The Devil's Alternative

PRESIDENT WILLIAM MATTHEWS sat stunned by the suddenness, the unexpectedness, and the brutality of the So­viet reaction. He waited while his CIA Director, Robert Ben­son, and his national security adviser, Stanislaw Poklewski, were sent for.

When the pair joined the Secretary of State in the Oval Of­fice, Matthews explained the burden of the visit from Ambas­sador Kirov.

“What the hell are they up to?” demanded the President.

None of his three principal advisers could come up with an answer. Various suggestions were put forward, notably that Maxim Rudin had suffered a reverse within his own Politburo and could not proceed with the Treaty of Dublin, and the Freya affair was simply his excuse for getting out of signing.

The idea was rejected by mutual consent. Without the treaty the Soviet Union would receive no grain, and they were at their last few truckloads. It was suggested the dead Aeroflot pilot, Captain Rudenko, represented the sort of loss of face the Kremlin could not stomach. This, too, was reject­ed. International treaties are not torn up because of dead pi­lots.

The Director of Central Intelligence summed up the feelings of everybody after an hour.

“It just doesn’t make sense, and yet it must. Maxim Rudin would not react like a madman unless he had a reason, a rea­son we don’t know.”

“That still doesn’t get us out from between two appalling alternatives,” said President Matthews. “Either we let the re­lease of Mishkin and Lazareff go through, and lose the most important disarmament treaty of our generation, and witness war within a year, or we use our clout to block that release, and subject Western Europe to the biggest ecological disaster of this generation.”

“We have to find a third choice,” said David Lawrence. “But in God’s name, where?”

“There is only one place to look,” replied Poklewski. “In­side Moscow. The answer lies inside Moscow somewhere. I do not believe we can formulate a policy aimed at avoiding both the alternative disasters unless we know why Maxim Rudin has reacted in this way.”

“I think you’re referring to the Nightingale,” Benson cut In. “There just isn’t the time. We’re not talking about weeks, or even days. We have only hours. I believe, Mr. President, that you should seek to speak personally with Maxim Rudin on the direct line. Ask him, as President to President, why he is taking this attitude over two Jewish hijackers.”

“And if he declines to give his reason?” asked Lawrence. “He could have given a reason through Kirov. Or sent a per­sonal letter. ...”

President Matthews made up his mind.

“I am calling Maxim Rudin,” he said. “But if he will not take my call or declines to give me an explanation, we will have to assume he is himself under intolerable pressures of some kind within his own circle. So while I am waiting for the call, I am going to entrust Mrs. Carpenter with the secret of what has just happened here and ask for her help through Sir Nigel Irvine and the Nightingale. In the last resort I will call Chancellor Busch in Bonn and ask him to give me more time.”

When the caller asked for Ludwig Jahn personally, the switchboard operator at Tegel Jail was prepared to cut him off. There had been numerous press calls seeking to speak with specific officers on the staff in order to elicit details on Mishkin and Lazareff. The operator had her orders: no calls.

But when the caller explained he was Jahn’s cousin and that Jahn was to have attended his daughter’s wedding the following day at noon, the operator softened. Family was dif­ferent. She put the call through; Jahn took it from his office.

“I think you remember me,” the voice told Jahn.

The officer remembered him well—the Russian with the la­bor-camp eyes.

“You shouldn’t have called me here,” he whispered hoarse­ly. “I can’t help you. The guards have been trebled, the shifts changed. I am on shift permanently now, sleeping here in the office until further notice—those are the orders. They are unapproachable now, those two men.”

“You had better make an excuse to get out for an hour,” said the voice of Colonel Kukushkin. “There’s a bar four hundred meters from the staff gate.” He named the bar and gave its address. Jahn did not know it, but he knew the street. “In one hour,” said the voice. There was a click.

It was eight P.M. in Berlin, and quite dark.

The British Prime Minister had been taking a quiet supper with her husband in the private apartments atop 10 Downing Street when she was summoned to accept a personal call from President Matthews. She was back at her desk when the call came through. The two government leaders knew each other well, and had met a dozen times since Britain’s first woman premier came to office. Face-to-face they used Chris­tian names, but even though the super-secure call across the Atlantic could not be eavesdropped, there was an official record made, so they stayed with formalities.

In careful, succinct terms. President Matthews explained the message he had received from Maxim Rudin via his Am­bassador in Washington. Joan Carpenter was stunned.

“In heaven’s name, why?” she asked.

“That’s my problem, ma’am,” came the Southern drawl from across the Atlantic. “There is no explanation. None at all. Two more things. Ambassador Kirov advised me that if the content of Rudin’s message ever became public knowledge, the same consequences to the Treaty of Dublin would still apply. I may count on your discretion?”

“Implicitly,” she replied. “The second thing?”

“I’ve tried to call Maxim Rudin on the hot line. He is un­available. Now, from that, I have to assume he has his prob­lems right in the heart of the Kremlin and he can’t talk about them. Frankly, that has put me in an impossible position. But about one thing I am absolutely determined. I cannot let that treaty be destroyed. It is far too important to the whole of the Western world. I have to fight for it. I cannot let two hi­jackers in a Berlin jail destroy it; I cannot let a bunch of ter­rorists on a tanker in the North Sea unleash an armed conflict between East and West such as would ensue.”

“I entirely agree with you, Mr. President,” said the Premier from her London desk. “What do you want from me? I imagine you would have more influence with Chancellor Busch than I.”

“It’s not that, ma’am. Two things. We have a certain amount of information about the consequences to Europe of the Freya’s blowing up, but I assume you have more. I need to know every conceivable possible consequence and option in the event the terrorists aboard do their worst.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Carpenter, “during the whole of today our people have put together an in-depth study of the ship, her cargo, the chances of containing the spillage, and so on. So far, we haven’t examined the idea of storming her. Now we may have to. I will have all our information on those as­pects on their way to you within the hour. What else?”

“This is the hard one, and I scarcely know how to ask it,” said William Matthews. “We believe there has to be an ex­planation of Rudin’s behavior, and until we know it, we are groping in the dark. If I am to handle this crisis, I have to see some daylight. I have to have that explanation. I need to know if there is a third option. I would like you to ask your people to activate the Nightingale one last time and get that answer for me.”

Joan Carpenter was pensive. She had always made it a pol­icy not to interfere with the way Sir Nigel Irvine ran his serv­ice. Unlike several of her predecessors, she had steadily declined to poke around in the intelligence services to satisfy her curiosity. Since coming to office she had doubled the budgets of both her directors, of SIS and MI5, had chosen hard-core professionals for the posts, and had been rewarded by their unswerving loyalty. Secure in that loyalty, she trusted them not to let her down. And neither had.

“I will do what I can,” she said at length. “But we are talk­ing about something in the very heart of the Kremlin, and a matter of hours. If it is possible, it will be done. You have my word on it.”

When the telephone was back in its cradle, she called her husband to tell him not to wait for her, she would be at her desk all night. From the kitchen she ordered a pot of coffee. The practical side of things arranged, she called Sir Julian Flannery at his home, told him simply over the line that a fresh crisis had arisen, and asked him to return at once to the Cabinet Office. Her last call was not on an open line; it was to the duty officer at the head office of the Firm. She asked for Sir Nigel Irvine to be contacted wherever he was, and to be asked to come immediately to No. 10. While waiting, she switched on the office television and caught the start of the nine o’clock BBC news. The long night had begun.

Ludwig Jahn slipped into the booth and sat down, sweating gently. From across the table the Russian regarded him coldly. The plump prison guard could not know that the fear­some Russian was fighting for his own life; the man gave no hint.

He listened impassively as Jahn explained the new pro­cedures, instituted since two that afternoon. In point of fact, Kukushkin had no diplomatic cover; he was hiding out in an SSD safe house in West Berlin as a guest of his East German colleagues.

“So you see,” concluded Jahn, “there is nothing I can do. I could not possibly get you into that corridor. There are three on duty, as a minimum figure, night and day. Passes have to be shown every time one enters the corridor, even by me, and we all know each other. We have worked together for years. No new face would be admitted without a check call to the governor.”

Kukushkin nodded slowly. Jahn felt relief rising in his chest. They would let him go; they would leave him alone; they would not hurt his family. It was over.

“You enter the corridor, of course,” said the Russian. “You may enter the cells.”

“Well, yes, I am the Oberachmeister. At periodic intervals I have to check that they are all right.”

“At night they sleep?”

“Maybe. They have heard about the matter in the North Sea. They lost their radios just after the noon broadcasts, but one of the other prisoners in solitary shouted the news across to them before the corridor was cleared of all other prisoners. Perhaps they will sleep, perhaps not.”

The Russian nodded somberly.

“Then,” he said, “you will do the job yourself.”

Jahn’s jaw dropped.

“No, no,” he babbled. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t use a gun. I couldn’t kill anyone.”

For answer the Russian laid two slim tubes like fountain pens on the table between them.

“Not guns,” he said. “These. Place the open end, here, a few centimeters from the mouth and nose of the sleeping man. Press the button on the side, here. Death occurs within three seconds. Inhalation of hydrogen cyanide gas causes in­stantaneous death. Within an hour the effects are identical to those of cardiac arrest. When it is done, close the cells, return to the staff area, wipe the tubes clean, and place them in the locker of another guard with access to the same pair of cells. Very simple, very clean. And it leaves you in the clear.”

What Kukushkin had laid before the horrified gaze of the senior officer was an updated version of the same sort of poi­son-gas pistols with which the “Wet Affairs” department of the KGB had assassinated the two Ukrainian nationalist lead­ers Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet in Germany two decades earlier. The principle was still simple, the efficiency of the gas increased by further research. Inside the tubes, glass globules of prussic acid rested. The trigger impelled a spring, which worked on a hammer, which crushed the glass. Simultaneous­ly the acid was vaporized by a compressed-air canister, ac­tivated in the same motion of pressing the trigger button. Impelled by the compressed air, the gas vapor shot out of the tube into the breathing passages in an invisible cloud. An hour later the telltale bitter almond smell of prussic acid was gone, the muscles of the corpse relaxed again; the symptoms were those of heart attack.

No one would believe two simultaneous heart attacks in two young men; a search would be made. The gas guns, found in the locker of a guard, would incriminate the man al­most completely.

“I ... I cant do that,” whispered Jahn.

“But I can, and will, see your entire family in an Arctic la­bor camp for the rest of their lives,” murmured the Russian. “A simple choice, Herr Jahn. The overcoming of your scruples for a brief ten minutes, against all their lives. Think about it.”

Kukushkin took Jahn’s hand, turned it over, and placed the tubes in the palm.

“Think about it,” he said, “but not too long. Then walk into those cells and do it That’s all.”

He slid out of the booth and left. Minutes later Jahn closed his hand around the gas guns, slipped them in his raincoat pocket, and went back to Tegel Jail. At midnight, in three hours, he would relieve the evening-shift supervisor. At one A.M. he would enter the cells and do it. He knew he had no alternative.

As the last rays of the sun left the sky, the Nimrod over the Freya had switched from her daytime f/126 camera to her nighttime f/135 version. Otherwise, nothing had changed. The night-vision camera, peering downward with its infrared sights, could pick out most of what was happening fifteen thousand feet beneath. If the Nimrod’s captain wanted, he could take still pictures with the aid of the f/135’s electronic flash, or throw the switch on his aircraft’s million-candle-power searchlight.

The night camera failed to notice the figure in the anorak, lying prostrate since midafternoon, slowly begin to move, crawling under the inspection catwalk, and from there inch­ing its way back toward the superstructure. When the figure finally crawled over the sill of the half-open doorway and stood up in the interior, no one noticed. At dawn it was sup­posed the body had been thrown into the sea.

The man in the anorak went below to the galley, rubbing hands and shivering repeatedly. In the galley he found one of his colleagues and helped himself to a piping mug of coffee. When he had finished he returned to the bridge and sought out his own clothes, the black tracksuit and sweater he had come aboard with.

“Jeez,” he told the man on the bridge in his American ac­cent, “you sure didn’t miss. I could feel the wadding from those blanks slapping into the back of the windbreaker.”

The bridge watch grinned.

“Andriy said to make it good,” he replied. “It worked. Mishkin and Lazareff are coming out at eight tomorrow morning. By afternoon they’ll be in Tel Aviv.”

“Great,” said the Ukrainian-American. “Let’s hope Andriy’s plan to get us off this ship works as well as the rest.”

“It will,” said the other. “You better get your mask on and give those clothes back to that Yankee in the paint locker. Then grab some sleep. You’re on watch at six in the morn­ing.”

Sir Julian Flannery reconvened the crisis management com­mittee within an hour of his private talk with the Prime Min­ister. She had told him the reason why the situation had changed, but he and Sir Nigel Irvine would be the only ones to know, and they would not talk. The members of the com­mittee would simply need to know that, for reasons of state, the release of Mishkin and Lazareff at dawn might be delayed or canceled, depending on the reaction of the Ger­man Chancellor.

Elsewhere in Whitehall, page after page of data about the Freya, her crew, cargo, and hazard potential were being pho­tographically transmitted direct to Washington.

Sir Julian had been lucky; most of the principal experts from the committee lived within a sixty-minute fast-drive ra­dius of Whitehall. Most were caught over dinner at home, none had left for the countryside; two were traced to restau­rants, one to the theater. By nine-thirty the bulk of UNICORNE were seated in conference once again.

Sir Julian explained that their duty now was to assume that the whole affair had passed from the realm of a form of exer­cise and into the major-crisis category.

“We have to assume that Chancellor Busch will agree to delay the release, pending the clarification of certain other matters. If he does, we have to assume the chance that the terrorists will at least activate their first threat, to vent oil cargo from the Freya. Now we have to plan to contain and destroy a possible first slick of twenty thousand tons of crude oil; secondly, to envisage that figure being multiplied fifty-fold.”

The picture that emerged was gloomy. Public indifference over years had led to political neglect; nevertheless, the amounts of crude-oil emulsifier in the hands of the British, and the vehicles for their delivery onto an oil slick, were still greater than those of the rest of Europe combined.

“We have to assume that the main burden of containing the ecological damage will fall to us,” said the man from Warren Springs. “In the Amoco Cadiz affair in 1978, the French refused to accept our help, even though we had better emulsifiers and better delivery systems than they did. Their fishermen paid bitterly for that particular stupidity. The old-fashioned detergent they used instead of our emulsifier concentrates caused as much toxic damage as the oil itself. And they had neither enough of it nor the right delivery sys­tems. It was like trying to kill an octopus with a peashooter.”

“I have no doubt the Germans, Dutch, and Belgians will not hesitate to ask for a joint allied operation in this matter,” said the man from the Foreign Office.

“Then we must be ready,” said Sir Julian. “How much have we got?”

Dr. Henderson from Warren Springs continued.

“The best emulsifier, in concentrated form, will emulsify—that is, break down into minuscule globules that permit natural bacteria to complete the destruction—twenty times its own volume. One gallon of emulsifier for twenty gallons of crude oil. We have one thousand tons in stock.”

“Enough for one slick of twenty thousand tons of crude oil,” observed Sir Julian. “What about a million tons?”

“Not a chance,” said Henderson grimly. “Not a chance in hell. If we start to produce more now, we can manufacture a thousand tons every four days. For a million tons, we’d need fifty thousand tons of emulsifier. Frankly, those maniacs in the black helmets could wipe out most marine life in the North Sea and English Channel, and foul up the beaches from Hull to Cornwall on our side, and Bremen to Ushant on the other.”

There was silence for a while.

“Let’s assume the first slick,” said Sir Julian quietly. “The other is beyond belief.”

The committee agreed to issue immediate orders for the procurement during the night of every ton of emulsifier from the store in Hampshire; to commandeer tanker lorries from the petroleum companies through the Energy Ministry; to bring the whole consignment to the esplanade parking lot at Lowestoft on the east coast; and to get under way and divert to Lowestoft every single marine tug with spray equipment, including the Port of London firefighting vessels and the Royal Navy equivalents. By late morning it was hoped to have the entire flotilla in Lowestoft port, tanking up with emulsifier.

“If the sea remains calm,” said Dr. Henderson, “the slick will drift gently northeast of the Freya on the tide, heading for North Holland, at about two knots. That gives us time. When the tide changes, it should drift back again. But if the wind rises, it might move faster, in any direction, according to the wind, which will overcome the tide at surface level. We should be able to cope with a twenty-thousand ton slick.”

“We can’t move ships into the area five miles round the Freya on three sides, or anywhere between her and the Dutch coast,” the Vice Chief of Defense Staff pointed out.

“But we can watch the slick from the Nimrod,” said the group captain from the RAF. “If it moves out of range of the Freya, your Navy chaps can start squirting.”

“So far, so good, for the threatened twenty-thousand-ton spillage,” said the Foreign Office man. “What happens after that?”

“Nothing,” said Dr. Henderson. “After that, we’re finished, expended.”

“Well, that’s it, then. An enormous administrative task awaits us,” said Sir Julian.

“There is one other option,” said Colonel Holmes of the Royal Marines. “The hard option.”

There was an uncomfortable silence around the table. The vice admiral and the group captain did not share the discom­fort; they were interested. The scientists and bureaucrats were accustomed to technical and administrative problems, their countermeasures and solutions. Each suspected the rawboned colonel in civilian clothes was talking about shooting holes in people.

“You may not like the option,” said Holmes reasonably, “but these terrorists have killed one sailor in cold blood. They may well kill another twenty-nine. The ship costs one hundred seventy million dollars, the cargo one hundred forty million dollars, the clean-up operation treble that. If, for whatever reason, Chancellor Busch cannot or will not release the men in Berlin, we may be left with no alternative but to try to storm the ship and knock off the man with the deto­nator before he can use it.”

“What exactly do you propose, Colonel Holmes?” asked Sir Julian.

“I propose that we ask Major Fallon to drive up from Dor­set and that we listen to him,” said Holmes.

It was agreed, and on that note the meeting adjourned un­til three A.M. It was ten minutes before ten o’clock.

During the meeting, not far away from the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister had received Sir Nigel Irvine.

“That, then, is the position, Sir Nigel,” she concluded. “If we cannot come up with a third alternative, either the men go free and Maxim Rudin tears up the Treaty of Dublin, or they stay in jail and their friends tear up the Freya. In the second case, they might stay their hand and not do it, but we can entertain no hopes of that. It might be possible to storm it, but chances of success are slim. In order to have a chance of perceiving the third alternative, we have to know why Maxim Rudin is taking this course. Is he, for example, over­playing his hand? Is he trying to bluff the West into sustain­ing enormous economic damage in order to offset his own embarrassment over his grain problems? Will he really go through with his threat? We have to know.”

“How long have you got, Prime Minister? How long has President Matthews got?” asked the Director General of the SIS.

“One must assume, if the hijackers are not released at dawn, we will have to stall the terrorists, play for time. But I would hope to have something for the President by afternoon tomorrow.”

“As a rather long-serving officer, I would have thought that was impossible, ma’am. It is the middle of the night in Mos­cow. The Nightingale is virtually unapproachable, except at meetings planned well ahead. To attempt an instant rendez­vous might well blow that agent sky-high.”

“I know your rules, Sir Nigel, and I understand them. The safety of the agent out in the cold is paramount. But so are matters of state. The destruction of the treaty, or the destruc­tion of the Freya, is a matter of state. The first could jeop­ardize peace for years, perhaps put Yefrem Vishnayev in power, with all its consequences. The financial losses alone sustained by Lloyd’s, and through Lloyd’s the British economy, if the Freya destroyed herself and the North Sea, would be disastrous, not to mention the deaths of the remain­ing twenty-nine seamen. I make no flat order, Sir Nigel. I ask you to put the certain alternatives against the putative hazard to one single Russian agent.”

“Ma’am, I will do what I can. You have my word on it,” said Sir Nigel, and left to return to his headquarters.

From an office in the Defense Ministry, Colonel Holmes was on the telephone to Poole, Dorset, headquarters of the Special Boat Service, or SBS. Major Simon Fallon was found befriending a pint of beer in the officers’ mess and brought to the telephone. The two Marines knew each other well.

“You’ve been following the Freya affair?” asked Holmes from London.

There was a dry chuckle from the other end.

“I thought you’d come shopping here eventually,” said Fallon. “What do they want?”

“Things are turning sour,” said Holmes. “The Germans may have to change their minds and keep those two jokers in Berlin after all. I’ve just spent an hour with the reconvened CMC. They don’t like it, but they may have to consider our way. Got any ideas?”

“Sure,” said Fallon. “Been thinking about it all day. Need a model, though, and a plan. And the gear.”

“Right,” said Holmes. “I have the plan here, and a pretty good model of another but similar ship. Get the boys to­gether. Get all the gear out of stores: underwater magnets, all the types of hardware, stun grenades—you name it. The lot. What you don’t need can be returned. I’m asking the Navy to come round from Portland and pick up the lot: the gear and the team. When you’ve left a good man in charge, jump into the car and get up to London. Report at my office as soon as you can.”

“Don’t worry,” said Fallon. “I’ve got the gear sorted and bagged already. Get the transport here as fast as you can. I’m on my way.”

When the hard, chunky major returned to the bar, there was silence. His men knew he had taken a call from London. Within minutes they were rousing the NCOs and Marines from their barracks, changing rapidly out of the plain clothes they had been wearing in the mess into the black webbing and green berets of their unit. Before midnight they were waiting on the stone jetty tucked away in their cordoned sec­tion of the Marine base; waiting for the arrival of the Navy to take their equipment to where it was needed.

There was a bright moon rising over Portland Bill to the west of them as the three fast patrol boats Sabre, Cutlass and Scimitar came out of the harbor, heading east for Poole. When the throttles were open, the three prows rose, the sterns buried in the foaming water, and the thunder echoed across the bay.

The same moon illuminated the long track of the Hamp­shire motorway as Major Fallon’s Rover sedan burned up the miles to London.

“Now, what the hell do I tell Chancellor Busch?” President Matthews asked his advisers.

It was five in the afternoon in Washington; though night had long settled on Europe, the late-afternoon sun was still on the Rose Garden beyond the French windows where the first buds were responding to the spring warmth.

“I don’t believe you can reveal to him the real message re­ceived from Kirov,” said Robert Benson.

“Why the devil not? I told Joan Carpenter, and no doubt she’ll have had to tell Nigel Irvine.”

“There’s a difference,” pointed out the CIA chief. “The British can take the necessary precautions to cope with an ec­ological problem in the sea off their coasts by calling on their technical experts. It’s a technical problem; Joan Carpenter did not need to call a full cabinet meeting. Dietrich Busch is going to be asked to hold onto Mishkin and Lazareff at the risk of provoking a catastrophe for his European neighbors. For that he’ll almost certainly consult his cabinet—”

“He’s an honorable man,” cut in Lawrence. “If he knows that the price is the Treaty of Dublin, he’ll feel bound to share that knowledge with his cabinet.”

“And there’s the problem,” concluded Benson. “That a minimum of fifteen more people would learn of it. Some of them would confide in their wives, their aides. We still haven’t forgotten the Guenter Guillaume affair. There are just too damn many leaks in Bonn. If it got out, the Dublin Treaty would be finished in any case, regardless of what hap­pened in the North Sea.”

His call went through in a minute. “What the hell do I tell him?” repeated Matthews.

“Tell him you have information that simply cannot be di­vulged on any telephone line, even a secure transatlantic line,” suggested Poklewski. “Tell him the release of Mishkin and Lazareff would provoke a greater disaster than even frus­trating the terrorists on the Freya for a few more hours. Ask him at this stage simply to give you a little time.”

“How long?” asked the President.

“As long as possible,” said Benson.

“And when the time runs out?” asked the President.

The call to Bonn came through. Chancellor Busch had been contacted at his home. The top-security call was patched through to him there. There was no need of translators on the line; Dietrich Busch spoke fluent English. President Matthews spoke to him for ten minutes while the Bonn government chief listened with growing amazement.

“But why?” he asked at length. “Surely the matter hardly affects the United States.”

Matthews was tempted. At the Washington end, Robert Benson wagged a warning finger.

“Mr. Chancellor, please. Believe me. I’m asking you to trust me. On this line, on any line across the Atlantic, I can’t be as frank as I’d like to be. Something has cropped up, something of enormous dimensions. Look, I’ll be as plain as I can. Over here we have discovered something about these two men; their release would be disastrous at this stage, for the next few hours. I’m asking for time, my friend, just time. A delay until certain things can be taken care of.”

The German Chancellor was standing in his study with the strains of Beethoven drifting through the door from the sit­ting room where he had been enjoying a cigar and a concert on the stereo. To say that he was suspicious would be putting it mildly. So far as he was concerned, the transatlantic line, established years before to link the NATO government heads, and checked regularly, was perfectly safe. Moreover, he rea­soned, the United States had perfectly good communications with their Bonn Embassy and could send him a personal message on that route if desired. It did not occur to him that Washington would simply not trust his cabinet with a secret of this magnitude after the repeated exposure of East Ger­man agents close to the seat of power on the Rhine.

On the other hand, the President of the United States was not given to making late-night calls or crazy appeals. He had to have his reasons, Busch knew. But what he was being asked was not something he could decide without con­sultation.

“It is just past ten P.M. over here,” he told Matthews. “We have until dawn to decide. Nothing fresh ought to happen un­til then. I shall reconvene my cabinet during the night and consult with them. I cannot promise you more.”

President William Matthews had to be satisfied with that.

When the phone was replaced, Dietrich Busch stayed for long minutes in thought. There was something going on, he reasoned, and it concerned Mishkin and Lazareff, sitting in their separate cells in Tegel Jail in West Berlin. If anything happened to them, there was no way in which the Federal Republic’s government would escape a howl of censure from within Germany, by the combined media and the political op­position. And with the state elections coming up ...

His first call was to Ludwig Fischer, his Minister of Jus­tice, also at home in the capital. None of his ministers would be weekending in the country, by prior agreement. His sug­gestion was met with immediate agreement by the Justice Minister. To transfer the pair from the old-fashioned prison of Tegel to the much newer and super-secure jail of Moabit was an obvious precaution. No CIA operatives would ever get at them inside Moabit. Fischer telephoned the instruction to Berlin immediately.

There are certain phrases, innocent enough, which when used by the senior cipher clerk at the British Embassy in Moscow to the man he knows to be the SIS resident on the embassy staff, mean, in effect, “Get the hell down here fast Something urgent is coming through from London.” Such was the phrase that brought Adam Munro from his bed at midnight Moscow time, ten P.M. London time, across town to Maurice Thorez Embankment.

Driving back from Downing Street to his office, Sir Nigel Irvine had realized the Prime Minister was absolutely right Compared to the destruction of the Treaty of Dublin on the one hand or the destruction of the Freya, her crew, and her cargo on the other, putting a Russian agent at risk of ex­posure was the lesser evil What he was going to ask Munro in Moscow to do, and the way he would have to demand it gave him no pleasure. But before he arrived at the SIS build­ing he knew it would have to be done.

Deep in the basement the communications room was han­dling the usual routine traffic when he entered, and startled the night duty staff. But the scrambler telex raised Moscow in less than five minutes. No one queried the right of the Master to talk directly to his Moscow resident in the middle of the night. It was thirty minutes later that the telex from the Mos­cow cipher room chattered its message that Munro was there and waiting.

The operators at both ends, senior men of a lifetime’s ex­perience, could be trusted with the whereabouts of Christ’s bones, if necessary—they had to be, they handled, as routine, messages that could bring down governments. From London the telex would send its scrambled, uninterceptible message down to a forest of aerials outside Cheltenham, better known for its horse races and woman’s college. From there the words would be converted automatically into an unbreakable one-off code and beamed out over a sleeping Europe to an aerial on the embassy roof. Four seconds after they were typed in London, they would emerge, in clear, on the telex in the basement of the old sugar magnate’s house in Moscow.

There, the cipher clerk turned to Munro, standing by his side.

“It’s the Master himself,” he said, reading the code tag on the incoming message. “There must be a flap on.”

Sir Nigel had to tell Munro the burden of Kirov’s message to President Matthews of only three hours earlier. Without that knowledge, Munro could not ask the Nightingale for the answer to Matthews’s question: Why?

The telex rattled for several minutes. Munro read the message that spewed out, with horror.

“I can’t do that,” he told the impassive clerk over whose shoulder he was reading. When the message from London was ended, he told the clerk:

“Reply as follows: ‘Not repeat not possible obtain this sort of answer in tune scale.’ Send it.”

The interchange between Sir Nigel Irvine and Adam Munro went on for fifteen minutes. There is a method of contacting N at short notice, suggested London. Yes, but only in case of dire emergency, replied Munro. This qualifies one hundred times as emergency, chattered the machine from London. But N could not begin to inquire in less than several days, pointed out Munro. Next regular Politburo meeting not due until Thursday following. What about records of last Thursday’s meeting? asked London. Freya was not hijacked last Thursday, retorted Munro. Finally Sir Nigel did what he hoped he would not have to do.

“Regret,” tapped the machine, “prime ministerial order not refusable. Unless attempt made avert this disaster, operation to bring out N to West cannot proceed.”

Munro looked down at the stream of paper coming out of the telex with disbelief. For the first time he was caught in the net of his own attempts to keep his love for the agent he ran from his superiors in London. Sir Nigel Irvine thought the Nightingale was an embittered Russian turncoat called Anatoly Krivoi, right-hand man to the warmonger Vishnayev.

“Make to London,” he told the clerk dully, “the following: ‘Will try this night stop decline to accept responsibility if N refuses or is unmasked during attempt stop.’ ”

The reply from the Master was brief: “Agree. Proceed.” It was half past one in Moscow, and very cold.

Half past six in Washington, and the dusk was settling over the sweep of lawns beyond the bulletproof windows behind the President’s chair, causing the lamps to be switched on. The group in the Oval Office was wailing: waiting for Chancellor Busch, waiting for an unknown agent in Moscow, waiting for a masked terrorist of unknown origins sitting on a million-ton bomb off Europe with a detonator in his hand. Waiting for the chance of a third alternative.

The phone rang and it was for Stanislaw Poklewski. He lis­tened, held a hand over the mouthpiece, and told the President it was from the Navy Department in answer to his query of an hour earlier.

There was one U.S. Navy vessel in the area of the Freya. She had been paying a courtesy visit to the Danish coastal city of Esbjerg, and was on her way back to join her squadron of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, or STANFORLANT, then cruising on patrol west of Norway. She was well off the Danish coast, steaming north by west to rejoin her NATO allies.

“Divert to Freya’s area,” said the President.

Poklewski passed the Commander in Chiefs order back to the Navy Department, which soon began to make signals via STANFORLANT headquarters to the American warship.

Just after one in the morning, the U.S.S. Moran, halfway between Denmark and the Orkney Islands, put her helm about, opened her engines to full power, and then began rac­ing through the moonlight southward for the English Chan­nel. She was a guided-missile ship of almost eight thousand tons, which, although heavier than the British light cruiser Argyll, was classified as a destroyer, or DD. Moving at full power in a calm sea, she was making close to thirty knots to bring her to her station five miles from the Freya at eight A.M.

There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mojarsky Ho­tel, just off the roundabout at the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Those that were there were dark, uninhabited, save two.

Munro watched the lights of the other car flicker and dim, then climbed from his own vehicle and walked across to it. When he climbed into the passenger seat beside her, Valen­tina was alarmed and trembling.

“What is it, Adam? Why did you call me at the apartment? The call must have been recorded.”

He put his arm around her, feeling the trembling through her coat.

“It was from a call box,” he said, “and only concerned Gregor’s inability to attend your dinner party. No one will suspect anything.”

“At two in the morning?” she remonstrated. “No one makes calls like that at two in the morning. I was seen to leave the apartment compound by the night watchman. He will report it.”

“Darling, I’m sorry. Listen.”

He told her of the visit by Ambassador Kirov to President Matthews the previous evening; of the news being passed to London; of the demand to him that he try to find out why the Kremlin was taking such an attitude over Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because those animals murdered Captain Rudenko, a man with a wife and children.”

“Valentina, we have listened to the Politburo these past nine months. The Treaty of Dublin is vital to your people. Why would Rudin put it in jeopardy over these two men?”

“He has not done so,” answered Valentina. “It is possible for the West to control the oil slick if the ship blows up. The costs can be met. The West is rich.”

“Darling, there are twenty-rune seamen aboard that ship. They, too, have wives and children. Twenty-nine men’s lives against the imprisonment of two. There has to be another and more serious reason.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It has not been mentioned in Politburo meetings. You know that also.”

Munro stared miserably through the windshield. He had hoped against hope she might have an answer for Washing­ton, something she had heard inside the Central Committee building. Finally he decided he had to tell her.

When he had finished, she stared through the darkness with round eyes. He caught a hint of tears in the dying light of the moon.

“They promised,” she whispered. “They promised they would bring me and Sasha out, in a fortnight, from Rumania.”

“They’ve gone back on their word,” he confessed. “They want this last favor.”

She placed her forehead on her gloved hands, supported by the steering wheel.

“They will catch me,” she mumbled. “I am so frightened.”

“They won’t catch you.” He tried to reassure her. “The KGB acts much more slowly than people think, and the higher their suspect is placed, the more slowly they have to act. If you can get this piece of information for President Matthews, I think I can persuade them to get you out in a few days, you and Sasha, instead of two weeks. Please try, my love. It’s our only chance left of ever being together.”

Valentina stared through the glass.

“There was a Politburo meeting this evening,” she said fi­nally. “I was not there. It was a special meeting, out of se­quence. Normally on Friday evenings they are all going to the country. Transcription begins tomorrow—that is, to­day—at ten in the morning. The staff have to give up their weekend to get it ready for Monday. Perhaps they mentioned the matter.”

“Could you get in to see the notes, listen to the tapes?” he asked.”

“In the middle of the night? There would be questions asked.”

“Make an excuse, darling. Any excuse. You want to start and finish your work early, so as to get away.”

“I will try,” she said eventually. “I will try—for you, Adam, not for those men in London.”

“I know those men in London,” said Adam Munro. “They will bring you and Sasha out if you help them now. This will be the last risk, truly the last.”

She seemed not to have heard him, and to have overcome, for a while, her fear of the KGB, exposure as a spy, the aw­ful consequences of capture unless she could escape in time. When she spoke, her voice was quite level.

“You know Detsky Mir? The soft-toys counter. At ten o’clock this morning.”

He stood on the black tarmac and watched her taillights vanish. It was done. They had asked him to do it, demanded that he do it, and he had done it. He had diplomatic protec­tion to keep him out of Lubyanka. The worst that could hap­pen would be his Ambassador’s summons to the Foreign Ministry on Monday morning to receive Dmitri Rykov’s icy protest and demand for his removal. But Valentina was walk­ing right into the secret archives, without even the disguise of normal, accustomed, justified behavior to protect her. He looked at his watch. Seven hours, seven hours to go, seven hours of knotted stomach muscles and ragged nerve ends. He walked back to his car.

Ludwig Jahn stood in the open gateway of Tegel Jail and watched the taillights of the armored van bearing Mishkin and Lazareff disappear down the street.

For him, unlike for Munro, there would be no more wait­ing, no tension stretching through the dawn and into the morning. For him the waiting was over.

He walked carefully to his office on the first floor and closed the door. For a few moments he stood by the open window, then drew back one hand and hurled the first of the cyanide pistols far into the night. He was fat, overweight, un­fit. A heart attack would be accepted as possible, provided no evidence was found.

Leaning far out of the window, he thought of his nieces over the Wall in the East, their laughing faces when Uncle Ludo had brought the presents four months ago at Christmas. He closed his eyes, held the other tube beneath his nostrils, and pressed the trigger button.

The pain slammed across his chest like a giant hammer. The loosened fingers dropped the tube, which fell with a tinkle to the street below. Jahn slumped, hit the windowsill, and caved backward into his office, already dead. When they found him, they would assume he had opened the window for air when the first pain came. Kukushkin would not have his triumph. The chimes of midnight were drowned by the roar of a truck that crushed the tube in the gutter to fragments.

The hijacking of the Freya had claimed its first victim.