The Devil's Alternative

“Damn and blast them,” shouted Major Fallon to the Navy commander who stood with him in the tiny wheelhouse of the Cutlass, “how fast can we go?”

“On water like this, over forty knots,” the commander shouted back.

Not enough, thought Adam Munro, both hands locked to a stanchion as the vessel shuddered and bucked like a runaway horse through the fog. The Freya was still five miles away, the terrorists’ speedboat another five beyond that. Even if they overhauled at ten knots, it would take an hour to come level with the inflatable carrying Svoboda to safety in the creeks of Holland, where he could lose himself. But he would be there in forty minutes, maybe less.

Cutlass and Scimitar were driving blind, tearing the fog to shreds, only to watch it form behind them. In any crowded sea, it would be lunacy to use such speed in conditions of zero visibility. But the sea was empty. In the wheelhouse of each launch, the commander listened to a constant stream of information from the Nimrod via the Argyll: his own position and that of the other fast patrol launch: the position in the fog ahead of them of the Freya herself; the position of the Sabre, well away to their left, heading toward the Freya at a slower speed; and the course and speed of the moving dot that represented Svoboda’s escape.

Well east of the Freya, the inflatable in which Andrew Drake and Azamat Krim were making for safety seemed to be in luck. Beneath the fog the sea had become even calmer, and the sheetlike water enabled them to increase speed even more. Most of their craft was out of the water, only the shaft of the howling engine being deep beneath the surface. A few feet away in the fog, passing by in a blur, Drake saw the last remaining traces of the wake made by their companions ten minutes ahead of them. It was odd, he thought, for the traces to remain on the sea’s surface for so long.

On the bridge of the Moran, which was lying south of the Freya, Captain Mike Manning also studied his radar scanner. He could see the Argyll away to the northwest of him, and the Freya a mite east of north.

Between them, the Cutlass and the Scimitar were visible, closing the gap fast. Away to the east he could spot the tiny blip of the racing speedboat, so small it was almost lost in the milky complexion of the screen. But it was there. Manning looked at the gap between the refugee and the hunters charging after it.

“They’ll never make it,” he said, and gave an order to his executive officer. The five-inch forward gun of the Moran began to traverse slowly to the right, seeking a target somewhere through the fog.

A seaman appeared at the elbow of Captain Preston, still absorbed in the pursuit through the fog as shown by his own scanner. His guns, he knew, were useless; the Freya lay almost between him and the target, so any shooting would be too risky. Besides, the bulk of the Freya masked the target from his own radar scanner, which could not, therefore, pass the correct aiming information to the guns.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the seaman.

“What is it?”

“Just come over the news, sir. Those two men who were flown to Israel today, sir. They’re dead. Died in their cells.”

“Dead?” queried Captain Preston incredulously. “Then the whole bloody thing was for nothing. Wonder who the hell could have done that. Better tell that Foreign Office chappie when he gets back. He’ll be interested.”

The sea was still flat calm for Andrew Drake. There was a slick, oily flatness to it that was unnatural in the North Sea. He and Krim were almost halfway to the Dutch coast when their engine coughed for the first time. It coughed again several seconds later, then repeatedly. The speed slowed, the power reduced.

Azamat Krim gunned the engine urgently. It fired, coughed again, and resumed running, but with a throaty sound.

“It’s overheating,” he shouted to Drake.

“It can’t be,” yelled Drake. “It should run at full power for at least an hour.”

Krim leaned out of the speedboat and dipped his hand in the water. He examined the palm and showed it to Drake. Streaks of sticky brown crude oil ran down to his wrist.

“It’s blocking the cooling ducts,” said Krim.

“They seem to be slowing down,” the operator in the Nimrod informed the Argyll, which passed the information to the Cutlass.

“Come on,” shouted Major Fallon, “we can still get the bastards!”

The distance began to close rapidly. The inflatable was down to ten knots. What Fallon did not know, nor the young commander who stood at the wheel of the racing Cutlass, was that they were speeding toward the edge of a great lake of oil lying on the surface of the ocean. Or that their prey was chugging right through the center of it.

Ten seconds later Azamat Krim’s engine cut out. The silence was eerie. Far away they could hear the boom of the engines of Cutlass and Scimitar coming toward them through the fog.

Krim scooped a double handful from the surface of the sea and held it out to Drake.

“It’s our oil, Andriy. It’s the oil we vented. We’re right in the middle of it.”

“They’ve stopped,” said the commander on the Cutlass to Fallon beside him. “The Argyll says they’ve stopped. God knows why.”

“We’ll get ’em!” shouted Fallon gleefully, and unslung his Ingram submachine gun.

On the Moran, gunnery officer Chuck Olsen reported to Manning, “We have range and direction.”

“Open fire,” said Manning calmly.

Seven miles to the south of the Cutlass, the forward gun of the Moran began to crash out its shells in steady, rhythmic sequence. The commander of the Cutlass could not hear the shells, but the Argyll could, and told him to slow down. He was heading straight into the area where the tiny speck on the radar screens had come to rest, and the Moran had opened fire on the same area. The commander eased back on his twin throttles; the bucking launch slowed, then settled, chugging gently forward.