The Devil's Alternative

Jan Grayling sounded relieved.

“I will ensure the RAF personnel at Gatow permit these four reporters to witness the takeoff,” he said.

“They had better,” said Drake. “I am extending the vent­ing of the oil by three hours. At noon we start pumping one hundred thousand tons into the sea.”

There was a click as the line went dead.

Premier Benyamin Golen was at his desk in his office in Jerusalem that Sunday morning. The Sabbath was over, and it was a normal working day; it was also past ten o’clock, two hours later than in Western Europe.

The Dutch Prime Minister was barely off the telephone be­fore the small unit of Mossad agents who had established themselves in an apartment in Rotterdam were relaying the message from the Freya back to Israel. They beat the diplo­matic channels by more than an hour.

It was the Premier’s personal adviser on security matters who brought him the transcript of the Freya broadcast and laid it silently on his desk. Golen read it quickly.

“What are they after?” he inquired.

“They are taking precautions against a switch of the prisoners,” said the adviser. “It would have been an obvious ploy—to make up two young men to pass for Mishkin and Lazareff at first glance, and effect a substitution.”

“Then who is going to recognize the real Mishkin and Laz­areff here in Israel?”

The security adviser shrugged.

“Someone on that observation terrace,” he said. “They have to have a colleague here in Israel who can recognize the men on sight—more probably someone whom Mishkin and Lazareff themselves can recognize.”

“And after recognition?”

“Some message or signal will presumably have to be passed to the media for broadcasting, to confirm to the men on the Freya that their friends have reached Israel safely. Without that message, they will think they have been tricked and go ahead with their deed.”

“Another of them? Here in Israel? I’m not having that,” said Benyamin Golen. “We may have to play host to Mishkin and Lazareff, but not to any more. I want that observation terrace put under clandestine scrutiny. If any watcher on that terrace receives a signal from these two when they arrive, I want him followed. He must be allowed to pass his message, then arrest him.”

On the Freya the morning ticked by with agonizing slowness. Every fifteen minutes Andrew Drake, scanning the wave bands of his portable radio, picked up English-language news broadcasts from the Voice of America or the BBC World Service. Each bore the same message: there had been no takeoff. The mechanics were still working on the faulty en­gine of the Dominie.

Shortly after nine o’clock the four radio reporters desig­nated as the witnesses to the takeoff were admitted to the Gatow Air Base and escorted by Military Police to the officers’ mess, where they were offered coffee and biscuits. Direct tele­phone facilities were established to their Berlin offices, whence radio circuits were held open to their native coun­tries. None of them met Adam Munro, who had borrowed the base commander’s private office and was speaking to Lon­don.

In the lee of the cruiser Argyll the three fast patrol boats Cutlass, Sabre, and Scimitar waited at their moorings. On the Cutlass Major Fallon had assembled his group of twelve Special Boat Service commandos.

“We have to assume the powers-that-be are going to let the bastards go,” he told them. “Sometime in the next couple of hours they’ll take off from West Berlin for Israel. They should arrive about four and a half hours later. So, during this evening or tonight, if they keep their word, those terror­ists are going to quit the Freya.

“Which way they’ll head, we don’t know yet, but probably toward Holland. The sea is empty of ships on that side. When they are three miles from the Freya, and out of possible range for a small, low-power transmitter-detonator to operate the explosives, Royal Navy experts are going to board the Freya and dismantle the charges. But that’s not our job.

“We’re going to take those bastards, and I want that man Svoboda. He’s mine, got it?”

There was a series of nods, and several grins. Action was what they had been trained for, and they had been cheated of it. The hunting instinct was high.

“The launch they’ve got is much slower than ours,” Fallon resumed. “They’ll have an eight-mile start, but I reckon we can take them three to four miles before they reach the coast. We have the Nimrod overhead, patched in to the Argyll. The Argyll will give us the directions we need. When we get close to them, we’ll have our searchlights. When we spot them, we take them out. London says no one is interested in prisoners. Don’t ask me why; maybe they want them silenced for rea­sons we know nothing about. They’ve given us the job, and we’re going to do it.”

A few miles away, Captain Mike Manning was also watching the minutes tick away. He, too, waited on news from Berlin that the mechanics had finished their work on the engine of the Dominie. The news in the small hours of the morning, while he sat sleepless in his cabin awaiting the dread­ed order to fire his shells and destroy the Freya and her crew, had surprised him. Out of the blue, the United States government had reversed its attitude of the previous sun­down; far from objecting to the release of the men from Moabit, far from being prepared to wipe out the Freya to prevent that release, Washington now had no objection. But his main emotion was relief, waves of pure relief that his murderous orders had been rescinded, unless. ... Unless something could still go wrong. Not until the two Ukrainian Jews had touched down at Ben-Gurion Airport would he be completely satisfied that his orders to shell the Freya to a fu­neral pyre had become part of history.

At a quarter to ten, in the cells below Alexander Barracks at Gatow airfield, Mishkin and Lazareff came out from the ef­fects of the narcotic they had ingested at eight o’clock. Al­most simultaneously the clocks Adam Munro had hung on the wall of each cell came to life. The sweep hands began to move around the dials.

Mishkin shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He felt sleepy, slightly muzzy in the head. He put it down to the bro­ken night, the sleepless hours, the excitement. He glanced at the clock on the wall; it read two minutes past eight. He knew that when he and David Lazareff had been led through the orderly room toward the cells, the clock there had said eight exactly. He stretched, swung himself off the bunk, and began to pace the cell. Five minutes later, at the other end of the corridor, Lazareff did much the same.

Adam Munro strolled into the hangar where Warrant Of­ficer Barker was still fiddling with the starboard engine of the Dominie.

“How is it going, Mr. Barker?” asked Munro.

The long-service technician withdrew himself from the guts of the engine and looked down at the civilian with exasper­ation.

“May I ask, sir, how long I am supposed to keep up this playacting? The engine’s perfect.”

Munro glanced at his watch.

“Ten-thirty,” he said. “In one hour exactly, I’d like you to telephone the aircrew room and the officers’ mess and report that she’s fit and ready to fly.”

“Eleven-thirty it is, sir,” said Warrant Officer Barker.

In the cells, David Lazareff glanced again at the wall clock. He thought he had been pacing for thirty minutes, but the clock said nine. An hour had gone by, but it had seemed a very short one. Still, in isolation in a cell, time plays strange tricks on the senses. Clocks, after all, are accurate. It never occurred to him or Mishkin that their clocks were moving at double speed to catch up on the missing hundred minutes in their lives, or that they were destined to synchronize with the clocks outside the cells at eleven-thirty precisely.

At eleven, Premier Jan Grayling in The Hague was on the telephone to the Governing Mayor of West Berlin.

“What the devil is going on, Herr Burgomeister?”