The Devil's Alternative

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.’ ”

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.