“Very well,” said the East German. “This is what you will do.”
Jahn was instructed to acquire from the locker of a vacationing colleague the necessary uniform and pass card. At two A.M. on the morning of Monday, April 4, he would descend to the ground floor and admit the Russian by the staff entrance from the street. He would accompany him to the top floor and hide him in the staff dayroom, to which he would acquire a duplicate key. He would cause the night duty officer on the top floor to absent himself on an errand, and take over the watch from him while he was away. During the man’s absence he would allow the Russian into the solitary-confinement corridor, lending him his passkey to both cells. When the Russian had “visited” Mishkin and Lazareff, the process would be reversed. The Russian would hide again until the duty officer returned to his post. Then Jahn would escort the Russian back to the staff entrance and let him out.
“It won’t work,” whispered Jahn, well aware that it probably would.
The Russian spoke at last, in German.
“It had better,” he said. “If it does not, I will personally ensure that your entire family begins a regime in Kolyma that will make the ‘extrastrict’ regime operating there seem like the honeymoon suite at the Kempinski Hotel.”
Jahn felt as if his bowels were being sprayed with liquid ice. None of the hard men in the “special wing” could compare with this man. He swallowed.
“I’ll do it,” he whispered.
“My friend will return here at six in the evening of Sunday, April third,” said the East German. “No reception committees from the police, if you please. It will do no good. We both have diplomatic passes in false names. We will deny everything and walk away quite freely. Just have the uniform and pass card awaiting him.”
Two minutes later they were gone. They took their photos with them. There was no evidence left It did not matter. Jahn could see every detail in his nightmares.
By March 23 over two hundred fifty ships, the first wave of the waiting merchant fleet, were docked in the major grain ports from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. There was still ice in the St. Lawrence, but it was shattered to mosaic by the icebreakers, aware of its defeat as the grain ships moved through it to berth by the grain elevators.
A fair proportion of these ships were of the Russian Sovfracht fleet, but the next largest numbers were flying the U.S. flag, for one of the conditions of the sale had been that American carriers take the prime contracts to move the grain.
Within ten days they would begin moving east across the Atlantic, bound for Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic, Leningrad at the head of the Gulf of Finland, and the warm-water ports of Odessa, Sevastopol, and Novorossisk on the Black Sea. Flags of ten other nations mingled with them to effect the biggest single dry-cargo movement since the Second World War. Elevators from Duluth to Houston spewed a golden tide of wheat, barley, oats, rye, and com into their bellies, all destined within a month for the hungry millions of Russia.
On the twenty-sixth, Andrew Drake rose from his work at the kitchen table of an apartment in the suburbs of Brussels and pronounced that he was ready.
The explosives had been packed into ten fiber suitcases, the submachine guns rolled in towels and stuffed into haversacks. Azamat Krim kept the detonators bedded in cotton in a cigar box that never left him. When darkness fell, the cargo was carried in relays down to the group’s secondhand, Belgian-registered panel van, and they set off for Blankenberge.
The little seaside resort facing the North Sea was quiet, the harbor virtually deserted, when they transferred their equipment under cover of darkness to the bilge
s of the fishing launch. It was a Saturday, and though a man walking his dog along the quay noticed them at work, he thought no more of it. Parties of sea anglers stocking up for a weekend’s fishing were common enough, even though it was a mite early in the year and still chilly.
On Sunday the twenty-seventh, Miroslav Kaminsky bade them good-bye, took the van, and drove back to Brussels. His job was to clean the Brussels flat from top to bottom and end to end, to abandon it, and to drive the van to a prearranged rendezvous in the polders of Holland. There he would leave it, with its ignition key in an agreed place, then take the ferry from the Hook back to Harwich and London. He had his itinerary well rehearsed and was confident he could carry out his part of the plan.
The remaining seven men left port and cruised sedately up the coast to lose themselves in the islands of Walcheren and North Beveland, just across the border with Holland. There, with their fishing rods much in evidence, they hove to and waited. On a powerful radio down in the cabin, Andrew Drake sat hunched, listening to the wavelength of Maas Estuary Control and the endless calls of the ships heading into or out of the Europoort and Rotterdam.
“Colonel Kukushkin is going into Tegel Jail to do the job early in the morning of April fourth,” Vassili Petrov told Maxim Rudin in the Kremlin that same Sunday morning. “There is a senior guard who will let him in, bring him to the cells of Mishkin and Lazareff, and let him out of the jail by the staff doorway when it is over.”
“The guard is reliable? One of our people?” asked Rudin.
“No, but he has family in East Germany. He has been persuaded to do as he is told. Kukushkin reports that he will not contact the police. He is too frightened.”
“Then he knows already whom he is working for. Which means he knows too much.”
“Kukushkin will silence him also, just as he steps out of the doorway. There will be no trace,” said Petrov.
“Eight days,” grunted Rudin. “He had better get it right.”
“He will,” said Petrov. “He, too, has a family. By a week from tomorrow Mishkin and Lazareff will be dead, and their secret with them. Those who helped them will keep silent to save their own lives. Even if they talk, it will be disbelieved. Mere hysterical allegations. No one will believe them.”
When the sun rose on the morning of the twenty-ninth, its first rays picked up the mass of the Freya twenty miles west of Ireland, cutting north by northeast through the eleven-degree longitude on a course to skirt the Outer Hebrides.
Her powerful radar scanners had picked up the fishing fleet in the darkness an hour before, and her officer of the watch noted them carefully. The nearest to her was well to the east, or landward side, of the tanker.
The sun glittered over the rocks of Donegal, a thin line on the eastward horizon to the men on the bridge with their advantage of eighty feet of altitude. It caught the small fishing smacks of the men from Killybegs, drifting out in the western seas for mackerel, herring, and whiting. And it caught the bulk of the Freya herself, like a moving landmass, steaming out of the south past the drifters and their gently bobbing nets.
Christy O’Byrne was in the tiny wheelhouse of the smack he and his brother owned, the Bernadette. He blinked several times, put down his cocoa mug, and stepped the three feet from the wheelhouse to the rail. His vessel was the nearest to the passing tanker.
From behind him, when they saw the Freya, the fishermen tugged on the horn lanyards, and a chorus of thin whoops disturbed the dawn. On the bridge of the Freya, Thor Larsen nodded to his junior officer; seconds later the bellowing bull roar of the Freya answered the Killybegs fleet.