The Devil's Alternative

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.

Little sirens like tin whistles, booming roars and shrill whoops echoed across the water as over a hundred sea cap­tains commanding vessels from the tiny to the grand, from the harmless to the deadly, gave the Freya the traditional sailor’s greeting.

Thor Larsen looked at the crowded sea about him and the empty lane leading to Euro Buoy 1. He turned to the waiting Dutch pilot.

“Mr. Pilot, pray set course for Rotterdam.”

On Sunday, April 10, 1983, in St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, two men approached the great oak refectory table that had been brought in for the purpose, and took their seats.

In the Minstrel Gallery the television cameras peered through the arcs of white light that bathed the table and beamed their images across the world.

Dmitri Rykov painstakingly scrawled his name for the So­viet Union on both copies of the Treaty of Dublin and passed the copies, bound in red Morocco leather, to David Lawrence, who signed for the United States.

Within hours the first grain ships, waiting off Murmansk and Leningrad, Sebastopol and Odessa, moved forward to their berths.

A week later the first Warsaw Pact units along the Iron Curtain began to load their gear to pull back east from the barbed-wire line.

On Thursday the fourteenth, the routine meeting of the Polit­buro in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin was far from routine.

The last man to enter the room, having been delayed out­side by a major of the Kremlin guard, was Yefrem Vishnayev.

When he came through the doorway, he observed that the faces of the other eleven members were all turned toward him. Maxim Rudin brooded at the center place at the top of the T-shaped table. Down each side of the stem were five chairs, and each was occupied. There was only one chair left vacant. It was the one at the far end of the stem of the table, facing up the length of it.

Impassively, Yefrem Vishnayev walked slowly forward to take that seat, known simply as the Penal Chair. It was to be his last Politburo meeting.

On April 18 a small freighter was rolling in the Black Sea swell, ten miles off the shore of Rumania. Just before two A.M. a fast speedboat left the freighter and raced toward the shore. At three miles it halted, and a Marine on board took a powerful flashlight, pointed it toward the invisible sands, and blinked a signal: three long dashes and three short ones. There was no answering light from the beach. The man re­peated his signal four times. Still there was no answer.

The speedboat turned back and returned to the freighter. An hour later it was stowed below decks and a message was transmitted to London.

From London another message went in code to the British Embassy in Moscow: “Regret Nightingale has not made the rendezvous. Suggest you return to London.”

On April 25 there was a plenary meeting of the full Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Palace of Congresses inside the Kremlin. The delegates had come from all over the Soviet Union, some of them many thousands of miles.

Standing on the podium beneath the outsized head of Lenin, Maxim Rudin made them his farewell