The Devil's Alternative (61 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me, sir,” said the seaman. “What is it?”

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

Died in their cells.”

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

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

speed slowed, the power reduced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krim scooped a double handful from the surface of the sea and held it out to Drake. “It’s our oil, Andriy. It’s the oil we vented. We’re right in the middle of it.”

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

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

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

“Open fire,” said Manning calmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It lasted for no more than fifteen seconds. In that time the sea blazed. Over half of a spillage of

twenty thousand tons of oil caught fire and burned. For several seconds it reached five thousand degrees centigrade. The sheer heat of it burned off the fog for miles around in a tenth of a minute, the white flames reaching four to five feet high off the surface of the water.

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

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

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

“
Shche ne vmerla Ukraina
. ...”

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

“What the hell did that mean?” whispered the commander of the
Cutlass
. Major Fallon shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Some foreign lingo.”

From beside them, Adam Munro gazed at the last flickering glow of the dying flames. “Roughly translated,” he said, “it means ‘The Ukraine will live again.’ ”

EPILOGUE

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.