The Devil's Alternative

THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR to Washington was coldly angry when he faced David Lawrence at the State Department on January 2.

The American Secretary of State was receiving him at the Soviet government’s request, though insistence would have been a better word.

The Ambassador read his formal protest in a flat mono­tone. When he had finished, he laid the text on the Ameri­can’s desk. Lawrence, who had known exactly what it would be, had an answer ready, prepared by his legal counselors, three of whom stood flanking him behind his chair.

He conceded that West Berlin was indeed not sovereign territory, but a city under Four Power occupation. Neverthe­less, the Western Allies had long conceded that in matters of jurisprudence the West Berlin authorities should handle all criminal and civil offenses other than those falling within the ambit of the purely military laws of the Western Allies. The hijacking of the airliner, he continued, while a terrible of­fense, was not committed by U.S. citizens against U.S. cit­izens or within the U.S. air base of Tempelhof. It was therefore an affair within civil jurisprudence. In consequence, the United States government maintained, it could not legally have held non-U.S. nationals or non-U.S. material witnesses within the territory of West Berlin, even though the airliner had come to rest on a USAF air base.

He had no recourse, therefore, but to reject the Soviet pro­test.

The Ambassador heard him out in stony silence. He re­joined that he could not accept the American explanation, and rejected it. He would report back to his government in that vein. On this note, he left, to return to his embassy and report to Moscow.

In a small flat in Bayswater, London, three men sat that day and stared at the tangle of newspapers strewn on the floor around them.

“A disaster,” snapped Andrew Drake, “a bloody disaster. By now they should have been in Israel. Within a month they’d have been released and could have given their press conference. What the hell did they have to shoot the captain for?”

“If he was landing at Schonefeld and refused to fly into West Berlin, they were finished, anyway,” observed Azamat Krim.

“They could have clubbed him,” snorted Drake.

“Heat of the moment,” said Kaminsky. “What do we do now?”

“Can those handguns be traced?” asked Drake of Krim.

The small Tatar shook his head.

“To the shop that sold them, perhaps,” he said. “Not to me. I didn’t have to identify myself.”

Drake paced the carpet, deep in thought.

“I don’t think they’ll be extradited back,” he said at length. “The Soviets want them now for hijacking, shooting Rudenko, hitting the KGB man on board, and of course the other one they took the identity card from. But the killing of the captain is the serious offense. Still, I don’t think a West German government will send two Jews back for execution. On the other hand, they’ll be tried and convicted. Probably sentenced to life. Miroslav, will they open their mouths about Ivanenko?”

The Ukrainian refugee shook his head.

“Not if they’ve got any sense,” he said. “Not in the heart of West Berlin. The Germans might have to change their minds and send them back after all. If they believed them, which they wouldn’t because Moscow would deny Ivanenko is dead, and produce a look-alike as proof. But Moscow would believe them, and have them liquidated. The Germans, not believing them, would offer no special protection. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’ll keep silent.”

“That’s no use to us,” pointed out Krim. “The whole point of the exercise, of all we’ve gone through, was to deal a single massive humiliating blow to the whole Soviet state ap­paratus. We can’t give that press conference; we don’t have the tiny details that will convince the world. Only Mishkin and Lazareff can do that.”

“Then they have to be got out of there,” said Drake with finality. “We have to mount a second operation to get them to Tel Aviv, with guarantees of their life and liberty. Other­wise it’s all been for nothing.”

“What happens now?” repeated Kaminsky.

“We think,” said Drake. “We work out a way, we plan it, and we execute it. They are not going to sit and rot their lives away in Berlin, not with a secret like that in their heads. And we have little time; it won’t take Moscow forever to put two and two together. They have their lead to follow now; they’ll know who did the Kiev job pretty soon. Then they’ll begin to plan their revenge. We have to beat them to it.”

The chilly anger of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington paled into insignificance beside the outrage of his colleague in Bonn as the Russian diplomat faced the West German For­eign Minister two days later. The refusal of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany to hand the two crimi­nals and murderers over to either the Soviet or the East Ger­man authorities was a flagrant breach of their hitherto friendly relations and could be construed only as a hostile act, he insisted.

The West German Foreign Minister was deeply uncomfort­able. Privately he wished the Tupolev had stayed on the run­way in East Germany. He refrained from pointing out that as the Russians had always insisted West Berlin was not a part of West Germany, they ought to be addressing themselves to the Senate in West Berlin.

The Ambassador repeated his case for the third time: the criminals were Soviet citizens; the victims were Soviet cit­izens; the airliner was Soviet territory; the outrage had taken place in Soviet airspace, and the murder either on or a few feet above the runway of East Germany’s principal airport. The crime should therefore be tried under Soviet or at the very least under East German law.

The Foreign Minister pointed out as courteously as he could that all precedent indicated that hijackers could be tried under the law of the land in which they arrived, if that country wished to exercise the right. This was in no way an imputation of unfairness in the Soviet judicial procedure. ...

The hell it wasn’t, he thought privately. No one in West Ger­many from the government to the press to the public had the slightest doubt that handing Mishkin and Lazareff back would mean KGB interrogation, a kangaroo court, and the firing squad. And they were Jewish—that was another prob­lem.

The first few days of January are slack for the press, and the West German press was making a big story out of this. The conservative and powerful Axel Springer newspapers were insisting that whatever they had done, the two hijackers should receive a fair trial, and that could be guaranteed only in West Germany. The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) Party, on which the governing coalition depended, was taking the same line. Certain quarters were giving the press a large amount of precise information and lurid details about the latest KGB crackdown in the Lvov area from which the hijackers came, suggesting that escape from the ter­ror was a justifiable reaction, albeit a deplorable way of do­ing it. And lastly the recent exposure of yet another Communist agent high in the civil service would not increase the popularity of a government taking a conciliatory line toward Moscow. And with the state elections pending ...

The Minister had his orders from the Chancellor. Mishkin and Lazareff, he told the Ambassador, would go on trial in West Berlin as soon as possible, and if—or rather when—convicted, would receive salutary sentences.

The Politburo meeting at the end of the week was stormy. Once again the tape recorders were off, the stenographers ab­sent.

“This is an outrage,” snapped Vishnayev. “Yet another scandal that diminishes the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world. It should never have happened.”

He implied that it had happened only due to the ever-weakening leadership of Maxim Rudin.

“It would not have happened,” retorted Petrov, “if the Comrade Marshal’s fighters had shot the plane down over Po­land, according to custom.”

“There was a communications breakdown between ground control and the fighter leader,” said Kerensky. “A chance in a thousand.”

“Fortuitous, though,” observed Rykov coldly. Through his ambassadors he knew the Mishkin and Lazareff trial would be public and would reveal exactly how the hijackers had first mugged a KGB officer in a park for his identity papers, then used the papers to penetrate to the flight deck.

“Is there any question,” asked Petryanov, a supporter of Vishnayev, “that these two men could be the ones who killed Ivanenko?”

The atmosphere was electric.

“None at all,” said Petrov firmly. “We know those two come from Lvov, not Kiev. They were Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate. We are investigating, of course, but so far there is no connection.”

“Should such a connection emerge, we will of course be in­formed?” asked Vishnayev.

“That goes without saying, Comrade,” growled Rudin.

The stenographers were recalled, and the meeting went on to discuss the progress at Castletown and the purchase of ten million tons of feed grain. Vishnayev did not press the issue. Rykov was at pains to show that the Soviet Union was gain­ing the quantities of wheat she would need to survive the winter and spring with minimal concessions of weapons lev­els, a point Marshal Kerensky disputed. But Komarov was forced to concede the imminent arrival of ten million tons of animal winter feed would enable him to release the same tonnage from hoarded stocks immediately, and prevent wholesale slaughter. The Maxim Rudin faction, with its hair­breadth supremacy, stayed intact.

As the meeting dispersed, the old Soviet chief drew Vassili Petrov aside.

“Is there any connection between the two Jews and the Ivanenko killing?” he inquired.

“There may be,” conceded Petrov. “We know they did the mugging in Ternopol, of course, so they were evidently prepared to travel outside Lvov to prepare their escape. We have their fingerprints from the aircraft, and they match those in their living quarters in Lvov. We have found no shoes that match the prints at the Kiev murder site, but we are still searching for those shoes. One last thing. We have an area of palmprint taken from the car that knocked down Ivanenko’s mother. We are trying to get a complete palmprint of both from inside Berlin. If they check ...”

“Prepare a plan, a contingency plan, a feasibility study,” said Rudin. “To have them liquidated inside their jail in West Berlin. Just in case. And another thing. If their identity as the killers of Ivanenko is proved, tell me, not the Politburo. We wipe them out first, then inform our comrades.”

Petrov swallowed hard. Cheating the Politburo was playing for the highest stakes in Soviet Russia. One slip and there would be no safety net. He recalled what Rudin had told him by the fire out at Usovo a fortnight earlier. With the Polit­buro tied six against six, Ivanenko dead, and two of their own six about to change sides, there were no aces left.

“Very well,” he said.

West German Chancellor Dietrich Busch received his Justice Minister in his private office in the Chancellery Building next to the old Palais Schaumberg just after the middle of the month. The government chief of West Germany was standing at his modern picture window, gazing out at the frozen snow. Inside the new, modern government headquarters overlooking Federal Chancellor Square, the temperature was warm enough for shirt sleeves, and nothing of the raw, bitter Janu­ary of the riverside town penetrated.

“This Mishkin and Lazareff affair, how goes it?” asked Busch.

“It’s strange,” admitted his Justice Minister, Ludwig Fischer. “They are being more cooperative than one could hope for. They seem eager to achieve a quick trial with no delays.”

“Excellent,” said the Chancellor. “That’s exactly what we want. A quick affair. Let’s get it over with. In what way are they cooperating?”

“They were offered a star lawyer from the right wing, paid for by subscribed funds—possibly German contributions, pos­sibly the Jewish Defense League from America. They turned him down. He wanted to make a major spectacle out of the trial, plenty of detail about the KGB terror against Jews in the Ukraine.”

“A right-wing lawyer wanted that?”

“All grist to their mill. Bash the Russians, and so on,” said Fischer. “Anyway, Mishkin and Lazareff want to go for an admission of guilt and plead mitigating circumstances. They insist on it If they do so, and claim the gun went off by acci­dent when the plane hit the runway at Schonefeld, they have a partial defense. Their new lawyer is asking for murder to be reduced to culpable homicide if they do.”

“I think we can grant them that,” said the Chancellor. “What would they get?”

“With the hijacking thrown in, fifteen to twenty years. Of course, they could be paroled after serving a third of the sen­tence. They’re young—mid-twenties. They could be out by the time they’re thirty.”

“That’s in five years,” growled Busch. “I’m concerned about the next five months. Memories fade. In five years they’ll be in the archives.”

“Well, they admit everything, but they insist that the gun went off by accident. They claim they just wanted to reach Israel the only way they knew how. They’ll plead guilty right down the line—to culpable homicide.”

“Let them have it,” said the Chancellor. “The Russians won’t like it, but it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. They’d draw life for murder, but that’s effectively twenty years nowadays.”

“There’s one other thing. They want to be transferred after the trial to a jail in West Germany.”

“Why?”

“They seem terrified of revenge by the KGB. They think they’ll be safer in West Germany than in West Berlin.”

“Rubbish,” snorted Busch. “They’ll be tried and jailed in West Berlin. The Russians would not dream of trying to settle accounts inside a Berlin jail. They wouldn’t dare. Still, we could do an internal transfer in a year or so. But not yet. Go ahead, Ludwig. Make it quick and clean, if they wish to co­operate. But get the press off my back before the elections, and the Russian Ambassador as well.”

At Chita the morning sun glittered along the deck of the Freya, lying, as she had for two and a half months, by the commissioning quay. In those seventy-five days she had been transformed. Day and night she had lain docile while the tiny creatures who had made her swarmed into and out of every part of her. Hundreds of miles of lines had been laid the length and breadth of her—pipes, tubes, and electric cables. Her labyrinthine electrical networks had been connected and tested, her incredibly complex system of pumps installed and tried.

The computer-linked instruments that would fill her holds and empty them, thrust her forward or shut her down, hold her to any point of the compass for weeks on end without a hand on her helm, and observe the stars above her and the seabed below, had been set in their places.

The food lockers and deepfreezes to sustain her crew for months were fully installed; so, too, the furniture, doorknobs, lightbulbs, lavatories, galley stoves, central heating, air condi­tioning, cinema, sauna, three bars, two dining rooms, beds, bunks, carpets, and clothes hangers.

Her five-story superstructure had been converted from an empty shell into a luxury hotel; her bridge, radio room, and computer room from empty, echoing galleries to a low-hum­ming complex of data banks, calculators, and control systems. When the last of the workmen picked up their tools and left her alone, she was the ultimate in size, power, capacity, luxury, and technical refinement that man could ever have set to float on water.

The rest of her crew of thirty had arrived by air fourteen days earlier to familiarize themselves with every inch of her. Besides her master, Captain Thor Larsen, they were made up of the first officer, second mate, and third mate; the chief en­gineer, first engineer, second engineer, and electrical engineer (who ranked as a “first”); the radio officer and chief steward (also ranked as officers) ; and twenty others, to comprise the full complement: the first cook, four stewards, three firemen, one repairman, ten able seamen, and one pumpman.

Two weeks before she was due to sail, the tugs drew her away from the quay to the center of Ise Bay. There her great twin propellers bit into the waters to bring her out to the western Pacific for sea trials. For officers and crew, as well as for the dozen Japanese technicians who went with her, it would mean two weeks of grueling hard work, testing every single system against every known or possible contingency.

There was $170 million worth of her moving out to the mouth of the bay that morning, and the small ships standing off Nagoya watched her pass with awe.

Twenty kilometers outside Moscow lies the tourist village and estate of Arkhangelskoye, complete with museum and a restaurant noted for its genuine bear steaks. In the last week of that freezing January, Adam Munro had reserved a table there for himself and a date from the secretarial pool at the British Embassy.

He always varied his dinner companions so that no one girl should notice too much, and if the young hopeful of the evening wondered why he chose to drive the distance he did over icy roads in temperatures fifteen degrees below freezing, she made no comment on it.

The restaurant in any case was warm and snug, and when he excused himself to fetch extra cigarettes from his car, she thought nothing of it. In the parking lot, he shivered as the icy blast hit him, and hurried to where the twin headlights glowed briefly in the darkness.

He climbed into the car beside Valentina, put an arm around her, drew her close and kissed her.

“I hate the thought of you being in there with another woman, Adam,” she whispered as she nuzzled his throat.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Not important. An excuse for being able to drive out here to dine without being suspected. I have news for you.”

“About us?” she asked.

“About us. I have asked my own people if they would help you to come out, and they have agreed. There is a plan. Do you know the port of Constanza on the Rumanian coast?”

She shook her head.

“I have heard of it, but never been there. I always holiday on the Soviet coast of the Black Sea.”

“Could you arrange to holiday there with Sasha?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “I can take my holidays virtually where I like. Rumania is within the Socialist bloc. It should not raise eyebrows.”

“When does Sasha leave school for the spring holidays?”

“The last few days of March, I think. Is that important?”

“It has to be in mid-April,” he told her. “My people think you could be brought off the beach to a freighter offshore. By speedboat. Can you make sure to arrange a spring holiday with Sasha at Constanza or the nearby Mamaia Beach in April?”

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try. April. Oh, Adam, it seems so close.”

“It is close, my love. Less than ninety days. Be patient a little longer, as I have been, and we will make it. We’ll start a whole new life.”

Five minutes later she had given him the transcription of the early January Politburo meeting and driven off into the night. He stuffed the sheaf of papers inside his waistband beneath his shirt and jacket, and returned to the warmth of the Arkhangelskoye Restaurant.

This time, he vowed, as he made polite conversation with the secretary, there would be no mistakes, no drawing back, no letting her go, as there had been in 1961. This time it would be forever.

Edwin Campbell leaned back from the Georgian table in the Long Gallery at Castletown House and looked across at Pro­fessor Sokolov. The last point on the agenda had been cov­ered, the last concession wrung. From the dining room below, a courier had reported that the secondary conference had matched the concessions of the upper floor with trade bar­gains from the United States to the Soviet Union.

“I think that’s it, Ivan, my friend,” said Campbell. “I don’t think we can do any more at this stage.”

The Russian raised his eyes from the pages of Cyrillic handwriting in front of him, his own notes. For over a hundred days he had fought tooth and claw to secure for his country the grain tonnages that could save her from disaster and yet retain the maximum in weapons levels from inner space to Eastern Europe. He knew he had had to make concessions that would have been unheard of four years ear­lier at Geneva, but he had done the best he could in the time scale allowed.

“I think you are right, Edwin,” he replied. “Let us have the arms-reduction treaty prepared in draft form for our respec­tive governments.”

“And the trade protocol,” said Campbell. “I imagine they will want that also.”

Sokolov permitted himself a wry smile.

“I am sure they will want it very much,” he said.

For the next week the twin teams of interpreters and stenog­raphers prepared both the treaty and the trade protocol. Oc­casionally the two principal negotiators were needed to clarify a point at issue, but for the most part, the transcrip­tion and translation work was left to the aides. When the two bulky documents, each in duplicate, were finally ready, the two chief negotiators departed to their separate capitals to present them to their masters.

Andrew Drake threw down his magazine and leaned back.

“I wonder,” he said.

“What?” asked Krim as he entered the small sitting room with three mugs of coffee. Drake tossed the magazine to the Tatar.

“Read the first article,” he said. Krim read in silence while Drake sipped his coffee. Kaminsky eyed them both.

“You’re crazy,” said Krim with finality.

“No,” said Drake. “Without some audacity we’ll be sitting here for the next ten years. It could work. Look, Mishkin and Lazareff come up for trial in a fortnight The outcome is a foregone conclusion. We might as well start planning now. We know we’re going to have to do it, anyway, if they are ever to come out of that jail. So let’s start planning. Azamat, you were in the paratroops in Canada?”

“Sure,” said Krim. “Five years.”

“Did you ever do an explosives course?”

“Yep. Demolition and sabotage. I was assigned for training to the Engineers for three months.”

“And years ago I used to have a passion for electronics and radio,” said Drake. “Probably because my dad had a ra­dio repair shop before he died. We could do it. We’d need help, but we could do it.”

“How many more men?” asked Krim.

“We’d need one on the outside, just to recognize Mishkin and Lazareff on their release. That would have to be Miroslav, here. For the job, us two, plus five to stand guard.”

“Such a thing has never been done before,” observed the Tatar doubtfully.

“All the more reason why it will be unexpected, therefore unprepared for.”

“We’d get caught at the end of it,” said Krim.

“Not necessarily. I’d cover the pullout if I had to. And anyway, the trial would be the sensation of the decade. With Mishkin and Lazareff free in Israel, half the Western world would applaud. The whole issue of a free Ukraine would be blazoned across every newspaper and magazine outside the Soviet bloc.”

“Do you know five more who would come in on it?”

"For years I’ve been collecting names,” said Drake. “Men who are sick and tired of talking. If they knew what we’d done already, yes, I could get five before the end of the month.”

“ All right,” said Krim, “if we’re into this thing, let’s do it. Where do you want me to go?”

“Belgium,” said Drake. “I want a large apartment in Brussels. We’ll bring the men there and make the apartment the group’s base.”

On the other side of the world while Drake was talking, the sun rose over Chita and the Ishikawajima-Harima shipyard. The Freya lay alongside her commissioning quay, her engines throbbing.

The previous evening had seen a lengthy conference in the office of the IHI chairman, attended by both the yard’s and the company’s chief superintendents, the accountants, Harry Wennerstrom, and Thor Larsen. The two technical experts had agreed that every one of the giant tanker’s systems was in perfect working order. Wennerstrom had signed the final release document, conceding that the Freya was all he had paid for.

In fact, he had paid five percent of her on the signature of the original contract to build her, five percent at the keel-lay­ing ceremony, five percent when she rode water, and five per­cent at official handover. The remaining eighty percent plus interest was payable over the succeeding eight years. But to all intents and purposes, she was his. The yard’s company flag had been ceremoniously hauled down, and the silver-on-blue winged Viking helmet emblem of the Nordia Line now flut­tered in the dawn breeze.

High on the bridge, towering over the vast spread of her deck, Harry Wennerstrom drew Thor Larsen by the arm into the radio room and closed the door behind him. The room was completely soundproof with the door closed.

“She’s all yours, Thor,” he said. “By the way, there’s been a slight change of plan regarding your arrival in Europe. I’m not lightening her offshore. Not for her maiden voyage. Just this once, you’re going to bring her into the Europoort at Rotterdam fully laden.”

Larsen stared at his employer in disbelief. He knew as well as Wennerstrom that fully loaded ULCCs never entered ports; they stood well offshore and lightened themselves by disgorging most of their cargo into other, smaller tankers in order to reduce their draft for the shallow seas. Or they berthed at “sea islands”—networks of pipes on stilts, well out to sea—from which their oil could be pumped ashore. The idea of a girl in every port was a hollow joke for the crews of the supertankers; they often did not berth anywhere near a city from year’s end to year’s end, but were flown off their ships for periodic leave periods. That was why the crew quar­ters had to be a real home away from home.

“The English Channel will never take her,” said Larsen.

“You’re not going up the Channel,” said Wennerstrom. “You’re going west of Ireland, west of the Hebrides, north of the Pentland Firth, between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, then south down the North Sea, following the twenty-fathom line, to moor at the deep-water anchorage. From there the pi­lots will bring you down the main channel toward the Mass Estuary. The tugs will bring you in from the Hook of Hol­land to the Europoort.”

“The Inner Channel from K.I. Buoy to the Mass won’t take her, fully laden,” protested Larsen.

“Yes, it will,” said Wennerstrom calmly. “They have dredged this channel to one hundred fifteen feet over the past four years. You’ll be drawing ninety-eight feet. Thor, if I were asked to name any mariner in the world who could bring a million-tonner into the Europoort, it would be you. It’ll be tight as all hell, but let me have this one last triumph. I want the world to see her, Thor. My Freya. I’ll have them all there waiting for her. The Dutch government, the world’s press. They’ll be my guests, and they’ll be dumbfounded. Oth­erwise, no one will ever see her; she’ll spend her whole life out of sight of land.”

“All right,” said Larsen slowly. “Just this once. I’ll be ten years older when it’s over.”

Wennerstrom grinned like a small boy.

“Just wait till they see her,” he said. “The first of April. See you in Rotterdam, Thor Larsen.”

Ten minutes later he was gone. At noon, with the Japanese workers lining the quayside to cheer her on her way, the mighty Freya eased away from the shore and headed for the mouth of the bay. At two P.M. on February 2, she came out again into the Pacific and swung her bow south toward the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra at the start of her maiden voyage.

On February 10, the Politburo in Moscow met to consider, approve, or reject the draft treaty and accompanying trade protocol negotiated at Castletown. Rudin and those who sup­ported him knew that if they could carry the terms of the treaty at this meeting, then, barring accidents thereafter, it could be ratified and signed. Yefrem Vishnayev and his faction of hawks were no less aware. The meeting was lengthy and exceptionally hard fought.

It is often assumed that world statesmen, even in private conclave, use moderate language and courteous address to their colleagues and advisers. This has not been true of several recent U.S. presidents and is completely untrue of the Politburo in closed session. The Russian equivalent of four-letter words flew thick and fast. Only the fastidious Vishnayev kept his language restrained, though his tone was acid as he and his allies fought every concession, line by line.

It was the Foreign Minister, Dmitri Rykov, who carried the others in the moderate faction.

“What we have gained,” he said, “is the assured sale to us, at last July’s reasonable prices, of fifty-five million tons of grains. Without them we face disaster on a national scale. Besides, we have nearly three billion dollars’ worth of the most modern technology, in consumer industries, computers, and oil production. With these we can master the problems that have beset us for two decades, and conquer them within five years.

“Against this we have to offset certain minimal concessions in arms levels and states of preparedness, which, I stress, will in no way at all hinder or retard our capacity to dominate the Third World and its raw-material resources inside the same five years. From the disaster that faced us last May, we have emerged triumphant, thanks to the inspired leadership of Comrade Maxim Rudin. To reject this treaty now would bring us back to last May, but worse: the last of our 1982 harvest grains will run out in sixty days.”

When the meeting voted on the treaty terms, which was in fact a vote on the continuing leadership of Maxim Rudin, the six-to-six tie remained intact.

“There’s only one thing that can bring him down now,” said Vishnayev with quiet finality to Marshal Kerensky in the former’s limousine as they drove home that evening. “If something serious happens to sway one or two of his faction before the treaty is ratified. If not, the Central Committee will approve the treaty on the Politburo’s recommendation, and it will go through. If only it could be proved that those two damned Jews in Berlin killed Ivanenko. ...”

Kerensky was less than his blustering self. Privately he was beginning to wonder if he had chosen the wrong side. Three months ago it had looked so certain that Rudin would be pushed too far, too fast, by the Americans and would lose his crucial support at the green baize table. But Kerensky was committed to Vishnayev now; there would be no massive So­viet maneuvers in East Germany in two months, and he had to swallow that.

“One other thing,” said Vishnayev. “If it had appeared six months ago, the power struggle would be over by now. I heard news from a contact out at the Kuntsevo clinic. Maxim Rudin is dying.”

“Dying?” repeated the Defense Minister. “When?”

“Not soon enough,” said the Party theoretician. “He’ll live to carry the day over this treaty, my friend. Time is running out for us, and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless the Ivanenko affair can yet blow up in his face.”

As he was speaking, the Freya was steaming through the Sunda Strait. To her port side lay Java Head, and far to star­board the great mass of the volcano Krakatau reared toward the night sky. On the darkened bridge a battery of dimly lit instruments told Thor Larsen, the senior officer of the watch, and the junior officer all they needed to know. Three separate navigational systems correlated their findings into the com­puter, set in the small room aft of the bridge, and those find­ings were dead accurate. Constant compass readings, true to within half a second of a degree, cross-checked themselves with the stars above, unchanging and unchangeable. Man’s artificial stars, the all-weather satellites, were also monitored and the resultant findings fed into the computer. Here the memory banks had absorbed tide, wind, undercurrents, tem­peratures, and humidity levels. From the computer, endless messages were flashed automatically to the gigantic rudder, which, far below the stern transom, flickered with the sensi­tivity of a fish’s tail.

High above the bridge, the two radar scanners whirled un­ceasingly, picking up coasts and mountains, ships and buoys, feeding them all into the computer, which processed this in­formation, too, ready to activate its hazard-alarm device at the first hint of danger. Beneath the water, the echo sounders relayed a three-dimensional map of the seabed far below, while from the bulbous bow section the forward sonar scan­ner looked ahead and down into the black waters. For the Freya, elapsed time from full-ahead to crash-stop would be thirty minutes, and she would cover three to four kilometers. She was that big.

Before dawn she had cleared the narrows of Sunda and her computers had turned her northwest along the hundred-fathom line to cut south of Sri Lanka for the Arabian Sea.

Two days later, on February 12, eight men grouped them­selves in the apartment Azamat Krim had rented in a suburb of Brussels. The five newcomers had been summoned by Drake, who long ago had noted them all, met and spoken with them long into the night, before deciding that they, too, shared his dream of striking a blow against Moscow. Two of the five were German-born Ukrainians, scions of the large Ukrainian community in the Federal Republic. One was an American from New York, also of a Ukrainian father, and the other two were Ukrainian-British.

When they heard what Mishkin and Lazareff had done to the head of the KGB, there was a babble of excited com­ment When Drake proposed that the operation could not be completed until the two partisans were free and safe, no one dissented. They talked through the night, and by dawn they had split into four teams of two.

Drake and Kaminsky would return to England to buy the necessary electronic equipment that Drake estimated he re­quired. One of the Germans would partner one of the En­glishmen and return to Germany to seek out the explosives they needed. The other German, who had contacts in Paris, would take the other Englishman to find and buy, or steal, the weaponry. Azamat Krim took his fellow North Ameri­can to seek a motor launch. The American, who had worked in a boatyard in upper New York State, reckoned he knew what he wanted.

Eight days later in the tightly guarded courtroom attached to Moabit Prison in West Berlin, the trial of Mishkin and Laz­areff started. Both men were silent and subdued in the dock as, within concentric walls of security from the barbed-wire entanglements atop the perimeter walls to the armed guards scattered all over the courtroom, they listened to the charges. The list took ten minutes to read. There was an audible gasp from the packed press benches when both men pleaded guilty to all charges. The state prosecutor rose to begin his narration of the events of New Year’s Eve to the panel of judges. When he had finished, the judges adjourned to discuss the sentence.

The Freya moved slowly and sedately through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. The breeze had freshened with the sunrise into the chilly shamal wind coming into her nose from the northwest, sand-laden, causing the horizon to be hazy and vague. Her crew all knew this landscape well enough, having passed many times on their way to collect crude oil from the Gulf. They were all experienced tanker-men.

To one side of the Freya, barren, arid Qeshm Island slid by, barely two cables away; to the other, the officers on the bridge could make out the bleak moonscape of Cape Musandam, with its sheer rocky mountains. The Freya was riding high, and the depth in the channel presented no problems. On the return, when she was laden with crude oil, it would be different. She would be almost shut down, moving slowly, watch officer’s eyes riveted on her depth sounder, watching the map of the seabed pass barely a few feet beneath her keel, ninety-eight feet below the waterline.

She was still in ballast, as she had been all the way from Chita. She had sixty giant tanks or holds, three abreast in lines of twenty, fore to aft. One of these was the slop tank, to be used for nothing else but gathering the slops from her fifty crude-carrying cargo tanks. Nine were permanent ballast tanks, to be used for nothing but pure seawater to give her stability when she was empty of cargo.

But her remaining fifty crude-oil tanks were sufficient. Each held 20,000 tons of crude oil. It was with complete con­fidence in the impossibility of her causing accidental oil pol­lution that she steamed on to Abu Dhabi to load her first cargo.

There is a modest bar on the rue Miollin in Paris where the small fry of the world of mercenaries and arms sellers are wont to forgather and take a drink together. It was here the German-Ukrainian and his English colleague were brought by the German’s French contact man.

There were several hours of low-voiced negotiation be­tween the Frenchman and another French friend of his. Eventually the contact man came across to the two Ukraini­ans.

“My friend says it is possible,” he told the Ukrainian from Germany. “Five hundred dollars each, American dollars, cash. One magazine per unit included.”

“We’ll take it if he’ll throw in one handgun with full maga­zine,” said the man from Germany.

Three hours later in the garage of a private house near Neuilly, six submachine carbines and one MAB automatic nine-millimeter handgun were wrapped in blankets and stowed in the trunk of the Ukrainians’ car. The money changed hands. In twelve hours, just before midnight of Feb­ruary 24, the two men arrived at their apartment in Brussels and stored their equipment at the back of a closet.

As the sun rose on February 25, the Freya eased her way back through the Strait of Hormuz, and on the bridge there was a sigh of relief as the officers gazing at the depth sounder saw the seabed drop away from in front of their eyes to the deep of the ocean. On the digital display, the figures ran rap­idly from twenty to one hundred fathoms. The Freya moved steadily back to her full-load service speed of fifteen knots as she went southeast back down the Gulf of Oman.

She was heavy-laden now, doing what she had been designed and built for—carrying a million tons of crude oil to the thirsty refineries of Europe and the millions of family cars that would drink it. Her draft was now at her designed ninety-eight feet, and her hazard-alarm devices had ingested the knowledge and knew what to do if the seabed ever ap­proached too close.

Her nine ballast tanks were now empty, acting as buoy­ancy tanks. Far away in the forepart, the first row of three tanks contained a full crude tank on port and starboard, with the single slop tank in the center. One row back were the first three empty ballast tanks. The second row of three was amid­ships, and the third row of three was at the foot of the super­structure, on the fifth floor of which Captain Thor Larsen handed the Freya to the senior officer of the watch and went down to his handsome day cabin for breakfast and a short sleep.

On the morning of February 26, after an adjournment of several days, the presiding judge in the Moabit courtroom in West Berlin began to read the judgment of himself and his two colleagues. It took several hours.

In their walled dock, Mishkin and Lazareff listened impas­sively. From time to time each sipped water from the glasses placed on the tables in front of them. From the packed booths reserved for the international press they were under scrutiny, as were the figures of the judges, while the findings were read. But one magazine journalist representing a leftist German monthly magazine seemed more interested in the glasses they drank from than in the prisoners themselves.

The court adjourned for lunch, and when it resumed, the journalist was missing from his seat. He was phoning from one of the kiosks outside the hearing room. Shortly after three, the judge reached his conclusion. Both men were re­quired to rise, to hear themselves sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

They were led away to begin their sentences at Tegel Jail in the northern part of the city, and within minutes the court­room had emptied. The cleaners took over, removing the brimming wastepaper baskets, carafes, and glasses. One of the middle-aged ladies occupied herself with cleaning the interior of the dock. Unobserved by her colleagues, she quietly picked up the prisoners’ two drinking glasses, wrapped each in a dustcloth, and placed them in her shopping bag beneath the empty wrappers of her sandwiches. No one noticed, and no one cared.

On the last day of the month, Vassili Petrov sought and re­ceived a private audience with Maxim Rudin in the latter’s Kremlin suite.

“Mishkin and Lazarett,” he said without preamble.

“What about them? They got fifteen years. It should have been the firing squad.”

“One of our people in West Berlin abstracted the glasses they used for water during the trial. The palmprint on one matches that from the car used in the hit-and-run affair in Kiev in October.”

“So it was them,” said Rudin grimly. “Damn them to hell! Vassili, wipe them out. Liquidate them as fast as you can. Give it to ‘Wet Affairs.’ ”

The KGB, vast and complex in its scope and organization, consists basically of four chief directorates, seven independent directorates, and six independent departments.

But the four chief directorates comprise the bulk of the KGB. One of these, the First, concerns itself exclusively with clandestine activities outside the USSR.

Deep within the heart of it is a section known simply as Department V (as in Victor), or the Executive Action De­partment. This is the one the KGB would most like to keep hidden from the rest of the world, inside and outside the USSR. For its tasks include sabotage, extortion, kidnapping, and assassination. Within the jargon of the KGB itself, it usu­ally has yet another name: the department of mokrte dyela, or “Wet Affairs,” so called because its operations not infre­quently involve someone’s getting wet with blood. It was to this Department V of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB that Maxim Rudin ordered Petrov to hand the elimination of Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I have already done as much,” said Petrov. “I thought of giving the affair to Colonel Kukushkin, Ivanenko’s head of security. He has a personal reason to wish to succeed—to save his own skin, apart from avenging Ivanenko and his own humiliation. He’s already served his time in Wet Affairs—ten years ago. Inevitably he is already aware of the secret of what happened in Rosa Luxemburg Street—he was there. And he speaks German. He would report back only to Gen­eral Abrassov or to me.”

Rudin nodded grimly.

“All right, let him have the job. He can pick his own team. Abrassov will give him everything he needs. The apparent reason will be to avenge the death of Flight Captain Rudenko. And Vassili, he had better succeed the first time. If he tries and fails, Mishkin and Lazareff could open their mouths. After a failed attempt to kill them, someone might believe them. Certainly Vishnayev would, and you know what that would mean.”

“I know,” said Petrov quietly. “He will not fail. He’ll do it himself.”