NORTH ATLANTIC

The JULIUS FUCIK was rolling ten degrees with a beam sea. It made life hard on the soldiers, Captain Kherov noted, but they were doing well for landsmen. His own crewmen were dangling over the sides with sprayguns, painting over the ship's Interlighter markings, preparatory to replacing them with the Lykes Lines emblem. The soldiers were cutting away parts of the superstructure to conform with the silhouette of the Doctor Lykes, a U.S.-flag Seabee carrier remarkably similar to the Fucik. The Soviet ship had been built years before in Finland's Valmet yard from plans purchased in America. Already the elevator winch area aft had been painted completely black to match the American line's house colors, and a black diamond had been painted on both sides of the superstructure. Gangs of men were changing the shape and colors of the two funnels with prefabricated parts. The hardest job remaining was the paintwork on the hull. The Interlighter markings were made of twentyfoot letters. Replacing them called for the use of canvas templates, and the lettering had to be neat and exact. Worst of all, there was no way to check the workmanship short of launching a ship's boat, something he had neither the time nor the inclination to do.

"How long, Comrade Captain?"

"Four hours at least. The work goes well." Kherov couldn't hide his concern. Here they were, mid-Atlantic, far from the usual sea lanes, but there was no telling-

"And if we are spotted by an American aircraft or ship?" General Andreyev asked.

"Then we will find out how effective our damage-control drills have been-and our mission will be a failure." Kherov ran his hand along the polished teak rail. He'd commanded this ship for six years, taken her into nearly every port on the North and South Atlantic. "We'll get some way on. The ship will ride more easily on a bow sea."

MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.

"When are you planning to leave?" Flynn asked Calloway.

"Soon, Patrick. I hope you'll be coming with me?" The unmarried children of both men were in college, and both had sent their wives west the day before.

"I don't know. I've never run away before." Flynn scowled at the empty stage at the end of the room. He had the scars to prove it. "They pay me to report the news."

"You'll be reporting no bloody news from inside Lefortovo Prison, my friend," Calloway observed. "Isn't one Pulitzer Prize enough?"

Flynn laughed. "I thought nobody but me remembered. What do you know that I don't, Willie?"

"I know I wouldn't be leaving without a damned good reason. And if it's good enough for me to leave, Patrick, it's bloody good enough for you." He'd been told only the night before that a peaceful resolution of this crisis was now less than a 50-percent probability. For the hundredth time, the Reuters correspondent blessed his decision to cooperate with the SIS.

"Here we go." Flynn took out his notepad.

The Foreign Minister entered from the usual door and moved to the lectern. He looked uncharacteristically frazzled, his suit rumpled, his shirt collar dingy, as though he'd been up all the previous night laboring to resolve the German crisis through diplomatic means. When he looked up, his eyes squinted through his reading glasses.

"Ladies and gentlemen, a year that has gone so well for East-West relations has turned to ashes in the mouths of us all. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the other nations that accepted our invitation to Vienna are within weeks of a comprehensive agreement on the control of strategic nuclear arms. America and the Soviet Union have agreed upon and implemented a grain sales agreement with unprecedented speed and cooperation, and even as we speak, deliveries are being made in Odessa on the Black Sea. Western tourism within the Soviet Union is at an alltime high, and this is perhaps the truest reflection of the spirit of detente -now our peoples are finally beginning to trust one another. All this effort, the efforts of East and West to bring about a just and lasting peace, have been brought to ruin by a handful of revanchist men who have not taken the lessons of the Second World War to heart.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Soviet Union has received irrefutable evidence that the government of the Federal Republic of Germany exploded its bomb in the Kremlin as part of a plot to bring about the reunification of Germany by force. We have in our possession classified German documents which prove that the West German government planned to bring down the Soviet government and use the resulting period of internal confusion to achieve their aim of remaking Germany into the principal continental power in Europe yet again. All Europeans know what that would mean to world peace.

"In this century, Germany has invaded my country twice. Over forty million Soviet citizens died repelling those two invasions, and we do not forget the deaths of so many millions of our fellow Europeans who were also the victims of German nationalism-Polish, Belgian, Dutch, French, English, and American men and women labored as our allies to safeguard the peace of Europe. After the Second World War, we all thought that this problem was completely at an end. Such was the reasoning behind the treaties which divided Germany and Europe into spheres of influence-remember that these spheres were ratified further by the Helsinki Accords in 1975-whose balance would serve to make a European war impossible.

"We know that the rearming of Germany by the West, supposedly a defensive measure against the imagined threat from the East-despite the fact that the Warsaw Pact was not even formed Warsaw Pact was not even formed until well after the NATO alliance was formed-was the first step in the West's own plan to unify Germany as a pawn to counterbalance the Soviet Union. That this was a foolish and unnecessary policy is now manifestly clear. I ask you if there is anyone in Europe who truly wants a unified Germany. The NATO countries themselves stopped agitating for this years ago. Except, of course, for some Germans who remember the days of German power in rather a different light from those of us who were its victims.

"The Federal Republic of Germany has evidently turned the tables on her Western allies, and plans to use the NATO alliance as a shield behind which to launch her own offensive operations, the objective of which can only upset the power balance that has safeguarded the peace in Europe for two generations. Although we can fault the West for creating this situation, the government of the Soviet Union does not-I repeat, does not-hold America or her NATO allies responsible for this. My country, too, has learned the bitter lesson that allies can turn on their supposed friends, much as a dog can turn on his master.

"The Soviet Union has no wish to cast away the dramatic progress made this year in foreign relations with the West." The Foreign Minister paused before going on. "But the Soviet Union cannot ignore, cannot set aside the fact, that a deliberate act of aggression has been made against the Soviet Union, on Soviet soil.

"The government of the Soviet Union will today deliver a note to the Bonn government. As a price of our forbearance, as a price of keeping the peace, we demand that the Bonn government immediately demobilize its army to a level consistent with maintenance of the civil peace. We further call upon the Bonn government to admit its aggressive action, to dissolve and call for new elections, so that the German people themselves may judge how well they have been served. Finally, we demand and expect that full reparations be paid to the government of the Soviet Union, and to the families of those so callously murdered by the revanchist German nationalists who hide in their city on the west bank of the Rhein. Failure to meet with these demands will have the gravest possible consequences.