The Devil's Alternative

At that moment a personal message arrived for the President from Prime Minister Carpenter in London.

“That’s some woman,” he said when he had read it. “The British think they can cope with the first oil slick of twenty thousand tons, but no more. They’re preparing a plan to storm the Freya with specialist frogmen after sundown and silence the man with the detonator. They give themselves a better than even chance.”

“So we only have to hold the German Chancellor in line for another twelve hours,” said Benson. “Mr. President, I urge you to order what I have just proposed. The chances are it will never have to be activated.”

“But if it must be, Bob? If it must be?”

“Then it must be.”

William Matthews placed the palms of his hands over his face and rubbed tired eyes with his fingertips.

“Dear God, no man should be asked to give orders like that,” he said. “But if it must ... Bob, give the order.”

The sun was just clear of the horizon, away to the east over the Dutch coast. On the afterdeck of the cruiser Argyll, now turned broadside to where the Freya lay, Major Fallon stood and looked down at the three fast assault craft tethered to her lee side. From the lookout on the Freda’s funnel top, all three would be out of vision. So, too, the activity on their decks, where Fallon’s team of Marine commandos were preparing their kayaks and unpacking their unusual pieces of equip­ment. It was a bright, clear sunrise, giving promise of another warm and sunny day. The sea was a flat calm. Fallon was joined by the Argyll’s skipper, Captain Richard Preston.

They stood side by side, looking down at the three sleek sea greyhounds that had brought the men and equipment from Poole in eight hours. The boats rocked in the swell of a warship passing several cables to the west of them. Fallon looked up.

“Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the gray warship flying the Stars and Stripes that was moving to the south.

“The American Navy has sent an observer,” said Captain Preston. “The U.S.S. Moran. She’ll take up station between us and the Montcalm.” He glanced at his watch. “Seven-thirty. Breakfast is being served in the wardroom, if you’d care to join us.”

It was seven-fifty when there was a knock at the door of the cabin of Captain Michael Manning, commanding the Moran.

She was at anchor after her race through the night, and Manning, who’d been on the bridge throughout the night, was running a razor over the stubble on his chin. When the radio­man entered. Manning took the proffered message and gave it a glance, still shaving. He stopped and turned to the sailor.

“It’s still in code,” he said.

“Yes, sir. It’s tagged for your eyes only, sir.”

Manning dismissed the man, went to his wall safe and took out his personal decoder. Such an occurrence was unusual, but not unheard of. He began to run a pencil down columns of figures, seeking the groups on the message in front of him and their corresponding letter combinations. When he had finished decoding, he just sat at his table and stared at the message, searching for any error. He rechecked the beginning of the message, hoping it was a practical joke. But there was no joke. It was for him, via STANFORLANT through the Navy Department, Washington. And it was a presidential or­der, personal to him from the Commander in Chief, U.S. Armed Forces, White House, Washington.

“He can’t ask me to do that,” he breathed. “No man can ask a sailor to do that.”

But the message did, and it was unequivocal: “In the event the West German government seeks to release the hijackers in Berlin unilaterally, the U.S.S. Moran is to sink the super­tanker Freya by shellfire, using all possible measures to ignite cargo and minimize environmental damage. This action will be taken on receipt by U.S.S. Moran of the signal THUNDERBOLT repeat THUNDERBOLT. Destroy message.”

Mike Manning was forty-three years old, married, with four children who lived with their mother outside Norfolk, Virginia. He had been an officer in the United States Navy for twenty-one years and had never yet thought to question a superior’s order.

He walked to the porthole and looked across the five miles of ocean to the low outline between himself and the climbing sun. He thought of his magnesium-based starshells slamming into her unprotected skin, penetrating the volatile crude oil beneath. He thought of twenty-eight men, crouched deep beneath the waterline, eighty feet beneath the waves, in a steel coffin, waiting for rescue, thinking of their own families. He crumpled the paper in his hand.

“Mr. President,” he whispered, “I don’t know if I can do that.”

0800 to 1500

DETSKY MIR means “Children’s World” and is Moscow’s premier toyshop—four stories of dolls and playthings, pup­pets and games. Compared to a Western equivalent, the lay­out is drab and the stock shabby, but it is the best the Soviet capital has, apart from the hard-currency Beriozka shops, where mainly foreigners go.

By an unintended irony it is across Dzerzhinsky Square from the KGB headquarters, which is definitely not a chil­dren’s world. Adam Munro was at the ground-floor soft-toys counter just before ten A.M. Moscow time, two hours later than North Sea time. He began to examine a nylon bear as if debating whether to buy it for his offspring.

Two minutes after ten, someone moved to the counter beside him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she was pale, her normally full lips drawn, tight, the color of cigarette ash.

She nodded. Her voice was pitched, like his own, low, con­versational, uninvolved.

“I managed to see the transcript, Adam. It’s serious.”

She picked up a hand puppet shaped like a small monkey in artificial fur, and told him quietly what she had discovered.

“That’s impossible,” he muttered. “He’s still convalescing from a heart attack.”

“No. He was shot dead last October thirty-first in the middle of the night on a street in Kiev.”

Two salesgirls leaning against the wall twenty feet away eyed them without curiosity and returned to their gossip. One of the few advantages of shopping in Moscow is that one is guaranteed complete privacy from assistance by the sales staff.

“And those two in Berlin were the ones?” asked Munro.

“It seems so,” she said dully. “The fear is that if they escape to Israel they will hold a press conference and inflict an intolerable humiliation on the Soviet Union.”

“Causing Maxim Rudin to fall,” breathed Munro. “No wonder he will not countenance their release. He cannot. He, too, has no alternative. And you—are you safe, darling?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There were suspicions. Un­spoken, but they were there. Soon there will be a report from the man on the telephone switchboard about your call; the gateman will report about my drive in the small hours. It will come together.”

“Listen, Valentina, I will get you out of here. Quickly, in the next few days.”

For the first time, she turned and faced him. He saw that her eyes were brimming.

“It’s over, Adam. I’ve done what you asked of me, and now it’s too late.” She reached up and kissed him briefly, be­fore the astonished gaze of the salesgirls. “Good-bye, Adam, my love. I’m sorry.”

She turned, paused for a moment to collect herself, and walked away, through the glass doors to the street, back through the gap in the Wall into the East. From where he stood with a plastic-faced milkmaid doll in his hand, he saw her reach the pavement and turn out of sight. A man in a gray trench coat, who had been wiping the windshield of a car, straightened, nodded to a colleague behind the wind­shield, and strolled after her.

Adam Munro felt the grief and the anger rising in his throat like a ball of sticky acid. The sounds of the shop