“Thank you very much,” said Grayling. “So am I. Gentlemen, what has just been said cannot fail to be made public within the hour. I suggest we return to our offices. I shall prepare a statement for the one o’clock news. Mr. Ambassador, I fear the pressure will now begin to swing toward Bonn.”

“Indeed it will,” said Voss. “I must be back inside the embassy as soon as possible.”

“Then accompany me to The Hague,” said Grayling. “I have police outriders, and we can talk in the car.”

Aides brought the two tapes, and the group left for The Hague, fifteen minutes up the coast. When they were gone, Dirk Van Gelder walked up to the flat roof where Harry Wennerstrom would have held his lunch with Van Gelder’s permission, the other guests looking eagerly to seaward, as they supped on champagne and salmon sandwiches, to catch the first glimpse of the leviathan.

Now perhaps she would never come, thought Van Gelder, staring out at the blue water. He, too, had his master’s ticket, having served as a Dutch merchant navy captain until he was offered the shore job with the promise of a regular life with his wife and children. As a seaman he thought of the Freya’s crew, locked far beneath the waves, waiting helplessly for rescue or death. But as a seaman he would not be in charge of negotiations. It was out of his hands now. Smoother men, calculating in political rather than human terms, would take over. He thought of the towering Norwegian skipper, whose picture he had seen but whom he had never met, now facing madmen armed with guns and dynamite, and wondered how he would have reacted had it ever happened to him. He had warned that this could happen one day, that the supertankers were too unprotected and highly dangerous. But money had spoken louder; the more powerful argument had been the extra cost of installing the necessary devices to make tankers like banks and explosive stores, both of which in a way they were. No one had listened, and no one ever would. People were concerned about airliners because they could crash on houses, but not about tankers, which traveled out of sight of land. So the politicians had not insisted, and the merchants had not volunteered. Now, because supertankers could be taken as easily as piggy banks, a captain and his crew of twenty-nine might die like rats in a swirl of oil and water.

He ground a cigarette under his heel into the tar of the roof, and looked again at the empty horizon.

“You poor bastards,” he said, “you poor bloody bastards. If only they’d listened.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1300 to 1900

IF THE REACTION of the media to the 0900 transmission had been muted and speculative, due to the uncertainty of the reliability of their informants, the reaction to the 1200 broadcast was frantic.

From twelve o’clock onward there was no doubt whatever what had happened to the Freya, or what had been said by Captain Larsen on his radiotelephone to Maas Control. Too many people had been listening.

Banner headlines that had been available for the noon editions of the evening papers, prepared at ten A.M., were swept away. Those that went to press at twelve-thirty were stronger in tone and size. There were no more question marks at the ends of sentences. Editorial columns were hastily prepared, specialist correspondents in matters of shipping and the environment required to produce instant assessments within the hour.

Radio and television programs were interrupted throughout Europe’s Friday lunch hour to beam the news to listeners and viewers.

On the dot of five past twelve, a man in a motorcyclist’s helmet, with goggles and scarf drawn around the lower part of the face, had walked calmly into the lobby of 85 Fleet Street and deposited an envelope addressed to the news editor of the Press Association. No one later recalled the man; dozens of such messengers walk into that lobby every day.

By twelve-fifteen the news editor was opening the envelope. It contained a transcript of the statement read by Captain Larsen fifteen minutes earlier, though it must have been prepared well before that. The news editor reported the delivery to his editor in chief, who told the Metropolitan Police. That did not stop the text from going straight onto the wires, both of the PA and their cousins upstairs, Reuters, who put out the text across the world.

Leaving Fleet Street, Miroslav Kaminsky dumped his helmet, goggles, and scarf in a garbage can, took a taxi to Heathrow Airport, and boarded the two-fifteen plane for Tel Aviv.

By two P.M. the editorial pressure on both the Dutch and West German governments was beginning to build up. Neither had had any time to consider in peace and quiet the reactions they should make to the demands. Both governments began to receive a flood of phone calls urging them to agree to release Mishkin and Lazareff rather than face the disaster promised by the destruction of the Freya off their coasts.

By one o’clock the West German Ambassador to The Hague was speaking directly to his Foreign Minister in Bonn, Klaus Hagowitz, who interrupted the Chancellor at his desk lunch. The text of the 1200 broadcast was already in Bonn, once from the BND intelligence service and once on the Reuters teleprinter. Every newspaper office in Germany also had the text from Reuters, and the telephone lines to the Chancellery Press Office were jammed with calls.

At one-forty-five the Chancellery put out a statement to the effect that an emergency cabinet meeting had been called for three o’clock to consider the entire situation. Ministers canceled their plans to leave Bonn for the weekend. Lunches were ill-digested.

The governor of Tegel Jail put down his telephone at two minutes past two with a certain deference. It was not often the Federal Republic’s Justice Minister cut clean through the protocol of communicating with the Governing Mayor of West Berlin and called him personally.

He picked up the internal phone and gave an order to his secretary. Doubtless the Berlin Senate would be in contact in due course with the same request, but so long as the Governing Mayor was out of touch at lunch somewhere, he would not refuse the Minister from Bonn.

Three minutes later, one of his senior prison officers entered the office.

“Have you heard the two o’clock news?” asked the governor.

It was only five past two. The officer pointed out that he had been on his rounds when the Weeper in his breast pocket buzzed, requiring him to go straight to a wall phone and check in. No, he had not heard the news. The governor told him of the noon demand of the terrorists on board the Freya. The officer’s jaw dropped open.

“One for the book, isn’t it?” said the governor. “It looks as if we shall be in the news within minutes. So, batten down the hatches. I’ve given orders to the main gate: no admissions by anyone other than staff. All press inquiries to the authorities at City Hall.

“Now, as regards Mishkin and Lazareff. I want the guard on that floor, and particularly in that corridor, trebled. Cancel free periods to raise enough staff. Transfer all other prisoners in that corridor to other cells or other levels. Seal the place. A group of intelligence people are flying in from Bonn to ask them who their friends in the North Sea are. Any questions?”

The prison officer swallowed and shook his head.

“Now,” resumed the governor, “we don’t know how long this emergency will last. When were you due off duty?”

“Six o’clock tonight, sir.”

“Returning on Monday morning at eight?”

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
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