The Devil's Alternative

“IT’S THE BEST we’ll get, Mr. President,” said Secretary of State David Lawrence. “Personally, I believe Edwin Camp­bell has done us proud at Castletown.”

Grouped before the President’s desk in the Oval Office were the secretaries of State, Defense, and the Treasury, with Stanislaw Poklewski, and Robert Benson of the CIA. Beyond the French windows the Rose Garden was whipped by a bit­ter wind. The snows had gone, but March 1 was bleak and uninviting.

President William Matthews laid his hand on the bulky folder in front of him, the draft agreement wrung out of the Castletown talks.

“A lot of it is too technical for me,” he confessed, “but the digest from the Defense Department impresses me. The way I see it is this: if we reject the agreement now, after the Soviet Politburo has accepted it, there’ll be no renegotiation, any­way. The matter of grain deliveries will become academic to Russia in three months in any case. By then they’ll be starv­ing and Rudin will be gone. Yefrem Vishnayev will get his war. Right?”

“That seems to be the unavoidable conclusion,” said David Lawrence.

“How about the other side of it—the concessions we have made?” asked the President.

“The secret trade protocol in the separate document,” said the Secretary of the Treasury, “requires us to deliver fifty-five million tons of mixed grains at production costs and nearly three billion dollars’ worth of oil, computer, and consumer industry technology, rather heavily subsidized. The total cost to the United States runs to almost four billion dollars. On the other hand, the sweeping arms reductions should enable us to claw back that much and more by reduced defense ex­penditures.”

“If the Soviets abide by their undertakings,” said the Secre­tary of Defense hastily.

“But if they do, and we have to believe they will,” coun­tered Lawrence, “by our own experts’ calculations they could not launch a successful conventional or tactical nuclear war across the face of Europe for at least five years.”

President Matthews knew that the presidential election of 1984 would not see his candidacy. But if he could step down in January 1985, leaving behind him peace for even half a decade, with the burdensome arms race of the seventies halted in its tracks, he would take his place among the great U.S. presidents. He wanted that more than anything else this spring of 1983.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have to approve this treaty as it stands, and for once I’m confident the Senate will see it the same way. David, inform Moscow we join them in agreeing to the terms, and propose that our negotiators reconvene at Castletown to draw up the formal treaty ready for signing. While this is going on, we will permit the loading of the grain ships, ready to sail on the day of signature. That is all.”

On March 3, Azamat Krim and his Ukrainian-American col­laborator clinched the deal that acquired them a sturdy and powerful launch. She was the kind of craft much favored by enthusiastic sea anglers on both the British and European coasts of the North Sea, steel-hulled, forty feet long, tough, and secondhand. She had Belgian registration, and they had found her near Ostende.

Up front, she had a cabin whose roof extended the for­ward third of her length. A companionway led down to a cramped four-berth resting area, with a tiny toilet and galley. Aft of the rear bulkhead she was open to the elements, and beneath the deck lay a powerful engine capable of taking her through the wild North Sea to the fishing grounds and back.

Krim and his companion brought her from Ostende to Blankenberge, farther up the Belgian coast, and when she was moored in the marina, she attracted no attention. Spring al­ways brings its crop of hardy sea anglers to the coasts with their boats and tackle. The American chose to live on board and work on the engine. Krim returned to Brussels to find that Andrew Drake had taken over the kitchen table as a workbench and was deeply engrossed in preparations of his own.

For the third time on her maiden voyage, the Freya had crossed the Equator, and March 7 found her entering the Mozambique Channel, heading south by southwest toward the Cape of Good Hope. She was still following her hundred-fathom line, leaving six hundred feet of clear ocean beneath her keel, a course that took her to seaward of the main shipping lanes. She had not seen land since coming out of the Gulf of Oman, but on the afternoon of the seventh she passed through the Comoro Islands at the north end of the Mozambique Channel. To starboard, her crew, taking advan­tage of the moderate winds and seas to stroll the quarter mile of forward deck or lounge beside the screened swimming pool up on C deck, saw Great Comoro Island, the peak of its densely wooded mountain hidden in clouds, the smoke from the burning undergrowth on its flanks drifting across the green water. By nightfall the skies had overcast with gray cloud, the wind turned squally. Ahead lay the heaving seas of the Cape and the final northward run to Europe and her wel­come.

The following day, Moscow replied formally to the proposal of President Matthews, welcoming his agreement, with the concurrence of the United States Senate, to the terms of the draft treaty and agreeing that the chief negotiators of Castletown should reconvene jointly to draft the formal treaty while remaining in constant contact with their respective gov­ernments.

The bulk of the Soviet merchant marine fleet, Sovfracht, along with the numerous other vessels already chartered by the Soviet Union, had already sailed at the American govern­ment’s invitation for the grain ports of North America. In Moscow the first reports were coming in of excessive quanti­ties of meat appearing in the peasant markets, indicating live­stock slaughter was taking place even on the state and collective farms, where it was forbidden. The last reserves of grain for animals and humans alike were running out.

In a private message to President Matthews, Maxim Rudin regretted that for health reasons he would not personally be able to sign the treaty on behalf of the Soviet Union unless the ceremony were held in Moscow; he therefore proposed a formal signature by foreign ministers in Dublin on April 10.

The winds of the Cape were hellish; the South African sum­mer was over, and the autumn gales thundered up from the Antarctic to batter Table Mountain. The Freya by March 12 was in the heart of the Agulhas Current, pushing westward through mountainous green seas, taking the gales from the southwest on her port beam.

It was bitter cold out on deck, but no one was there. Be­hind the double-glazing of the bridge, Captain Thor Larsen and his two officers of the watch stood with the helmsman, radio officer, and two others in shirt sleeves. Warm, safe, pro­tected by the aura of her invincible technology, they gazed forward to where forty-foot waves impelled by the force 10 winds out of the southwest reared above the Freya’s port side, hovered for a moment, then crashed down to obscure her gigantic deck and its myriad pipes and valves in a swirling maelstrom of white foam. While the waves burst, only the fo’c’sle, far ahead, was discernible, like a separate entity. As the foam receded, defeated, through the scuppers, the Freya shook herself and buried her bulk in another oncoming mountain. A hundred feet beneath the men, ninety thousand shaft horsepower pushed a million tons of crude oil another few yards toward Rotterdam. High above, the Cape alba­trosses wheeled and glided, their lost cries unheard behind the Plexiglas. Coffee was served by one of the stewards.

Two days later, on Monday the fourteenth, Adam Munro drove out of the courtyard of the Commercial Section of the British Embassy and turned sharp right into Kutuzovsky Prospekt toward the city center. His destination was the main embassy building, where he had been summoned by the head of Chancery. The telephone call, certainly tapped by the KGB, had referred to the clarification of minor details for a forthcoming trade delegation visit from London. In fact it meant that there was a message awaiting him in the cipher room.

The cipher room in the embassy building on Maurice Thorez Embankment 5s in the basement, a secure room regu­larly checked by the “sweepers,” who are not looking for dust, but for listening devices. The cipher clerks are diplomat­ic personnel and security-checked to the highest level. Never­theless, sometimes messages come in that bear a coding to indicate they will not and cannot be decoded by the normal decoding machines. The tag on these messages will indicate that they have to be passed to one particular cipher clerk, a man who has the right to know because he has a need to know. Occasionally a message for Adam Munro bore such a coding, as today. The clerk in question knew Munro’s real job because he needed to—if for no other reason, to protect him from those who did not.

Munro entered the cipher room, and the clerk spotted him. They withdrew to a small annex where the clerk, a