The Devil's Alternative

“Down there,” said the seaman.

“Go on down,” said the terrorist. The boy spun the twin butterfly handles, unscrewing the cleats, and pulled them back. Seizing the door handle, he swung it open. There was a light inside, showing a tiny platform and a steel stairway run­ning down to the bowels of the Freya. At a jerk from the gun, the seaman stepped inside and began to head downward, the terrorist behind him.

Over seventy feet of the stairs led down, past several gal­leries from which steel doors led off. When they reached the bottom they were well below waterline, only the keel beneath the deck plating under their feet. They were in an enclosure with four steel doors. The terrorist nodded to the one facing aft.

“What’s that lead to?”

“Steering-gear housing.”

“Let’s have a look.”

When the door was open, it showed a great vaulted hall all in metal and painted pale green. It was well lit. Most of the center of the deck space was taken up by a mountain of en­cased machinery the device which, receiving its orders from the computers of the bridge, would move the rudder. The walls of the cavity were curved to the nethermost part of the ship’s hull. Aft of the chamber, beyond the steel, the great rudder of the Freya would be hanging inert in the black waters of the North Sea. The terrorist ordered the door closed again and bolted shut.

Port and starboard of the steering-gear chamber were, re­spectively, a chemical store and a paint store. The chemical store the terrorist ignored; he was not going to make men prisoners where there was acid to play with. The paint store was better. It was quite large, airy, well ventilated, and its outer wall was the hull of the ship.

“What’s the fourth door?” asked the terrorist. The fourth was the only door with no handles.

“It leads to the rear of the engine room,” said the seaman. “It is bolted on the other side.”

The terrorist pushed against the steel door. It was rock-solid. He seemed satisfied.

“How many men on this ship?” he asked. “Or women. No tricks. If there is one more than the figure you give, we’ll shoot them.”

The boy ran his tongue over dry lips.

“There are no women,” he said. “There might be wives next trip, but not on the maiden voyage. There are thirty men, including Captain Larsen.”

Knowing what he needed to know, the terrorist pushed the frightened young man into the paint locker, swung the door closed, and threw one of the twin bolts into its socket. Then he returned back up the ladder.

Emerging on the poop deck, he avoided the interior stairs and raced back up the outside ladders to the bridge, stepping in from outside where they reached the bridgewing.

He nodded to his five companions, who still held the two officers at gunpoint, and issued a stream of further orders. Minutes later the two bridge officers, joined by the chief stew­ard and chief engineer, roused from their beds on D deck be­low the bridge, were marched down to the paint locker. Most of the crew were asleep on B deck, where the bulk of the cabins were situated, much smaller than the officers’ accom­modations above their heads, on C and D.

There were protests, exclamations, bitter language, as they were herded out and down. But at every stage the leader of the terrorists, the only one who spoke at all, informed them in English that their captain was held in his own cabin and would die in the event of any resistance. The officers and men obeyed their orders.

Down in the paint locker the crew was finally counted: twenty-nine. The first cook and two of the four stewards were allowed to return to the galley on A deck and ferry down to the paint store trays of buns and rolls, along with crates of bottled lemonade and canned beer. Two buckets were pro­vided for toilets.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” the terrorist leader told the twenty-nine angry men who stared back at him from in­side the paint locker. “You won’t be here long. Thirty hours at most. One last thing. Your captain wants the pumpman. Who is he?”

A Swede called Martinsson stepped forward.

“I’m the pumpman,” he said.

“Come with me.” It was four-thirty.

A deck, the ground floor of the superstructure, was entirely devoted to the rooms containing the services of the marine giant. Located there were the main galley, deepfreeze cham­ber, cool room, other assorted food stores, liquor store, soiled-linen store, automatic laundry, cargo-control room, in­cluding the inert-gas control, and the firefighting-control room, also called the foam room.

Above it was B deck, with all nonofficer accommoda­tions, cinema, library, four recreation rooms, and three bars.

C deck held the officer cabins apart from the four on the level above, plus the officers’ dining salon and smoking room, and the crew’s club, with swimming pool, sauna, and gym­nasium.

It was the cargo-control room on A deck that interested the terrorist, and he ordered the pumpman to bring him to it. There were no windows; it was centrally heated, air-condi­tioned, silent, and well lit. Behind his mask the eyes of the terrorist chief flickered over the banks of switches and settled on the rear bulkhead. Here behind the control console where the pumpman now sat, a visual display board, nine feet wide and four feet tall, occupied the wall. It showed in map form the crude-tank layout of the Freya’s cargo capacity.

“If you try to trick me,” he told the pumpman, “it may cost me the life of one of my men, but I shall surely find out If I do, I shall not shoot you, my friend, I shall shoot your Captain Larsen. Now, point out to me where the ballast holds are, and where the cargo holds.”

Martinsson was not going to argue, with his captain’s life at stake. He was in his mid-twenties, and Thor Larsen was a generation older. He had sailed with Larsen twice before, in­cluding his first-ever voyage as pumpman, and like all the crew he had enormous respect and liking for the towering Norwegian, who had a reputation for unflagging consider­ation for his crew and for being the best mariner in the Nordia fleet. He pointed at the diagram in front of him.

The sixty holds were laid out in sets of three across the beam of the Freya; twenty such sets.

“Up here in the forepart,” said Martinsson, “the port and starboard tanks are full of crude. The center is the slop tank, empty now, like a buoyancy tank, because we are on our maiden voyage and have not discharged cargo yet. So there has been no need to scour the cargo tanks and pump the slops in here. One row back, all three are ballast tanks. They were full of seawater from Japan to the Gulf; now they are full of air.”

“Open the valves,” said the terrorist, “between all three ballast tanks and the slop tank.” Martinsson hesitated. “Go on, do it.”

Martinsson pressed three square plastic controls on the console in front of him. There was a low humming from be­hind the console. A quarter of a mile in front of them, down below the steel deck, great valves the size of normal garage doors swung open, forming a single, linked unit out of the four tanks, each capable of holding twenty thousand tons of liquid. Not only air but any liquid now entering one of the tanks would flow freely to the other three.

“Where are the next ballast tanks?” asked the terrorist. With his forefinger Martinsson pointed halfway down the ship.

“Here, amidships, there are three in a row, side by side,” he said.

“Leave them alone,” said the terrorist “Where are the others?”

“There are nine ballast tanks in all,” said Martinsson. “The last three are here, side by side as usual, right up close to the superstructure.”

“Open the valves so they communicate with each other.”

Martinsson did as he was bid.

“Good,” said the terrorist. “Now, can the ballast tanks be linked straight through to the cargo tanks?”

“No,” said Martinsson, “it’s not possible. The ballast tanks are permanent for ballast—that is, seawater or air —but never oil. The cargo tanks are the reverse. The two systems do not interconnect.”

“Fine,” said the masked man. “We can change all that. One last thing. Open all the valves between all the cargo tanks, laterally and longitudinally, so that all fifty communicate with each other.”

It took fifteen seconds for all the necessary control buttons to be pushed. Far down in the treacly blackness of the crude oil, scores of gigantic valves swung open, forming one enor­mous, single tank containing a million tons of crude. Martins-son stared at his handiwork in horror.