“At night they sleep?”
“Maybe. They have heard about the matter in the North Sea. They lost their radios just after the noon broadcasts, but one of the other prisoners in solitary shouted the news across to them before the corridor was cleared of all other prisoners. Perhaps they will sleep, perhaps not.”
The Russian nodded somberly.
“Then,” he said, “you will do the job yourself.”
Jahn’s jaw dropped.
“No, no,” he babbled. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t use a gun. I couldn’t kill anyone.”
For answer the Russian laid two slim tubes like fountain pens on the table between them.
“Not guns,” he said. “These. Place the open end, here, a few centimeters from the mouth and nose of the sleeping man. Press the button on the side, here. Death occurs within three seconds. Inhalation of hydrogen cyanide gas causes instantaneous death. Within an hour the effects are identical to those of cardiac arrest. When it is done, close the cells, return to the staff area, wipe the tubes clean, and place them in the locker of another guard with access to the same pair of cells. Very simple, very clean. And it leaves you in the clear.”
What Kukushkin had laid before the horrified gaze of the senior officer was an updated version of the same sort of poison-gas pistols with which the “Wet Affairs” department of the KGB had assassinated the two Ukrainian nationalist leaders Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet in Germany two decades earlier. The principle was still simple, the efficiency of the gas increased by further research. Inside the tubes, glass globules of prussic acid rested. The trigger impelled a spring, which worked on a hammer, which crushed the glass. Simultaneously the acid was vaporized by a compressed-air canister, activated in the same motion of pressing the trigger button. Impelled by the compressed air, the gas vapor shot out of the tube into the breathing passages in an invisible cloud. An hour later the telltale bitter almond smell of prussic acid was gone, the muscles of the corpse relaxed again; the symptoms were those of heart attack.
No one would believe two simultaneous heart attacks in two young men; a search would be made. The gas guns, found in the locker of a guard, would incriminate the man almost completely.
“I ... I cant do that,” whispered Jahn.
“But I can, and will, see your entire family in an Arctic labor camp for the rest of their lives,” murmured the Russian. “A simple choice, Herr Jahn. The overcoming of your scruples for a brief ten minutes, against all their lives. Think about it.”
Kukushkin took Jahn’s hand, turned it over, and placed the tubes in the palm.
“Think about it,” he said, “but not too long. Then walk into those cells and do it That’s all.”
He slid out of the booth and left. Minutes later Jahn closed his hand around the gas guns, slipped them in his raincoat pocket, and went back to Tegel Jail. At midnight, in three hours, he would relieve the evening-shift supervisor. At one A.M. he would enter the cells and do it. He knew he had no alternative.
As the last rays of the sun left the sky, the Nimrod over the Freya had switched from her daytime f/126 camera to her nighttime f/135 version. Otherwise, nothing had changed. The night-vision camera, peering downward with its infrared sights, could pick out most of what was happening fifteen thousand feet beneath. If the Nimrod’s captain wanted, he could take still pictures with the aid of the f/135’s electronic flash, or throw the switch on his aircraft’s million-candle-power searchlight.
The night camera failed to notice the figure in the anorak, lying prostrate since midafternoon, slowly begin to move, crawling under the inspection catwalk, and from there inching its way back toward the superstructure. When the figure finally crawled over the sill of the half-open doorway and stood up in the interior, no one noticed. At dawn it was supposed the body had been thrown into the sea.
The man in the anorak went below to the galley, rubbing hands and shivering repeatedly. In the galley he found one of his colleagues and helped himself to a piping mug of coffee. When he had finished he returned to the bridge and sought out his own clothes, the black tracksuit and sweater he had come aboard with.
“Jeez,” he told the man on the bridge in his American accent, “you sure didn’t miss. I could feel the wadding from those blanks slapping into the back of the windbreaker.”
The bridge watch grinned.
“Andriy said to make it good,” he replied. “It worked. Mishkin and Lazareff are coming out at eight tomorrow morning. By afternoon they’ll be in Tel Aviv.”
“Great,” said the Ukrainian-American. “Let’s hope Andriy’s plan to get us off this ship works as well as the rest.”
“It will,” said the other. “You better get your mask on and give those clothes back to that Yankee in the paint locker. Then grab some sleep. You’re on watch at six in the morning.”
Sir Julian Flannery reconvened the crisis management committee within an hour of his private talk with the Prime Minister. She had told him the reason why the situation had changed, but he and Sir Nigel Irvine would be the only ones to know, and they would not talk. The members of the committee would simply need to know that, for reasons of state, the release of Mishkin and Lazareff at dawn might be delayed or canceled, depending on the reaction of the German Chancellor.
Elsewhere in Whitehall, page after page of data about the Freya, her crew, cargo, and hazard potential were being photographically transmitted direct to Washington.
Sir Julian had been lucky; most of the principal experts from the committee lived within a sixty-minute fast-drive radius of Whitehall. Most were caught over dinner at home, none had left for the countryside; two were traced to restaurants, one to the theater. By nine-thirty the bulk of UNICORNE were seated in conference once again.
Sir Julian explained that their duty now was to assume that the whole affair had passed from the realm of a form of exercise and into the major-crisis category.
“We have to assume that Chancellor Busch will agree to delay the release, pending the clarification of certain other matters. If he does, we have to assume the chance that the terrorists will at least activate their first threat, to vent oil cargo from the Freya. Now we have to plan to contain and destroy a possible first slick of twenty thousand tons of crude oil; secondly, to envisage that figure being multiplied fifty-fold.”
The picture that emerged was gloomy. Public indifference over years had led to political neglect; nevertheless, the amounts of crude-oil emulsifier in the hands of the British, and the vehicles for their delivery onto an oil slick, were still greater than those of the rest of Europe combined.
“We have to assume that the main burden of containing the ecological damage will fall to us,” said the man from Warren Springs. “In the Amoco Cadiz affair in 1978, the French refused to accept our help, even though we had better emulsifiers and better delivery systems than they did. Their fishermen paid bitterly for that particular stupidity. The old-fashioned detergent they used instead of our emulsifier concentrates caused as much toxic damage as the oil itself. And they had neither enough of it nor the right delivery systems. It was like trying to kill an octopus with a peashooter.”