The gunnery officer stiffened to attention.
“I’ll load and lay your gun for you, Captain Manning,” he said, “but I will not fire it. If the fire button has to be pressed, you must press it yourself.”
He snapped a perfect salute and marched away to the fire-control station below decks.
You won’t have to, thought Ma
nning, and I couldn’t charge you with mutiny. If the President himself orders me, I will fire it. Then I will resign my commission.
An hour later the Westland Wessex from the Argyll came overhead and winched a Royal Navy officer to the deck of the Moran. He asked to speak to Captain Manning in private and was shown to the American’s cabin.
“Compliments of Captain Preston, sir,” said the ensign, and handed Manning a letter from Preston. When he had finished reading it, Manning sat back like a man reprieved from the gallows. It told him that the British were sending in a team of armed frogmen at ten that night, and all governments had agreed to undertake no independent action in the meantime.
While Manning was thinking the unthinkable aboard the U.S.S. Moran, the airliner bearing Adam Munro back to the West was clearing the Soviet-Polish border.
From the toyshop on Dzerzhinsky Square, Munro had gone to a public call box and telephoned the head of Chancery at his embassy. He had told the amazed diplomat in coded language that he had discovered what his masters wanted to know, but would not be returning to the embassy. Instead, he was heading straight for the airport to catch the noon plane.
By the time the diplomat had informed the Foreign Office of this, and the FO had told the SIS, the message back to the effect that Munro should cable his news was too late. Munro was boarding.
“What the devil’s he doing?” asked Sir Nigel Irvine of Barry Ferndale in the SIS head office in London when he learned his stormy petrel was flying home.
“No idea,” replied the controller of Soviet Section. “Perhaps the Nightingale’s been blown and he needs to get back urgently before the diplomatic incident blows up. Shall I meet him?”
“When does he land?”
“One-forty-five London time,” said Ferndale. “I think I ought to meet him. It seems he has the answer to President Matthews’s question. Frankly, I’m curious to find out what the devil it can be.”
“So am I,” said Sir Nigel. “Take a car with a scrambler phone and stay in touch with me personally.”
At a quarter to twelve, Drake sent one of his men to bring the Freya’s pumpman back to the cargo-control room on A deck. Leaving Thor Larsen under the guard of another terrorist, Drake descended to cargo control, took the fuses from his pocket, and replaced them. Power was restored to the cargo pumps.
“When you discharge cargo, what do you do?” he asked the crewman. “I’ve still got a submachine gun pointing at your captain, and I’ll order it to be used if you play any tricks.”
“The ship’s pipeline system terminates at a single point, a cluster of pipes that we call the manifold,” said the pumpman. “Hoses from the shore installation are coupled to the manifold. After that, the main gate valves are opened at the manifold, and the ship begins to pump.”
“What’s your rate of discharge?”
“Twenty thousand tons per hour,” said the man. “During discharge, the ship’s balance is maintained by venting several tanks at different points on the ship simultaneously.”
Drake had noted that there was a slight, one-knot tide flowing past the Freya, northeast toward the West Frisian Islands. He pointed to a tank amidships on the Freya’s starboard side.
“Open the master valve on that one,” he said. The man paused for a second, then obeyed.
“Right,” said Drake. “When I give the word, switch on the cargo pumps and vent the entire tank.”
“Into the sea?” asked the pumpman incredulously.
“Into the sea,” said Drake grimly. “Chancellor Busch is about to learn what international pressure really means.”
As the minutes ticked away to midday of Saturday, April 2, Europe held its breath. So far as anyone knew, the terrorists had already executed one seaman for a breach of the airspace above them, and had threatened to do it again, or vent crude oil, on the stroke of noon.
The Nimrod that had replaced Squadron Leader Latham’s aircraft the previous midnight had run short of fuel by eleven A.M., so Latham was back on duty, cameras whirring as the minutes to noon ticked away.
Many miles above him, a Condor spy satellite was on station, bouncing its continuous stream of picture images across the globe to where a haggard American President sat in the Oval Office watching a television screen. On the TV the Freya inched gently into the frame from the bottom rim, like a pointing finger.
In London, men of rank and influence in the Cabinet Office briefing room grouped around a screen on which was presented what the Nimrod was seeing. The Nimrod was on continuous camera roll from five minutes before twelve, her pictures passing to the Data Link on the Argyll beneath her, and from there to Whitehall.
Along the rails of the Montcalm, Breda, Brunner, Argyll, and Moran, sailors of five nations passed binoculars from hand to hand. Their officers stood as high aloft as they could get, with telescopes to eye.