The Devil's Alternative

“IT’S THE BEST we’ll get, Mr. President,” said Secretary of State David Lawrence. “Personally, I believe Edwin Camp­bell has done us proud at Castletown.”

Grouped before the President’s desk in the Oval Office were the secretaries of State, Defense, and the Treasury, with Stanislaw Poklewski, and Robert Benson of the CIA. Beyond the French windows the Rose Garden was whipped by a bit­ter wind. The snows had gone, but March 1 was bleak and uninviting.

President William Matthews laid his hand on the bulky folder in front of him, the draft agreement wrung out of the Castletown talks.

“A lot of it is too technical for me,” he confessed, “but the digest from the Defense Department impresses me. The way I see it is this: if we reject the agreement now, after the Soviet Politburo has accepted it, there’ll be no renegotiation, any­way. The matter of grain deliveries will become academic to Russia in three months in any case. By then they’ll be starv­ing and Rudin will be gone. Yefrem Vishnayev will get his war. Right?”

“That seems to be the unavoidable conclusion,” said David Lawrence.

“How about the other side of it—the concessions we have made?” asked the President.

“The secret trade protocol in the separate document,” said the Secretary of the Treasury, “requires us to deliver fifty-five million tons of mixed grains at production costs and nearly three billion dollars’ worth of oil, computer, and consumer industry technology, rather heavily subsidized. The total cost to the United States runs to almost four billion dollars. On the other hand, the sweeping arms reductions should enable us to claw back that much and more by reduced defense ex­penditures.”

“If the Soviets abide by their undertakings,” said the Secre­tary of Defense hastily.

“But if they do, and we have to believe they will,” coun­tered Lawrence, “by our own experts’ calculations they could not launch a successful conventional or tactical nuclear war across the face of Europe for at least five years.”

President Matthews knew that the presidential election of 1984 would not see his candidacy. But if he could step down in January 1985, leaving behind him peace for even half a decade, with the burdensome arms race of the seventies halted in its tracks, he would take his place among the great U.S. presidents. He wanted that more than anything else this spring of 1983.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have to approve this treaty as it stands, and for once I’m confident the Senate will see it the same way. David, inform Moscow we join them in agreeing to the terms, and propose that our negotiators reconvene at Castletown to draw up the formal treaty ready for signing. While this is going on, we will permit the loading of the grain ships, ready to sail on the day of signature. That is all.”

On March 3, Azamat Krim and his Ukrainian-American col­laborator clinched the deal that acquired them a sturdy and powerful launch. She was the kind of craft much favored by enthusiastic sea anglers on both the British and European coasts of the North Sea, steel-hulled, forty feet long, tough, and secondhand. She had Belgian registration, and they had found her near Ostende.

Up front, she had a cabin whose roof extended the for­ward third of her length. A companionway led down to a cramped four-berth resting area, with a tiny toilet and galley. Aft of the rear bulkhead she was open to the elements, and beneath the deck lay a powerful engine capable of taking her through the wild North Sea to the fishing grounds and back.

Krim and his companion brought her from Ostende to Blankenberge, farther up the Belgian coast, and when she was moored in the marina, she attracted no attention. Spring al­ways brings its crop of hardy sea anglers to the coasts with their boats and tackle. The American chose to live on board and work on the engine. Krim returned to Brussels to find that Andrew Drake had taken over the kitchen table as a workbench and was deeply engrossed in preparations of his own.

For the third time on her maiden voyage, the Freya had crossed the Equator, and March 7 found her entering the Mozambique Channel, heading south by southwest toward the Cape of Good Hope. She was still following her hundred-fathom line, leaving six hundred feet of clear ocean beneath her keel, a course that took her to seaward of the main shipping lanes. She had not seen land since coming out of the Gulf of Oman, but on the afternoon of the seventh she passed through the Comoro Islands at the north end of the Mozambique Channel. To starboard, her crew, taking advan­tage of the moderate winds and seas to stroll the quarter mile of forward deck or lounge beside the screened swimming pool up on C deck, saw Great Comoro Island, the peak of its densely wooded mountain hidden in clouds, the smoke from the burning undergrowth on its flanks drifting across the green water. By nightfall the skies had overcast with gray cloud, the wind turned squally. Ahead lay the heaving seas of the Cape and the final northward run to Europe and her wel­come.

The following day, Moscow replied formally to the proposal of President Matthews, welcoming his agreement, with the concurrence of the United States Senate, to the terms of the draft treaty and agreeing that the chief negotiators of Castletown should reconvene jointly to draft the formal treaty while remaining in constant contact with their respective gov­ernments.

The bulk of the Soviet merchant marine fleet, Sovfracht, along with the numerous other vessels already chartered by the Soviet Union, had already sailed at the American govern­ment’s invitation for the grain ports of North America. In Moscow the first reports were coming in of excessive quanti­ties of meat appearing in the peasant markets, indicating live­stock slaughter was taking place even on the state and collective farms, where it was forbidden. The last reserves of grain for animals and humans alike were running out.

In a private message to President Matthews, Maxim Rudin regretted that for health reasons he would not personally be able to sign the treaty on behalf of the Soviet Union unless the ceremony were held in Moscow; he therefore proposed a formal signature by foreign ministers in Dublin on April 10.

The winds of the Cape were hellish; the South African sum­mer was over, and the autumn gales thundered up from the Antarctic to batter Table Mountain. The Freya by March 12 was in the heart of the Agulhas Current, pushing westward through mountainous green seas, taking the gales from the southwest on her port beam.

It was bitter cold out on deck, but no one was there. Be­hind the double-glazing of the bridge, Captain Thor Larsen and his two officers of the watch stood with the helmsman, radio officer, and two others in shirt sleeves. Warm, safe, pro­tected by the aura of her invincible technology, they gazed forward to where forty-foot waves impelled by the force 10 winds out of the southwest reared above the Freya’s port side, hovered for a moment, then crashed down to obscure her gigantic deck and its myriad pipes and valves in a swirling maelstrom of white foam. While the waves burst, only the fo’c’sle, far ahead, was discernible, like a separate entity. As the foam receded, defeated, through the scuppers, the Freya shook herself and buried her bulk in another oncoming mountain. A hundred feet beneath the men, ninety thousand shaft horsepower pushed a million tons of crude oil another few yards toward Rotterdam. High above, the Cape alba­trosses wheeled and glided, their lost cries unheard behind the Plexiglas. Coffee was served by one of the stewards.

Two days later, on Monday the fourteenth, Adam Munro drove out of the courtyard of the Commercial Section of the British Embassy and turned sharp right into Kutuzovsky Prospekt toward the city center. His destination was the main embassy building, where he had been summoned by the head of Chancery. The telephone call, certainly tapped by the KGB, had referred to the clarification of minor details for a forthcoming trade delegation visit from London. In fact it meant that there was a message awaiting him in the cipher room.

The cipher room in the embassy building on Maurice Thorez Embankment 5s in the basement, a secure room regu­larly checked by the “sweepers,” who are not looking for dust, but for listening devices. The cipher clerks are diplomat­ic personnel and security-checked to the highest level. Never­theless, sometimes messages come in that bear a coding to indicate they will not and cannot be decoded by the normal decoding machines. The tag on these messages will indicate that they have to be passed to one particular cipher clerk, a man who has the right to know because he has a need to know. Occasionally a message for Adam Munro bore such a coding, as today. The clerk in question knew Munro’s real job because he needed to—if for no other reason, to protect him from those who did not.

Munro entered the cipher room, and the clerk spotted him. They withdrew to a small annex where the clerk, a precise, methodical man with bifocal glasses, used a key from his waistband to unlock a separate decoding machine. He passed the London message into it, and the machine spat out the translation. The clerk took no notice, averting his gaze as Munro moved away.

Munro read the message and smiled. He memorized it within seconds and passed it straight into a shredder, which reduced the thin paper to fragments hardly bigger than dust. He thanked the clerk and left, with a song in his heart. Barry Ferndale had informed him that with the Russian-American treaty on the threshold of signature, the Nightingale could be brought out, to a discreet but extremely generous welcome, from the coast of Rumania near Constanza, during the week of April 16-23. There were further details for the exact pickup. He was asked to consult with the Nightingale and confirm acceptance and agreement.

After receiving Maxim Rudin’s personal message, President Matthews had remarked to David Lawrence:

“Since this is more than a mere arms-limitation agreement, I suppose it really can be called a treaty. And since it seems destined to be signed in Dublin, no doubt history will call it the Treaty of Dublin.”

Lawrence had consulted with the government of the Re­public of Ireland, whose officials had agreed with barely hid­den delight that they would be pleased to host the formal signing ceremony between David Lawrence for the United States and Dmitri Rykov for the USSR in St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, on April 10.

On March 16, therefore, President Matthews replied to Maxim Rudin, agreeing to the proposed place and date.

There are two fairly large rock quarries in the mountains out­side Ingolstadt in Bavaria. During the night of March 18, the night watchman in one of these was attacked and tied up by two masked men, at least one of them armed with a handgun, he later told police. The men, who seemed to know what they were looking for, broke into the dynamite store, using the night watchman’s keys, and stole 250 kilograms of rock-blasting explosives and a number of electric detonators. Long before morning they were gone, and as the following day was Saturday the nineteenth, it was almost noon before the trussed night watchman was rescued and the theft discov­ered. Subsequent police investigations were intensive, and in view of the apparent knowledge of the layout of the quarry by the robbers, concentrated on the area of former employ­ees. But the search was for extreme left-wingers, and the name Klimchuk, which belonged to a man who had been em­ployed three years earlier at the quarry, attracted no particu­lar attention, being assumed to be of Polish extraction. Actually it is a Ukrainian name. By that Saturday evening the two cars bearing the explosives had arrived back in Brus­sels, penetrating the German-Belgian border on the Aachen-Liage motorway. They were not stopped, weekend traffic being especially heavy.

By the evening of the twentieth the Freya was well past Sene­gal, having made good time from the Cape with the aid of the southeast trade winds and a helpful current. Though it was early in the year for Northern Europe, there were vaca­tioners on the beaches of the Canary Islands.

The Freya was far to the west of the islands, but just after dawn on the twenty-first her bridge officers could make out the volcanic Pico de Monte Teide on Tenerife, their first landfall since they had glimpsed the rugged coastline of Cape Province. As the mountains of the Canaries dropped away, they knew that apart from the chance of seeing Madeira’s summit they would next see the lights warning them to stay clear of the wild coasts of Mayo and Donegal.

Adam Munro had waited impatiently for a week to see the woman he loved, but there was no way he could get through to her before their prearranged meet on Monday the twenty-first For the site he had returned to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, whose 238 hectares of parks and grounds merged with the main Botanical Gardens of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Here, in a sheltered arboretum in the open air, he found her waiting just before noon. Be­cause of the chance of a casual glance from a passerby, he could not take the risk of kissing her as he wanted to.

Instead he told her with controlled excitement of the news from London. She was overjoyed.

“I have news for you,” she told him. “There will be a Cen­tral Committee fraternal delegation to the Rumanian Party Congress during the first half of April, and I have been asked to accompany it. Sasha’s school breaks for vacation on March twenty-ninth, and we will leave for Bucharest on April fifth. After ten days it will be perfectly normal for me to take a bored little boy to the resort beaches for a week.”

“Then I’ll fix it for the night of Monday, the eighteenth of April. That will give you several days in Constanza to find your way around. You must hire or borrow a car, and ac­quire a powerful torch. Now, Valentina my love, these are the details. Memorize them, for there can be no mistakes:

“North of Constanza lies the resort of Mamaia, where the western package tourists go. Drive north from Constanza through Mamaia on the evening of the eighteenth. Exactly six miles north of Mamaia a track leads right from the coast highway to the beach. On the headland at the junction you will see a short stone tower with its lower half painted white. It is a coast marker for fishermen. Leave the car well off the road and descend the bluff to the beach. At two A.M. you will see a light from the sea: three long dashes and three short ones. Take your own torch with its beam cut down by a tube of cardboard and point it straight at where the light came from. Flash back the reverse signal: three shorts and three longs. A speedboat will come out of the sea for you and Sasha. There will be one Russian-speaker and two Marines. Identify yourself with the phrase The Nightingale sings in Berkeley Square.’ Have you got that?”

“Yes. Adam, where is Berkeley Square?”

“In London. It is very beautiful, like you. It has many trees.”

“And do nightingales sing there?”

“According to the words of the song, one used to. Darling, it seems so short. Four weeks today. When we get to London I’ll show you Berkeley Square.”

“Adam, tell me something. Have I betrayed my own people—the Russian people?”

“No,” he said with finality, “you have not. The leaders nearly did. If you had not done what you did, Vishnayev and your uncle might have got their war. In it, Russia would have been destroyed, most of America, my country, and Western Europe. You have not betrayed the people of your country.”

“But they would never understand, never forgive me,” she said. There was a hint of tears in her dark eyes. “They will call me a traitor. I shall be an exile.”

“One day, perhaps, this madness will end. One day, per­haps, you can come back. Listen, my love, we cannot stay longer. It’s too risky. There is one last thing. I need your pri­vate phone number. No, I know we agreed that I would never ring. But I will not see you again until you are in the West in safety. If there should by any remote chance be a change of plan or date, I may have to contact you as a mat­ter of emergency. If I do, I will pretend to be a friend called Gregor, explaining that I cannot attend your dinner party. If that happens, leave at once and meet me in the park of the Mojarsky Hotel at the top of Kutuzovsky Prospekt.”

She nodded meekly and gave him her number. He kissed her on the cheek.

“I’ll see you in London, my darling,” he told her, and was gone through the trees. Privately he knew he would have to resign and take the icy anger of Sir Nigel Irvine when it be­came plain the Nightingale was not Anatoly Krivoi but a woman, and his wife-to-be. But by then it would be too late for even the service to do anything about it.

Ludwig Jahn stared at the two men who occupied the avail­able chairs of his tidy bachelor flat in Wedding, the working-class district of West Berlin, with growing fear. They bore the stamp of men he had seen once, long before, and whom he had hoped never to see again.

The one who was talking was undoubtedly German; Jahn had no doubt about that. What he did not know was that the man was Major Gerhard Schulz, of the East German secret police, the dreaded Staatssicherheitsdienst, known simply as the SSD. He would never know the name, but he could guess the occupation.

He could also guess that the SSD had copious files on ev­ery East German who had ever quit to come to the West, and that was his problem. Thirty years earlier, as an eighteen-year-old, Jahn had taken part in the building workers’ riots in East Berlin that had become the East German uprising. He had been lucky. Although he had been picked up in one of the sweeps by the Russian police and their East German Communist acolytes, he had not been held. But he recalled the smell of the detention cells, and the stamp of the men who ruled them. His visitors this March 22, three decades later, bore the same stamp.

He had kept his head low for eight years after the 1953 ri­ots; men in 1961, before the Wall was completed, he quietly walked into the West. For the past fifteen years he had had a good job with the West Berlin civil service, starting as a guard in the prison service and rising to Oberwachmeister, chief officer of Two Block, Tegel Jail.

The other man in his room that evening kept silent. Jahn would never know that he was a Soviet colonel named Kukushkin, present on behalf of the “Wet Affairs” depart­ment of the KGB.

Jahn stared in horror at the photographs the German eased from a large envelope and placed before him slowly, one by one. They showed his widowed mother in a cell, terrified, aged nearly eighty, staring at the camera obediently, hopeful of release. There were his two younger brothers, handcuffs on wrists, in different cells, the masonry of the walls showing up clearly in the high-definition prints.

“Then there are your sisters-in-law and your three delight­ful little nieces. Oh, yes, we know about the Christmas presents. What is it they call you? Uncle Ludo? How very charming. Tell me, have you ever seen places like these?”

There were more photographs—pictures that made the comfortably plump Jahn close his eyes for several seconds. Strange, zombielike figures, clad in rags, moved through the pictures, shaven, skull-like faces peering dully at the camera. They huddled; they shuffled; they wrapped their withered feet in rags to keep out the Arctic cold. They were stubbled, shriveled, subhuman. They were some of the inhabitants of the slave labor camps of the Kolyma complex, far away at the eastern end of Siberia, north of the Kamchatka Peninsula, where gold is mined deep in the Arctic Circle.

“Life sentences in these ... resorts ... are only for the worst enemies of the state, Herr Jahn. But my colleague here can ensure such life sentences for all your family—yes, even your dear old mother—with just one single telephone call. Now, tell me, do you want him to make that call?”

Jahn gazed across into the eyes of the man who had not spoken. The eyes were as bleak as the Kolyma camps.

“Nein,” he whispered. “No, please. What do you want?”

It was the German who answered.

“In Tegel Jail are two hijackers, Mishkin and Lazareff. Do you know them?”

Jahn nodded dumbly.

“Yes. They arrived four weeks ago. There was much pub­licity.”

“Where, exactly, are they?”

“Number Two Block. Top floor, east wing. Solitary con­finement, at their own request. They fear the other prisoners. Or so they say. There is no reason. For child rapists there is a reason, but not for these two. Yet they insist.”

“But you can visit them, Herr Jahn? You have access?”

Jahn remained silent. He began to fear what the visitors wanted with the hijackers. They came from the East; the hi­jackers had escaped from there. It could not be to bring them birthday gifts.

“Have another look at the pictures, Jahn. Have a good look before you think of obstructing us.”

“Yes, I can visit them. On my rounds. But only at night. During the day shift there are three guards in that corridor. One or two would always accompany me if I wished to visit them. But in the day shift there would be no reason for me to visit them. Only to check on them during the night shift.”

“Are you on the night shift at the moment?”

“No. Day shift.”

“What are the hours of the night shift?”

“Midnight to eight A.M. Lights are out at ten P.M. Shift changes at midnight. Relief is at eight A.M. During the night shift I would patrol the block three times, accompanied by the duty officer of each floor.”

The unnamed German thought for a while.

“My friend here wishes to visit them. When do you return to the night shift?”

“Monday, April fourth,” said Jahn.

“Very well,” said the East German. “This is what you will do.”

Jahn was instructed to acquire from the locker of a vaca­tioning colleague the necessary uniform and pass card. At two A.M. on the morning of Monday, April 4, he would descend to the ground floor and admit the Russian by the staff entrance from the street. He would accompany him to the top floor and hide him in the staff dayroom, to which he would acquire a duplicate key. He would cause the night duty officer on the top floor to absent himself on an errand, and take over the watch from him while he was away. Dur­ing the man’s absence he would allow the Russian into the solitary-confinement corridor, lending him his passkey to both cells. When the Russian had “visited” Mishkin and Lazareff, the process would be reversed. The Russian would hide again until the duty officer returned to his post. Then Jahn would escort the Russian back to the staff entrance and let him out.

“It won’t work,” whispered Jahn, well aware that it proba­bly would.

The Russian spoke at last, in German.

“It had better,” he said. “If it does not, I will personally ensure that your entire family begins a regime in Kolyma that will make the ‘extrastrict’ regime operating there seem like the honeymoon suite at the Kempinski Hotel.”

Jahn felt as if his bowels were being sprayed with liquid ice. None of the hard men in the “special wing” could com­pare with this man. He swallowed.

“I’ll do it,” he whispered.

“My friend will return here at six in the evening of Sun­day, April third,” said the East German. “No reception com­mittees from the police, if you please. It will do no good. We both have diplomatic passes in false names. We will deny ev­erything and walk away quite freely. Just have the uniform and pass card awaiting him.”

Two minutes later they were gone. They took their photos with them. There was no evidence left It did not matter. Jahn could see every detail in his nightmares.

By March 23 over two hundred fifty ships, the first wave of the waiting merchant fleet, were docked in the major grain ports from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. There was still ice in the St. Lawrence, but it was shattered to mosaic by the icebreakers, aware of its defeat as the grain ships moved through it to berth by the grain elevators.

A fair proportion of these ships were of the Russian Sovfracht fleet, but the next largest numbers were flying the U.S. flag, for one of the conditions of the sale had been that American carriers take the prime contracts to move the grain.

Within ten days they would begin moving east across the Atlantic, bound for Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic, Leningrad at the head of the Gulf of Finland, and the warm-water ports of Odessa, Sevastopol, and Novorossisk on the Black Sea. Flags of ten other nations mingled with them to effect the biggest single dry-cargo movement since the Sec­ond World War. Elevators from Duluth to Houston spewed a golden tide of wheat, barley, oats, rye, and com into their bellies, all destined within a month for the hungry millions of Russia.

On the twenty-sixth, Andrew Drake rose from his work at the kitchen table of an apartment in the suburbs of Brussels and pronounced that he was ready.

The explosives had been packed into ten fiber suitcases, the submachine guns rolled in towels and stuffed into haversacks. Azamat Krim kept the detonators bedded in cotton in a cigar box that never left him. When darkness fell, the cargo was carried in relays down to the group’s secondhand, Belgian-registered panel van, and they set off for Blankenberge.

The little seaside resort facing the North Sea was quiet, the harbor virtually deserted, when they transferred their equip­ment under cover of darkness to the bilges of the fishing launch. It was a Saturday, and though a man walking his dog along the quay noticed them at work, he thought no more of it. Parties of sea anglers stocking up for a weekend’s fishing were common enough, even though it was a mite early in the year and still chilly.

On Sunday the twenty-seventh, Miroslav Kaminsky bade them good-bye, took the van, and drove back to Brussels. His job was to clean the Brussels flat from top to bottom and end to end, to abandon it, and to drive the van to a prearranged rendezvous in the polders of Holland. There he would leave it, with its ignition key in an agreed place, then take the ferry from the Hook back to Harwich and London. He had his itinerary well rehearsed and was confident he could carry out his part of the plan.

The remaining seven men left port and cruised sedately up the coast to lose themselves in the islands of Walcheren and North Beveland, just across the border with Holland. There, with their fishing rods much in evidence, they hove to and waited. On a powerful radio down in the cabin, Andrew Drake sat hunched, listening to the wavelength of Maas Es­tuary Control and the endless calls of the ships heading into or out of the Europoort and Rotterdam.

“Colonel Kukushkin is going into Tegel Jail to do the job early in the morning of April fourth,” Vassili Petrov told Maxim Rudin in the Kremlin that same Sunday morning. “There is a senior guard who will let him in, bring him to the cells of Mishkin and Lazareff, and let him out of the jail by the staff doorway when it is over.”

“The guard is reliable? One of our people?” asked Rudin.

“No, but he has family in East Germany. He has been per­suaded to do as he is told. Kukushkin reports that he will not contact the police. He is too frightened.”

“Then he knows already whom he is working for. Which means he knows too much.”

“Kukushkin will silence him also, just as he steps out of the doorway. There will be no trace,” said Petrov.

“Eight days,” grunted Rudin. “He had better get it right.”

“He will,” said Petrov. “He, too, has a family. By a week from tomorrow Mishkin and Lazareff will be dead, and their secret with them. Those who helped them will keep silent to save their own lives. Even if they talk, it will be disbelieved. Mere hysterical allegations. No one will believe them.”

When the sun rose on the morning of the twenty-ninth, its first rays picked up the mass of the Freya twenty miles west of Ireland, cutting north by northeast through the eleven-degree longitude on a course to skirt the Outer Hebrides.

Her powerful radar scanners had picked up the fishing fleet in the darkness an hour before, and her officer of the watch noted them carefully. The nearest to her was well to the east, or landward side, of the tanker.

The sun glittered over the rocks of Donegal, a thin line on the eastward horizon to the men on the bridge with their ad­vantage of eighty feet of altitude. It caught the small fishing smacks of the men from Killybegs, drifting out in the western seas for mackerel, herring, and whiting. And it caught the bulk of the Freya herself, like a moving landmass, steaming out of the south past the drifters and their gently bobbing nets.

Christy O’Byrne was in the tiny wheelhouse of the smack he and his brother owned, the Bernadette. He blinked several times, put down his cocoa mug, and stepped the three feet from the wheelhouse to the rail. His vessel was the nearest to the passing tanker.

From behind him, when they saw the Freya, the fishermen tugged on the horn lanyards, and a chorus of thin whoops disturbed the dawn. On the bridge of the Freya, Thor Larsen nodded to his junior officer; seconds later the bellowing bull roar of the Freya answered the Killybegs fleet.

Christy O’Byrne leaned on the rail and watched the Freya fill the horizon, heard the throb of her power beneath the sea, and felt the Bernadette begin to roll in the widening wake of the tanker.

“Holy Mary,” he whispered, “would you look at the size of her.”

On the eastern shore of Ireland, compatriots of Christy O’Byrne were at work that morning in Dublin Castle, for seven hundred years the seat of power of the British. As a tiny boy perched on his father’s shoulder, Martin Donahue had watched from outside as the last British troops marched out of the castle forever, following the signing of a peace treaty. Sixty-one years later, on the verge of retirement from government service, he was a cleaner, pushing a Hoover back and forth over the electric-blue carpet of St Patrick’s Hall.

He had not been present when any of Ireland’s successive presidents had been inaugurated beneath Vincent Waldre’s magnificent 1778 painted ceiling, nor would he be present in twelve days when two superpowers signed the Treaty of Dub­lin below the motionless heraldic banners of the long-gone Knights of St. Patrick. For forty years he had just kept it dusted for them.

Rotterdan, too, was preparing, but for a different ceremony. Harry Wennerstrom arrived on the thirtieth and installed himself in the best suite at the Hilton Hotel.

He had come by his private executive jet, now parked at Schiedam municipal airport just outside the city. Throughout the day four secretaries fussed around him, preparing for the Scandinavian and Dutch dignitaries, the tycoons from the worlds of oil and shipping, and the scores of press people who would attend his reception on the evening of April 1 for Captain Thor Larsen and his officers.

A select party of notables and members of the press would be his guests on the flat roof of the modern Maas Control building, situated on the very tip of the sandy shore at the Hook of Holland. Well protected against the stiff spring breeze, they would watch from the north shore of the Maas Estuary as the six tugs pulled and pushed the Freya those last few kilometers from the estuary into the Caland Kanaal, from there to the Beer Kanaal, and finally to rest by Clint Blake’s new oil refinery in the heart of the Europoort.

While the Freya closed down her systems during the after­noon, the group would come back by cavalcade of limousines to central Rotterdam, forty kilometers up the river, for an evening reception. A press conference would precede this, during which Wennerstrom would present Thor Larsen to the world’s press.

Already, he knew, newspapers and television had leased hel­icopters to give the last few miles of the Freya and her berth­ing complete camera coverage.

Harry Wennerstrom was a contented old man.

By the early hours of March 30 the Freya was well through the channel between the Orkneys and the Shetlands. She had turned south, heading down the North Sea. As soon as she entered the crowded lanes of the North Sea, the Freya had reported in, contacting the first of the shore-based area traf­fic-control officers at Wick on the coast of Caithness in the far north of Scotland.

Because of her size and draft, she was a “hampered vessel.” She had reduced speed to ten knots and was follow­ing the instructions fed to her from Wick by VHF radiotele­phone. All around her, unseen, the various control centers had her marked on their high-definition radars, manned by qualified pilot operators. These centers are equipped with computerized support systems capable of rapid assimilation of weather, tide, and traffic-density information.

Ahead of the Freya as she crawled down the southbound traffic lane, smaller ships were crisply informed to get out of her way. At midnight she passed Flamborough Head on the coast of Yorkshire, now moving farther east, away from the British coast and toward Holland. Throughout her passage she had followed the deepwater channel, a minimum of twenty fathoms. On her bridge, despite the constant instruc­tions from ashore, her officers watched the echo-sounder readings, observing the banks and sandbars that make up the floor of the North Sea slide past on either side of her.

Just before sundown of March 31, at a point exactly fif­teen sea miles due east of the Outer Gabbard Light, now down to her bare steerage speed of five knots, the giant swung gently eastward and moved to her overnight position, the deep-draft anchorage located at fifty-two degrees north. She was twenty-seven sea miles due west of the Maas Es­tuary, twenty-seven miles from home and glory.

It was midnight in Moscow. Adam Munro had decided to walk home from the diplomatic reception at the embassy. He had been driven there by the commercial counselor, so his own car was parked by his flat off Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

Halfway over the Serafimov Bridge, he paused to gaze down at the Moscow River. To his right he could see the il­luminated cream-and-white stucco facade of the embassy; to his left the dark red walls of the Kremlin loomed above him, and above them the upper floor and dome of the Great Kremlin Palace.

It had been roughly ten months since he had flown from London to take up his new appointment. In that time he had pulled off the greatest espionage coup for decades, running the only spy the West had ever operated inside the heart of the Kremlin. They would savage him for breaking training, for not telling them all along who she was, but they could not diminish the value of what he had brought out.

Three weeks more and she would be out of this place, safe In London. He would be out, too, resigning from the service to start a new life somewhere else with the only person in the world he loved, ever had loved, or ever would.

He would be glad to leave Moscow, with its secrecy, its endless furtiveness, its mind-numbing drabness. In ten days the Americans would have their arms-reduction treaty, the Krem­lin its grain and technology, the service its thanks and gratitude from Downing Street and the White House alike. A week more and he would have his wife-to-be, and she her freedom. He shrugged deeper into his thick, fur-collared coat and walked on across the bridge.

Midnight in Moscow is ten P.M. in the North Sea. By 2200 hours the Freya was motionless at last. She had steamed 7,085 miles from Chita to Abu Dhabi and a further 12,015 miles from there to where she now lay. She lay motionless along the line of the tide; from her stem a single anchor chain streamed out and down to the seabed, with five shackles on deck. Each link of the chain needed to hold her was nearly a yard long, and the steel thicker than a man’s thigh.

Because of her “hampered” state, Captain Larsen had brought her down from the Orkneys himself, with two navi­gating officers to assist him, as well as the helmsman. Even at the overnight anchorage he left his first officer, Stig Lundquist, his third mate, Tom Keller (a Danish-American), and an able seaman on the bridge through the night. The officers would maintain constant anchor watch; the seaman would carry out periodic deck inspection.

Though the Freya’s engines were closed down, her turbines and generators hummed rhythmically, churning out the power to keep her systems functioning.

Among these were constant input of tide and weather, of which the latest reports were heartening.

He could have had March gales; instead, an unseasonal area of high pressure almost stationary over the North Sea and the English Channel had brought a mild early spring to the coasts. The sea was almost a flat calm; a one-knot tide ran northeastward from the vessel toward the West Frisians. The sky had been a near-cloudless blue all day, and despite a touch of frost that night, bade fair to be so again on the mor­row.

Bidding his officers goodnight, Captain Larsen left the bridge and descended one floor to D deck. Here, on the ex­treme starboard side, he had his suite. The spacious and well-appointed day cabin carried four windows looking for­ward down the length of the vessel, and two looking out to starboard. Aft of the day cabin were his bedroom and bathroom. The sleeping cabin also had two windows, both to starboard. All the windows were sealed, save one in the day cabin that was closed but with screw bolts that could be man­ually undone.

Outside his sealed windows to forward, the facade of the superstructure fell sheer to the deck; to starboard the win­dows gave onto ten feet of steel landing, beyond which was the starboard rail, and beyond it the sea. Five flights of steel ladders ran from the lowest A deck up five floors to the bridge-wing above his head, each stage of the ladders debouching onto a steel landing. All these sets of ladders and landings were open to the sky, exposed to the elements. They were sel­dom used, for the interior stairwells were heated and warm.

Thor Larsen lifted the napkin off the plate of chicken and salad the chief steward had left him, looked longingly at the bottle of Scotch in his liquor cabinet, and settled for coffee from the percolator. After eating he decided to work the night away on a final run-through of the channel charts for the morning’s berthing. It was going to be tight, and he wanted to know that channel as well as the two Dutch pilots who would arrive by helicopter from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at seven-thirty to take her over. Prior to that, he knew, a gang of ten men from ashore, the extra hands, called “riggers,” who were needed for the berthing operation, would arrive by launch at 0700.

As midnight struck, he settled at the broad table in his day cabin, spread his charts, and began to study.

At ten minutes before three in the morning, it was frosty but clear outside. A half-moon caused the rippling sea to glitter. Inside the bridge Stig Lundquist and Tom Keller shared a companionable mug of coffee. The able seaman prowled the flowing screens along the bridge console.

“Sir,” he called, “there’s a launch approaching.”

Tom Keller rose and crossed to where the seaman pointed at the radar screen. There were a score of blips—some sta­tionary, some moving, but all well away from the Freya. One tiny blip seemed to be approaching from the southeast.

“Probably a fishing boat making sure of being ready on the fishing grounds by sunrise,” said Keller.

Lundquist was looking over his shoulder. He flicked to a lower range.

“She’s coming very close,” he said.

Out at sea, the launch had to be aware of the mass of the Freya. The tanker carried anchor lights above the fo’c’sle and at the stern. Besides, her deck was floodlit and her superstruc­ture was lit like a Christmas tree by the lights in the accom­modation. The launch, instead of veering away, began to curve in toward the stern of the Freya.

“She looks as if she’s going to come alongside,” said Kel­ler.

“She can’t be the berthing crew,” said Lundquist. “They’re not due till seven.”

“Perhaps they couldn’t sleep, wanted to be well on time,” said Keller.

“Go down to the head of the ladder,” Lundquist told the seaman, “and tell me what you see. Put on the headset when you get there, and stay in touch.”

The accommodation ladder on the ship was amidships. On a big vessel it is so heavy that steel cables powered by an electric motor either lower it from the ship’s rail to the sea level or raise it to lie parallel to the rail. On the Freya, even full-laden, the rail was nine meters above the sea, an impos­sible jump, and the ladder was fully raised.

Seconds later the two officers saw the seaman leave the su­perstructure below them and begin to stroll down the deck. When he reached the ladder head, he mounted a small plat­form that jutted over the sea, and looked down. As he did so, he took a headset from a weatherproof box and fitted the ear­phones over his head. From the bridge Lundquist pressed a switch and a powerful light came on, illuminating the seaman far away along the deck as he peered down to the black sea. The launch had vanished from the radar screen; she was too close to be observed.

“What do you see?” asked Lundquist into a stick micro­phone.

The seaman’s voice came back into the bridge. “Nothing, sir.”

Meanwhile the launch had passed around the rear of the Freya, under the very overhang of her stern. For seconds it was out of sight. At either side of the stern, the guardrail of A deck was at its nearest point to the sea, just six meters above the water. The two men standing on the cabin roof of the launch had reduced this to three meters. As the launch emerged from the transom shadow, both men slung the three-point grapnels they held, the hooks sheathed in black rubber hose.

Each grapnel, trailing rope, rose twelve feet, dropped over the guardrail, and caught fast. As the launch moved on, both men were swept off the cabin roof to hang by the ropes, ankles in the sea. Then each began to climb rapidly, hand over hand, unheeding of the submachine carbines strapped to their backs. In two seconds the launch emerged into the light and began to run down the side of the Freya toward the courtesy ladder.

“I can see it now,” said the seaman high above. “It looks like a fishing launch.”

“Keep the ladder up until they identify themselves,” or­dered Lundquist from the bridge.

Far behind and below him the two boarders were over the rail. Each unhooked his grapnel and heaved it into the sea, where it sank, trailing rope. The two men set off at a fast lope, around to the starboard side and straight for the steel ladders. On soundless rubber-soled shoes they began to race upward.

The launch came to rest beneath the ladder, eight meters above the cramped cabin. Inside, four men crouched. At the wheel, the helmsman stared silently up at the seaman above him.

“Who are you?” called the seaman. “Identify yourself.”

There was no answer. Far below, in the glare of the spot­light, the man in the black woolen helmet just stared back.

“He won’t answer,” said the seaman into his mouthpiece.

“Keep the spotlight on them,” ordered Lundquist. “I’m coming to have a look.”

Throughout the interchange the attention of both Lund­quist and Keller had been to the port side and forward of the bridge. On the starboard side the door leading from the bridgewing into the bridge suddenly opened, bringing a gust of icy air. Both officers spun around. The door closed. Facing them were two men in black balaclava helmets, black crew-neck sweaters, black track-suit trousers, and rubber deck shoes. Each pointed a submachine carbine at the officers.

“Order your seaman to lower the ladder,” said one in En­glish. The two officers stared at them unbelievingly. This was impossible. The gunman raised his weapon and squinted down the sight at Keller.

“I’ll give you three seconds,” he said to Lundquist. “Then I’m blowing the head off your colleague.”

Brick-red with anger, Lundquist leaned to the stick mike.

“Lower the ladder,” he told the seaman.

The disembodied voice came back into the bridge. “But sir ...”

“It’s all right, lad,” said Lundquist. “Do as I say.”

With a shrug the seaman pressed a button on the small console at the ladder head. There was a hum of motors and the ladder slowly lowered to the sea. Two minutes later four other men, all in black, were herding the seaman back along the deck to the superstructure while the fifth man made the launch fast. Two more minutes and the six of them entered the bridge from the port side, the seaman’s eyes wide with fright. When he entered the bridge he saw the other two gun­men holding his officers.

“How on earth ...?” asked the seaman.

“Take it easy,” ordered Lundquist. To the only gunman who had spoken so far, he asked in English, “What do you want?”

“We want to speak to your captain,” said the man behind the mask. “Where is he?”

The door from the wheelhouse to the inner stairwell opened, and Thor Larsen stepped onto the bridge. His gaze took in his three crewmen with their hands behind their heads, and seven black-clad terrorists. His eyes, when he turned to the man who had asked the question, were blue and friendly as a cracking glacier.

“I am Captain Thor Larsen, master of the Freya,” he said slowly, “and who the hell are you?”

“Never mind who we are,” said the terrorist leader. “We have just taken over your ship. Unless your officers and men do as they are told, we shall start by making an example of your seaman. Which is it to be?”

Larsen looked slowly around him. Three of the sub­machine guns were pointing straight at the eighteen-year-old deckhand. He was white as chalk.

“Mr. Lundquist,” said Larsen formally, “do as these men say.” Turning back to the leader he asked, “What exactly is it you want with the Freya?”

“That is easy,” said the terrorist without hesitation. “We wish you no harm personally, but unless our requirements are carried out—to the letter—we shall not hesitate to do what we have to in order to secure compliance.”

“And then?” asked Larsen.

“Within thirty hours the West German government is going to release two of our friends from a West Berlin jail and fly them to safety. If they do not, I am going to blast you, your crew, your ship, and one million tons of crude oil all over the North Sea.”