The Devil's Alternative (45 page)

The hijacking of the
Freya
had claimed its first victim.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Midnight to 0800

THE RESUMED West German cabinet meeting assembled in the Chancellery at one A.M., and the mood when the ministers heard from Dietrich Busch the plea from Washington varied between exasperation and truculence.

“Well, why the hell won’t he give a reason?” asked the Defense Minister. “Doesn’t he trust us?” “He claims he has a reason of paramount importance, but cannot divulge it even over the hot

line,” replied Chancellor Busch. “That gives us the opportunity of either believing him or calling him a liar. At this stage I cannot do the latter.”

“Has he any idea what the terrorists will do when they learn Mishkin and Lazareff are not to be released at dawn?” queried another.

“Yes, I think he has. At least the texts of all the exchanges between the
Freya
and Maas Control are in his hands. As we all know, they have threatened either to kill another seaman, or to vent twenty thousand tons of crude, or both.”

“Well, then, let him carry the responsibility,” urged the Interior Minister. “Why should we take the blame if that happens?”

“I haven’t the slightest intention that we should,” replied Busch, “but that doesn’t answer the question. Do we grant President Matthews’s request or not?”

There was silence for a while. The Foreign Minister broke it. “How long is he asking for?”

“As long as possible,” said the Chancellor. “He seems to have some plan afoot to break the deadlock, to find a third alternative. But what the plan is, or what the alternative could be, he alone knows. He and a few people he evidently trusts with the secret,” he added with some bitterness. “But that doesn’t include us, for the moment.”

“Well, personally I think it is stretching the friendship between us a bit far,” said the Foreign Minister, “but I think we ought to grant him an extension, while making plain, at least unofficially, that it is at his request, not ours.”

“Perhaps he has an idea to storm the
Freya
,” suggested Defense.

“Our own people say that would be extremely risky,” replied the Interior Minister. “It would require an underwater approach for at least the last two miles, a sheer climb up smooth steel from the sea to the deck, a penetration of the superstructure without being observed from atop the funnel, and the selection of the right cabin with the leader of the terrorists in it. If, as we suspect, the man holds a remote-control detonating mechanism in his hand, he’d have to be shot and killed before he could press the button.”

“In any case, it is too late to do it before dawn,” said the Defense Minister. “It would have to be in darkness, and that means ten P.M. at the earliest, twenty-one hours from now.”

At a quarter to three the German cabinet finally agreed to grant President Matthews his request: an indefinite delay on the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, while reserving the right to keep the consequences under constant review and to reverse that decision if it became regarded in Western Europe as impossible to continue to hold the pair.

At the same time the government spokesman was quietly asked to leak the news to two of his

most reliable media contacts that only massive pressure from Washington had caused the about- face in Bonn.

It was eleven P.M. in Washington, four A.M. in Europe, when the news from Bonn reached President Matthews. He sent back his heartfelt thanks to Chancellor Busch and asked David Lawrence:

“Any reply from Jerusalem yet?”

“None,” said Lawrence. “We know only that our Ambassador there has been granted a personal interview with Benyamin Golen.”

When the Israeli Premier was disturbed for the second time during the Sabbath night, his tetchy capacity for patience was wearing distinctly thin. He received the U.S. Ambassador in his dressing gown, and the reception was frosty. It was three A.M. in Europe, but five in Jerusalem, and the first thin light of Saturday morning was on the hills of Judea.

He listened without reaction to the Ambassador’s personal plea from President Matthews. His private fear was for the identity of the terrorists aboard the
Freya
. No terrorist action aimed at delivering Jews from a prison cell had been mounted since the days of his own youth, fighting right on the soil where he stood. Then it had been to free condemned Jewish partisans from a British jail at Acre, and he had been a part of that fight. Now it was Israel that roundly condemned terrorism, the taking of hostages, the blackmail of regimes. And yet ...

And yet, hundreds of thousands of his own people would secretly sympathize with two youths who had sought to escape the terror of the KGB in the only way left open to them. The same voters would not openly hail the youths as heroes, but they would not condemn them as murderers, ei- ther. As to the masked men on the
Freya
, there was a chance that they, too, were Jewish—possibly (heaven forbid) Israelis. He had hoped the previous evening that the affair would be over by sundown of the Sabbath, the prisoners from Berlin inside Israel, the terrorists on the
Freya
captured or dead. There would be a fuss, but it would die down.

Now he was learning that there would be no release. The news hardly inclined him to the American request, which was in any case impossible. When he had heard the Ambassador out, he shook his head.

“Please convey to my good friend William Matthews my heartfelt wish that this appalling affair can be concluded without further loss of life,” he replied. “But on the matter of Mishkin and Lazareff my position is this: if on behalf of the government and the people of Israel, and at the urgent request of West Germany, I give a solemn public pledge not to imprison them here or return them to Berlin, then I shall have to abide by that pledge. I’m sorry, but I cannot do as you ask and return them to jail in Germany as soon as the
Freya
has been released.”

He did not need to explain what the American Ambassador already knew: that apart from any question of national honor, even the explanation that promises extracted under duress were not binding would not work in this case. The outrage from the National Religious Party, the Gush Emunim extremists, the Jewish Defense League, and the hundred thousand Israeli voters who had come from the USSR in the past decade—all these alone would prevent any Israeli premier from reneging on an international pledge to set Mishkin and Lazareff free.

“Well, it was worth a try,” said President Matthews when the cable reached Washington an hour later.

“It now ranks as one possible ‘third alternative’ that no longer exists,” remarked David Lawrence, “even if Maxim Rudin had accepted it, which I doubt.”

It was one hour to midnight; lights were burning in five government departments scattered

across the capital, as they burned in the Oval Office and a score of other rooms throughout the White House where men and women sat at telephones and teleprinters awaiting the news from Europe. The four men in the Oval Office settled to await the reaction from the
Freya.

Doctors say three in the morning is the time when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb; it is the hour of deepest weariness, slowest reactions, and gloomiest depression. Three A.M. marked one complete cycle of the sun and moon for the two men who faced each other in the captain’s cabin of the
Freya.

Neither had slept that night or the previous one; each had been forty-four hours without rest; each was drawn and red-eyed.

Thor Larsen, at the epicenter of a whirling storm of international activity, of cabinets and councils, embassies and meetings, plottings and consultations that kept the lights burning on three continents from Jerusalem to Washington, was playing his own game. He was pitting his own capacity to stay awake against the will of the fanatic who faced him, knowing that at stake if he failed were the lives of his crew and his ship.

Larsen knew that the man who called himself Svoboda, younger and consumed by his own inner fire, nerves tightened by a combination of black coffee and the tension of his gamble against the world, could have ordered the Norwegian captain to be tied up while he himself sought rest. So the bearded mariner sat facing the barrel of a gun and played on his captor’s pride, hoping that the man would take his challenge, refuse to back down, and concede defeat in the game of beating sleep.

It was Larsen who proposed the endless cups of strong black coffee, a drink he usually took with milk and sugar only two or three times a day. It was he who talked through the day and the night, provoking the Ukrainian with suggestions of eventual failure, then backing off when the man be- came too irritable for safety. Long years of experience, nights of yawning, gritty-mouthed training as a sea captain, had taught the bearded giant to stay awake and alert through the night watches, when the cadets drowsed and the deckhands dozed.

So he played his own solitary game, without guns or ammunition, without teleprinters or night- sight cameras, without support and without company. All the superb technology the Japanese had built into his new command was as much use as rusty nails to him now. If he pushed the man across the table too far, he might lose his temper and shoot to kill. If he were provoked too far, he could order the execution of another crewman. If he felt himself becoming too drowsy, he might have himself relieved by another, fitter terrorist while he himself took sleep and undid all that Larsen was trying to do to him.

That Mishkin and Lazareff would be released at dawn, Larsen still had reason to believe. After their safe arrival in Tel Aviv, the terrorists would prepare to quit the
Freya
. Or would they? Could they? Would the surrounding warships let them go so easily? Even away from the
Freya
, attacked by the NATO navies, Svoboda could press his button and blow the
Freya
apart.

But that was not all of it This man in black had killed one of the crew. Thor Larsen wanted him for that, and he wanted him dead. So he talked the night away to the man opposite him, denying them both sleep.

Whitehall was not sleeping, either. The crisis management committee had been in session since three A.M., and by four, the progress reports were complete.

Across southern England the bulk tanker lorries, commandeered from Shell, British Petroleum, and a dozen other sources, were filling up with emulsifier concentrate at the Hampshire depot Bleary-eyed drivers rumbled through the night, empty toward Hampshire or loaded toward

Lowestoft, moving hundreds of tons of the concentrate to the Suffolk port. By four A.M. the stocks were empty; all one thousand tons of the national supply were headed east to the coast.

So also were inflatable booms to try to hold the vented oil away from the coast until the chemicals could do their work. The factory that made the emulsifier had been geared for maximum output until further notice.

At half past three the news had come from Washington that the Bonn cabinet had agreed to hold Mishkin and Lazareff for a while longer.

“Does Matthews know what he’s doing?” someone asked. Sir Julian Flannery’s face was impassive.

“We must assume that he does,” he said smoothly. “We must also assume that a venting by the
Freya
will probably now take place. The efforts of the night have not been in vain. At least we are now almost ready.”

“We must also assume,” said the civil servant from the Foreign Ministry, “that when the announcement becomes public, France, Belgium, and Holland are going to ask for assistance in fighting any oil slick that may result.”

“Then we shall be ready to do what we can,” said Sir Julian. “Now, what about the spraying and firefighting vessels?”

The report in the UNICORNE room mirrored what was happening at sea. From the Humber estuary, tugs were churning south toward Lowestoft harbor, while from the Thames and even as far around as the Navy base at Lee, other tugs capable of spraying liquid onto the surface of the sea were moving to the rendezvous point on the Suffolk coast. They were not the only things moving around the south coast that night.

Off the towering cliffs of Beachy Head, the
Cutlass
,
Scimitar
, and
Sabre
, carrying the assorted, complex, and lethal hardware of the world’s toughest team of assault frogmen, were pointing their noses north of east to bring them past Sussex and Kent toward where the cruiser
Argyll
lay at an- chor in the North Sea.

The boom of their engines echoed off the chalk battlements of the southern coast, and light sleepers in Eastbourne heard the rumble out to sea.

Twelve Royal Marines of the Special Boat Service clung to the rails of the bucking craft, watching over their precious kayaks and the crates of diving gear, weapons, and unusual explosives that made up the props of their trade. It was all being carried as deck cargo.

“I hope,” shouted the young lieutenant commander who skippered the
Cutlass
to the Marine beside him, the second-in-command of the team, “that those whizz-bangs you’re carrying back there don’t go off.”

“They won’t,” said the Marine captain with confidence, “not until we use them.”

In a room adjoining the main conference center beneath the Cabinet Office, their commanding officer was poring over photographs of the
Freya
, taken by night and day. He was comparing the configuration shown by the Nimrod’s pictures with the scale plan provided by Lloyd’s and the model of the supertanker
British Princess
lent by British Petroleum.

“Gentlemen,” said Colonel Hohnes, joining the assembled men next door, “I think it’s time we considered one of the less palatable choices we may have to face.”

“Ah, yes,” said Sir Julian regretfully, “the hard option.”

“If,” pursued Hohnes, “President Matthews continues to object to the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, and West Germany continues to accede to that demand, the moment may well come when the terrorists will realize the game is up, that their blackmail is not going to work. At that moment they may well refuse to have their bluff called, and blow the
Freya
to pieces. Personally, it