The Devil's Alternative

THE RESUMED West German cabinet meeting assembled in the Chancellery at one A.M., and the mood when the min­isters heard from Dietrich Busch the plea from Washington varied between exasperation and truculence.

“Well, why the hell won’t he give a reason?” asked the De­fense Minister. “Doesn’t he trust us?”

“He claims he has a reason of paramount importance, but cannot divulge it even over the hot line,” replied Chancellor Busch. “That gives us the opportunity of either believing him or calling him a liar. At this stage I cannot do the latter.”

“Has he any idea what the terrorists will do when they learn Mishkin and Lazareff are not to be released at dawn?” queried another.

“Yes, I think he has. At least the texts of all the exchanges between the Freya and Maas Control are in his hands. As we all know, they have threatened either to kill another seaman, or to vent twenty thousand tons of crude, or both.”

“Well, then, let him carry the responsibility,” urged the In­terior Minister. “Why should we take the blame if that hap­pens?”

“I haven’t the slightest intention that we should,” replied Busch, “but that doesn’t answer the question. Do we grant President Matthews’s request or not?”

There was silence for a while. The Foreign Minister broke it.

“How long is he asking for?”

“As long as possible,” said the Chancellor. “He seems to have some plan afoot to break the deadlock, to find a third alternative. But what the plan is, or what the alternative could be, he alone knows. He and a few people he evidently trusts with the secret,” he added with some bitterness. “But that doesn’t include us, for the moment.”

“Well, personally I think it is stretching the friendship be­tween us a bit far,” said the Foreign Minister, “but I think we ought to grant him an extension, while making plain, at least unofficially, that it is at his request, not ours.”

“Perhaps he has an idea to storm the Freya,” suggested Defense.

“Our own people say that would be extremely risky,” re­plied the Interior Minister. “It would require an underwater approach for at least the last two miles, a sheer climb up smooth steel from the sea to the deck, a penetration of the superstructure without being observed from atop the funnel, and the selection of the right cabin with the leader of the ter­rorists in it. If, as we suspect, the man holds a remote-control detonating mechanism in his hand, he’d have to be shot and killed before he could press the button.”

“In any case, it is too late to do it before dawn,” said the Defense Minister. “It would have to be in darkness, and that means ten P.M. at the earliest, twenty-one hours from now.”

At a quarter to three the German cabinet finally agreed to grant President Matthews his request: an indefinite delay on the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, while reserving the right to keep the consequences under constant review and to re­verse that decision if it became regarded in Western Europe as impossible to continue to hold the pair.

At the same time the government spokesman was quietly asked to leak the news to two of his most reliable media con­tacts that only massive pressure from Washington had caused the about-face in Bonn.

It was eleven P.M. in Washington, four A.M. in Europe, when the news from Bonn reached President Matthews. He sent back his heartfelt thanks to Chancellor Busch and asked David Lawrence:

“Any reply from Jerusalem yet?”

“None,” said Lawrence. “We know only that our Ambassa­dor there has been granted a personal interview with Benyamin Golen.”

When the Israeli Premier was disturbed for the second time during the Sabbath night, his tetchy capacity for patience was wearing distinctly thin. He received the U.S. Ambassador in his dressing gown, and the reception was frosty. It was three A.M. in Europe, but five in Jerusalem, and the first thin light of Saturday morning was on the hills of Judea.

He listened without reaction to the Ambassador’s personal plea from President Matthews. His private fear was for the identity of the terrorists aboard the Freya. No terrorist action aimed at delivering Jews from a prison cell had been mount­ed since the days of his own youth, fighting right on the soil where he stood. Then it had been to free condemned Jewish partisans from a British jail at Acre, and he had been a part of that fight. Now it was Israel that roundly condemned ter­rorism, the taking of hostages, the blackmail of regimes. And yet ...

And yet, hundreds of thousands of his own people would secretly sympathize with two youths who had sought to es­cape the terror of the KGB in the only way left open to them. The same voters would not openly hail the youths as heroes, but they would not condemn them as murderers, ei­ther. As to the masked men on the Freya, there was a chance that they, too, were Jewish—possibly (heaven forbid) Israe­lis. He had hoped the previous evening that the affair would be over by sundown of the Sabbath, the prisoners from Berlin inside Israel, the terrorists on the Freya captured or dead. There would be a fuss, but it would die down.

Now he was learning that there would be no release. The news hardly inclined him to the American request, which was in any case impossible. When he had heard the Ambassador out, he shook his head.

“Please convey to my good friend William Matthews my heartfelt wish that this appalling affair can be concluded without further loss of life,” he replied. “But on the matter of Mishkin and Lazareff my position is this: if on behalf of the government and the people of Israel, and at the urgent re­quest of West Germany, I give a solemn public pledge not to imprison them here or return them to Berlin, then I shall have to abide by that pledge. I’m sorry, but I cannot do as you ask and return them to jail in Germany as soon as the Freya has been released.”

He did not need to explain what the American Ambassa­dor already knew: that apart from any question of national honor, even the explanation that promises extracted under duress were not binding would not work in this case. The outrage from the National Religious Party, the Gush Emunim extremists, the Jewish Defense League, and the hundred thousand Israeli voters who had come from the USSR in the past decade—all these alone would prevent any Israeli pre­mier from reneging on an international pledge to set Mishkin and Lazareff free.

“Well, it was worth a try,” said President Matthews when the cable reached Washington an hour later.

“It now ranks as one possible ‘third alternative’ that no longer exists,” remarked David Lawrence, “even if Maxim Rudin had accepted it, which I doubt.”

It was one hour to midnight; lights were burning in five government departments scattered across the capital, as they burned in the Oval Office and a score of other rooms throughout the White House where men and women sat at telephones and teleprinters awaiting the news from Europe. The four men in the Oval Office settled to await the reaction from the Freya.

Doctors say three in the morning is the time when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb; it is the hour of deepest weariness, slowest reactions, and gloomiest depression. Three A.M. marked one complete cycle of the sun and moon for the two men who faced each other in the captain’s cabin of the Freya.

Neither had slept that night or the previous one; each had been forty-four hours without rest; each was drawn and red-eyed.

Thor Larsen, at the epicenter of a whirling storm of inter­national activity, of cabinets and councils, embassies and meetings, plottings and consultations that kept the lights burning on three continents from Jerusalem to Washington, was playing his own game. He was pitting his own capacity to stay awake against the will of the fanatic who faced him, knowing that at stake if he failed were the lives of his crew and his ship.

Larsen knew that the man who called himself Svoboda, younger and consumed by his own inner fire, nerves tightened by a combination of black coffee and the tension of his gamble against the world, could have ordered the Norwegian captain to be tied up while he himself sought rest. So the bearded mariner sat facing the barrel of a gun and played on his captor’s pride, hoping that the man would take his chal­lenge, refuse to back down, and concede defeat in the game of beating sleep.

It was Larsen who proposed the endless cups of strong black coffee, a drink he usually took with milk and sugar only two or three times a day. It was he who talked through the day and the night, provoking the Ukrainian with sugges­tions of eventual failure, then backing off when the man be­came too irritable for safety. Long years of experience, nights of yawning, gritty-mouthed training as a sea captain, had taught the bearded giant to stay awake and alert through the night watches, when the cadets drowsed and the deckhands dozed.

So he played his own solitary game, without guns or am­munition, without teleprinters or night-sight cameras, without support and without company. All the superb technology the Japanese had built into his new command was as much use as rusty nails to him now. If he pushed the man across the table too far, he might lose his temper and shoot to kill. If he were provoked too far, he could order the execution of an­other crewman. If he felt himself becoming too drowsy, he might have himself relieved by another, fitter terrorist while he himself took sleep and undid all that Larsen was trying to do to him.

That Mishkin and Lazareff would be released at dawn, Larsen still had reason to believe. After their safe arrival in Tel Aviv, the terrorists would prepare to quit the Freya. Or would they? Could they? Would the surrounding warships let them go so easily? Even away from the Freya, attacked by the NATO navies, Svoboda could press his button and blow the Freya apart.

But that was not all of it This man in black had killed one of the crew. Thor Larsen wanted him for that, and he wanted him dead. So he talked the night away to the man opposite him, denying them both sleep.

Whitehall was not sleeping, either. The crisis management committee had been in session since three A.M., and by four, the progress reports were complete.

Across southern England the bulk tanker lorries, com­mandeered from Shell, British Petroleum, and a dozen other sources, were filling up with emulsifier concentrate at the Hampshire depot Bleary-eyed drivers rumbled through the night, empty toward Hampshire or loaded toward Lowestoft, moving hundreds of tons of the concentrate to the Suffolk port. By four A.M. the stocks were empty; all one thousand tons of the national supply were headed east to the coast.

So also were inflatable booms to try to hold the vented oil away from the coast until the chemicals could do their work. The factory that made the emulsifier had been geared for maximum output until further notice.

At half past three the news had come from Washington that the Bonn cabinet had agreed to hold Mishkin and Laz­areff for a while longer.

“Does Matthews know what he’s doing?” someone asked.

Sir Julian Flannery’s face was impassive.

“We must assume that he does,” he said smoothly. “We must also assume that a venting by the Freya will probably now take place. The efforts of the night have not been in vain. At least we are now almost ready.”

“We must also assume,” said the civil servant from the Foreign Ministry, “that when the announcement becomes public, France, Belgium, and Holland are going to ask for as­sistance in fighting any oil slick that may result.”

“Then we shall be ready to do what we can,” said Sir Julian. “Now, what about the spraying and firefighting vessels?”

The report in the UNICORNE room mirrored what was happening at sea. From the Humber estuary, tugs were churn­ing south toward Lowestoft harbor, while from the Thames and even as far around as the Navy base at Lee, other tugs capable of spraying liquid onto the surface of the sea were moving to the rendezvous point on the Suffolk coast. They were not the only things moving around the south coast that night.

Off the towering cliffs of Beachy Head, the Cutlass, Scimi­tar, and Sabre, carrying the assorted, complex, and lethal hardware of the world’s toughest team of assault frogmen, were pointing their noses north of east to bring them past Sussex and Kent toward where the cruiser Argyll lay at an­chor in the North Sea.

The boom of their engines echoed off the chalk battlements of the southern coast, and light sleepers in Eastbourne heard the rumble out to sea.

Twelve Royal Marines of the Special Boat Service clung to the rails of the bucking craft, watching over their precious kayaks and the crates of diving gear, weapons, and unusual explosives that made up the props of their trade. It was all being carried as deck cargo.

“I hope,” shouted the young lieutenant commander who skippered the Cutlass to the Marine beside him, the second-in-command of the team, “that those whizz-bangs you’re car­rying back there don’t go off.”

“They won’t,” said the Marine captain with confidence, “not until we use them.”

In a room adjoining the main conference center beneath the Cabinet Office, their commanding officer was poring over photographs of the Freya, taken by night and day. He was comparing the configuration shown by the Nimrod’s pictures with the scale plan provided by Lloyd’s and the model of the supertanker British Princess lent by British Petroleum.

“Gentlemen,” said Colonel Hohnes, joining the assembled men next door, “I think it’s time we considered one of the less palatable choices we may have to face.”

“Ah, yes,” said Sir Julian regretfully, “the hard option.”

“If,” pursued Hohnes, “President Matthews continues to object to the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, and West Ger­many continues to accede to that demand, the moment may well come when the terrorists will realize the game is up, that their blackmail is not going to work. At that moment they may well refuse to have their bluff called, and blow the Freya to pieces. Personally, it seems to me this will not happen be­fore nightfall, which gives us about sixteen hours.”

“Why nightfall, Colonel?” asked Sir Julian.

“Because, sir, unless they are all suicide candidates, which they may be, one must assume that they will seek their own escape in the confusion. Now, if they wish to try to live, they may well leave the ship and operate their remote-control det­onator at a certain distance from the ship’s side.”

“And your proposal, Colonel?”

“Twofold, sir. Firstly, their launch. It is still moored beside the courtesy ladder. As soon as darkness falls, a diver could approach that launch and attach a delayed-action explosive device to it. If the Freya were to blow up, nothing within a half-mile radius would be safe. Therefore I propose a charge detonated by a mechanism operated by water pressure. As the launch moves away from the ship’s side, the forward thrust of the launch will cause water to enter a funnel beneath the keel. This water will operate a trigger, and sixty seconds later the launch will blow up, before the terrorists have reached a point half a mile from the Freya, and there­fore before they can operate their own detonator.”

“Would the exploding of their launch not detonate the charges on the Freya?” asked someone.

“No. If they have a remote-control detonator, it must be electronically operated. The charge would blow the launch carrying the terrorists to smithereens. No one would survive.”

“But if the detonator sank, would not the water pressure depress the button?” asked one of the scientists.

“No. Once under the water, the remote-control detonator would be safe. It could not beam its radio message to the larger charges in the ship’s tanks.”

“Excellent,” said Sir Julian. “Can this plan not operate be­fore darkness falls?”

“No, it cannot,” answered Holmes. “A frogman diver leaves a trail of bubbles. In stormy weather this might not be noticed, but on a flat sea it would be too obvious. One of the lookouts could spot the bubbles rising. It would provoke what we are trying to avoid.”

“After dark it is, then,” said Sir Julian.

“Except for one thing, which is why I oppose the idea of sabotaging their escape launch as the only ploy. If, as may well happen, the leader of the terrorists is prepared to die with the Freya, he may not leave the ship with the rest of his team. So I believe we may have to storm the ship during a night attack and get to him before he can use his device.”

The Cabinet Secretary sighed.

“I see. Doubtless you have a plan for that as well?”

“Personally, I do not. But I would like you to meet Major Simon Fallon, commanding the Special Boat Service.”

It was all the stuff of Sir Julian Flannery’s nightmares. The Marine major was barely five feet eight inches tall, but he seemed about the same across the shoulders and was evi­dently of that breed of men who talk about reducing other humans to their component parts with the same ease that Lady Flannery talked of dicing vegetables for one of her fa­mous Provenaal salads.

In at least three encounters the peace-loving Cabinet Secre­tary had had occasion to meet officers from the SAS, but this was the first time he had seen the commander of the other, smaller specialist unit, the SBS. They were, he observed to himself, of the same breed.

The SBS had originally been formed for conventional war, to act as specialists in attacks from the sea on coastal in­stallations. That was why they were drawn from the Marine commandos. As a basic requirement they were physically fit to a revolting degree, experts in swimming, canoeing, diving, climbing, marching, and fighting.

From there they went on to become proficient in para­chuting, explosives, demolition, and the seemingly limit­less techniques of cutting throats or breaking necks with knife, wire loop, or simply bare hands. In this, and in their capacity for living in self-sufficiency on, or rather off, the countryside for extended periods and leaving no trace of their presence, they simply shared the skills of their cousins in the SAS.

It was in their underwater skills that the SBS men were dif­ferent. In frogman gear they could swim prodigious distances and lay explosive charges, or drop their swimming gear while treading water without a ripple and emerge from the sea with their arsenal of special weapons wrapped about them.

Some of their weaponry was fairly routine: knives and cheese wire. But since the start of that rash of outbreaks of terrorism in the late sixties, they had acquired fresh toys that delighted them.

All were expert marksmen with their high-precision, hand-tooled Finlanda rifle, a Norwegian-made piece that had been evaluated as perhaps the best rifle in the world. It could be, and usually was, fitted with an image intensifier, a sniperscope as long as a bazooka, and a completely effective silencer and flash guard.

For taking doors away in half a second, they tended, like the SAS, toward short-barreled pump-action shotguns firing solid charges. These they never aimed at the lock, for there could be other bolts behind the door; they fired two simulta­neously to take off both hinges, kicked the door down, and opened fire with the silenced Ingram machine pistols.

Also in the arsenal that had helped the SAS assist the Ger­mans at Mogadishu were their flash-bang-crash grenades, a sophisticated development of the “stun” grenades. These do more than just stun; they paralyze. With a half-second delay after pulling the pin, these grenades, thrown into a confined space containing both terrorists and hostages, have three ef­fects. The flash blinds anyone looking in that direction for at least thirty seconds, the bang blows the eardrums out, causing instant pain and a certain loss of concentration, and the crash is a tonal sound that enters the middle ear and causes a ten-second paralysis of all muscles. (During tests, one of their own men once tried to pull the trigger of a gun pressed into a companion’s side while the grenade went off. It was impos­sible. Both “terrorist” and “hostage” lost their eardrums. But eardrums can grow again; dead hostages cannot.)

While the paralytic effect lasts, the rescuers spray bullets four inches over head height while their colleagues dive for the hostages, dragging them to the floor. At this point, the fixers drop their aim by six inches.

The exact position of hostage and terrorist in a closed room can be determined by the application of an electronic stethoscope to the outside of the door. Speech inside the room is not necessary; breathing can be heard and located ac­curately. The rescuers communicate in an elaborate sign lan­guage that permits of no misunderstanding.

Major Fallon placed the model of the Princess on the con­ference table, aware he had the attention of everyone present.

“I propose,” he began, “to ask the cruiser Argyll to turn herself broadside on to the Freya, and then before dawn park the assault boats containing my men and equipment close up in the lee of the Argyll, where the lookout, here, on top of the Freya’s funnel, cannot see them, even with binoculars. That will enable us to make our preparations, unobserved, through the afternoon. In case of airplanes hired by the press, I would like the sky cleared, and any emulsifier-spraying tugs within visual range of what we are doing to keep silent.”

There was no dissent to that. Sir Julian made two notes.

“I would approach the Freya with four two-man kayaks, halting at a range of three miles, in darkness, before the ris­ing of the moon. Her radar will not spot kayaks. They are too small, too low in the water; they are of wood and canvas construction, which does not effectively register on radar. The paddlers will be in rubber, leather, wool undervests, and so on, and all buckles will be plastic. Nothing should register on the Freya’s radar.

“The men in the rear seats will be frogmen; their oxygen bottles have to be of metal, but at three miles will not register larger than a floating oil drum, not enough to cause alarm on the Freya’s bridge. At a range of three miles the divers take a compass bearing on the Freya’s stern, which they can see be­cause it is illuminated, and drop overboard. They have lumi­nescent wrist compasses, and swim by these.”

“Why not go for the bow?” asked the RAF group captain. “It’s darker there.”

“Partly because it would mean eliminating the man on lookout high up on the fo’c’sle, and he may be in walkie-talkie contact with the bridge,” said Fallon. “Partly because it’s a hell of a long walk down that deck, and they have a spotlight operable from the bridge. Partly because the super­structure, approached from the front, is a steel wall five sto­ries high. We would climb it, but it has windows to cabins, some of which may be occupied.

“The four divers, one of whom will be me, rendezvous at the stern of the Freya. There should be a tiny overhang of a few feet. Now, there’s a man on top of the funnel, a hundred feet up. But people a hundred feet up tend to look outward rather than straight down. To help him in this, I want the Ar­gyll to start flashing her searchlight to another nearby vessel, creating a spectacle for the man to watch. We will come up the stern from the water, having shed flippers, masks, oxygen bottles, and weighted belts. We will be bareheaded, barefoot, in rubber wet suits only. All weaponry carried in wide web­bing belts round the waist.”

“How do you get up the side of the Freya carrying forty pounds of metal after a three-mile swim?” asked one of the ministry men.

Fallon smiled.

“It’s only thirty feet at most to the taffrail,” he said. “While practicing on the North Sea oil rigs, we’ve climbed a hundred sixty feet of vertical steel in four minutes.”

He saw no point in explaining the details of the fitness necessary for such a feat, nor of the equipment that made it possible.

The boffins had long ago developed for the SBS some re­markable climbing gear. Included among it were magnetic climbing clamps. These were like dinner plates, fringed with rubber so that they could be applied to metal without making a sound. The plate itself was rimmed with steel beneath the rubber, and this steel ring could be magnetized to enormous strength.

The magnetic force could be turned on or off by a thumb switch pressed by the man holding the grip on the back of the plate. The electrical charge came from a small but reli­able nickel-cadmium battery inside the climbing plate.

The divers were trained to come out of the sea, reach up­ward and affix the first plate, then turn on the current. The magnet jammed the plate to the steel structure. Hanging on this, they reached higher and hung the second plate. Only when it was secure did they unlock the first disk, reach higher still, and reaffix it. Hand over hand, hanging on by fist grip, wrist, and forearm, they climbed out of the sea and up­ward—body, legs, feet, and equipment swinging free, pulling against the hands and wrists.

So strong were the magnets, so strong also the arms and shoulders, that the commandoes could climb an overhang of forty-five degrees if they had to.

“The first man goes up with the special clamps,” said Fallon, “trailing a rope behind him. If it is quiet on the poop deck, he fixes the rope, and the other three can be on deck inside ten seconds. Now, here, in the lee of the funnel assem­bly, this turbine housing should cast a shadow in the light thrown by the lamp above the door to the superstructure at A deck level. We group in this shadow. We’ll have black wet suits; black hands, feet, and faces.

“The first major hazard is getting across this patch of il­luminated afterdeck from the shadow of the turbine housing to the main superstructure with all its living quarters.”

“So how do you do it?” asked the vice admiral, fascinated by this return from technology to the days of Nelson.

“We don’t, sir,” said Fallon. “We will be on the side of the funnel assembly away from where the Argyll is stationed. We hope the lookout atop the funnel will be looking at the Ar­gyll, away from us. We move across from the shadow of the turbine housing, round the corner of the superstructure to this point here, outside the window of the dirty-linen store. We cut the plate-glass window in silence with a miniature blowtorch working off a small gas bottle, and go in through the window. The chances of the door of such a store being locked are pretty slim. No one pinches dirty linen, so no one locks such doors. By this time we will be inside the super­structure, emerging to a passage a few yards from the main stairway leading up to B, C, and D decks, and the bridge.”

“Where do you find the terrorist leader,” asked Sir Julian Flannery, “the man with the detonator?”

“On the way up the stairs we listen at every door for sounds of voices,” said Fallon. “If there are any, we open the door and eliminate everyone in the room with silenced auto­matics. Two men entering the cabin; two men outside on guard. All the way up the structure. Anyone met on the stairs, the same thing. That should bring us to D deck unob­served. Here we have to take a calculated gamble. One choice is the captain’s cabin; one man will take that choice. Open the door, step inside, and shoot without any question. Another man will take the chief engineer’s cabin on the same floor, other side of the ship. Same procedure. The last two men will cover the first officer’s and chief steward’s cabins and take the bridge itself; one man with grenades, the second with an Ingram. It’s too big an area, that bridge, to pick tar­gets. Well just have to sweep it with the Ingram and take ev­erybody in the place after the grenades have paralyzed them.”

“What if one of them is Captain Larsen?” asked a ministry man.

Fallon studied the table.

“I’m sorry, there’s no way of identifying targets,” he said.

“Suppose none of the cabins or the bridge contains the leader? Suppose the man with the remote-control detonator is somewhere else? Out on deck taking the air? In the lavatory? Asleep in another cabin?”

Simon Fallon shrugged. “Bang,” he said, “big bang.”

“There are twenty-eight crewmen locked down below,” protested a scientist. “Can’t you get them out? Or at least up on deck where they could have a chance to swim for it?”

“No, sir. I’ve tried every way of getting down to the paint locker, if they are indeed in the paint locker. To attempt to get down through the deck housing would give the game away: the bolts could well squeak; the opening of the steel door would flood the poop deck with light. To go down through the main superstructure to the engine room and try to get them that way would split my force. Moreover, the en­gine room is vast: three levels of it, vaulted like a cathedral. One single man down there, in communication with his leader before we could silence him, and everything would be lost. I believe getting the man with the detonator is our best chance.”

“If she does blow up with you and your men topside, I suppose you can dive over the side and swim for the Argyll?” suggested another of the ministry civil servants.

Major Fallon looked at the man with anger in his sun­tanned face.

“Sir, if she blows up, any swimmer within two hundred yards of her will be sucked down into the currents of water pouring into her holes.”

“I’m sorry, Major Fallon,” interposed the Cabinet Secre­tary hurriedly. “I am sure my colleague was simply con­cerned for your own safety. Now the question is this. The percentage chance of your hitting the holder of the detonator is a highly problematical figure. Failure to stop the man from setting off his charges would provoke the very disaster we are trying to avoid—”

“With the greatest respect, Sir Julian,” cut in Colonel Hohnes, “if the terrorists threaten during the course of the day to blow up the Freya at a certain hour tonight, and Chancellor Busch will not weaken in the matter of releasing Mishkin and Lazareff, surely we will have to try Major Fallon’s way. We’ll be in a no-win situation then, anyway. We’ll have no alternative.”

The meeting murmured assent. Sir Julian conceded.

“Very well. Defense Ministry will please make to Argyll: she should turn herself broadside to the Freya and provide a lee shelter for Major Fallon’s assault boats when they arrive. Environment will instruct air-traffic controllers to spot and turn back all aircraft trying to approach the Argyll at any al­titude; various responsible departments will instruct the tugs and other vessels near the Argyll not to betray Major Fallon’s preparations to anyone. What about you personally, Major Fallon?”

The Marine commando glanced at his watch. It was five-fifteen.

“The Navy is lending me a helicopter from the Battersea Heliport to the afterdeck of the Argyll,” he said. “I’ll be there when my men and equipment arrive by sea if I leave now. ...”

“Then be on your way, and good luck to you, young man.”

The men at the meeting stood up in tribute as a somewhat embarrassed major gathered his model ship, his plans and photographs, and left with Colonel Holmes for the helicopter pad beside the Thames Embankment.

A weary Sir Julian Flannery left the smoke-charged room to ascend to the chill of the predawn of another spring day and report to his Prime Minister.

At six A.M. a simple statement from Bonn was issued to the effect that after due consideration of all the factors involved, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany had come to the conclusion that it would after all be wrong to accede to blackmail and that therefore the policy of releasing Mishkin and Lazareff at eight A.M. had been reconsidered.

Instead, the statement continued, the Federal Republic’s government would do all in its power to enter into negotia­tions with the captors of the Freya, with a view to seeking the release of the ship and its crew by alternative proposals.

The European allies of West Germany were informed of this statement just one hour before it was issued. Each and every premier privately asked the same question: “What the hell is Bonn up to?”

The exception was Joan Carpenter in London, who knew already. But unofficially, each government was informed that the reversal of position stemmed from urgent American pressure on Bonn during the night, and informed, moreover, that Bonn had agreed to delay the release only pending fur­ther and, it was hoped, more optimistic developments.

With the breaking of the news, the Bonn government spokesman had a brief and very private working breakfast with two influential German journalists, during which the newsmen were given to understand in oblique terms that the change of policy stemmed only from brutal pressure from Washington.

The first radio newscasts of the day carried the fresh state­ment out of Bonn even as the listeners were picking up their newspapers, which confidently announced the release at breakfast time of the two hijackers. The newspaper editors were not amused and bombarded the government’s press of­fice for an explanation. None was forthcoming that satisfied anyone. The Sunday papers, due for preparation that Satur­day, geared themselves for an explosive issue the following morning.

On the Freya, the news from Bonn came over the BBC World Service, to which Drake had tuned his portable radio, at six-thirty. Like many another interested party in Europe that morning, the Ukrainian listened to the news in silence, then burst out:

“What the hell do they think they’re up to?”

“Something has gone wrong,” said Thor Larsen flatly. “They’ve changed their minds. It’s not going to work.”

For answer, Drake leaned far across the table and pointed his handgun straight at the Norwegian’s face.

“Don’t you gloat!” he shouted. “It’s not just my friends in Berlin they’re playing silly games with. It’s not just me. It’s your precious ship and crew they’re playing with. And don’t you forget it.”

He went into deep thought for several minutes, then used the captain’s intercom to summon one of his men from the bridge. The man, when he came to the cabin, was still masked, and spoke to his chief in Ukrainian, but the tone sounded worried. Drake left him to guard Captain Larsen and was away for fifteen minutes. When he returned, he brusquely beckoned the Freya’s skipper to accompany him to the bridge.

The call came in to Maas Control just a minute before seven. Channel 20 was still reserved for the Freya alone, and the duty operator was expecting something, for he, too, had heard the news from Bonn. When the Freya called, he had the tape spinning.

Larsen’s voice sounded tired, but he read the statement from his captors in an unemotional tone.

“ ‘Following the stupid decision of the government in Bonn to reverse its decision to release Lev Mishkin and David Lazareff at oh-eight-hundred hours this morning, those who presently hold the Freya announce the following: in the event that Mishkin and Lazareff are not released and airborne on their way to Tel Aviv by noon today, the Freya will, on the stroke of noon, vent twenty thousand tons of crude oil into the North Sea. Any attempt to prevent this, or interfere with the process, and any attempt by ships or aircraft to enter the area of clear water around the Freya, will result in the imme­diate destruction of the ship, her crew, and her cargo.’ ”

The transmission ceased, and the channel was cut off. No questions were asked. Almost a hundred listening posts heard the message, and it was contained in news flashes on the breakfast radio shows across Europe within fifteen minutes.

President Matthews’s Oval Office was beginning to adopt the aspect of a council of war by the small hours of the morning.

All four men in it had taken their jackets off and loosened ties. Aides came and went with messages from the communi­cations room for one or another of the presidential advisers. The corresponding communication rooms at Langley and the State Department had been patched through to the White House. It was seven-fifteen European time but two-fifteen in the small hours when the news of Drake’s ultimatum was brought into the office and handed to Robert Benson. He passed it without a word to President Matthews.

“I suppose we should have expected it,” said the President wearily, “but that makes it no easier to take.”

“Do you think he’ll really do it, whoever he is?” asked Secretary of State David Lawrence.

“He’s done everything else he’s promised so far, damn him,” replied Stanislaw Poklewski.

“I assume Mishkin and Lazareff are under extra-heavy guard in Tegel,” said Lawrence.

“They’re not in Tegel anymore,” replied Benson. “They were moved just before midnight, Berlin time, to Moabit. It’s more modern and more secure.”

“How do you know, Bob?” asked Poklewski.

“I’ve had Tegel and Moabit under surveillance since the Freya’s noon broadcast,” said Benson.

Lawrence, the old-style diplomat, looked exasperated.

“Is it the new policy to spy even on our allies?” he snapped.

“Not quite,” replied Benson. “We’ve always done it.”

“Why the change of jail, Bob?” asked Matthews. “Does Dietrich Busch think the Russians would try to get at Mishkin and Lazareff?”

“No, Mr. President He thinks I will,” said Benson.

“There seems to me a possibility here that maybe we hadn’t thought of,” interposed Poklewski. “If the terrorists on the Freya go ahead and vent twenty thousand tons of crude, and, say, threaten to vent a further fifty thousand tons later in the day, the pressures on Busch could become over­whelming. ...”

“No doubt they will,” observed Lawrence.

“What I mean is, Busch might simply decide to go it alone and release the hijackers unilaterally. Remember, he doesn’t know that the price of such an action would be the destruc­tion of the Treaty of Dublin.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“There’s nothing I can do to stop him,” said President Matthews quietly.

“There is, actually,” said Benson. He had the instant atten­tion of the other three. When he described what it was, the faces of Matthews, Lawrence, and Poklewski showed disgust.

“I couldn’t give that order,” said the President.

“It’s a pretty terrible thing to do,” agreed Benson, “but it’s the only way to preempt Chancellor Busch. And we will know if he tries to make secret plans to release the pair pre­maturely. Never mind how; we will know. Let’s face it; the alternative would be the destruction of the treaty, and the consequences in terms of a resumed arms race that this must bring. If the treaty is destroyed, presumably we will not go ahead with the grain shipments to Russia. In that event, Rudin may fall. ...”

“Which makes his reaction over this business so crazy,” Lawrence pointed out.

“Maybe so, but that is his reaction, and until we know why, we can’t judge how crazy he is,” Benson resumed. “Un­til we do know, Chancellor Busch’s private knowledge of the proposal I have just made should hold him in check awhile longer.”

“You mean we could just use it as something to hold over Busch’s head?” asked Matthews hopefully. “We might never actually have to do it?”

At that moment a personal message arrived for the President from Prime Minister Carpenter in London.

“That’s some woman,” he said when he had read it. “The British think they can cope with the first oil slick of twenty thousand tons, but no more. They’re preparing a plan to storm the Freya with specialist frogmen after sundown and silence the man with the detonator. They give themselves a better than even chance.”

“So we only have to hold the German Chancellor in line for another twelve hours,” said Benson. “Mr. President, I urge you to order what I have just proposed. The chances are it will never have to be activated.”

“But if it must be, Bob? If it must be?”

“Then it must be.”

William Matthews placed the palms of his hands over his face and rubbed tired eyes with his fingertips.

“Dear God, no man should be asked to give orders like that,” he said. “But if it must ... Bob, give the order.”

The sun was just clear of the horizon, away to the east over the Dutch coast. On the afterdeck of the cruiser Argyll, now turned broadside to where the Freya lay, Major Fallon stood and looked down at the three fast assault craft tethered to her lee side. From the lookout on the Freda’s funnel top, all three would be out of vision. So, too, the activity on their decks, where Fallon’s team of Marine commandos were preparing their kayaks and unpacking their unusual pieces of equip­ment. It was a bright, clear sunrise, giving promise of another warm and sunny day. The sea was a flat calm. Fallon was joined by the Argyll’s skipper, Captain Richard Preston.

They stood side by side, looking down at the three sleek sea greyhounds that had brought the men and equipment from Poole in eight hours. The boats rocked in the swell of a warship passing several cables to the west of them. Fallon looked up.

“Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the gray warship flying the Stars and Stripes that was moving to the south.

“The American Navy has sent an observer,” said Captain Preston. “The U.S.S. Moran. She’ll take up station between us and the Montcalm.” He glanced at his watch. “Seven-thirty. Breakfast is being served in the wardroom, if you’d care to join us.”

It was seven-fifty when there was a knock at the door of the cabin of Captain Michael Manning, commanding the Moran.

She was at anchor after her race through the night, and Manning, who’d been on the bridge throughout the night, was running a razor over the stubble on his chin. When the radio­man entered. Manning took the proffered message and gave it a glance, still shaving. He stopped and turned to the sailor.

“It’s still in code,” he said.

“Yes, sir. It’s tagged for your eyes only, sir.”

Manning dismissed the man, went to his wall safe and took out his personal decoder. Such an occurrence was unusual, but not unheard of. He began to run a pencil down columns of figures, seeking the groups on the message in front of him and their corresponding letter combinations. When he had finished decoding, he just sat at his table and stared at the message, searching for any error. He rechecked the beginning of the message, hoping it was a practical joke. But there was no joke. It was for him, via STANFORLANT through the Navy Department, Washington. And it was a presidential or­der, personal to him from the Commander in Chief, U.S. Armed Forces, White House, Washington.

“He can’t ask me to do that,” he breathed. “No man can ask a sailor to do that.”

But the message did, and it was unequivocal: “In the event the West German government seeks to release the hijackers in Berlin unilaterally, the U.S.S. Moran is to sink the super­tanker Freya by shellfire, using all possible measures to ignite cargo and minimize environmental damage. This action will be taken on receipt by U.S.S. Moran of the signal THUNDERBOLT repeat THUNDERBOLT. Destroy message.”

Mike Manning was forty-three years old, married, with four children who lived with their mother outside Norfolk, Virginia. He had been an officer in the United States Navy for twenty-one years and had never yet thought to question a superior’s order.

He walked to the porthole and looked across the five miles of ocean to the low outline between himself and the climbing sun. He thought of his magnesium-based starshells slamming into her unprotected skin, penetrating the volatile crude oil beneath. He thought of twenty-eight men, crouched deep beneath the waterline, eighty feet beneath the waves, in a steel coffin, waiting for rescue, thinking of their own families. He crumpled the paper in his hand.

“Mr. President,” he whispered, “I don’t know if I can do that.”