The Devil's Alternative

She seemed not to have heard him, and to have overcome, for a while, her fear of the KGB, exposure as a spy, the aw­ful consequences of capture unless she could escape in time. When she spoke, her voice was quite level.

“You know Detsky Mir? The soft-toys counter. At ten o’clock this morning.”

He stood on the black tarmac and watched her taillights vanish. It was done. They had asked him to do it, demanded that he do it, and he had done it. He had diplomatic protec­tion to keep him out of Lubyanka. The worst that could hap­pen would be his Ambassador’s summons to the Foreign Ministry on Monday morning to receive Dmitri Rykov’s icy protest and demand for his removal. But Valentina was walk­ing right into the secret archives, without even the disguise of normal, accustomed, justified behavior to protect her. He looked at his watch. Seven hours, seven hours to go, seven hours of knotted stomach muscles and ragged nerve ends. He walked back to his car.

Ludwig Jahn stood in the open gateway of Tegel Jail and watched the taillights of the armored van bearing Mishkin and Lazareff disappear down the street.

For him, unlike for Munro, there would be no more wait­ing, no tension stretching through the dawn and into the morning. For him the waiting was over.

He walked carefully to his office on the first floor and closed the door. For a few moments he stood by the open window, then drew back one hand and hurled the first of the cyanide pistols far into the night. He was fat, overweight, un­fit. A heart attack would be accepted as possible, provided no evidence was found.

Leaning far out of the window, he thought of his nieces over the Wall in the East, their laughing faces when Uncle Ludo had brought the presents four months ago at Christmas. He closed his eyes, held the other tube beneath his nostrils, and pressed the trigger button.

The pain slammed across his chest like a giant hammer. The loosened fingers dropped the tube, which fell with a tinkle to the street below. Jahn slumped, hit the windowsill, and caved backward into his office, already dead. When they found him, they would assume he had opened the window for air when the first pain came. Kukushkin would not have his triumph. The chimes of midnight were drowned by the roar of a truck that crushed the tube in the gutter to fragments.

The hijacking of the Freya had claimed its first victim.

Midnight to 0800

THE RESUMED West German cabinet meeting assembled in the Chancellery at one A.M., and the mood when the min­isters heard from Dietrich Busch the plea from Washington varied between exasperation and truculence.

“Well, why the hell won’t he give a reason?” asked the De­fense Minister. “Doesn’t he trust us?”

“He claims he has a reason of paramount importance, but cannot divulge it even over the hot line,” replied Chancellor Busch. “That gives us the opportunity of either believing him or calling him a liar. At this stage I cannot do the latter.”

“Has he any idea what the terrorists will do when they learn Mishkin and Lazareff are not to be released at dawn?” queried another.

“Yes, I think he has. At least the texts of all the exchanges between the Freya and Maas Control are in his hands. As we all know, they have threatened either to kill another seaman, or to vent twenty thousand tons of crude, or both.”

“Well, then, let him carry the responsibility,” urged the In­terior Minister. “Why should we take the blame if that hap­pens?”

“I haven’t the slightest intention that we should,” replied Busch, “but that doesn’t answer the question. Do we grant President Matthews’s request or not?”

There was silence for a while. The Foreign Minister broke it.

“How long is he asking for?”

“As long as possible,” said the Chancellor. “He seems to have some plan afoot to break the deadlock, to find a third alternative. But what the plan is, or what the alternative could be, he alone knows. He and a few people he evidently trusts with the secret,” he added with some bitterness. “But that doesn’t include us, for the moment.”

“Well, personally I think it is stretching the friendship be­tween us a bit far,” said the Foreign Minister, “but I think we ought to grant him an extension, while making plain, at least unofficially, that it is at his request, not ours.”

“Perhaps he has an idea to storm the Freya,” suggested Defense.

“Our own people say that would be extremely risky,” re­plied the Interior Minister. “It would require an underwater approach for at least the last two miles, a sheer climb up smooth steel from the sea to the deck, a penetration of the superstructure without being observed from atop the funnel, and the selection of the right cabin with the leader of the ter­rorists in it. If, as we suspect, the man holds a remote-control detonating mechanism in his hand, he’d have to be shot and killed before he could press the button.”

“In any case, it is too late to do it before dawn,” said the Defense Minister. “It would have to be in darkness, and that means ten P.M. at the earliest, twenty-one hours from now.”

At a quarter to three the German cabinet finally agreed to grant President Matthews his request: an indefinite delay on the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, while reserving the right to keep the consequences under constant review and to re­verse that decision if it became regarded in Western Europe as impossible to continue to hold the pair.

At the same time the government spokesman was quietly asked to leak the news to two of his most reliable media con­tacts that only massive pressure from Washington had caused the about-face in Bonn.

It was eleven P.M. in Washington, four A.M. in Europe, when the news from Bonn reached President Matthews. He sent back his heartfelt thanks to Chancellor Busch and asked David Lawrence:

“Any reply from Jerusalem yet?”

“None,” said Lawrence. “We know only that our Ambassa­dor there has been granted a personal interview with Benyamin Golen.”

When the Israeli Premier was disturbed for the second time during the Sabbath night, his tetchy capacity for patience was wearing distinctly thin. He received the U.S. Ambassador in his dressing gown, and the reception was frosty. It was three A.M. in Europe, but five in Jerusalem, and the first thin light of Saturday morning was on the hills of Judea.

He listened without reaction to the Ambassador’s personal plea from President Matthews. His private fear was for the identity of the terrorists aboard the Freya. No terrorist action aimed at delivering Jews from a prison cell had been mount­ed since the days of his own youth, fighting right on the soil where he stood. Then it had been to free condemned Jewish partisans from a British jail at Acre, and he had been a part of that fight. Now it was Israel that roundly condemned ter­rorism, the taking of hostages, the blackmail of regimes. And yet ...

And yet, hundreds of thousands of his own people would secretly sympathize with two youths who had sought to es­cape the terror of the KGB in the only way left open to them. The same voters would not openly hail the youths as heroes, but they would not condemn them as murderers, ei­ther. As to the masked men on the Freya, there was a chance that they, too, were Jewish—possibly (heaven forbid) Israe­lis. He had hoped the previous evening that the affair would be over by sundown of the Sabbath, the prisoners from Berlin inside Israel, the terrorists on the Freya captured or dead. There would be a fuss, but it would die down.

Now he was learning that there would be no release. The news hardly inclined him to the American request, which was in any case impossible. When he had heard the Ambassador out, he shook his head.