The Devil's Alternative

thinks he can crack it. He’s putting several thousand service stations across the motorways of Europe, marketing his own brand of gasoline and oil. And for that he’ll need tanker tonnage. And I’ve got it. A seven-year contract to bring crude from the Middle East to Western Europe. He’s already building his own refinery at Rotterdam, alongside Esso, Mobil, and Chev­ron. That is what the new tanker is for. She’s big and she’s ultramodern and she’s expensive, but she’ll pay. She’ll make five or six runs a year from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam, and in five years she’ll amortize the investment. But that’s not the reason I’m building her. She’s going to be the biggest and the best; my flagship, my memorial. And you’re going to be her skipper.”

Thor Larsen sat in silence. Lisa’s hand stole across the table and laid itself on top of his, squeezing gently. Two years before, Larsen knew, he could never have skippered a Swedish-flag vessel, being himself a Norwegian. But since the Goteborg Agreement of the previous year, which Wennerstrom had helped to push through, a Swedish shipowner could apply for honorary Swedish citizenship for exceptional Scandinavian but non-Swedish officers in his employ, so that they could be offered captaincies. He had applied successfully on behalf of Larsen.

The coffee came, and they sipped it appreciatively.

“I’m having her built at the Ishikawajima-Harima yard in Japan,” said Wennerstrom. “It’s the only yard in the world that can take her. They have the dry dock.”

Both men knew the days of ships being built on slipways and then being allowed to slide into the water were long past. The size and weight factors were too great. The giants were now built in enormous dry docks, so that when they were ready for launching, the sea was let in through dock sluices and the ships simply floated off their blocks and rode water inside the dock.

“Work began on her last November fourth,” Wennerstrom told them. “The keel was laid on January thirtieth. She’s tak­ing shape now. She’ll float next November first, and after three months at the fitting-out berth and sea trials, she’ll sail on February second. And you’ll be on her bridge, Thor.”

“Thank you,” said Larsen. “What are you calling her?

“Ah, yes. I’ve thought of that. Do you remember the sagas? Well, we’ll name her to please Niorn, the god of the sea.” He was gripping his glass of water, staring at the flame of the candle in its cast-iron holder before him. “For Niorn controls the fire and the water, the twin enemies of a tanker captain, the explosion and the sea herself.”

The water in his glass and the flame of the candle reflected in the old man’s eyes, as once fire and water had reflected in his eyes as he sat helpless in a lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic in 1942, four cables from his blazing tanker, his first command, watching his crew fry in the sea around him.

Thor Larsen stared at his patron, doubting that the old man could really believe this mythology; Lisa, being a woman, knew he meant every word of it. At last Wennerstrom sat back, pushed the glass aside with an impatient ges­ture, and filled his spare glass with red wine.

“So we will call her after the daughter of Niorn—Freya, the most beautiful of all the goddesses. We will call her Freya.” He raised his glass. “To the Freya.”

They all drank.

“When she sails,” said Wennerstrom, “the world will never have seen the like of her. And when she is past sailing, the world will never see the like of her again.”

Larsen was aware that the two biggest tankers in the world were the French Shell tankers Bellamya and Batillus, both with a capacity of just over half a million tons.

“What will be the Freya’s deadweight?” asked Larsen. “How much crude will she carry?”

“Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that,” said the old shipowner mischievously. “She’ll be carrying one million tons of crude oil.”

Thor Larsen heard a hiss of indrawn breath from his wife beside him.

“That’s big,” he said at last. “That’s very big.”

“The biggest the world has ever seen,” said Wennerstrom.

Two days later a jumbo jet arrived at London Heathrow from Toronto. Among its passengers it carried one Azamat Krim, Canadian-born son of an emigre, who, like Andrew Drake, had Anglicized his name—to Arthur Crimmins. He was one of those whom Drake had noted years before as a man who shared his beliefs completely.

Drake was waiting to meet him as he came out of the cus­toms area, and together they drove to Drake’s flat, off the Bayswater Road.

Azamat Krim was a Crimean Tatar by heritage, short, dark, and wiry. His father, unlike Drake’s, had fought in the Second World War with the Red Army rather than against it, and had been captured in combat by the Germans. His per­sonal loyalty to Russia and that of others like him had availed them nothing. Stalin had accused the entire Tatar na­tion of collaboration with the Germans, a patently unfounded charge but one that the Soviet leader employed as an excuse to deport the Tatar people to the east. Tens of thousands had died in the unheated cattle trucks, thousands more in the arid wastes of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

In a German forced-labor camp, Chingris Krim had heard of the death of his entire family. Liberated by the Canadians in 1945, he had been lucky not to be sent back to Stalin’s Russia for execution or the slave camps. He had been be­friended by a Canadian officer, a former rodeo rider from Calgary, who one day on an Austrian horse farm had ad­mired the Tatar soldier’s mastery of horses and brilliant rid­ing. The Canadian had secured Krim’s authorized emigration to Canada, where he had married and fathered a son. Azamat was the boy, now aged thirty and, like Drake, bitter against the Kremlin for the sufferings of his father’s people.

In a small flat in Bayswater, Andrew Drake explained his plan, and the Tatar agreed to join him in it. Together they put the final touches to securing the needed funds by taking out a bank in northern England.

The man Adam Munro reported to at the head office was his controller, Barry Ferndale, the head of the Soviet Section. Years before, Ferndale had done his time in the field, and had assisted in the exhaustive debriefings of Oleg Penkovsky when the Russian defector visited Britain while accompany­ing Soviet trade delegations.

He was short and rotund, pink-cheeked and jolly. He hid his keen brain and a profound knowledge of Soviet affairs be­hind mannerisms of great cheerfulness and seeming naivete.

In his office on the fourth floor of the Firm’s headquarters, he listened to the tape from Moscow from end to end. When it was over he began furiously polishing his glasses, hopping with excitement.

“Good gracious me, my dear fellow. My dear Adam. What an extraordinary affair. This really is quite priceless.”

“If it’s true,” said Munro carefully. Ferndale started, as if the thought had not occurred to him.

“Ah, yes, of course. If it’s true. Now, you simply must tell me how you got hold of it.”

Munro told his story carefully. It was true in every detail save that he claimed the source of the tape had been Anatoly Krivoi.

“Krivoi, yes, yes, know of him of course,” said Ferndale. “Well now, I shall have to get this translated into English and show it to the Master. This could be very big indeed. You won’t be able to return to Moscow tomorrow, you know, Do you have a place to stay? Your club? Excellent. First class. Well now, you pop along and have a decent dinner and stay at the club for a couple of days.”

Ferndale called his wife to tell her he would not be home to their modest house at Pinner that evening, but he would be spending the night in town. She knew his job and was accus­tomed to such absences.

Then he spent the night working on the translation of the tape, alone in his office. He was fluent in Russian, without the ultrakeen ear for tone and pitch that Munro had, which denotes the truly bilingual speaker. But it was good enough. He missed nothing of the Yakovlev report, nor of the brief but stunned reaction that had followed it among the Polit­buro members.

At ten o’clock the following morning, sleepless but shaved and breakfasted, looking as pink and fresh as he always did, Ferndale called Sir Nigel Irvine’s secretary on the private line and asked to see him. He was with the Director General in ten minutes.

Sir Nigel Irvine read the transcript in silence, put it down, and regarded the tape lying on the desk before him.