The Devil's Alternative

tramp steamer had sailed during the evening.

Now another man stood by the bedside, accompanied by a police officer and the white-coated doctor. All three were Turkish, but the short, broad man in the civilian suit spoke passable English.

“He’ll pull through,” said the doctor, “but he’s very sick for the moment. Heatstroke, second-degree sunburn, exposure generally, and by the look of it, he hasn’t eaten for days. Generally weak.”

“What are these?” asked the civilian, gesturing at the in­travenous tubes that entered both the man’s arms.

“Saline drip and concentrated glucose drip for nourishment and to offset shock,” said the doctor. “The sailors probably saved his life by taking the heat out of the burns, but we’ve bathed him in calamine to help the healing process. Now it’s between him and Allah.”

Umit Erdal, partner in the shipping and trading company of Erdal and Semait, was the Lloyd’s subagent for the port of Trabzon, and the Garibaldi’s agent had thankfully passed the matter of the castaway over to him. The sick man’s eyelids fluttered in the nut-brown, bearded face. Erdal cleared his throat, bent over the figure, and spoke in his best English.

“What ... is ... you ... name?” he asked slowly and clearly.

The man groaned and moved his head from side to side several times. The Lloyd’s man bent his head closer to listen. “Zradzhenyi,” the sick man murmured, “zradzhenyi.”

Erdal straightened up. “He’s not Turkish,” he said with fi­nality, “but he seems to be called Zradzhenyi. It’s probably a Ukrainian name.”

Both his companions shrugged.

“I’ll inform Lloyd’s in London,” said Erdal. “Maybe they’ll have news of a missing vessel somewhere in the Black Sea.”

The daily bible of the world’s merchant marine fraternity is Lloyd’s List, which is published Monday to Saturday and contains editorials, features, and news on one topic only—shipping. Its partner in harness, Lloyd’s Shipping Index, gives the movements of the world’s thirty thousand active merchant vessels: name of ship, owner, flag of registry, year of con­struction, tonnage, where last reported coming from, and where bound.

Both organs are published out of a building complex at Sheepen Place, Colchester, in the English county of Essex. It was to this building that Umit Erdal telexed the shipping movements into and out of the port of Trabzon, and added a small extra for the attention of the Lloyd’s Shipping Intelli­gence Unit in the same building.

The SI unit checked their maritime casualty records to confirm that there were no recent reports of missing, sunk, or simply overdue vessels in the Black Sea, and passed the par­agraph over to the editorial desk of the List. Here a subeditor gave it a mention as a news brief on the front page, including the name the castaway had given as his own. It appeared the following morning.

Most of those who read Lloyd’s List that day in late April flipped past the paragraph about the unidentified man in Trabzon.

But the piece caught and held the sharp eyes and the atten­tion of a man in his early thirties who worked as senior clerk and trusted employee in a firm of chartered shipbrokers situ­ated in a small street called Crutched Friars in the center of the City of London, financial and commercial square mile of the British capital. His colleagues in the firm knew him as Andrew Drake.

Having absorbed the content of the paragraph, Drake left his desk and went to the company boardroom, where he con­sulted a framed chart of the world that showed prevailing wind and ocean-current circulation. The winds in the Black Sea during spring and summer are predominantly from the north, and the currents screw counterclockwise around this small ocean from the southern coast of the Ukraine in the far northwest of the sea, down past the coasts of Rumania and Bulgaria, then swing eastward again into the shipping lanes between Istanbul and Cape Ince.

Drake did some calculations on a scratch pad. A small skiff, setting off from the marshes of the delta of the Dniester River just south of Odessa could make four to five knots with a following wind and favorable current, southward past Rumania and Bulgaria toward Turkey. But after three days it would tend to be carried eastward, away from the Bosporus toward the eastern end of the Black Sea.

The Weather and Navigation section of Lloyd’s List con­firmed there had been bad weather nine days earlier in that area. The sort, Drake mused, that could cause a skiff in the hands of an unskilled seaman to capsize, lose its mast and all its contents, and leave its occupant, even if he could climb back into it again, at the mercy of the sun and the wind.

Two hours later Andrew Drake asked for a week of his owed holidays, and it was agreed that he could take it, but only starting the following Monday, May 3.

He was mildly excited as he waited out the week and bought himself from a nearby agency a round-trip ticket from London to Istanbul. He decided to buy the connecting ticket from Istanbul to Trabzon with cash in Istanbul. He also checked to confirm that a British passport holder needs no visa for Turkey, but after work he secured for himself the needed smallpox vaccination certificate at the British Airways medical center at Victoria.

He was excited because he thought there just might be a chance that, after years of waiting, he had found the man he was looking for. Unlike the three men by the castaway’s bedside two days earlier, he knew what country the word zradzhenyi came from. He also knew it was not the man’s name. The man in the bed had been muttering the word be­trayed in his native tongue, and that language was Ukrainian. Which could mean that the man was a refugee Ukrainian partisan.

Andrew Drake, despite his Anglicized name, was also a Ukrainian, and a fanatic.

Drake’s first call after arriving in Trabzon was at the office of Umit Erdal, whose name he had obtained from a friend at Lloyd’s on the grounds that he was taking a holiday on the Turkish coast and, speaking not a word of Turkish, might need some assistance. Erdal, seeing the letter of introduction that Drake was able to produce, was happily unquestioning as to why his visitor should want to see the castaway in the local hospital. He wrote a personal letter of introduction to the hospital administrator, and, shortly after lunch, Drake was shown into the small, one-bed ward where the man lay.

The local Lloyd’s agent had already told him that the man, while conscious again, spent much of the time sleeping, and during his periods of wakefulness had so far said absolutely nothing. When Drake entered the room, the invalid was lying on his back, eyes closed. Drake drew up a chair and sat by the bedside. For a time he stared at the man’s haggard face. After several minutes the man’s eyelids flickered, half-opened, and closed again. Whether he had seen the visitor staring at him intently, Drake did not know. But he knew the man was on the fringe of wakefulness. Slowly he leaned forward and said clearly in the sick man’s ear:

“Shche ne vmerla Ukraina.”

The words mean, literally, “The Ukraine is not dead,” but in a looser translation would mean “The Ukraine lives on.” They are the first words of the Ukrainian national anthem, banned by the Russian masters, and would be instantly recog­nizable to a nationally conscious Ukrainian.

The sick man’s eyes flicked open, and he regarded Drake intently. After several seconds he asked in Ukrainian, “Who are you?”

“A Ukrainian, like yourself,” said Drake.

The other man’s eyes clouded with suspicion.

“Quisling,” he said.

Drake shook his head. “No,” he said calmly. “I am British by nationality, born and bred there, son of a Ukrainian fa­ther and an English mother. But in my heart I’m as Ukrainian as you are.”

The man in the bed stared stubbornly at the ceiling.

“I could show you my passport, issued in London, but that would prove nothing. A Chekisti could produce one if he wanted to try to trick you.” Drake had used the slang term for a Soviet secret policeman and KGB member.

“But you are not in the Ukraine anymore and there are no Chekisti here,” Drake went on. “You were not washed up on the shores of the Crimea, nor of south Russia or Georgia. You did not land in Rumania or Bulgaria, either. You were picked up by an Italian ship and landed here at Trabzon. You are in Turkey. You are in the West.