The Devil's Alternative

“Yes, of course,” said the Israeli secretary at the other end.

“Then listen,” said Kaminsky, “I will say this only once. If the supertanker Freya is to be released unharmed, the first item in the six o’clock news on the BBC World Service, European time, must include the phrase ‘no alternative.’ If that phrase is not included in the first news item of the broadcast, the ship will be destroyed. Have you got that?”

There were several seconds of silence as the young secretary to the Jerusalem correspondent scribbled rapidly on a pad.

“Yes, I think so. Who is this?” she asked.

> Outside the bedroom door in the Avia, Avram Hirsch was joined by two other men. One had a short-barreled shotgun. Both were dressed in airport staff uniform. Hirsch was still in the uniform of the newspaper delivery company: green trousers, green blouse, and green peaked cap. He listened at the door until he heard the tinkle of the telephone being replaced. Then he stood back, drew his service revolver, and nodded to the man with the shotgun.

The gunner aimed once, carefully, at the door lock and blew the whole assembly out of the woodwork. Avram Hirsch went past him at a run, moved three paces into the room, dropped to a crouch, gun held forward in both hands, pointed straight at the target, and called on the room’s occupant to freeze.

Hirsch was a Sabra, born in Israel thirty-four years earlier, the son of two immigrants who had survived the death camps of the Third Reich. Around the house in his childhood the language spoken was always Yiddish or Russian, for both his parents were Russian Jews.

He supposed the man in front of him was Russian; he had no reason to think otherwise. So he called to him in Russian. “Stoi. ...” His voice echoed through the small bedroom.

Miroslav Kaminsky was standing by the bed, the telephone directory in his hand. When the door crashed open, he dropped the book, which closed, preventing any searcher from seeing which page it had been open at, or what number he might have called.

When the cry came, he did not see a hotel bedroom outside Tel Aviv; he saw a small farmhouse in the foothills of the Carpathians, heard again the shouts of the men with the green insignia closing in on the hideaway of his group. He looked at Avram Hirsch, took in the flash of green from his peaked cap and uniform, and began to move toward the open window.

He could hear them again, coming at him through the bushes shouting their endless cry: “Stoi. ... Stoi. ... Stoi. ...” There was nothing to do but run, run like a fox with the hounds behind him, out through the back door of the farmhouse and into the undergrowth.

He was running backward, through the open glass door to the tiny balcony, when the balcony rail caught him in the small of the back and flipped him over. When he hit the parking lot fifty feet below, his back, pelvis, and skull were shattered. From over the balcony rail, Avram Hirsch looked down at the broken body and muttered to Detective Constable Bentsur:

“What the hell did he do that for?”

The service aircraft that had brought the two specialists to Gatow from Britain the previous evening returned westward soon after the takeoff of the Dominie from Berlin for Tel Aviv. Adam Munro hitched a lift on it, but used his clearance from the Cabinet Office to require that it drop him off at Amsterdam before going on to England.

He had also ensured that the Wessex helicopter from the Argyll would be at Schiphol to meet him. It was half past four when the Wessex settled back onto the afterdeck of the missile cruiser. The officer who welcomed him aboard glanced with evident disapproval at his appearance, but took him to meet Captain Preston.

All the Navy officer knew was that his visitor was from the Foreign Office and had been in Berlin supervising the departure of the hijackers to Israel.

“Care for a wash and brush-up?” he asked.

“Love one,” said Munro. “Any news of the Dominie?”

“Landed fifteen minutes ago at Ben-Gurion,” said Captain Preston. “I could have my steward press your suit, and I’m sure we could find you a shirt that fits.”

“I’d prefer a nice thick sweater,” said Munro. “It’s turned damn cold out there.”

“Yes, that may prove a bit of a problem,” said Captain Preston. “There’s a belt of cold air moving down from Norway. We could get a spot of sea mist this evening.”

The sea mist, when it descended just after five o’clock, was a rolling bank of fog that drifted out of the north as the cold air followed the heat wave and came in contact with the warm land and sea.

When Adam Munro, washed, shaved, and dressed in borrowed thick white Navy sweater and black serge trousers, joined Captain Preston on the bridge just after five, the fog was thickening.

“Damn and blast!” said Preston. “These terrorists seem to be having everything their own way.”

By half past five the fog had blotted out the Freya from vision, and swirled around the stationary warships, none of which could see each other except on radar. The circling Nimrod above could see them all, and the Freya, on its radar, and was still flying in clear air at fifteen thousand feet. But the sea itself had vanished in a blanket of gray cotton. Just after five the tide turned again and began to move back to the northeast, bearing the drifting oil slick with it, somewhere between the Freya and the Dutch shore.

The BBC correspondent in Jerusalem was a staffer of long experience in the Israeli capital and had many and good contacts. As soon as he learned of the telephone call his secretary had taken, he called a friend in one of the security services.

“That’s the message,” he said, “and I’m going to send it to London right now. But I haven’t a clue who telephoned it.”

There was a grunt at the other end.

“Send the message,” said the security man. “As to the man on the telephone, we know. And thanks.”

It was just after four-thirty when the news flash was broadcast on the Freya that Mishkin and Lazareff had landed at Ben-Gurion.