The Devil's Alternative

“How is it going, Mr. Barker?” asked Munro.

The long-service technician withdrew himself from the guts of the engine and looked down at the civilian with exasperation.

“May I ask, sir, how long I am supposed to keep up this playacting? The engine’s perfect.”

Munro glanced at his watch.

“Ten-thirty,” he said. “In one hour exactly, I’d like you to telephone the aircrew room and the officers’ mess and report that she’s fit and ready to fly.”

“Eleven-thirty it is, sir,” said Warrant Officer Barker.

In the cells, David Lazareff glanced again at the wall clock. He thought he had been pacing for thirty minutes, but the clock said nine. An hour had gone by, but it had seemed a very short one. Still, in isolation in a cell, time plays strange tricks on the senses. Clocks, after all, are accurate. It never occurred to him or Mishkin that their clocks were moving at double speed to catch up on the missing hundred minutes in their lives, or that they were destined to synchronize with the clocks outside the cells at eleven-thirty precisely.

At eleven, Premier Jan Grayling in The Hague was on the telephone to the Governing Mayor of West Berlin.

“What the devil is going on, Herr Burgomeister?”

“I don’t know,” shouted the exasperated Berlin official. “The British say they are nearly finished with their damn engine. Why the hell they can’t use a British Airways airliner from the civil airport I don’t understand. We would pay for the extra cost of taking one out of service to fly to Israel with two passengers only.”

“Well, I’m telling you that in one hour those madmen on the Freya are going to vent a hundred thousand tons of oil,” said Jan Grayling, “and my government will hold the British responsible.”

“I entirely agree with you,” said the voice from Berlin. “The whole affair is madness.”

At eleven-thirty Warrant Officer Barker closed the cowling of the engine and climbed down. He went to a wall phone and called the officers’ mess. The base commander came on the line.

“She’s ready, sir,” said the technician.

The RAF officer turned to the men grouped around him, including the governor of Moabit Prison and four radio reporters holding telephones linked to their offices.

“The fault has been put right,” he said. “She’ll be taking off in fifteen minutes.”

From the windows of the mess they watched the sleek little executive jet being towed out into the sunshine. The pilot and copilot climbed aboard and started both engines.

The prison governor entered the cells of the prisoners and informed them they were about to take off. His watch said eleven-thirty-five. So did the wall clocks.

Still in silence, the two prisoners were marched to the MP Land Rover and driven with the German prison official across the tarmac to the waiting jet. Followed by the air quartermaster sergeant who would be the only other occupant of the Dominie on its flight to Ben-Gurion, they went up the steps without a backward glance and settled into their seats.

At eleven-forty-five, Wing Commander Peter Jarvis opened both the throttles and the Dominie climbed away from the runway of Gatow airfield. On instructions from the air-traffic controller, it swung cleanly into the southbound air corridor from West Berlin to Munich and disappeared into the blue sky.

Within two minutes, all four radio reporters were speaking to their audiences live from the officers’ mess at Gatow. Their voices went out across the world to inform their listeners that forty-eight hours after the demands were originally made from the Freya, Mishkin and Lazareff were airborne and on their way to Israel and freedom.

In the homes of thirty officers and seamen from the Freya the broadcasts were heard; in thirty houses across Scandinavia, mothers and wives broke down and children asked why Mummy was crying.

In the small armada of tugs and emulsifier-spraying vessels lying in a screen west of the Argyll the news came through, and there were sighs of relief. Neither the scientists nor the seamen had ever believed they could cope with a hundred thousand tons of crude oil spilling into the sea.

In Texas, oil tycoon Clint Blake caught the news from NBC over his Sunday morning breakfast in the sun and shouted “About goddam time, too!”

Harry Wennerstrom heard the BBC broadcast in his penthouse suite high over Rotterdam and grinned with satisfaction.

In every newspaper office from Ireland to the Iron Curtain the Monday morning editions of the dailies were in preparation. Teams of writers were putting together the whole story from the first invasion of the Freya in the small hours of Friday until the present moment. Space was left for the arrival of Mishkin and Lazareff in Israel, and the freeing of the Freya herself. There would be time before the first editions went to press at ten P.M. to include most of the end of the story.

At twenty minutes past twelve, European time, the State of Israel agreed to abide by the demands made from the Freya for the public reception and identification of Mishkin and Lazareff at Ben-Gurion Airport in four hours’ time.

In his sixth-floor room at the Avia Hotel, three miles from Ben-Gurion Airport, Miroslav Kaminsky heard the news on the piped-in radio. He leaned back with a sigh of relief. Having arrived in Israel late Friday afternoon, he had expected to see his fellow partisans arrive on Saturday. Instead, he had listened by radio to the change of heart by the German government in the small hours, the delay through the morning, and the venting of the oil at noon. He had bitten his fingernails down, helpless to assist, unable to rest, until the final decision to release them after all. Now for him, too, the hours were ticking away until touchdown of the Dominie at four-fifteen European time, six-fifteen in Tel Aviv.

On the Freya, Andrew Drake heard the news of the takeoff with a satisfaction that cut through his weariness. The agreement of the State of Israel to his demands thirty-five minutes later was by way of a formality.

“They’re on t