The Devil's Alternative

hoarded stocks immediately, and prevent wholesale slaughter. The Maxim Rudin faction, with its hair­breadth supremacy, stayed intact.

As the meeting dispersed, the old Soviet chief drew Vassili Petrov aside.

“Is there any connection between the two Jews and the Ivanenko killing?” he inquired.

“There may be,” conceded Petrov. “We know they did the mugging in Ternopol, of course, so they were evidently prepared to travel outside Lvov to prepare their escape. We have their fingerprints from the aircraft, and they match those in their living quarters in Lvov. We have found no shoes that match the prints at the Kiev murder site, but we are still searching for those shoes. One last thing. We have an area of palmprint taken from the car that knocked down Ivanenko’s mother. We are trying to get a complete palmprint of both from inside Berlin. If they check ...”

“Prepare a plan, a contingency plan, a feasibility study,” said Rudin. “To have them liquidated inside their jail in West Berlin. Just in case. And another thing. If their identity as the killers of Ivanenko is proved, tell me, not the Politburo. We wipe them out first, then inform our comrades.”

Petrov swallowed hard. Cheating the Politburo was playing for the highest stakes in Soviet Russia. One slip and there would be no safety net. He recalled what Rudin had told him by the fire out at Usovo a fortnight earlier. With the Polit­buro tied six against six, Ivanenko dead, and two of their own six about to change sides, there were no aces left.

“Very well,” he said.

West German Chancellor Dietrich Busch received his Justice Minister in his private office in the Chancellery Building next to the old Palais Schaumberg just after the middle of the month. The government chief of West Germany was standing at his modern picture window, gazing out at the frozen snow. Inside the new, modern government headquarters overlooking Federal Chancellor Square, the temperature was warm enough for shirt sleeves, and nothing of the raw, bitter Janu­ary of the riverside town penetrated.

“This Mishkin and Lazareff affair, how goes it?” asked Busch.

“It’s strange,” admitted his Justice Minister, Ludwig Fischer. “They are being more cooperative than one could hope for. They seem eager to achieve a quick trial with no delays.”

“Excellent,” said the Chancellor. “That’s exactly what we want. A quick affair. Let’s get it over with. In what way are they cooperating?”

“They were offered a star lawyer from the right wing, paid for by subscribed funds—possibly German contributions, pos­sibly the Jewish Defense League from America. They turned him down. He wanted to make a major spectacle out of the trial, plenty of detail about the KGB terror against Jews in the Ukraine.”

“A right-wing lawyer wanted that?”

“All grist to their mill. Bash the Russians, and so on,” said Fischer. “Anyway, Mishkin and Lazareff want to go for an admission of guilt and plead mitigating circumstances. They insist on it If they do so, and claim the gun went off by acci­dent when the plane hit the runway at Schonefeld, they have a partial defense. Their new lawyer is asking for murder to be reduced to culpable homicide if they do.”

“I think we can grant them that,” said the Chancellor. “What would they get?”

“With the hijacking thrown in, fifteen to twenty years. Of course, they could be paroled after serving a third of the sen­tence. They’re young—mid-twenties. They could be out by the time they’re thirty.”

“That’s in five years,” growled Busch. “I’m concerned about the next five months. Memories fade. In five years they’ll be in the archives.”

“Well, they admit everything, but they insist that the gun went off by accident. They claim they just wanted to reach Israel the only way they knew how. They’ll plead guilty right down the line—to culpable homicide.”

“Let them have it,” said the Chancellor. “The Russians won’t like it, but it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. They’d draw life for murder, but that’s effectively twenty years nowadays.”

“There’s one other thing. They want to be transferred after the trial to a jail in West Germany.”

“Why?”

“They seem terrified of revenge by the KGB. They think they’ll be safer in West Germany than in West Berlin.”

“Rubbish,” snorted Busch. “They’ll be tried and jailed in West Berlin. The Russians would not dream of trying to settle accounts inside a Berlin jail. They wouldn’t dare. Still, we could do an internal transfer in a year or so. But not yet. Go ahead, Ludwig. Make it quick and clean, if they wish to co­operate. But get the press off my back before the elections, and the Russian Ambassador as well.”

At Chita the morning sun glittered along the deck of the Freya, lying, as she had for two and a half months, by the commissioning quay. In those seventy-five days she had been transformed. Day and night she had lain docile while the tiny creatures who had made her swarmed into and out of every part of her. Hundreds of miles of lines had been laid the length and breadth of her—pipes, tubes, and electric cables. Her labyrinthine electrical networks had been connected and tested, her incredibly complex system of pumps installed and tried.

The computer-linked instruments that would fill her holds and empty them, thrust her forward or shut her down, hold her to any point of the compass for weeks on end without a hand on her helm, and observe the stars above her and the seabed below, had been set in their places.

The food lockers and deepfreezes to sustain her crew for months were fully installed; so, too, the furniture, doorknobs, lightbulbs, lavatories, galley stoves, central heating, air condi­tioning, cinema, sauna, three bars, two dining rooms, beds, bunks, carpets, and clothes hangers.

Her five-story superstructure had been converted from an empty shell into a luxury hotel; her bridge, radio room, and computer room from empty, echoing galleries to a low-hum­ming complex of data banks, calculators, and control systems. When the last of the workmen picked up their tools and left her alone, she was the ultimate in size, power, capacity, luxury, and technical refinement that man could ever have set to float on water.

The rest of her crew of thirty had arrived by air fourteen days earlier to familiarize themselves with every inch of her. Besides her master, Captain Thor Larsen, they were made up of the first officer, second mate, and third mate; the chief en­gineer, first engineer, second engineer, and electrical engineer (who ranked as a “first”); the radio officer and chief steward (also ranked as officers) ; and twenty others, to comprise the full complement: the first cook, four stewards, three firemen, one repairman, ten able seamen, and one pumpman.

Two weeks before she was due to sail, the tugs drew her away from the quay to the center of Ise Bay. There her great twin propellers bit into the waters to bring her out to the western Pacific for sea trials. For officers and crew, as well as for the dozen Japanese technicians who went with her, it would mean two weeks of grueling hard work, testing every single system against every known or possible contingency.

There was $170 million worth of her moving out to the mouth of the bay that morning, and the small ships standing off Nagoya watched her pass with awe.

Twenty kilometers outside Moscow lies the tourist village and estate of Arkhangelskoye, complete with museum and a restaurant noted for its genuine bear steaks. In the last week of that freezing January, Adam Munro had reserved a table there for himself and a date from the secretarial pool at the British Embassy.

He always varied his dinner companions so that no one girl should notice too much, and if the young hopeful of the evening wondered why he chose to drive the distance he did over icy roads in temperatures fifteen degrees below freezing, she made no comment on it.

The restaurant in any case was warm and snug, and when he excused himself to fetch extra cigarettes from his car, she thought nothing of it. In the parking lot, he shivered as the icy blast hit him, and hurried to where the twin headlights glowed briefly in the darkness.

He climbed into the car beside Valentina, put an arm around her, drew her close and kissed her.

“I hate the thought of you being in there with another woman, Adam,” she whispered as she nuzzled his throat.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Not important. An excuse for being able to drive out here to dine without being suspected. I have news for you.”