Rudin grunted. “If he doesn’t offer us something by the New Year, we won’t carry the Politburo in the first week of January.”
He reached out and took a draft of brandy, exhaling with a satisfied sigh.
“Are you sure you should be drinking?” asked Petrov. “The doctors forbade you five years ago.”
“To hell with the doctors,” said Rudin. “That’s what I really called you here for. I can inform you beyond any doubt that I am not going to die of alcoholism or liver failure.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Petrov.
There’s more. On April thirtieth I am going to retire. Does that surprise you?”
Petrov sat motionless, alert. He had twice seen the supremos go down. Khrushchev in flames, ousted and disgraced, to become a nonperson. Brezhnev on his own terms. He had been close enough to feel the thunder when the most powerful tyrant in the world gives way to another. But never this close. This time he wore the mantle unless others could snatch it from him.
“Yes,” he said carefully, “it does.”
“In April I am calling a meeting of the full Central Committee,” said Rudin. “To announce to them my decision to go on April thirtieth. On May Day there will be a new leader at the center of the line on the Mausoleum. I want it to be you. In June the plenary Party Congress is due. The leader will outline the policy from then on. I want it to be you. I told you that weeks ago.”
Petrov knew he was Rudin’s choice, since that meeting in the old leader’s private suite in the Kremlin when the dead Ivanenko had been with them, cynical and watchful as ever. But he had not known it would be so fast.
“I won’t get the Central Committee to accept your nomination unless I can give them something they want. Grain. They’ve all known the position for a long time. If Castletown fails, Vishnayev will have it all.”
“Why so soon?” asked Petrov.
Rudin held up his glass. From the shadows the silent Misha appeared and poured brandy into it.
“I got the results of the tests from Kuntsevo yesterday,” said Rudin. “They’ve been working on tests for months. Now they’re certain. Not cigarettes and not Armenian brandy. Leukemia. Six to twelve months. Let’s just say I won’t see a Christmas after this one. And if we have a nuclear war, neither will you.
“In the next hundred days we have to secure a grain agreement from the Americans and wipe out the Ivanenko affair once and for all time. The sands are running out, and too damn fast. The cards are on the table, face up, and there are no more aces to play.”
On December 28, the United States formally offered the Soviet Union a sale, for immediate delivery and at commercial rates, of ten million tons of animal feed grains, to be considered as being outside any terms still being negotiated at Castletown.
On New Year’s Eve, an Aeroflot twin-jet Tupolev-134 took off from Lvov airport, bound for Minsk on an internal flight. Just north of the border between the Ukraine and White Russia, high over the Pripet Marshes, a nervous-looking young man rose from his seat and approached the stewardess, who was several rows back from the steel door leading to the flight deck, speaking with a passenger.
Knowing the toilets were at the other end of the cabin, she straightened as the young man approached her. As she did so, the young man spun her around, clamped his left forearm across her throat, drew a handgun, and jammed it into her ribs. She screamed. There was a chorus of shouts and yells from the passengers. The hijacker began to drag the girl backward to the locked door to the flight deck. On the bulkhead next to the door was the intercom enabling the stewardess to speak to the flight crew, who had orders to refuse to open the door in the event of a hijack.
From midway down the fuselage, one of the passengers rose, automatic in hand. He crouched in the aisle, both hands clasped around his gun, pointing it straight at the stewardess and the hijacker behind her.
“Hold it!” he shouted. “KGB. Hold it right there.”
“Tell them to open the door,” yelled the hijacker.
“Not a chance!” shouted the armed flight guard from the KGB back to the hijacker.
“If they don’t, I’ll kill the girl,” screamed the man holding the stewardess.
The girl had a lot of courage. She lunged backward with her heel, caught the gunman in the shin, broke his grip, and made to run toward the police agent. The hijacker sprang after her, passing three rows of passengers. It was a mistake. From an aisle seat, one of them rose, turned, and slammed a fist into the nape of the hijacker’s neck. The man fell, face downward; before he could move, his assailant had snatched the man’s gun and was pointing it at him. The hijacker turned, sat up, looked at the gun, put his face in his hands, and began to moan softly.
From the rear the KGB agent stepped past the stewardess, gun still at the ready, and approached the rescuer.
“Who are you?” he asked. For answer, the rescuer reached into an inside pocket, produced a card, and flicked it open.
The agent looked at the KGB card.
“You’re not from Lvov,” he said.
“Ternopol,” said the other. “I was going home on leave in Minsk, so I had no sidearm. But I have a good right fist.” He grinned.
The agent from Lvov nodded.
“Thanks, Comrade. Keep him covered.” He stepped to the intercom and talked rapidly into it. He was relating what had happened and asking for a police escort at Minsk.
“Is it safe to have a look?” asked a metallic voice from behind the door.
“Sure,” said the KGB agent. “He’s safe enough now.”
There was a clicking behind the door, and it opened to show the head of the engineer, somewhat frightened and intensely curious.
The agent from Ternopol acted very strangely. He turned from the man on the floor, crashed the revolver into the base of his colleague’s skull, shoved him aside, and thrust his foot in the space between the door and jamb before it could close. In a second he was through it, pushing the engineer backward onto the flight deck. The man on the floor behind him rose, grabbed the flight guard’s own automatic, a standard KGB Tokarev nine-millimeter, followed through the steel door, and slammed it behind him. It locked automatically.
Two minutes later, under the guns of David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin, the Tupolev turned due west for Warsaw and Berlin, the latter being the ultimate limit of their fuel supply. At the controls Captain Mikhail Rudenko sat white-faced with rage; beside him his copilot, Sergei Vatutin, slowly answered the frantic requests from the Minsk control tower regarding the change of course.
By the time the airliner had crossed the border into Polish airspace, Minsk tower and four other airliners on the same wavelength knew the Tupolev was in the hands of hijackers. When it bored clean through the center of Warsaw’s air-traffic-control zone, Moscow already knew. A hundred miles west of Warsaw, a flight of six Polish-based Soviet MIG-23 fighters swept in from starboard and formatted on the Tupolev. The flight leader was jabbering rapidly into his mask.
At his desk in the Defense Ministry on Frunze Street, Moscow, Marshal Nikolai Kerensky took an urgent call on the line linking him to Soviet Air Force headquarters.
“Where?” he barked.
“Passing over Poznán,” was the answer. “Three hundred kilometers to Berlin. Fifty minutes’ flying time.”
The marshal considered carefully. This could be the scandal that Vishnayev had demanded. There was no doubt what should be done. The Tupolev should be shot down, with its entire passenger and crew complement. Later the version given out would be that the hijackers had fired within the fuselage, hitting a main fuel tank. It had happened twice in the past decade.
He gave his orders. A hundred meters off the airliner’s wing tip, the commander of the MIG flight listened five minutes later.
“If you say so, Comrade Colonel,” he told his base commander. Twenty minutes later, the airliner passed across the Oder-Niesse Line and began its descent into Berlin. As it did so, the MIGs peeled gracefully away and slipped down the sk
y toward their home base.
“I have to tell Berlin we’re coming in,” Captain Rudenko appealed to Mishkin. “If there’s a plane on the runway, we’ll end up as a ball of fire.”
Mishkin stared ahead at the banks of steel-gray winter clouds. He had never been in an airplane before, but what the captain said made sense.
“Very well,” he said, “break silence and tell Tempelhof you are coming in. No requests, just a flat statement.”
Captain Rudenko was playing his last card. He leaned forward, adjusted the channel selection dial, and began to speak.
“Tempelhof, West Berlin. Tempelhof, West Berlin. This is Aeroflot flight three-five-one. ...”
He was speaking in English, the international language of air traffic control. Mishkin and Lazareff knew almost none of it, apart from what they had picked up on broadcasts in Ukrainian from the West. Mishkin jabbed his gun into Rudenko’s neck.
“No tricks,” he said in Ukrainian.
In the control tower at East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, the two controllers looked at each other in amazement. They were being called on their own frequency but being addressed as Tempelhof. No Aeroflot plane would dream of landing in West Berlin—apart from which, Tempelhof had not been West Berlin’s civil airport for ten years. Tempelhof had reverted to a U.S. Air Force base when Tegel took over as the civil airport. One of the East Germans, faster than the other, snatched the microphone.
“Tempelhof to Aeroflot three-five-one, you are cleared to land. Straight run-in,” he said. In the airliner Captain Rudenko swallowed hard and lowered flaps and undercarriage. The Tupolev let down rapidly to the main airport of Communist East Germany. They broke cloud at a thousand feet and saw the landing lights ahead of them. At five hundred feet Mishkin peered suspiciously through the streaming perspex. He had heard of West Berlin, of brilliant lights, packed streets, teeming crowds of shoppers up the Kurfürstendamm, and Tempelhof Airport right in the heart of it all. This airport was right out in the countryside.
“It’s a trick,” he yelled at Lazareff, “it’s the East!” He jabbed his gun into Captain Rudenko’s neck. “Pull out,” he screamed, “pull out or I’ll shoot!”
The Ukrainian captain gritted his teeth and held course for the last hundred meters. Mishkin reached over his shoulder and tried to haul back on the control column. The twin booms, when they came, were so close together that it was impossible to tell which came first. Mishkin claimed the thump of the wheels hitting the tarmac caused the gun to go off; copilot Vatutin maintained Mishkin had fired first. It was too confused for a final and definitive version ever to be established.
The bullet tore a gaping hole in the neck of Captain Rudenko and killed him instantly. There was blue smoke in the flight deck, Vatutin hauling back on the stick, yelling to his engineer for more power. The jet engines screamed a mite louder than the passengers as the Tupelov, heavy as a wet loaf, bounced twice more on the tarmac, then lifted into the air, rolling, struggling for lift. Vatutin held her, nose high, wallowing, praying for more engine power, as the outer suburbs of East Berlin blurred past beneath them, followed by the Berlin Wall itself.
When the Tupolev came over the perimeter of Tempelhof, it cleared the nearest houses by six feet.
White-faced, the young copilot hammered the plane onto the main runway with Lazareff’s gun in his back. Mishkin held the red-soaked body of Captain Rudenko from falling across the control column. The Tupolev finally came to rest three quarters down the runway, still on all its wheels.
Staff Sergeant Leroy Coker was a patriotic man. He sat huddled against the cold at the wheel of his Security Police Jeep, his fur-trimmed parka drawn tight around the edges of his face, and he thought longingly of the warmth of Alabama. But he was on guard duty, and he took it seriously.
When the incoming airliner lurched over the houses beyond the perimeter fence, engines howling, undercarriage and flaps hanging, he let out a “What the sheee-yit!” and sat bolt upright. He had never been to Russia, nor even across to the East, but he had read all about them over there. He did not know much about the Cold War, but he well knew that an attack by the Communists was always imminent unless men like Leroy Coker kept on their guard. He also knew a red star when he saw one, and a hammer and sickle.
When the airliner slithered to a stop, he unslung his carbine, took a bead, and blew the nosewheel tires out.
Mishkin and Lazareff surrendered three hours later. Their intent had been to keep the crew, release the passengers, take on board three notables from West Berlin, and be flown to Tel Aviv. But a new nosewheel for a Tupolev was out of the question; the Russians would never supply one. And when the news of the killing of Rudenko was made known to the USAF base authorities, they refused to supply a plane of their own. Marksmen ringed the Tupolev; there was no way the two men could herd the others, even at gunpoint, to an alternative aircraft. The sharpshooters would have cut them down. After an hour’s talk with the base commander, they walked out with their hands in the air.
That night, they were formally handed over to the West Berlin authorities for imprisonment and trial.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR to Washington was coldly angry when he faced David Lawrence at the State Department on January 2.
The American Secretary of State was receiving him at the Soviet government’s request, though insistence would have been a better word.
The Ambassador read his formal protest in a flat monotone. When he had finished, he laid the text on the American’s desk. Lawrence, who had known exactly what it would be, had an answer ready, prepared by his legal counselors, three of whom stood flanking him behind his chair.
He conceded that West Berlin was indeed not sovereign territory, but a city under Four Power occupation. Nevertheless, the Western Allies had long conceded that in matters of jurisprudence the West Berlin authorities should handle all criminal and civil offenses other than those falling within the ambit of the purely military laws of the Western Allies. The hijacking of the airliner, he continued, while a terrible offense, was not committed by U.S. citizens against U.S. citizens or within the U.S. air base of Tempelhof. It was therefore an affair within civil jurisprudence. In consequence, the United States government maintained, it could not legally have held non-U.S. nationals or non-U.S. material witnesses within the territory of West Berlin, even though the airliner had come to rest on a USAF air base.
He had no recourse, therefore, but to reject the Soviet protest.
The Ambassador heard him out in stony silence. He rejoined that he could not accept the American explanation, and rejected it. He would report back to his government in that vein. On this note, he left, to return to his embassy and report to Moscow.
In a small flat in Bayswater, London, three men sat that day and stared at the tangle of newspapers strewn on the floor around them.
“A disaster,” snapped Andrew Drake, “a bloody disaster. By now they should have been in Israel. Within a month they’d have been released and could have given their press conference. What the hell did they have to shoot the captain for?”
“If he was landing at Schönefeld and refused to fly into West Berlin, they were finished, anyway,” observed Azamat Krim.
“They could have clubbed him,” snorted Drake.
“Heat of the moment,” said Kaminsky. “What do we do now?”
“Can those handguns be traced?” asked Drake of Krim.
The small Tatar shook his head.
“To the shop that sold them, perhaps,” he said. “Not to me. I didn’t have to identify myself.”
Drake paced the carpet, deep in thought.
“I don’t think they’ll be extradited back,” he said at length. “The Soviets want them now for hijacking, shooting Rudenko, hitting the KGB man on board, and of course the other one they took the identity card from. But the killing of the captain is the serious offense. Still, I don’t think a West German government will send two Jews back for execution. On the other han
d, they’ll be tried and convicted. Probably sentenced to life. Miroslav, will they open their mouths about Ivanenko?”
The Ukrainian refugee shook his head.
“Not if they’ve got any sense,” he said. “Not in the heart of West Berlin. The Germans might have to change their minds and send them back after all. If they believed them, which they wouldn’t because Moscow would deny Ivanenko is dead, and produce a look-alike as proof. But Moscow would believe them, and have them liquidated. The Germans, not believing them, would offer no special protection. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’ll keep silent.”
“That’s no use to us,” pointed out Krim. “The whole point of the exercise, of all we’ve gone through, was to deal a single massive humiliating blow to the whole Soviet state apparatus. We can’t give that press conference; we don’t have the tiny details that will convince the world. Only Mishkin and Lazareff can do that.”
“Then they have to be got out of there,” said Drake with finality. “We have to mount a second operation to get them to Tel Aviv, with guarantees of their life and liberty. Otherwise it’s all been for nothing.”
“What happens now?” repeated Kaminsky.
“We think,” said Drake. “We work out a way, we plan it, and we execute it. They are not going to sit and rot their lives away in Berlin, not with a secret like that in their heads. And we have little time; it won’t take Moscow forever to put two and two together. They have their lead to follow now; they’ll know who did the Kiev job pretty soon. Then they’ll begin to plan their revenge. We have to beat them to it.”
The chilly anger of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington paled into insignificance beside the outrage of his colleague in Bonn as the Russian diplomat faced the West German Foreign Minister two days later. The refusal of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany to hand the two criminals and murderers over to either the Soviet or the East German authorities was a flagrant breach of their hitherto friendly relations and could be construed only as a hostile act, he insisted.