He ground a cigarette under his heel into the tar of the roof, and looked again at the empty horizon.
“You poor bastards,” he said, “you poor bloody bastards. If only they’d listened.”
IF THE REACTION of the media to the 0900 transmission had been muted and speculative, due to the uncertainty of the reliability of their informants, the reaction to the 1200 broadcast was frantic.
From twelve o’clock onward there was no doubt whatever what had happened to the Freya, or what had been said by Captain Larsen on his radiotelephone to Maas Control. Too many people had been listening.
Banner headlines that had been available for the noon editions of the evening papers, prepared at ten A.M., were swept away. Those that went to press at twelve-thirty were stronger in tone and size. There were no more question marks at the ends of sentences. Editorial columns were hastily prepared, specialist correspondents in matters of shipping and the environment required to produce instant assessments within the hour.
Radio and television programs were interrupted throughout Europe’s Friday lunch hour to beam the news to listeners and viewers.
On the dot of five past twelve, a man in a motorcyclist’s helmet, with goggles and scarf drawn around the lower part of the face, had walked calmly into the lobby of 85 Fleet Street and deposited an envelope addressed to the news editor of the Press Association. No one later recalled the man; dozens of such messengers walk into that lobby every day.
By twelve-fifteen the news editor was opening the envelope. It contained a transcript of the statement read by Captain Larsen fifteen minutes earlier, though it must have been prepared well before that. The news editor reported the delivery to his editor in chief, who told the Metropolitan Police. That did not stop the text from going straight onto the wires, both of the PA and their cousins upstairs, Reuters, who put out the text across the world.
Leaving Fleet Street, Miroslav Kaminsky dumped his helmet, goggles, and scarf in a garbage can, took a taxi to Heathrow Airport, and boarded the two-fifteen plane for Tel Aviv.
By two P.M. the editorial pressure on both the Dutch and West German governments was beginning to build up. Neither had had any time to consider in peace and quiet the reactions they should make to the demands. Both governments began to receive a flood of phone calls urging them to agree to release Mishkin and Lazareff rather than face the disaster promised by the destruction of the Freya off their coasts.
By one o’clock the West German Ambassador to The Hague was speaking directly to his Foreign Minister in Bonn, Klaus Hagowitz, who interrupted the Chancellor at his desk lunch. The text of the 1200 broadcast was already in Bonn, once from the BND intelligence service and once on the Reuters teleprinter. Every newspaper office in Germany also had the text from Reuters, and the telephone lines to the Chancellery Press Office were jammed with calls.
At one-forty-five the Chancellery put out a statement to the effect that an emergency cabinet meeting had been called for three o’clock to consider the entire situation. Ministers canceled their plans to leave Bonn for the weekend. Lunches were ill-digested.
The governor of Tegel Jail put down his telephone at two minutes past two with a certain deference. It was not often the Federal Republic’s Justice Minister cut clean through the protocol of communicating with the Governing Mayor of West Berlin and called him personally.
He picked up the internal phone and gave an order to his secretary. Doubtless the Berlin Senate would be in contact in due course with the same request, but so long as the Governing Mayor was out of touch at lunch somewhere, he would not refuse the Minister from Bonn.
Three minutes later, one of his senior prison officers entered the office.
“Have you heard the two o’clock news?” asked the governor.
It was only five past two. The officer pointed out that he had been on his rounds when the Weeper in his breast pocket buzzed, requiring him to go straight to a wall phone and check in. No, he had not heard the news. The governor told him of the noon demand of the terrorists on board the Freya. The officer’s jaw dropped open.
“One for the book, isn’t it?” said the governor. “It looks as if we shall be in the news within minutes. So, batten down the hatches. I’ve given orders to the main gate: no admissions by anyone other than staff. All press inquiries to the authorities at City Hall.
“Now, as regards Mishkin and Lazareff. I want the guard on that floor, and particularly in that corridor, trebled. Cancel free periods to raise enough staff. Transfer all other prisoners in that corridor to other cells or other levels. Seal the place. A group of intelligence people are flying in from Bonn to ask them who their friends in the North Sea are. Any questions?”
The prison officer swallowed and shook his head.
“Now,” resumed the governor, “we don’t know how long this emergency will last. When were you due off duty?”
“Six o’clock tonight, sir.”
“Returning on Monday morning at eight?”
“No, sir. On Sunday night at midnight. I go on the night shift next week.”
“I’ll have to ask you to work right on through,” said the governor. “Of course, well make up the time to you later with a generous bonus. But I’d like you right on top of the job from here on. Agreed?”
“Yes, sir. Whatever you say. I’ll get on with it now.”
The governor, who liked to adopt a comradely attitude with his staff, came around the desk and clapped the man on the shoulder.
“You’re a good fellow, Jahn. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
Squadron Leader Mark Latham stared down the runway, heard his takeoff clearance from the control tower, and nodded to his copilot. The younger man’s gloved hand eased the four throttles slowly open; in the wing roots, four Rolls-Royce Spey engines rose in pitch to push out forty-five thousand pounds of thrust, and the Nimrod Mark 2 climbed away from the RAF station at Kinross and turned southeast from Scotland toward the North Sea and the Channel.
What the thirty-one-year-old squadron leader of Coastal Command was flying he knew to be about the best aircraft for submarine and shipping surveillance in the world. With its crew of twelve, improved power plants, performance, and surveillance aids, the Nimrod could either skim the waves at low level, slow and steady, listening on electronic ears to the sounds of underwater movement, or cruise at altitude, hour after hour, two engines shut down for fuel economy, observing an enormous area of ocean beneath it.
Its radars would pick up the slightest movement of a metallic substance down there on the water’s surface; its cameras could photograph by day and night; it was unaffected by storm or snow, hail or sleet, fog or wind, light or dark. Its Data Link computers could process the received information, identify what it saw for what it was, and transmit the whole picture, in visual or electronic terms, back to base or to a Royal Navy vessel tapped into the Data Link.