The Devil's Alternative

After replacing the VHF radiotelephone on the bridge of the Freya, Captain Thor Larsen had been taken at gunpoint on a tour of his own ship, peering with flashlight into the forward ballast holds to note the big packages strapped far down be­low the waterline.

Returning down the deck, he had seen the launch with the berthing crew turn, three miles out, and head back for the shore. To seaward a small freighter had passed, heading south, and had greeted the leviathan at anchor with a cheery hoot. It was not returned.

He had seen the single charge in the center ballast tank amidships, and the further charges in the after ballast tanks close by the superstructure. He did not need to see the paint locker. He knew where it was, and could imagine how close the charges were placed.

At half past eight, while Dirk Van Gelder was striding into the Maas Control Building to listen to the tape recording, Thor Larsen was being escorted back to his day cabin. He had noted one of the terrorists, muffled against the chill, perched right up in the fo’c’sle apron of the Freya, watching the arc of the sea out in front of the vessel. Another was high on the top of the funnel casing, over a hundred feet up, with a commanding view of the sea around him. A third was on the bridge, patrolling the radar screens, able, thanks to the Freya’s own technology, to see a circle of ocean with a radius of forty-eight miles, and most of the sea beneath her.

Of the remaining four, two, the leader and another, were with him; the other two must be below decks somewhere.

The terrorist leader forced him to sit at his own table in his own cabin. The man tapped the oscillator, which was clipped to his belt.

“Captain, please don’t force me to press this red button. And please don’t think that I will not—either if there is any attempt at heroics on this ship or if my demands are not met. Now, please read this.”

He handed Captain Larsen a sheaf of three sheets of fools­cap paper covered with typed writing in English. Larsen went rapidly through it.

“At nine o’clock you are going to read that message over the ship-to-shore radio to the chairman of the Port Authority of Rotterdam. No more, and no less. No breaking into Dutch or Norwegian. No supplementary questions. Just the message. Understand?”

Larsen nodded grimly. The door opened, and a masked terrorist came in. He had apparently been in the galley. He bore a tray with fried eggs, butter, jam, and coffee, which he placed on the table between them.

“Breakfast,” said the terrorist leader. He gestured toward Larsen. “You might as well eat.”

Larsen shook his head, but drank the coffee. He had been awake all night, and had risen from his bed the previous morning at seven. Twenty-six hours awake, and many more to go. He needed to stay alert, and guessed the black coffee might help. He calculated also that the terrorist across the table from him had been awake the same amount of time.

The terrorist signaled the remaining gunman to leave. As the door closed they were alone, but the broad expanse of table put the terrorist well out of Larsen’s reach. The gun lay within inches of the man’s right hand; the oscillator was at his waist.

“I don’t think we shall have to abuse your hospitality for more than thirty hours, maybe forty,” said the masked man. “But if I wear this mask during that time, I shall suffocate. You have never seen me before, and after tomorrow you will never see me again.”

With his left hand, the man pulled the black balaclava hel­met from his head. Larsen found himself staring at a man in his early thirties, with brown eyes and medium-brown hair. He puzzled Larsen. The man spoke like an Englishman, be­haved like one. But Englishmen did not hijack tankers, surely. Irish, perhaps? IRA? But he had referred to friends of his in prison in Germany. Arab, perhaps? There were PLO terror­ists in prison in Germany. And he spoke a strange language to his companions. Not Arabic by the sound of it, yet there were scores of different dialects in Arabic, and Larsen knew only the Gulf Arabs. Again, Irish perhaps.

“What do I call you?” he asked the man whom he would never know as Andriy Drach or Andrew Drake. The man thought for a moment as he ate.

“You can call me ‘Svoboda,’ ” he said at length. “It is a common name in my language. But it is also a word. It means freedom.’ ”

“That’s not Arabic,” said Larsen.

The man smiled for the first time.

“Certainly not. We are not Arabs. We are Ukrainian freedom fighters, and proud of it.”

“And you think the authorities will free your friends in prison?” asked Larsen.

“They will have to,” said Drake confidently. “They have no alternative. Come, it is almost nine o’clock.”

0900 to 1300

“PILOT MAAS, Pilot Maas, this is the Freya.”

Captain Thor Larsen’s baritone voice echoed into the main control room at the squat building on the tip of the Hook of Holland. In the first-floor office with its sweeping picture win­dows gazing out over the North Sea, now curtained against the bright morning sun to give clarity to the radar screens, five men sat waiting.

Dijkstra and Schipper were still on duty, thoughts of breakfast forgotten. Dirk Van Gelder stood behind Dijkstra, ready to take over when the call came through. At another console, one of the day-shift men was taking care of the rest of the estuary traffic, bringing ships in and out, but keeping them away from the Freya, whose blip on the radar screen was at the limit of vision but still larger than all the others. The senior maritime safety officer of Maas Control was also present.

When the call came, Dijkstra slipped out of his chair before the speaker, and Van Gelder sat down. He gripped the stem of the table microphone, cleared his throat, and threw the “transmit” switch.

“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead, please.”

Beyond the confines of the building, which looked for all the world like a chopped-off air-traffic control tower sitting on the sand, other ears were listening. During the earlier transmission, two other ships had caught part of the conver­sation, and there had been a bit of chitchat between ships’ ra­dio officers in the intervening two hours. Now a dozen were listening keenly.

On the Freya, Larsen knew he could switch to Channel 16, speak to Scheveningen Radio, and ask for a patch-through to Maas Control for greater privacy, but the listeners would soon join him on that channel. So he stayed with Channel 20.

“Freya to Pilot Maas, I wish to speak personally to the chairman of the Port Authority.”

This is Pilot Maas. This is Dirk Van Gelder speaking. I am the chairman of the Port Authority.”

“This is Captain Thor Larsen, master of the Freya.”

“Yes, Captain Larsen, your voice is recognized. What is your problem?”

At the other end, on the bridge of the Freya, Drake ges­tured with the tip of his gun to the written statement in Larsen’s hand. Larsen nodded, flicked his “transmit” switch, and began to read into the telephone.

“I am reading a prepared statement. Please do not inter­rupt and do not pose questions.

“ ‘At three o’clock this morning, the Freya was taken over by armed men. I have already been given ample reason to be­lieve they are in deadly earnest and prepared to carry out all their threats unless their demands are met.’ ”

In the control tower on the sand, there was a hiss of in­drawn breath from behind Van Gelder. He closed his eyes wearily. For years he had been urging that some security measures be taken to protect these floating bombs from a hi­jacking. He had been ignored, and now it had happened at last. The voice from the speaker went on; the tape recorder revolved impassively.

“ ‘My entire crew is presently locked in the lowest portion of the ship, behind steel doors, and cannot escape. So far, no harm has come to them. I myself am held at gunpoint on my own bridge.

“ ‘During the night, explosive charges have been placed at strategic positions at various points inside the