The Devil's Alternative

“You’ve been following the Freya affair?” asked Holmes from London.

There was a dry chuckle from the other end.

“I thought you’d come shopping here eventually,” said Fallon. “What do they want?”

“Things are turning sour,” said Holmes. “The Germans may have to change their minds and keep those two jokers in Berlin after all. I’ve just spent an hour with the reconvened CMC. They don’t like it, but they may have to consider our way. Got any ideas?”

“Sure,” said Fallon. “Been thinking about it all day. Need a model, though, and a plan. And the gear.”

“Right,” said Holmes. “I have the plan here, and a pretty good model of another but similar ship. Get the boys together. Get all the gear out of stores: underwater magnets, all the types of hardware, stun grenades—you name it. The lot. What you don’t need can be returned. I’m asking the Navy to come round from Portland and pick up the lot: the gear and the team. When you’ve left a good man in charge, jump into the car and get up to London. Report at my office as soon as you can.”

“Don’t worry,” said Fallon. “I’ve got the gear sorted and bagged already. Get the transport here as fast as you can. I’m on my way.”

When the hard, chunky major returned to the bar, there was silence. His men knew he had taken a call from London. Within minutes they were rousing the NCOs and Marines from their barracks, changing rapidly out of the plain clothes they had been wearing in the mess into the black webbing and green berets of their unit. Before midnight they were waiting on the stone jetty tucked away in their cordoned section of the Marine base; waiting for the arrival of the Navy to take their equipment to where it was needed.

There was a bright moon rising over Portland Bill to the west of them as the three fast patrol boats Sabre, Cutlass and Scimitar came out of the harbor, heading east for Poole. When the throttles were open, the three prows rose, the sterns buried in the foaming water, and the thunder echoed across the bay.

The same moon illuminated the long track of the Hampshire motorway as Major Fallon’s Rover sedan burned up the miles to London.

“Now, what the hell do I tell Chancellor Busch?” President Matthews asked his advisers.

It was five in the afternoon in Washington; though night had long settled on Europe, the late-afternoon sun was still on the Rose Garden beyond the French windows where the first buds were responding to the spring warmth.

“I don’t believe you can reveal to him the real message received from Kirov,” said Robert Benson.

“Why the devil not? I told Joan Carpenter, and no doubt she’ll have had to tell Nigel Irvine.”

“There’s a difference,” pointed out the CIA chief. “The British can take the necessary precautions to cope with an ecological problem in the sea off their coasts by calling on their technical experts. It’s a technical problem; Joan Carpenter did not need to call a full cabinet meeting. Dietrich Busch is going to be asked to hold onto Mishkin and Lazareff at the risk of provoking a catastrophe for his European neighbors. For that he’ll almost certainly consult his cabinet—”

“He’s an honorable man,” cut in Lawrence. “If he knows that the price is the Treaty of Dublin, he’ll feel bound to share that knowledge with his cabinet.”

“And there’s the problem,” concluded Benson. “That a minimum of fifteen more people would learn of it. Some of them would confide in their wives, their aides. We still haven’t forgotten the Günter Guillaume affair. There are just too damn many leaks in Bonn. If it got out, the Dublin Treaty would be finished in any case, regardless of what happened in the North Sea.”

His call went through in a minute. “What the hell do I tell him?” repeated Matthews.

“Tell him you have information that simply cannot be divulged on any telephone line, even a secure transatlantic line,” suggested Poklewski. “Tell him the release of Mishkin and Lazareff would provoke a greater disaster than even frustrating the terrorists on the Freya for a few more hours. Ask him at this stage simply to give you a little time.”

“How long?” asked the President.

“As long as possible,” said Benson.

“And when the time runs out?” asked the President.

The call to Bonn came through. Chancellor Busch had been contacted at his home. The top-security call was patched through to him there. There was no need of translators on the line; Dietrich Busch spoke fluent English. President Matthews spoke to him for ten minutes while the Bonn government chief listened with growing amazement.

“But why?” he asked at length. “Surely the matter hardly affects the United States.”

Matthews was tempted. At the Washington end, Robert Benson wagged a warning finger.

“Mr. Chancellor, please. Believe me. I’m asking you to trust me. On this line, on any line across the Atlantic, I can’t be as frank as I’d like to be. Something has cropped up, something of enormous dimensions. Look, I’ll be as plain as I can. Over here we have discovered something about these two men; their release would be disastrous at this stage, for the next few hours. I’m asking for time, my friend, just time. A delay until certain things can be taken care of.”

The German Chancellor was standing in his study with the strains of Beethoven drifting through the door from the sitting room where he had been enjoying a cigar and a concert on the stereo. To say that he was suspicious would be putting it mildly. So far as he was concerned, the transatlantic line, established years before to link the NATO government heads, and checked regularly, was perfectly safe. Moreover, he reasoned, the United States had perfectly good communications with their Bonn Embassy and could send him a personal message on that route if desired. It did not occur to him that Washington would simply not trust his cabinet with a secret of this magnitude after the repeated exposure of East German agents close to the seat of power on the Rhine.

On the other hand, the President of the United States was not given to making late-night calls or crazy appeals. He had to have his reasons, Busch knew. But what he was being asked was not something he could decide without consultation.

“It is just past ten P.M. over here,” he told Matthews. “We have until dawn to decide. Nothing fresh ought to happen until then. I shall reconvene my cabinet during the night and consult with them. I cannot promise you more.”

President William Matthews had to be satisfied with that.