The Devil's Alternative

The girl had a lot of courage. She lunged backward with her heel, caught the gunman in the shin, broke his grip, and made to run toward the police agent. The hijacker sprang after her, passing three rows of passengers. It was a mistake. From an aisle seat, one of them rose, turned, and slammed a fist into the nape of the hijacker’s neck. The man fell, face downward; before he could move, his assailant had snatched the man’s gun and was pointing it at him. The hijacker turned, sat up, looked at the gun, put his face in his hands, and began to moan softly.

From the rear the KGB agent stepped past the stewardess, gun still at the ready, and approached the rescuer.

“Who are you?” he asked. For answer, the rescuer reached into an inside pocket, produced a card, and flicked it open.

The agent looked at the KGB card.

“You’re not from Lvov,” he said.

“Ternopol,” said the other. “I was going home on leave in Minsk, so I had no sidearm. But I have a good right fist.” He grinned.

The agent from Lvov nodded.

“Thanks, Comrade. Keep him covered.” He stepped to the intercom and talked rapidly into it. He was relating what had happened and asking for a police escort at Minsk.

“Is it safe to have a look?” asked a metallic voice from behind the door.

“Sure,” said the KGB agent. “He’s safe enough now.”

There was a clicking behind the door, and it opened to show the head of the engineer, somewhat frightened and intensely curious.

The agent from Ternopol acted very strangely. He turned from the man on the floor, crashed the revolver into the base of his colleague’s skull, shoved him aside, and thrust his foot in the space between the door and jamb before it could close. In a second he was through it, pushing the engineer backward onto the flight deck. The man on the floor behind him rose, grabbed the flight guard’s own automatic, a standard KGB Tokarev nine-millimeter, followed through the steel door, and slammed it behind him. It locked automatically.

Two minutes later, under the guns of David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, the Tupolev turned due west for Warsaw and Berlin, the latter being the ultimate limit of their fuel supply. At the controls Captain Mikhail Rudenko sat white-faced with rage; beside him his copilot, Sergei Vatutin, slowly answered the frantic requests from the Minsk control tower regarding the change of course.

By the time the airliner had crossed the border into Polish airspace, Minsk tower and four other airliners on the same wavelength knew the Tupolev was in the hands of hijackers. When it bored clean through the center of Warsaw’s air-traffic-control zone, Moscow already knew. A hundred miles west of Warsaw, a flight of six Polish-based Soviet MIG-23 fighters swept in from starboard and formatted on the Tupolev. The flight leader was jabbering rapidly into his mask.

At his desk in the Defense Ministry on Frunze Street, Moscow, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky took an urgent call on the line linking him to Soviet Air Force headquarters.

“Where?” he barked.

“Passing over Poznán,” was the answer. “Three hundred kilometers to Berlin. Fifty minutes’ flying time.”

The marshal considered carefully. This could be the scandal that Vishnayev had demanded. There was no doubt what should be done. The Tupolev should be shot down, with its entire passenger and crew complement. Later the version given out would be that the hijackers had fired within the fuselage, hitting a main fuel tank. It had happened twice in the past decade.

He gave his orders. A hundred meters off the airliner’s wing tip, the commander of the MIG flight listened five minutes later.

“If you say so, Comrade Colonel,” he told his base commander. Twenty minutes later, the airliner passed across the Oder-Niesse Line and began its descent into Berlin. As it did so, the MIGs peeled gracefully away and slipped down the sk

y toward their home base.

“I have to tell Berlin we’re coming in,” Captain Rudenko appealed to Mishkin. “If there’s a plane on the runway, we’ll end up as a ball of fire.”

Mishkin stared ahead at the banks of steel-gray winter clouds. He had never been in an airplane before, but what the captain said made sense.

“Very well,” he said, “break silence and tell Tempelhof you are coming in. No requests, just a flat statement.”

Captain Rudenko was playing his last card. He leaned forward, adjusted the channel selection dial, and began to speak.

“Tempelhof, West Berlin. Tempelhof, West Berlin. This is Aeroflot flight three-five-one. ...”

He was speaking in English, the international language of air traffic control. Mishkin and Lazareff knew almost none of it, apart from what they had picked up on broadcasts in Ukrainian from the West. Mishkin jabbed his gun into Rudenko’s neck.

“No tricks,” he said in Ukrainian.

In the control tower at East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, the two controllers looked at each other in amazement. They were being called on their own frequency but being addressed as Tempelhof. No Aeroflot plane would dream of landing in West Berlin—apart from which, Tempelhof had not been West Berlin’s civil airport for ten years. Tempelhof had reverted to a U.S. Air Force base when Tegel took over as the civil airport. One of the East Germans, faster than the other, snatched the microphone.

“Tempelhof to Aeroflot three-five-one, you are cleared to land. Straight run-in,” he said. In the airliner Captain Rudenko swallowed hard and lowered flaps and undercarriage. The Tupolev let down rapidly to the main airport of Communist East Germany. They broke cloud at a thousand feet and saw the landing lights ahead of them. At five hundred feet Mishkin peered suspiciously through the streaming perspex. He had heard of West Berlin, of brilliant lights, packed streets, teeming crowds of shoppers up the Kurfürstendamm, and Tempelhof Airport right in the heart of it all. This airport was right out in the countryside.