Doctors say three in the morning is the time when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb; it is the hour of deepest weariness, slowest reactions, and gloomiest depression. Three A.M. marked one complete cycle of the sun and moon for the two men who faced each other in the captain’s cabin of the Freya.
Neither had slept that night or the previous one; each had been forty-four hours without rest; each was drawn and red-eyed.
Thor Larsen, at the epicenter of a whirling storm of international activity, of cabinets and councils, embassies and meetings, plottings and consultations that kept the lights burning on three continents from Jerusalem to Washington, was playing his own game. He was pitting his own capacity to stay awake against the will of the fanatic who faced him, knowing that at stake if he failed were the lives of his crew and his ship.
Larsen knew that the man who called himself Svoboda, younger and consumed by his own inner fire, nerves tightened by a combination of black coffee and the tension of his gamble against the world, could have ordered the Norwegian captain to be tied up while he himself sought rest. So the bearded mariner sat facing the barrel of a gun and played on his captor’s pride, hoping that the man would take his challenge, refuse to back down, and concede defeat in the game of beating sleep.
It was Larsen who proposed the endless cups of strong black coffee, a drink he usually took with milk and sugar only two or three times a day. It was he who talked through the day and the night, provoking the Ukrainian with suggestions of eventual failure, then backing off when the man became too irritable for safety. Long years of experience, nights of yawning, gritty-mouthed training as a sea captain, had taught the bearded giant to stay awake and alert through the night watches, when the cadets drowsed and the deckhands dozed.
So he played his own solitary game, without guns or ammunition, without teleprinters or night-sight cameras, without support and without company. All the superb technology the Japanese had built into his new command was as much use as rusty nails to him now. If he pushed the man across the table too far, he might lose his temper and shoot to kill. If he were provoked too far, he could order the execution of another crewman. If he felt himself becoming too drowsy, he might have himself relieved by another, fitter terrorist while he himself took sleep and undid all that Larsen was trying to do to him.
That Mishkin and Lazareff would be released at dawn, Larsen still had reason to believe. After their safe arrival in Tel Aviv, the terrorists would prepare to quit the Freya. Or would they? Could they? Would the surrounding warships let them go so easily? Even away from the Freya, attacked by the NATO navies, Svoboda could press his button and blow the Freya apart.
But that was not all of it This man in black had killed one of the crew. Thor Larsen wanted him for that, and he wanted him dead. So he talked the night away to the man opposite him, denying them both sleep.
Whitehall was not sleeping, either. The crisis management committee had been in session since three A.M., and by four, the progress reports were complete.
Across southern England the bulk tanker lorries, commandeered from Shell, British Petroleum, and a dozen other sources, were filling up with emulsifier concentrate at the Hampshire depot Bleary-eyed drivers rumbled through the night, empty toward Hampshire or loaded toward Lowestoft, moving hundreds of tons of the concentrate to the Suffolk port. By four A.M. the stocks were empty; all one thousand tons of the national supply were headed east to the coast.
So also were inflatable booms to try to hold the vented oil away from the coast until the chemicals could do their work. The factory that made the emulsifier had been geared for maximum output until further notice.
At half past three the news had come from Washington that the Bonn cabinet had agreed to hold Mishkin and Lazareff for a while longer.
“Does Matthews know what he’s doing?” someone asked.
Sir Julian Flannery’s face was impassive.
“We must assume that he does,” he said smoothly. “We must also assume that a venting by the Freya will probably now take place. The efforts of the night have not been in vain. At least we are now almost ready.”
“We must also assume,” said the civil servant from the Foreign Ministry, “that when the announcement becomes public, France, Belgium, and Holland are going to ask for assistance in fighting any oil slick that may result.”
“Then we shall be ready to do what we can,” said Sir Julian. “Now, what about the spraying and firefighting vessels?”
The report in the UNICORNE room mirrored what was happening at sea. From the Humber estuary, tugs were churning south toward Lowestoft harbor, while from the Thames and even as far around as the Navy base at Lee, other tugs capable of spraying liquid onto the surface of the sea were moving to the rendezvous point on the Suffolk coast. They were not the only things moving around the south coast that night.
Off the towering cliffs of Beachy Head, the Cutlass, Scimitar, and Sabre, carrying the assorted, complex, and lethal hardware of the world’s toughest team of assault frogmen, were pointing their noses north of east to bring them past Sussex and Kent toward where the cruiser Argyll lay at anchor in the North Sea.
The boom of their engines echoed off the chalk battlements of the southern coast, and light sleepers in Eastbourne heard the rumble out to sea.
Twelve Royal Marines of the Special Boat Service clung to the rails of the bucking craft, watching over their precious kayaks and the crates of diving gear, weapons, and unusual explosives that made up the props of their trade. It was all being carried as deck cargo.
“I hope,” shouted the young lieutenant commander who skippered the Cutlass to the Marine beside him, the second-in-command of the team, “that those whizz-bangs you’re carrying back there don’t go off.”
“They won’t,” said the Marine captain with confidence, “not until we use them.”
In a room adjoining the main conference center beneath the Cabinet Office, their commanding officer was poring over photographs of the Freya, taken by night and day. He was comparing the configuration shown by the Nimrod’s pictures with the scale plan provided by Lloyd’s and the model of the supertanker British Princess lent by British Petroleum.
“Gentlemen,” said Colonel Hohnes, joining the assembled men next door, “I think it’s time we considered one of the less palatable choices we may have to face.”
“Ah, yes,” said Sir Julian regretfully, “the hard option.”
“If,” pursued Hohnes, “President Matthews continues to object to the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, and West Germany continues to accede to that demand, the moment may well come when the terrorists will realize the game is up, that their blackmail is not going to work. At that moment they may well refuse to have their bluff called, and blow the Freya to pieces. Personally, it seems to me this will not happen before nightfall, which gives us about sixteen hours.”
“Why nightfall, Colonel?” asked Sir Julian.
“Because, sir, unless they are all suicide candidates, which they may be, one must assume that they will seek their own escape in the confusion. Now, if they wish to try to live, they may well leave the ship and operate their remote-control detonator at a certain distance from the ship’s side.”
“And your proposal, Colonel?”
“Twofold, sir. Firstly, their launch. It is still moored beside the courtesy ladder. As soon as darkness falls, a diver could approach that launch and attach a delayed-action explosive device to it. If the Freya were to blow up, nothing within a half-mile radius would be safe. Therefore I propose a charge detonated by a mechanism operated by water pressure. As the launch moves away from the ship’s side, the forward thrust of the launch will cause water to enter a funnel beneath the keel. This water will operate a trigger, and sixty seconds later the launch will blow up, before the terrorists have reached a point half a mile from the Freya, and therefore before they can operate their own detonator.”
“Would the exploding of their launch not detonate the charges on the Freya??
?? asked someone.
“No. If they have a remote-control detonator, it must be electronically operated. The charge would blow the launch carrying the terrorists to smithereens. No one would survive.”
“But if the detonator sank, would not the water pressure depress the button?” asked one of the scientists.
“No. Once under the water, the remote-control detonator would be safe. It could not beam its radio message to the larger charges in the ship’s tanks.”
“Excellent,” said Sir Julian. “Can this plan not operate before darkness falls?”
“No, it cannot,” answered Holmes. “A frogman diver leaves a trail of bubbles. In stormy weather this might not be noticed, but on a flat sea it would be too obvious. One of the lookouts could spot the bubbles rising. It would provoke what we are trying to avoid.”
“After dark it is, then,” said Sir Julian.
“Except for one thing, which is why I oppose the idea of sabotaging their escape launch as the only ploy. If, as may well happen, the leader of the terrorists is prepared to die with the Freya, he may not leave the ship with the rest of his team. So I believe we may have to storm the ship during a night attack and get to him before he can use his device.”
The Cabinet Secretary sighed.
“I see. Doubtless you have a plan for that as well?”
“Personally, I do not. But I would like you to meet Major Simon Fallon, commanding the Special Boat Service.”
It was all the stuff of Sir Julian Flannery’s nightmares. The Marine major was barely five feet eight inches tall, but he seemed about the same across the shoulders and was evidently of that breed of men who talk about reducing other humans to their component parts with the same ease that Lady Flannery talked of dicing vegetables for one of her famous Provençal salads.
In at least three encounters the peace-loving Cabinet Secretary had had occasion to meet officers from the SAS, but this was the first time he had seen the commander of the other, smaller specialist unit, the SBS. They were, he observed to himself, of the same breed.
The SBS had originally been formed for conventional war, to act as specialists in attacks from the sea on coastal installations. That was why they were drawn from the Marine commandos. As a basic requirement they were physically fit to a revolting degree, experts in swimming, canoeing, diving, climbing, marching, and fighting.
From there they went on to become proficient in parachuting, explosives, demolition, and the seemingly limitless techniques of cutting throats or breaking necks with knife, wire loop, or simply bare hands. In this, and in their capacity for living in self-sufficiency on, or rather off, the countryside for extended periods and leaving no trace of their presence, they simply shared the skills of their cousins in the SAS.
It was in their underwater skills that the SBS men were different. In frogman gear they could swim prodigious distances and lay explosive charges, or drop their swimming gear while treading water without a ripple and emerge from the sea with their arsenal of special weapons wrapped about them.
Some of their weaponry was fairly routine: knives and cheese wire. But since the start of that rash of outbreaks of terrorism in the late sixties, they had acquired fresh toys that delighted them.
All were expert marksmen with their high-precision, hand-tooled Finlanda rifle, a Norwegian-made piece that had been evaluated as perhaps the best rifle in the world. It could be, and usually was, fitted with an image intensifier, a sniperscope as long as a bazooka, and a completely effective silencer and flash guard.
For taking doors away in half a second, they tended, like the SAS, toward short-barreled pump-action shotguns firing solid charges. These they never aimed at the lock, for there could be other bolts behind the door; they fired two simultaneously to take off both hinges, kicked the door down, and opened fire with the silenced Ingram machine pistols.
Also in the arsenal that had helped the SAS assist the Germans at Mogadishu were their flash-bang-crash grenades, a sophisticated development of the “stun” grenades. These do more than just stun; they paralyze. With a half-second delay after pulling the pin, these grenades, thrown into a confined space containing both terrorists and hostages, have three effects. The flash blinds anyone looking in that direction for at least thirty seconds, the bang blows the eardrums out, causing instant pain and a certain loss of concentration, and the crash is a tonal sound that enters the middle ear and causes a ten-second paralysis of all muscles. (During tests, one of their own men once tried to pull the trigger of a gun pressed into a companion’s side while the grenade went off. It was impossible. Both “terrorist” and “hostage” lost their eardrums. But eardrums can grow again; dead hostages cannot.)
While the paralytic effect lasts, the rescuers spray bullets four inches over head height while their colleagues dive for the hostages, dragging them to the floor. At this point, the fixers drop their aim by six inches.
The exact position of hostage and terrorist in a closed room can be determined by the application of an electronic stethoscope to the outside of the door. Speech inside the room is not necessary; breathing can be heard and located accurately. The rescuers communicate in an elaborate sign language that permits of no misunderstanding.
Major Fallon placed the model of the Princess on the conference table, aware he had the attention of everyone present.
“I propose,” he began, “to ask the cruiser Argyll to turn herself broadside on to the Freya, and then before dawn park the assault boats containing my men and equipment close up in the lee of the Argyll, where the lookout, here, on top of the Freya’s funnel, cannot see them, even with binoculars. That will enable us to make our preparations, unobserved, through the afternoon. In case of airplanes hired by the press, I would like the sky cleared, and any emulsifier-spraying tugs within visual range of what we are doing to keep silent.”
There was no dissent to that. Sir Julian made two notes.
“I would approach the Freya with four two-man kayaks, halting at a range of three miles, in darkness, before the rising of the moon. Her radar will not spot kayaks. They are too small, too low in the water; they are of wood and canvas construction, which does not effectively register on radar. The paddlers will be in rubber, leather, wool undervests, and so on, and all buckles will be plastic. Nothing should register on the Freya’s radar.
“The men in the rear seats will be frogmen; their oxygen bottles have to be of metal, but at three miles will not register larger than a floating oil drum, not enough to cause alarm on the Freya’s bridge. At a range of three miles the divers take a compass bearing on the Freya’s stern, which they can see because it is illuminated, and drop overboard. They have luminescent wrist compasses, and swim by these.”
“Why not go for the bow?” asked the RAF group captain. “It’s darker there.”
“Partly because it would mean eliminating the man on lookout high up on the fo’c’sle, and he may be in walkie-talkie contact with the bridge,” said Fallon. “Partly because it’s a hell of a long walk down that deck, and they have a spotlight operable from the bridge. Partly because the superstructure, approached from the front, is a steel wall five stories high. We would climb it, but it has windows to cabins, some of which may be occupied.
“The four divers, one of whom will be me, rendezvous at the stern of the Freya. There should be a tiny overhang of a few feet. Now, there’s a man on top of the funnel, a hundred feet up. But people a hundred feet up tend to look outward rather than straight down. To help him in this, I want the Argyll to start flashing her searchlight to another nearby vessel, creating a spectacle for the man to watch. We will come up the stern from the water, having shed flippers, masks, oxygen bottles, and weighted belts. We will be bareheaded, barefoot, in rubber wet suits only. All weaponry carried in wide webbing belts round the waist.”
“How do you get up the side of the Freya carrying forty pounds of metal after a three-mile swim?” asked one of the ministry men.
Fallon smiled.
?
??It’s only thirty feet at most to the taffrail,” he said. “While practicing on the North Sea oil rigs, we’ve climbed a hundred sixty feet of vertical steel in four minutes.”
He saw no point in explaining the details of the fitness necessary for such a feat, nor of the equipment that made it possible.
The boffins had long ago developed for the SBS some remarkable climbing gear. Included among it were magnetic climbing clamps. These were like dinner plates, fringed with rubber so that they could be applied to metal without making a sound. The plate itself was rimmed with steel beneath the rubber, and this steel ring could be magnetized to enormous strength.
The magnetic force could be turned on or off by a thumb switch pressed by the man holding the grip on the back of the plate. The electrical charge came from a small but reliable nickel-cadmium battery inside the climbing plate.
The divers were trained to come out of the sea, reach upward and affix the first plate, then turn on the current. The magnet jammed the plate to the steel structure. Hanging on this, they reached higher and hung the second plate. Only when it was secure did they unlock the first disk, reach higher still, and reaffix it. Hand over hand, hanging on by fist grip, wrist, and forearm, they climbed out of the sea and upward—body, legs, feet, and equipment swinging free, pulling against the hands and wrists.
So strong were the magnets, so strong also the arms and shoulders, that the commandoes could climb an overhang of forty-five degrees if they had to.
“The first man goes up with the special clamps,” said Fallon, “trailing a rope behind him. If it is quiet on the poop deck, he fixes the rope, and the other three can be on deck inside ten seconds. Now, here, in the lee of the funnel assembly, this turbine housing should cast a shadow in the light thrown by the lamp above the door to the superstructure at A deck level. We group in this shadow. We’ll have black wet suits; black hands, feet, and faces.
“The first major hazard is getting across this patch of illuminated afterdeck from the shadow of the turbine housing to the main superstructure with all its living quarters.”