The operators at both ends, senior men of a lifetime’s experience, could be trusted with the whereabouts of Christ’s bones, if necessary—they had to be, they handled, as routine, messages that could bring down governments. From London the telex would send its scrambled, uninterceptible message down to a forest of aerials outside Cheltenham, better known for its horse races and woman’s college. From there the words would be converted automatically into an unbreakable one-off code and beamed out over a sleeping Europe to an aerial on the embassy roof. Four seconds after they were typed in London, they would emerge, in clear, on the telex in the basement of the old sugar magnate’s house in Moscow.
There, the cipher clerk turned to Munro, standing by his side.
“It’s the Master himself,” he said, reading the code tag on the incoming message. “There must be a flap on.”
Sir Nigel had to tell Munro the burden of Kirov’s message to President Matthews of only three hours earlier. Without that knowledge, Munro could not ask the Nightingale for the answer to Matthews’s question: Why?
The telex rattled for several minutes. Munro read the message that spewed out, with horror.
“I can’t do that,” he told the impassive clerk over whose shoulder he was reading. When the message from London was ended, he told the clerk:
“Reply as follows: ‘Not repeat not possible obtain this sort of answer in tune scale.’ Send it.”
The interchange between Sir Nigel Irvine and Adam Munro went on for fifteen minutes. There is a method of contacting N at short notice, suggested London. Yes, but only in case of dire emergency, replied Munro. This qualifies one hundred times as emergency, chattered the machine from London. But N could not begin to inquire in less than several days, pointed out Munro. Next regular Politburo meeting not due until Thursday following. What about records of last Thursday’s meeting? asked London. Freya was not hijacked last Thursday, retorted Munro. Finally Sir Nigel did what he hoped he would not have to do.
“Regret,” tapped the machine, “prime ministerial order not refusable. Unless attempt made avert this disaster, operation to bring out N to West cannot proceed.”
Munro looked down at the stream of paper coming out of the telex with disbelief. For the first time he was caught in the net of his own attempts to keep his love for the agent he ran from his superiors in London. Sir Nigel Irvine thought the Nightingale was an embittered Russian turncoat called Anatoly Krivoi, right-hand man to the warmonger Vishnayev.
“Make to London,” he told the clerk dully, “the following: ‘Will try this night stop decline to accept responsibility if N refuses or is unmasked during attempt stop.’ ”
The reply from the Master was brief: “Agree. Proceed.” It was half past one in Moscow, and very cold.
Half past six in Washington, and the dusk was settling over the sweep of lawns beyond the bulletproof windows behind the President’s chair, causing the lamps to be switched on. The group in the Oval Office was wailing: waiting for Chancellor Busch, waiting for an unknown agent in Moscow, waiting for a masked terrorist of unknown origins sitting on a million-ton bomb off Europe with a detonator in his hand. Waiting for the chance of a third alternative.
The phone rang and it was for Stanislaw Poklewski. He listened, held a hand over the mouthpiece, and told the President it was from the Navy Department in answer to his query of an hour earlier.
There was one U.S. Navy vessel in the area of the Freya. She had been paying a courtesy visit to the Danish coastal city of Esbjerg, and was on her way back to join her squadron of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, or STANFORLANT, then cruising on patrol west of Norway. She was well off the Danish coast, steaming north by west to rejoin her NATO allies.
“Divert to Freya’s area,” said the President.
Poklewski passed the Commander in Chiefs order back to the Navy Department, which soon began to make signals via STANFORLANT headquarters to the American warship.
Just after one in the morning, the U.S.S. Moran, halfway between Denmark and the Orkney Islands, put her helm about, opened her engines to full power, and then began racing through the moonlight southward for the English Channel. She was a guided-missile ship of almost eight thousand tons, which, although heavier than the British light cruiser Argyll, was classified as a destroyer, or DD. Moving at full power in a calm sea, she was making close to thirty knots to bring her to her station five miles from the Freya at eight A.M.
There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mojarsky Hotel, just off the roundabout at the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Those that were there were dark, uninhabited, save two.
Munro watched the lights of the other car flicker and dim, then climbed from his own vehicle and walked across to it. When he climbed into the passenger seat beside her, Valentina was alarmed and trembling.
“What is it, Adam? Why did you call me at the apartment? The call must have been recorded.”
He put his arm around her, feeling the trembling through her coat.
“It was from a call box,” he said, “and only concerned Gregor’s inability to attend your dinner party. No one will suspect anything.”
“At two in the morning?” she remonstrated. “No one makes calls like that at two in the morning. I was seen to leave the apartment compound by the night watchman. He will report it.”
“Darling, I’m sorry. Listen.”
He told her of the visit by Ambassador Kirov to President Matthews the previous evening; of the news being passed to London; of the demand to him that he try to find out why the Kremlin was taking such an attitude over Mishkin and Lazareff.
“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because those animals murdered Captain Rudenko, a man with a wife and children.”
“Valentina, we have listened to the Politburo these past nine months. The Treaty of Dublin is vital to your people. Why would Rudin put it in jeopardy over these two men?”
“He has not done so,” answered Valentina. “It is possible for the West to control the oil slick if the ship blows up. The costs can be met. The West is rich.”
“Darling, there are twenty-rune seamen aboard that ship. They, too, have wives and children. Twenty-nine men’s lives against the imprisonment of two. There has to be another and more serious reason.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It has not been mentioned in Politburo meetings. You know that also.”
Munro stared miserably through the windshield. He had hoped against hope she might have an answer for Washington, something she had heard inside the Central Committee building. Finally he decided he had to tell her.
When he had finished, she stared through the darkness with round eyes. He caught a hint of tears in the dying light of the moon.
“They promised,” she whispered. “They promised they would bring me and Sasha out, in a fortnight, from Rumania.”
“They’ve gone back on their word,” he confessed. “They want this last favor.”
She placed her forehead on her gloved hands, supported by the steering wheel.
“They will catch me,” she mumbled. “I am so frightened.”
“They won’t catch you.” He tried to reassure her. “The KGB acts much more slowly than people think, and the higher their suspect is placed, the more slowly they have to act. If you can get this piece of information for President Matthews, I think I can persuade them to get you out in a few days, you and Sasha, instead of two weeks. Please try, my love. It’s our only chance left of ever being together.”
Valentina stared through the glass.
“There was a Politburo meeting this evening,” she said finally. “I was not there. It was a special meeting, out of sequence. Normally on Friday evenings they are all going to the country. Transcription begins tomorrow—that is, today—at ten in the morning. The staff have to give up their weekend to get it ready for Monday. Perhaps they mentioned the matter.”
“Could you get in to see the notes, listen to the tapes?” he ask
ed.”
“In the middle of the night? There would be questions asked.”
“Make an excuse, darling. Any excuse. You want to start and finish your work early, so as to get away.”
“I will try,” she said eventually. “I will try—for you, Adam, not for those men in London.”
“I know those men in London,” said Adam Munro. “They will bring you and Sasha out if you help them now. This will be the last risk, truly the last.”
She seemed not to have heard him, and to have overcome, for a while, her fear of the KGB, exposure as a spy, the awful consequences of capture unless she could escape in time. When she spoke, her voice was quite level.
“You know Detsky Mir? The soft-toys counter. At ten o’clock this morning.”
He stood on the black tarmac and watched her taillights vanish. It was done. They had asked him to do it, demanded that he do it, and he had done it. He had diplomatic protection to keep him out of Lubyanka. The worst that could happen would be his Ambassador’s summons to the Foreign Ministry on Monday morning to receive Dmitri Rykov’s icy protest and demand for his removal. But Valentina was walking right into the secret archives, without even the disguise of normal, accustomed, justified behavior to protect her. He looked at his watch. Seven hours, seven hours to go, seven hours of knotted stomach muscles and ragged nerve ends. He walked back to his car.
Ludwig Jahn stood in the open gateway of Tegel Jail and watched the taillights of the armored van bearing Mishkin and Lazareff disappear down the street.
For him, unlike for Munro, there would be no more waiting, no tension stretching through the dawn and into the morning. For him the waiting was over.
He walked carefully to his office on the first floor and closed the door. For a few moments he stood by the open window, then drew back one hand and hurled the first of the cyanide pistols far into the night. He was fat, overweight, unfit. A heart attack would be accepted as possible, provided no evidence was found.
Leaning far out of the window, he thought of his nieces over the Wall in the East, their laughing faces when Uncle Ludo had brought the presents four months ago at Christmas. He closed his eyes, held the other tube beneath his nostrils, and pressed the trigger button.
The pain slammed across his chest like a giant hammer. The loosened fingers dropped the tube, which fell with a tinkle to the street below. Jahn slumped, hit the windowsill, and caved backward into his office, already dead. When they found him, they would assume he had opened the window for air when the first pain came. Kukushkin would not have his triumph. The chimes of midnight were drowned by the roar of a truck that crushed the tube in the gutter to fragments.
The hijacking of the Freya had claimed its first victim.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Midnight to 0800
THE RESUMED West German cabinet meeting assembled in the Chancellery at one A.M., and the mood when the ministers heard from Dietrich Busch the plea from Washington varied between exasperation and truculence.
“Well, why the hell won’t he give a reason?” asked the Defense Minister. “Doesn’t he trust us?”
“He claims he has a reason of paramount importance, but cannot divulge it even over the hot line,” replied Chancellor Busch. “That gives us the opportunity of either believing him or calling him a liar. At this stage I cannot do the latter.”
“Has he any idea what the terrorists will do when they learn Mishkin and Lazareff are not to be released at dawn?” queried another.
“Yes, I think he has. At least the texts of all the exchanges between the Freya and Maas Control are in his hands. As we all know, they have threatened either to kill another seaman, or to vent twenty thousand tons of crude, or both.”
“Well, then, let him carry the responsibility,” urged the Interior Minister. “Why should we take the blame if that happens?”
“I haven’t the slightest intention that we should,” replied Busch, “but that doesn’t answer the question. Do we grant President Matthews’s request or not?”
There was silence for a while. The Foreign Minister broke it.
“How long is he asking for?”
“As long as possible,” said the Chancellor. “He seems to have some plan afoot to break the deadlock, to find a third alternative. But what the plan is, or what the alternative could be, he alone knows. He and a few people he evidently trusts with the secret,” he added with some bitterness. “But that doesn’t include us, for the moment.”
“Well, personally I think it is stretching the friendship between us a bit far,” said the Foreign Minister, “but I think we ought to grant him an extension, while making plain, at least unofficially, that it is at his request, not ours.”
“Perhaps he has an idea to storm the Freya,” suggested Defense.
“Our own people say that would be extremely risky,” replied the Interior Minister. “It would require an underwater approach for at least the last two miles, a sheer climb up smooth steel from the sea to the deck, a penetration of the superstructure without being observed from atop the funnel, and the selection of the right cabin with the leader of the terrorists in it. If, as we suspect, the man holds a remote-control detonating mechanism in his hand, he’d have to be shot and killed before he could press the button.”
“In any case, it is too late to do it before dawn,” said the Defense Minister. “It would have to be in darkness, and that means ten P.M. at the earliest, twenty-one hours from now.”
At a quarter to three the German cabinet finally agreed to grant President Matthews his request: an indefinite delay on the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, while reserving the right to keep the consequences under constant review and to reverse that decision if it became regarded in Western Europe as impossible to continue to hold the pair.
At the same time the government spokesman was quietly asked to leak the news to two of his most reliable media contacts that only massive pressure from Washington had caused the about-face in Bonn.
It was eleven P.M. in Washington, four A.M. in Europe, when the news from Bonn reached President Matthews. He sent back his heartfelt thanks to Chancellor Busch and asked David Lawrence:
“Any reply from Jerusalem yet?”
“None,” said Lawrence. “We know only that our Ambassador there has been granted a personal interview with Benyamin Golen.”
When the Israeli Premier was disturbed for the second time during the Sabbath night, his tetchy capacity for patience was wearing distinctly thin. He received the U.S. Ambassador in his dressing gown, and the reception was frosty. It was three A.M. in Europe, but five in Jerusalem, and the first thin light of Saturday morning was on the hills of Judea.
He listened without reaction to the Ambassador’s personal plea from President Matthews. His private fear was for the identity of the terrorists aboard the Freya. No terrorist action aimed at delivering Jews from a prison cell had been mounted since the days of his own youth, fighting right on the soil where he stood. Then it had been to free condemned Jewish partisans from a British jail at Acre, and he had been a part of that fight. Now it was Israel that roundly condemned terrorism, the taking of hostages, the blackmail of regimes. And yet ...
And yet, hundreds of thousands of his own people would secretly sympathize with two youths who had sought to escape the terror of the KGB in the only way left open to them. The same voters would not openly hail the youths as heroes, but they would not condemn them as murderers, either. As to the masked men on the Freya, there was a chance that they, too, were Jewish—possibly (heaven forbid) Israelis. He had hoped the previous evening that the affair would be over by sundown of the Sabbath, the prisoners from Berlin inside Israel, the terrorists on the Freya captured or dead. There would be a fuss, but it would die down.
Now he was learning that there would be no release. The news hardly inclined him to the American request, which was in any case impossible. When he had heard the Ambassador out, he shook his head.
“Please convey to my good friend Willi
am Matthews my heartfelt wish that this appalling affair can be concluded without further loss of life,” he replied. “But on the matter of Mishkin and Lazareff my position is this: if on behalf of the government and the people of Israel, and at the urgent request of West Germany, I give a solemn public pledge not to imprison them here or return them to Berlin, then I shall have to abide by that pledge. I’m sorry, but I cannot do as you ask and return them to jail in Germany as soon as the Freya has been released.”
He did not need to explain what the American Ambassador already knew: that apart from any question of national honor, even the explanation that promises extracted under duress were not binding would not work in this case. The outrage from the National Religious Party, the Gush Emunim extremists, the Jewish Defense League, and the hundred thousand Israeli voters who had come from the USSR in the past decade—all these alone would prevent any Israeli premier from reneging on an international pledge to set Mishkin and Lazareff free.
“Well, it was worth a try,” said President Matthews when the cable reached Washington an hour later.
“It now ranks as one possible ‘third alternative’ that no longer exists,” remarked David Lawrence, “even if Maxim Rudin had accepted it, which I doubt.”
It was one hour to midnight; lights were burning in five government departments scattered across the capital, as they burned in the Oval Office and a score of other rooms throughout the White House where men and women sat at telephones and teleprinters awaiting the news from Europe. The four men in the Oval Office settled to await the reaction from the Freya.