The Devil's Alternative

of New Year’s Eve to the panel of judges. When he had finished, the judges adjourned to discuss the sentence.

The Freya moved slowly and sedately through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. The breeze had freshened with the sunrise into the chilly shamal wind coming into her nose from the northwest, sand-laden, causing the horizon to be hazy and vague. Her crew all knew this landscape well enough, having passed many times on their way to collect crude oil from the Gulf. They were all experienced tanker- men.

To one side of the Freya, barren, arid Qeshm Island slid by, barely two cables away; to the other, the officers on the bridge could make out the bleak moonscape of Cape Musandam, with its sheer rocky mountains. The Freya was riding high, and the depth in the channel presented no problems. On the return, when she was laden with crude oil, it would be different. She would be almost shut down, moving slowly, watch officer’s eyes riveted on her depth sounder, watching the map of the seabed pass barely a few feet beneath her keel, ninety-eight feet below the waterline.

She was still in ballast, as she had been all the way from Chita. She had sixty giant tanks or holds, three abreast in lines of twenty, fore to aft. One of these was the slop tank, to be used for nothing else but gathering the slops from her fifty crude-carrying cargo tanks. Nine were permanent ballast tanks, to be used for nothing but pure seawater to give her stability when she was empty of cargo.

But her remaining fifty crude-oil tanks were sufficient. Each held 20,000 tons of crude oil. It was with complete con­fidence in the impossibility of her causing accidental oil pol­lution that she steamed on to Abu Dhabi to load her first cargo.

There is a modest bar on the rue Miollin in Paris where the small fry of the world of mercenaries and arms sellers are wont to forgather and take a drink together. It was here the German-Ukrainian and his English colleague were brought by the German’s French contact man.

There were several hours of low-voiced negotiation be­tween the Frenchman and another French friend of his. Eventually the contact man came across to the two Ukraini­ans.

“My friend says it is possible,” he told the Ukrainian from Germany. “Five hundred dollars each, American dollars, cash. One magazine per unit included.”

“We’ll take it if he’ll throw in one handgun with full maga­zine,” said the man from Germany.

Three hours later in the garage of a private house near Neuilly, six submachine carbines and one MAB automatic nine-millimeter handgun were wrapped in blankets and stowed in the trunk of the Ukrainians’ car. The money changed hands. In twelve hours, just before midnight of Feb­ruary 24, the two men arrived at their apartment in Brussels and stored their equipment at the back of a closet.

As the sun rose on February 25, the Freya eased her way back through the Strait of Hormuz, and on the bridge there was a sigh of relief as the officers gazing at the depth sounder saw the seabed drop away from in front of their eyes to the deep of the ocean. On the digital display, the figures ran rap­idly from twenty to one hundred fathoms. The Freya moved steadily back to her full-load service speed of fifteen knots as she went southeast back down the Gulf of Oman.

She was heavy-laden now, doing what she had been designed and built for—carrying a million tons of crude oil to the thirsty refineries of Europe and the millions of family cars that would drink it. Her draft was now at her designed ninety-eight feet, and her hazard-alarm devices had ingested the knowledge and knew what to do if the seabed ever ap­proached too close.

Her nine ballast tanks were now empty, acting as buoy­ancy tanks. Far away in the forepart, the first row of three tanks contained a full crude tank on port and starboard, with the single slop tank in the center. One row back were the first three empty ballast tanks. The second row of three was amid­ships, and the third row of three was at the foot of the super­structure, on the fifth floor of which Captain Thor Larsen handed the Freya to the senior officer of the watch and went down to his handsome day cabin for breakfast and a short sleep.

On the morning of February 26, after an adjournment of several days, the presiding judge in the Moabit courtroom in West Berlin began to read the judgment of himself and his two colleagues. It took several hours.

In their walled dock, Mishkin and Lazareff listened impas­sively. From time to time each sipped water from the glasses placed on the tables in front of them. From the packed booths reserved for the international press they were under scrutiny, as were the figures of the judges, while the findings were read. But one magazine journalist representing a leftist German monthly magazine seemed more interested in the glasses they drank from than in the prisoners themselves.

The court adjourned for lunch, and when it resumed, the journalist was missing from his seat. He was phoning from one of the kiosks outside the hearing room. Shortly after three, the judge reached his conclusion. Both men were re­quired to rise, to hear themselves sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

They were led away to begin their sentences at Tegel Jail in the northern part of the city, and within minutes the court­room had emptied. The cleaners took over, removing the brimming wastepaper baskets, carafes, and glasses. One of the middle-aged ladies occupied herself with cleaning the interior of the dock. Unobserved by her colleagues, she quietly picked up the prisoners’ two drinking glasses, wrapped each in a dustcloth, and placed them in her shopping bag beneath the empty wrappers of her sandwiches. No one noticed, and no one cared.

On the last day of the month, Vassili Petrov sought and re­ceived a private audience with Maxim Rudin in the latter’s Kremlin suite.

“Mishkin and Lazarett,” he said without preamble.

“What about them? They got fifteen years. It should have been the firing squad.”

“One of our people in West Berlin abstracted the glasses they used for water during the trial. The palmprint on one matches that from the car used in the hit-and-run affair in Kiev in October.”

“So it was them,” said Rudin grimly. “Damn them to hell! Vassili, wipe them out. Liquidate them as fast as you can. Give it to ‘Wet Affairs.’ ”

The KGB, vast and complex in its scope and organization, consists basically of four chief directorates, seven independent directorates, and six independent departments.

But the four chief directorates comprise the bulk of the KGB. One of these, the First, concerns itself exclusively with clandestine activities outside the USSR.

Deep within the heart of it is a section known simply as Department V (as in Victor), or the Executive Action De­partment. This is the one the KGB would most like to keep hidden from the rest of the world, inside and outside the USSR. For its tasks include sabotage, extortion, kidnapping, and assassination. Within the jargon of the KGB itself, it usu­ally has yet another name: the department of mokrte dyela, or “Wet Affairs,” so called because its operations not infre­quently involve someone’s getting wet with blood. It was to this Department V of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB that Maxim Rudin ordered Petrov to hand the elimination of Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I have already done as much,” said Petrov. “I thought of giving the affair to Colonel Kukushkin, Ivanenko’s head of security. He has a personal reason to wish to succeed—to save his own skin, apart from avenging Ivanenko and his own humiliation. He’s already served his time in Wet Affairs—ten years ago. Inevitably he is already aware of the secret of what happened in Rosa Luxemburg Street—he was there. And he speaks German. He would report back only to Gen­eral Abrassov or to me.”

Rudin nodded grimly.

“All right, let him have the job. He can pick his own team. Abrassov will give him everything he needs. The apparent reason will be to avenge the death of Flight Captain Rudenko. And Vassili, he had better succeed the first time. If he tries and fails, Mishkin and Lazareff could open their mouths. After a failed attempt to kill them, someone might believe them. Certainly Vishnayev would, and you know what that would mean.”

“I know,” said Petrov quietly. “He will not fail. He’ll do it himself.”