The voice ended, and there was a loud click. Dijkstra tried to call back two or three times. Then he looked across at his colleague.
“What the hell did that mean?”
Officer Wilhelm Schipper shrugged in perplexity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Captain Larsen sounded as if he might be in danger.”
“He spoke of men getting killed,” said Dijkstra. “How killed? What’s he got, a mutiny? Someone run amok?”
“We’d better do what he says until this is sorted out,” said Schipper.
“Right,” said Dijkstra. “You get on to the chairman. I’ll contact the launch and the two pilots up at Schiphol.”
The launch bearing the berthing crew was chugging at a steady ten knots across the flat calm toward the Freya, with three miles still to go. It was developing into a beautiful spring morning, warm for the time of year. At three miles the bulk of the giant tanker was already looming large, and the ten Dutchmen who would help her berth, but who had never seen her before, were craning their necks as they came closer.
No one thought anything when the ship-to-shore radio by the helmsman’s side crackled and squawked. He took the handset off its cradle and held it to his ear. With a frown he cut the engine to idling, and asked for a repeat. When he got it, he put the helm hard a-starboard and brought the launch around in a semicircle.
“We’re going back,” he told the men, who looked at him with puzzlement. “There’s something wrong. Captain Larsen’s not ready for you yet.”
Behind them the Freya receded again toward the horizon as they headed back to the Hook.
Up at Schiphol Airport, south of Amsterdam, the two estuary pilots were walking toward the Port Authority helicopter that would airlift them out to the deck of the tanker. It was routine procedure; they always went out to waiting ships by whirlybird.
The senior pilot, a grizzled veteran with twenty years at sea, a master’s ticket, and fifteen years as a Maas Pilot, carried his “brown box,” the instrument that would help him steer her to within a yard of seawater if he wished to be so precise. With the Freya clearing twenty feet only from the shoals and the Inner Channel barely fifty feet wider than the Freya herself, he would need it this morning.
As they ducked underneath the whirling blades, the helicopter pilot leaned out and wagged a warning finger at them.
“Something seems to be wrong,” he yelled above the roar of the engine. “We have to wait. I’m closing her down.”
The engine cut, the blades swished to a stop.
“What the hell’s all that about?” asked the second pilot.
The helicopter flier shrugged.
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Just came through from Maas Control. The ship isn’t ready for you yet.”
At his handsome country house outside Vlaardingen, Dirk Van Gelder, chairman of the Port Authority, was at breakfast a few minutes before eight when the phone rang. His wife answered it.
“It’s for you,” she called, and went back to the kitchen, where the coffee was perking. Van Gelder rose from the breakfast table, dropped his newspaper on the chair, and shuffled in carpet slippers out to the hallway.
“Van Gelder,” he said into the telephone. As he listened, he stiffened, his brow furrowed.
“What did he mean, killed?” he asked.
There was another stream of words into his ear.
“Right,” said Van Gelder. “Stay there. I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”
He slammed the phone down, kicked off the slippers, and put on his shoes and jacket. Two minutes later he was at his garage doors. As he climbed into his Mercedes and backed out to the gravel driveway, he was fighting back thoughts of his personal and abiding nightmare.
“Dear God, not a hijack. Please, not a hijack.”
After replacing the VHF radiotelephone on the bridge of the Freya, Captain Thor Larsen had been taken at gunpoint on a tour of his own ship, peering with flashlight into the forward ballast holds to note the big packages strapped far down below the waterline.
Returning down the deck, he had seen the launch with the berthing crew turn, three miles out, and head back for the shore. To seaward a small freighter had passed, heading south, and had greeted the leviathan at anchor with a cheery hoot. It was not returned.
He had seen the single charge in the center ballast tank amidships, and the further charges in the after ballast tanks close by the superstructure. He did not need to see the paint locker. He knew where it was, and could imagine how close the charges were placed.
At half past eight, while Dirk Van Gelder was striding into the Maas Control Building to listen to the tape recording, Thor Larsen was being escorted back to his day cabin. He had noted one of the terrorists, muffled against the chill, perched right up in the fo’c’sle apron of the Freya, watching the arc of the sea out in front of the vessel. Another was high on the top of the funnel casing, over a hundred feet up, with a commanding view of the sea around him. A third was on the bridge, patrolling the radar screens, able, thanks to the Freya’s own technology, to see a circle of ocean with a radius of forty-eight miles, and most of the sea beneath her.
Of the remaining four, two, the leader and another, were with him; the other two must be below decks somewhere.
The terrorist leader forced him to sit at his own table in his own cabin. The man tapped the oscillator, which was clipped to his belt.
“Captain, please don’t force me to press this red button. And please don’t think that I will not—either if there is any attempt at heroics on this ship or if my demands are not met. Now, please read this.”
He handed Captain Larsen a sheaf of three sheets of foolscap paper covered with typed writing in English. Larsen went rapidly through it.
“At nine o’clock you are going to read that message over the ship-to-shore radio to the chairman of the Port Authority of Rotterdam. No more, and no less. No breaking into Dutch or Norwegian. No supplementary questions. Just the message. Understand?”
Larsen nodded grimly. The door opened, and a masked terrorist came in. He had apparently been in the galley. He bore a tray with fried eggs, butter, jam, and coffee, which he placed on the table between them.
“Breakfast,” said the terrorist leader. He gestured toward Larsen. “You might as well eat.”
Larsen shook his head, but drank the coffee. He had been awake all night, and had risen from his bed the previous morning at seven. Twenty-six hours awake, and many more to go. He needed to stay alert, and guessed the black coffee might help. He calculated also that the terrorist across the table from him had been awake the same amount of time.
The terrorist signaled the remaining gunman to leave. As the door closed they were alone, but the broad expanse of table put the terrorist well out of Larsen’s reach. The gun lay within inches of the man’s right hand; the oscillator was at his waist.
“I don’t think we shall have to abuse your hospitality for more than thirty hours, maybe forty,” said the masked man. “But if I wear this mask during that time, I shall suffocate. You have never seen me before, and after tomorrow you will never see me again.”
With his left hand, the man pulled the black balaclava helmet from his head. Larsen found himself staring at a man in his early thirties, with brown eyes and medium-brown hair. He puzzled Larsen. The man spoke like an Englishman, behaved like one. But Englishmen did not hijack tankers, surely. Irish, perhaps? IRA? But he had referred to friends of his in prison in Germany. Arab, perhaps? There were PLO terrorists in prison in Germany. And he spoke a strange language to his companions. Not Arabic by the sound of it, yet there were scores of different dialects in Arabic, and Larsen knew only the Gulf Arabs. Again, Irish perhaps.
“What do I call you?” he asked the man whom he would never know as Andriy Drach or Andrew Drake. The man thought for a moment as he ate.
“You can call me ‘Svoboda,’ ” he said at length. “It is a common name in my language. But it is also a word. It means freedom.’
”
“That’s not Arabic,” said Larsen.
The man smiled for the first time.
“Certainly not. We are not Arabs. We are Ukrainian freedom fighters, and proud of it.”
“And you think the authorities will free your friends in prison?” asked Larsen.
“They will have to,” said Drake confidently. “They have no alternative. Come, it is almost nine o’clock.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
0900 to 1300
“PILOT MAAS, Pilot Maas, this is the Freya.”
Captain Thor Larsen’s baritone voice echoed into the main control room at the squat building on the tip of the Hook of Holland. In the first-floor office with its sweeping picture windows gazing out over the North Sea, now curtained against the bright morning sun to give clarity to the radar screens, five men sat waiting.
Dijkstra and Schipper were still on duty, thoughts of breakfast forgotten. Dirk Van Gelder stood behind Dijkstra, ready to take over when the call came through. At another console, one of the day-shift men was taking care of the rest of the estuary traffic, bringing ships in and out, but keeping them away from the Freya, whose blip on the radar screen was at the limit of vision but still larger than all the others. The senior maritime safety officer of Maas Control was also present.
When the call came, Dijkstra slipped out of his chair before the speaker, and Van Gelder sat down. He gripped the stem of the table microphone, cleared his throat, and threw the “transmit” switch.
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead, please.”
Beyond the confines of the building, which looked for all the world like a chopped-off air-traffic control tower sitting on the sand, other ears were listening. During the earlier transmission, two other ships had caught part of the conversation, and there had been a bit of chitchat between ships’ radio officers in the intervening two hours. Now a dozen were listening keenly.
On the Freya, Larsen knew he could switch to Channel 16, speak to Scheveningen Radio, and ask for a patch-through to Maas Control for greater privacy, but the listeners would soon join him on that channel. So he stayed with Channel 20.
“Freya to Pilot Maas, I wish to speak personally to the chairman of the Port Authority.”
This is Pilot Maas. This is Dirk Van Gelder speaking. I am the chairman of the Port Authority.”
“This is Captain Thor Larsen, master of the Freya.”
“Yes, Captain Larsen, your voice is recognized. What is your problem?”
At the other end, on the bridge of the Freya, Drake gestured with the tip of his gun to the written statement in Larsen’s hand. Larsen nodded, flicked his “transmit” switch, and began to read into the telephone.
“I am reading a prepared statement. Please do not interrupt and do not pose questions.
“ ‘At three o’clock this morning, the Freya was taken over by armed men. I have already been given ample reason to believe they are in deadly earnest and prepared to carry out all their threats unless their demands are met.’ ”
In the control tower on the sand, there was a hiss of indrawn breath from behind Van Gelder. He closed his eyes wearily. For years he had been urging that some security measures be taken to protect these floating bombs from a hijacking. He had been ignored, and now it had happened at last. The voice from the speaker went on; the tape recorder revolved impassively.
“ ‘My entire crew is presently locked in the lowest portion of the ship, behind steel doors, and cannot escape. So far, no harm has come to them. I myself am held at gunpoint on my own bridge.
“ ‘During the night, explosive charges have been placed at strategic positions at various points inside the Freya’s hull. I have examined these myself, and can corroborate that if exploded they would blast the Freya apart, kill her crew instantly, and vent one million tons of crude oil into the North Sea.’ ”
“Oh, my God,” said a voice behind Van Gelder. He waved an impatient hand for the speaker to shut up.
“ ‘These are the immediate demands of the men who hold the Freya prisoner. One: all sea traffic is to be cleared at once from the area inside the arc from a line forty-five degrees south of a bearing due east of the Freya, and forty-five degrees north of the same bearing—that is, inside a ninety-degree arc between the Freya and the Dutch coast. Two: no vessel, surface or submarine, is to attempt to approach the Freya on any other bearing to within five miles. Three: no aircraft is to pass overhead the Freya within a circle of five miles’ radius of her, and below a height of ten thousand feet.’ Is that clear? You may answer.”
Van Gelder gripped the microphone hard.
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Dirk Van Gelder speaking. Yes, that is clear. I will have all surface traffic cleared from the area enclosed by a ninety-degree arc between the Freya and the Dutch coast, and from an area five sea miles from the Freya on all other sides. I will instruct Schiphol Airport traffic control to ban all air movements within the five-mile-radius area below ten thousand feet. Over.”
There was a pause, and Larsen’s voice came back.
“I am informed that if there is any attempt to breach these orders, there will be an immediate riposte without further consultation. Either the Freya will vent twenty thousand tons of crude oil immediately, or one of my seamen will be ... executed. Is that understood? You may answer.”
Dirk Van Gelder turned to his traffic officers.
“Jesus, get the shipping out of that area, fast. Get on to Schiphol and tell them. No commercial flights, no private aircraft, no choppers taking pictures—nothing. Now move.”
To the microphone he said, “Understood, Captain Larsen. Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” said the disembodied voice. “There will be no further radio contact with the Freya until twelve hundred hours. At that time the Freya will call you again. I will wish to speak directly and personally to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands and the West German Ambassador. Both must be present. That is all.”
The microphone went dead. On the bridge of the Freya, Drake removed the handset from Larsen’s hand and replaced it. Then he gestured the Norwegian to return to the day cabin. When they were seated with the seven-foot table between them, Drake laid down his gun and leaned back. As his sweater rode up, Larsen saw the lethal oscillator clipped at his waistband.
“What do we do now?” asked Larsen.
“We wait,” said Drake. “While Europe goes quietly mad.”
“They’ll kill you, you know,” said Larsen. “You’ve got on board, but you’ll never get off. They may have to do what you say, but when they have done it, they’ll be waiting for you.”
“I know,” said Drake. “But you see, I don’t mind if I die. I’ll fight to live, of course, but I’ll die, and I’ll kill, before I’ll see them kill off my project.”
“You want these two men in Germany free, that much?” asked Larsen.
“Yes, that much. I can’t explain why, and if I did, you wouldn’t understand. But for years my land, my people, have been occupied, persecuted, imprisoned, killed. And no one cared a shit. Now I threaten to kill one single man, or hit Western Europe in the pocket, and you’ll see what they do. Suddenly it’s a disaster. But for me, the slavery of my land, that is the disaster.”
“This dream of yours, what is it, exactly?” asked Larsen.
“A free Ukraine,” said Drake simply. “Which cannot be achieved short of a popular uprising by millions of people.”
“In the Soviet Union?” said Larsen. “That’s impossible. That will never happen.”
“It could,” countered Drake. “It could. It happened in East Germany, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia. But first, the conviction by those millions that they could never win, that their oppressors are invincible, must be broken. If it once were, the floodgates could open wide.”
“No one will ever believe that,” said Larsen.
“Not in the West, no. But there’s the strange thing. Here in the West, people would say I cannot be right in that calculation. But
in the Kremlin they know I am.”
“And for this ... popular uprising, you are prepared to die?” asked Larsen.
“If I must. That is my dream. That land, that people, I love more than life itself. That’s my advantage: within a hundred-mile radius of us here, there is no one else who loves something more than his life.”
A day earlier Thor Larsen might have agreed with the fanatic. But something was happening inside the big, slow-moving Norwegian that surprised him. For the first time in his life he hated a man enough to kill him. Inside his head a private voice said, “I don’t care about your Ukrainian dream, Mr. Svoboda. You are not going to kill my crew and my ship.”
At Felixstowe on the coast of Suffolk, the English Coastguard officer walked quickly away from his coastal radio set and picked up the telephone.
“Get me the Department of the Environment in London,” he told the operator.
“By God, those Dutchies have got themselves a problem this time,” said his deputy, who had heard the conversation between the Freya and Maas Control also.
“It’s not just the Dutch,” said the senior coastguardsman. “Look at the map.”
On the wall was a map of the entire southern portion of the North Sea and the northern end of the English Channel. It showed the coast of Suffolk right across to the Maas Estuary. In chinagraph pencil the coastguardsman had marked the Freya at her overnight position. It was a little more than two-thirds of the way from England to Holland.
“If she blows, lad, our coasts will also be under a foot of oil from Hull round to Southampton.”
Minutes later he was talking to a civil servant in London, one of the men in the department of the ministry specifically concerned with oil-slick hazards. What he said caused the morning’s first cup of tea in London to go quite cold.