The Devil's Alternative

WHEN THE HELICOPTER rose from the White House lawn, the Secret Service agents were left behind. An amazed pilot found himself bearing the mysterious Englishman in the rumpled clothes, and the Director of the CIA. To their right, as they rose above Washington, the Potomac River glittered in the late-afternoon sun. The pilot headed due southeast for Andrews Air Force Base.

Inside the Oval Office, Stanislaw Poklewski, invoking the personal authority of President Matthews in every sentence, was speaking to the base commander there. That officer’s pro­testations died slowly away. Finally, the national security ad­viser handed the phone to William Matthews.

“Yes, General, this is William Matthews and those are my orders. You will inform Colonel O’Sullivan that he is to prepare a flight plan immediately for a polar route direct from Washington to Moscow. Clearance to enter Soviet air­space unharmed will be radioed to him before he quits Greenland.”

The President went back to his other telephone, the red machine on which he was trying to speak directly to Maxim Rudin in Moscow.

At Andrews, the commander himself met the helicopter as it touched down. Without the presence of Robert Benson, whom the Air Force general knew by sight, it was unlikely he would have accepted the unknown Englishman as a passenger on the world’s fastest reconnaissance jet, let alone his orders to allow that jet to take off for Moscow. Ten years after it entered service, it was still on the secret list, so sophisticated were its components and systems.

“Very well, Mr. Director,” he said finally, “but I have to tell you that in Colonel O’Sullivan we have one very angry Arizonan.”

He was right. While Adam Munro was taken to the pilot clothing store to be issued with a g-suit, boots, and goldfish-bowl oxygen helmet, Robert Benson found Colonel George T. O’Sullivan in the navigation room, cigar clamped in his teeth, poring over maps of the Arctic and eastern Baltic. The Direc­tor of Central Intelligence might outrank him, but he was in no mood to be polite.

“Are you seriously ordering me to fly this bird clean across Greenland and Scandinavia, and into the heart of Rooshia?” he demanded truculently.

“No, Colonel,” said Benson reasonably. “The President of the United States is ordering you to do it.”

“Without my navigator-systems operator? With some god­dam Limey sitting in his seat?”

“The ‘goddam Limey’ happens to bear a personal message from President Matthews to President Rudin of the USSR which has to reach him tonight and cannot be discussed in any other way,” said Benson.

The Air Force colonel stared at him for a moment.

“Well,” he conceded, “it better be goddam important.”

At twenty minutes before six, Adam Munro was led into the hangar where the aircraft stood, swarming with ground technicians preparing her to fly.

He had heard of the Lockheed SR-71, nicknamed the Blackbird due to its color; he had seen pictures of it, but never the real thing. It was certainly impressive. On a single, thin nosewheel assembly, the bulletlike nose cone thrust upward at a shallow angle. Far down the fuselage, wafer-thin wings sprouted, delta-shaped, being both wings and tail con­trols all in one.

Almost at each wing tip, the engines were situated, sleek pods housing the Pratt and Whitney JT-11-D turbofans, each capable with afterburner of throwing out thirty-two thousand pounds of thrust Two knifelike rudders rose, one from atop each engine, to give directional control. Body and engines resembled three hypodermic syringes, linked only by the wing.

Small white U.S. stars in their white circles indicated its nationality; otherwise the SR-71 was black from nose to tail.

Ground assistants helped him into the narrow confines of the rear seat; he found himself sinking lower and lower until the side walls of the cockpit rose above his ears. When the canopy came down, it would be almost flush with the fuse­lage to cut down drag effect. Looking out, he would see only directly upward to the stars.

The man who should have occupied that seat would have understood the bewildering array of radar screens, electronic countermeasure systems, and camera controls, for the SR-71 was essentially a spy plane, designed and equipped to cruise at altitudes far beyond the reach of most interceptor fighters and rockets, photographing what it saw below.

Helpful hands linked the tubes sprouting from his suit to the aircraft’s systems: radio, oxygen, anti-g-force. He watched Colonel O’Sullivan lower himself into the seat in front of him and begin attaching his own life-support systems with accustomed ease. When the radio was connected, the Arizonan’s voice boomed in his ears.

“You Scotch, Mr. Munro?”

“Scottish, yes,” said Munro into his helmet.

“I’m Irish,” said the voice in his ears. “You a Catholic?”

“A what?”

“A Catholic, for chrissake.”

Munro thought for a moment. He was not really religious at all.

“No,” he said, “Church of Scotland.”

There was evident disgust up front.

“Jesus, twenty years in the United States Air Force and I get to chauffeur a Scotch Protestant.”

The triple-perspex canopy capable of withstanding the tremendous air-pressure differences of ultra-high-altitude flight was closed upon them. A hiss indicated the cabin was now fully pressurized. Drawn by a tractor somewhere ahead of the nosewheel, the SR-71 emerged from the hangar into the evening light.

Heard from inside the aircraft, the engines, once started, seemed to make only a low, whistling sound. Outside, the ground crew shuddered even in their earmuffs as the boom echoed through the hangars.

Colonel O’Sullivan secured immediate clearance for takeoff even while he was running through his seemingly innumer­able pre-takeoff checks. At the start of the main runway, the Blackbird paused, rocked on its wheels as the colonel lined her up; then Munro heard his voice:

“Whatever God you pray to, start now, and hold tight.”

Something like a runaway train hit Munro squarely across the broad of the back; it was the molded seat in which he was strapped. He could see no buildings to judge his speed, just the pale blue sky above. When the jet reached 150 knots, the nose left the tarmac; half a second later the main wheels parted company, and O’Sullivan lifted the undercarriage into its bay.

Clean of encumbrances, the SR-71 tilted back until its jet efflux pipes were pointing directly down at Maryland, and it climbed. It climbed almost vertically, powering its way to the sky like a rocket, which was almost what it was. Munro was on his back, feet toward the sky, conscious only of the steady pressure of the seat on his spine as the Blackbird streaked toward a sky that was soon turning to dark blue, to violet, and finally to black.

In the front seat, Colonel O’Sullivan was navigating, which is to say, following the instructions flashed before him in digi­tal display by the aircraft’s on-board computer. It was feeding him altitude, speed, rate of climb, course and heading, exter­nal and internal temperatures, engine and jet-pipe tempera­tures, oxygen flow rates, and approach to the speed of sound.

Somewhere below them, Philadelphia and New York went by like toy towns; over northern New York State they went through the sound barrier, still climbing and still accelerating. At eighty thousand feet, five miles higher than the Concorde flew, Colonel O’Sullivan cut out the afterburners and leveled his flight attitude.

Though it was still not quite sundown, the sky was a deep black, for at these altitudes there are so few air molecules from which the sun’s rays can reflect that there is no light. But there are still enough such molecules to cause skin friction on a plane like the Blackbird. Before the state of Maine and the Canadian frontier had passed beneath them, they had adopted a fast-cruise speed of almost three times the speed of sound. Before Munro’s amazed eyes, the black skin of the SR-71, made of pure titanium, began to glow cherry-red in the heat.

Within the cockpit, the aircraft’s own refrigeration system kept its occupants comfortably cool in their g-suits.

“Can I talk?” asked Munro.

“Sure,” said the pilot laconically.

“Where are we now?”

“Over the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” said O’Sullivan, “heading for Newfoundland.”

“How many miles to Moscow?”

“From Andrews, four thousand eight hundred fifty-six miles.”

“How long for the flight?”

“Three hours and fifty minutes.”

Munro calculated. They had taken off at six P.M. Washing­ton time, eleven P.M. European time. That would be one A.M. in Moscow on Sunday, April 3. They would touch down at around five A.M. Moscow time. If Rudin agreed to his plan, and the Blackbird could bring him back to Berlin, they would gain two hours by flying the other way. There was just time to make Berlin by dawn.

They had been flying for just under one hour when Canada’s last landfall at Cape Harrison drifted far beneath them and they were over the cruel North Atlantic, bound for the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.

“Mr. President Rudin, please hear me out,” said William Matthews. He was speaking earnestly into a small micro­phone on his desk, the so-called hot line, which in fact is not a telephone at all. From an amplifier to one side of the mi­crophone, the listeners in the Oval Office could hear the mut­ter of the simultaneous translator speaking in Russian into Rudin’s ear in Moscow.

“Maxim Andreevich, I believe we are both too old in this business, that we have worked too hard and too long to se­cure peace for our peoples, to be frustrated and cheated at this late stage by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea.”

There was silence for a few seconds; then the gruff voice of Rudin came on the line, speaking in Russian. By the President’s side a young aide from the State Department rattled off the translation in a low voice.

“Then, William, my friend, you must destroy the tanker, take away the weapon of blackmail, for I can do no other than I have done.”

Bob Benson shot the President a warning look. There was no need to tell Rudin the West already knew the real truth about Ivanenko.

“I know this,” said Matthews into the mike. “But I cannot destroy the tanker, either. To do so would destroy me. There may be another way. I ask you with all my heart to receive this man who is even now airborne from here and heading for Moscow. He has a proposal that may be the way out for us both.”

“Who is this American?” asked Rudin.

“He is not American, he is British,” said President Mat­thews. “His name is Adam Munro.”

There was silence for several moments. Finally the voice from Russia came back grudgingly.

“Give my staff the details of his flight plan—height, speed, course. I will order that his airplane be allowed through, and will receive him personally when he arrives. Spakoinyo notch, William.”

“He wishes you a peaceful night, Mr. President,” said the translator.

“He must be joking,” said William Matthews. “Give his people the Blackbird’s flight path, and tell Blackbird to proceed on course.”

On board the Freya, it struck midnight. Captives and captors entered their third and last day. Before another midnight struck, Mishkin and Lazareff would be in Israel, or the Freya and all aboard her would be dead.

Despite his threat to choose a different cabin, Drake was confident there would be no night attack from the Marines, and elected to stay where he was.

Thor Larsen faced him grimly across the table in the day cabin. For both men the exhaustion was almost total. Larsen, fighting back the waves of weariness that tried to force him to place his head in his arms and go to sleep, continued his solo game of seeking to keep Svoboda awake, too, pinpricking the Ukrainian to make him reply.

The surest way of provoking Svoboda, he had discovered, the surest way of making him use up his last remaining reserve of nervous energy, was to draw the conversation to the question of Russians.

“I don’t believe in your popular uprising, Mr. Svoboda,” he said. “I don’t believe the Russians will ever rise against their masters in the Kremlin. Bad, inefficient, brutal they may be; but they have only to raise the specter of the foreigner, and they can rely on that limitless Russian patriotism.”

For a moment it seemed the Norwegian might have gone too far. Svoboda’s hand closed over the butt of his gun; his face went white with rage.

“Damn and blast their patriotism!” he shouted, rising to his feet “I am sick and tired of hearing Western writers and liberals go on and on about this so-called marvelous Russian patriotism.

“What kind of patriotism is it that can feed only on the destruction of other people’s love of homeland? What about my patriotism, Larsen? What about the Ukrainians’ love for their enslaved homeland? What about Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians? Are they not allowed any patriotism? Must it all be sublimated to this endless and sick­ening love of Russia?

“I hate their bloody patriotism. It is mere chauvinism, and always has been, since Peter and Ivan. It can exist only through the conquest and slavery of other, surrounding na­tions.”

He was standing over Larsen, halfway around the table, waving his gun, panting from the exertion of shouting. He took a grip on himself and returned to his seat. Pointing the gun barrel at Thor Larsen like a forefinger, he told him:

“One day, maybe not too long from now, the Russian em­pire will begin to crack. One day soon, the Rumanians will exercise their patriotism, and the Poles and Czechs. Followed by the East Germans and Hungarians. And the Balts and Ukrainians, the Georgians and Armenians. The Russian em­pire will crack and crumble, the way the Roman and British empires cracked, because at last the arrogance of their man­darins became insufferable.

“Within twenty-four hours I am personally going to put the cold chisel into the mortar and swing one gigantic hammer onto it. And if you or anyone else gets in my way, you’ll die. And you had better believe it.”

He put the gun down and spoke more softly.

“In any case, Busch has acceded to my demands, and this time he will not go back on his promise. This time, Mishkin and Lazareff will reach Israel.”

Thor Larsen observed the younger man clinically. It had been risky; he had nearly used his gun. But he had also nearly lost his concentration; he had nearly come within range. One more time, one single further attempt, in the sad hour just before dawn ...

Coded and urgent messages had passed all night between Washington and Omaha, and from there to the many radar stations mat make up the eyes and ears of the Western al­liance in an electronic ring around the Soviet Union. Distant eyes had seen the shooting star of the blip from the Blackbird moving east of Iceland toward Scandinavia on its route to Moscow. Forewarned, the watchers raised no alarm.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, messages out of Mos­cow alerted the Soviet watchers to the presence of the in­coming plane. Forewarned, no fighters scrambled to intercept it. An air highway was cleared from the Gulf of Bothnia to Moscow, and the Blackbird stuck to its route.

But one fighter base had apparently not heard the warning; or hearing it, had not heeded it; or had been given a secret command from somewhere deep inside the Defense Ministry, countermanding the Kremlin’s orders.

High in the Arctic, east of Kirkenes, two Mig-25s clawed their way from the snow toward the stratosphere on an inter­ception course. These were the 25-E versions, ultramodern, better powered and armed than the older version of the sev­enties and the 25-A.

They were capable of 2.8 times the speed of sound, and of a maximum altitude of eighty thousand feet. But the six Acrid air-to-air missiles that each had slung beneath its wings would roar on, another twenty thousand feet above that They were climbing on full power with afterburner, leaping upward at over ten thousand feet per minute.

The Blackbird was over Finland, heading for Lake Ladoga and Leningrad, when Colonel O’Sullivan grunted into the mi­crophone.

“We have company.”

Munro came out of his reverie. Though he understood little of the technology of the SR-71, the small radar screen in front of him told its own story. There were two small blips on it, approaching fast.

“Who are they?” he asked, and for a moment a twinge of fear moved in the pit of his stomach. Maxim Rudin had given his personal clearance. He wouldn’t revoke it, surely. But would someone else?

Up front, Colonel O’Sullivan had his own duplicate radar scanner. He watched the speed of approach for several sec­onds.

“Mig-twenty-fives,” he said. “At sixty thousand feet and climbing fast. Those goddam Rooshians. Knew we should never have trusted them.”

“You turning back to Sweden?” asked Munro.

“Nope,” said the colonel. “President of the U.S. of A. said to git you to Moscow, Limey, and you are going to Moscow.”

Colonel O’Sullivan threw his two afterburners into the game; Munro felt a kick as from a mule in the base of the spine as the power increased. The Mach counter began to move upward, toward and finally through the mark represent­ing three times the speed of sound. On the radar screen the approach of the blips slowed and halted.

The nose of the Blackbird rose slightly; in the rarefied at­mosphere, seeking a tenuous lift from the weak air around her, the aircraft slid through the eighty-thousand-foot mark and kept climbing.

Below them, Major Pyotr Kuznetsov, leading the two-plane detail, pushed his two Tumansky single-shaft jet engines to the limit of performance. His Soviet technology was good, the best available, but he was producing five thousand fewer pounds of thrust with his two engines than the twin American jets above him. Moreover, he was carrying external weapon­ry, whose drag was acting as a brake on his speed.

Nevertheless, the two Migs swept through seventy thousand feet and approached rocket range. Major Kuznetsov armed his six missiles and snapped an order to his wingman to fol­low suit.

The Blackbird was nudging ninety thousand feet, and Colonel O’Sullivan’s radar told him his pursuers were over seventy-five thousand feet and nearly within rocket range. In straight pursuit they could not hold him on speed and alti­tude, but they were on an intercept course, cutting the corner from their flight path to his.

“If I thought they were escorts,” he said to Munro, “I’d let the bastards come close. But I just never did trust Rooshians.”

Munro was sticky with sweat beneath his thermal clothing. He had read the Nightingale file; the colonel had not.

“They’re not escorts,” he said. “They have orders to see me dead.”

“You don’t say,” came the drawl in his ear. “Goddam con­spiring bastards. President of the U.S. of A. wants you alive, Limey. In Moscow.”

The Blackbird pilot threw on the whole battery of his elec­tronic countermeasures. Rings of invisible jamming waves ra­diated out from the speeding black jet, filling the atmosphere for miles around with the radar equivalent of a bucket of sand in the eyes.

The small screen in front of Major Kuznetsov became a seething snowfield, like a television set when the main tube blows out. The digital display showing him he was closing with his victim and when to fire his rockets was still fifteen seconds short of firing time. Slowly it began to unwind, tell­ing him he had lost his target somewhere up there in the freezing stratosphere.

Thirty seconds later the two hunters keeled onto their wing tips and dropped away down the sky to their Arctic base.

Of the five airports that surround Moscow, one of them, Vnukovo II, is never seen by foreigners. It is reserved for the Party elite and their fleet of jets maintained at peak readiness by the Air Force. It was here, at five A.M. local time, that Colonel O’Sullivan put the Blackbird onto Russian soil.

When the cooling jet reached the parking bay, it was sur­rounded by a group of officers wrapped in thick coats and fur hats, for early April is still bitter in Moscow before dawn. The Arizonan lifted the cockpit canopy on its hydraulic struts and gazed at the surrounding crowd with horror.

“Rooshians,” he breathed. “Messing all over my bird.” He unbuckled and stood up. “Hey, get your mother-loving hands off this machine, ya hear?”

Adam Munro left the desolate colonel trying to prevent the Russian Air Force from finding the flush caps leading to the refueling valves, and was whisked away in a black limousine, accompanied by two bodyguards from the Kremlin staff. In the car he was allowed to peel off his g-suit and dress again in his trousers and jacket, both of which had spent the journey rolled up between his knees and looked as if they had just been machine-washed.

Forty-five minutes later the Zil, preceded by the two mo­torcycle outriders who had cleared the roads into Moscow, shot through the Borovitsky Gate into the Kremlin, skirted the Great Palace, and headed for the side door to the Arsenal Building. At two minutes to six, Adam Munro was shown into the private apartment of the leader of the USSR, to find an old man in a dressing gown, nursing a cup of warm milk. He was waved to an upright chair. The door closed behind him.

“So you are Adam Munro,” said Maxim Rudin. “Now, what is this proposal from President Matthews?”

Munro sat in the straight-backed chair and looked across the desk at Maxim Rudin. He had seen him several times at state functions, but never this close. The old man looked weary and strained.

There was no interpreter present, Rudin spoke no English. In the hours while he had been in the air, Munro realized, Rudin had checked his name and knew perfectly well he was a diplomat from the British Embassy who spoke Russian.

“The proposal, Mr. Secretary-General,” Munro began in fluent Russian, “is a possible way whereby the terrorists on the supertanker Freya can be persuaded to leave that ship without having secured what they came for.”

“Let me make one thing clear, Mr. Munro. There is to be no more talk of the liberation of Mishkin and Lazareff.”

“Indeed not, sir. In fact, I had hoped we might talk of Yuri Ivanenko.”

Rudin stared back at him, face impassive. Slowly he lifted his glass of milk and took a sip.

“You see, sir, one of those two has let something slip al­ready,” said Munro. He was forced, to strengthen his argu­ment, to let Rudin know that he, too, was aware of what had happened to Ivanenko. But he could not indicate he had learned it from someone inside the Kremlin hierarchy, just in case Valentina was still free.

“Fortunately,” he went on, “it was to one of our people, and the matter has been taken care of.”

“Your people?” mused Rudin. “Ah, yes, I think I know who your people are. How many others know?”

“The Director General of my organization, the British Prime Minister, President Matthews, and three of his senior advisers. No one who knows has the slightest intention of re­vealing this for public consumption. Not the slightest.”

Rudin seemed to ruminate for a while.

“Can the same be said for Mishkin and Lazareff?” he asked.

“That is the problem,” said Munro. “That has always been the problem since the terrorists—who are Ukrainian emigres, by the way—stepped onto the Freya.”

“I told William Matthews, the only way out of this is to destroy the Freya. It would cost a handful of lives, but save a lot of trouble.”

“It would have saved a lot of trouble if the airliner in which those two young killers escaped had been shot down,” rejoined Munro.

Rudin looked at him keenly from under beetle eyebrows.

“That was a mistake,” he said flatly.

“Like the mistake tonight in which two MIG-twenty-fives almost shot down the plane in which I was flying?”

The old Russian’s head jerked up.

“I did not know,” he said. For the first time, Munro be­lieved him.

“I put it to you, sir, that destroying the Freya would not work. That is, it would not solve the problem. Three days ago Mishkin and Lazareff were two insignificant escapees and hi­jackers, serving fifteen years in jail. Now they are already ce­lebrities. But it is assumed their freedom is being sought for its own sake. We know different.

“If the Freya were destroyed,” Munro went on, “the entire world would wonder why it had been so vital to keep them in jail. So far, no one realizes that it is not their imprisonment that is vital, it is their silence. With the Freya, her cargo, and her crew destroyed in order to keep them in jail, they would have no further reason to stay silent. And because of the Freya, the world would believe them when they spoke about what they had done. So simply keeping them in jail is no use anymore.”

Rudin nodded slowly.

“You are right, young man,” he said. “The West Germans would give them their audience; they would have their press conference.”

“Precisely,” said Munro. “This, then, Is my suggestion.”

He outlined the same train of events that he had described to Mrs. Carpenter and President Matthews over the previous twelve hours. The Russian showed neither surprise nor hor­ror, just interest.

“Would it work?” he asked at last.

“It has to work,” said Munro. “It is the last alternative. They have to be allowed to go to Israel.”

Rudin looked at the clock on the wall. It was past six-forty-five A.M. Moscow time. In fourteen hours he would have to face Vishnayev and the rest of the Politburo. This time there would be no oblique approach; this time the Party theoretician would put down a formal motion of no confi­dence. His grizzled head nodded.

“Do it, Mr. Munro,” he said. “Do it and make it work. For if it doesn’t, there will be no more Treaty of Dublin, and no more Freya, either.”

He pressed the bell push, and the door opened immedi­ately. An immaculate major of the Kremlin praetorian guard stood there.

“I shall need to deliver two signals: one to the Americans, one to my own people,” said Munro. “A representative of each embassy is waiting outside the Kremlin walls.”

Rudin issued his orders to the guard major, who nodded and escorted Munro out. As they were passing through the doorway, Maxim Rudin called:

“Mr. Munro.”

Munro turned. The old man was as he had found him, hands cupped around his glass of milk.

“Should you ever need another job, Mr. Munro,” he said grimly, “come and see me. There is always a place here for men of talent.”

As the Zil limousine left the Kremlin by the Borovitsky Gate at seven A.M., the morning sun was just tipping the spire of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Two long black cars waited by the curb. Munro descended from the Zil and approached each in turn. He passed one message to the American diplomat and one to the British. Before he was airborne for Berlin, the in­structions would be in London and Washington.

On the dot of eight o’clock the bullet nose of the SR-71 lifted from the tarmac of Vnukovo II Airport and turned due west for Berlin, a thousand miles away. It was flown by a thoroughly disgusted Colonel O’Sullivan, who had spent three hours watching his precious bird being refueled by a team of Soviet Air Force mechanics.

“Where do you want to go now?” he called through the intercom. “I can’t bring this into Tempelhof, ya know. Not enough room.”

“Make a landing at the British base at Gatow,” said Munro.

“First Rooshians, now Limeys,” grumbled the Arizonan. “Dunno why we don’t put this bird on public display. Seems everyone is entitled to have a good look at her today.”

“If this mission is successful,” said Munro, “the world may not need the Blackbird anymore.”

Colonel O’Sullivan, far from being pleased, regarded the suggestion as a disaster.

“Know what I’m going to do if that happens?” he called. “I’m going to become a goddam cabdriver. I’m sure getting enough practice.”

Far below, the city of Vilnius in Lithuania went by. Flying at twice the speed of the rising sun, they would be in Berlin at seven A.M. local time.

It was half past five on the Freya, while Adam Munro was in a car between the Kremlin and the airport, that the intercom from the bridge rang in the day cabin.

Drake answered it, listened for a while, and replied in Ukrainian. From across the table Thor Larsen watched him through half-closed eyes.

Whatever the call was, it perplexed the terrorist leader, who sat with a frown, staring at the table, until one of his men came to relieve him in the guarding of the Norwegian skipper.

Drake left the captain under the barrel of the submachine gun in the hands of his masked subordinate and went up to the bridge. When he returned ten minutes later, he seemed angry.

“What’s the matter?” asked Larsen. “Something gone wrong again?”

“The West German Ambassador on the line from The Hague,” said Drake. “It seems the Russians have refused to allow any West German jet, official or private, to use the air corridors out of West Berlin.”

“That’s logical,” said Larsen. “They’re hardly likely to as­sist in the escape of the two men who murdered their airline captain.”

Drake dismissed his colleague, who closed the door behind him and returned to the bridge. The Ukrainian resumed his seat.

“The British have offered to assist Chancellor Busch by putting a communications jet from the Royal Air Force at their disposal to fly Mishkin and Lazareff from Berlin to Tel Aviv.”

“I’d accept,” said Larsen. “After all, the Russians aren’t above diverting a German jet, even snooting it down and claiming an accident. They’d never dare fire on an RAF mili­tary jet in one of the air corridors. You’re on the threshold of victory; don’t throw it away for a technicality. Accept the of­fer.”

Bleary-eyed from weariness, slow from lack of sleep, Drake regarded the Norwegian.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “They might shoot down a German plane. In fact, I have accepted.”

“Then it’s all over but the shouting,” said Larsen, forcing a smile. “Let’s celebrate.”

He had two cups of coffee in front of him, poured while he was waiting for Drake to return. He pushed one halfway down the long table; the Ukrainian reached for it. In a well-planned operation it was the first mistake he had made. ...

Thor Larsen came at him down the length of the table with all the pent-up rage of the past fifty hours unleashed in the violence of a maddened bear.

The partisan recoiled, reached for his gun, had it in his hand and was about to fire. A fist like a log of cut spruce caught him on the left temple, flung him out of his chair and backward across the cabin floor.

Had he been less fit, he would have been out cold. He was very fit, and younger than the seaman. As he fell, the gun slipped from his hand and skittered across the floor. He came up empty-handed, fighting, to meet the charge of the Norwe­gian, and the pair of them went down again in a tangle of arms and legs, fragments of a shattered chair, and two bro­ken coffee cups.

Larsen was trying to use his weight and strength, the Ukrainian his youth and speed. The latter won. Evading the grip of the big man’s hands, Drake wriggled free and went for the door. He almost made it; his hand was reaching for the knob when Larsen launched himself across the carpet and brought both his ankles out from under him.

The two men came up again together, a yard apart, the Norwegian between Drake and the door. The Ukrainian lunged with a foot, caught the bigger man in the groin with a kick that doubled him over. Larsen recovered, rose again, and threw himself at the man who had threatened to destroy his ship.

Drake must have recalled that the cabin was virtually soundproof. He fought in silence, wrestling, biting, gouging, kicking, and the pair rolled over the carpet amid the broken furniture and crockery. Somewhere beneath them was the gun that could have ended it all; in Drake’s belt was the os­cillator, which, if the red button on it was pressed, would cer­tainly end it all.

In fact it ended after two minutes; Thor Larsen pulled one hand free, grasped the head of the struggling Ukrainian, and slammed it into the leg of the table. Drake went rigid for half a second, then slumped limply. From just below his hairline a thin trickle of blood seeped down his forehead.

Panting with weariness, Thor Larsen raised himself from the floor and looked at the unconscious man. Carefully he eased the oscillator from the Ukrainian’s belt, held it in his left hand, and crossed to the one window in the starboard side of his cabin that was secured closed with butterfly-headed bolts. One-handed, he began to unwind them. The first one flicked open; he started on the second. A few more seconds, a single long throw, and the oscillator would sail out of the porthole, across the intervening ten feet of steel deck, and into the North Sea.

On the floor behind him, the young terrorist’s hand inched over the carpet to where his discarded gun lay. Larsen had the second bolt undone and was swinging the brass-framed window inward when Drake lined himself painfully onto one shoulder, reached around the table, and fired.

The crash of the gun in the enclosed cabin was earsplitting. Thor Larsen reeled back against the wall by the open window and looked first at his left hand, then at Drake. From the floor the Ukrainian stared back in disbelief.

The single shot had hit the Norwegian captain in the palm of his left hand—the hand that held the oscillator—driving shards of plastic and glass into the flesh. For ten seconds both men stared at each other, waiting for the series of rumbling explosions that would mark the end of the Freya.

They never came. The soft-nosed slug had fragmented the detonator device into small pieces, and, in shattering, it had not had time to reach the tonal pitch needed to trigger the detonators in the bombs below decks.

Slowly the Ukrainian climbed to his feet, holding onto the table for support. Thor Larsen looked at the steady stream of blood running from his broken hand down to the carpet. Then he looked across at the panting terrorist.

“I have won, Mr. Svoboda. I have won. You cannot destroy my ship and my crew.”

“You may know that, Captain Larsen,” said the man with the gun, “and I may know that. But they”—he gestured to the open porthole and the lights of the NATO warships in the predawn gloom across the water—“they don’t know that. The game goes on. Mishkin and Lazareff will reach Israel.”