On the other side of the Iron Curtain, messages out of Moscow alerted the Soviet watchers to the presence of the incoming plane. Forewarned, no fighters scrambled to intercept it. An air highway was cleared from the Gulf of Bothnia to Moscow, and the Blackbird stuck to its route.
But one fighter base had apparently not heard the warning; or hearing it, had not heeded it; or had been given a secret command from somewhere deep inside the Defense Ministry, countermanding the Kremlin’s orders.
High in the Arctic, east of Kirkenes, two Mig-25s clawed their way from the snow toward the stratosphere on an interception course. These were the 25-E versions, ultramodern, better powered and armed than the older version of the seventies and the 25-A.
They were capable of 2.8 times the speed of sound, and of a maximum altitude of eighty thousand feet. But the six Acrid air-to-air missiles that each had slung beneath its wings would roar on, another twenty thousand feet above that They were climbing on full power with afterburner, leaping upward at over ten thousand feet per minute.
The Blackbird was over Finland, heading for Lake Ladoga and Leningrad, when Colonel O’Sullivan grunted into the microphone.
“We have company.”
Munro came out of his reverie. Though he understood little of the technology of the SR-71, the small radar screen in front of him told its own story. There were two small blips on it, approaching fast.
“Who are they?” he asked, and for a moment a twinge of fear moved in the pit of his stomach. Maxim Rudin had given his personal clearance. He wouldn’t revoke it, surely. But would someone else?
Up front, Colonel O’Sullivan had his own duplicate radar scanner. He watched the speed of approach for several seconds.
“Mig-twenty-fives,” he said. “At sixty thousand feet and climbing fast. Those goddam Rooshians. Knew we should never have trusted them.”
“You turning back to Sweden?” asked Munro.
“Nope,” said the colonel. “President of the U.S. of A. said to git you to Moscow, Limey, and you are going to Moscow.”
Colonel O’Sullivan threw his two afterburners into the game; Munro felt a kick as from a mule in the base of the spine as the power increased. The Mach counter began to move upward, toward and finally through the mark representing three times the speed of sound. On the radar screen the approach of the blips slowed and halted.
The nose of the Blackbird rose slightly; in the rarefied atmosphere, seeking a tenuous lift from the weak air around her, the aircraft slid through the eighty-thousand-foot mark and kept climbing.
Below them, Major Pyotr Kuznetsov, leading the two-plane detail, pushed his two Tumansky single-shaft jet engines to the limit of performance. His Soviet technology was good, the best available, but he was producing five thousand fewer pounds of thrust with his two engines than the twin American jets above him. Moreover, he was carrying external weaponry, whose drag was acting as a brake on his speed.
Nevertheless, the two Migs swept through seventy thousand feet and approached rocket range. Major Kuznetsov armed his six missiles and snapped an order to his wingman to follow suit.
The Blackbird was nudging ninety thousand feet, and Colonel O’Sullivan’s radar told him his pursuers were over seventy-five thousand feet and nearly within rocket range. In straight pursuit they could not hold him on speed and altitude, but they were on an intercept course, cutting the corner from their flight path to his.
“If I thought they were escorts,” he said to Munro, “I’d let the bastards come close. But I just never did trust Rooshians.”
Munro was sticky with sweat beneath his thermal clothing. He had read the Nightingale file; the colonel had not.
“They’re not escorts,” he said. “They have orders to see me dead.”
“You don’t say,” came the drawl in his ear. “Goddam conspiring bastards. President of the U.S. of A. wants you alive, Limey. In Moscow.”
The Blackbird pilot threw on the whole battery of his electronic countermeasures. Rings of invisible jamming waves radiated out from the speeding black jet, filling the atmosphere for miles around with the radar equivalent of a bucket of sand in the eyes.
The small screen in front of Major Kuznetsov became a seething snowfield, like a television set when the main tube blows out. The digital display showing him he was closing with his victim and when to fire his rockets was still fifteen seconds short of firing time. Slowly it began to unwind, telling him he had lost his target somewhere up there in the freezing stratosphere.
Thirty seconds later the two hunters keeled onto their wing tips and dropped away down the sky to their Arctic base.
Of the five airports that surround Moscow, one of them, Vnukovo II, is never seen by foreigners. It is reserved for the Party elite and their fleet of jets maintained at peak readiness by the Air Force. It was here, at five A.M. local time, that Colonel O’Sullivan put the Blackbird onto Russian soil.
When the cooling jet reached the parking bay, it was surrounded by a group of officers wrapped in thick coats and fur hats, for early April is still bitter in Moscow before dawn. The Arizonan lifted the cockpit canopy on its hydraulic struts and gazed at the surrounding crowd with horror.
“Rooshians,” he breathed. “Messing all over my bird.” He unbuckled and stood up. “Hey, get your mother-loving hands off this machine, ya hear?”
Adam Munro left the desolate colonel trying to prevent the Russian Air Force from finding the flush caps leading to the refueling valves, and was whisked away in a black limousine, accompanied by two bodyguards from the Kremlin staff. In the car he was allowed to peel off his g-suit and dress again in his trousers and jacket, both of which had spent the journey rolled up between his knees and looked as if they had just been machine-washed.
Forty-five minutes later the Zil, preceded by the two motorcycle outriders who had cleared the roads into Moscow, shot through the Borovitsky Gate into the Kremlin, skirted the Great Palace, and headed for the side door to the Arsenal Building. At two minutes to six, Adam Munro was shown into the private apartment of the leader of the USSR, to find an old man in a dressing gown, nursing a cup of warm milk. He was waved to an upright chair. The door closed behind him.
“So you are Adam Munro,” said Maxim Rudin. “Now, what is this proposal from President Matthews?”
Munro sat in the straight-backed chair and looked across the desk at Maxim Rudin. He had seen him several times at state functions, but never this close. The old man looked weary and strained.
There was no interpreter present, Rudin spoke no English. In the hours while he had been in the air, Munro realized, Rudin had checked his name and knew perfectly well he was a diplomat from the British Embassy who spoke Russian.
“The proposal, Mr. Secretary-General,” Munro began in fluent Russian, “is a possible way whereby the terrorists on the supertanker Freya can be persuaded to leave that ship without having secured what they came for.”
“Let me make one thing clear, Mr. Munro. There is to be no more talk of the liberation of Mishkin and Lazareff.”
“Indeed not, sir. In fact, I had hoped we might talk of Yuri Ivanenko.”
Rudin stared back at him, face impassive. Slowly he lifted his glass of milk and took a sip.
“You see, sir, one of those two has let something slip already,” said Munro. He was forced, to strengthen his argument, to let Rudin know that he, too, was aware of what had happened to Ivanenko. But he could not indicate he had learned it from someone inside the Kremlin hierarchy, just in case Valentina was still free.
“Fortunately,” he went on, “it was to one of our people, and the matter has been taken care of.”
“Your people?” mused Rudin. “Ah, yes, I think I know who your people are. How many others know?”
“The Director General of my organization, the British Prime Minister, President Matthews, and three of his senior advisers. No one who knows has the slightest intention of revealing this for public consumption. Not the slightest.”
; Rudin seemed to ruminate for a while.
“Can the same be said for Mishkin and Lazareff?” he asked.
“That is the problem,” said Munro. “That has always been the problem since the terrorists—who are Ukrainian émigrés, by the way—stepped onto the Freya.”
“I told William Matthews, the only way out of this is to destroy the Freya. It would cost a handful of lives, but save a lot of trouble.”
“It would have saved a lot of trouble if the airliner in which those two young killers escaped had been shot down,” rejoined Munro.
Rudin looked at him keenly from under beetle eyebrows.
“That was a mistake,” he said flatly.
“Like the mistake tonight in which two MIG-twenty-fives almost shot down the plane in which I was flying?”
The old Russian’s head jerked up.
“I did not know,” he said. For the first time, Munro believed him.
“I put it to you, sir, that destroying the Freya would not work. That is, it would not solve the problem. Three days ago Mishkin and Lazareff were two insignificant escapees and hijackers, serving fifteen years in jail. Now they are already celebrities. But it is assumed their freedom is being sought for its own sake. We know different.
“If the Freya were destroyed,” Munro went on, “the entire world would wonder why it had been so vital to keep them in jail. So far, no one realizes that it is not their imprisonment that is vital, it is their silence. With the Freya, her cargo, and her crew destroyed in order to keep them in jail, they would have no further reason to stay silent. And because of the Freya, the world would believe them when they spoke about what they had done. So simply keeping them in jail is no use anymore.”
Rudin nodded slowly.
“You are right, young man,” he said. “The West Germans would give them their audience; they would have their press conference.”
“Precisely,” said Munro. “This, then, Is my suggestion.”
He outlined the same train of events that he had described to Mrs. Carpenter and President Matthews over the previous twelve hours. The Russian showed neither surprise nor horror, just interest.
“Would it work?” he asked at last.
“It has to work,” said Munro. “It is the last alternative. They have to be allowed to go to Israel.”
Rudin looked at the clock on the wall. It was past six-forty-five A.M. Moscow time. In fourteen hours he would have to face Vishnayev and the rest of the Politburo. This time there would be no oblique approach; this time the Party theoretician would put down a formal motion of no confidence. His grizzled head nodded.
“Do it, Mr. Munro,” he said. “Do it and make it work. For if it doesn’t, there will be no more Treaty of Dublin, and no more Freya, either.”
He pressed the bell push, and the door opened immediately. An immaculate major of the Kremlin praetorian guard stood there.
“I shall need to deliver two signals: one to the Americans, one to my own people,” said Munro. “A representative of each embassy is waiting outside the Kremlin walls.”
Rudin issued his orders to the guard major, who nodded and escorted Munro out. As they were passing through the doorway, Maxim Rudin called:
“Mr. Munro.”
Munro turned. The old man was as he had found him, hands cupped around his glass of milk.
“Should you ever need another job, Mr. Munro,” he said grimly, “come and see me. There is always a place here for men of talent.”
As the Zil limousine left the Kremlin by the Borovitsky Gate at seven A.M., the morning sun was just tipping the spire of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Two long black cars waited by the curb. Munro descended from the Zil and approached each in turn. He passed one message to the American diplomat and one to the British. Before he was airborne for Berlin, the instructions would be in London and Washington.
On the dot of eight o’clock the bullet nose of the SR-71 lifted from the tarmac of Vnukovo II Airport and turned due west for Berlin, a thousand miles away. It was flown by a thoroughly disgusted Colonel O’Sullivan, who had spent three hours watching his precious bird being refueled by a team of Soviet Air Force mechanics.
“Where do you want to go now?” he called through the intercom. “I can’t bring this into Tempelhof, ya know. Not enough room.”
“Make a landing at the British base at Gatow,” said Munro.
“First Rooshians, now Limeys,” grumbled the Arizonan. “Dunno why we don’t put this bird on public display. Seems everyone is entitled to have a good look at her today.”
“If this mission is successful,” said Munro, “the world may not need the Blackbird anymore.”
Colonel O’Sullivan, far from being pleased, regarded the suggestion as a disaster.
“Know what I’m going to do if that happens?” he called. “I’m going to become a goddam cabdriver. I’m sure getting enough practice.”
Far below, the city of Vilnius in Lithuania went by. Flying at twice the speed of the rising sun, they would be in Berlin at seven A.M. local time.
It was half past five on the Freya, while Adam Munro was in a car between the Kremlin and the airport, that the intercom from the bridge rang in the day cabin.
Drake answered it, listened for a while, and replied in Ukrainian. From across the table Thor Larsen watched him through half-closed eyes.
Whatever the call was, it perplexed the terrorist leader, who sat with a frown, staring at the table, until one of his men came to relieve him in the guarding of the Norwegian skipper.
Drake left the captain under the barrel of the submachine gun in the hands of his masked subordinate and went up to the bridge. When he returned ten minutes later, he seemed angry.
“What’s the matter?” asked Larsen. “Something gone wrong again?”
“The West German Ambassador on the line from The Hague,” said Drake. “It seems the Russians have refused to allow any West German jet, official or private, to use the air corridors out of West Berlin.”
“That’s logical,” said Larsen. “They’re hardly likely to assist in the escape of the two men who murdered their airline captain.”
Drake dismissed his colleague, who closed the door behind him and returned to the bridge. The Ukrainian resumed his seat.
“The British have offered to assist Chancellor Busch by putting a communications jet from the Royal Air Force at their disposal to fly Mishkin and Lazareff from Berlin to Tel Aviv.”
“I’d accept,” said Larsen. “After all, the Russians aren’t above diverting a German jet, even snooting it down and claiming an accident. They’d never dare fire on an RAF military jet in one of the air corridors. You’re on the threshold of victory; don’t throw it away for a technicality. Accept the offer.”
Bleary-eyed from weariness, slow from lack of sleep, Drake regarded the Norwegian.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “They might shoot down a German plane. In fact, I have accepted.”
“Then it’s all over but the shouting,” said Larsen, forcing a smile. “Let’s celebrate.”
He had two cups of coffee in front of him, poured while he was waiting for Drake to return. He pushed one halfway down the long table; the Ukrainian reached for it. In a well-planned operation it was the first mistake he had made. ...
Thor Larsen came at him down the length of the table with all the pent-up rage of the past fifty hours unleashed in the violence of a maddened bear.
The partisan recoiled, reached for his gun, had it in his hand and was about to fire. A fist like a log of cut spruce caught him on the left temple, flung him out of his chair and backward across the cabin floor.
Had he been less fit, he would have been out cold. He was very fit, and younger than the seaman. As he fell, the gun slipped from his hand and skittered across the floor. He came up empty-handed, fighting, to meet the charge of the Norwegian, and the pair of them went down again in a tangle of arms and legs, fragments of a shattered chair, and two broken coffee cups.
Larsen was t
rying to use his weight and strength, the Ukrainian his youth and speed. The latter won. Evading the grip of the big man’s hands, Drake wriggled free and went for the door. He almost made it; his hand was reaching for the knob when Larsen launched himself across the carpet and brought both his ankles out from under him.
The two men came up again together, a yard apart, the Norwegian between Drake and the door. The Ukrainian lunged with a foot, caught the bigger man in the groin with a kick that doubled him over. Larsen recovered, rose again, and threw himself at the man who had threatened to destroy his ship.
Drake must have recalled that the cabin was virtually soundproof. He fought in silence, wrestling, biting, gouging, kicking, and the pair rolled over the carpet amid the broken furniture and crockery. Somewhere beneath them was the gun that could have ended it all; in Drake’s belt was the oscillator, which, if the red button on it was pressed, would certainly end it all.
In fact it ended after two minutes; Thor Larsen pulled one hand free, grasped the head of the struggling Ukrainian, and slammed it into the leg of the table. Drake went rigid for half a second, then slumped limply. From just below his hairline a thin trickle of blood seeped down his forehead.
Panting with weariness, Thor Larsen raised himself from the floor and looked at the unconscious man. Carefully he eased the oscillator from the Ukrainian’s belt, held it in his left hand, and crossed to the one window in the starboard side of his cabin that was secured closed with butterfly-headed bolts. One-handed, he began to unwind them. The first one flicked open; he started on the second. A few more seconds, a single long throw, and the oscillator would sail out of the porthole, across the intervening ten feet of steel deck, and into the North Sea.
On the floor behind him, the young terrorist’s hand inched over the carpet to where his discarded gun lay. Larsen had the second bolt undone and was swinging the brass-framed window inward when Drake lined himself painfully onto one shoulder, reached around the table, and fired.
The crash of the gun in the enclosed cabin was earsplitting. Thor Larsen reeled back against the wall by the open window and looked first at his left hand, then at Drake. From the floor the Ukrainian stared back in disbelief.