The Devil's Alternative

Freya, the great wall of superstructure behind them, the long, lonely deck ahead. One of the men, the one at the rear, was in black from head to foot, with a submachine gun. The one ahead wore sneak­ ers, casual slacks, and a nylon-type anorak with three horizontal black stripes across its back. The hood was up against the chill afternoon breeze.

“Looks like a terrorist at the back, but a seaman in front,” said the camera operator. Latham nodded. He could not see the colors; his pictures were monochrome.

“Give me a closer look,” he said, “and transmit.” The camera zoomed down until the frame occupied forty feet of foredeck, both men walking in the center of the pic­ture.

Captain Thor Larsen could see the colors. He gazed through the wide forward windows of his cabin beneath the bridge in disbelief. Behind him the guard with the machine gun stood well back, muzzle trained on the middle of the Norwegian’s white sweater.

Halfway down the foredeck, reduced by distance to match-stick figures, the second man, in black, stopped, raised his machine gun, and aimed at the back in front of him. Even through the glazing the crackle of the one- second burst could be heard. The figure in the pillar-box red anorak arched as if kicked in the spine, threw up its arms, pitched forward, rolled once, and came to rest, half-obscured beneath the inspection catwalk.

Thor Larsen slowly closed his eyes. When the ship had been taken over, his third mate, Danish-American Tom Kel­ler, had been wearing fawn slacks and a light nylon wind-breaker in bright red with three black stripes across the back. Larsen leaned his forehead against the back of his hand on the glass. Then he straightened, turned to the man he knew as Svoboda, and stared at him. Drake stared back.

“I warned them,” he said angrily. “I told them exactly what would happen, and they thought they could play games. Now they know they cant.”

Twenty minutes later the still pictures showing the se­quence of what had happened on the deck of the Freya were coming out of a machine in the heart of London. Twenty minutes after that, the details in verbal terms were rattling off a teleprinter in the Federal Chancellery in Bonn. It was four-thirty P.M.

Chancellor Busch looked at his cabinet.

“I regret to have to inform you,” he said, “that one hour ago a private plane apparently sought to take pictures of the Freya from close range, about a thousand feet. Ten minutes later the terrorists walked one of the crew halfway down the deck and, under the cameras of the British Nimrod above them, executed him. His body now lies half under the cat­walk, half under the sky.”

There was dead silence in the room.

“Can he be identified?” asked one of the ministers in a low voice.

“No, his face was partly covered by the hood of his an­orak.”

“Bastards,” said the Defense Minister. “Now thirty families all over Scandinavia will be in anguish, instead of one. They’re really turning the knife.”

“In the wake of this, so will the four governments of Scan­dinavia, and I shall have to answer their ambassadors,” said Hagowitz. “I really don’t think we have any alternative.”

When the hands were raised, the majority were for Hagowitz’s proposal: that he instruct the German Ambassa­dor to Israel to seek an urgent interview with the Israeli Pre­mier and ask from him, at Germany’s request, the guarantee the terrorists had demanded. Following which, if it was given, the Federal Republic would announce that with regret it had no alternative, in order to spare further misery to innocent men and women outside West Germany, but to release Mishkin and Lazareff to Israel.

“The terrorists have given the Israeli Prime Minister until midnight to offer that guarantee,” said Chancellor Busch. “And ourselves until dawn to put these hijackers on a plane. We’ll hold our announcement until Jerusalem agrees. Without that, there is nothing we can do, anyway.”

By agreement among the NATO allies concerned, the RAF Nimrod remained the only aircraft in the sky above the Freya, circling endlessly, watching and noting, sending pic­tures back to base whenever there was anything to show—pictures that went immediately to London and to the capitals of the concerned countries.

At five P.M. the lookouts were changed, the men from the fo’c’sle and funnel top, who had been there for ten hours, being allowed to return, chilled and stiff, to the crew’s quarters for food, warmth, and sleep. For the night watch, they were replaced by others, equipped with walkie-talkies and powerful flashlights.

But the allied agreement on the Nimrod did not extend to surface ships. Each coastal nation wanted an on-site observer from its own Navy. During the late afternoon the French light cruiser Montcalm stole quietly out of the south and hove lo, just over five nautical miles from the Freya. Out of the north, where she had been cruising off the Frisians, came the Dutch missile frigate Breda, which stopped six nautical miles to the north of the helpless tanker.

She was joined by the German missile frigate Brunner, and the frigates lay five cable lengths away from each other, both watching the dim shape on the southern horizon. From the Scottish port of Leith, where she had been on a courtesy visit, H.M.S. Argyll put to sea, and as the first evening star ap­peared in the cloudless sky, she took up her station due west of the Freya.

She was a guided-missile light cruiser, known as a DLG, of just under six thousand tons, armed with batteries of Exocet missiles. Her modern gas-turbine and steam engines had en­abled her to put to sea at a moment’s notice, and deep in her hull the Data Link computer she carried was tapped into the Data Link of the Nimrod circling fifteen thousand feet above in the darkening sky. Toward her stern, one step up from the afterdeck, she carried her own Westland Wessex helicopter.

Beneath the water, the sonar ears of the warships surround­ed the Freya on three sides; above the water, the radar scan­ners swept the ocean constantly. With the Nimrod above, Freya was cocooned in an invisible shroud of electronic sur­veillance. She lay silent and inert as the sun prepared to fall over the English coast.

It was five o’clock in Western Europe but seven in Israel when the West German Ambassador asked for a personal audience with Premier Benyamin Golen. It was pointed out to him at once that the Sabbath had started one hour before and that as a devout Jew the Premier was at rest in his own home. Nevertheless, the message was relayed because neither the Prime Minister’s private office nor he himself was unaware of what was happening in the North Sea. Indeed, since the 0900 broadcast from Thor Larsen, the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, had been keeping Jerusalem informed, and following the demands made at noon concerning Israel, the most copi­ous position papers had been prepared. Before the official start of the Sabbath at six o’clock, Premier Golen had read them all.

“I am not prepared to break Shabbat and drive to the office,” he told his aide, who telephoned him with the news, “even though I am now answering this telephone. And it is rather a long way to walk. Ask the Ambassador to call on me personally.”

Ten minutes later the German Embassy car drew up out­side the Premier’s ascetically modest house in the suburbs of Jerusalem. When the envoy was shown in, he was apologetic.

After the traditional greetings of “Shabbat Shalom,” the Ambassador said:

“Prime Minister, I would not have disturbed you for all the world during the hours of the Sabbath, but I understand it is permitted to break the Sabbath if human life is at stake.”

Premier Golen inclined his head.

“It is permitted if human life is at stake or in danger,” he conceded.

“In this case, that is very much so,” said the Ambassador. “You will be aware, sir, of what has been happening on board the supertanker Freya in the North Sea these past twelve hours.”

The Premier was more than aware; he was deeply con­cerned, for since the noon demands, it had become plain that the terrorists, whoever they were, could not be Palestinian Arabs, and might even be Jewish fanatics. But his own agen­cies, the external Mossad and the internal Sherut Bitachon, called from its initials Shin Bet, had not been able to find any trace of such fanatics being missing from their usual haunts.

“I am aware, Ambassador, and I join in sorrow for the murdered seaman. What is it that the Federal Republic