"For years I’ve been collecting names,” said Drake. “Men who are sick and tired of talking. If they knew what we’d done already, yes, I could get five before the end of the month.”
“ All right,” said Krim, “if we’re into this thing, let’s do it. Where do you want me to go?”
“Belgium,” said Drake. “I want a large apartment in Brussels. We’ll bring the men there and make the apartment the group’s base.”
On the other side of the world while Drake was talking, the sun rose over Chita and the Ishikawajima-Harima shipyard. The Freya lay alongside her commissioning quay, her engines throbbing.
The previous evening had seen a lengthy conference in the office of the IHI chairman, attended by both the yard’s and the company’s chief superintendents, the accountants, Harry Wennerstrom, and Thor Larsen. The two technical experts had agreed that every one of the giant tanker’s systems was in perfect working order. Wennerstrom had signed the final release document, conceding that the Freya was all he had paid for.
In fact, he had paid five percent of her on the signature of the original contract to build her, five percent at the keel-laying ceremony, five percent when she rode water, and five percent at official handover. The remaining eighty percent plus interest was payable over the succeeding eight years. But to all intents and purposes, she was his. The yard’s company flag had been ceremoniously hauled down, and the silver-on-blue winged Viking helmet emblem of the Nordia Line now fluttered in the dawn breeze.
High on the bridge, towering over the vast spread of her deck, Harry Wennerstrom drew Thor Larsen by the arm into the radio room and closed the door behind him. The room was completely soundproof with the door closed.
“She’s all yours, Thor,” he said. “By the way, there’s been a slight change of plan regarding your arrival in Europe. I’m not lightening her offshore. Not for her maiden voyage. Just this once, you’re going to bring her into the Europoort at Rotterdam fully laden.”
Larsen stared at his employer in disbelief. He knew as well as Wennerstrom that fully loaded ULCCs never entered ports; they stood well offshore and lightened themselves by disgorging most of their cargo into other, smaller tankers in order to reduce their draft for the shallow seas. Or they berthed at “sea islands”—networks of pipes on stilts, well out to sea—from which their oil could be pumped ashore. The idea of a girl in every port was a hollow joke for the crews of the supertankers; they often did not berth anywhere near a city from year’s end to year’s end, but were flown off their ships for periodic leave periods. That was why the crew quarters had to be a real home away from home.
“The English Channel will never take her,” said Larsen.
“You’re not going up the Channel,” said Wennerstrom. “You’re going west of Ireland, west of the Hebrides, north of the Pentland Firth, between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, then south down the North Sea, following the twenty-fathom line, to moor at the deep-water anchorage. From there the pilots will bring you down the main channel toward the Mass Estuary. The tugs will bring you in from the Hook of Holland to the Europoort.”
“The Inner Channel from K.I. Buoy to the Mass won’t take her, fully laden,” protested Larsen.
“Yes, it will,” said Wennerstrom calmly. “They have dredged this channel to one hundred fifteen feet over the past four years. You’ll be drawing ninety-eight feet. Thor, if I were asked to name any mariner in the world who could bring a million-tonner into the Europoort, it would be you. It’ll be tight as all hell, but let me have this one last triumph. I want the world to see her, Thor. My Freya. I’ll have them all there waiting for her. The Dutch government, the world’s press. They’ll be my guests, and they’ll be dumbfounded. Otherwise, no one will ever see her; she’ll spend her whole life out of sight of land.”
“All right,” said Larsen slowly. “Just this once. I’ll be ten years older when it’s over.”
Wennerstrom grinned like a small boy.
“Just wait till they see her,” he said. “The first of April. See you in Rotterdam, Thor Larsen.”
Ten minutes later he was gone. At noon, with the Japanese workers lining the quayside to cheer her on her way, the mighty Freya eased away from the shore and headed for the mouth of the bay. At two P.M. on February 2, she came out again into the Pacific and swung her bow south toward the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra at the start of her maiden voyage.
On February 10, the Politburo in Moscow met to consider, approve, or reject the draft treaty and accompanying trade protocol negotiated at Castletown. Rudin and those who supported him knew that if they could carry the terms of the treaty at this meeting, then, barring accidents thereafter, it could be ratified and signed. Yefrem Vishnayev and his faction of hawks were no less aware. The meeting was lengthy and exceptionally hard fought.
It is often assumed that world statesmen, even in private conclave, use moderate language and courteous address to their colleagues and advisers. This has not been true of several recent U.S. presidents and is completely untrue of the Politburo in closed session. The Russian equivalent of four-letter words flew thick and fast. Only the fastidious Vishnayev kept his language restrained, though his tone was acid as he and his allies fought every concession, line by line.
It was the Foreign Minister, Dmitri Rykov, who carried the others in the moderate faction.
“What we have gained,” he said, “is the assured sale to us, at last July’s reasonable prices, of fifty-five million tons of grains. Without them we face disaster on a national scale. Besides, we have nearly three billion dollars’ worth of the most modern technology, in consumer industries, computers, and oil production. With these we can master the problems that have beset us for two decades, and conquer them within five years.
“Against this we have to offset certain minimal concessions in arms levels and states of preparedness, which, I stress, will in no way at all hinder or retard our capacity to dominate the Third World and its raw-material resources inside the same five years. From the disaster that faced us last May, we have emerged triumphant, thanks to the inspired leadership of Comrade Maxim Rudin. To reject this treaty now would bring us back to last May, but worse: the last of our 1982 harvest grains will run out in sixty days.”
When the meeting voted on the treaty terms, which was in fact a vote on the continuing leadership of Maxim Rudin, the six-to-six tie remained intact.
“There’s only one thing that can bring him down now,” said Vishnayev with quiet finality to Marshal Kerensky in the former’s limousine as they drove home that evening. “If something serious happens to sway one or two of his faction before the treaty is ratified. If not, the Central Committee will approve the treaty on the Politburo’s recommendation, and it will go through. If only it could be proved that those two damned Jews in Berlin killed Ivanenko. ...”
Kerensky was less than his blustering self. Privately he was beginning to wonder if he had chosen the wrong side. Three months ago it had looked so certain that Rudin would be pushed too far, too fast, by the Americans and would lose his crucial support at the green baize table. But Kerensky was committed to Vishnayev now; there would be no massive Soviet maneuvers in East Germany in two months, and he had to swallow that.
“One other thing,” said Vishnayev. “If it had appeared six months ago, the power struggle would be over by now. I heard news from a contact out at the Kuntsevo clinic. Maxim Rudin is dying.”
“Dying?” repeated the Defense Minister. “When?”
“Not soon enough,” said the Party theoretician. “He’ll live to carry the day over this treaty, my friend. Time is running out for us, and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless the Ivanenko affair can yet blow up in his face.”
As he was speaking, the Freya was steaming through the Sunda Strait. To her port side lay Java Head, and far to starboard the great mass of the volcano Krakatau reared toward the night sky. On the darkened bridge a battery of dimly lit instruments told Thor Larsen, the senior officer of the wat
ch, and the junior officer all they needed to know. Three separate navigational systems correlated their findings into the computer, set in the small room aft of the bridge, and those findings were dead accurate. Constant compass readings, true to within half a second of a degree, cross-checked themselves with the stars above, unchanging and unchangeable. Man’s artificial stars, the all-weather satellites, were also monitored and the resultant findings fed into the computer. Here the memory banks had absorbed tide, wind, undercurrents, temperatures, and humidity levels. From the computer, endless messages were flashed automatically to the gigantic rudder, which, far below the stern transom, flickered with the sensitivity of a fish’s tail.
High above the bridge, the two radar scanners whirled unceasingly, picking up coasts and mountains, ships and buoys, feeding them all into the computer, which processed this information, too, ready to activate its hazard-alarm device at the first hint of danger. Beneath the water, the echo sounders relayed a three-dimensional map of the seabed far below, while from the bulbous bow section the forward sonar scanner looked ahead and down into the black waters. For the Freya, elapsed time from full-ahead to crash-stop would be thirty minutes, and she would cover three to four kilometers. She was that big.
Before dawn she had cleared the narrows of Sunda and her computers had turned her northwest along the hundred-fathom line to cut south of Sri Lanka for the Arabian Sea.
Two days later, on February 12, eight men grouped themselves in the apartment Azamat Krim had rented in a suburb of Brussels. The five newcomers had been summoned by Drake, who long ago had noted them all, met and spoken with them long into the night, before deciding that they, too, shared his dream of striking a blow against Moscow. Two of the five were German-born Ukrainians, scions of the large Ukrainian community in the Federal Republic. One was an American from New York, also of a Ukrainian father, and the other two were Ukrainian-British.
When they heard what Mishkin and Lazareff had done to the head of the KGB, there was a babble of excited comment When Drake proposed that the operation could not be completed until the two partisans were free and safe, no one dissented. They talked through the night, and by dawn they had split into four teams of two.
Drake and Kaminsky would return to England to buy the necessary electronic equipment that Drake estimated he required. One of the Germans would partner one of the Englishmen and return to Germany to seek out the explosives they needed. The other German, who had contacts in Paris, would take the other Englishman to find and buy, or steal, the weaponry. Azamat Krim took his fellow North American to seek a motor launch. The American, who had worked in a boatyard in upper New York State, reckoned he knew what he wanted.
Eight days later in the tightly guarded courtroom attached to Moabit Prison in West Berlin, the trial of Mishkin and Lazareff started. Both men were silent and subdued in the dock as, within concentric walls of security from the barbed-wire entanglements atop the perimeter walls to the armed guards scattered all over the courtroom, they listened to the charges. The list took ten minutes to read. There was an audible gasp from the packed press benches when both men pleaded guilty to all charges. The state prosecutor rose to begin his narration of the events of New Year’s Eve to the panel of judges. When he had finished, the judges adjourned to discuss the sentence.
The Freya moved slowly and sedately through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. The breeze had freshened with the sunrise into the chilly shamal wind coming into her nose from the northwest, sand-laden, causing the horizon to be hazy and vague. Her crew all knew this landscape well enough, having passed many times on their way to collect crude oil from the Gulf. They were all experienced tanker-men.
To one side of the Freya, barren, arid Qeshm Island slid by, barely two cables away; to the other, the officers on the bridge could make out the bleak moonscape of Cape Musandam, with its sheer rocky mountains. The Freya was riding high, and the depth in the channel presented no problems. On the return, when she was laden with crude oil, it would be different. She would be almost shut down, moving slowly, watch officer’s eyes riveted on her depth sounder, watching the map of the seabed pass barely a few feet beneath her keel, ninety-eight feet below the waterline.
She was still in ballast, as she had been all the way from Chita. She had sixty giant tanks or holds, three abreast in lines of twenty, fore to aft. One of these was the slop tank, to be used for nothing else but gathering the slops from her fifty crude-carrying cargo tanks. Nine were permanent ballast tanks, to be used for nothing but pure seawater to give her stability when she was empty of cargo.
But her remaining fifty crude-oil tanks were sufficient. Each held 20,000 tons of crude oil. It was with complete confidence in the impossibility of her causing accidental oil pollution that she steamed on to Abu Dhabi to load her first cargo.
There is a modest bar on the rue Miollin in Paris where the small fry of the world of mercenaries and arms sellers are wont to forgather and take a drink together. It was here the German-Ukrainian and his English colleague were brought by the German’s French contact man.
There were several hours of low-voiced negotiation between the Frenchman and another French friend of his. Eventually the contact man came across to the two Ukrainians.
“My friend says it is possible,” he told the Ukrainian from Germany. “Five hundred dollars each, American dollars, cash. One magazine per unit included.”
“We’ll take it if he’ll throw in one handgun with full magazine,” said the man from Germany.
Three hours later in the garage of a private house near Neuilly, six submachine carbines and one MAB automatic nine-millimeter handgun were wrapped in blankets and stowed in the trunk of the Ukrainians’ car. The money changed hands. In twelve hours, just before midnight of February 24, the two men arrived at their apartment in Brussels and stored their equipment at the back of a closet.
As the sun rose on February 25, the Freya eased her way back through the Strait of Hormuz, and on the bridge there was a sigh of relief as the officers gazing at the depth sounder saw the seabed drop away from in front of their eyes to the deep of the ocean. On the digital display, the figures ran rapidly from twenty to one hundred fathoms. The Freya moved steadily back to her full-load service speed of fifteen knots as she went southeast back down the Gulf of Oman.
She was heavy-laden now, doing what she had been designed and built for—carrying a million tons of crude oil to the thirsty refineries of Europe and the millions of family cars that would drink it. Her draft was now at her designed ninety-eight feet, and her hazard-alarm devices had ingested the knowledge and knew what to do if the seabed ever approached too close.
Her nine ballast tanks were now empty, acting as buoyancy tanks. Far away in the forepart, the first row of three tanks contained a full crude tank on port and starboard, with the single slop tank in the center. One row back were the first three empty ballast tanks. The second row of three was amidships, and the third row of three was at the foot of the superstructure, on the fifth floor of which Captain Thor Larsen handed the Freya to the senior officer of the watch and went down to his handsome day cabin for breakfast and a short sleep.
On the morning of February 26, after an adjournment of several days, the presiding judge in the Moabit courtroom in West Berlin began to read the judgment of himself and his two colleagues. It took several hours.
In their walled dock, Mishkin and Lazareff listened impassively. From time to time each sipped water from the glasses placed on the tables in front of them. From the packed booths reserved for the international press they were under scrutiny, as were the figures of the judges, while the findings were read. But one magazine journalist representing a leftist German monthly magazine seemed more interested in the glasses they drank from than in the prisoners themselves.
The court adjourned for lunch, and when it resumed, the journalist was missing from his seat. He was phoning from one of the kiosks outside the hearing room. Shortly after three, the judge reached hi
s conclusion. Both men were required to rise, to hear themselves sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.
They were led away to begin their sentences at Tegel Jail in the northern part of the city, and within minutes the courtroom had emptied. The cleaners took over, removing the brimming wastepaper baskets, carafes, and glasses. One of the middle-aged ladies occupied herself with cleaning the interior of the dock. Unobserved by her colleagues, she quietly picked up the prisoners’ two drinking glasses, wrapped each in a dustcloth, and placed them in her shopping bag beneath the empty wrappers of her sandwiches. No one noticed, and no one cared.
On the last day of the month, Vassili Petrov sought and received a private audience with Maxim Rudin in the latter’s Kremlin suite.
“Mishkin and Lazarett,” he said without preamble.
“What about them? They got fifteen years. It should have been the firing squad.”
“One of our people in West Berlin abstracted the glasses they used for water during the trial. The palmprint on one matches that from the car used in the hit-and-run affair in Kiev in October.”
“So it was them,” said Rudin grimly. “Damn them to hell! Vassili, wipe them out. Liquidate them as fast as you can. Give it to ‘Wet Affairs.’ ”
The KGB, vast and complex in its scope and organization, consists basically of four chief directorates, seven independent directorates, and six independent departments.
But the four chief directorates comprise the bulk of the KGB. One of these, the First, concerns itself exclusively with clandestine activities outside the USSR.
Deep within the heart of it is a section known simply as Department V (as in Victor), or the Executive Action Department. This is the one the KGB would most like to keep hidden from the rest of the world, inside and outside the USSR. For its tasks include sabotage, extortion, kidnapping, and assassination. Within the jargon of the KGB itself, it usually has yet another name: the department of mokrte dyela, or “Wet Affairs,” so called because its operations not infrequently involve someone’s getting wet with blood. It was to this Department V of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB that Maxim Rudin ordered Petrov to hand the elimination of Mishkin and Lazareff.