The Devil's Alternative

The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth

THE CASTAWAY would have been dead before sundown but for the sharp eyes of an Italian seaman called Mario. By the time he was spotted he had lapsed into unconsciousness, the exposed parts of his near-naked body grilled to second-degree burns by the relentless sun, and those parts submerged in seawater soft and white between the salt sores like the limbs of a rotting goose.

Mario Curcio was the cook-steward on the Garibaldi, an amiable old rust bucket out of Brindisi, thumping her way eastward toward Cape Ince and on to Trabzon in the far eastern corner of the north shore of Turkey. She was on her way to pick up a cargo of almonds from Anatolia.

Just why Mario decided that morning in the last ten days of April 1982 to empty his bucket of potato peelings over the lee rail instead of through the garbage chute at the poop, he could never explain, nor was he ever asked to. But perhaps to take a breath of fresh Black Sea air and break the monotony of the steam heat in the cramped galley, he stepped out on deck, strolled to the starboard rail, and hurled his garbage to an indifferent but patient sea. He turned away and started to lumber back to his duties. After two steps he stopped, frowned, turned, and walked back to the rail, puzzled and uncertain.

The ship was heading east-northeast to clear Cape Ince, so that as he shielded his eyes and gazed abaft the beam, the noon sun was almost straight in his face. But he was sure he had seen something out there on the blue-green rolling swell between the ship and the coast of Turkey, twenty miles to the south. Unable to see it again, he trotted up the afterdeck, mounted the outside ladders to the wing of the bridge, and peered again. Then he saw it, quite clearly, for half a second between the softly moving hills of water. He turned to the open door behind him, leading into the wheelhouse, and shouted “Capitano!”

Captain Vittorio Ingrao took some persuading, for Mario was a simple lad, but he was enough of a sailor to know that if a man might be out there on the water, he was duty-bound to turn his ship around and have a closer look, and his radar had indeed revealed an echo. It took the captain half an hour to bring the Garibaldi around and back to the spot Mario had pointed at, and then he, too, saw it.

The skiff was barely twelve feet long, and not very wide. A light craft, of the type that could have been a ship’s jolly boat. Forward of midships there was a single thwart across the boat, with a hole in it for the stepping of a mast. But ei­ther there had never been a mast or it had been ill-secured and had gone overboard. With the Garibaldi stopped and wallowing in the swell, Captain Ingrao leaned on the bridgewing rail and watched Mario and the bosun, Paolo Longhi, set off in the motor lifeboat to bring the skiff alongside. From his elevation he could look down into the skiff as it was towed closer.

The man in it was lying on his back in several inches of seawater. He was gaunt and emaciated, bearded and uncon­scious, his head to one side, breathing in short gasps. He moaned a few times as he was lifted aboard and the sailors’ hands touched his flayed shoulders and chest.

There was one permanently spare cabin on the Garibaldi, kept free as a sort of sick bay, and the castaway was taken to it. Mario, at his own request, was given time off to tend the man, whom he soon came to regard as his personal property, as a boy will take special care of a puppy he has personally rescued from death. Longhi, the bosun, gave the man a shot of morphine from the first-aid chest to spare him the pain, and the pair of them set to work on the sunburn.

Being Calabrians they knew a bit about sunburn and prepared the best sunburn salve in the world. Mario brought from his galley a fifty-fifty mixture of fresh lemon juice and wine vinegar in a basin, a light cotton cloth torn from his pil­lowcase, and a bowl of ice cubes. Soaking the cloth in the mixture and wrapping it around a dozen ice cubes, he gently pressed the pad to the worst areas, where the ultraviolet rays had bitten through almost to the bone. Plumes of steam rose from the unconscious man as the freezing astringent drew the heat out of the scorched flesh. The man shuddered.

“Better a fever than death by burn shock.” Mario told him in Italian. The man could not hear, and if he had, he could not have understood.

Longhi joined his skipper on the afterdeck, where the skiff had been hauled.

“Anything?” he asked.

Captain Ingrao shook his head.

“Nothing on the man, either. No watch, no name tag. A pair of cheap underpants with no label. And his beard looks about ten days old.”

“There’s nothing here, either,” said Ingrao. “No mast, no sail, no oars. No food and no water container. No name on the boat, even. But it could have peeled off.”

“A tourist from a beach resort, blown out to sea?” asked Longhi.

Ingrao shrugged. “Or a survivor from a small freighter,” he said. “We’ll be at Trabzonin two days. The Turkish authori­ties can solve that one when he wakes up and talks. Mean­while, let’s get under way. Oh, and we must cable our agent there and tell him what’s happened. We’ll need an ambulance on the quay when we dock.”

Two days later the castaway, still barely conscious and un­able to speak, was tucked up between white sheets in a sick ward in the small municipal hospital of Trabzon.

Mario the sailor had accompanied his castaway in the am­bulance from the quay to the hospital, along with the ship’s agent and the port’s medical officer, who had insisted on checking the delirious man for communicable diseases. After waiting an hour by the bedside, he had bade his unconscious friend farewell and returned to the Garibaldi to prepare the crew’s lunch. That had been the previous day, and the old Italian tramp steamer had sailed during the evening.

Now another man stood by the bedside, accompanied by a police officer and the white-coated doctor. All three were Turkish, but the short, broad man in the civilian suit spoke passable English.

“He’ll pull through,” said the doctor, “but he’s very sick for the moment. Heatstroke, second-degree sunburn, exposure generally, and by the look of it, he hasn’t eaten for days. Generally weak.”

“What are these?” asked the civilian, gesturing at the in­travenous tubes that entered both the man’s arms.

“Saline drip and concentrated glucose drip for nourishment and to offset shock,” said the doctor. “The sailors probably saved his life by taking the heat out of the burns, but we’ve bathed him in calamine to help the healing process. Now it’s between him and Allah.”

Umit Erdal, partner in the shipping and trading company of Erdal and Semait, was the Lloyd’s subagent for the port of Trabzon, and the Garibaldi’s agent had thankfully passed the matter of the castaway over to him. The sick man’s eyelids fluttered in the nut-brown, bearded face. Erdal cleared his throat, bent over the figure, and spoke in his best English.

“What ... is ... you ... name?” he asked slowly and clearly.

The man groaned and moved his head from side to side several times. The Lloyd’s man bent his head closer to listen. “Zradzhenyi,” the sick man murmured, “zradzhenyi.”

Erdal straightened up. “He’s not Turkish,” he said with fi­nality, “but he seems to be called Zradzhenyi. It’s probably a Ukrainian name.”

Both his companions shrugged.

“I’ll inform Lloyd’s in London,” said Erdal. “Maybe they’ll have news of a missing vessel somewhere in the Black Sea.”

The daily bible of the world’s merchant marine fraternity is Lloyd’s List, which is published Monday to Saturday and contains editorials, features, and news on one topic only—shipping. Its partner in harness, Lloyd’s Shipping Index, gives the movements of the world’s thirty thousand active merchant vessels: name of ship, owner, flag of registry, year of con­struction, tonnage, where last reported coming from, and where bound.

Both organs are published out of a building complex at Sheepen Place, Colchester, in the English county of Essex. It was to this building that Umit Erdal telexed the shipping movements into and out of the port of Trabzon, and added a small extra for the attention of the Lloyd’s Shipping Intelli­gence Unit in the same building.

The SI unit checked their maritime casualty records to confirm that there were no recent reports of missing, sunk, or simply overdue vessels in the Black Sea, and passed the par­agraph over to the editorial desk of the List. Here a subeditor gave it a mention as a news brief on the front page, including the name the castaway had given as his own. It appeared the following morning.

Most of those who read Lloyd’s List that day in late April flipped past the paragraph about the unidentified man in Trabzon.

But the piece caught and held the sharp eyes and the atten­tion of a man in his early thirties who worked as senior clerk and trusted employee in a firm of chartered shipbrokers situ­ated in a small street called Crutched Friars in the center of the City of London, financial and commercial square mile of the British capital. His colleagues in the firm knew him as Andrew Drake.

Having absorbed the content of the paragraph, Drake left his desk and went to the company boardroom, where he con­sulted a framed chart of the world that showed prevailing wind and ocean-current circulation. The winds in the Black Sea during spring and summer are predominantly from the north, and the currents screw counterclockwise around this small ocean from the southern coast of the Ukraine in the far northwest of the sea, down past the coasts of Rumania and Bulgaria, then swing eastward again into the shipping lanes between Istanbul and Cape Ince.

Drake did some calculations on a scratch pad. A small skiff, setting off from the marshes of the delta of the Dniester River just south of Odessa could make four to five knots with a following wind and favorable current, southward past Rumania and Bulgaria toward Turkey. But after three days it would tend to be carried eastward, away from the Bosporus toward the eastern end of the Black Sea.

The Weather and Navigation section of Lloyd’s List con­firmed there had been bad weather nine days earlier in that area. The sort, Drake mused, that could cause a skiff in the hands of an unskilled seaman to capsize, lose its mast and all its contents, and leave its occupant, even if he could climb back into it again, at the mercy of the sun and the wind.

Two hours later Andrew Drake asked for a week of his owed holidays, and it was agreed that he could take it, but only starting the following Monday, May 3.

He was mildly excited as he waited out the week and bought himself from a nearby agency a round-trip ticket from London to Istanbul. He decided to buy the connecting ticket from Istanbul to Trabzon with cash in Istanbul. He also checked to confirm that a British passport holder needs no visa for Turkey, but after work he secured for himself the needed smallpox vaccination certificate at the British Airways medical center at Victoria.

He was excited because he thought there just might be a chance that, after years of waiting, he had found the man he was looking for. Unlike the three men by the castaway’s bedside two days earlier, he knew what country the word zradzhenyi came from. He also knew it was not the man’s name. The man in the bed had been muttering the word be­trayed in his native tongue, and that language was Ukrainian. Which could mean that the man was a refugee Ukrainian partisan.

Andrew Drake, despite his Anglicized name, was also a Ukrainian, and a fanatic.

Drake’s first call after arriving in Trabzon was at the office of Umit Erdal, whose name he had obtained from a friend at Lloyd’s on the grounds that he was taking a holiday on the Turkish coast and, speaking not a word of Turkish, might need some assistance. Erdal, seeing the letter of introduction that Drake was able to produce, was happily unquestioning as to why his visitor should want to see the castaway in the local hospital. He wrote a personal letter of introduction to the hospital administrator, and, shortly after lunch, Drake was shown into the small, one-bed ward where the man lay.

The local Lloyd’s agent had already told him that the man, while conscious again, spent much of the time sleeping, and during his periods of wakefulness had so far said absolutely nothing. When Drake entered the room, the invalid was lying on his back, eyes closed. Drake drew up a chair and sat by the bedside. For a time he stared at the man’s haggard face. After several minutes the man’s eyelids flickered, half-opened, and closed again. Whether he had seen the visitor staring at him intently, Drake did not know. But he knew the man was on the fringe of wakefulness. Slowly he leaned forward and said clearly in the sick man’s ear:

“Shche ne vmerla Ukraina.”

The words mean, literally, “The Ukraine is not dead,” but in a looser translation would mean “The Ukraine lives on.” They are the first words of the Ukrainian national anthem, banned by the Russian masters, and would be instantly recog­nizable to a nationally conscious Ukrainian.

The sick man’s eyes flicked open, and he regarded Drake intently. After several seconds he asked in Ukrainian, “Who are you?”

“A Ukrainian, like yourself,” said Drake.

The other man’s eyes clouded with suspicion.

“Quisling,” he said.

Drake shook his head. “No,” he said calmly. “I am British by nationality, born and bred there, son of a Ukrainian fa­ther and an English mother. But in my heart I’m as Ukrainian as you are.”

The man in the bed stared stubbornly at the ceiling.

“I could show you my passport, issued in London, but that would prove nothing. A Chekisti could produce one if he wanted to try to trick you.” Drake had used the slang term for a Soviet secret policeman and KGB member.

“But you are not in the Ukraine anymore and there are no Chekisti here,” Drake went on. “You were not washed up on the shores of the Crimea, nor of south Russia or Georgia. You did not land in Rumania or Bulgaria, either. You were picked up by an Italian ship and landed here at Trabzon. You are in Turkey. You are in the West. You made it.”

The man’s eyes were on his face now, alert, lucid, wanting to believe.

“Can you move?” asked Drake.

“I don’t know,” said the man.

Drake nodded across the small room to the window, be­yond which the sounds of traffic could be heard.

“The KGB can dress up hospital staff to look like Turks,” he said, “but they cannot change a whole city for one man whom they could torture for a confession if they wanted. Can you make the window?”

Helped by Drake, the castaway hobbled painfully to the window and looked out at the street scene.

“The cars are Austins and Morrises, imported from En­gland,” said Drake. “Peugeots from France and Volkswagens from West Germany. The words on the billboards are in Turkish. That advertisement over there is for Coca-Cola.”

The man put the back of one hand against his mouth and chewed at the knuckles. He blinked rapidly several times.

“I made it,” he said.

“Yes,” said Drake, “by a miracle you made it.”

“My name,” said the castaway when he was back in bed, “is Miroslav Kaminsky. I come from Ternopol. I was the leader of a group of seven Ukrainian partisans.”

Over the next hour the story came out. Kaminsky and six others like him, all from the Ternopol area, once a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism, and a region where some of the em­bers still glowed, had decided to strike back against the program of ruthless russification of their land that had intensified in the sixties and become a “final solution” in the seventies and early eighties for the whole area of Ukrainian art, po­etry, literature, language, and national consciousness. In six months of operations they had ambushed and killed two low-level Party secretaries—Russians imposed by Moscow on Ternopol—and a plainclothes KGB agent. Then had come the betrayal.

Whoever had talked, he, too, had died in the hail of fire as the green insignia of the KGB special troops had closed in on the country cottage where the group was meeting to plan its next operation. Only Kaminsky had escaped, running like an animal through the undergrowth, hiding by day in barns and woodland, moving by night, heading southeast toward the coast with a vague idea of jumping a Western ship.

It had been impossible to get near the docks of Odessa. Living off potatoes and swedes from the fields, he had sought refuge in the swampy country of the Dniester estuary south­west of Odessa, toward the Rumanian border. Finally, com­ing by night on a small fishing hamlet on a creek, he had stolen a skiff with a stepped mast and a small sail. He had never been in a sailing boat before and knew nothing of the sea. Trying to manage the sail and the rudder, just holding on and praying, he had let the skiff run before the wind, south­ward by the stars and the sun.

By pure luck he had avoided the patrol boats that cruise the offshore waters of the Soviet Union, and the fishing fleets. The tiny sliver of wood that contained him had slipped past the coastal radar sweeps until he was out of range. Then he was lost, somewhere between Rumania and the Crimea, head­ing south, but far from the nearest shipping lanes—if he did but know where they were, anyway. The storm caught him unawares. Not knowing how to shorten sail in time, he had capsized, spending the night using his last reserves of strength clinging to the upturned hull. By morning he had righted the skiff and crawled inside. His clothes, which he had taken off to let the night wind cool his skin, were gone. So also were his few raw potatoes, the open lemonade bottle of fresh water, the sail, and the rudder. The pain came shortly after sunrise as the heat of the day increased. Oblivion came on the third day after the storm. When he regained conscious­ness he was in a bed, taking the pain of the burns in silence, listening to the voices he thought were Bulgarian. For six days he had kept his eyes closed and his mouth shut.

Andrew Drake heard him out with a song in his heart. He had found the man he had waited years for.

“I’ll go and see the Swiss consul in Istanbul and try to ob­tain temporary travel documents for you from the Red Cross,” he said when Kaminsky showed signs of tiring. “If I do, I can probably get you to England, at least on a tem­porary visa. Then we can try for asylum. I’ll return in a few days.”

By the door, he paused.

“You can’t go back, you know,” he told Kaminsky. “But with your help, I can. It’s what I want It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Andrew Drake took longer than he had thought in Istanbul, and it was not until May 16 that he was able to fly back to Trabzon with travel papers for Kaminsky. He had extended his leave after a long telephone call to London and a row with the broking firm’s junior partner, but it was worth it. For through Kaminsky he was certain he could fulfill the single burning ambition of his life.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (and the Tsarist Empire before it), despite its monolithic appearance from outside, has two Achilles heels. One is the problem of feeding its 250 million people. The other is euphemistically called “the nationalities question.” In the fifteen constituent repub­lics ruled from Moscow, capital of the USSR and of the Rus­sian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), are several score identifiable non-Russian peoples, the most nu­merous and perhaps the most nationally conscious of whom are the Ukrainians. By 1982 the population of the RSFSR numbered only 120 million out of the 250. Second in economic importance and population, with 70 million inhabi­tants, was the Ukrainian SSR, which was one reason why un­der tsars and Politburo the Ukraine had always been singled out for special attention and particularly ruthless russification. The second reason lay in its history.

The Ukraine is divided by the Dnieper River into two parts. West (right-bank) Ukraine stretches from Kiev west­ward to the Polish border. East (left-bank) Ukraine is more russified, having dwelt under the tsars for centuries; during those centuries West Ukraine formed a part, successively, of Poland, Austria, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its spirit­ual and cultural orientation was and remains more Western than the rest of the region, except possibly for the three Bal­tic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Ukrainians read and write with Roman letters, not Cyrillic script; they are overwhelmingly Uniate Catholics, not Russian Orthodox Christians. Their language, poetry, literature, arts, and tradi­tions predate the rise of the Rus conquerors who swept down from the north.

In 1918, with the breakup of Austria-Hungary, West Ukrainians tried desperately for a separate republic out of the empire’s ruins; unlike the Czechs, Slovaks, and Magyars, they failed and were annexed in 1919 by Poland as the province of East Galicia. When Hitler swept into western Poland in 1939, Stalin came in from the east with the Red Army and took Galicia. In 1941, the Germans took it. What followed was a violent and vicious confusion of hopes, fears, and loy­alties. Some hoped for concessions from Moscow if they fought the Germans. Others mistakenly thought a free Ukraine would come through the defeat of Moscow by Ber­lin, and joined the Ukrainian Division, which fought in Ger­man uniform against the red Army. Others, like Kaminsky’s father, took to the Carpathian Mountains as guerrillas and fought first one invader, then the next, then the first again. They all lost. Stalin won, and pushed his empire westward to the Bug River, the new border for Poland. West Ukraine came under the new tsars, the Politburo, but the old dreams lived on. Apart from one glimmer in the last days of Khrushchev, the program to crush them once and for all had steadily intensified.

Stepan Drach, a student from Rovno, joined up with the Ukrainian Division. He was one of the lucky ones; he sur­vived the war and was captured by the British in Austria in 1945. Sent to work as a farm laborer in Norfolk, he would certainly have been returned to the USSR for execution by the NKVD in 1946 as the British Foreign Office and Ameri­can State Department quietly conspired to return the two mil­lion “victims of Yalta” to the mercies of Stalin. But he was lucky again. Behind a Norfolk haystack he tumbled a Land Army girl, and she became pregnant. Marriage was the an­swer, and six months later, on compassionate grounds, he was excused repatriation and allowed to stay in England. Freed from farm labor, he used the knowledge he had gained as a radio operator to set up a small repair shop in Bradford, a center for Britain’s thirty thousand Ukrainians. The first baby died in infancy; a second son, christened Andriy, was born in 1950.

Andriy learned Ukrainian at his father’s knee, and that was not all. He learned, too, of his father’s land, of the great, sweeping vistas of the Carpathians and Ruthenia. He imbibed his father’s loathing of Russians. But the father died in an au­tomobile crash when the boy was twelve; his mother, tired of her husband’s endless evenings with fellow exiles around the sitting-room fire, talking of the past in a language she could never understand, Anglicized both their names to Drake, and Andriy’s given name to Andrew. It was as Andrew Drake that the boy went to grammar school and the university; as Andrew Drake that he received his first passport.

The rebirth came in his late teens at the university. There were other Ukrainians there, and he became fluent again in his father’s language. These were the late sixties, and the brief renaissance of Ukrainian literature and poetry back in the Ukraine had come and gone, its leading lights mostly by then doing slave labor in the camps of Gulag. So he absorbed these events with hindsight and knowledge of what had befal­len the writers. He read everything he could get his hands on as the first years of the seventh decade dawned: the classics of Taras Shevchenko and those who wrote in the brief flower­ing under Lenin, suppressed and liquidated under Stalin. But most of all he read the works of those called “the Sixtiers” because they flourished for a brief few years until Brezhnev struck yet again to stamp out the national pride they called for. He read and grieved for Osdachy, Chornovil, and Dzyuba; and when he read the poems and secret diary of Pavel Symonenko, the young firebrand dead of cancer at twenty-eight, the cult figure of the Ukrainian students inside the USSR, his heart broke for a land he had never even seen.

With his love for this land of his dead father came a matching loathing of those he saw as its persecutors. Avidly he devoured the underground pamphlets that came out, smuggled from the resistance movement inside; he read the Ukrainian Herald, with its accounts of what befell the hundreds of unknowns, the miserable, forgotten ones who did not receive the publicity accorded to the great Moscow trials of Daniel, Sinyavsky, Orlov, Shcharansky. With each detail, his hatred grew until for Andrew Drake, once Andriy Drach, the personification of all evil in the world was called simply the KGB.

He had enough sense of reality to eschew the crude, raw nationalism of the older exiles, and their divisions between West and East Ukrainians. He rejected, too, their implanted anti-Semitism, preferring to accept the works of Gluzman, both a Zionist and a Ukrainian nationalist, as the words of a fellow Ukrainian. He analyzed the exile community in Britain and Europe and perceived there were four levels: the lan­guage nationalists, for whom simply speaking and writing in the tongue of their fathers was enough; the debating national­ists, who would talk forever and a day but do nothing; the slogan daubers, who irritated their adoptive countrymen but left the Soviet Behemoth untouched; and the activists, who demonstrated before visiting Moscow dignitaries, were care­fully photographed and filed by the Special Branch, and achieved a passing publicity.

Drake rejected them all. He remained quiet, well-behaved, and aloof. He came south to London and took a clerking job. There are many in such work who have one secret passion, unknown to all their colleagues, that absorbs all their savings, their spare time, and their annual holidays. Drake was such a man. He quietly put together a small group of men who felt just as he did; traced them, met them, befriended them, swore a common oath with them, and bade them be patient For Andriy Drach had a secret dream, and, as T. E. Lawrence said, he was dangerous because “he dreamed with his eyes open.” His dream was that one day he would strike one single gigantic blow against the men of Moscow that would shake them as they had never been shaken before. He would penetrate the walls of their power and hurt them right inside the fortress.

His dream was alive and one step nearer fulfillment for the finding of Kaminsky, and he was a determined and excited man as his plane slipped once more out of a warm blue sky toward Trabzon.

Miroslav Kaminsky looked across at Drake with indecision on his face.

“I don’t know, Andriy,” he said. “I just don’t know. Despite everything you have done, I just don’t know if I can trust you that much. I’m sorry, it’s the way I’ve had to live all my life.”

“Miroslav, you could know me for the next twenty years and not know more about me than you do already. Every­thing I’ve told you about me is the truth. If you cannot go back, then let me go in your place. But I must have contacts there. If you know of anybody, anybody at all ...”

Kaminsky finally agreed.

“There are two men,” he said at last. “They were not blown when my group was destroyed, and no one knew of them. I had met them only a few months earlier.”

“But they are Ukrainians, and partisans?” asked Drake ea­gerly.

“Yes, they are Ukrainians. But that is not their primary motivation. Their people, too, have suffered. Their fathers, like mine, have been for ten years in the labor camps, but for a different reason. They are Jews.”

“But do they hate Moscow?” asked Drake. “Do they, too, want to strike against the Kremlin?”

“Yes, they hate Moscow,” replied Kaminsky. “As much as you or I. Their inspiration seems to be a thing called the Jewish Defense League. They heard about it on the radio. It seems their philosophy, like ours, is to begin to strike back, not to take any more persecution lying down.”

“Then let me make contact with them,” urged Drake.

The following morning, Drake flew back to London with the names and addresses in Lvov of the two young Jewish partisans. Within two weeks he had subscribed to a package tour run by Intourist for early July, visiting Kiev, Ternopol, and Lvov. He also quit his job and withdrew his life savings in cash.

Unnoticed by anyone, Andrew Drake, born Andriy Drach, was going to his private war—against the Kremlin.