The Devil's Alternative (27 page)

“Tempelhof to Aeroflot three-five-one, you are cleared to land. Straight run-in,” he said. In the airliner Captain Rudenko swallowed hard and lowered flaps and undercarriage. The Tupolev let down rapidly to the main airport of Communist East Germany. They broke cloud at a thousand feet and saw the landing lights ahead of them. At five hundred feet Mishkin peered suspiciously through the streaming perspex. He had heard of West Berlin, of brilliant lights, packed streets, teeming crowds of shoppers up the Kurfürstendamm, and Tempelhof Airport right in the heart of it all. This airport was right out in the countryside.

“It’s a trick,” he yelled at Lazareff, “it’s the East!” He jabbed his gun into Captain Rudenko’s neck. “Pull out,” he screamed, “pull out or I’ll shoot!”

The Ukrainian captain gritted his teeth and held course for the last hundred meters. Mishkin reached over his shoulder and tried to haul back on the control column. The twin booms, when they came, were so close together that it was impossible to tell which came first. Mishkin claimed the thump of the wheels hitting the tarmac caused the gun to go off; copilot Vatutin maintained Mishkin had fired first. It was too confused for a final and definitive version ever to be established. The bullet tore a gaping hole in the neck of Captain Rudenko and killed him instantly. There was blue smoke in the flight deck, Vatutin hauling back on the stick, yelling to his engineer for more power. The jet engines screamed a mite louder than the passengers as the Tupelov, heavy as a wet loaf, bounced twice more on the tarmac, then lifted into the air, rolling, struggling for lift. Vatutin held her, nose high, wallowing, praying for more engine power, as the outer suburbs of East Berlin

blurred past beneath them, followed by the Berlin Wall itself.

When the Tupolev came over the perimeter of Tempelhof, it cleared the nearest houses by six feet.

White-faced, the young copilot hammered the plane onto the main runway with Lazareff’s gun in his back. Mishkin held the red-soaked body of Captain Rudenko from falling across the control column. The Tupolev finally came to rest three quarters down the runway, still on all its wheels.

Staff Sergeant Leroy Coker was a patriotic man. He sat huddled against the cold at the wheel of his Security Police Jeep, his fur-trimmed parka drawn tight around the edges of his face, and he thought longingly of the warmth of Alabama. But he was on guard duty, and he took it seriously.

When the incoming airliner lurched over the houses beyond the perimeter fence, engines howling, undercarriage and flaps hanging, he let out a “What the sheee-yit!” and sat bolt upright. He had never been to Russia, nor even across to the East, but he had read all about them over

there. He did not know much about the Cold War, but he well knew that an attack by the Communists was always imminent unless men like Leroy Coker kept on their guard. He also knew a red star when he saw one, and a hammer and sickle.

When the airliner slithered to a stop, he unslung his carbine, took a bead, and blew the nosewheel tires out.

Mishkin and Lazareff surrendered three hours later. Their intent had been to keep the crew, release the passengers, take on board three notables from West Berlin, and be flown to Tel Aviv. But a new nosewheel for a Tupolev was out of the question; the Russians would never supply one. And when the news of the killing of Rudenko was made known to the USAF base authorities, they refused to supply a plane of their own. Marksmen ringed the Tupolev; there was no way the two men could herd the others, even at gunpoint, to an alternative aircraft. The sharpshooters would have cut them down. After an hour’s talk with the base commander, they walked out with their hands in the air.

That night, they were formally handed over to the West Berlin authorities for imprisonment and trial.

CHAPTER NINE

THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR to Washington was coldly angry when he faced David Lawrence at the State Department on January 2.

The American Secretary of State was receiving him at the Soviet government’s request, though insistence would have been a better word.

The Ambassador read his formal protest in a flat monotone. When he had finished, he laid the text on the American’s desk. Lawrence, who had known exactly what it would be, had an answer ready, prepared by his legal counselors, three of whom stood flanking him behind his chair.

He conceded that West Berlin was indeed not sovereign territory, but a city under Four Power occupation. Nevertheless, the Western Allies had long conceded that in matters of jurisprudence the West Berlin authorities should handle all criminal and civil offenses other than those falling within the ambit of the purely military laws of the Western Allies. The hijacking of the airliner, he continued, while a terrible offense, was not committed by U.S. citizens against U.S. citizens or within the U.S. air base of Tempelhof. It was therefore an affair within civil jurisprudence. In consequence, the United States government maintained, it could not legally have held non-U.S. nationals or non-U.S. material witnesses within the territory of West Berlin, even though the airliner had come to rest on a USAF air base.

He had no recourse, therefore, but to reject the Soviet protest.

The Ambassador heard him out in stony silence. He rejoined that he could not accept the American explanation, and rejected it. He would report back to his government in that vein. On this note, he left, to return to his embassy and report to Moscow.

In a small flat in Bayswater, London, three men sat that day and stared at the tangle of newspapers strewn on the floor around them.

“A disaster,” snapped Andrew Drake, “a bloody disaster. By now they should have been in Israel. Within a month they’d have been released and could have given their press conference. What the hell did they have to shoot the captain for?”

“If he was landing at Schönefeld and refused to fly into West Berlin, they were finished, anyway,” observed Azamat Krim.

“They could have clubbed him,” snorted Drake.

“Heat of the moment,” said Kaminsky. “What do we do now?” “Can those handguns be traced?” asked Drake of Krim.

The small Tatar shook his head.

“To the shop that sold them, perhaps,” he said. “Not to me. I didn’t have to identify myself.” Drake paced the carpet, deep in thought.

“I don’t think they’ll be extradited back,” he said at length. “The Soviets want them now for hijacking, shooting Rudenko, hitting the KGB man on board, and of course the other one they took the identity card from. But the killing of the captain is the serious offense. Still, I don’t think a West German government will send two Jews back for execution. On the other hand, they’ll be tried and convicted. Probably sentenced to life. Miroslav, will they open their mouths about Ivanenko?”

The Ukrainian refugee shook his head.

“Not if they’ve got any sense,” he said. “Not in the heart of West Berlin. The Germans might

have to change their minds and send them back after all. If they believed them, which they wouldn’t because Moscow would deny Ivanenko is dead, and produce a look-alike as proof. But Moscow would believe them, and have them liquidated. The Germans, not believing them, would offer no special protection. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’ll keep silent.”

“That’s no use to us,” pointed out Krim. “The whole point of the exercise, of all we’ve gone through, was to deal a single massive humiliating blow to the whole Soviet state apparatus.
We
can’t give that press conference; we don’t have the tiny details that will convince the world. Only Mishkin and Lazareff can do that.”

“Then they have to be got out of there,” said Drake with finality. “We have to mount a second operation to get them to Tel Aviv, with guarantees of their life and liberty. Otherwise it’s all been for nothing.”

“What happens now?” repeated Kaminsky.

“We think,” said Drake. “We work out a way, we plan it, and we execute it. They are not going to sit and rot their lives away in Berlin, not with a secret like that in their heads. And we have little time; it won’t take Moscow forever to put two and two together. They have their lead to follow now; they’ll know who did the Kiev job pretty soon. Then they’ll begin to plan their revenge. We have to beat them to it.”

The chilly anger of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington paled into insignificance beside the outrage of his colleague in Bonn as the Russian diplomat faced the West German Foreign Minister two days later. The refusal of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany to hand the two criminals and murderers over to either the Soviet or the East German authorities was a flagrant breach of their hitherto friendly relations and could be construed only as a hostile act, he insisted.

The West German Foreign Minister was deeply uncomfortable. Privately he wished the Tupolev had stayed on the runway in East Germany. He refrained from pointing out that as the Russians had always insisted West Berlin was not a part of West Germany, they ought to be addressing themselves to the Senate in West Berlin.

The Ambassador repeated his case for the third time: the criminals were Soviet citizens; the victims were Soviet citizens; the airliner was Soviet territory; the outrage had taken place in Soviet airspace, and the murder either on or a few feet above the runway of East Germany’s principal airport. The crime should therefore be tried under Soviet or at the very least under East German law.

The Foreign Minister pointed out as courteously as he could that all precedent indicated that hijackers could be tried under the law of the land in which they arrived, if that country wished to exercise the right. This was in no way an imputation of unfairness in the Soviet judicial procedure.

...

The hell it wasn’t, he thought privately. No one in West Germany from the government to the press to the public had the slightest doubt that handing Mishkin and Lazareff back would mean KGB interrogation, a kangaroo court, and the firing squad. And they were Jewish—that was another problem.

The first few days of January are slack for the press, and the West German press was making a big story out of this. The conservative and powerful Axel Springer newspapers were insisting that whatever they had done, the two hijackers should receive a fair trial, and that could be guaranteed only in West Germany. The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) Party, on which the governing coalition depended, was taking the same line. Certain quarters were giving the press a large amount of precise information and lurid details about the latest KGB crackdown in the Lvov area

from which the hijackers came, suggesting that escape from the terror was a justifiable reaction, albeit a deplorable way of doing it. And lastly the recent exposure of yet another Communist agent high in the civil service would not increase the popularity of a government taking a conciliatory line toward Moscow. And with the state elections pending ...

The Minister had his orders from the Chancellor. Mishkin and Lazareff, he told the Ambassador, would go on trial in West Berlin as soon as possible, and if—or rather when—convicted, would receive salutary sentences.

The Politburo meeting at the end of the week was stormy. Once again the tape recorders were off, the stenographers absent.

“This is an outrage,” snapped Vishnayev. “Yet another scandal that diminishes the Soviet Union in the eyes of the world. It should never have happened.”

He implied that it had happened only due to the ever-weakening leadership of Maxim Rudin.

“It would not have happened,” retorted Petrov, “if the Comrade Marshal’s fighters had shot the plane down over Poland, according to custom.”

“There was a communications breakdown between ground control and the fighter leader,” said Kerensky. “A chance in a thousand.”

“Fortuitous, though,” observed Rykov coldly. Through his ambassadors he knew the Mishkin and Lazareff trial would be public and would reveal exactly how the hijackers had first mugged a KGB officer in a park for his identity papers, then used the papers to penetrate to the flight deck.

“Is there any question,” asked Petryanov, a supporter of Vishnayev, “that these two men could be the ones who killed Ivanenko?”

The atmosphere was electric.

“None at all,” said Petrov firmly. “We know those two come from Lvov, not Kiev. They were Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate. We are investigating, of course, but so far there is no connection.”

“Should such a connection emerge, we will of course be informed?” asked Vishnayev. “That goes without saying, Comrade,” growled Rudin.

The stenographers were recalled, and the meeting went on to discuss the progress at Castletown and the purchase of ten million tons of feed grain. Vishnayev did not press the issue. Rykov was at pains to show that the Soviet Union was gaining the quantities of wheat she would need to survive the winter and spring with minimal concessions of weapons levels, a point Marshal Kerensky disputed. But Komarov was forced to concede the imminent arrival of ten million tons of animal winter feed would enable him to release the same tonnage from hoarded stocks immediately, and prevent wholesale slaughter. The Maxim Rudin faction, with its hairbreadth supremacy, stayed intact.

As the meeting dispersed, the old Soviet chief drew Vassili Petrov aside.

“
Is
there any connection between the two Jews and the Ivanenko killing?” he inquired.

“There may be,” conceded Petrov. “We know they did the mugging in Ternopol, of course, so they were evidently prepared to travel outside Lvov to prepare their escape. We have their fingerprints from the aircraft, and they match those in their living quarters in Lvov. We have found no shoes that match the prints at the Kiev murder site, but we are still searching for those shoes. One last thing. We have an area of palmprint taken from the car that knocked down Ivanenko’s mother. We are trying to get a complete palmprint of both from inside Berlin. If they check ...”

“Prepare a plan, a contingency plan, a feasibility study,” said Rudin. “To have them liquidated

inside their jail in West Berlin. Just in case. And another thing. If their identity as the killers of Ivanenko is proved, tell me, not the Politburo. We wipe them out first, then inform our comrades.” Petrov swallowed hard. Cheating the Politburo was playing for the highest stakes in Soviet Russia. One slip and there would be no safety net. He recalled what Rudin had told him by the fire out at Usovo a fortnight earlier. With the Politburo tied six against six, Ivanenko dead, and two of