The Devil's Alternative

CLOSE BY THE BRIDGE across the Moscow River at Uspenskoye is a restaurant called the Russian Isba. It is built in the style of the timber cottages in which Russian peasants dwell, and which are called isbas. Both interior and exterior are of split nine tree trunks, nailed to timber uprights. The gap between is traditionally filled with river clay, in a fashion not unlike the manner in which North American log cabins are insulated.

These isbas may look primitive, and from the point of view of sanitation often are, but they are much warmer than brick or concrete structures through the freezing Russian winters. The Isba restaurant is snug and warm inside, divided into a dozen small private dining rooms, many of which will seat only one dinner party. Unlike the restaurants of central Mos­cow, it is permitted a profit incentive linked to staff pay, and as a result, and in even more stark contrast to the usual run of Russian eateries, it has tasty food and fast and willing service.

It was here that Adam Munro had set up his next meeting with Valentina, scheduled for Saturday, September 4. She had secured a dinner date with a male friend and had per­suaded him to take her to this particular restaurant. Munro had invited one of the embassy secretaries to dinner, and had booked the table in her name, not in his own. The written reservations record would not, therefore, show that either Munro or Valentina had been present that evening.

They dined in separate rooms, and on the dot of nine o’clock each made the excuse of going to the toilet and left the table. They met in the parking lot, and Munro, whose own car would have been too noticeable with its embassy plates, followed Valentina to her own private Zhiguli sedan. She was subdued and puffed nervously at a cigarette.

Munro had handled two Russian defectors-in-place and knew the incessant strahl that begins to wear at the nerves af­ter a few weeks of subterfuge and secrecy.

“I got my chance,” she said at length. “Three days ago. The meeting of early July. I was nearly caught.”

Munro was tense. Whatever she might think about her being trusted within the Party machine, no one, no one at all, is ever really trusted in Moscow politics. She was walking a high wire; they both were. The difference was, he had a net: his diplomatic status.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Someone came in. A guard. I had just switched off the copying machine and was back at my typewriter. He was per­fectly friendly. But he leaned against the machine. It was still warm. I don’t think he noticed anything. But it frightened me. That’s not all that frightened me. I couldn’t read the transcript until I got home. I was too busy feeding it into the copier. Adam, it’s awful.”

She took her car keys, unlocked the glove compartment, and extracted a fat envelope, which she handed to Munro. The moment of handover is usually the moment when the watchers pounce, if they are there; the moment when the feet pound on the gravel, the doors are torn open, the occupants dragged out. Nothing happened.

Munro glanced at his watch. Nearly ten minutes. Too long. He put the envelope in his inside breast pocket.

“I’m going to try for permission to bring you out,” he said. “You can’t go on like this forever, even for much longer. Nor can you simply settle back to the old life, not now. Not knowing what you know. Nor can I carry on, knowing you are out in the city, knowing that we love each other. I have a leave break next month. I’m going to ask them in London then.”

This time she made no demur, a sign that her nerve was showing the first signs of breaking.

“All right,” she said. Seconds later, she was gone into the darkness of the parking lot. He watched her enter the pool of light by the open restaurant door and disappear inside. He gave her two minutes, then returned to his own impatient companion.

It was three in the morning before Munro had finished read­ing Plan Aleksandr, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky’s scenario for the conquest of Western Europe. He poured himself a double brandy and sat staring at the papers on his sitting-room table. Valentina’s jolly, kindly Uncle Nikolai, he mused, had cer­tainly laid it on the line. He spent two hours staring at a map of Europe, and by sunrise was as certain as Kerensky himself that in terms of conventional warfare the plan would work. Secondly, he was sure that Rykov, too, was right: thermonu­clear war would ensue. And thirdly, he was convinced there was no way of convincing the dissident members of the Polit­buro of this, short of the holocaust’s actually happening.

He rose and went to the window. Daylight was breaking in the east, out over the Kremlin spires; an ordinary Sunday was beginning for the citizens of Moscow, as it would in two hours for the Londoners and five hours later for the New Yorkers.

All his adult life the guarantee that summer Sundays would remain just plain ordinary had been dependent on a fine balance—a balance of belief in the might and willpower of the opponent superpower, a balance of credibility, a bal­ance of fear, but a balance for all that. He shivered, partly from the chill of morning, more from the realization that the papers behind him proved that at last the old nightmare was coming out of the shadows; the balance was breaking down.

The Sunday sunrise found Andrew Drake in far better hu­mor, for his Saturday night had brought information of a dif­ferent kind.

Every area of human knowledge, however small, however arcane, has its experts and its devotees. And every group of these appear to have one place where they congregate to talk, discuss, exchange their information, and impart the newest gossip.

Shipping movements in the eastern Mediterranean hardly form a subject on which doctorates are earned, but they do form a subject of great interest to out-of-work seamen in that area, such as Andrew Drake was pretending to be. The in­formation center about such movements is a small hotel called the Cavo d’Oro, standing above a yacht basin in the port of Piraeus.

Drake had already observed the offices of the agents, and probable owners, of the Salonika Line, but he knew the last thing he should do was to visit them.

Instead, he checked into the Cavo d’Oro Hotel and spent his time at the bar, where captains, mates, bosuns, agents, dockland gossips, and job seekers sat over drinks to exchange what tidbits of information they had. On Saturday night Drake found his man, a bosun who had once worked for the Salonika Line. It took half a bottle of retsina to extract the information.

“The one that visits Odessa most frequently is the M/V Sanadria,” he was told. “She is an old tub. Captain is Nikos Thanos. I think she’s in harbor now.”

She was in harbor, and Drake found her by midmorning. She was a five-thousand-ton-deadweight, tween-deck Mediter­ranean trader, rusty and none too clean, but if she was head­ing into the Black Sea and up to Odessa on her next voyage, Drake would not have minded if she had been full of holes.

By sundown he had found her captain, having learned that Thanos and all his officers were from the Greek island of Chios. Most of these Greek-run traders are almost family af­fairs, the master and his senior officers usually being from the same island, and often interrelated. Drake spoke no Greek, but fortunately English was the lingua franca of the interna­tional maritime community, even in Piraeus, and just before sundown he found Captain Thanos.

Northern Europeans, when they finish work, head for home, wife, and family. Eastern Mediterraneans head for the coffeehouse, friends, and gossip. The mecca of the coffee­house community in Piraeus is a street alongside the water­front called Akti Miaouli; its vicinity contains little else but shipping offices and coffeehouses.

Each frequenter has his favorite, and they are always crammed. Captain Thanos hung out when he was ashore at an open-fronted affair called Miki’s, and there Drake found him, sitting over the inevitable thick black coffee, tumbler of cold water, and shot glass of ouzo. He was short, broad, and nut-brown, with black curly hair and several days of stubble.

“Captain Thanos?” asked Drake. The man looked up in suspicion at the Englishman and nodded.

“Nikos Thanos, of the Sanadria?” The seaman nodded again. His three companions had fallen silent, watching. Drake smiled.

“My name is Andrew Drake. Can I offer you a drink?” Captain Thanos used one forefinger to indicate his own glass and those of his companions. Drake, still standing, sum­moned a waiter and ordered five of everything. Thanos nodded to a vacant chair, the invitation to join them. Drake knew it would be slow, and might take days. But he was not going to hurry. He had found his ship.

The meeting in the Oval Office five days later was far less relaxed. All eight members of the ad hoc committee of the National Security Council were present, with President Mat­thews in the chair. All had spent half the night reading the transcript of the Politburo meeting in which Marshal Kerensky had laid out his plan for war and Vishnayev had made his bid for power. All eight men were shaken. The focus was on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Craig.

“The question is, General,” President Matthews asked, “is it feasible?”

“In terms of a conventional war across the face of Western Europe from the Iron Curtain to the Channel ports, even in­volving the use of tactical nuclear shells and rockets, yes, Mr. President, it’s feasible.”

“Could the West, before next spring, increase her defenses to the point of making it completely unworkable?”

“That’s a harder one, Mr. President. Certainly we in the United States could ship more men, more hardware, over to Europe. That would give the Soviets ample excuse to beef up their own levels, if they ever needed such an excuse. But as to our European allies, they don’t have the reserves we have; for over a decade they have run down their manpower levels, arms levels, and preparation levels to a point where the im­balance in conventional manpower and hardware between the NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact forces is at a stage that cannot be recouped in a mere nine months. The training that the personnel would need, even if recruited now, the produc­tion of new weapons of the necessary sophistication—these cannot be achieved in nine months.”

“So they’re back to 1939 again,” said the Secretary of the Treasury gloomily.

“What about the nuclear option?” asked Bill Matthews qui­etly. General Craig shrugged.

“If the Soviets attack in full force, it’s inescapable. Fore­warned may be forearmed, but nowadays armament pro­grams and training programs take too long. Forewarned as we are, we could slow up a Soviet advance westward, spoil Kerensky’s time scale of a hundred hours. But whether we could stop him dead—the whole damn Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force—that’s another matter. By the time we knew the answer, it would probably be too late, anyway. Which makes our use of the nuclear option inescapable. Unless, of course, sir, we abandon Europe and our three hundred thou­sand men there.”

“David?” asked the President.

Secretary of State David Lawrence tapped the file in front of him.

“For about the first time in my life, I agree with Dmitri Rykov. It’s not just a question of Western Europe. If Europe goes, the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, Iran, and the Arabian states cannot hold. Ten years ago, five per­cent of our oil was imported; five years ago, the total had risen to fifty percent. Now it’s running at sixty-two percent, and rising. Even the whole of the Western Hemisphere can­not fulfill more than fifty-five percent of our needs at max­imum production. We need the Arabian oil. Without it we are as finished as Europe, without a shot fired.”

Suggestions, gentlemen?” asked the President.

“The Nightingale is valuable, but not indispensable, not now,” said Stanislaw Poklewski. “Why not meet with Rudin and lay it on the table? We now know about Plan Aleksandr; we know the intent. And we will take steps to head off that intent to make it unworkable. When he informs his Politburo of that, they’ll realize the element of surprise is lost, that the war option won’t work anymore. It’ll be the end of the Night­ingale, but it will also be the end of Plan Aleksandr.”

Bob Benson of the CIA shook his head vigorously.

“I don’t think it’s that simple, Mr. President. As I read it, it’s not a question of convincing Rudin or Rykov. There’s a vicious faction fight now going on inside the Politburo, as we know. At stake is the succession to Rudin. And the famine is hanging over them.

“Vishnayev and Kerensky have proposed- a limited war as a means both of obtaining the food surpluses of Western Eu­rope and of imposing war discipline on the Soviet peoples. Revealing what we know to Rudin would change nothing. It might even cause him to fall. Vishnayev and his group would take over; they are completely ignorant of the West and the way we Americans react to being attacked. Even with the ele­ment of surprise gone, with the grain famine pending they could still try the war option.”

“I agree with Bob,” said David Lawrence. “There is a par­allel here with the Japanese position forty years ago. The oil embargo caused the fall of the moderate Konoye faction. In­stead, we got General Tojo, and that led to Pearl Harbor. If Maxim Rudin is toppled now, we could get Yefrem Vishnayev in his place. And on the basis of these papers, that could lead to war.”

“Then Maxim Rudin must not fall,” said President Mat­thews.

“Mr. President, I protest,” said Poklewski heatedly. “Am I to understand that the efforts of the United States are now to be bent toward saving the skin of Maxim Rudin? Have any of us forgotten what he did, the people liquidated under his regime, for him to get to the pinnacle of power in Soviet Russia?”

“Stan, I’m sorry,” said President Matthews with finality. “Last month I authorized a refusal by the United States to supply the Soviet Union with the grain it needs to head off a famine. At least until I knew what the perspectives of that famine would be. I can no longer pursue that policy of rejec­tion, because I think we now know what those perspectives entail.

“Gentlemen, I am going this night to draft a personal letter to President Rudin, proposing that David Lawrence and Dmi­tri Rykov meet on neutral territory to confer together. And that they confer on the subject of the new SALT Four arms-limitation treaty and any other matters of interest.”

When Andrew Drake returned to the Cavo d’Oro after his second meeting with Captain Thanos, there was a message waiting for him. It was from Azamat Krim, to say he and Kaminsky had just checked into their agreed hotel.

An hour later Drake was with them. The van had come through unscathed. During the night, Drake had the guns and ammunition transferred piece by piece to his own room at the Cavo d’Oro in separate visits from Kaminsky and Krim. When all was safely locked away, he took them both out to dinner. The following morning, Krim flew back to London, to live in Drake’s apartment and await his phone call. Kaminsky stayed on in a small pension in the back streets of Pi­raeus. It was not comfortable, but it was anonymous.

While they were dining, the U.S. Secretary of State was locked in private conference with the Irish Ambassador to Washington.

“If my meeting with Foreign Minister Rykov is to succeed,” said David Lawrence, “we must have privacy. The discretion must be absolute. Reykjavik in Iceland is too obvi­ous; our base at Keflavik there is like U.S. territory. The meeting has to be on neutral territory. Geneva is full of watching eyes; ditto Stockholm and Vienna. Helsinki, like Iceland, would be too obvious. Ireland is halfway between Moscow and Washington, and you still foster the cult of pri­vacy there.”

That night, coded messages passed between Washington and Dublin. Within twenty-four hours, the government in Dublin had agreed to host the meeting and proposed flight plans for both parties. Within hours, President Matthews’s personal and private letter to President Maxim Rudin was on its way to Ambassador Donaldson in Moscow.

Andrew Drake at his third attempt secured a person-to-per­son conversation with Captain Nikos Thanos. There was by then little doubt in the old Greek’s mind that the young En­glishman wanted something from him, but he gave no hint of curiosity. As usual, Drake bought the coffee and ouzo.

“Captain,” said Drake, “I have a problem, and I think you may be able to help me.”

Thanos raised an eyebrow but studied his coffee.

“Sometime near the end of the month the Sanadria will sail from Piraeus for Istanbul and the Black Sea. I believe you will be calling at Odessa.”

Thanos nodded. “We are due to sail on the thirtieth,” he said, “and yes, we will be discharging cargo at Odessa.”

“I want to go to Odessa,” said Drake. “I must reach Odessa.”

“You are an Englishman,” said Thanos. “There are pack­age tours of Odessa. You could fly there. There are cruises by Soviet liners out of Odessa. You could join one.”

Drake shook his head.

“It’s not as easy as that,” he said. “Captain Thanos, I would not receive a visa for Odessa. My application would be dealt with in Moscow, and I would not be allowed in.”

“And why do you want to go?” asked Thanos with suspi­cion.

“I have a girl in Odessa,” said Drake. “My fiancee. I want to get her out.”

Captain Thanos shook his head with finality. He and his ancestors from Chios had been smuggling in the eastern Med­iterranean since Homer was learning to talk, and he knew that a brisk contraband trade went into and out of Odessa, and that his own crew made a tidy living on the side from bringing such luxury items as nylons, perfume, and leather coats to the black market of the Ukrainian port. But smug­gling people was quite different, and he had no intention of getting involved in that.

“I don’t think you understand,” said Drake. “There’s no question of bringing her out on the Sanadria. Let me ex­plain.”

He produced a photograph of himself and a remarkably pretty girl sitting on the balustrade of the Potemkin Stairway, which links the city with the port. Thanos’s interest revived at once, for the girl was definitely worth looking at.

“I am a graduate in Russian studies of the University of Bradford,” said Drake. “Last year I was an exchange student for six months, and spent those six months at Odessa Univer­sity. That was where I met Larissa. We fell in love. We wanted to get married.”

Like most Greeks, Nikos Thanos prided himself on his ro­mantic nature. Drake was talking his language.

“Why didn’t you?” he asked.

“The Soviet authorities would not let us,” said Drake. “Of course, I wanted to bring Larissa back to England and marry her and settle down. She applied for permission to leave and was turned down. I kept reapplying on her behalf from the London end. No luck. Then, last July, I did as you just sug­gested; I went on a package tour to the Ukraine, through Kiev, Ternopol, and Lvov.”

He flicked open his passport and showed Thanos the date stamps at the Kiev airport.

“She came up to Kiev to see me. We made love. Now she has written to me to say she is having our baby. So now I have to marry her more than ever.”

Captain Thanos also knew the rules. They had applied to his society since time began. He looked again at the photo­graph. He was not to know that the girl was a London lady who had posed in a studio not far from King’s Cross station, nor that the background of the Potemkin Stairway was an en­larged detail from a tourist poster obtained at the London of­fice of Intourist.

“So how are you going to get her out?” he asked.

“Next month,” said Drake, “there is a Soviet liner, the Litva, leaving Odessa with a large party from the Soviet youth movement, the Komsomol, for an off-season educa­tional tour of the Mediterranean.”

Thanos nodded; he knew the Litva well.

“Because I made too many scenes over the matter of Lar­issa, the authorities will not let me back in. Larissa would not normally be allowed to go on this tour. But there is an official in the local branch of the Interior Ministry who likes to live well above his income. He will get her onto that cruise with all her papers in order, and when the ship docks at Venice, I will be waiting for her. But the official wants ten thousand American dollars. I have them, but I have to get the package to her.”

It made perfect sense to Captain Thanos. He knew the level of bureaucratic corruption that was endemic to the southern shore of the Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia—Com­munism or no Communism. That an official should “arrange” a few documents for enough Western currency to improve his life-style substantially was quite normal.

An hour later the deal was concluded. For a further five thousand dollars Thanos would take Drake on as a temporary deckhand for the duration of the voyage.

“We sail on the thirtieth,” he said, “and we should be in Odessa on the tenth or eleventh. Be at the quay where the Sanadria is berthed by six P.M. on the thirtieth. Wait until the agent’s water clerk has left, then come aboard just before the immigration people.”

Four hours later in Drake’s flat in London, Azamat Krim took Drake’s call from Piraeus giving bun the date that Mishkin and Lazareff needed to know.

It was on the twentieth that President Matthews received Maxim Rudin’s reply. It was a personal letter, as his had been to the Soviet leader. In it Rudin agreed to the secret meeting between David Lawrence and Dmitri Rykov in Ire­land, scheduled for the twenty-fourth.

President Matthews pushed the letter across his desk to Lawrence.

“He’s not wasting time,” he remarked.

“He has no time to waste,” returned the Secretary of State. “Everything is being prepared. I have two men in Dublin now, checking out the arrangements. Our Ambassador to Dub­lin will be meeting the Soviet Ambassador tomorrow, as a result of this letter, to finalize details.”

“Well, David, you know what to do,” said the President.

Azamat Krim’s problem was to be able to post a letter or card to Mishkin from inside the Soviet Union, complete with Russian stamps and written in Russian, without going through the necessary delay in waiting for a visa to be granted to him by the Soviet Consulate in London, which could take up to four weeks. With the help of Drake, he had solved it relatively simply.

Prior to 1980, the main airport of Moscow, Sheremetyevo, had been a small, drab, and shabby affair. But for the Olym­pics the Soviet government had commissioned a grand new airport terminal there, and Drake had done some research on it.

The facilities in the new terminal, which handled all long­-distance flights out of Moscow, were excellent. There were numerous plaques praising the achievements of Soviet tech­nology all over the airport; conspicuous by its absence was any mention that Moscow had had to commission a West German firm to build the place because no Soviet construc­tion company could have achieved the standard or the com­pletion date. The West Germans had been handsomely paid in hard currency, but their contract had had rigorous penalty clauses in the case of noncompletion by the start of the 1980 Olympics. For this reason, the Germans had used only two local Russian ingredients—sand and water. Everything else had been trucked in from West Germany in order to be cer­tain of delivery on time.

In the great transit lounge and departure lounges, they had built letter boxes to handle the mail of anyone forgetting to post his last picture postcards from inside Moscow before leaving. The KGB monitors every single letter, postcard, cable, or phone call coming into or leaving the Soviet Union. Massive though the task may be, it gets done. But the new departure lounges at Sheremetyevo were used both for inter­national flights and for long-distance internal Soviet Union flights.

Krim’s postcard, therefore, had been acquired at the Aero­flot offices in London. Modern Soviet stamps sufficient for a postcard at the internal rate had been openly bought from the London stamp emporium Stanley Gibbons. On the card, which showed a picture of the Tupolev-144 supersonic pas­senger jet, was written in Russian the message: “Just leaving with our factory’s Party group for the expedition to Kha­barovsk. Great excitement. Almost forgot to write you. Many happy returns for your birthday on the eleventh. Your cousin, Ivan.”

Khabarovsk being in the extreme southeast of Siberia, close to the Sea of Japan, a group leaving by Aeroflot for that city would leave from the same terminal building as a flight leav­ing for Japan. The card was addressed to David Mishkin at his address in Lvov.

Azamat Krim took the Aeroflot flight from London to Mos­cow and changed planes there for the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Narita Airport, Tokyo. He had an open-dated re­turn. He also had a two-hour wait in the transit lounge in Moscow. Here he dropped the card in the letter box and went on to Tokyo. Once there, he changed to Japan Air Lines and flew back to London.

The card was examined by the KGB postal detail at Mos­cow’s airport, assumed to be from a Russian to a Ukrainian cousin, both living and working inside the USSR, and sent on. It arrived in Lvov three days later.

While the tired and very jet-lagged Crimean Tatar was flying back from Japan, a small jet of the Norwegian internal air­line Braethens-Safe banked high over the fishing town of alesund and began to let down to the municipal airport on the flat island across the bay. From one of its passenger win­dows Thor Larsen looked down with the thrill of excitement that he felt whenever he returned to the small community that had raised him and that would always be home.

He had arrived in the world in 1935, in a fisherman’s cot­tage in the old Buholmen quarter, long since demolished to make way for the new highway. Buholmen before the war had been the fishing quarter, a maze of wooden cottages in gray, blue, and ocher. From his father’s cottage a yard had run down, like all the others along the row, from the back stoop to the sound. Here were the rickety wooden jetties where the independent fishermen like his father had tied their small vessels when they came home from the sea; here the smells of his childhood had been of pitch, resin, paint, salt, and fish.

As a child he had sat on his father’s jetty, watching the big ships moving slowly up to berth at the Storneskaia, and he had dreamed of the places they must visit, far away across the western ocean. By the age of seven he could manage his own small skiff several hundred yards off the Buholmen shore to where old Sula Mountain cast her shadow from across the fjord on the shining water.

“He’ll be a seaman,” said his father, watching with satis­faction from his jetty. “Not a fisherman, staying close to these waters, but a seaman.”

He was five when the Germans came to alesund, big, gray-coated men who tramped around in heavy boots. It was not until he was seven that he saw the war. It was summer, and his father had let him come fishing during the holidays from Norvoy School. With the rest of the alesund fishing fleet, his father’s boat was far out at sea under the guard of a German uboat. During the night he awoke because men were moving about. Away to the west were twinkling lights, the mastheads of the Orkneys fleet.

There was a small rowboat bobbing beside his father’s vessel, and the crew were shifting herring boxes. Before the child’s astounded gaze, a young man, pale and exhausted, emerged from beneath the boxes in the hold and was helped into the rowboat. Minutes later it was lost in the darkness, heading for the Orkneys men. Another radio operator from the Resistance was on his way to England for training. His father made him promise never to mention what he had seen. A week later in alesund there was a rattle of rifle fire one evening, and his mother told him he should say his prayers extra hard because the schoolmaster was dead.

By the time he was in his early teens, growing out of clothes faster than his mother could make them, he, too, had become obsessed with radio and in two years had built his own transmitter-receiver. His father gazed at the apparatus in wonderment; it was beyond his comprehension. Thor was six­teen when, the day after Christmas of 1951, he picked up an SOS message from a ship in distress in the mid-Atlantic. She was the Flying Enterprise. Her cargo had shifted, and she was listing badly in heavy seas.

For sixteen days the world and a teenage Norwegian boy watched and listened with baited breath as the Danish-born American captain, Kurt Carlsen, refused to leave his sinking ship and nursed her painfully eastward through the gales toward the south of England. Sitting in his attic hour after hour with his headphones over his ears, looking out through the dormer window at the wild ocean beyond the mouth of the fjord, Thor Larsen had willed the old freighter to make it home to port. On January 10, 1952, she finally sank, just fifty-seven miles off Falmouth harbor.

Larsen heard her go down, listened to the shadowing tugs tell of her death and of the rescue of her indomitable cap­tain. He took off his headphones, laid them down, and de­scended to his parents, who were at the table.

“I have decided,” he told them, “what I am going to be. I am going to be a sea captain.”

A month later he entered the merchant marine.

The plane touched down and rolled to a stop outside the small, neat terminal with its goose pond by the parking lot. His wife, Lisa, was waiting for him with the car; with her were Kristina, his sixteen-year-old daughter, and Kurt, his fourteen-year-old son. The pair chattered like magpies on the short drive across the island to the ferry, and across the sound to alesund, and all the way home to their comfortable ranch-style house in the secluded suburb of Bogneset.

It was good to be home. He would go fishing with Kurt out on the Borgund Fjord, as his father had taken him fishing there in his youth; they would picnic in the last days of the summer on their little cabin cruiser or on the knobby green islands that dotted the sound. He had three weeks of leave; then Japan, and in February the captaincy of the biggest ship the world had ever seen. He had come a long way from the wooden cottage in Buholmen, but alesund was still his home and for this descendant of Vikings there was nowhere in the world quite like it.

On the night of September 23, a Grumman Gulf stream in the livery of a well-known commercial corporation lifted off from Andrews Air Force Base and, carrying long-distance tanks, headed east across the Atlantic for the Irish airport of Shan­non. It was phased into the Irish air-traffic-control network as a private charter flight. When it landed at Shannon it was shepherded in darkness to the side of the airfield away from the international terminal and surrounded by five black and curtained limousines.

Secretary of State David Lawrence and his party of six were greeted by the U.S. Ambassador and the deputy chief of mission, and all five limousines swept out of the airport pe­rimeter fence by a side gate. They headed northeast through the sleeping countryside toward County Meath.

That same night a Tupolev-134 twin-jet of Aeroflot refu­eled at East Berlin’s Schonefeld Airport and headed west over Germany and the Low Countries toward Britain and Ireland. It was slated as a special Aeroflot flight bringing a trade dele­gation to Dublin. As such, the British air-traffic controllers passed it over to their Irish colleagues as it left the coast of Wales. The Irish had their military air-traffic network take it over, and it landed two hours before dawn at the Irish Air Corps base at Baldonnel, outside Dublin.

Here the Tupolev was parked between two hangars out of sight of the main airfield buildings, and it was greeted by the Soviet Ambassador, the Irish Deputy Foreign Minister, and six limousines. Foreign Minister Rykov and his party entered the vehicles, were screened by the interior curtains, and left the air base.

High above the banks of the River Boyne, in an environ­ment of great natural beauty and not far from the market town of Slane in County Meath, stands Slane Castle, ances­tral home of the family Conyngham, earls of Mount Charles. The youthful earl had been quietly asked by the Irish govern­ment to accept a week’s holiday in a luxury hotel in the west with his pretty countess, and to lend the castle to the govern­ment for a few days. He had agreed. The restaurant at­tached to the castle was marked as closed for repairs, the staff were given a week’s leave, fresh government caterers moved in, and Irish police in plain clothes discreetly posted themselves at all points of the compass around the castle. When the two cavalcades of limousines had entered the grounds, the main gates were shut. If the local people noticed anything, they were courteous enough to make no mention of it.

In the Georgian private dining room before the marble fireplace by Adam, the two statesmen met for a sustaining breakfast.

“Dmitri, good to see you again,” said David Lawrence, ex­tending his hand.

Rykov shook it warmly. He glanced around him at the sil­ver gifts from George IV, and the Conyngham portraits on the walls.

“So this is how you decadent bourgeois capitalists live,” he said.

Lawrence roared with laughter. “I wish it were, Dmitri, I wish it were.”

At eleven o’clock, surrounded by their aides in Johnston’s magnificent Gothic circular library, the two men settled down to negotiate. The bantering was over.

“Mr. Foreign Minister,” said Lawrence, “it seems we both have problems. Ours concern the continuing arms race be­tween our two nations, which nothing seems able to halt or even slow down, and which worries us deeply. Yours seems to concern the forthcoming grain harvest in the Soviet Union. I hope we can find a means between us to lessen these, our mutual problems.”

“I hope so, too, Mr. Secretary of State,” said Rykov cau­tiously. “What have you in mind?”

There is only one direct flight a week between Athens and Istanbul, the Tuesday Sabena connection, leaving Athens’s Ellinikon Airport at 1400 hours and landing at Istanbul at 1645. On Tuesday, September 28, Miroslav Kaminsky was on it, instructed to secure for Andrew Drake a consignment of sheepskin and suede coats and jackets for trading in Odessa.

That same afternoon, Secretary of State Lawrence finished re­porting to the ad hoc committee of the National Security Council in the Oval Office.

“Mr. President, gentlemen, I think we have it. Providing Maxim Rudin can keep his hold on the Politburo and secure their agreement.

“The proposal is that we and the Soviets each send two teams of negotiators to a resumed arms-limitation conference. The suggested venue is Ireland again. The Irish government has agreed and will prepare a suitable conference hall and living accommodations, providing we and the Soviets signal our assent.

“One team from each side will face the other across the table to discuss a broad range of arms limitations. This is the big one: I secured a concession from Dmitri Rykov that the ambit of the discussion need not exclude thermonuclear weapons, strategic weapons, inner space, international inspec­tion, tactical nuclear weapons, conventional weapons and manpower levels, or disengagement of forces along the Iron Curtain line.”

There was a murmur of approval and surprise from the other seven men present. No previous American-Soviet arms conference had ever had such widely drawn terms of refer­ence. If all areas showed a move toward genuine and moni­tored detente, it would add up to a peace treaty.

“These talks will be what the conference is supposedly about, so far as the world is concerned, and the usual press bulletins will be necessary,” resumed Secretary of State Lawrence. “Now, in back of the main conference, the sec­ondary conference of technical experts will negotiate the sale by the U.S. to the Soviets at financial costs still to be worked out, but probably lower than world prices, of up to fifty-five million tons of grain, consumer-product technology, com­puters, and oil-extraction technology.

“At every stage there will be liaison between the up-front and the in-back teams of negotiators on each side. They make a concession on arms; we make a concession on low-cost goodies.”

“When is this slated for?” asked Poklewski.

“That’s the surprise element,” said Lawrence. “Normally the Russians like to work very slowly. Now it seems they are in a hurry. They want to start in two weeks.”

“Good God, we can’t be ready for ‘go’ in two weeks!” ex­claimed the Secretary of Defense, whose department was inti­mately involved.

“We have to be,” said President Matthews. “There will never be another chance like this again. Besides, we have our SALT team ready and briefed. They have been ready for months. We have to bring in Agriculture, Trade, and Tech­nology on this, and fast. We have to get together the team who can talk on the other—the trade and technology—side of the deal. Gentlemen, please see to it. At once.”

Maxim Rudin did not put it to his Politburo quite like that, two days later.

“They have taken the bait,” he said from his chair at the head of the table. “When they make a concession on wheat or technology in one of the conference rooms, we make the absolute minimum concession in the other conference room. We will get our grain, Comrades; we will feed our people, we will head off the famine, and at the minimum price. Ameri­cans, after all, have never been able to outnegotiate Russians.”

There was a general buzz of agreement.

“What concessions?” snapped Vishnayev. “How far back will these concessions set the Soviet Union and the triumph of world Marxism-Leninism?”

“As to your first question,” replied Rykov, “we cannot know until we are negotiating. As to your second, the answer must be substantially less than a famine would set us back.”

“There are two points we should be clear on before we de­cide whether to talk or not,” said Rudin. “One is that the Po­litburo will be kept fully informed at every stage, so if the moment comes when the price is too high, this council will have the right to abort the conference and I will defer to Comrade Vishnayev and his plan for a war in the spring. The second is that no concession we may make to secure the wheat need necessarily obtain for very long after the de­liveries have taken place.”

There were several grins around the table. This was the sort of realpolitik the Politburo was much more accustomed to, as they had shown in transforming the old Helsinki Agree­ment on detente into a farce.

“Very well,” said Vishnayev, “but I think we should lay down the exact parameters of our negotiating teams’ author­ity to concede points.”

“I have no objection to that,” said Rudin.

The meeting continued on this theme for an hour and a half. Rudin got his vote to proceed, by the same margin as before, seven against six.

On the last day of the month, Andrew Drake stood in the shade of a crane and watched the Sanadria battening down her hatches. Conspicuous on deck she had Vac-U-Vators for Odessa, powerful suction machines, like vacuum cleaners, for sucking wheat out of the hold of a ship and straight into a grain elevator. The Soviet Union must be trying to improve her grain-unloading capacity, he mused, though he did not know why. Below the weather deck were forklift trucks for Istanbul and agricultural machinery for Varna in Bulgaria, part of a transshipment cargo that had come in from Amer­ica as far as Piraeus.

He watched the agent’s water clerk leave the ship, giving Captain Thanos a last shake of the hand. Thanos scanned the pier and made out the figure of Drake loping toward him, his kit bag over one shoulder and his suitcase in the other hand.

In the captain’s day cabin, Drake handed over his passport and vaccination certificates. He signed the ship’s articles and became a member of the deck crew. While he was down be­low stowing his gear, Captain Thanos entered his name in the ship’s crew list just before the Greek immigration officer came on board. The two men had the usual drink together.

“There’s an extra crewman,” said Thanos, as if in passing. The immigration officer scanned the list and the pile of seaman’s books and passports in front of him. Most were Greek, but there were six others, non-Greek. Drake’s British passport stood out The immigration officer selected it and riffled through the pages. A fifty-dollar bill fell out.

“An out-of-work,” said Thanos, “trying to get to Turkey and head for the East. Thought you’d be glad to be rid of him.”

Five minutes later the crew’s identity documents had been returned to their wooden tray and the vessel’s papers stamped for outward clearance. Daylight was fading as her ropes were cast off, and Sanadria slipped away from her berth and headed south before turning northeast for the Dardanelles.

Below decks, the crew were grouping around the greasy messroom table. One of them was hoping no one would look under his mattress, where the Sako Hornet rifle was stored. In Moscow his target was sitting down to an excellent supper.