He could also guess that the SSD had copious files on every East German who had ever quit to come to the West, and that was his problem. Thirty years earlier, as an eighteen-year-old, Jahn had taken part in the building workers’ riots in East Berlin that had become the East German uprising. He had been lucky. Although he had been picked up in one of the sweeps by the Russian police and their East German Communist acolytes, he had not been held. But he recalled the smell of the detention cells, and the stamp of the men who ruled them. His visitors this March 22, three decades later, bore the same stamp.
He had kept his head low for eight years after the 1953 riots; men in 1961, before the Wall was completed, he quietly walked into the West. For the past fifteen years he had had a good job with the West Berlin civil service, starting as a guard in the prison service and rising to Oberwachmeister, chief officer of Two Block, Tegel Jail.
The other man in his room that evening kept silent. Jahn would never know that he was a Soviet colonel named Kukushkin, present on behalf of the “Wet Affairs” department of the KGB.
Jahn stared in horror at the photographs the German eased from a large envelope and placed before him slowly, one by one. They showed his widowed mother in a cell, terrified, aged nearly eighty, staring at the camera obediently, hopeful of release. There were his two younger brothers, handcuffs on wrists, in different cells, the masonry of the walls showing up clearly in the high-definition prints.
“Then there are your sisters-in-law and your three delightful little nieces. Oh, yes, we know about the Christmas presents. What is it they call you? Uncle Ludo? How very charming. Tell me, have you ever seen places like these?”
There were more photographs—pictures that made the comfortably plump Jahn close his eyes for several seconds. Strange, zombielike figures, clad in rags, moved through the pictures, shaven, skull-like faces peering dully at the camera. They huddled; they shuffled; they wrapped their withered feet in rags to keep out the Arctic cold. They were stubbled, shriveled, subhuman. They were some of the inhabitants of the slave labor camps of the Kolyma complex, far away at the eastern end of Siberia, north of the Kamchatka Peninsula, where gold is mined deep in the Arctic Circle.
“Life sentences in these ... resorts ... are only for the worst enemies of the state, Herr Jahn. But my colleague here can ensure such life sentences for all your family—yes, even your dear old mother—with just one single telephone call. Now, tell me, do you want him to make that call?”
Jahn gazed across into the eyes of the man who had not spoken. The eyes were as bleak as the Kolyma camps.
“Nein,” he whispered. “No, please. What do you want?”
It was the German who answered.
“In Tegel Jail are two hijackers, Mishkin and Lazareff. Do you know them?”
Jahn nodded dumbly.
“Yes. They arrived four weeks ago. There was much publicity.”
“Where, exactly, are they?”
“Number Two Block. Top floor, east wing. Solitary confinement, at their own request. They fear the other prisoners. Or so they say. There is no reason. For child rapists there is a reason, but not for these two. Yet they insist.”
“But you can visit them, Herr Jahn? You have access?”
Jahn remained silent. He began to fear what the visitors wanted with the hijackers. They came from the East; the hijackers had escaped from there. It could not be to bring them birthday gifts.
“Have another look at the pictures, Jahn. Have a good look before you think of obstructing us.”
“Yes, I can visit them. On my rounds. But only at night. During the day shift there are three guards in that corridor. One or two would always accompany me if I wished to visit them. But in the day shift there would be no reason for me to visit them. Only to check on them during the night shift.”
“Are you on the night shift at the moment?”
“No. Day shift.”
“What are the hours of the night shift?”
“Midnight to eight A.M. Lights are out at ten P.M. Shift changes at midnight. Relief is at eight A.M. During the night shift I would patrol the block three times, accompanied by the duty officer of each floor.”
The unnamed German thought for a while.
“My friend here wishes to visit them. When do you return to the night shift?”
“Monday, April fourth,” said Jahn.
“Very well,” said the East German. “This is what you will do.”
Jahn was instructed to acquire from the locker of a vacationing colleague the necessary uniform and pass card. At two A.M. on the morning of Monday, April 4, he would descend to the ground floor and admit the Russian by the staff entrance from the street. He would accompany him to the top floor and hide him in the staff dayroom, to which he would acquire a duplicate key. He would cause the night duty officer on the top floor to absent himself on an errand, and take over the watch from him while he was away. During the man’s absence he would allow the Russian into the solitary-confinement corridor, lending him his passkey to both cells. When the Russian had “visited” Mishkin and Lazareff, the process would be reversed. The Russian would hide again until the duty officer returned to his post. Then Jahn would escort the Russian back to the staff entrance and let him out.
“It won’t work,” whispered Jahn, well aware that it probably would.
The Russian spoke at last, in German.
“It had better,” he said. “If it does not, I will personally ensure that your entire family begins a regime in Kolyma that will make the ‘extrastrict’ regime operating there seem like the honeymoon suite at the Kempinski Hotel.”
Jahn felt as if his bowels were being sprayed with liquid ice. None of the hard men in the “special wing” could compare with this man. He swallowed.
“I’ll do it,” he whispered.
“My friend will return here at six in the evening of Sunday, April third,” said the East German. “No reception committees from the police, if you please. It will do no good. We both have diplomatic passes in false names. We will deny everything and walk away quite freely. Just have the uniform and pass card awaiting him.”
Two minutes later they were gone. They took their photos with them. There was no evidence left It did not matter. Jahn could see every detail in his nightmares.
By March 23 over two hundred fifty ships, the first wave of the waiting merchant fleet, were docked in the major grain ports from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. There was still ice in the St. Lawrence, but it was shattered to mosaic by the icebreakers, aware of its defeat as the grain ships moved through it to berth by the grain elevators.
A fair proportion of these ships were of the Russian Sovfracht fleet, but the next largest numbers were flying the U.S. flag, for one of the conditions of the sale had been that American carriers take the prime contracts to move the grain.
Within ten days they would begin moving east across the Atlantic, bound for Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic, Leningrad at the head of the Gulf of Finland, and the warm-water ports of Odessa, Sevastopol, and Novorossisk on the Black Sea. Flags of ten other nations mingled with them to effect the biggest single dry-cargo movement since the Second World War. Elevators from Duluth to Houston spewed a golden tide of wheat, barley, oats, rye, and com into their bellies, all destined within a month for the hungry millions of Russia.
On the twenty-sixth, Andrew Drake rose from his work at the kitchen table of an apartment in the suburbs of Brussels and pronounced that he was ready.
The explosives had been packed into ten fiber suitcases, the submachine guns rolled in towels and stuffed into haversacks. Azamat Krim kept the detonators bedded in cotton in a cigar box that never left him. When darkness fell, the cargo was carried in relays down to the group’s secondhand, Belgian-registered panel van, and they set off for Blankenberge.
The little seaside resort facing the North Sea was quiet, the harbor virtually deserted, when they transferred their equipment under cover of darkness to the bilge
s of the fishing launch. It was a Saturday, and though a man walking his dog along the quay noticed them at work, he thought no more of it. Parties of sea anglers stocking up for a weekend’s fishing were common enough, even though it was a mite early in the year and still chilly.
On Sunday the twenty-seventh, Miroslav Kaminsky bade them good-bye, took the van, and drove back to Brussels. His job was to clean the Brussels flat from top to bottom and end to end, to abandon it, and to drive the van to a prearranged rendezvous in the polders of Holland. There he would leave it, with its ignition key in an agreed place, then take the ferry from the Hook back to Harwich and London. He had his itinerary well rehearsed and was confident he could carry out his part of the plan.
The remaining seven men left port and cruised sedately up the coast to lose themselves in the islands of Walcheren and North Beveland, just across the border with Holland. There, with their fishing rods much in evidence, they hove to and waited. On a powerful radio down in the cabin, Andrew Drake sat hunched, listening to the wavelength of Maas Estuary Control and the endless calls of the ships heading into or out of the Europoort and Rotterdam.
“Colonel Kukushkin is going into Tegel Jail to do the job early in the morning of April fourth,” Vassili Petrov told Maxim Rudin in the Kremlin that same Sunday morning. “There is a senior guard who will let him in, bring him to the cells of Mishkin and Lazareff, and let him out of the jail by the staff doorway when it is over.”
“The guard is reliable? One of our people?” asked Rudin.
“No, but he has family in East Germany. He has been persuaded to do as he is told. Kukushkin reports that he will not contact the police. He is too frightened.”
“Then he knows already whom he is working for. Which means he knows too much.”
“Kukushkin will silence him also, just as he steps out of the doorway. There will be no trace,” said Petrov.
“Eight days,” grunted Rudin. “He had better get it right.”
“He will,” said Petrov. “He, too, has a family. By a week from tomorrow Mishkin and Lazareff will be dead, and their secret with them. Those who helped them will keep silent to save their own lives. Even if they talk, it will be disbelieved. Mere hysterical allegations. No one will believe them.”
When the sun rose on the morning of the twenty-ninth, its first rays picked up the mass of the Freya twenty miles west of Ireland, cutting north by northeast through the eleven-degree longitude on a course to skirt the Outer Hebrides.
Her powerful radar scanners had picked up the fishing fleet in the darkness an hour before, and her officer of the watch noted them carefully. The nearest to her was well to the east, or landward side, of the tanker.
The sun glittered over the rocks of Donegal, a thin line on the eastward horizon to the men on the bridge with their advantage of eighty feet of altitude. It caught the small fishing smacks of the men from Killybegs, drifting out in the western seas for mackerel, herring, and whiting. And it caught the bulk of the Freya herself, like a moving landmass, steaming out of the south past the drifters and their gently bobbing nets.
Christy O’Byrne was in the tiny wheelhouse of the smack he and his brother owned, the Bernadette. He blinked several times, put down his cocoa mug, and stepped the three feet from the wheelhouse to the rail. His vessel was the nearest to the passing tanker.
From behind him, when they saw the Freya, the fishermen tugged on the horn lanyards, and a chorus of thin whoops disturbed the dawn. On the bridge of the Freya, Thor Larsen nodded to his junior officer; seconds later the bellowing bull roar of the Freya answered the Killybegs fleet.
Christy O’Byrne leaned on the rail and watched the Freya fill the horizon, heard the throb of her power beneath the sea, and felt the Bernadette begin to roll in the widening wake of the tanker.
“Holy Mary,” he whispered, “would you look at the size of her.”
On the eastern shore of Ireland, compatriots of Christy O’Byrne were at work that morning in Dublin Castle, for seven hundred years the seat of power of the British. As a tiny boy perched on his father’s shoulder, Martin Donahue had watched from outside as the last British troops marched out of the castle forever, following the signing of a peace treaty. Sixty-one years later, on the verge of retirement from government service, he was a cleaner, pushing a Hoover back and forth over the electric-blue carpet of St Patrick’s Hall.
He had not been present when any of Ireland’s successive presidents had been inaugurated beneath Vincent Waldré’s magnificent 1778 painted ceiling, nor would he be present in twelve days when two superpowers signed the Treaty of Dublin below the motionless heraldic banners of the long-gone Knights of St. Patrick. For forty years he had just kept it dusted for them.
Rotterdan, too, was preparing, but for a different ceremony. Harry Wennerstrom arrived on the thirtieth and installed himself in the best suite at the Hilton Hotel.
He had come by his private executive jet, now parked at Schiedam municipal airport just outside the city. Throughout the day four secretaries fussed around him, preparing for the Scandinavian and Dutch dignitaries, the tycoons from the worlds of oil and shipping, and the scores of press people who would attend his reception on the evening of April 1 for Captain Thor Larsen and his officers.
A select party of notables and members of the press would be his guests on the flat roof of the modern Maas Control building, situated on the very tip of the sandy shore at the Hook of Holland. Well protected against the stiff spring breeze, they would watch from the north shore of the Maas Estuary as the six tugs pulled and pushed the Freya those last few kilometers from the estuary into the Caland Kanaal, from there to the Beer Kanaal, and finally to rest by Clint Blake’s new oil refinery in the heart of the Europoort.
While the Freya closed down her systems during the afternoon, the group would come back by cavalcade of limousines to central Rotterdam, forty kilometers up the river, for an evening reception. A press conference would precede this, during which Wennerstrom would present Thor Larsen to the world’s press.
Already, he knew, newspapers and television had leased helicopters to give the last few miles of the Freya and her berthing complete camera coverage.
Harry Wennerstrom was a contented old man.
By the early hours of March 30 the Freya was well through the channel between the Orkneys and the Shetlands. She had turned south, heading down the North Sea. As soon as she entered the crowded lanes of the North Sea, the Freya had reported in, contacting the first of the shore-based area traffic-control officers at Wick on the coast of Caithness in the far north of Scotland.
Because of her size and draft, she was a “hampered vessel.” She had reduced speed to ten knots and was following the instructions fed to her from Wick by VHF radiotelephone. All around her, unseen, the various control centers had her marked on their high-definition radars, manned by qualified pilot operators. These centers are equipped with computerized support systems capable of rapid assimilation of weather, tide, and traffic-density information.
Ahead of the Freya as she crawled down the southbound traffic lane, smaller ships were crisply informed to get out of her way. At midnight she passed Flamborough Head on the coast of Yorkshire, now moving farther east, away from the British coast and toward Holland. Throughout her passage she had followed the deepwater channel, a minimum of twenty fathoms. On her bridge, despite the constant instructions from ashore, her officers watched the echo-sounder readings, observing the banks and sandbars that make up the floor of the North Sea slide past on either side of her.
Just before sundown of March 31, at a point exactly fifteen sea miles due east of the Outer Gabbard Light, now down to her bare steerage speed of five knots, the giant swung gently eastward and moved to her overnight position, the deep-draft anchorage located at fifty-two degrees north. She was twenty-seven sea miles due west of the Maas Estuary, twenty-seven miles from home and glory.
It was midnight in Moscow. Adam Munro had decided to walk home from the diplomatic re
ception at the embassy. He had been driven there by the commercial counselor, so his own car was parked by his flat off Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
Halfway over the Serafimov Bridge, he paused to gaze down at the Moscow River. To his right he could see the illuminated cream-and-white stucco facade of the embassy; to his left the dark red walls of the Kremlin loomed above him, and above them the upper floor and dome of the Great Kremlin Palace.
It had been roughly ten months since he had flown from London to take up his new appointment. In that time he had pulled off the greatest espionage coup for decades, running the only spy the West had ever operated inside the heart of the Kremlin. They would savage him for breaking training, for not telling them all along who she was, but they could not diminish the value of what he had brought out.
Three weeks more and she would be out of this place, safe In London. He would be out, too, resigning from the service to start a new life somewhere else with the only person in the world he loved, ever had loved, or ever would.
He would be glad to leave Moscow, with its secrecy, its endless furtiveness, its mind-numbing drabness. In ten days the Americans would have their arms-reduction treaty, the Kremlin its grain and technology, the service its thanks and gratitude from Downing Street and the White House alike. A week more and he would have his wife-to-be, and she her freedom. He shrugged deeper into his thick, fur-collared coat and walked on across the bridge.
Midnight in Moscow is ten P.M. in the North Sea. By 2200 hours the Freya was motionless at last. She had steamed 7,085 miles from Chita to Abu Dhabi and a further 12,015 miles from there to where she now lay. She lay motionless along the line of the tide; from her stem a single anchor chain streamed out and down to the seabed, with five shackles on deck. Each link of the chain needed to hold her was nearly a yard long, and the steel thicker than a man’s thigh.
Because of her “hampered” state, Captain Larsen had brought her down from the Orkneys himself, with two navigating officers to assist him, as well as the helmsman. Even at the overnight anchorage he left his first officer, Stig Lundquist, his third mate, Tom Keller (a Danish-American), and an able seaman on the bridge through the night. The officers would maintain constant anchor watch; the seaman would carry out periodic deck inspection.