“Sure,” said the pilot laconically.
“Where are we now?”
“Over the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” said O’Sullivan, “heading for Newfoundland.”
“How many miles to Moscow?”
“From Andrews, four thousand eight hundred fifty-six miles.”
“How long for the flight?”
“Three hours and fifty minutes.”
Munro calculated. They had taken off at six P.M. Washington time, eleven P.M. European time. That would be one A.M. in Moscow on Sunday, April 3. They would touch down at around five A.M. Moscow time. If Rudin agreed to his plan, and the Blackbird could bring him back to Berlin, they would gain two hours by flying the other way. There was just time to make Berlin by dawn.
They had been flying for just under one hour when Canada’s last landfall at Cape Harrison drifted far beneath them and they were over the cruel North Atlantic, bound for the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.
“Mr. President Rudin, please hear me out,” said William Matthews. He was speaking earnestly into a small microphone on his desk, the so-called hot line, which in fact is not a telephone at all. From an amplifier to one side of the microphone, the listeners in the Oval Office could hear the mutter of the simultaneous translator speaking in Russian into Rudin’s ear in Moscow.
“Maxim Andreevich, I believe we are both too old in this business, that we have worked too hard and too long to secure peace for our peoples, to be frustrated and cheated at this late stage by a gang of murderers on a tanker in the North Sea.”
There was silence for a few seconds; then the gruff voice of Rudin came on the line, speaking in Russian. By the President’s side a young aide from the State Department rattled off the translation in a low voice.
“Then, William, my friend, you must destroy the tanker, take away the weapon of blackmail, for I can do no other than I have done.”
Bob Benson shot the President a warning look. There was no need to tell Rudin the West already knew the real truth about Ivanenko.
“I know this,” said Matthews into the mike. “But I cannot destroy the tanker, either. To do so would destroy me. There may be another way. I ask you with all my heart to receive this man who is even now airborne from here and heading for Moscow. He has a proposal that may be the way out for us both.”
“Who is this American?” asked Rudin.
“He is not American, he is British,” said President Matthews. “His name is Adam Munro.”
There was silence for several moments. Finally the voice from Russia came back grudgingly.
“Give my staff the details of his flight plan—height, speed, course. I will order that his airplane be allowed through, and will receive him personally when he arrives. Spakoinyo notch, William.”
“He wishes you a peaceful night, Mr. President,” said the translator.
“He must be joking,” said William Matthews. “Give his people the Blackbird’s flight path, and tell Blackbird to proceed on course.”
On board the Freya, it struck midnight. Captives and captors entered their third and last day. Before another midnight struck, Mishkin and Lazareff would be in Israel, or the Freya and all aboard her would be dead.
Despite his threat to choose a different cabin, Drake was confident there would be no night attack from the Marines, and elected to stay where he was.
Thor Larsen faced him grimly across the table in the day cabin. For both men the exhaustion was almost total. Larsen, fighting back the waves of weariness that tried to force him to place his head in his arms and go to sleep, continued his solo game of seeking to keep Svoboda awake, too, pinpricking the Ukrainian to make him reply.
The surest way of provoking Svoboda, he had discovered, the surest way of making him use up his last remaining reserve of nervous energy, was to draw the conversation to the question of Russians.
“I don’t believe in your popular uprising, Mr. Svoboda,” he said. “I don’t believe the Russians will ever rise against their masters in the Kremlin. Bad, inefficient, brutal they may be; but they have only to raise the specter of the foreigner, and they can rely on that limitless Russian patriotism.”
For a moment it seemed the Norwegian might have gone too far. Svoboda’s hand closed over the butt of his gun; his face went white with rage.
“Damn and blast their patriotism!” he shouted, rising to his feet “I am sick and tired of hearing Western writers and liberals go on and on about this so-called marvelous Russian patriotism.
“What kind of patriotism is it that can feed only on the destruction of other pe
ople’s love of homeland? What about my patriotism, Larsen? What about the Ukrainians’ love for their enslaved homeland? What about Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians? Are they not allowed any patriotism? Must it all be sublimated to this endless and sickening love of Russia?