“Any chance that it’s a bluff, a confidence trick, that they really can’t destroy the Freya or kill her crew?” someone asked.
The Interior Minister shook his head.
“We can’t bank on that. These pictures the British have just transmitted to us show the armed and masked men are real enough. I’ve sent them along to the leader of GSG-nine to see what he thinks. But the trouble is, approaching a ship with all-around, over-and-under radar and sonar cover is not their area of expertise. It would mean divers or frogmen.”
He was referring by GSG-nine to the ultratough unit of West German commandos drawn from the Border Troops who had stormed the hijacked aircraft at Mogadisho five years earlier.
The argument continued for an hour: whether to accede to the terrorists’ demands in view of the several nationalities of the probable victims of a refusal, and accept the inevitable protests from Moscow; or whether to refuse and call their bluff; or whether to consult with the British allies about the idea of storming the Freya. A compromise view of adopting delaying tactics, stalling for time, testing the determination of the Freya’s captors, seemed to be gaining ground. At four-fifteen, there was a quiet knock on the door. Chancellor Busch frowned; he did not like interruptions.
“Herein,” he called. An aide entered the room and whispered urgently in the Chancellor’s ear. The head of the Federal Republic’s government paled.
“Du lieber Gott,” he breathed.
When the light aircraft, later traced as a privately owned Cessna on charter from Le Touquet airfield on the northern French coast, began to approach, she was spotted by three different air-traffic-control zones: at Heathrow, Brussels, and Amsterdam. She was flying due north, and the radars put her at five thousand feet, on track for the Freya. The ether began to crackle furiously.
“Unidentified light aircraft ... identify yourself and turn back. You are entering a prohibited area. ...”
French and English were used; later, Dutch. They had no effect. Either the pilot had switched off his radio or he was on the wrong channel. The operators on the ground began to weep through the wave bands.
The circling Nimrod picked the aircraft up on radar and tried to contact her.
On board the Cessna, the pilot turned to his passenger in despair.
“They’ll have my license,” he yelled. “They’re going mad down there.”
“Switch off,” the passenger shouted back. “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. You never heard them, okay?”
The passenger gripped his camera and adjusted the telephoto lens. He began to sight up on the approaching supertanker. In the forepeak, the masked lookout stiffened and squinted against the sun, now in the southwest. The plane was coming from due south. After watching for several seconds, he took a walkie-talkie from his anorak and spoke sharply into it.
On the bridge, one of his colleagues heard the message, peered forward through the panoramic screen, and walked hurriedly outside onto the wing. Here he, too, could hear the engine note. He reentered the bridge and shook his sleeping colleague awake, snapping several orders in Ukrainian. The man ran downstairs to the door of the day cabin and knocked.
Inside the cabin, Thor Larsen and Andrew Drake, both looking unshaven and more haggard than twelve hours earlier, were still at the table, the gun by the Ukrainian’s right hand. A foot away from him was his powerful transistor radio, picking up the latest news. The masked man entered on his command and spoke in Ukrainian. His leader scowled and ordered the man to take over in the cabin.
Drake left the cabin quickly, raced up to the bridge and out onto the wing. As he did so, he pulled on his black mask. From the bridge he gazed up as the Cessna, banking at a thousand feet, performed one orbit of the Freya and flew back to the south, climbing steadily. While it turned he had seen the great zoom lens poking down at him.
Inside the aircraft, the free-lance cameraman was exultant.
“Fantastic!” he shouted at the pilot. “Completely exclusive. The magazines will pay their right arms for this.”
Drake returned to the bridge and issued a rapid stream of orders. Over the walkie-talkie he told the man up front to continue his watch. The bridge lookout was sent below to summon two men who were catching sleep. When all three returned, he gave them further instructions. When he returned to the day cabin, he did not dismiss the extra guard.
“I think it’s time I told those stupid bastards over there in Europe that I am not joking,” he told Thor Larsen.
Five minutes later the camera operator on the Nimrod called over the intercom to his captain.
“There’s something happening down there, skipper.”
Squadron Leader Latham left the flight deck and walked back to the center section of the hull, where the visual image of what the cameras were photographing was on display. Two men were walking down the deck of the Freya, the great wall of superstructure behind them, the long, lonely deck ahead. One of the men, the one at the rear, was in black from head to foot, with a submachine gun. The one ahead wore sneakers, casual slacks, and a nylon-type anorak with three horizontal black stripes across its back. The hood was up against the chill afternoon breeze.
“Looks like a terrorist at the back, but a seaman in front,” said the camera operator. Latham nodded. He could not see the colors; his pictures were monochrome.
“Give me a closer look,” he said, “and transmit.” The camera zoomed down until the frame occupied forty feet of foredeck, both men walking in the center of the picture.
Captain Thor Larsen could see the colors. He gazed through the wide forward windows of his cabin beneath the bridge in disbelief. Behind him the guard with the machine gun stood well back, muzzle trained on the middle of the Norwegian’s white sweater.
Halfway down the foredeck, reduced by distance to match-stick figures, the second man, in black, stopped, raised his machine gun, and aimed at the back in front of him. Even through the glazing the crackle of the one-second burst could be heard. The figure in the pillar-box red anorak arched as if kicked in the spine, threw up its arms, pitched forward, rolled once, and came to rest, half-obscured beneath the inspection catwalk.
Thor Larsen slowly closed his eyes. When the ship had been taken over, his third mate, Danish-American Tom Keller, had been wearing fawn slacks and a light nylon wind-breaker in bright red with three black stripes across the back. Larsen leaned his forehead against the back of his hand on the glass. Then he straightened, turned to the man he knew as Svoboda, and stared at him. Drake stared back.
“I warned them,” he said angrily. “I told them exactly what would happen, and they thought they could play games. Now they know they cant.”
Twenty minutes later the still pictures showing the sequence of what had happened on the deck of the Freya were coming out of a machine in the heart of London. Twenty minutes after that, the details in verbal terms were rattling off a teleprinter in the Federal Chancellery in Bonn. It was four-thirty P.M.
Chancellor Busch looked at his cabinet.
“I regret to have to inform you,” he said, “that one hour ago a private plane apparently sought to take pictures of the Freya from close range, about a thousand feet. Ten minutes later the terrorists walked one of the crew halfway down the deck and, under the cameras of the British Nimrod above them, executed him. His body now lies half under the catwalk, half under the sky.”
There was dead silence in the room.
“Can he be identified?” asked one of the ministers in a low voice.
“No, his face was partly covered by the hood of his anorak.”
“Bastards,” said the Defense Minister. “Now thirty families all over Scandinavia will be in anguish, instead of one. They’re really turning the knife.”
“In the wake of this, so will the four governments of Scandinavia, and I shall have to answer their ambassadors,” said Hagowitz. “I really don’t think we have any alternative.”
When the hands were raised, the majority were for Hagowitz’s proposal
: that he instruct the German Ambassador to Israel to seek an urgent interview with the Israeli Premier and ask from him, at Germany’s request, the guarantee the terrorists had demanded. Following which, if it was given, the Federal Republic would announce that with regret it had no alternative, in order to spare further misery to innocent men and women outside West Germany, but to release Mishkin and Lazareff to Israel.
“The terrorists have given the Israeli Prime Minister until midnight to offer that guarantee,” said Chancellor Busch. “And ourselves until dawn to put these hijackers on a plane. We’ll hold our announcement until Jerusalem agrees. Without that, there is nothing we can do, anyway.”
By agreement among the NATO allies concerned, the RAF Nimrod remained the only aircraft in the sky above the Freya, circling endlessly, watching and noting, sending pictures back to base whenever there was anything to show—pictures that went immediately to London and to the capitals of the concerned countries.
At five P.M. the lookouts were changed, the men from the fo’c’sle and funnel top, who had been there for ten hours, being allowed to return, chilled and stiff, to the crew’s quarters for food, warmth, and sleep. For the night watch, they were replaced by others, equipped with walkie-talkies and powerful flashlights.
But the allied agreement on the Nimrod did not extend to surface ships. Each coastal nation wanted an on-site observer from its own Navy. During the late afternoon the French light cruiser Montcalm stole quietly out of the south and hove lo, just over five nautical miles from the Freya. Out of the north, where she had been cruising off the Frisians, came the Dutch missile frigate Breda, which stopped six nautical miles to the north of the helpless tanker.
She was joined by the German missile frigate Brunner, and the frigates lay five cable lengths away from each other, both watching the dim shape on the southern horizon. From the Scottish port of Leith, where she had been on a courtesy visit, H.M.S. Argyll put to sea, and as the first evening star appeared in the cloudless sky, she took up her station due west of the Freya.
She was a guided-missile light cruiser, known as a DLG, of just under six thousand tons, armed with batteries of Exocet missiles. Her modern gas-turbine and steam engines had enabled her to put to sea at a moment’s notice, and deep in her hull the Data Link computer she carried was tapped into the Data Link of the Nimrod circling fifteen thousand feet above in the darkening sky. Toward her stern, one step up from the afterdeck, she carried her own Westland Wessex helicopter.
Beneath the water, the sonar ears of the warships surrounded the Freya on three sides; above the water, the radar scanners swept the ocean constantly. With the Nimrod above, Freya was cocooned in an invisible shroud of electronic surveillance. She lay silent and inert as the sun prepared to fall over the English coast.
It was five o’clock in Western Europe but seven in Israel when the West German Ambassador asked for a personal audience with Premier Benyamin Golen. It was pointed out to him at once that the Sabbath had started one hour before and that as a devout Jew the Premier was at rest in his own home. Nevertheless, the message was relayed because neither the Prime Minister’s private office nor he himself was unaware of what was happening in the North Sea. Indeed, since the 0900 broadcast from Thor Larsen, the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, had been keeping Jerusalem informed, and following the demands made at noon concerning Israel, the most copious position papers had been prepared. Before the official start of the Sabbath at six o’clock, Premier Golen had read them all.
“I am not prepared to break Shabbat and drive to the office,” he told his aide, who telephoned him with the news, “even though I am now answering this telephone. And it is rather a long way to walk. Ask the Ambassador to call on me personally.”
Ten minutes later the German Embassy car drew up outside the Premier’s ascetically modest house in the suburbs of Jerusalem. When the envoy was shown in, he was apologetic.
After the traditional greetings of “Shabbat Shalom,” the Ambassador said:
“Prime Minister, I would not have disturbed you for all the world during the hours of the Sabbath, but I understand it is permitted to break the Sabbath if human life is at stake.”
Premier Golen inclined his head.
“It is permitted if human life is at stake or in danger,” he conceded.
“In this case, that is very much so,” said the Ambassador. “You will be aware, sir, of what has been happening on board the supertanker Freya in the North Sea these past twelve hours.”
The Premier was more than aware; he was deeply concerned, for since the noon demands, it had become plain that the terrorists, whoever they were, could not be Palestinian Arabs, and might even be Jewish fanatics. But his own agencies, the external Mossad and the internal Sherut Bitachon, called from its initials Shin Bet, had not been able to find any trace of such fanatics being missing from their usual haunts.
“I am aware, Ambassador, and I join in sorrow for the murdered seaman. What is it that the Federal Republic wants of Israel?”
“Prime Minister, my country’s cabinet has considered all the issues for several hours. Though it regards the prospect of acceding to terrorist blackmail with utter repugnance, and though if the affair were a completely internal German matter it might be prepared to resist, in the present case it feels it must yield.
“My government’s request is therefore that the State of Israel agree to accept Lev Mishkin and David Lazareff, with the guarantees of nonprosecution and nonextradition that the terrorists demand.”
Premier Golen had in fact been considering the reply he would make to such a request for several hours. It came as no surprise to him. He had prepared his position. His government was a finely balanced coalition, and privately he was aware that many if not most of his own people were so incensed by the continuing persecution of Jews and the Jewish religion inside the USSR that for them Mishkin and Lazareff were hardly to be considered terrorists in the same class as the Baader-Meinhof gang or the PLO. Indeed, some sympathized with them for seeking to escape by hijacking a Soviet airliner, and accepted that the gun in the cockpit had gone off by accident.
“You have to understand two things, Ambassador. One is that although Mishkin and Lazareff may be Jews, the State of Israel had nothing to do with their original offenses, nor with the demand for their freedom now made.”
If the terrorists themselves turn out to be Jewish, how many people are going to believe that? he thought.
“The second thing is that the State of Israel is not directly affected by the plight of the Freya’s crew, nor by the effects of her possible destruction. It is not the State of Israel that is under pressure here, or being blackmailed.”
“That is understood, Prime Minister,” said the German.
“If, therefore, Israel agrees to receive these two men, it must be clearly and publicly understood that she does so at the express and earnest request of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
“That request is being made, sir, by me, now, on behalf of my government.”
Fifteen minutes later the format was arranged. West Germany would publicly announce that it had made the request to Israel on its own behalf. Immediately afterward, Israel would announce that she had reluctantly agreed to the request. Following that, West Germany could announce the release of the prisoners at 0800 hours the following morning, European time. The announcements would come from Bonn and Jerusalem, and would be synchronized at ten-minute intervals, starting one hour hence. It was seven-thirty in Israel, five-thirty in Europe.
Across the continent the last editions of the afternoon newspapers whirled onto the streets, to be snapped up by a public of three hundred million who had followed the drama since midmorning. The latest headlines gave details of the murder of the unidentified seaman and the arrest of a free-lance French photographer and a pilot at Le Touquet.
Radio bulletins carried the news that the West German Ambassador to Israel had visited Premier Golen in his private house during t
he Sabbath, and had left thirty-five minutes later. There was no news from the meeting, and speculation was rife. Television had pictures of anyone who would pose for them, and quite a few who preferred not to. The latter were the ones who knew what was going on. No pictures taken by the Nimrod of the seaman’s body were released by the authorities.
The daily papers, preparing for issue starting at midnight, were holding front pages for the chance of a statement from Jerusalem or Bonn, or another transmission from the Freya. The learned articles on the inside pages about the Freya herself, her cargo, the effects of its spillage, speculation on the identity of the terrorists, and editorials urging the release of the two hijackers, covered many columns of copy.
A mild and balmy dusk was ending a glorious spring day when Sir Julian Flannery completed his report to the Prime Minister in her office at 10 Downing Street. It was comprehensive and yet succinct, a masterpiece of draftsmanship.
“We have to assume, then, Sir Julian,” she said at length, “that they certainly exist, that they have undoubtedly taken complete possession of the Freya, that they could well be in a position to blow her apart and sink her, that they would not stop at doing so, and that the financial, environmental, and human consequences would constitute a catastrophe of appalling dimensions.”
“That, ma’am, might seem to be the most pessimistic interpretation, yet the crisis management committee feels it would be rash to assume a more hopeful tone,” the Secretary to the Cabinet replied. “Only four have been seen: the two lookouts and their replacements. We feel we must assume another on the bridge, one watching the prisoners, and a leader; that makes a minimum of seven. They might be too few to stop an armed boarding party, but we cannot assume so. They might have no dynamite on board, or too little, or have placed it wrongly, but we cannot assume so. Their triggering device might fail, they might have no second device, but we cannot assume so. They might not be prepared to kill any more seamen, but we cannot assume so. Finally, they might not be prepared actually to blow the Freya apart and die with her, but we cannot assume so. Your committee feels it would be wrong to assume less than the possible, which is the worst.”