“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.