The Devil's Alternative

They dined in separate rooms, and on the dot of nine o’clock each made the excuse of going to the toilet and left the table. They met in the parking lot, and Munro, whose own car would have been too noticeable with its embassy plates, followed Valentina to her own private Zhiguli sedan. She was subdued and puffed nervously at a cigarette.

Munro had handled two Russian defectors-in-place and knew the incessant strahl that begins to wear at the nerves af­ter a few weeks of subterfuge and secrecy.

“I got my chance,” she said at length. “Three days ago. The meeting of early July. I was nearly caught.”

Munro was tense. Whatever she might think about her being trusted within the Party machine, no one, no one at all, is ever really trusted in Moscow politics. She was walking a high wire; they both were. The difference was, he had a net: his diplomatic status.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Someone came in. A guard. I had just switched off the copying machine and was back at my typewriter. He was per­fectly friendly. But he leaned against the machine. It was still warm. I don’t think he noticed anything. But it frightened me. That’s not all that frightened me. I couldn’t read the transcript until I got home. I was too busy feeding it into the copier. Adam, it’s awful.”

She took her car keys, unlocked the glove compartment, and extracted a fat envelope, which she handed to Munro. The moment of handover is usually the moment when the watchers pounce, if they are there; the moment when the feet pound on the gravel, the doors are torn open, the occupants dragged out. Nothing happened.

Munro glanced at his watch. Nearly ten minutes. Too long. He put the envelope in his inside breast pocket.

“I’m going to try for permission to bring you out,” he said. “You can’t go on like this forever, even for much longer. Nor can you simply settle back to the old life, not now. Not knowing what you know. Nor can I carry on, knowing you are out in the city, knowing that we love each other. I have a leave break next month. I’m going to ask them in London then.”

This time she made no demur, a sign that her nerve was showing the first signs of breaking.

“All right,” she said. Seconds later, she was gone into the darkness of the parking lot. He watched her enter the pool of light by the open restaurant door and disappear inside. He gave her two minutes, then returned to his own impatient companion.

It was three in the morning before Munro had finished read­ing Plan Aleksandr, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky’s scenario for the conquest of Western Europe. He poured himself a double brandy and sat staring at the papers on his sitting-room table. Valentina’s jolly, kindly Uncle Nikolai, he mused, had cer­tainly laid it on the line. He spent two hours staring at a map of Europe, and by sunrise was as certain as Kerensky himself that in terms of conventional warfare the plan would work. Secondly, he was sure that Rykov, too, was right: thermonu­clear war would ensue. And thirdly, he was convinced there was no way of convincing the dissident members of the Polit­buro of this, short of the holocaust’s actually happening.

He rose and went to the window. Daylight was breaking in the east, out over the Kremlin spires; an ordinary Sunday was beginning for the citizens of Moscow, as it would in two hours for the Londoners and five hours later for the New Yorkers.

All his adult life the guarantee that summer Sundays would remain just plain ordinary had been dependent on a fine balance—a balance of belief in the might and willpower of the opponent superpower, a balance of credibility, a bal­ance of fear, but a balance for all that. He shivered, partly from the chill of morning, more from the realization that the papers behind him proved that at last the old nightmare was coming out of the shadows; the balance was breaking down.

The Sunday sunrise found Andrew Drake in far better hu­mor, for his Saturday night had brought information of a dif­ferent kind.

Every area of human knowledge, however small, however arcane, has its experts and its devotees. And every group of these appear to have one place where they congregate to talk, discuss, exchange their information, and impart the newest gossip.

Shipping movements in the eastern Mediterranean hardly form a subject on which doctorates are earned, but they do form a subject of great interest to out-of-work seamen in that area, such as Andrew Drake was pretending to be. The in­formation center about such movements is a small hotel called the Cavo d’Oro, standing above a yacht basin in the port of Piraeus.

Drake had already observed the offices of the agents, and probable owners, of the Salonika Line, but he knew the last thing he should do was to visit them.

Instead, he checked into the Cavo d’Oro Hotel and spent his time at the bar, where captains, mates, bosuns, agents, dockland gossips, and job seekers sat over drinks to exchange what tidbits of information they had. On Saturday night Drake found his man, a bosun who had once worked for the Salonika Line. It took half a bottle of retsina to extract the information.

“The one that visits Odessa most frequently is the M/V Sanadria,” he was told. “She is an old tub. Captain is Nikos Thanos. I think she’s in harbor now.”

She was in harbor, and Drake found her by midmorning. She was a five-thousand- ton-deadweight, tween-deck Mediter­ranean trader, rusty and none too clean, but if she was head­ing into the Black Sea and up to Odessa on her next voyage, Drake would not have minded if she had been full of holes.

By sundown he had found her captain, having learned that Thanos and all his officers were from the Greek island of Chios. Most of these Greek-run traders are almost family af­fairs, the master and his senior officers usually being from the same island, and often interrelated. Drake spoke no Greek, but fortunately English was the lingua franca of the interna­tional maritime community, even in Piraeus, and just before sundown he found Captain Thanos.

Northern Europeans, when they finish work, head for home, wife, and family. Eastern Mediterraneans head for the coffeehouse, friends, and gossip. The mecca of the coffee­house community in Piraeus is a street alongside the water­front called Akti Miaouli; its vicinity contains little else but shipping offices and coffeehouses.

Each frequenter has his favorite, and they are always crammed. Captain Thanos hung out when he was ashore at an open-fronted affair called Miki’s, and there Drake found him, sitting over the inevitable thick black coffee, tumbler of cold water, and shot glass of ouzo. He was short, broad, and nut-brown, with black curly hair and several days of stubble.

“Captain Thanos?” asked Drake. The man looked up in suspicion at the Englishman and nodded.

“Nikos Thanos, of the Sanadria?” The seaman nodded again. His three companions had fallen silent, watching. Drake smiled.

“My name is Andrew Drake. Can I offer you a drink?” Captain Thanos used one forefinger to indicate his own glass and those of his companions. Drake, still standing, sum­moned a waiter and ordered five of everything. Thanos nodded to a vacant chair, the invitation to join them. Drake knew it would be slow, and might take days. But he was not going to hurry. He had found his ship.

The meeting in the Oval Office five days later was far less relaxed. All eight members of the ad hoc committee of the National Security Council were present, with President Mat­thews in the chair. All had spent half the night reading the transcript of the Politburo meeting in which Marshal Kerensky had laid out his plan for war and Vishnayev had made his bid for power. All eight men were shaken. The focus was on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Craig.

“The question is, General,” President Matthews asked, “is it feasible?”

“In terms of a conventional war across the face of Western Europe from the Iron Curtain to the Channel ports, even in­volving the use of tactical nuclear shells and rockets, yes, Mr. President, it’s feasible.”

“Could the West, before next spring, increase her defenses to the point of making it completely unworkable?”

“That’s a harder one, Mr. President. Certainly we in the United States could ship more men, more hardware, over to Europe. That would give the Soviets ample excuse to beef up their own levels, if they ever needed such an excuse. But as to our European allies, they don’t have the reserves we have; for over a decade they have run down their manpower levels, arms levels, and preparation levels to a point where the im­balance in conventional