“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 William 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.
“It now ranks as one possible ‘third alternative’ that no longer exists,” remarked David Lawrence, “even if Maxim Rudin had accepted it, which I doubt.”
It was one hour to midnight; lights were burning in five government departments scattered across the capital, as they burned in the Oval Office and a score of other rooms throughout the White House where men and women sat at telephones and teleprinters awaiting the news from Europe. The four men in the Oval Office settled to await the reaction from the Freya.
Doctors say three in the morning is the time when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb; it is the hour of deepest weariness, slowest reactions, and gloomiest depression. Three A.M. marked one complete cycle of the sun and moon for the two men who faced each other in the captain’s cabin of the Freya.
Neither had slept that night or the previous one; each had been forty-four hours without rest; each was drawn and red-eyed.
Thor Larsen, at the epicenter of a whirling storm of international activity, of cabinets and councils, embassies and meetings, plottings and consultations that kept the lights burning on three continents from Jerusalem to Washington, was playing his own game. He was pitting his own capacity to stay awake against the will of the fanatic who faced him, knowing that at stake if he failed were the lives of his crew and his ship.
Larsen knew that the man who called himself Svoboda, younger and consumed by his own inner fire, nerves tightened by a combination of black coffee and the tension of his gamble against the world, could have ordered the Norwegian captain to be tied up while he himself sought rest. So the bearded mariner sat facing the barrel of a gun and played on his captor’s pride, hoping that the man would take his challenge, refuse to back down, and concede defeat in the game of beating sleep.
It was Larsen who proposed the endless cups of strong black coffee, a drink he usually took with milk and sugar only two or three times a day. It was he who talked through the day and the night, provoking the Ukrainian with suggestions of eventual failure, then backing off when the man became too irritable for safety. Long years of experience, nights of yawning, gritty-mouthed training as a sea captain, had taught the bearded giant to stay awake and alert through the night watches, when the cadets drowsed and the deckhands dozed.
So he played his own solitary game, without guns or ammunition, without teleprinters or night-sight cameras, without support and without company. All the superb technology the Japanese had built into his new command was as much use as rusty nails to him now. If he pushed the man across the table too far, he might lose his temper and shoot to kill. If he were provoked too far, he could order the execution of another crewman. If he felt himself becoming too drowsy, he might have himself relieved by another, fitter terrorist while he himself took sleep and undid all that Larsen was trying to do to him.
That Mishkin and Lazareff would be released at dawn, Larsen still had reason to believe. After their safe arrival in Tel Aviv, the terrorists would prepare to quit the Freya. Or would they? Could they? Would the surrounding warships let them go so easily? Even away from the Freya, attacked by the NATO navies, Svoboda could press his button and blow the Freya apart.