The Devil's Alternative

the warship on station?”

“In position, gun laid and loaded,” confirmed Stanislaw Poklewski.

“Unless this man Munro has some idea that would work,” suggested Robert Benson. “Will you agree to see him, Mr. President?”

“Bob, I’ll see the devil himself if he can propose some way of getting me off this hook,” said Matthews.

“One thing at least we may now be certain of,” said David Lawrence. “Maxim Rudin was not overreacting. He could do nothing other than what he has done, after all. In his fight with Yefrem Vishnayev, he, too, has no aces left. How the hell did those two in Moabit Prison ever get to shoot Yuri Ivanenko?”

“We have to assume the one who leads that group on the Freya helped them,” said Benson. “I’d dearly love to get my hands on that Svoboda.”

“No doubt you’d kill him,” said Lawrence with distaste.

“Wrong,” said Benson. “I’d enlist him. He’s tough, inge­nious, and ruthless. He’s taken ten European governments and made them dance like puppets.”

It was noon in Washington, five P.M. in London, as the late-afternoon Concorde hoisted its stiltlike legs over the concrete of Heathrow, lifted its drooping spear of a nose toward the western sky, and climbed through the sound barrier toward the sunset.

The normal rules about not creating the sonic boom until well out over the sea had been overruled by orders from Downing Street. The pencil-slim dart pushed its four scream­ing Olympus engines to full power just after takeoff, and a hundred fifty thousand pounds of thrust flung the airliner toward the stratosphere.

The captain had estimated three hours to Washington, two hours ahead of the sun. Halfway across the Atlantic he told his Boston-bound passengers with deep regret that the Con­corde would make a stopover of a few moments at Dulles In­ternational Airport, Washington, before heading back to Boston, for “operational reasons.”

It was seven P.M. in Western Europe but nine in Moscow when Yefrem Vishnayev finally got the personal and highly unusual Saturday evening meeting with Maxim Rudin for which he had been clamoring all day.

The old director of Soviet Russia agreed to meet his Party theoretician in the Politburo meeting room on the third floor of the Arsenal building.

When he arrived, Vishnayev was backed by Marshal Niko­lai Kerensky, but he found Rudin supported by his allies, Dmitri Rykov and Vassili Petrov.

“I note that few appear to be enjoying this brilliant spring weekend in the countryside,” he said acidly.

Rudin shrugged. “I was in the midst of enjoying a private dinner with two friends,” he said. “What brings you, Com­rades Vishnayev and Kerensky, to the Kremlin at this hour?”

The room was bare of secretaries and guards; it contained just the five power bosses of the Soviet Union in angry con­frontation beneath the globe lights in the high ceiling.

“Treason,” snapped Vishnayev. “Treason, Comrade Secre­tary-General.”

The silence was ominous, menacing.

“Whose treason?” asked Rudin.

Vishnayev leaned across the table and spoke two feet from Rudin’s face.

“The treason of two filthy Jews from Lvov,” he hissed. “The treason of two men now in jail in Berlin. Two men whose freedom is being sought by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea. The treason of Mishkin and Lazareff.”

“It is true,” said Rudin carefully, “that the murder last De­cember by these two of Captain Rudenko of Aeroflot consti­tutes—”

“Is it not also true,” asked Vishnayev menacingly, “that these two murderers also killed Yuri Ivanenko?”

Maxim Rudin would dearly have liked to shoot a sideways glance at Vassili Petrov by his side. Something had gone wrong. There had been a leak.

Petrov’s lips set in a hard, straight line. He, too, now con­trolling the KGB through General Abrassov, knew that the circle of men aware of the real truth was small, very small. The man who had spoken, he was sure, was Colonel Kukushkin, who had first failed to protest his master, and then failed to liquidate his master’s killers. He was trying to buy his career, perhaps even his life, by changing camps and confiding to Vishnayev.

“It is certainly suspected,” said Rudin carefully. “Not a proven fact.”

“I understand it is a proven fact,” snapped Vishnayev. “These two men have been positively identified as the killers of our dear comrade, Yuri Ivanenko.”

Rudin reflected on how intensely Vishnayev had loathed Ivanenko and wished him dead and gone.

“The point is academic,” said Rudin. “Even for the killing of Captain Rudenko, the two murderers are destined to be liquidated inside their Berlin jail.”

“Perhaps not,” said Vishnayev with well-simulated outrage. “It appears they may be released by West Germany and sent to Israel. The West is weak; it cannot hold out for long against the terrorists on the Freya. If those two reach Israel alive, they will talk. I think, my friends—oh, yes, I truly think we all know what they will say.”

“What are you asking for?” said Rudin.

Vishnayev rose. Taking his example, Kerensky rose, too.

“I am demanding,” said Vishnayev, “an extraordinary plenary meeting of the full Politburo here in this room to­morrow night at this hour, nine o’clock. On a matter of ex­ ceptional national urgency. That is my right, Comrade Secretary-General?”

Rudin nodded slowly. He looked up at Vishnayev from un­der his eyebrows.

“Yes,” he growled, “that is your right.”

“Then until this hour tomorrow,” snapped the Party theo­retician, and stalked from the chamber.

Rudin turned to Petrov.

“Colonel Kukushkin?” he asked.

“It looks like it. Either way, Vishnayev knows.”

“Any possibility of eliminating Mishkin and Lazareff inside Moabit?”

Petrov shook his head.

“Not by tomorrow. No chance of mounting a fresh oper­ation under a new man in that time. Is there any way of pressuring the West not to release them at all?”

“No,” said Rudin shortly. “I have brought every pressure on Matthews that I know how. There is nothing more I can bring to bear on him. It is up to him now, him and that damned German Chancellor in Bonn.”

“Tomorrow,” said Rykov soberly, “Vishnayev and his people will produce Kukushkin and demand that we hear him out. And if by then Mishkin and Lazareff are in Israel ...”

At eight P.M. European time, Andrew Drake, speaking through Captain Thor Larsen from the Freya, issued his final ultimatum.

At nine A.M. the following morning, in thirteen hours, the Freya would vent one hundred thousand tons of crude oil into the North Sea unless Mishkin and Lazareff were airborne and on their way to Tel Aviv. At eight P.M., unless they were in Israel and identified as genuine, the Freya would blow her­self apart.

“That’s positively the last straw!” shouted Dietrich Busch when he heard the ultimatum ten minutes after it was broad­cast from the Freya. “Who does William Matthews think he is? No one— absolutely no one—is going to force the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany to carry on with this charade. It is over!”

At twenty past eight, the West German government an­nounced that it was unilaterally releasing Mishkin and Lazareff the following morning at eight A.M.

At eight-thirty, a personal coded message arrived on the U.S.S. Moran for Captain Mike Manning. When decoded, it read simply: “Prepare for fire order seven A.M. tomorrow.”

He screwed it into a ball in his fist and looked out through the porthole toward the Freya. She was lit like a Christmas tree, flood and arc lights bathing her towering superstructure in a glare of white light. She sat on the ocean five miles away, doomed, helpless; waiting for one of