The point is academic,” said Rudin. “Even for the killing of Captain Rudenko, the two murderers are destined to be liquidated inside their Berlin jail.”

“Perhaps not,” said Vishnayev with well-simulated outrage. “It appears they may be released by West Germany and sent to Israel. The West is weak; it cannot hold out for long against the terrorists on the Freya . If those two reach Israel alive, they will talk. I think, my friends—oh, yes, I truly think we all know what they will say.”

“What are you asking for?” said Rudin.

Vishnayev rose. Taking his example, Kerensky rose, too.

“I am demanding ,” said Vishnayev, “an extraordinary plenary meeting of the full Politburo here in this room to­morrow night at this hour, nine o’clock. On a matter of ex­ceptional national urgency. That is my right, Comrade Secretary-General?”

Rudin nodded slowly. He looked up at Vishnayev from un­der his eyebrows.

“Yes,” he growled, “that is your right.”

“Then until this hour tomorrow,” snapped the Party theo­retician, and stalked from the chamber.

Rudin turned to Petrov.

“Colonel Kukushkin?” he asked.

“It looks like it. Either way, Vishnayev knows.”

“Any possibility of eliminating Mishkin and Lazareff inside Moabit?”

Petrov shook his head.

“Not by tomorrow. No chance of mounting a fresh oper­ation under a new man in that time. Is there any way of pressuring the West not to release them at all?”

“No,” said Rudin shortly. “I have brought every pressure on Matthews that I know how. There is nothing more I can bring to bear on him. It is up to him now, him and that damned German Chancellor in Bonn.”

“Tomorrow,” said Rykov soberly, “Vishnayev and his people will produce Kukushkin and demand that we hear him out. And if by then Mishkin and Lazareff are in Israel ...”

At eight P.M. European time, Andrew Drake, speaking through Captain Thor Larsen from the Freya , issued his final ultimatum.

At nine A.M. the following morning, in thirteen hours, the Freya would vent one hundred thousand tons of crude oil into the North Sea unless Mishkin and Lazareff were airborne and on their way to Tel Aviv. At eight P.M., unless they were in Israel and identified as genuine, the Freya would blow her­self apart.

“That’s positively the last straw!” shouted Dietrich Busch when he heard the ultimatum ten minutes after it was broad­cast from the Freya . “Who does William Matthews think he is? No one—absolutely no one—is going to force the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany to carry on with this charade. It is over!”

At twenty past eight, the West German government an­nounced that it was unilaterally releasing Mishkin and Lazareff the following morning at eight A.M.

At eight-thirty, a personal coded message arrived on the U.S.S. Moran for Captain Mike Manning. When decoded, it read simply: “Prepare for fire order seven A.M. tomorrow.”

He screwed it into a ball in his fist and looked out through the porthole toward the Freya . She was lit like a Christmas tree, flood and arc lights bathing her towering superstructure in a glare of white light. She sat on the ocean five miles away, doomed, helpless; waiting for one of her two execu­tioners to finish her off.

While Thor Larsen was speaking on the Freya’s radiotele­phone to Maas Control, the Concorde bearing Adam Munro swept over the perimeter fence at Dulles International Air­port, flaps and undercarriage hanging, nose high, a delta-shaped bird of prey seeking to grip the runway.

The bewildered passengers, like goldfish peering through the tiny windows, noted only that she did not taxi toward the terminal building, but simply hove to, engines running, in a parking bay beside the taxi track. A gangway was waiting, along with a black limousine.

A single passenger, carrying no mackintosh and no hand luggage, rose from near the front, stepped out of the open door, and ran down the steps. Seconds later the gangway was withdrawn, the door closed, and the apologetic captain an­nounced that they would take off at once for Boston.

Adam Munro stepped into the limousine beside the two burly escorts and was immediately relieved of his passport. The two Secret Service agents studied it intently as the car swept across the expanse of tarmac to where a small helicop­ter stood in the lee of a hangar, rotors whirling.

The agents were formal, polite. They had their orders. Be­fore he boarded the helicopter, Munro was exhaustively frisked for hidden weapons. When they were satisfied, they escorted him aboard and the whirlybird lifted off, beading across the Potomac for Washington and the spreading lawns of the White House. It was half an hour after touchdown at Dulles, three-thirty on a warm Washington spring afternoon, when they landed, barely a hundred yards from the Oval Of­fice windows.

The two agents escorted Munro across the lawns to where a narrow street ran between the big gray Executive Office Building, a Victorian monstrosity of porticos and columns in­tersected by a bewildering variety of different types of win­dow, and the much smaller, white West Wing, a squat box partly sunken below ground level.

It was to a small door at the basement level that the two agents led Munro. Inside, they identified themselves and their visitor to a uniformed policeman sitting at a tiny desk. Munro was surprised; this was all a far cry from the sweep­ing facade of the front entrance to the residence on Pennsylvania Avenue, so well-known to tourists and beloved of Americans.

The policeman checked with someone by house phone, and a woman secretary came out of an elevator several minutes later. She led the three past the policeman and down a cor­ridor, at the end of which they mounted a narrow staircase. One floor up, they were at ground level, stepping through a door into a thickly carpeted hallway, where a male aide in a charcoal-gray suit glanced with raised eyebrows at the un­shaven, disheveled Englishman.

“You’re to come straight through, Mr. Munro,” he said, and led the way. The two Secret Service agents stayed with the woman.

Munro was led down the corridor, past a small bust of Abraham Lincoln. Two staffers coming the other way passed in silence. The man leading him veered to the left and con­fronted another uniformed policeman sitting at a desk outside a white, paneled door, set flush with the wall. The policeman examined Munro’s passport again, looked at his appearance with evident disapproval, reached under his desk and pressed a button. A buzzer sounded, and the aide pushed at the door. When it opened, he stepped back and ushered Munro past him. Munro took two paces forward and found himself in the Oval Office. The door clicked shut behind him.

The four men in the room were evidently waiting for him, all four staring toward the curved door now set back in the wall where he stood. He recognized President William Mat­thews, but this was a President as no voter had ever seen him: tired, haggard, ten years older than the smiling, confident, mature but energetic image on the posters.

Robert Benson rose and approached him.

“I’m Bob Benson,” he said. He drew Munro toward the desk. William Matthews leaned across and shook hands. Munro was introduced to David Lawrence and Stanislaw Poklewski, both of whom he recognized from their newspaper pictures.