Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

They had been flying for just under one hour when Canada’s last landfall at Cape Harrison drifted far beneath them and they were over the cruel North Atlantic, bound for the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.

“Mr. President Rudin, please hear me out,” said William Matthews. He was speaking earnestly into a small micro­phone on his desk, the so-called hot line, which in fact is not a telephone at all. From an amplifier to one side of the mi­crophone, the listeners in the Oval Office could hear the mut­ter of the simultaneous translator speaking in Russian into Rudin’s ear in Moscow.

“Maxim Andreevich, I believe we are both too old in this business, that we have worked too hard and too long to se­cure peace for our peoples, to be frustrated and cheated at this late stage by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea.”

There was silence for a few seconds; then the gruff voice of Rudin came on the line, speaking in Russian. By the President’s side a young aide from the State Department rattled off the translation in a low voice.

“Then, William, my friend, you must destroy the tanker, take away the weapon of blackmail, for I can do no other than I have done.”

Bob Benson shot the President a warning look. There was no need to tell Rudin the West already knew the real truth about Ivanenko.

“I know this,” said Matthews into the mike. “But I cannot destroy the tanker, either. To do so would destroy me. There may be another way. I ask you with all my heart to receive this man who is even now airborne from here and heading for Moscow. He has a proposal that may be the way out for us both.”

“Who is this American?” asked Rudin.

“He is not American, he is British,” said President Mat­thews. “His name is Adam Munro.”

There was silence for several moments. Finally the voice from Russia came back grudgingly.

“Give my staff the details of his flight plan—height, speed, course. I will order that his airplane be allowed through, and will receive him personally when he arrives. Spakoinyo notch , William.”

“He wishes you a peaceful night, Mr. President,” said the translator.

“He must be joking,” said William Matthews. “Give his people the Blackbird’s flight path, and tell Blackbird to proceed on course.”

On board the Freya , it struck midnight. Captives and captors entered their third and last day. Before another midnight struck, Mishkin and Lazareff would be in Israel, or the Freya and all aboard her would be dead.

Despite his threat to choose a different cabin, Drake was confident there would be no night attack from the Marines, and elected to stay where he was.

Thor Larsen faced him grimly across the table in the day cabin. For both men the exhaustion was almost total. Larsen, fighting back the waves of weariness that tried to force him to place his head in his arms and go to sleep, continued his solo game of seeking to keep Svoboda awake, too, pinpricking the Ukrainian to make him reply.

The surest way of provoking Svoboda, he had discovered, the surest way of making him use up his last remaining reserve of nervous energy, was to draw the conversation to the question of Russians.

“I don’t believe in your popular uprising, Mr. Svoboda,” he said. “I don’t believe the Russians will ever rise against their masters in the Kremlin. Bad, inefficient, brutal they may be; but they have only to raise the specter of the foreigner, and they can rely on that limitless Russian patriotism.”

For a moment it seemed the Norwegian might have gone too far. Svoboda’s hand closed over the butt of his gun; his face went white with rage.

“Damn and blast their patriotism!” he shouted, rising to his feet “I am sick and tired of hearing Western writers and liberals go on and on about this so-called marvelous Russian patriotism.

“What kind of patriotism is it that can feed only on the destruction of other people’s love of homeland? What about my patriotism, Larsen? What about the Ukrainians’ love for their enslaved homeland? What about Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians? Are they not allowed any patriotism? Must it all be sublimated to this endless and sick­ening love of Russia?

“I hate their bloody patriotism. It is mere chauvinism, and always has been, since Peter and Ivan. It can exist only through the conquest and slavery of other, surrounding na­tions.”

He was standing over Larsen, halfway around the table, waving his gun, panting from the exertion of shouting. He took a grip on himself and returned to his seat. Pointing the gun barrel at Thor Larsen like a forefinger, he told him:

“One day, maybe not too long from now, the Russian em­pire will begin to crack. One day soon, the Rumanians will exercise their patriotism, and the Poles and Czechs. Followed by the East Germans and Hungarians. And the Balts and Ukrainians, the Georgians and Armenians. The Russian em­pire will crack and crumble, the way the Roman and British empires cracked, because at last the arrogance of their man­darins became insufferable.

“Within twenty-four hours I am personally going to put the cold chisel into the mortar and swing one gigantic hammer onto it. And if you or anyone else gets in my way, you’ll die. And you had better believe it.”

He put the gun down and spoke more softly.

“In any case, Busch has acceded to my demands, and this time he will not go back on his promise. This time, Mishkin and Lazareff will reach Israel.”

Thor Larsen observed the younger man clinically. It had been risky; he had nearly used his gun. But he had also nearly lost his concentration; he had nearly come within range. One more time, one single further attempt, in the sad hour just before dawn ...

Coded and urgent messages had passed all night between Washington and Omaha, and from there to the many radar stations mat make up the eyes and ears of the Western al­liance in an electronic ring around the Soviet Union. Distant eyes had seen the shooting star of the blip from the Blackbird moving east of Iceland toward Scandinavia on its route to Moscow. Forewarned, the watchers raised no alarm.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, messages out of Mos­cow alerted the Soviet watchers to the presence of the in­coming plane. Forewarned, no fighters scrambled to intercept it. An air highway was cleared from the Gulf of Bothnia to Moscow, and the Blackbird stuck to its route.

But one fighter base had apparently not heard the warning; or hearing it, had not heeded it; or had been given a secret command from somewhere deep inside the Defense Ministry, countermanding the Kremlin’s orders.

High in the Arctic, east of Kirkenes, two Mig-25s clawed their way from the snow toward the stratosphere on an inter­ception course. These were the 25-E versions, ultramodern, better powered and armed than the older version of the sev­enties and the 25-A.

They were capable of 2.8 times the speed of sound, and of a maximum altitude of eighty thousand feet. But the six Acrid air-to-air missiles that each had slung beneath its wings would roar on, another twenty thousand feet above that They were climbing on full power with afterburner, leaping upward at over ten thousand feet per minute.

The Blackbird was over Finland, heading for Lake Ladoga and Leningrad, when Colonel O’Sullivan grunted into the mi­crophone.

“We have company.”

Munro came out of his reverie. Though he understood little of the technology of the SR-71, the small radar screen in front of him told its own story. There were two small blips on it, approaching fast.

“Who are they?” he asked, and for a moment a twinge of fear moved in the pit of his stomach. Maxim Rudin had given his personal clearance. He wouldn’t revoke it, surely. But would someone else?