The Devil's Alternative

When the phone was replaced, Dietrich Busch stayed for long minutes in t

hought. There was something going on, he reasoned, and it concerned Mishkin and Lazareff, sitting in their separate cells in Tegel Jail in West Berlin. If anything happened to them, there was no way in which the Federal Republic’s government would escape a howl of censure from within Germany, by the combined media and the political opposition. And with the state elections coming up ...

His first call was to Ludwig Fischer, his Minister of Justice, also at home in the capital. None of his ministers would be weekending in the country, by prior agreement. His suggestion was met with immediate agreement by the Justice Minister. To transfer the pair from the old-fashioned prison of Tegel to the much newer and super-secure jail of Moabit was an obvious precaution. No CIA operatives would ever get at them inside Moabit. Fischer telephoned the instruction to Berlin immediately.

There are certain phrases, innocent enough, which when used by the senior cipher clerk at the British Embassy in Moscow to the man he knows to be the SIS resident on the embassy staff, mean, in effect, “Get the hell down here fast Something urgent is coming through from London.” Such was the phrase that brought Adam Munro from his bed at midnight Moscow time, ten P.M. London time, across town to Maurice Thorez Embankment.

Driving back from Downing Street to his office, Sir Nigel Irvine had realized the Prime Minister was absolutely right Compared to the destruction of the Treaty of Dublin on the one hand or the destruction of the Freya, her crew, and her cargo on the other, putting a Russian agent at risk of exposure was the lesser evil What he was going to ask Munro in Moscow to do, and the way he would have to demand it gave him no pleasure. But before he arrived at the SIS building he knew it would have to be done.

Deep in the basement the communications room was handling the usual routine traffic when he entered, and startled the night duty staff. But the scrambler telex raised Moscow in less than five minutes. No one queried the right of the Master to talk directly to his Moscow resident in the middle of the night. It was thirty minutes later that the telex from the Moscow cipher room chattered its message that Munro was there and waiting.

The operators at both ends, senior men of a lifetime’s experience, could be trusted with the whereabouts of Christ’s bones, if necessary—they had to be, they handled, as routine, messages that could bring down governments. From London the telex would send its scrambled, uninterceptible message down to a forest of aerials outside Cheltenham, better known for its horse races and woman’s college. From there the words would be converted automatically into an unbreakable one-off code and beamed out over a sleeping Europe to an aerial on the embassy roof. Four seconds after they were typed in London, they would emerge, in clear, on the telex in the basement of the old sugar magnate’s house in Moscow.

There, the cipher clerk turned to Munro, standing by his side.

“It’s the Master himself,” he said, reading the code tag on the incoming message. “There must be a flap on.”

Sir Nigel had to tell Munro the burden of Kirov’s message to President Matthews of only three hours earlier. Without that knowledge, Munro could not ask the Nightingale for the answer to Matthews’s question: Why?

The telex rattled for several minutes. Munro read the message that spewed out, with horror.

“I can’t do that,” he told the impassive clerk over whose shoulder he was reading. When the message from London was ended, he told the clerk:

“Reply as follows: ‘Not repeat not possible obtain this sort of answer in tune scale.’ Send it.”

The interchange between Sir Nigel Irvine and Adam Munro went on for fifteen minutes. There is a method of contacting N at short notice, suggested London. Yes, but only in case of dire emergency, replied Munro. This qualifies one hundred times as emergency, chattered the machine from London. But N could not begin to inquire in less than several days, pointed out Munro. Next regular Politburo meeting not due until Thursday following. What about records of last Thursday’s meeting? asked London. Freya was not hijacked last Thursday, retorted Munro. Finally Sir Nigel did what he hoped he would not have to do.

“Regret,” tapped the machine, “prime ministerial order not refusable. Unless attempt made avert this disaster, operation to bring out N to West cannot proceed.”

Munro looked down at the stream of paper coming out of the telex with disbelief. For the first time he was caught in the net of his own attempts to keep his love for the agent he ran from his superiors in London. Sir Nigel Irvine thought the Nightingale was an embittered Russian turncoat called Anatoly Krivoi, right-hand man to the warmonger Vishnayev.

“Make to London,” he told the clerk dully, “the following: ‘Will try this night stop decline to accept responsibility if N refuses or is unmasked during attempt stop.’ ”

The reply from the Master was brief: “Agree. Proceed.” It was half past one in Moscow, and very cold.

Half past six in Washington, and the dusk was settling over the sweep of lawns beyond the bulletproof windows behind the President’s chair, causing the lamps to be switched on. The group in the Oval Office was wailing: waiting for Chancellor Busch, waiting for an unknown agent in Moscow, waiting for a masked terrorist of unknown origins sitting on a million-ton bomb off Europe with a detonator in his hand. Waiting for the chance of a third alternative.

The phone rang and it was for Stanislaw Poklewski. He listened, held a hand over the mouthpiece, and told the President it was from the Navy Department in answer to his query of an hour earlier.

There was one U.S. Navy vessel in the area of the Freya. She had been paying a courtesy visit to the Danish coastal city of Esbjerg, and was on her way back to join her squadron of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, or STANFORLANT, then cruising on patrol west of Norway. She was well off the Danish coast, steaming north by west to rejoin her NATO allies.

“Divert to Freya’s area,” said the President.

Poklewski passed the Commander in Chiefs order back to the Navy Department, which soon began to make signals via STANFORLANT headquarters to the American warship.

Just after one in the morning, the U.S.S. Moran, halfway between Denmark and the Orkney Islands, put her helm about, opened her engines to full power, and then began racing through the moonlight southward for the English Channel. She was a guided-missile ship of almost eight thousand tons, which, although heavier than the British light cruiser Argyll, was classified as a destroyer, or DD. Moving at full power in a calm sea, she was making close to thirty knots to bring her to her station five miles from the Freya at eight A.M.

There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mojarsky Hotel, just off the roundabout at the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Those that were there were dark, uninhabited, save two.

Munro watched the lights of the other car flicker and dim, then climbed from his own vehicle and walked across to it. When he climbed into the passenger seat beside her, Valentina was alarmed and trembling.

“What is it, Adam? Why did you call me at the apartment? The call must have been recorded.”

He put his arm around her, feeling the trembling through her coat.

“It was from a call box,” he said, “and only concerned Gregor’s inability to attend your dinner party. No one will suspect anything.”

“At two in the morning?” she remonstrated. “No one makes calls like that at two in the morning. I was seen to leave the apartment compound by the night watchman. He will report it.”