The Devil's Alternative

MOABIT PRISON in West Berlin comprises two sections. The older part predates the Second World War. But during the sixties and early seventies, when the Baader-Meinhof gang spread a wave of terror over Germany, a new section was added. Into it were built ultramodern security systems, the toughest steel and concrete, television scanners, electroni­cally controlled doors and grilles.

On the upper floor, David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin were awakened in their separate cells by the governor of Moabit at six A.M. on the morning of Sunday, April 3, 1983.

“You are being released,” he told them brusquely. “You are being flown to Israel this morning. Takeoff is scheduled for eight o’clock. Get ready to depart; we leave for the air­field at seven-thirty.”

Ten minutes later the military commandant of the British Sector was on the telephone to the Governing Mayor of West Berlin.

“I’m terribly sorry, Herr Burgomeister,” he told the Ber­liner, “but a takeoff from the civil airport at Tegel is out of the question. For one thing, the aircraft, by agreement be­tween our governments, will be a Royal Air Force jet, and the refueling and maintenance facilities for our aircraft are far better at our own airfield at Gatow. For a second reason, we are trying to avoid the chaos of an invasion by the press, which we can easily prevent at Gatow. It would be hard for you to do this at Tegel Airport.”

Privately, the Governing Mayor was somewhat relieved. If the British took over the whole operation, any possible disas­ters would be their responsibility.

“So what do you want us to do, General?” he asked.

“London has asked me to suggest to you that these blighters be put in a closed and armored van inside Moabit, and be driven straight into Gatow. Your chaps can hand them over to us in privacy inside the wire, and of course we’ll sign for them.”

The press was less than happy. Over four hundred report­ers and cameramen had camped outside Moabit Prison since the announcement from Bonn the previous evening that their release would take place at eight. They desperately wanted pictures of the pair leaving for the airport. Other teams of newsmen were staking out the civil airport at Tegel, seeking vantage points for their telephoto lenses high on the observa­tion terraces of the terminal building. They were all destined to be frustrated.

The advantage of the British base at Gatow is that it occu­pies one of the most outlying and isolated sites inside the fenced perimeter of West Berlin, situated on the western side of the broad Havel River, close up against the border with Communist East Germany, which surrounds the beleaguered city on all sides.

Inside the base there had been controlled activity for hours before dawn. Between three and four o’clock an RAF version of the HS-125 executive jet, known as the Dominie, had flown in from Britain. It was fitted with long-range fuel tanks that would extend its range to give it ample reserves to fly from Berlin to Tel Aviv over Munich, “Venice, and Athens without ever entering Communist airspace. Its 500-mile-per-hour cruising speed would enable the Dominie to complete the 2,200-mile journey in just over four hours.

Since landing, the Dominie had been towed to a quiet hangar, where it had been serviced and refueled.

So keen were the press on watching Moabit and the airport at Tegel that no one noticed a sleek black SR-71 sweep over the East Germany-West Berlin border in the extreme corner of the city and drop onto the main runway at Gatow at just three minutes after seven o’clock. This aircraft, too, was quickly towed to an empty hangar, where a team of mechan­ics from the U.S. Air Force at Tempelhof hurriedly closed the doors against prying eyes and began to work on it. The SR-71 had done its job. A relieved Colonel O’Sullivan found himself at last surrounded by his fellow countrymen; next destination: his beloved U.S. of A.

His passenger left the hangar and was greeted by a youth­ful RAF squadron leader waiting with a Land Rover.

“Mr. Munro?”

“Yes.” Munro produced his identification, which the Air Force officer scanned closely.

“There are two gentlemen waiting to see you in the mess, sir.”

The two gentlemen could, if challenged, have proved that they were low-grade civil servants attached to the Ministry of Defense. What neither would have cared to concede was that they were concerned with experimental work in a very se­cluded laboratory, whose findings, when such were made, went immediately into a top-secret classification.

Both men were neatly dressed and carried attache cases. One wore rimless glasses and had medical qualifications, or had had until he and the profession of Hippocrates had parted company. The other was his subordinate, a former male nurse.

“You have the equipment I asked for?” asked Munro with­out preamble.

For an answer, the senior man opened his attache case and extracted a flat box no larger than a cigar case. He opened it and showed Munro what nestled on a bed of cotton inside.

“Ten hours,” he said. “No more.”

“That’s tight,” said Munro. “Very tight.”

It was seven-thirty on a bright, sunny morning.

The Nimrod from Coastal Command still turned and turned fifteen thousand feet above the Freya. Apart from observing the tanker, its duties also included that of watching the oil slick of the previous noon. The gigantic stain was still moving sluggishly on the face of the water, still out of range of the emulsifier-spraying tugs, which were not allowed to enter the area immediately around the Freya herself.

After spillage the slick had drifted gently northeast of the tanker on the one-knot tide toward the northern coast of Holland. But during the night it had halted, the tide had moved to the ebb, and the light breeze had shifted several points. Be­fore dawn the slick had come back, until it had passed the Freya and lay just south of her, two miles away from her side in the direction of Holland and Belgium.

On the tugs and firefighting ships, each loaded with its maximum capacity of emulsifier concentrate, the scientists from Warren Springs prayed the sea would stay calm and the wind light until they could move into operation. A sudden change in wind, a deterioration in the weather, and the giant slick could break up, driven before the storm toward the beaches either of Europe or of Britain.

Meteorologists in Britain and Europe watched with appre­hension the approach of a cold front coming down from the Denmark Strait, bringing cold air to dispel the unseasonable heat wave, and possibly wind and rain. Twenty-four hours of squalls would shatter the calm sea and make the slick uncon­trollable. The ecologists prayed the descending cold snap would bring no more than a sea fog.

On the Freya, as the minutes to eight o’clock ticked away, nerves became even more strained and taut. Andrew Drake, supported by two men with submachine guns to prevent an­other attack from the Norwegian skipper, had allowed Cap­tain Larsen to use his own first-aid box on his hand. Gray-faced with pain, the captain had plucked from the pulped meat of his palm such pieces of glass and plastic as he could, then bandaged the hand and placed it in a rough sling around his neck. Drake watched him from across the cabin, a small adhesive plaster covering the cut on his forehead.

“You’re a brave man, Thor Larsen, I’ll say that for you,” he said. “But nothing has changed. I can still vent every ton of oil on this ship with her own pumps, and before I’m half­way through, the Navy out there will open fire on her and complete the job. If the Germans renege again on their promise, that’s just what I’ll do at nine.”

At precisely seven-thirty the journalists outside Moabit Prison were rewarded for their vigil. The double gates on Klein Moabit Strasse opened for the first time, and the nose of a blank-sided armored van appeared. From apartment windows across the road, the photographers got what pictures they could, which were not very many, and the stream of press cars started up, to follow the van wherever it would go.

Simultaneously, television remote-broadcast units rolled their cameras, and radio reporters chattered excitedly into their microphones. Even as they spoke, their words went straight to the various capital cities from which they hailed, including that of the BBC man. His voice echoed into the day cabin of the Freya, where Andrew Drake, who had started it all, sat listening to his radio.

“They’re on their way,” he said with satisfaction. “Not long to wait now. Time to tell them the final details of their reception in Tel Aviv.”

He left for the bridge; two men remained to cover the Freya’s captain, slumped in his chair at the table, struggling with an exhausted brain against the waves of pain from his bleeding and broken hand.

The armored van, preceded by motorcycle outriders with howling sirens, swept through the twelve-foot-high steel-mesh gates of the British base at Gatow, and the pole barrier de­scended fast as the first car bulging with newsmen tried to follow it through. The car stopped with a squeal of tires. The double gates swung to. Within minutes a crowd of protesting reporters and photographers were at the wire clamoring for admittance.

Gatow contains not only an air base; it has an Army unit as well, and the commandant was an Army brigadier. The men on the gate were from the Military Police, four giants with red-topped caps, peaked down to the bridge of the nose, immovable and immune.

“You cannot do this.” yelled an outraged photographer from Der Spiegel. “We demand to see the prisoners take off.”

“That’s all right, Fritz,” said Staff Sergeant Brian Farrow comfortably. “I’ve got my orders.”

Reporters rushed to public telephones to complain to their editors. They complained to the Governing Mayor, who sym­pathized earnestly and promised to contact the base com­mander at Gatow immediately. When the phone was quiet, he leaned back and lit a cigar.

Inside the base, Adam Munro, accompanied by the wing commander in charge of aircraft maintenance, walked into the hangar where the Dominie stood.

“How is she?” Munro asked of the warrant officer (techni­cal) in charge of the fitters and riggers.

“Hundred percent, sir,” said the veteran mechanic.

“No, she’s not,” said Munro. “I think if you look under one of the engine cowlings, you’ll find an electrical malfunc­tion that needs quite a bit of attention.”

The warrant officer looked at the stranger in amazement, then across to his superior officer.

“Do as he says, Mr. Barker,” said the wing commander. “There has to be a technical delay. The Dominie must not be ready for takeoff for a while. But the German authorities must believe the malfunction is genuine. Open her up and get to work.”

Warrant Officer James Barker had spent thirty years maintaining aircraft for the Royal Air Force. Wing com­manders’ orders were not to be disobeyed, even if they did originate with a scruffy civilian who ought to be ashamed of the way he was dressed, not to mention that he badly needed a shave.

The prison governor, Alois Bruckner, had arrived in his own car to witness the handover of his prisoners to the British, and their takeoff for Israel. When he heard the air­craft was not yet ready, he was incensed and demanded to see it for himself.

He arrived in the hangar, escorted by the RAF base com­mander, to find Warrant Officer Barker head and shoulders into the starboard engine of the Dominie.

“What is the matter?” he asked in exasperation.

Warrant Officer Barker pulled his head out.

“Electrical short circuit, sir,” he told the official. “Spotted it during a test run of the engines just now. Shouldn’t be too long.”

“These men must take off at eight o’clock, in ten minutes’ time,” said the German. “At nine o’clock the terrorists on the Freya are going to vent a hundred thousand tons of oil.”

“Doing my best, sir. Now, if I could just get on with my job?” said the warrant officer.

The base commander steered Herr Bruckner out of the hangar. He had no idea what the orders from London meant, either, but orders they were, and he intended to obey them.

“Why don’t we step across to the officers’ mess for a nice cup of tea?” he suggested.

“I don’t want a nice cup of tea,” said the frustrated Herr Bruckner. “I want a nice takeoff for Tel Aviv. But first I must telephone the Governing Mayor.”

“Then the officers’ mess is just the place,” said the wing commander. “By the way, since the prisoners can’t really remain in that van much longer, I’ve ordered them to the Mili­tary Police station cells in Alexander Barracks. They’ll be nice and comfortable there.”

It was five to eight when the BBC radio correspondent was given a personal briefing by the RAF base commander about the technical malfunction in the Dominie, and his report cut clean into the eight A.M. news as a special flash seven minutes later. It was heard on the Freya.

“They’d better hurry up,” said Drake.

Adam Munro and the two civilians entered the Military Po­lice cells just after eight o’clock. It was a small unit, used only for the occasional Army prisoner, and there were four cells in a row. Mishkin was in the first, Lazareff in the fourth. The Junior civilian let Munro and his colleague enter the cor­ridor leading to the cells, then closed the corridor door and stood with his back to it.

“Last-minute interrogation,” he told the outraged MP ser­geant in charge. “Intelligence people.” He tapped the side of his nose. The MP sergeant shrugged and went back to the or­derly room.

Munro entered the first cell. Lev Mishkin, in civilian clothes, was sitting on the edge of the bunk bed, smoking a cigarette. He had been told he was going to Israel at last, but he was still nervous and uninformed about most of what had been going on these past three days.

Munro stared at him. He had almost dreaded meeting him. But for this man and his crazy schemes to assassinate Yuri Ivaneriko in pursuit of some far-off dream, his beloved Valen­tina would even now be packing her bags, preparing to leave for Rumania, the Party conference, the holiday at Mamaia Beach, and the boat that would take her to freedom. He saw again the back of the woman he loved going through the plate-glass doors to the Moscow street, the man in the trench coat straightening up and beginning to follow her.

“I am a doctor,” he said in Russian. “Your friends, the Ukrainians who have demanded your release, have also insist­ed you be medically fit to travel.”

Mishkin stood up and shrugged. He was unprepared for the four rigid fingertips that jabbed him in the solar plexus, did not expect the small canister held under his nose as he gasped for air, and was unable to prevent himself from in­haling the aerosol vapor that sprayed from the nozzle of the can as he inhaled. When the knockout gas hit the lungs, his legs buckled without a sound, and Munro caught him beneath the armpits before he reached the floor. Carefully he was laid on the bed.

“It’ll act for five minutes, no more,” said the civilian from the Defense Ministry. “Then he’ll wake with a fuzzy head but no ill effects. You’d better move fast.”

Munro opened the attache case and took out the box con­taining the hypodermic syringe, the cotton, and a small bottle of alcohol. Soaking the cotton in the alcohol, he swabbed a portion of the prisoner’s right forearm to sterilize the skin, held the syringe to the light and squeezed until a fine jet of liquid rose into the air, expelling the last bubble.

The injection took less than three seconds, and ensured that Lev Mishkin would remain under its effects for almost two hours, longer than necessary but a period that could not be reduced.

The two men closed the cell door behind them and went down to where David Lazareff, who had heard nothing, was pacing up and down, full of nervous energy. The aerosol spray worked with the same instantaneous effect. Two minutes later he had also had his injection.

The civilian accompanying Munro reached into his breast pocket and took out a flat tin box. He held it out.

“I leave you now,” he said coldly. “This isn’t what I am paid for.”

Neither hijacker knew, nor would ever know, what had been injected into them. In fact it was a mixture of two nar­cotics called pethidine and hyoscine by the British, and meperidine and scopolamine by the Americans. In combination they have remarkable effects.

They cause the patient to remain awake, albeit slightly sleepy, willing and able to be obedient to instructions. They also have the effect of telescoping time, so that coming out from their effects after almost two hours, the patient has the impression of having suffered a dizzy spell for several seconds. Finally, they cause complete amnesia, so that when the effects wear off, the patient has not the slightest recall of any­thing that happened during the intervening period. Only a reference to a clock will reveal that time has passed at all.

Munro reentered Mishkin’s cell. He helped the young man into a sitting position on his bed, back to the wall.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said Mishkin, and smiled. They were speaking in Russian, but Mishkin would never remember it.

Munro opened his flat tin box, extracted two halves of a long, torpedo-shaped capsule called a spansule, such as is of­ten used as a cold remedy, and screwed the two ends to­gether.

“I want you to take this pill,” he said, and held it out with a glass of water.

“Sure,” said Mishkin, and swallowed it without demur.

From his attache case Munro took a battery-operated wall clock and adjusted a timer at the back. Then he hung it on the wall. The hands read eight o’clock but were not in mo­tion. He left Mishkin sitting on his bed, and returned to the cell of the other man. Five minutes later the job was finished. He repacked his bag and left the cell corridor.

“They’re to remain in isolation until the aircraft is ready for them,” he told the MP sergeant at the orderly room desk as he passed through. “No one to see them at all. Base com­mander’s orders.”

For the first time Andrew Drake was speaking in his own voice to the Dutch Premier, Jan Grayling. Later, English linguistics experts, analyzing the tape recording made of the conversation, would place the accent as having originated within a twenty-mile radius of the city of Bradford, England, but by then it would be too late.

“These are the terms for the arrival of Mishkin and Lazareff in Israel,” said Drake. “I shall expect no later than one hour after the takeoff from Berlin an assurance from Premier Golen that they will be fulfilled. If they are not, I shall re­gard the agreement as null and void.

“One: the two are to be led from the aircraft on foot and at a slow pace past the observation terrace on top of the main terminal building at Ben-Gurion Airport.

“Two: access to that terrace is to be open to the public. No controls of identity or screening of the public is to take place by the Israeli security force.

“Three: if there has been any switch of the prisoners, if any look-alike actors are playing their part, I shall know within hours.

“Four: three hours before the airplane lands at Ben-Gu­rion, the Israeli radio is to publish the time of its arrival and inform everyone that any person who wishes to come and witness their arrival is welcome to do so. The broadcast is to be in Hebrew and English, French and German. That is all.”

“Mr. Svoboda,” Jan Grayling cut in urgently, “all these de­mands have been noted and will be passed immediately to the Israel! government. I am sure they will agree. Please do not cut contact. I have urgent information from the British in West Berlin.”

“Go ahead,” said Drake curtly.

“The RAF technicians working on the executive Jet in the hangar at Gatow airfield have reported a serious electrical fault developed this morning in one of the engines during testing. I implore you to believe this is no trick. They are working frantically to put the fault right. But there will be a delay of an hour or two.”

“If this is a trick, it’s going to cost your beaches a deposit of one hundred thousand tons of crude oil,” snapped Drake.

“It is not a trick,” said Grayling urgently. “All aircraft oc­casionally suffer a technical fault. It is disastrous that this should happen to the RAF plane right now. But it has, and it will be mended—is being mended, even as we speak.”

There was silence for a while as Drake thought.

“I want takeoff witnessed by four different national radio reporters, each in live contact with his head office. I want live reports by each of that takeoff. They must be from the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, the BBC, and France’s ORTF. All in English and all within five minutes of takeoff.”

Jan Grayling sounded relieved.

“I will ensure the RAF personnel at Gatow permit these four reporters to witness the takeoff,” he said.

“They had better,” said Drake. “I am extending the vent­ing of the oil by three hours. At noon we start pumping one hundred thousand tons into the sea.”

There was a click as the line went dead.

Premier Benyamin Golen was at his desk in his office in Jerusalem that Sunday morning. The Sabbath was over, and it was a normal working day; it was also past ten o’clock, two hours later than in Western Europe.

The Dutch Prime Minister was barely off the telephone be­fore the small unit of Mossad agents who had established themselves in an apartment in Rotterdam were relaying the message from the Freya back to Israel. They beat the diplo­matic channels by more than an hour.

It was the Premier’s personal adviser on security matters who brought him the transcript of the Freya broadcast and laid it silently on his desk. Golen read it quickly.

“What are they after?” he inquired.

“They are taking precautions against a switch of the prisoners,” said the adviser. “It would have been an obvious ploy—to make up two young men to pass for Mishkin and Lazareff at first glance, and effect a substitution.”

“Then who is going to recognize the real Mishkin and Laz­areff here in Israel?”

The security adviser shrugged.

“Someone on that observation terrace,” he said. “They have to have a colleague here in Israel who can recognize the men on sight—more probably someone whom Mishkin and Lazareff themselves can recognize.”

“And after recognition?”

“Some message or signal will presumably have to be passed to the media for broadcasting, to confirm to the men on the Freya that their friends have reached Israel safely. Without that message, they will think they have been tricked and go ahead with their deed.”

“Another of them? Here in Israel? I’m not having that,” said Benyamin Golen. “We may have to play host to Mishkin and Lazareff, but not to any more. I want that observation terrace put under clandestine scrutiny. If any watcher on that terrace receives a signal from these two when they arrive, I want him followed. He must be allowed to pass his message, then arrest him.”

On the Freya the morning ticked by with agonizing slowness. Every fifteen minutes Andrew Drake, scanning the wave bands of his portable radio, picked up English-language news broadcasts from the Voice of America or the BBC World Service. Each bore the same message: there had been no takeoff. The mechanics were still working on the faulty en­gine of the Dominie.

Shortly after nine o’clock the four radio reporters desig­nated as the witnesses to the takeoff were admitted to the Gatow Air Base and escorted by Military Police to the officers’ mess, where they were offered coffee and biscuits. Direct tele­phone facilities were established to their Berlin offices, whence radio circuits were held open to their native coun­tries. None of them met Adam Munro, who had borrowed the base commander’s private office and was speaking to Lon­don.

In the lee of the cruiser Argyll the three fast patrol boats Cutlass, Sabre, and Scimitar waited at their moorings. On the Cutlass Major Fallon had assembled his group of twelve Special Boat Service commandos.

“We have to assume the powers-that-be are going to let the bastards go,” he told them. “Sometime in the next couple of hours they’ll take off from West Berlin for Israel. They should arrive about four and a half hours later. So, during this evening or tonight, if they keep their word, those terror­ists are going to quit the Freya.

“Which way they’ll head, we don’t know yet, but probably toward Holland. The sea is empty of ships on that side. When they are three miles from the Freya, and out of possible range for a small, low-power transmitter-detonator to operate the explosives, Royal Navy experts are going to board the Freya and dismantle the charges. But that’s not our job.

“We’re going to take those bastards, and I want that man Svoboda. He’s mine, got it?”

There was a series of nods, and several grins. Action was what they had been trained for, and they had been cheated of it. The hunting instinct was high.

“The launch they’ve got is much slower than ours,” Fallon resumed. “They’ll have an eight-mile start, but I reckon we can take them three to four miles before they reach the coast. We have the Nimrod overhead, patched in to the Argyll. The Argyll will give us the directions we need. When we get close to them, we’ll have our searchlights. When we spot them, we take them out. London says no one is interested in prisoners. Don’t ask me why; maybe they want them silenced for rea­sons we know nothing about. They’ve given us the job, and we’re going to do it.”

A few miles away, Captain Mike Manning was also watching the minutes tick away. He, too, waited on news from Berlin that the mechanics had finished their work on the engine of the Dominie. The news in the small hours of the morning, while he sat sleepless in his cabin awaiting the dread­ed order to fire his shells and destroy the Freya and her crew, had surprised him. Out of the blue, the United States government had reversed its attitude of the previous sun­down; far from objecting to the release of the men from Moabit, far from being prepared to wipe out the Freya to prevent that release, Washington now had no objection. But his main emotion was relief, waves of pure relief that his murderous orders had been rescinded, unless. ... Unless something could still go wrong. Not until the two Ukrainian Jews had touched down at Ben-Gurion Airport would he be completely satisfied that his orders to shell the Freya to a fu­neral pyre had become part of history.

At a quarter to ten, in the cells below Alexander Barracks at Gatow airfield, Mishkin and Lazareff came out from the ef­fects of the narcotic they had ingested at eight o’clock. Al­most simultaneously the clocks Adam Munro had hung on the wall of each cell came to life. The sweep hands began to move around the dials.

Mishkin shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He felt sleepy, slightly muzzy in the head. He put it down to the bro­ken night, the sleepless hours, the excitement. He glanced at the clock on the wall; it read two minutes past eight. He knew that when he and David Lazareff had been led through the orderly room toward the cells, the clock there had said eight exactly. He stretched, swung himself off the bunk, and began to pace the cell. Five minutes later, at the other end of the corridor, Lazareff did much the same.

Adam Munro strolled into the hangar where Warrant Of­ficer Barker was still fiddling with the starboard engine of the Dominie.

“How is it going, Mr. Barker?” asked Munro.

The long-service technician withdrew himself from the guts of the engine and looked down at the civilian with exasper­ation.

“May I ask, sir, how long I am supposed to keep up this playacting? The engine’s perfect.”

Munro glanced at his watch.

“Ten-thirty,” he said. “In one hour exactly, I’d like you to telephone the aircrew room and the officers’ mess and report that she’s fit and ready to fly.”

“Eleven-thirty it is, sir,” said Warrant Officer Barker.

In the cells, David Lazareff glanced again at the wall clock. He thought he had been pacing for thirty minutes, but the clock said nine. An hour had gone by, but it had seemed a very short one. Still, in isolation in a cell, time plays strange tricks on the senses. Clocks, after all, are accurate. It never occurred to him or Mishkin that their clocks were moving at double speed to catch up on the missing hundred minutes in their lives, or that they were destined to synchronize with the clocks outside the cells at eleven-thirty precisely.

At eleven, Premier Jan Grayling in The Hague was on the telephone to the Governing Mayor of West Berlin.

“What the devil is going on, Herr Burgomeister?”

“I don’t know,” shouted the exasperated Berlin official. “The British say they are nearly finished with their damn en­gine. Why the hell they can’t use a British Airways airliner from the civil airport I don’t understand. We would pay for the extra cost of taking one out of service to fly to Israel with two passengers only.”

“Well, I’m telling you that in one hour those madmen on the Freya are going to vent a hundred thousand tons of oil,” said Jan Grayling, “and my government will hold the British responsible.”

“I entirely agree with you,” said the voice from Berlin. “The whole affair is madness.”

At eleven-thirty Warrant Officer Barker closed the cowling of the engine and climbed down. He went to a wall phone and called the officers’ mess. The base commander came on the line.

“She’s ready, sir,” said the technician.

The RAF officer turned to the men grouped around him, including the governor of Moabit Prison and four radio re­porters holding telephones linked to their offices.

“The fault has been put right,” he said. “She’ll be taking off in fifteen minutes.”

From the windows of the mess they watched the sleek little executive jet being towed out into the sunshine. The pilot and copilot climbed aboard and started both engines.

The prison governor entered the cells of the prisoners and informed them they were about to take off. His watch said eleven-thirty-five. So did the wall clocks.

Still in silence, the two prisoners were marched to the MP Land Rover and driven with the German prison official across the tarmac to the waiting jet. Followed by the air quartermaster sergeant who would be the only other occupant of the Dominie on its flight to Ben-Gurion, they went up the steps without a backward glance and settled into their seats.

At eleven-forty-five, Wing Commander Peter Jarvis opened both the throttles and the Dominie climbed away from the runway of Gatow airfield. On instructions from the air-traffic controller, it swung cleanly into the southbound air corridor from West Berlin to Munich and disappeared into the blue sky.

Within two minutes, all four radio reporters were speaking to their audiences live from the officers’ mess at Gatow. Their voices went out across the world to inform their listeners that forty-eight hours after the demands were originally made from the Freya, Mishkin and Lazareff were airborne and on their way to Israel and freedom.

In the homes of thirty officers and seamen from the Freya the broadcasts were heard; in thirty houses across Scandina­via, mothers and wives broke down and children asked why Mummy was crying.

In the small armada of tugs and emulsifier-spraying vessels lying in a screen west of the Argyll the news came through, and there were sighs of relief. Neither the scientists nor the seamen had ever believed they could cope with a hundred thousand tons of crude oil spilling into the sea.

In Texas, oil tycoon Clint Blake caught the news from NBC over his Sunday morning breakfast in the sun and shouted “About goddam time, too!”

Harry Wennerstrom heard the BBC broadcast in his pent­house suite high over Rotterdam and grinned with satisfac­tion.

In every newspaper office from Ireland to the Iron Curtain the Monday morning editions of the dailies were in prepara­tion. Teams of writers were putting together the whole story from the first invasion of the Freya in the small hours of Fri­day until the present moment. Space was left for the arrival of Mishkin and Lazareff in Israel, and the freeing of the Freya herself. There would be time before the first editions went to press at ten P.M. to include most of the end of the story.

At twenty minutes past twelve, European time, the State of Israel agreed to abide by the demands made from the Freya for the public reception and identification of Mishkin and Laz­areff at Ben-Gurion Airport in four hours’ time.

In his sixth-floor room at the Avia Hotel, three miles from Ben-Gurion Airport, Miroslav Kaminsky heard the news on the piped-in radio. He leaned back with a sigh of relief. Hav­ing arrived in Israel late Friday afternoon, he had expected to see his fellow partisans arrive on Saturday. Instead, he had listened by radio to the change of heart by the German gov­ernment in the small hours, the delay through the morning, and the venting of the oil at noon. He had bitten his finger­nails down, helpless to assist, unable to rest, until the final de­cision to release them after all. Now for him, too, the hours were ticking away until touchdown of the Dominie at four-fifteen European time, six-fifteen in Tel Aviv.

On the Freya, Andrew Drake heard the news of the takeoff with a satisfaction that cut through his weariness. The agree­ment of the State of Israel to his demands thirty-five minutes later was by way of a formality.

“They’re on their way,” he told Larsen. “Four hours to Tel Aviv and safety. Another four hours after that—even less if the fog closes down—and we’ll be gone. The Navy will come on board and release you. You’ll have proper medical help for that hand, and you’ll have your crew and your ship back. ... You should be happy.”

The Norwegian skipper was leaning back in his chair, deep black smudges under his eyes, refusing to give the younger man the satisfaction of seeing him fall asleep. For him it was still not over—not until the poisonous explosive charges had been removed from his holds, not until the last terrorist had left his ship. He knew he was close to collapse. The searing pain from his hand had settled down to a dull, booming throb that thumped up the arm to the shoulder, and the waves of exhaustion swept over him until he was dizzy. But still he would not close his eyes.

He raised his eyes to the Ukrainian with contempt.

“And Tom Keller?” he asked.

“Who?”

“My third officer, the man you shot out on the deck on Friday morning.”

Drake laughed.

“Tom Keller is down below with the others,” he said. “The shooting was a charade. One of my own men in Keller’s clothes. The bullets were blanks.”

The Norwegian grunted. Drake looked across at him with interest.

“I can afford to be generous,” he said, “because I have won. I brought against the whole of Western Europe a threat they could not face, and an exchange they could not wriggle out of. In short, I left them no alternative. But you nearly beat me; you came within an inch of it.

“From six o’clock this morning when you destroyed the detonator, those commandos could have stormed this ship any time they pleased. Fortunately, they don’t know that. But they might have done if you’d signaled to them. You’re a brave man, Thor Larsen. Is there anything you want?”

“Just get off my ship,” said Larsen.

“Soon now, very soon, Captain.”

High over Venice, Wing Commander Jarvis moved the con­trols slightly and the speeding silver dart turned a few points east of south for the long run down the Adriatic.

“How are the clients?” he asked the quartermaster ser­geant.

“Sitting quietly, watching the scenery,” said the QMS over his shoulder.

“Keep ’em like that,” said the pilot. “The last time they took a plane trip, they ended up shooting the captain.”

The QMS laughed.

“I’ll watch ’em,” he promised.

The copilot tapped the flight plan on his knee.

“Three hours to touchdown,” he said.

The broadcasts from Gatow had also been heard elsewhere in the world. In Moscow the news was translated into Russian and brought to a table in a private apartment at the privi­leged end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt where two men sat at lunch shortly after two P.M. local time.

Marshal Nikolai Kerensky read the typed message and slammed a meaty fist onto the table.

“They’ve let them go!” he shouted. “They’ve given in. The Germans and the British have caved in. The two Jews are on their way to Tel Aviv.”

Silently, Yefrem Vishnayev took the message from his companion’s hand and read it. He permitted himself a wintry smile.

“Then tonight, when we produce Colonel Kukushkin and his evidence before the Politburo, Maxim Rudin will be fin­ished,” he said. “The censure motion will pass; there is no doubt of it. By midnight, Nikolai, the Soviet Union will be ours. And in a year, all Europe.”

The marshal of the Red Army poured two generous slugs of Stolichnaya vodka. Pushing one toward the Party theoreti­cian, he raised his own.

“To the triumph of the Red Army!”

Vishnayev raised his vodka, a spirit he seldom touched. But there were exceptions.

“To a truly Communist world!”