“It’s over, Captain Larsen. We’re leaving, you’ll be glad to hear.”
The captain’s personal locker contained one set of handcuffs, with keys, in case of the necessity physically to restrain someone on board. Cases of madness have been known on ships. Drake slipped one of the cuffs around Larsen’s right wrist and snapped it shut. The other went around the table leg. The table was bolted to the floor. Drake paused in the doorway and laid the keys to the handcuffs on top of a shelf.
“Good-bye, Captain Larsen. You may not believe this, but I’m sorry about the oil slick. It would never have happened if the fools out there had not tried to trick me. I’m sorry about your hand, but that, too, need not have happened. We’ll not see each other again, so good-bye.”
He closed and locked the cabin door behind him and ran down the three flights of stairs to A deck and outside to where his men were grouped on the afterdeck. He took his transistor radio with him.
“All ready?” he asked Azamat Krim.
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” said the Crimean Tatar.
“Everything okay?” he asked the Ukrainian-American who was an expert on small boats.
The man nodded.
“All systems go,” he replied.
Drake looked at his watch. It was twenty past six.
“Right. Six-forty-five, Azamat hits the ship’s siren, and the launch and the first group leave simultaneously. Azamat and I leave ten minutes later. You’ve all got papers and clothes. After you hit the Dutch coast, everyone scatters. It’s every man for himself.”
He looked over the side. By the fishing launch, two inflatable Zodiac speedboats bobbed in the fog-shrouded water. Each had been dragged out from the fishing launch and inflated in the previous hour. One was the fourteen-foot model, big enough for five men. The smaller, ten-foot model would take two comfortably. With the forty-horsepower out-boards behind them, they would make thirty knots over a calm sea.
“They won’t be long now,” said Major Simon Fallon, standing at the forward rail of the Cutlass.
The three fast patrol boats, long since invisible from the Freya, had been pulled clear of the western side of the Argyll and now lay tethered beneath her stern, noses pointed to where the Freya lay, five miles away through the fog.
The Marines of the SBS were scattered, four to each boat, all armed with submachine carbines, grenades, and knives.
One boat, the Sabre, also carried on board four Royal Navy explosives experts, and this boat would make straight for the Freya to board and liberate her as soon as the circling Nimrod had spotted the terrorist launch leaving the side of the supertanker and achieving a distance of three miles from her. The Cutlass and Scimitar would pursue the terrorists and hunt them down before they could lose themselves in the maze of creeks and islands that make up the Dutch coast south of the Maas.
Major Fallon would head the pursuit group in the Cutlass. Standing beside him, to his considerable disgust, was the man from the Foreign Office, Mr. Munro.
“Just stay well out of the way when we close with them,” Fallon said. “We know they have submachine carbines and handguns, maybe more. Personally, I don’t see why you insist on coming at all.”
“Let’s just say I have a personal interest in these bastards,” said Munro, “especially Mr. Svoboda.”
“So have I,” growled Fallon. “And Svoboda’s mine.”
Aboard the Moran, Mike Manning had heard the news of the safe arrival of Mishkin and Lazareff in Israel with as much relief as Drake on the Freya. For him, as for Thor Larsen, it was the end of a nightmare. There would be no shelling of the Freya now. His only regret was that the fast patrol boats of the Royal Navy would have the pleasure of hunting down the terrorists when they made their break. For Manning the agony he had been through for a day and a half parlayed itself into anger.
“If I could get my hands on Svoboda,” he told his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Olsen, “I’d happily wring the bastard’s neck.”
As on the Argyll, the Brunner, the Breda, and the Montcalm, the Moran’s radar scanners swept the ocean for signs of the launch moving away from the Freya’s side. Six-fifteen came and went, and there was no sign.
In its turret the forward gun of the Moran, still loaded, moved away from the Freya and pointed at the empty sea three miles to the northeast.
At ten past eight Tel Aviv time, Lev Mishkin was standing in his cell beneath the streets of Tel Aviv, when he felt a pain in his chest. Something like a rock seemed to be growing fast în-side him. He opened his mouth to scream, but the air was cut off. He pitched forward, face down, and died on the floor of the cell.
There was an Israeli policeman on permanent guard outside the door of the cell, and he had orders to peer inside at least every two or three minutes. Less than sixty seconds after Mishkin died, his eye was pressed to the judas hole. What he saw caused him to let out a yell of alarm, and he frantically rattled the key in the lock to open the door. Farther up the corridor, a colleague in front of Lazareff’s door heard the yell and ran to his assistance. Together they burst into Mishkin’s cell and bent over the prostrate figure.
“He’s dead,” breathed one of the men. The other rushed into the corridor and hit the alarm button. Then they ran to Lazareff’s cell and hurried inside.
The second prisoner was doubled up on the bed, arms wrapped around himself as the paroxysms struck him.
“What’s the matter?” shouted one of the guards, but he spoke in Hebrew, which Lazareff did not understand. The dying man forced out four words in Russian. Both guards heard him clearly and later repeated the phrase to senior officers, who were able to translate it.
“Head ... of ... KGB ... dead.”
That was all he said. His mouth stopped moving; he lay on his side on the cot, sightless eyes staring at the blue uniforms in front of him.
The ringing bell brought the chief superintendent, a dozen other officers of the station staff, and the doctor, who had been drinking coffee in the police chiefs office.
The doctor examined each rapidly, searching mouths, throats, and eyes, feeling pulses and listening to chests. When he had done, he stalked from the second cell. The superintendent followed him into the corridor; he was a badly worried man.
“What the hell’s happened?” he asked the doctor.
“I can do a full autopsy later,” said the doctor, “or maybe it will be taken out of my hands. But as to what has happened, they’ve been poisoned, that’s what happened.”
“But they haven’t eaten anything,” protested the policeman. “They haven’t drunk anything. They were just going to have supper. Perhaps at the airport ... or on the plane ...?”
“No,” said the doctor, “a slow-acting poison would not work with such speed, and simultaneously. Body systems vary too much. Each either administered to himself, or was administered, a massive dose of instantaneously fatal poison, which I suspect to be potassium cyanide, within the five to ten seconds before they died.”
“That’s not possible,” shouted the police chief. “My men were outside the cells all the time. Both prisoners were thoroughly examined before they entered the cells. Mouths, anuses—the lot. There were no hidden poison capsules. Besides, why would they commit suicide? They’d soon have had their freedom.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor, “but they both died within seconds of that poison’s hitting them.”
“I’m phoning the Prime Minister’s office at once,” said the chief superintendent grimly, and strode off to his office.
The Prime Minister’s personal security adviser, like almost everyone else in Israel, was an ex-soldier. But the man whom those within a five-mile radius of the Knesset called simply “Barak” had never been an ordinary soldier. He had started as a paratrooper under the paracommander Rafael Eytan, the legendary Raful. Later he had transferred, to serve as a major in General Arik Sharon’s elite 101 Unit until he stopped a bullet in the kneecap during a dawn raid on a Palestinian apartment block
in Beirut.
Since then he had specialized in the more technical side of security operations, using his knowledge of what he would have done to kill the Israeli Premier, and then reversing it to protect his master. It was he who took the call from Tel Aviv and entered the office where Benyamin Golen was working late, to break the news to him.
“Inside the cell itself?” echoed the stunned Premier. “Then they must have taken the poison themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” said Barak. “They had every reason to want to live.”
“Then they were killed by others?”
“It looks like it, Prime Minister.”
“But who would want them dead?”
“The KGB, of course. One of them muttered something about the KGB, in Russian. It seems he was saying the head of the KGB wanted them dead.”
“But they haven’t been in the hands of the KGB. Twelve hours ago they were in Moabit Prison. Then for eight hours in the hands of the British. Then two hours with us. In our hands they ingested nothing—no food, no drink, nothing. So how did they take in an instant-acting poison?”
Barak scratched his chin, a dawning gleam in his eye.
“There is a way, Prime Minister. A delayed-action capsule.”
He took a sheet of paper and drew a diagram.
“It is possible to design and make a capsule like this. It has two halves; one is threaded so that it screws into the other half just before it is swallowed.”
The Prime Minister looked at the diagram with growing anger.
“Go on,” he commanded.
“One half of the capsule is of a ceramic substance, immune both to the acidic effects of the gastric juices of the human stomach and to the effects of the much stronger acid inside it. And strong enough not to be broken by the muscles of the throat when it is swallowed.
“The other half is of a plastic compound, tough enough to withstand the digestive juices, but not enough to resist the acid. In the second portion lies the cyanide. Between the two is a copper membrane. The two halves are screwed together; the acid begins to burn away at the copper wafer. The capsule is swallowed. Several hours later, depending on the thickness of the copper, the acid burns through. It is the same principle as certain types of acid-operated detonators.
“When the acid penetrates the copper membrane, it quickly cuts through the plastic of the second chamber, and the cyanide floods out into the body system. I believe it can be extended up to ten hours, by which time the indigestible capsule has reached the lower bowel. Once the poison is out, the blood absorbs it quickly and carries it to the heart.”
Barak had seen his Premier annoyed before, even angry. But he had never seen him white and trembling with rage.
“They send me two men with poison pellets deep inside them,” he whispered, “two walking time bombs, triggered to die when they are in our hands? Israel will not be blamed for this outrage. Publish the news of the deaths immediately. Do you understand? At once. And say a pathology examination is under way at this very moment. That is an order.”
“If the terrorists have not yet left the Freya,” suggested Barak, “that news could reverse their plans to leave.”
“The men responsible for poisoning Mishkin and Lazareff should have thought of that,” snapped Premier Golen. “But any delay in the announcement and Israel will be blamed for murdering them. And that I will not tolerate.”
The fog rolled on. It thickened; it deepened. It covered the sea from the coast of East Anglia across to Walcheren. It embalmed the flotilla of tugs bearing the emulsifier that were sheltering west of the warships, and the Navy vessels themselves. It whirled around the Cutlass, Sabre, and Scimitar as they lay under the stern of the Argyll, engines throbbing softly, straining to be up and away to track down their prey. It shrouded the biggest tanker in the world at her mooring between the warships and the Dutch shore.
At six-forty-five all the terrorists but two climbed down into the larger of the inflatable speedboats. One of them, the Ukrainian-American, jumped into the old fishing launch that had brought them to the middle of the North Sea, and glanced upward.
From the rail above him, Andrew Drake nodded. The man pushed the starter button, and the sturdy engine coughed into life. The prow of the launch was pointed due west, her wheel lashed with cord to hold her steady on course. The terrorist gradually increased the power of the engine, holding her in neutral gear.
Across the water, keen ears, human and electronic, had caught the sound of the motor; urgent commands and questions flashed among the warships, and from the Argyll to the circling Nimrod overhead. The spotter plane looked to its radar but detected no movement on the sea below.
Drake spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, and far up on the bridge, Azamat Krim hit the Freya’s siren button.
The air filled with a booming roar of sound as the siren blew away the silence of the surrounding fog and the lapping water.
On his bridge on the Argyll, Captain Preston snorted with impatience.
“They’re trying to drown the sound of the launch engine,” he observed. “No matter; we’ll have it on radar as soon as it leaves the Freya’s side.”
Seconds later the terrorist in the launch slammed the gear into forward, and the fishing boat, its engine revving high, pulled violently away from the Freya’s stern. The terrorist leaped for the swinging rope above him, lifted his feet, and let the empty boat churn out from under him. In two seconds it was lost in the fog, plowing its way strongly toward the warships to the west.
The terrorist swung on the end of his rope, then lowered himself into the speedboat where his four companions waited. One of them jerked at the engine’s lanyard: the outboard coughed and roared. The five men in it gripped the handholds, and the helmsman pushed on the power. The inflatable dug its motor into the water, cleared the stern of the Freya, lifted its blunt nose high, and tore away across the calm water toward Holland.
The radar operator in the Nimrod high above spotted the steel hull of the fishing launch instantly; the rubber-compound speedboat gave no reflector signal.
“The launch is moving,” he told the Argyll below him. “Hell, they’re coming straight at you.”
Captain Preston glanced at the radar display on his own bridge.
“Got ’em,” he said, and watched the blip separating itself from the great white blob that represented the Freya herself.
“He’s right, she’s boring straight at us. What the hell are they trying to do?”
On full power and empty, the fishing launch was making fifteen knots. In twenty minutes it would be among the Navy ships, then through them and into the flotilla of tugs behind them.
“They must think they can get through the screen of warships unharmed, and then lose themselves among the tugs in the fog,” suggested the first officer, beside Captain Preston. “Shall we send the Cutlass to intercept?”
“I’m not risking good men, however much Major Fallon may want his personal fight,” said Preston. “Those bastards have already shot one seaman on the Freya, and orders from the Admiralty are quite specific. Use the guns.”
The procedure that was put into effect on the Argyll was smooth and practiced. The four other NATO warships were politely asked not to open fire, but to leave the job to the Argyll. Her fore and aft five-inch guns swung smoothly onto target and opened fire.
Even at two miles, the target was small. Somehow it survived the first salvo, though the sea around it erupted in spouts of rising water when the shells dropped. There was no spectacle for the watchers on the Argyll, nor for those crouched on the three patrol boats beside her. Whatever was happening out there in the fog was invisible; only the radar could see every drop of every shell, and the target boat rearing and plunging in the maddened water. But the radar could not tell its masters that no figure stood at the helm, no men crouched terrified in her stern.
Andrew Drake and Azamat Krim sat quietly in their two-man speedboat close by the Freya and waited. Drake held onto the ro
pe that hung from her rail high above. Through the fog they both heard the first muffled boom of the Argyll’s guns. Drake nodded at Krim, who started the outboard engine. Drake released the rope, and the inflatable sped away, light as a feather, skimming the sea as the speed built up, its engine noise drowned by the roar of the Freya’s siren.
Krim looked at his left wrist, where a waterproof compass was strapped, and altered course a few points to south. He had calculated forty-five minutes at top speed from the Freya to the maze of islands that make up North and South Beveland.
At five minutes to seven, the fishing launch stopped the Argyll’s sixth shell, a direct hit. The explosive tore the launch apart, lifting it half out of the water and rolling both stern and aft sections over. The fuel tank blew up, and the steel-hulled boat sank like a stone.
“Direct hit,” reported the gunnery officer from deep inside the Argyll where he and his gunners had watched the uneven duel on radar. “She’s gone.”
The blip faded from the screen; the illuminated sweep arm went around and around but showed only the Freya at five miles. On the bridge, four officers watched the same display, and there were a few moments of silence. It was the first time for any of them that their ship had actually killed anybody.
“Let the Sabre go,” said Captain Preston quietly. “They can board and liberate the Freya now.”
The radar operator in the darkened hull of the Nimrod peered closely at his screen. He could see all the warships, all the tugs, and the Freya to the east of them. But somewhere beyond the Freya, shielded by the tanker’s bulk from the Navy vessels, a tiny speck seemed to be moving away to the southeast; it was so small it could almost have been missed; it was no bigger than the blip that would have been made by a medium-size tin can; in fact it was the metallic cover to the outboard engine of a speeding inflatable. Tin cans do not move across the face of the ocean at thirty knots.
“Nimrod to Argyll, Nimrod to Argyll ...”
The officers on the bridge of the guided-missile cruiser listened to the news from the circling aircraft with shock. One of them ran to the wing of the bridge and shouted the information down to the sailors from Portland who waited on their patrol launches.