The Devil's Alternative

IT WAS eight P.M. in Western Europe but ten in Moscow, and the Politburo meeting had been in session for an hour.

Yefrem Vishnayev and his supporters were becoming im­patient. The Party theoretician knew he was strong enough; there was no point in further delay. He rose portentously to his feet.

“Comrades, general discussion is all very well, but it brings us nowhere. I have asked for this special meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet for a purpose, and that is to see whether the Presidium continues to have confidence in the leadership of our esteemed Secretary-General, Comrade Maxim Rudin.

“We have all heard the arguments for and against the so-called Treaty of Dublin, concerning the grain shipments the United States had promised to make to us, and the price—in my view, the inordinately high price—we have been required to pay for them.

“And finally we have heard of the escape to Israel of the murderers Mishkin and Lazareff, men who it has been proved to you beyond a doubt were responsible for assassinating our dear comrade, Yuri Ivanenko. My motion is as follows: that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet can no longer have con­fidence in the continued direction of the affairs of our great nation by Comrade Rudin. Comrade Secretary-General, I de­mand a vote on the motion.”

He sat down. There was silence. Even for those partici­pating, far more for the smaller fry present, the fall of a giant from Kremlin power is a terrifying moment.

“Those in favor of the motion?” asked Maxim Rudin.

Yefrem Vishnayev raised his hand. Marshal Nikolai Kerensky followed suit. Vitautas the Lithuanian did likewise. There was a pause of several seconds. Mukhamed the Tajik raised his hand. The telephone rang. Rudin answered it, listened, and replaced the receiver.

“I should not, of course,” he said impassively, “interrupt a vote, but the news just received is of some passing interest.

“Two hours ago Mishkin and Lazareff both died, instan­taneously, in cells beneath the central police station of Tel Aviv. A colleague fell to his death from a hotel balcony win­dow outside that city. One hour ago the terrorists who had hi­jacked the Freya in the North Sea—to liberate these men—died in a sea of blazing petrol. None of them ever opened their mouths. And now none of them ever will.

“We were, I believe, in the midst of voting on Comrade Vishnayev’s resolution. ...”

Eyes were studiously averted; gazes were upon the table.

“Those against the motion?” murmured Rudin.

Vassili Petrov and Dmitri Rykov raised their hands. They were followed by Chavadze the Georgian, Shushkin, and Stepanov.

Petryanov, who had once voted for the Vishnayev faction, glanced at the raised hands, caught the drift of the wind, and raised his own.

“May I,” said Komarov of Agriculture, “express my per­sonal pleasure at being able to vote with the most complete confidence in favor of our Secretary-General.”

He raised his hand. Rudin smiled at him.

Slug, thought Rudin. I am personally going to stamp you into the garden path.

“Then with my own vote the issue is denied by eight votes to four,” said Rudin. “I don’t think there is any other business?”

There was none.

Twelve hours later, Captain Thor Larsen stood once again on the bridge of the Freya and scanned the sea around him.

It had been an eventful night. The British Marines had found and freed him twelve hours before, on the verge of collapse. Royal Navy demolitions experts had carefully low­ered themselves into the holds of the supertanker and plucked the detonators from the dynamite, bringing the charges gently up from the bowels of the ship to the deck, whence they were removed.

Strong hands had turned the steel cleats to the door behind which his crew had been imprisoned for sixty-four hours, and the liberated seamen had whooped and danced for joy. All night they had been putting through personal calls to their parents and wives.

The gentle hands of a Royal Navy doctor had laid Thor Larsen on his own bunk and tended the wounds as well as conditions would allow.

“You’ll need surgery, of course,” the doctor told the Nor­wegian. “And it’ll be set up for the moment you arrive by helicopter in Rotterdam.”

“Wrong,” said Larsen on the brink of unconsciousness. “I will go to Rotterdam, but I will go on the Freya.”

The doctor had cleaned and swabbed the broken hand, sterilizing against infection and injecting morphine to dull the pain. Before he was finished, Thor Larsen slept.

Skilled hands had piloted the stream of helicopters that landed on the Freya’s helipad amidships through the night, bringing Harry Wennerstrom to inspect his ship, and the berth­ing crew to help her dock. The pumpman had found his spare fuses and repaired his cargo-control pumps. Crude oil had been pumped from one of the full holds to the vented one to restore the balance; the valves had all been closed.

While the captain slept, the first and second officers had examined every inch of the Freya from stem to stern. The chief engineer had gone over his beloved engines foot by foot, testing every system to make sure nothing had been damaged.

During the dark hours, the tugs and firefighting ships had started to spray their emulsifier concentrate onto the area of sea where the scum of the vented oil still clung to the water. Most had burned off in the single brief holocaust caused by the magnesium shells of Captain Manning.

Just before dawn, Thor Larsen had awakened. The chief steward had helped him gently into his clothes, the full uni­form of a senior captain of the Nordia Line that he insisted on wearing. He had slipped his bandaged hand carefully down the sleeve with the four gold rings, then hung the hand back in the sling around his neck.

At eight A.M. he stood beside his first and second officers on the bridge. The two pilots from Maas Control were also there, the senior pilot with his independent “brown box” navi­gational aid system.

To Thor Larsen’s surprise, the sea to the north, south, and west of him was crowded. There were trawlers from the Humber and the Scheide, fishermen up from Lorient and Saint-Malo, Ostende and the coast of Kent. Merchant vessels flying a dozen flags mingled with the warships of five NATO navies, all of them hove to within a radius of three miles and outward from that.

At two minutes past eight, the gigantic propellers of the Freya began to turn, the massive anchor cable rumbled up from the ocean floor. From beneath her stern a maelstrom of white water appeared.

In the sky above, four aircraft circled, bearing television cameras that showed a watching world the sea goddess com­ing under way.

As the wake broadened behind her, and the Viking helmet emblem of her company fluttered out from her yardarm, the North Sea exploded in a burst of sound.

Little sirens like tin whistles, booming roars and shrill whoops echoed across the water as over a hundred sea cap­tains commanding vessels from the tiny to the grand, from the harmless to the deadly, gave the Freya the traditional sailor’s greeting.

Thor Larsen looked at the crowded sea about him and the empty lane leading to Euro Buoy 1. He turned to the waiting Dutch pilot.

“Mr. Pilot, pray set course for Rotterdam.”

On Sunday, April 10, 1983, in St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, two men approached the great oak refectory table that had been brought in for the purpose, and took their seats.

In the Minstrel Gallery the television cameras peered through the arcs of white light that bathed the table and beamed their images across the world.

Dmitri Rykov painstakingly scrawled his name for the So­viet Union on both copies of the Treaty of Dublin and passed the copies, bound in red Morocco leather, to David Lawrence, who signed for the United States.

Within hours the first grain ships, waiting off Murmansk and Leningrad, Sebastopol and Odessa, moved forward to their berths.

A week later the first Warsaw Pact units along the Iron Curtain began to load their gear to pull back east from the barbed-wire line.

On Thursday the fourteenth, the routine meeting of the Polit­buro in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin was far from routine.

The last man to enter the room, having been delayed out­side by a major of the Kremlin guard, was Yefrem Vishnayev.

When he came through the doorway, he observed that the faces of the other eleven members were all turned toward him. Maxim Rudin brooded at the center place at the top of the T-shaped table. Down each side of the stem were five chairs, and each was occupied. There was only one chair left vacant. It was the one at the far end of the stem of the table, facing up the length of it.

Impassively, Yefrem Vishnayev walked slowly forward to take that seat, known simply as the Penal Chair. It was to be his last Politburo meeting.

On April 18 a small freighter was rolling in the Black Sea swell, ten miles off the shore of Rumania. Just before two A.M. a fast speedboat left the freighter and raced toward the shore. At three miles it halted, and a Marine on board took a powerful flashlight, pointed it toward the invisible sands, and blinked a signal: three long dashes and three short ones. There was no answering light from the beach. The man re­peated his signal four times. Still there was no answer.

The speedboat turned back and returned to the freighter. An hour later it was stowed below decks and a message was transmitted to London.

From London another message went in code to the British Embassy in Moscow: “Regret Nightingale has not made the rendezvous. Suggest you return to London.”

On April 25 there was a plenary meeting of the full Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Palace of Congresses inside the Kremlin. The delegates had come from all over the Soviet Union, some of them many thousands of miles.

Standing on the podium beneath the outsized head of Lenin, Maxim Rudin made them his farewell speech.

He began by outlining to them the crisis that had faced their country twelve months earlier; he painted a picture of famine and hunger to make their hair stand on end. He went on to describe the brilliant feat of diplomacy by which the Politburo had instructed Dmitri Rykov to meet the Ameri­cans in Dublin and gain from them grain shipments of un­precedented size, along with imports of technology and computers, all at minimal cost. No mention was made of concessions on arms levels. He received a standing ovation for ten minutes.

Turning his attention to the matter of world peace, he re­minded one and all of the constant danger to peace that was posed by the territorial and imperialistic ambitions of the capitalist West, occasionally aided by enemies of peace right there within the Soviet Union.

This was too much; consternation was unconfined. But, he went on with an admonishing finger, the secret conspirators with the imperialists had been uncovered and rooted out, thanks to the eternal vigilance of the tireless Yuri Ivanenko, who had died a week earlier in a sanatorium after a long and gallant struggle against a serious heart ailment.

When the news of his death broke, there were cries of hor­ror and compassion for the departed comrade who had saved them all. Rudin raised a regretful hand for silence.

But, he told them, Ivanenko had been ably assisted before his heart attack the previous October, and replaced since his infirmity began, by his ever loyal comrade-in-arms Vassili Petrov, who had completed the task of safeguarding the Soviet Union as the world’s first champion of peace.

There was an ovation for Vassili Petrov.

Because the conspiracies of the antipeace faction, both in­side and outside the Soviet Union, had been exposed and destroyed, Rudin went on, it had been possible for the USSR, in its unending search for detente and peace, to curb its arms-building programs for the first time in years. More of the national effort could thenceforward be directed toward the production of consumer goods and social improvement, thanks solely to the vigilance of the Politburo in spotting the antipeace faction for what they were.

This time the applause extended for another ten minutes.

Maxim Rudin waited until the clapping was almost over before he raised his hands; then he dropped his speaking tone.

As for himself, Rudin said, he had done what he could, but the time had come for him to depart.

The stunned silence was tangible.

He had toiled long—too long, perhaps—bearing on his shoulders the most onerous burdens, which had sapped his strength and his health.

On the podium, his shoulders slumped with the weariness of it all. There were cries of “No! No!”

He was an old man, Rudin said. What did he want? Noth­ing more than any other old man wanted. To sit by the fire on a winter’s night and play with his grandchildren. ...

In the diplomatic gallery the British head of Chancery whispered to the Ambassador:

“I say, that’s going a bit strong. He’s had more people shot than I’ve had hot dinners.”

The Ambassador raised a single eyebrow and muttered back:

“Think yourself lucky. If this were America, he’d produce his bloody grandchildren on the stage.”

And so, concluded Rudin, the time had come for him to admit openly to his friends and comrades that the doctors had informed him he had only a few more months to live. With his audience’s permission he would lay down the burden of office and spend what little time remained to him in the countryside he loved so much, with the family who were the sun and the moon to him.

Several of the women delegates were crying openly by now.

One last question remained, said Rudin. He wished to re­tire in five days, on the last day of the month. The following morning was May Day, and a new man would stand atop Lenin’s Mausoleum to take the salute of the great parade. Who would that man be?

It should be a man of youth and vigor, of wisdom and un­bounded patriotism; a man who had proved himself in the highest councils of the land but was not yet bowed with age. Such a man, Rudin proclaimed, the peoples of the fifteen So­viet Socialist Republics were lucky to have, in the person of Vassili Petrov. ...

The election of Petrov to succeed Rudin was carried by ac­clamation. Supporters of alternative candidates would have been shouted down had they tried to speak. They did not even bother.

Following the climax of the hijacking in the North Sea, Sir Nigel Irvine had wished Adam Munro to remain in London, or at least not to return to Moscow. Munro had appealed personally to the Prime Minister to be allowed one last chance to ascertain whether his agent, the Nightingale, was safe. In view of his role in ending the crisis, his wish had been granted.

Since his meeting in the small hours of April 3 with Maxim Rudin, it was evident that his cover was completely blown and that he could not function as an agent in Moscow.

The Ambassador and the head of Chancery regarded his return with considerable misgivings, and it was no surprise when his name was carefully excluded from any diplomatic invitations, or that he could not be received by any represen­tative of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade. He hung about like a forlorn and unwanted party guest, hoping against hope that Valentina would contact him to indicate she was safe.

Once he tried her private telephone number. There was no answer. She could have been out, but he dared not risk it again. Following the fall of the Vishnayev faction, he was told he had until the end of the month. Then he would be re­called to London, and his resignation from the Firm would be gratefully accepted.

Maxim Rudin’s farewell speech caused a furor in the diplo­matic missions, as each informed its home government of the news of Rudin’s departure and prepared position papers on his successor, Vassili Petrov. Munro was excluded from this whirl of activity.

It was therefore all the more surprising when, following the announcement of a reception in St. George’s Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace on the evening of April 30, invitations arrived at the British Embassy for the Ambassador, the head of Chancery, and Adam Munro. It was even hinted during a phone call from the Soviet Foreign Ministry to the embassy that Munro was confidently expected to attend.

The state reception to bid farewell to Maxim Rudin was a glittering affair. Over a hundred of the elite of the Soviet Union mingled with four times that number of foreign diplo­mats from the Socialist world, the West, and the Third World. Fraternal delegations from Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc were also there, ill at ease amid the full eve­ning dress, military uniforms, stars, orders, and medals. It could have been a tsar who was abdicating, rather than the leader of a classless workers’ paradise.

The foreigners mingled with their Russian hosts beneath the three thousand lights of the six spreading chandeliers, ex­changing gossip and congratulations in the niches where the great tsarist war heroes were commemorated with the other Knights of St. George. Maxim Rudin moved among them like an old lion, accepting the plaudits of well-wishers from one hundred fifty countries as no more than his due.

Munro spotted him from afar, but he was not included in the list of those presented personally, nor was it wise for him to approach the outgoing Secretary-General. Before midnight, pleading a natural tiredness, Rudin excused himself and left the guests to the care of Petrov and the others from the Polit­buro.

Twenty minutes later Adam Munro felt a touch at his arm. Standing behind him was an immaculate major in the uni­form of the Kremlin’s own praetorian guard. Impassive as ever, the major spoke to him in Russian.

“Mr. Munro, please come with me.”

His tone permitted of no expostulation. Munro was not surprised. Evidently, his inclusion in the guest list had been a mistake; it had been spotted, and he was being asked to leave.

But the major headed away from the main doors, passed through into the high, octagonal Hall of St. Vladimir, up a wooden staircase guarded by a bronze grille, and out into the warm starlight of Upper Savior Square.

The man walked with completely confident tread, at ease among passages and doorways well known to him, although unseen by most.

Still following, Munro went across the square and into the Terem Palace. Silent guards were at every door; each opened as the major approached, and closed as they passed through. They walked straight across the Front Hall Chamber and to the end of the Cross Chamber. Here, at a door at the far end, the major paused and knocked. There was a gruff command from inside. The major opened the door, stood aside, and in­dicated that Munro should enter.

The third chamber in the Terem Palace, the so-called Palace of Chambers, is the Throne Room, the holy of holies of the old tsars, the most inaccessible of all the rooms. In red, gilt, and mosaic tiles, with parquet floor and deep burgundy carpet, it is lush but smaller and warmer than most of the other rooms. It was the place where the tsars worked or re­ceived emissaries in complete privacy. Standing staring out through the Petition Window was Maxim Rudin. He turned as Munro entered.

“So, Mr. Munro, you will be leaving us, I hear.”

It had been twenty-seven days since Munro had seen him before, in dressing gown, nursing a glass of milk, in his per­sonal apartments in the Arsenal. Now he was in a beautifully cut charcoal-gray suit, almost certainly from Savile Row, London, bearing the two orders of Lenin and Hero of the So­viet Union on the left lapel. The Throne Room suited him better this way.

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Munro.

Maxim Rudin glanced at his watch.

“In ten minutes, Mr. ex-President,” he remarked. “Mid­night, I officially retire. You also, I presume, will be re­tiring?”

The old fox knows perfectly well that my cover was blown the night I met him, thought Munro, and that I also have to retire.

“Yes, Mr. President. I shall be returning to London tomor­row, to retire.”

Rudin did not approach him or hold out his hand. He stood across the room, just where the tsars had once stood, in the room representing the pinnacle of the Russian Empire, and nodded.

“Then I shall wish you farewell, Mr. Munro.”

He pressed a small onyx bell on a table, and behind Munro the door opened.

“Good-bye, sir,” said Munro. He had half turned to go, when Rudin spoke again.

“Tell me, Mr. Munro, what do you think of our Red Square?”

Munro stopped, puzzled. It was a strange question for a man saying farewell. Munro thought, and answered carefully.

“It is very impressive.”

“Impressive, yes,” said Rudin, as if weighing the word. “Not, perhaps, so elegant as your Berkeley Square, but some­times, even here, you can hear a Nightingale sing.”

Munro stood motionless as the painted saints on the ceiling above him. His stomach turned over in a wave of nausea. They had got her, and, unable to resist, she had told them all, even the code name and the reference to the old song about the Nightingale in Berkeley Square.

“Will you shoot her?” he asked dully.

Rudin seemed genuinely surprised.

“Shoot her? Why should we shoot her?”

So it would be the labor camps, the living death, for the woman he loved and had been so near to marrying in his na­tive Scotland.

“Then what will you do to her?”

The old Russian raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.

“Do? Nothing. She is a loyal woman, a patriot. She is also very fond of you, young man. Not in love, you understand, but genuinely fond—”

“I don’t understand,” said Munro. “How do you know?”

“She asked me to tell you,” said Rudin. “She will not be a housewife in Edinburgh. She will not be Mrs. Munro. She cannot see you again—ever. But she does not want you to worry for her, to fear for her. She is well, privileged, hon­ored, among her own people. She asked me to tell you not to worry.”

The dawning comprehension was almost as dizzying as the fear. Munro stared at Rudin as the disbelief receded.

“She was yours,” he said quietly. “She was yours all along. From the first contact in the woods, just after Vishnayev made his bid for war in Europe. She was working for you. ...”

The grizzled old Kremlin fox shrugged.

“Mr. Munro,” growled the old Russian, “how else could I get my messages to President Matthews with the absolute cer­tainty that they would be believed?”

The impassive major with the cold eyes drew at his elbow; he was outside the Throne Room, and the door closed behind him. Five minutes later he was shown out, on foot, through a small door in the Savior Gate onto Red Square. The parade marshals were rehearsing their roles for May Day. The clock above his head struck midnight.

He turned left toward the National Hotel to find a taxi. A hundred yards later, as he passed Lenin’s Mausoleum, to the surprise and outrage of a militiaman, he began to laugh.