The Devil's Alternative

OFF THE COAST south of Haifa, the little Dominie turned its nose for the last time and began dropping on a straight-in course for the main runway at Ben-Gurion Airport, inland from Tel Aviv.

It touched down after exactly four hours and thirty minutes of flight, at four-fifteen European time. It was six-fif­teen in Israel.

At Ben-Gurion the upper terrace of the passenger building was crowded with curious sightseers, surprised in a security-obsessed country to be allowed free access to such a spec­tacle.

Despite the earlier demands of the terrorists on the Freya that there be no police presence, officers of the Israeli Special Branch were there. Some were in the uniform of El Al staff, others selling soft drinks, or sweeping the forecourt, or at the wheels of taxis. Detective Inspector Avram Hirsch was in a newspaper delivery van, doing nothing in particular with bundles of evening papers that might or might not be des­tined for the kiosk in the main concourse.

After touchdown, the Royal Air Force plane was led by a ground-control jeep to the apron of tarmac in front of the passenger terminal. Here a small knot of officials waited to take charge of the two passengers from Berlin.

Not far away an El Al jet was also parked, and from its curtained portholes two men with binoculars peered through the cracks in the fabric at the row of faces atop the passenger building. Each had a walkie-talkie set to hand.

Somewhere in the crowd of several hundred on the obser­vation terrace Miroslav Kaminsky stood, indistinguishable from the innocent sightseers.

One of the Israeli officials mounted the few steps to the Dominie and went inside. After two minutes he emerged, fol­lowed by David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin. Two young hotheads from the Jewish Defense League on the terrace un­furled a placard they had secreted in their coats and held it up. It read simply welcome and was written in Hebrew. They also began to clap, until several of their neighbors told them to shut up.

Mishkin and Lazareff looked up at the crowd on the ter­race above them as they were led along the front of the ter­minal building, preceded by a knot of officials and with two uniformed policemen behind them. Several of the sightseers waved; most watched in silence.

From inside the parked airliner the Special Branch men peered out, straining to catch any sign of recognition from the refugees toward one of those at the railing.

Lev Mishkin saw Kaminsky first and muttered something quickly in Ukrainian out of the side of his mouth. It was picked up at once by a directional microphone aimed at the pair of them from a catering van a hundred yards away. The man squinting at the riflelike microphone did not hear the phrase; the man next to him in the cramped van, with the ear­phones over his head, did. He had been picked for his knowledge of Ukrainian. He muttered into a walkie-talkie, “Mishkin just made a remark to Lazareff. He said, quote, ‘There he is, near the end, wearing the blue tie,’ unquote.”

Inside the parked airliner the two watchers swung their binoculars toward the end of the terrace. Between them and the terminal building the knot of officials continued their solemn parade past the sightseers.

Mishkin, having spotted his fellow Ukrainian, looked away. Lazareff ran his eyes along the line of faces above him, spotted Miroslav Kaminsky, and winked. That was all Ka­minsky needed; there had been no switch of prisoners.

One of the men behind the curtains in the airliner said, “Got him,” and began to speak into his walkie-talkie.

“Medium height, early thirties, brown hair, brown eyes, dressed in gray trousers, tweed sports jacket, and blue tie. Standing seven or eight feet from the far end of the observa­tion terrace, toward the control tower.”

Mishkin and Lazareff disappeared into the building. The crowd on the roof, the spectacle over, began to disperse. They poured down the stairwell to the interior of the main concourse. At the bottom of the stairs a gray-haired man was sweeping cigarette butts into a trash can. As the column swept past him, he spotted a man in a tweed jacket and blue tie. He was still sweeping as the man strode across the con­course floor.

The sweeper reached into his trash cart, took out a small black box, and muttered, “Suspect moving on foot toward exit gate five.”

Outside the building Avram Hirsch hefted a bundle of eve­ning newspapers from the back of the van and swung them onto a dolly held by one of his colleagues. The man in the blue tie walked within a few feet of him, looking neither to right nor left, made for a parked rented car, and climbed in.

Detective Inspector Hirsch slammed the rear doors of his van, walked to the passenger door, and swung himself into the seat.

“The Volkswagen Golf over there in the car park,” he said to the van driver, Detective Constable Moishe Bentsur. When the rented car left the parking area en route for the main exit from the airport complex, the newspaper van was two hundred yards behind it.

Ten minutes later Avram Hirsch alerted the other police cars coming up behind him. “Suspect entering Avia Hotel car park.”

Miroslav Kaminsky had his room key in his pocket. He passed quickly through the foyer and took the elevator to his sixth-floor room. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he lifted the telephone and asked for an outside line. When he got it, he began to dial.

“He’s just asked for an outside line,” the switchboard oper­ator told Inspector Hirsch, who was by her side.

“Can you trace the number he’s dialing?”

“No, it’s automatic for local calls.”

“Blast!” said Hirsch. “Come on.” He and Bentsur ran for the elevator.

The telephone in the Jerusalem office of the BBC was an­swered at the third ring.

“Do you speak English?” asked Kaminsky.

“Yes, of course,” said the Israeli secretary at the other end.

“Then listen,” said Kaminsky, “I will say this only once. If the supertanker Freya is to be released unharmed, the first item in the six o’clock news on the BBC World Service, Eu­ropean time, must include the phrase ‘no alternative.’ If that phrase is not included in the first news item of the broadcast, the ship will be destroyed. Have you got that?”

There were several seconds of silence as the young secre­tary to the Jerusalem correspondent scribbled rapidly on a pad.

“Yes, I think so. Who is this?” she asked.

Outside the bedroom door in the Avia, Avram Hirsch was joined by two other men. One had a short-barreled shotgun. Both were dressed in airport staff uniform. Hirsch was still in the uniform of the newspaper delivery company: green trousers, green blouse, and green peaked cap. He listened at the door until he heard the tinkle of the telephone being re­placed. Then he stood back, drew his service revolver, and nodded to the man with the shotgun.

The gunner aimed once, carefully, at the door lock and blew the whole assembly out of the woodwork. Avram Hirsch went past him at a run, moved three paces into the room, dropped to a crouch, gun held forward in both hands, pointed straight at the target, and called on the room’s occu­pant to freeze.

Hirsch was a Sabra, born in Israel thirty-four years earlier, the son of two immigrants who had survived the death camps of the Third Reich. Around the house in his childhood the language spoken was always Yiddish or Russian, for both his parents were Russian Jews.

He supposed the man in front of him was Russian; he had no reason to think otherwise. So he called to him in Russian. “Stoi. ...” His voice echoed through the small bedroom.

Miroslav Kaminsky was standing by the bed, the telephone directory in his hand. When the door crashed open, he dropped the book, which closed, preventing any searcher from seeing which page it had been open at, or what number he might have called.

When the cry came, he did not see a hotel bedroom out­side Tel Aviv; he saw a small farmhouse in the foothills of the Carpathians, heard again the shouts of the men with the green insignia closing in on the hideaway of his group. He looked at Avram Hirsch, took in the flash of green from his peaked cap and uniform, and began to move toward the open window.

He could hear them again, coming at him through the bushes shouting their endless cry: “Stoi. ... Stoi. ... Stoi. ...” There was nothing to do but run, run like a fox with the hounds behind him, out through the back door of the farmhouse and into the undergrowth.

He was running backward, through the open glass door to the tiny balcony, when the balcony rail caught him in the small of the back and flipped him over. When he hit the parking lot fifty feet below, his back, pelvis, and skull were shattered. From over the balcony rail, Avram Hirsch looked down at the broken body and muttered to Detective Con­stable Bentsur:

“What the hell did he do that for?”

The service aircraft that had brought the two specialists to Gatow from Britain the previous evening returned westward soon after the takeoff of the Dominie from Berlin for Tel Aviv. Adam Munro hitched a lift on it, but used his clear­ance from the Cabinet Office to require that it drop him off at Amsterdam before going on to England.

He had also ensured that the Wessex helicopter from the Argyll would be at Schiphol to meet him. It was half past four when the Wessex settled back onto the afterdeck of the missile cruiser. The officer who welcomed him aboard glanced with evident disapproval at his appearance, but took him to meet Captain Preston.

All the Navy officer knew was that his visitor was from the Foreign Office and had been in Berlin supervising the depar­ture of the hijackers to Israel.

“Care for a wash and brush-up?” he asked.

“Love one,” said Munro. “Any news of the Dominie?”

“Landed fifteen minutes ago at Ben-Gurion,” said Captain Preston. “I could have my steward press your suit, and I’m sure we could find you a shirt that fits.”

“I’d prefer a nice thick sweater,” said Munro. “It’s turned damn cold out there.”

“Yes, that may prove a bit of a problem,” said Captain Preston. “There’s a belt of cold air moving down from Norway. We could get a spot of sea mist this evening.”

The sea mist, when it descended just after five o’clock, was a rolling bank of fog that drifted out of the north as the cold air followed the heat wave and came in contact with the warm land and sea.

When Adam Munro, washed, shaved, and dressed in bor­rowed thick white Navy sweater and black serge trousers, joined Captain Preston on the bridge just after five, the fog was thickening.

“Damn and blast!” said Preston. “These terrorists seem to be having everything their own way.”

By half past five the fog had blotted out the Freya from vision, and swirled around the stationary warships, none of which could see each other except on radar. The circling Nimrod above could see them all, and the Freya, on its ra­dar, and was still flying in clear air at fifteen thousand feet. But the sea itself had vanished in a blanket of gray cotton. Just after five the tide turned again and began to move back to the northeast, bearing the drifting oil slick with it, some­where between the Freya and the Dutch shore.

The BBC correspondent in Jerusalem was a staffer of long experience in the Israeli capital and had many and good con­tacts. As soon as he learned of the telephone call his secre­tary had taken, he called a friend in one of the security services.

“That’s the message,” he said, “and I’m going to send it to London right now. But I haven’t a clue who telephoned it.”

There was a grunt at the other end.

“Send the message,” said the security man. “As to the man on the telephone, we know. And thanks.”

It was just after four-thirty when the news flash was broad­cast on the Freya that Mishkin and Lazareff had landed at Ben-Gurion.

Andrew Drake threw himself back in his chair with a shout.

“We’ve done it!” he yelled at Thor Larsen. “They’re in Is­rael!”

Larsen nodded slowly. He was trying to close his mind to the steady agony from his wounded hand.

“Congratulations,” he said sardonically. “Now perhaps you can leave my ship and go to hell.”

The telephone from the bridge rang. There was a rapid exchange in Ukrainian, and Larsen heard a whoop of joy from the other end.

“Sooner than you think,” said Drake. “The lookout on the funnel reports a thick bank of fog moving toward the whole area from the north. With luck we won’t even have to wait until dark. The fog will be even better for our purpose. But when we do leave, I’m afraid I’ll have to handcuff you to the table leg. The Navy will rescue you in a couple of hours.”

At five o’clock the main newscast brought a dispatch from Tel Aviv to the effect that the demands of the hijackers of the Freya in the matter of the reception at Ben-Gurion Air­port of Mishkin and Lazareff had been abided by. Mean­while, the Israeli government would keep the two from Berlin in custody until the Freya was released, safe and unharmed. In the event that she was not, the Israeli government would regard its pledges to the terrorists as null and void, and re­turn Mishkin and Lazareff to jail.

In the day cabin on the Freya, Drake laughed.

“They won’t need to,” he told Larsen. “I don’t care what happens to me now. In twenty-four hours those two men are going to hold an international press conference. And when they do, Captain Larsen, when they do, they are going to blow the biggest hole ever made in the walls of the Kremlin.”

Larsen looked out of the windows at the thickening mist.

“The commandos might use this fog to storm the Freya,” he said. “Your lights would be of no use. In a few minutes you won’t be able to see any bubbles from frogmen under­water.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” said Drake. “Nothing matters anymore. Only that Mishkin and Lazareff get their chance to speak. That was what it was all about. That is what makes it all worthwhile.”

The two Jewish-Ukrainians had been taken from Ben-Gurion Airport in a police van to the central police station in Tel Aviv and locked in separate cells. Prime Minister Golen was prepared to abide by his part of the bargain—the exchange of the two men for the safety of the Freya, her crew, and her cargo. But he was not prepared to have Svoboda trick him.

For Mishkin and Lazareff it was the third cell in a day, but both knew it would be the last. As they parted in the cor­ridor, Mishkin winked at his friend and called in Ukrainian, “Not next year in Jerusalem—but tomorrow.”

From an office upstairs, the chief superintendent in charge of the station made a routine call to the police doctor to give the pair a medical examination, and the doctor promised to come at once. It was half past seven Tel Aviv time.

The last thirty minutes before six o’clock dragged by like years on the Freya. In the day cabin, Drake had tuned his ra­dio to the BBC World Service and listened impatiently for the six o’clock newscast.

Azamat Krim, assisted by three of his colleagues, shinnied down a rope from the taffrail of the tanker to the sturdy fish­ing launch that had bobbed beside the hull for the past two and half days. When the four of them were standing in the launch’s open waist, they began preparations for the depar­ture of the group from the Freya.

At six o’clock the chimes of Big Ben rang out from Lon­don, and the evening news broadcast began.

“This is the BBC World Service. The time is six o’clock in London, and here is the news, read to you by Peter Chal­mers.”

A new voice came on. It was heard in the wardroom of the Argyll, where Captain Preston and most of his officers were grouped around the set. Captain Mike Manning tuned in on the Moran; the same newscast was heard at 10 Downing Street, in The Hague, Washington, Paris, Brussels, Bonn, and Jerusalem. On the Freya. Andrew Drake sat motionless, watching the radio unblinkingly.

“In Jerusalem today. Prime Minister Benyamin Golen said that following the arrival earlier from West Berlin of the two prisoners David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, he would have no alternative but to abide by his pledge to free the two men, provided the supertanker Freya was freed with her crew un­harmed. ...”

“No alternative!” shouted Drake. “That’s the phrase! Miroslav has done it!”

“Done what?” asked Larsen.

“Recognized them. It’s them, all right. No switching has taken place.”

He slumped back in his chair and exhaled a deep sigh.

“It’s over, Captain Larsen. We’re leaving, you’ll be glad to hear.”

The captain’s personal locker contained one set of hand­cuffs, with keys, in case of the necessity physically to restrain someone on board. Cases of madness have been known on ships. Drake slipped one of the cuffs around Larsen’s right wrist and snapped it shut. The other went around the table leg. The table was bolted to the floor. Drake paused in the doorway and laid the keys to the handcuffs on top of a shelf.

“Good-bye, Captain Larsen. You may not believe this, but I’m sorry about the oil slick. It would never have happened if the fools out there had not tried to trick me. I’m sorry about your hand, but that, too, need not have happened. We’ll not see each other again, so good-bye.”

He closed and locked the cabin door behind him and ran down the three flights of stairs to A deck and outside to where his men were grouped on the afterdeck. He took his transistor radio with him.

“All ready?” he asked Azamat Krim.

“As ready as we’ll ever be,” said the Crimean Tatar.

“Everything okay?” he asked the Ukrainian-American who was an expert on small boats.

The man nodded.

“All systems go,” he replied.

Drake looked at his watch. It was twenty past six.

“Right. Six-forty-five, Azamat hits the ship’s siren, and the launch and the first group leave simultaneously. Azamat and I leave ten minutes later. You’ve all got papers and clothes. After you hit the Dutch coast, everyone scatters. It’s every man for himself.”

He looked over the side. By the fishing launch, two inflat­able Zodiac speedboats bobbed in the fog-shrouded water. Each had been dragged out from the fishing launch and in­flated in the previous hour. One was the fourteen-foot model, big enough for five men. The smaller, ten-foot model would take two comfortably. With the forty-horsepower out-boards behind them, they would make thirty knots over a calm sea.

“They won’t be long now,” said Major Simon Fallon, stand­ing at the forward rail of the Cutlass.

The three fast patrol boats, long since invisible from the Freya, had been pulled clear of the western side of the Argyll and now lay tethered beneath her stern, noses pointed to where the Freya lay, five miles away through the fog.

The Marines of the SBS were scattered, four to each boat, all armed with submachine carbines, grenades, and knives.

One boat, the Sabre, also carried on board four Royal Navy explosives experts, and this boat would make straight for the Freya to board and liberate her as soon as the circling Nimrod had spotted the terrorist launch leaving the side of the su­pertanker and achieving a distance of three miles from her. The Cutlass and Scimitar would pursue the terrorists and hunt them down before they could lose themselves in the maze of creeks and islands that make up the Dutch coast south of the Maas.

Major Fallon would head the pursuit group in the Cutlass. Standing beside him, to his considerable disgust, was the man from the Foreign Office, Mr. Munro.

“Just stay well out of the way when we close with them,” Fallon said. “We know they have submachine carbines and handguns, maybe more. Personally, I don’t see why you insist on coming at all.”

“Let’s just say I have a personal interest in these bastards,” said Munro, “especially Mr. Svoboda.”

“So have I,” growled Fallon. “And Svoboda’s mine.”

Aboard the Moran, Mike Manning had heard the news of the safe arrival of Mishkin and Lazareff in Israel with as much relief as Drake on the Freya. For him, as for Thor Larsen, it was the end of a nightmare. There would be no shelling of the Freya now. His only regret was that the fast patrol boats of the Royal Navy would have the pleasure of hunting down the terrorists when they made their break. For Manning the agony he had been through for a day and a half parlayed it­self into anger.

“If I could get my hands on Svoboda,” he told his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Olsen, “I’d happily wring the bastard’s neck.”

As on the Argyll, the Brunner, the Breda, and the Montcalm, the Moran’s radar scanners swept the ocean for signs of the launch moving away from the Freya’s side. Six-fifteen came and went, and there was no sign.

In its turret the forward gun of the Moran, still loaded, moved away from the Freya and pointed at the empty sea three miles to the northeast.

At ten past eight Tel Aviv time, Lev Mishkin was standing in his cell beneath the streets of Tel Aviv, when he felt a pain in his chest. Something like a rock seemed to be growing fast in-side him. He opened his mouth to scream, but the air was cut off. He pitched forward, face down, and died on the floor of the cell.

There was an Israeli policeman on permanent guard out­side the door of the cell, and he had orders to peer inside at least every two or three minutes. Less than sixty seconds after Mishkin died, his eye was pressed to the judas hole. What he saw caused him to let out a yell of alarm, and he frantically rattled the key in the lock to open the door. Farther up the corridor, a colleague in front of Lazareff’s door heard the yell and ran to his assistance. Together they burst into Mishkin’s cell and bent over the prostrate figure.

“He’s dead,” breathed one of the men. The other rushed into the corridor and hit the alarm button. Then they ran to Lazareff’s cell and hurried inside.

The second prisoner was doubled up on the bed, arms wrapped around himself as the paroxysms struck him.

“What’s the matter?” shouted one of the guards, but he spoke in Hebrew, which Lazareff did not understand. The dy­ing man forced out four words in Russian. Both guards heard him clearly and later repeated the phrase to senior officers, who were able to translate it.

“Head ... of ... KGB ... dead.”

That was all he said. His mouth stopped moving; he lay on his side on the cot, sightless eyes staring at the blue uniforms in front of him.

The ringing bell brought the chief superintendent, a dozen other officers of the station staff, and the doctor, who had been drinking coffee in the police chiefs office.

The doctor examined each rapidly, searching mouths, throats, and eyes, feeling pulses and listening to chests. When he had done, he stalked from the second cell. The superin­tendent followed him into the corridor; he was a badly wor­ried man.

“What the hell’s happened?” he asked the doctor.

“I can do a full autopsy later,” said the doctor, “or maybe it will be taken out of my hands. But as to what has hap­pened, they’ve been poisoned, that’s what happened.”

“But they haven’t eaten anything,” protested the police­man. “They haven’t drunk anything. They were just going to have supper. Perhaps at the airport ... or on the plane ...?”

“No,” said the doctor, “a slow-acting poison would not work with such speed, and simultaneously. Body systems vary too much. Each either administered to himself, or was admin­istered, a massive dose of instantaneously fatal poison, which I suspect to be potassium cyanide, within the five to ten sec­onds before they died.”

“That’s not possible,” shouted the police chief. “My men were outside the cells all the time. Both prisoners were thor­oughly examined before they entered the cells. Mouths, anuses—the lot. There were no hidden poison capsules. Besides, why would they commit suicide? They’d soon have had their freedom.”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor, “but they both died within seconds of that poison’s hitting them.”

“I’m phoning the Prime Minister’s office at once,” said the chief superintendent grimly, and strode off to his office.

The Prime Minister’s personal security adviser, like almost everyone else in Israel, was an ex-soldier. But the man whom those within a five-mile radius of the Knesset called simply “Barak” had never been an ordinary soldier. He had started as a paratrooper under the paracommander Rafael Eytan, the legendary Raful. Later he had transferred, to serve as a ma­jor in General Arik Sharon’s elite 101 Unit until he stopped a bullet in the kneecap during a dawn raid on a Palestinian apartment block in Beirut.

Since then he had specialized in the more technical side of security operations, using his knowledge of what he would have done to kill the Israeli Premier, and then reversing it to protect his master. It was he who took the call from Tel Aviv and entered the office where Benyamin Golen was working late, to break the news to him.

“Inside the cell itself?” echoed the stunned Premier. “Then they must have taken the poison themselves.”

“I don’t think so,” said Barak. “They had every reason to want to live.”

“Then they were killed by others?”

“It looks like it, Prime Minister.”

“But who would want them dead?”

“The KGB, of course. One of them muttered something about the KGB, in Russian. It seems he was saying the head of the KGB wanted them dead.”

“But they haven’t been in the hands of the KGB. Twelve hours ago they were in Moabit Prison. Then for eight hours in the hands of the British. Then two hours with us. In our hands they ingested nothing—no food, no drink, nothing. So how did they take in an instant-acting poison?”

Barak scratched his chin, a dawning gleam in his eye.

“There is a way, Prime Minister. A delayed-action cap­sule.”

He took a sheet of paper and drew a diagram.

“It is possible to design and make a capsule like this. It has two halves; one is threaded so that it screws into the other half just before it is swallowed.”

The Prime Minister looked at the diagram with growing anger.

“Go on,” he commanded.

“One half of the capsule is of a ceramic substance, im­mune both to the acidic effects of the gastric juices of the hu­man stomach and to the effects of the much stronger acid inside it. And strong enough not to be broken by the muscles of the throat when it is swallowed.

“The other half is of a plastic compound, tough enough to withstand the digestive juices, but not enough to resist the acid. In the second portion lies the cyanide. Between the two is a copper membrane. The two halves are screwed together; the acid begins to burn away at the copper wafer. The cap­sule is swallowed. Several hours later, depending on the thickness of the copper, the acid burns through. It is the same principle as certain types of acid-operated detonators.

“When the acid penetrates the copper membrane, it quickly cuts through the plastic of the second chamber, and the cyanide floods out into the body system. I believe it can be extended up to ten hours, by which time the indigestible capsule has reached the lower bowel. Once the poison is out, the blood absorbs it quickly and carries it to the heart.”

Barak had seen his Premier annoyed before, even angry. But he had never seen him white and trembling with rage.

“They send me two men with poison pellets deep inside them,” he whispered, “two walking time bombs, triggered to die when they are in our hands? Israel will not be blamed for this outrage. Publish the news of the deaths immediately. Do you understand? At once. And say a pathology examination is under way at this very moment. That is an order.”

“If the terrorists have not yet left the Freya,” suggested Barak, “that news could reverse their plans to leave.”

“The men responsible for poisoning Mishkin and Lazareff should have thought of that,” snapped Premier Golen. “But any delay in the announcement and Israel will be blamed for murdering them. And that I will not tolerate.”

The fog rolled on. It thickened; it deepened. It covered the sea from the coast of East Anglia across to Walcheren. It em­balmed the flotilla of tugs bearing the emulsifier that were sheltering west of the warships, and the Navy vessels them­selves. It whirled around the Cutlass, Sabre, and Scimitar as they lay under the stern of the Argyll, engines throbbing softly, straining to be up and away to track down their prey. It shrouded the biggest tanker in the world at her mooring between the warships and the Dutch shore.

At six-forty-five all the terrorists but two climbed down into the larger of the inflatable speedboats. One of them, the Ukrainian-American, jumped into the old fishing launch that had brought them to the middle of the North Sea, and glanced upward.

From the rail above him, Andrew Drake nodded. The man pushed the starter button, and the sturdy engine coughed into life. The prow of the launch was pointed due west, her wheel lashed with cord to hold her steady on course. The terrorist gradually increased the power of the engine, holding her in neutral gear.

Across the water, keen ears, human and electronic, had caught the sound of the motor; urgent commands and ques­tions flashed among the warships, and from the Argyll to the circling Nimrod overhead. The spotter plane looked to its ra­dar but detected no movement on the sea below.

Drake spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, and far up on the bridge, Azamat Krim hit the Freya’s siren button.

The air filled with a booming roar of sound as the siren blew away the silence of the surrounding fog and the lapping water.

On his bridge on the Argyll, Captain Preston snorted with impatience.

“They’re trying to drown the sound of the launch engine,” he observed. “No matter; we’ll have it on radar as soon as it leaves the Freya’s side.”

Seconds later the terrorist in the launch slammed the gear into forward, and the fishing boat, its engine revving high, pulled violently away from the Freya’s stern. The terrorist leaped for the swinging rope above him, lifted his feet, and let the empty boat churn out from under him. In two seconds it was lost in the fog, plowing its way strongly toward the warships to the west.

The terrorist swung on the end of his rope, then lowered himself into the speedboat where his four companions waited. One of them jerked at the engine’s lanyard: the outboard coughed and roared. The five men in it gripped the hand­holds, and the helmsman pushed on the power. The inflatable dug its motor into the water, cleared the stern of the Freya, lifted its blunt nose high, and tore away across the calm water toward Holland.

The radar operator in the Nimrod high above spotted the steel hull of the fishing launch instantly; the rubber-com­pound speedboat gave no reflector signal.

“The launch is moving,” he told the Argyll below him. “Hell, they’re coming straight at you.”

Captain Preston glanced at the radar display on his own bridge.

“Got ’em,” he said, and watched the blip separating itself from the great white blob that represented the Freya herself.

“He’s right, she’s boring straight at us. What the hell are they trying to do?”

On full power and empty, the fishing launch was making fifteen knots. In twenty minutes it would be among the Navy ships, then through them and into the flotilla of tugs behind them.

“They must think they can get through the screen of war­ships unharmed, and then lose themselves among the tugs in the fog,” suggested the first officer, beside Captain Preston. “Shall we send the Cutlass to intercept?”

“I’m not risking good men, however much Major Fallon may want his personal fight,” said Preston. “Those bastards have already shot one seaman on the Freya, and orders from the Admiralty are quite specific. Use the guns.”

The procedure that was put into effect on the Argyll was smooth and practiced. The four other NATO warships were politely asked not to open fire, but to leave the job to the Ar­gyll. Her fore and aft five-inch guns swung smoothly onto target and opened fire.

Even at two miles, the target was small. Somehow it sur­vived the first salvo, though the sea around it erupted in spouts of rising water when the shells dropped. There was no spectacle for the watchers on the Argyll, nor for those crouched on the three patrol boats beside her. Whatever was happening out there in the fog was invisible; only the radar could see every drop of every shell, and the target boat rear­ing and plunging in the maddened water. But the radar could not tell its masters that no figure stood at the helm, no men crouched terrified in her stern.

Andrew Drake and Azamat Krim sat quietly in their two-man speedboat close by the Freya and waited. Drake held onto the rope that hung from her rail high above. Through the fog they both heard the first muffled boom of the Argyll’s guns. Drake nodded at Krim, who started the outboard en­gine. Drake released the rope, and the inflatable sped away, light as a feather, skimming the sea as the speed built up, its engine noise drowned by the roar of the Freya’s siren.

Krim looked at his left wrist, where a waterproof compass was strapped, and altered course a few points to south. He had calculated forty-five minutes at top speed from the Freya to the maze of islands that make up North and South Beveland.

At five minutes to seven, the fishing launch stopped the Ar­gyll’s sixth shell, a direct hit. The explosive tore the launch apart, lifting it half out of the water and rolling both stern and aft sections over. The fuel tank blew up, and the steel-hulled boat sank like a stone.

“Direct hit,” reported the gunnery officer from deep inside the Argyll where he and his gunners had watched the uneven duel on radar. “She’s gone.”

The blip faded from the screen; the illuminated sweep arm went around and around but showed only the Freya at five miles. On the bridge, four officers watched the same display, and there were a few moments of silence. It was the first time for any of them that their ship had actually killed anybody.

“Let the Sabre go,” said Captain Preston quietly. “They can board and liberate the Freya now.”

The radar operator in the darkened hull of the Nimrod peered closely at his screen. He could see all the warships, all the tugs, and the Freya to the east of them. But somewhere beyond the Freya, shielded by the tanker’s bulk from the Navy vessels, a tiny speck seemed to be moving away to the southeast; it was so small it could almost have been missed; it was no bigger than the blip that would have been made by a medium-size tin can; in fact it was the metallic cover to the outboard engine of a speeding inflatable. Tin cans do not move across the face of the ocean at thirty knots.

“Nimrod to Argyll, Nimrod to Argyll ...”

The officers on the bridge of the guided-missile cruiser listened to the news from the circling aircraft with shock. One of them ran to the wing of the bridge and shouted the in­formation down to the sailors from Portland who waited on their patrol launches.

Two seconds later the Cutlass and Scimitar were away, the booming roar of their twin diesel marine engines filling the fog around them. Long white plumes of spray rose from their bows; the noses rose higher and higher, the sterns deeper in the wake, as the bronze screws whipped through the foaming water.

“Damn and blast them,” shouted Major Fallon to the Navy commander who stood with him in the tiny wheelhouse of the Cutlass, “how fast can we go?”

“On water like this, over forty knots,” the commander shouted back.

Not enough, thought Adam Munro, both hands locked to a stanchion as the vessel shuddered and bucked like a runaway horse through the fog. The Freya was still five miles away, the terrorists’ speedboat another five beyond that. Even if they overhauled at ten knots, it would take an hour to come level with the inflatable carrying Svoboda to safety in the creeks of Holland, where he could lose himself. But he would be there in forty minutes, maybe less.

Cutlass and Scimitar were driving blind, tearing the fog to shreds, only to watch it form behind them. In any crowded sea, it would be lunacy to use such speed in conditions of zero visibility. But the sea was empty. In the wheelhouse of each launch, the commander listened to a constant stream of information from the Nimrod via the Argyll: his own posi­tion and that of the other fast patrol launch: the position in the fog ahead of them of the Freya herself; the position of the Sabre, well away to their left, heading toward the Freya at a slower speed; and the course and speed of the moving dot that represented Svoboda’s escape.

Well east of the Freya, the inflatable in which Andrew Drake and Azamat Krim were making for safety seemed to be in luck. Beneath the fog the sea had become even calmer, and the sheetlike water enabled them to increase speed even more. Most of their craft was out of the water, only the shaft of the howling engine being deep beneath the surface. A few feet away in the fog, passing by in a blur, Drake saw the last remaining traces of the wake made by their companions ten minutes ahead of them. It was odd, he thought, for the traces to remain on the sea’s surface for so long.

On the bridge of the Moran, which was lying south of the Freya, Captain Mike Manning also studied his radar scanner. He could see the Argyll away to the northwest of him, and the Freya a mite east of north.

Between them, the Cutlass and the Scimitar were visible, closing the gap fast. Away to the east he could spot the tiny blip of the racing speedboat, so small it was almost lost in the milky complexion of the screen. But it was there. Manning looked at the gap between the refugee and the hunters charg­ing after it.

“They’ll never make it,” he said, and gave an order to his executive officer. The five-inch forward gun of the Moran be­gan to traverse slowly to the right, seeking a target some­where through the fog.

A seaman appeared at the elbow of Captain Preston, still absorbed in the pursuit through the fog as shown by his own scanner. His guns, he knew, were useless; the Freya lay al­most between him and the target, so any shooting would be too risky. Besides, the bulk of the Freya masked the target from his own radar scanner, which could not, therefore, pass the correct aiming information to the guns.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the seaman.

“What is it?”

“Just come over the news, sir. Those two men who were flown to Israel today, sir. They’re dead. Died in their cells.”

“Dead?” queried Captain Preston incredulously. “Then the whole bloody thing was for nothing. Wonder who the hell could have done that. Better tell that Foreign Office chappie when he gets back. He’ll be interested.”

The sea was still flat calm for Andrew Drake. There was a slick, oily flatness to it that was unnatural in the North Sea. He and Krim were almost halfway to the Dutch coast when their engine coughed for the first time. It coughed again several seconds later, then repeatedly. The speed slowed, the power reduced.

Azamat Krim gunned the engine urgently. It fired, coughed again, and resumed running, but with a throaty sound.

“It’s overheating,” he shouted to Drake.

“It can’t be,” yelled Drake. “It should run at full power for at least an hour.”

Krim leaned out of the speedboat and dipped his hand in the water. He examined the palm and showed it to Drake. Streaks of sticky brown crude oil ran down to his wrist.

“It’s blocking the cooling ducts,” said Krim.

“They seem to be slowing down,” the operator in the Nimrod informed the Argyll, which passed the information to the Cutlass.

“Come on,” shouted Major Fallon, “we can still get the bastards!”

The distance began to close rapidly. The inflatable was down to ten knots. What Fallon did not know, nor the young commander who stood at the wheel of the racing Cutlass, was that they were speeding toward the edge of a great lake of oil lying on the surface of the ocean. Or that their prey was chugging right through the center of it.

Ten seconds later Azamat Krim’s engine cut out. The silence was eerie. Far away they could hear the boom of the engines of Cutlass and Scimitar coming toward them through the fog.

Krim scooped a double handful from the surface of the sea and held it out to Drake.

“It’s our oil, Andriy. It’s the oil we vented. We’re right in the middle of it.”

“They’ve stopped,” said the commander on the Cutlass to Fallon beside him. “The Argyll says they’ve stopped. God knows why.”

“We’ll get ’em!” shouted Fallon gleefully, and unslung his Ingram submachine gun.

On the Moran, gunnery officer Chuck Olsen reported to Manning, “We have range and direction.”

“Open fire,” said Manning calmly.

Seven miles to the south of the Cutlass, the forward gun of the Moran began to crash out its shells in steady, rhythmic sequence. The commander of the Cutlass could not hear the shells, but the Argyll could, and told him to slow down. He was heading straight into the area where the tiny speck on the radar screens had come to rest, and the Moran had opened fire on the same area. The commander eased back on his twin throttles; the bucking launch slowed, then settled, chugging gently forward.

“What the hell are you doing?” shouted Major Fallon. “They can’t be more than a mile or so ahead.”

The answer came from the sky. Somewhere above them, a mile forward from the bow, there was a sound like a rushing train as the first shells from the Moran homed in on their tar­get.

The three semi-armor-piercing shells went straight into the water, raising spouts of foam but missing the bobbing inflat­able by a hundred yards.

The starshells had proximity fuses. They exploded in blind­ing sheets of white light a few feet above the ocean surface, showering gentle, soft gobbets of burning magnesium over a wide area.

The men on the Cutlass were silent, seeing the fog ahead of them illuminated. Four cables to starboard, the Scimitar was also hove to, on the very edge of the oil slick.

The magnesium dropped onto the crude oil, raising its tem­perature to and beyond its flashpoint. The light fragments of blazing metal, not heavy enough to penetrate the scum, sat and burned in the oil.

Before the eyes of the watching sailors and Marines the sea caught fire; a gigantic plain, miles long and miles wide, began to glow, a ruddy red at first, then brighter and hotter.

It lasted for no more than fifteen seconds. In that time the sea blazed. Over half of a spillage of twenty thousand tons of oil caught fire and burned. For several seconds it reached five thousand degrees centigrade. The sheer heat of it burned off the fog for miles around in a tenth of a minute, the white flames reaching four to five feet high off the surface of the water.

In utter silence the sailors and Marines gazed at the blister­ing inferno starting only a hundred yards ahead of them; some had to shield their faces or be scorched by the heat.

From the midst of the fire a single candle spurted, as if a petrol tank had exploded. The burning oil made no sound as it shimmered and glowed for its brief life.

From the heart of the flames, carrying across the water, a single human scream reached the ears of the sailors:

“Shche ne vmerla Ukraina. ...”

Then it was gone. The flames died down, fluttered, and waned. The fog closed in.

“What the hell did that mean?” whispered the commander of the Cutlass. Major Fallon shrugged.

“Don’t ask me. Some foreign lingo.”

From beside them, Adam Munro gazed at the last flicker­ing glow of the dying flames.

“Roughly translated,” he said, “it means ‘The Ukraine will live again.’ ”