It was the Foreign Minister, Dmitri Rykov, who carried the others in the moderate faction.
“What we have gained,” he said, “is the assured sale to us, at last July’s reasonable prices, of fifty-five million tons of grains. Without them we face disaster on a national scale. Besides, we have nearly three billion dollars’ worth of the most modern technology, in consumer industries, computers, and oil production. With these we can master the problems that have beset us for two decades, and conquer them within five years.
“Against this we have to offset certain minimal concessions in arms levels and states of preparedness, which, I stress, will in no way at all hinder or retard our capacity to dominate the Third World and its raw-material resources inside the same five years. From the disaster that faced us last May, we have emerged triumphant, thanks to the inspired leadership of Comrade Maxim Rudin. To reject this treaty now would bring us back to last May, but worse: the last of our 1982 harvest grains will run out in sixty days.”
When the meeting voted on the treaty terms, which was in fact a vote on the continuing leadership of Maxim Rudin, the six-to-six tie remained intact.
“There’s only one thing that can bring him down now,” said Vishnayev with quiet finality to Marshal Kerensky in the former’s limousine as they drove home that evening. “If something serious happens to sway one or two of his faction before the treaty is ratified. If not, the Central Committee will approve the treaty on the Politburo’s recommendation, and it will go through. If only it could be proved that those two damned Jews in Berlin killed Ivanenko. ...”
Kerensky was less than his blustering self. Privately he was beginning to wonder if he had chosen the wrong side. Three months ago it had looked so certain that Rudin would be pushed too far, too fast, by the Americans and would lose his crucial support at the green baize table. But Kerensky was committed to Vishnayev now; there would be no massive Soviet maneuvers in East Germany in two months, and he had to swallow that.
“One other thing,” said Vishnayev. “If it had appeared six months ago, the power struggle would be over by now. I heard news from a contact out at the Kuntsevo clinic. Maxim Rudin is dying.”
“Dying?” repeated the Defense Minister. “When?”
“Not soon enough,” said the Party theoretician. “He’ll live to carry the day over this treaty, my friend. Time is running out for us, and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless the Ivanenko affair can yet blow up in his face.”
As he was speaking, the Freya was steaming through the Sunda Strait. To her port side lay Java Head, and far to starboard the great mass of the volcano Krakatau reared toward the night sky. On the darkened bridge a battery of dimly lit instruments told Thor Larsen, the senior officer of the watch, and the junior officer all they needed to know. Three separate navigational systems correlated their findings into the computer, set in the small room aft of the bridge, and those findings were dead accurate. Constant compass readings, true to within half a second of a degree, cross-checked themselves with the stars above, unchanging and unchangeable. Man’s artificial stars, the all-weather satellites, were also monitored and the resultant findings fed into the computer. Here the memory banks had absorbed tide, wind, undercurrents, temperatures, and humidity levels. From the computer, endless messages were flashed automatically to the gigantic rudder, which, far below the stern transom, flickered with the sensitivity of a fish’s tail.
High above the bridge, the two radar scanners whirled unceasingly, picking up coasts and mountains, ships and buoys, feeding them all into the computer, which processed this information, too, ready to activate its hazard-alarm device at the first hint of danger. Beneath the water, the echo sounders relayed a three-dimensional map of the seabed far below, while from the bulbous bow section the forward sonar scanner looked ahead and down into the black waters. For the Freya, elapsed time from full-ahead to crash-stop would be thirty minutes, and she would cover three to four kilometers. She was that big.
Before dawn she had cleared the narrows of Sunda and her computers had turned her northwest along the hundred-fathom line to cut south of Sri Lanka for the Arabian Sea.
Two days later, on February 12, eight men grouped themselves in the apartment Azamat Krim had rented in a suburb of Brussels. The five newcomers had been summoned by Drake, who long ago had noted them all, met and spoken with them long into the night, before deciding that they, too, shared his dream of striking a blow against Moscow. Two of the five were German-born Ukrainians, scions of the large Ukrainian community in the Federal Republic. One was an American from New York, also of a Ukrainian father, and the other two were Ukrainian-British.
When they heard what Mishkin and Lazareff had done to the head of the KGB, there was a babble of excited comment When Drake proposed that the operation could not be completed until the two partisans were free and safe, no one dissented. They talked through the night, and by dawn they had split into four teams of two.
Drake and Kaminsky would return to England to buy the necessary electronic equipment that Drake estimated he required. One of the Germans would partner one of the Englishmen and return to Germany to seek out the explosives they needed. The other German, who had contacts in Paris, would take the other Englishman to find and buy, or steal, the weaponry. Azamat Krim took his fellow North American to seek a motor launch. The American, who had worked in a boatyard in upper New York State, reckoned he knew what he wanted.
Eight days later in the tightly guarded courtroom attached to Moabit Prison in West Berlin, the trial of Mishkin and Lazareff started. Both men were silent and subdued in the dock as, within concentric walls of security from the barbed-wire entanglements atop the perimeter walls to the armed guards scattered all over the courtroom, they listened to the charges. The list took ten minutes to read. There was an audible gasp from the packed press benches when both men pleaded guilty to all charges. The state prosecutor rose to begin his narration of the events of New Year’s Eve to the panel of judges. When he had finished, the judges adjourned to discuss the sentence.
The Freya moved slowly and sedately through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. The breeze had freshened with the sunrise into the chilly shamal wind coming into her nose from the northwest, sand-laden, causing the horizon to be hazy and vague. Her crew all knew this landscape well enough, having passed many times on their way to collect crude oil from the Gulf. They were all experienced tanker-men.
To one side of the Freya, barren, arid Qeshm Island slid by, barely two cables away; to the other, the officers on the bridge could make out the bleak moonscape of Cape Musandam, with its sheer rocky mountains. The Freya was riding high, and the depth in the channel presented no problems. On the return, when she was laden with crude oil, it would be different. She would be almost shut down, moving slowly, watch officer’s eyes riveted on her depth sounder, watching the map of the seabed pass barely a few feet beneath her keel, ninety-eight feet below the waterline.
She was still in ballast, as she had been all the way from Chita. She had sixty giant tanks or holds, three abreast in lines of twenty, fore to aft. One of these was the slop tank, to be used for nothing else but gathering the slops from her fifty crude-carrying cargo tanks. Nine were permanent ballast tanks, to be used for nothing but pure seawater to give her stability when she was empty of cargo.