The Devil's Alternative

The bulk of the Soviet merchant marine fleet, Sovfracht, along with the numerous other vessels already chartered by the Soviet Union, had already sailed at the American government’s invitation for the grain ports of North America. In Moscow the first reports were coming in of excessive quantities of meat appearing in the peasant markets, indicating livestock slaughter was taking place even on the state and collective farms, where it was forbidden. The last reserves of grain for animals and humans alike were running out.

In a private message to President Matthews, Maxim Rudin regretted that for health reasons he would not personally be able to sign the treaty on behalf of the Soviet Union unless the ceremony were held in Moscow; he therefore proposed a formal signature by foreign ministers in Dublin on April 10.

The winds of the Cape were hellish; the South African summer was over, and the autumn gales thundered up from the Antarctic to batter Table Mountain. The Freya by March 12 was in the heart of the Agulhas Current, pushing westward through mountainous green seas, taking the gales from the southwest on her port beam.

It was bitter cold out on deck, but no one was there. Behind the double-glazing of the bridge, Captain Thor Larsen and his two officers of the watch stood with the helmsman, radio officer, and two others in shirt sleeves. Warm, safe, protected by the aura of her invincible technology, they gazed forward to where forty-foot waves impelled by the force 10 winds out of the southwest reared above the Freya’s port side, hovered for a moment, then crashed down to obscure her gigantic deck and its myriad pipes and valves in a swirling maelstrom of white foam. While the waves burst, only the fo’c’sle, far ahead, was discernible, like a separate entity. As the foam receded, defeated, through the scuppers, the Freya shook herself and buried her bulk in another oncoming mountain. A hundred feet beneath the men, ninety thousand shaft horsepower pushed a million ton

s of crude oil another few yards toward Rotterdam. High above, the Cape albatrosses wheeled and glided, their lost cries unheard behind the Plexiglas. Coffee was served by one of the stewards.

Two days later, on Monday the fourteenth, Adam Munro drove out of the courtyard of the Commercial Section of the British Embassy and turned sharp right into Kutuzovsky Prospekt toward the city center. His destination was the main embassy building, where he had been summoned by the head of Chancery. The telephone call, certainly tapped by the KGB, had referred to the clarification of minor details for a forthcoming trade delegation visit from London. In fact it meant that there was a message awaiting him in the cipher room.

The cipher room in the embassy building on Maurice Thorez Embankment 5s in the basement, a secure room regularly checked by the “sweepers,” who are not looking for dust, but for listening devices. The cipher clerks are diplomatic personnel and security-checked to the highest level. Nevertheless, sometimes messages come in that bear a coding to indicate they will not and cannot be decoded by the normal decoding machines. The tag on these messages will indicate that they have to be passed to one particular cipher clerk, a man who has the right to know because he has a need to know. Occasionally a message for Adam Munro bore such a coding, as today. The clerk in question knew Munro’s real job because he needed to—if for no other reason, to protect him from those who did not.

Munro entered the cipher room, and the clerk spotted him. They withdrew to a small annex where the clerk, a precise, methodical man with bifocal glasses, used a key from his waistband to unlock a separate decoding machine. He passed the London message into it, and the machine spat out the translation. The clerk took no notice, averting his gaze as Munro moved away.

Munro read the message and smiled. He memorized it within seconds and passed it straight into a shredder, which reduced the thin paper to fragments hardly bigger than dust. He thanked the clerk and left, with a song in his heart. Barry Ferndale had informed him that with the Russian-American treaty on the threshold of signature, the Nightingale could be brought out, to a discreet but extremely generous welcome, from the coast of Rumania near Constanza, during the week of April 16-23. There were further details for the exact pickup. He was asked to consult with the Nightingale and confirm acceptance and agreement.

After receiving Maxim Rudin’s personal message, President Matthews had remarked to David Lawrence:

“Since this is more than a mere arms-limitation agreement, I suppose it really can be called a treaty. And since it seems destined to be signed in Dublin, no doubt history will call it the Treaty of Dublin.”

Lawrence had consulted with the government of the Republic of Ireland, whose officials had agreed with barely hidden delight that they would be pleased to host the formal signing ceremony between David Lawrence for the United States and Dmitri Rykov for the USSR in St. Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle, on April 10.

On March 16, therefore, President Matthews replied to Maxim Rudin, agreeing to the proposed place and date.

There are two fairly large rock quarries in the mountains outside Ingolstadt in Bavaria. During the night of March 18, the night watchman in one of these was attacked and tied up by two masked men, at least one of them armed with a handgun, he later told police. The men, who seemed to know what they were looking for, broke into the dynamite store, using the night watchman’s keys, and stole 250 kilograms of rock-blasting explosives and a number of electric detonators. Long before morning they were gone, and as the following day was Saturday the nineteenth, it was almost noon before the trussed night watchman was rescued and the theft discovered. Subsequent police investigations were intensive, and in view of the apparent knowledge of the layout of the quarry by the robbers, concentrated on the area of former employees. But the search was for extreme left-wingers, and the name Klimchuk, which belonged to a man who had been employed three years earlier at the quarry, attracted no particular attention, being assumed to be of Polish extraction. Actually it is a Ukrainian name. By that Saturday evening the two cars bearing the explosives had arrived back in Brussels, penetrating the German-Belgian border on the Aachen-Liège motorway. They were not stopped, weekend traffic being especially heavy.

By the evening of the twentieth the Freya was well past Senegal, having made good time from the Cape with the aid of the southeast trade winds and a helpful current. Though it was early in the year for Northern Europe, there were vacationers on the beaches of the Canary Islands.

The Freya was far to the west of the islands, but just after dawn on the twenty-first her bridge officers could make out the volcanic Pico de Monte Teide on Tenerife, their first landfall since they had glimpsed the rugged coastline of Cape Province. As the mountains of the Canaries dropped away, they knew that apart from the chance of seeing Madeira’s summit they would next see the lights warning them to stay clear of the wild coasts of Mayo and Donegal.

Adam Munro had waited impatiently for a week to see the woman he loved, but there was no way he could get through to her before their prearranged meet on Monday the twenty-first For the site he had returned to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, whose 238 hectares of parks and grounds merged with the main Botanical Gardens of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Here, in a sheltered arboretum in the open air, he found her waiting just before noon. Because of the chance of a casual glance from a passerby, he could not take the risk of kissing her as he wanted to.

Instead he told her with controlled excitement of the news from London. She was overjoyed.

“I have news for you,” she told him. “There will be a Central Committee fraternal delegation to the Rumanian Party Congress during the first half of April, and I have been asked to accompany it. Sasha’s school breaks for vacation on March twenty-ninth, and we will leave for Bucharest on April fifth. After ten days it will be perfectly normal for me to take a bored little boy to the resort beaches for a week.”

“Then I’ll fix it for the night of Monday, the eighteenth of April. That will give you several days in Constanza to find your way around. You must hire or borrow a car, and acquire a powerful torch. Now, Valentina my love, these are the details. Memorize them, for there can be no mistakes:

“North of Constanza lies the resort of Mamaia, where the western package tourists go. Drive north from Constanza through Mamaia on the evening of the eighteenth. Exactly six miles north of Mamaia a track leads right from the coast highway to the beach. On the headland at the junction you will see a short stone tower with its lower half painted white. It is a coast marker for fishermen. Leave the car well off the road and descend the bluff to the beach. At two A.M. you will see a light from the sea: three long dashes and three short ones. Take your own torch with its beam cut down by a tube of cardboard and point it straight at where the light came from. Flash back the reverse signal: three shorts and three longs. A speedboat will come out of the sea for you and Sasha. There will be one Russian-speaker and two Marines. Identify yourself with the phrase The Nightingale sings in Berkeley Square.’ Have you got that?”

“Yes. Adam, where is Berkeley Square?”

“In London. It is very beautiful, like you. It has many trees.”

“And do nightingales sing there?”

“According to the words of the song, one used to. Darling, it seems so short. Four weeks today. When we get to London I’ll show you Berkeley Square.”

“Adam, tell me something. Have I betrayed my own people—the Russian people?”

“No,” he said with finality, “you have not. The leaders nearly did. If you had not done what you did, Vishnayev and your uncle might have got their war. In it, Russia would have been destroyed, most of America, my country, and Western Europe. You have not betrayed the people of your country.”

“But they would never understand, never forgive me,” she said. There was a hint of tears in her dark eyes. “They will call me a traitor. I shall be an exile.”

“One day, perhaps, this madness will end. One day, perhaps, you can come back. Li

sten, my love, we cannot stay longer. It’s too risky. There is one last thing. I need your private phone number. No, I know we agreed that I would never ring. But I will not see you again until you are in the West in safety. If there should by any remote chance be a change of plan or date, I may have to contact you as a matter of emergency. If I do, I will pretend to be a friend called Gregor, explaining that I cannot attend your dinner party. If that happens, leave at once and meet me in the park of the Mojarsky Hotel at the top of Kutuzovsky Prospekt.”