The hijacking of the Freya had claimed its first victim.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Midnight to 0800
THE RESUMED West German cabinet meeting assembled in the Chancellery at one A.M., and the mood when the ministers heard from Dietrich Busch the plea from Washington varied between exasperation and truculence.
“Well, why the hell won’t he give a reason?” asked the Defense Minister. “Doesn’t he trust us?”
“He claims he has a reason of paramount importance, but cannot divulge it even over the hot line,” replied Chancellor Busch. “That gives us the opportunity of either believing him or calling him a liar. At this stage I cannot do the latter.”
“Has he any idea what the terrorists will do when they learn Mishkin and Lazareff are not to be released at dawn?” queried another.
“Yes, I think he has. At least the texts of all the exchanges between the Freya and Maas Control are in his hands. As we all know, they have threatened either to kill another seaman, or to vent twenty thousand tons of crude, or both.”
“Well, then, let him carry the responsibility,” urged the Interior Minister. “Why should we take the blame if that happens?”
“I haven’t the slightest intention that we should,” replied Busch, “but that doesn’t answer the question. Do we grant President Matthews’s request or not?”
There was silence for a while. The Foreign Minister broke it.
“How long is he asking for?”
“As long as possible,” said the Chancellor. “He seems to have some plan afoot to break the deadlock, to find a third alternative. But what the plan is, or what the alternative could be, he alone knows. He and a few people he evidently trusts with the secret,” he added with some bitterness. “But that doesn’t include us, for the moment.”
“Well, personally I think it is stretching the friendship between us a bit far,” said the Foreign Minister, “but I think we ought to grant him an extension, while making plain, at least unofficially, that it is at his request, not ours.”
“Perhaps he has an idea to storm the Freya,” suggested Defense.
“Our own people say that would be extremely risky,” replied the Interior Minister. “It would require an underwater approach for at least the last two miles, a sheer climb up smooth steel from the sea to the deck, a penetration of the superstructure without being observed from atop the funnel, and the selection of the right cabin with the leader of the terrorists in it. If, as we suspect, the man holds a remote-control detonating mechanism in his hand, he’d have to be shot and killed before he could press the button.”
“In any case, it is too late to do it before dawn,” said the Defense Minister. “It would have to be in darkness, and that means ten P.M. at the earliest, twenty-one hours from now.”
At a quarter to three the German cabinet finally agreed to grant President Matthews his request: an indefinite delay on the release of Mishkin and Lazareff, while reserving the right to keep the consequences under constant review and to reverse that decision if it became regarded in Western Europe as impossible to continue to hold the pair.
At the same time the government spokesman was quietly asked to leak the news to two of his most reliable media contacts that only massive pressure from Washington had caused the about-face in Bonn.
It was eleven P.M. in Washington, four A.M. in Europe, when the news from Bonn reached President Matthews. He sent back his heartfelt thanks to Chancellor Busch and asked David Lawrence:
“Any reply from Jerusalem yet?”
“None,” said Lawrence. “We know only that our Ambassador there has been granted a personal interview with Benyamin Golen.”
When the Israeli Premier was disturbed for the second time during the Sabbath night, his tetchy capacity for patience was wearing distinctly thin. He received the U.S. Ambassador in his dressing gown, and the reception was frosty. It was three A.M. in Europe, but five in Jerusalem, and the first thin light of Saturday morning was on the hills of Judea.
He listened without reaction to the Ambassador’s personal plea from President Matthews. His private fear was for the identity of the terrorists aboard the Freya. No terrorist action aimed at delivering Jews from a prison cell had been mounted since the days of his own youth, fighting right on the soil where he stood. Then it had been to free condemned Jewish partisans from a British jail at Acre, and he had been a part of that fight. Now it was Israel that roundly condemned terrorism, the taking of hostages, the blackmail of regimes. And yet ...
And yet, hundreds of thousands of his own people would secretly sympathize with two youths who had sought to escape the terror of the KGB in the only way left open to them. The same voters would not openly hail the youths as heroes, but they would not condemn them as murderers, either. As to the masked men on the Freya, there was a chance that they, too, were Jewish—possibly (heaven forbid) Israelis. He had hoped the previous evening that the affair would be over by sundown of the Sabbath, the prisoners from Berlin inside Israel, the terrorists on the Freya captured or dead. There would be a fuss, but it would die down.
Now he was learning that there would be no release. The news hardly inclined him to the American request, which was in any case impossible. When he had heard the Ambassador out, he shook his head.
“Please convey to my good friend Willi
am Matthews my heartfelt wish that this appalling affair can be concluded without further loss of life,” he replied. “But on the matter of Mishkin and Lazareff my position is this: if on behalf of the government and the people of Israel, and at the urgent request of West Germany, I give a solemn public pledge not to imprison them here or return them to Berlin, then I shall have to abide by that pledge. I’m sorry, but I cannot do as you ask and return them to jail in Germany as soon as the Freya has been released.”
He did not need to explain what the American Ambassador already knew: that apart from any question of national honor, even the explanation that promises extracted under duress were not binding would not work in this case. The outrage from the National Religious Party, the Gush Emunim extremists, the Jewish Defense League, and the hundred thousand Israeli voters who had come from the USSR in the past decade—all these alone would prevent any Israeli premier from reneging on an international pledge to set Mishkin and Lazareff free.
“Well, it was worth a try,” said President Matthews when the cable reached Washington an hour later.