The Devil's Alternative

To the microphone he said, “Understood, Captain Larsen. Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” said the disembodied voice. “There will be no further radio contact with the Freya until twelve hundred hours. At that time the Freya will call you again. I will wish to speak directly and personally to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands and the West German Ambassador. Both must be present. That is all.”

The microphone went dead. On the bridge of the Freya, Drake removed the handset from Larsen’s hand and replaced it. Then he gestured the Norwegian to return to the day cabin. When they were seated with the seven-foot table between them, Drake laid down his gun and leaned back. As his sweater rode up, Larsen saw the lethal oscillator clipped at his waistband.

“What do we do now?” asked Larsen.

“We wait,” said Drake. “While Europe goes quietly mad.”

“They’ll kill you, you know,” said Larsen. “You’ve got on board, but you’ll never get off. They may have to do what you say, but when they have done it, they’ll be waiting for you.”

“I know,” said Drake. “But you see, I don’t mind if I die. I’ll fight to live, of course, but I’ll die, and I’ll kill, before I’ll see them kill off my project.”

“You want these two men in Germany free, that much?” asked Larsen.

“Yes, that much. I can’t explain why, and if I did, you wouldn’t understand. But for years my land, my people, have been occupied, persecuted, imprisoned, killed. And no one cared a shit. Now I threaten to kill one single man, or hit Western Europe in the pocket, and you’ll see what they do. Suddenly it’s a disaster. But for me, the slavery of my land, that is the disaster.”

“This dream of yours, what is it, exactly?” asked Larsen.

“A free Ukraine,” said Drake simply. “Which cannot be achieved short of a popular uprising by millions of people.”

“In the Soviet Union?” said Larsen. “That’s impossible. That will never happen.”

“It could,” countered Drake. “It could. It happened in East Germany, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia. But first, the conviction by those millions that they could never win, that their oppressors are invincible, must be broken. If it once were, the floodgates could open wide.”

“No one will ever believe that,” said Larsen.

“Not in the West, no. But there’s the strange thing. Here in the West, people would say I cannot be right in that calculation. But

in the Kremlin they know I am.”

“And for this ... popular uprising, you are prepared to die?” asked Larsen.

“If I must. That is my dream. That land, that people, I love more than life itself. That’s my advantage: within a hundred-mile radius of us here, there is no one else who loves something more than his life.”

A day earlier Thor Larsen might have agreed with the fanatic. But something was happening inside the big, slow-moving Norwegian that surprised him. For the first time in his life he hated a man enough to kill him. Inside his head a private voice said, “I don’t care about your Ukrainian dream, Mr. Svoboda. You are not going to kill my crew and my ship.”

At Felixstowe on the coast of Suffolk, the English Coastguard officer walked quickly away from his coastal radio set and picked up the telephone.

“Get me the Department of the Environment in London,” he told the operator.

“By God, those Dutchies have got themselves a problem this time,” said his deputy, who had heard the conversation between the Freya and Maas Control also.

“It’s not just the Dutch,” said the senior coastguardsman. “Look at the map.”

On the wall was a map of the entire southern portion of the North Sea and the northern end of the English Channel. It showed the coast of Suffolk right across to the Maas Estuary. In chinagraph pencil the coastguardsman had marked the Freya at her overnight position. It was a little more than two-thirds of the way from England to Holland.

“If she blows, lad, our coasts will also be under a foot of oil from Hull round to Southampton.”

Minutes later he was talking to a civil servant in London, one of the men in the department of the ministry specifically concerned with oil-slick hazards. What he said caused the morning’s first cup of tea in London to go quite cold.

Dirk Van Gelder managed to catch the Prime Minister at his residence, just about to leave for his office. The urgency of the Port Authority chairman finally persuaded the young aide from the Cabinet Office to pass the phone to the Premier.

“Jan Grayling,” he said into the speaker. As he listened to Van Gelder his face tightened.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” said Van Gelder. “Captain Larsen was reading from a prepared statement. He was not allowed to deviate from it, nor answer questions.”