December Ultimatum (7 page)

BONN

‘
The House in Bonngasse’

The little man stopped at the corner and waited for the last cars of the night to pass. It was bitterly cold but he was always telling people the desert was as cold at night as any German winter. He watched the wind spiral the snow through the yellow light of the shop windows. It stuck like glue to his coat and like ice to his eyebrows and beard. He had watched it from inside the taxi, flying at the windscreen, building up each side of the wipers until it reduced their sweeping arc and the taxi driver had stopped to scrape it away, using German words he had never heard before.

He would protest later at being dropped off here like this, alone in the snow, but the instructions over the telephone less than an hour ago had been explicit enough. ‘Stand with your back to the Rathaus,’ the voice had said, ‘and face the Marktplatz. Look left. That is Wenzlegasse. Walk three blocks and turn into Friedrichstrasse. Go another fifty metres and Bonngasse is on the right. Number thirty-five is the old house, just down from Beethoven’s.’

He remembered the German voice. ‘Once you leave the Marktplatz we’ll be around you. Our security. Not yours.’ The house in Bonngasse in the West German capital of Bonn had been famous once in its own small way, which had nothing to do with the nearness of Beethoven’s birthplace.

Fifteen years ago, an enterprising local photographer walking past it during the first fall of snow early one December evening had seen its commercial potential. He borrowed a small fir tree in a tub, bought a large wreath of fir cones and holly which he tied with a red ribbon to the old oak door and, using his own floodlights, completed a dozen colour photographs. The snow that evening was deep and fresh and it covered the steep roof of number thirty-five like great soft rolls of white dough. He was well pleased with the effect.

Later, in his studio, he superimposed another print: a carol singer he’d photographed at Christmas the year before, a small girl complete with carol sheet, lantern, bobcap and scarf. He completed his Yuletide composition with a negative from his print library, one of the Icon of Christ on the Cross taken inside Bonn’s Munster Cathedral.

This gleamed from the dark December sky above the snow-covered tiles of number thirty-five.

Suitably mounted, it earned him an immediate profit and a contract for it to be reprinted in its thousands as Christmas cards. For a while the seventeenth-century house in Bonngasse, one of the very few escapees of the Allied bomber blitz, was famous and people came to take their own snaps. It became almost a place of pilgrimage, though visitors left disappointed because number thirty-five looked drab without the snow, without the holly and the red ribbon, without the little caroller and Christ in the dark December sky watching her. It looked vulgar in daylight, wedged between a sex shop and a coin-operated washerette, facing a used-car lot.

No one ever discovered the little girl’s name, despite searches by national model agencies, but as it happened she later became very well-known in West Germany. This, however, had nothing to do with singing or Christmas or Christ. The pretty child grew up with a fierce dedication to international anarchy and the ability to kill very efficiently in its cause. She was also extremely lithe, with a body and a face men considered beautiful and desirable.

Anna Birgit Schneider joined the Baader-Meinhoff terrorists late. Already Fraulein Ulrike Meinhoff had killed herself in defeat in her solitary confinement cell. And Andreas Baader and his mistress Gudrin Ensslin had followed with double suicides in Stammheim. Anna Schneider then joined Verone Becker, Jorg Kranz, Wolfgang Hüber and Hanna-Glise Krobbe, collectively known as the Red Army Faction, a confused, desperate and lethal gang of young middle-class anarchists.

For more than a year, Anna’s identity and membership of the Red Army Faction was not known to the West German police. She had grown up in a middle-class, inconspicuous district of Bonn, respectably, as befits the only daughter of widower Johann Schneider, Doctor of Medicine. Her lack of a police record was valuable to those in charge of the Red Army Faction who were working on the inside of it and to those lawyers and other young anonymous professionals promoting its aims on the outside. Schneider was used as a go-between, crossing international borders freely, carrying passports, letters, poisons, munitions, replacement spares for the Red Army’s weapons, from one underground cell to another. And returning cash to the suppliers.

But the job as courier was frustrating to the young ambitious Anna. It was not enough for her to be assistant in the organisation. She was twenty-two years old and desperate for terrorist activity.

Her opportunity came on the fourteenth of July, 1979. Three Red Army members preparing to leave their apartment in the dock area of Hamburg to rob the Deutsche Bank in Jungfernsteg came face to face with three men of the Zielfahndung
GS10,
the West German Police Target Squad, who shot the three young terrorists—two boys and a girl—through their faces at a range of two metres as they left the front door of their hideaway, their weapons still in their holdalls. The sudden deaths were a great encouragement to the West German counter-terrorist units and a blow to the Red Army, but the bank had still to be robbed and three replacements were quickly assembled. Anna Schneider, caressing her newly-acquired Tokarev pistol, was one. Seven hundred thousand Deutschmarks were taken from the cashiers but then, even though the two others were on their way out of the front door, Anna shot dead two of the cashiers and a mother and her child lying face down on the floor. And she dropped her father’s visiting-card by the bodies. Never again would she spend her time carrying messages. As of that day, in that one obscene act of terror, she became West Germany’s most wanted terrorist and—in the logic of terrorism—the Red Army’s most prized possession.

She had now come to thirty-five Bonngasse, but for one evening only. Fifteen years before, she had collected dozens of the famous Christmas cards and so had her father; it had been their secret. If Anna now recognized the house, she did not show it. She sat on the bare, stained mattress in the bedroom on the first floor, a sleeping-bag tied up to her waist to keep her warm, polishing her small black Tokarev pistol with a piece of mutton-cloth. Anna Schneider, now twenty-seven years old, graduate of Leipzig University, disciple of Marcuse, Guevara, Morighelles and Habash, was waiting for a knock on the street door, a loud knock. She was waiting for someone who could tell her about a place called Ullswater in what was known as the Lake District of northern England, where King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was staying and where he was to be assassinated.

Schneider took off her gloves and from the breast pocket of her anorak pulled out a small silencer, screwed it carefully on to the barrel of the gun, placed the pistol on her lap, covered it with the sleeping-bag and waited for the Arab.

At that moment, three thousand miles away East in the Persian Gulf, an assault ship of the United States Navy began to change course in a slow three-mile-wide turning circle. Men aboard shielded their eyes from the low yellowing evening sun and felt the coolness on their faces as they turned into the breeze. The
USS
Okinawa,
seventeen- thousand-ton veteran, had completed its goodwill visit to the Gulf and was obeying a signal from the
US
Naval Headquarters in the Pentagon, Washington, to make a new course south east, out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, into the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.

PERSIAN GULF

‘They’re trying another Cuba’

Their faces were green and blank and entirely without contour, lacking the third dimension. Their eyes were wide and unblinking as if witnessing some dreadful evil.

The room was dark except for the luminous glare of the radar screens. It was also hot and humid, and the green faces glistened with sweat. The low hum of the ship’s generators was the only sound.

The five men stood still. Occasionally one would ease his weight from one foot to the other, or lean forward to see the tiny moving blobs as the radar scanners swept clockwise around their dials, and each man in turn, every few minutes or so, would check his own wristwatch against the quartz digital above the main radar consul.

All five wore the light khaki uniforms of officers of the United States Navy—tropical dress—short-sleeved shirts, open necks. They stood in line behind the radar operators, or rather they stood at a slight angle, one slightly behind the other, as if service discipline made it necessary to stand a half-step behind one’s superior officer, it being assumed leadership meant always being a half a step ahead.

Captain Edward James Hanks therefore stood furthest forward, nearest the radar screens. He had been in command of the
Okinawa
for nine and a half years and it was his last sea command. In four months’ time he would take shore-leave and then a posting to Annapolis Naval College, Maryland pending his retirement from the
US
Navy, after forty-two years in the service. Life had come full circle. He had been fresh out of Annapolis on his first overseas posting as a ensign aboard the
West Virginia
and had come as close as he had ever been to losing his sea-legs and his life when a Japanese Nakajima torpedo-bomber took the side out of the bunk-room as he was sleeping off a night watch at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor.

Captain Hanks survived four years of the war in the Pacific. He was junior Gunnery Officer aboard the carrier
Yorktown
, had taken shrapnel in his back during the battle of the Midway and was with the
Enterprise
when McClusky went after Yamamoto. He wore the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Navy Achievement Medal and a breastful more.

He took command of the
Okinawa
in February, 1975, two months before the fall of Saigon. It was from this twenty- one-year-old assault ship he’d been given, forty miles out in the South China Sea, that task force helicopters took off for the
US
Embassy to bring refugees from defeated South Vietnam back aboard, thousands of Vietnamese who filled the
Okinawa
from bow to stern—living in their own stench and urine in the semi-dark of the hangars sixty feet below sea level as the ship steamed slowly to the Philippines and the promised New World beyond that.

Captain Hanks could still smell them, even though the hangars had been steam-hosed and disinfected many times over since. On tropical nights, when the air maintenance crews opened the doors to the lift shafts going down from the carrier’s deck and the air was still and warm, Captain Hanks could smell the stench rising and he would not eat his food and would refuse his coffee, and he would stand on the bridge in silence holding a clean white handkerchief soaked in aftershave to his nose.

And if a sudden breeze should come off the sea, Captain Hanks would hear coming up through the lift shafts the screams of young women, the coughs of consumptive old men and the cries of orphaned babies, and he would leave the bridge suddenly and go to his cabin to escape the ghosts of that miserable human cargo of that miserable American war.

Captain Hanks had many strange ways. His officers said he had been too long at sea and had survived more than his fair share of it, though it was not something he would admit to himself or hear from others.

His daily cliché was ‘Workhorses are sent out to graze too early’—a reference, in case any one of his officers should forget, that he was only fifty-five years old, fit and with experience at sea second to none. And yet, despite it, he was being sent ashore before his time. The prospect had been with him all his sea life, yet it had always seemed so distant. Retirement was for old men, and he was not old.

It was the day he received the signal from Norfolk Virginia, telling him the date of the
Okinawa’s
scrapping that Captain Hanks suddenly realized it would soon all be over. According to successive medical examinations, he had been told he could expect to live another twenty years at least— and he knew that meant twenty years on land, alone.

He had never married and he had been an only son, so there were no nephews, no nieces, no grandchildren. Forty- two years in the service and never in one place long enough for a man so introverted to have time enough to make a friend. Not one. Without his ship, Captain Hanks would be on his own. Already he felt retired, and more and more he retreated into the past. He would stand silently on
Okinawa’s
bridge, and relive Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese
KATE’s
dive-bombing that early December Sunday morning. Sometimes he would touch the shrapnel scars at the base of his back, tracing the ridges of thick skin of the badly sewn-up wounds, and remember the
Yorktown
lurching with the shock of the torpedo blasts and seeing his own blood mingling with the ship’s oil as he floundered half-conscious in the water.

And that glorious morning in June as he had watched Lt Commander McClusky take off from the deck of the carrier
Enterprise
to attack Yamamoto’s fleet. He remembered it all so fondly, those first days of victory in the Midway and the glory that attached itself to every man who fought there. Captain Hanks wore his service ribbons proudly and in these silent moods of remembrance and depression he would finger them, each one a separate gilt chapter of his long sea life.

The
Okinawa
had been anchored for three days off the Island of Bahrain as part of a ‘showing-the-flag’ tour of the Gulf States. The ship had been to Kuwait and was now sailing south-east to move through the narrow Straits of Hormuz into the Gulf of Oman for a two-day stay at the friendly port of Muscat. Captain Hanks would then take the carrier into the Arabian Sea, sailing further south into the India Ocean for a visit to Berbera in Somalia and on to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. Then he would move into the commercial shipping lanes, past Madagascar, around the tip of South Africa at the Cape of Good Hope and into the Southern Atlantic. Then to the west coast of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea for a stop at Monrovia in Liberia. Finally he would head his ship due west for the final three thousand five hundred miles of Atlantic crossing to Newport, Norfolk Virginia, to the scrapyard of his career.

He watched the sweeping arm of the radar scanner pick up the small blobs and smear them as it swept on. In the last twenty minutes he had been in the operations room they had not seemed to move, but the radar operator sitting in front of him reported they had travelled one hundred and twenty- five nautical miles since they had first appeared during the night watch.

‘Heading three hundred and fifteen degrees.’

‘Bastards.’

‘Sir?’

‘I said bastards, coming this close at this time. Simple provocation.’

‘But we’re here, sir.’

Captain Hanks knew Lieutenant Ginsberg to be a Jew, a liberal and provocative, and he ignored him.

‘I mean maybe they’re coming, sir, because we’re here,’ said Ginsberg, but the Captain still did not answer.

The dots on the screen had become more distinctive now, showing the formation of a triangle, the apex forward, each dot a similar distance from the next.

‘Still eighteen knots?’

‘Yes, Captain. Bearing and speed constant.’

‘Assume they’re making for Hormuz. How soon?’

‘One moment, sir.’ The radar operator reached across with his right hand and began typing on the keys of the computer. Almost immediately the answer showed up in red digits on the computer screen for everyone to see. Calculating that speed and bearing remained constant and predicting tide and wind change, the Soviet Seventh Fleet, led by the aircraft carrier
Minsk
—thirty-eight thousand tons and the pride of the Soviet Navy—accompanied by the thirteen- thousand ton assault ship
Ivan Rogov
and a flotilla of twenty other warships of various tonnage and capability, would be crossing the Tropic of Cancer and beginning their turn towards the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf in nine hours and ten minutes time.

Captain Hanks swore. ‘Fucking provocation. With a rebellion going full steam in Saudi Arabia, and sending them in here now. Sheer goddamned fucking provocation.’ Lieutenant Vaduz,
Okinawa
’s
Communications Officer, coughed. ‘The latest satellite surveillance, sir, confirms twenty-two vessels. They’re photo-wiring the pictures at this time, sir.’

‘It’s not photographs I need, Mr Vaduz, it’s an order. I know what the mother-fuckers look like. In nine hours I’ll be surrounded by twenty-two Russian warships and I want to know in good time—good time, mind you—what I’m expected to do.’

‘We must assume, sir,’ said Lieutenant Ginsberg, ‘that they mean to anchor somewhere in the south of the Gulf. There’s nothing north for them. So to avoid confrontation we need only change course a few degrees south.’

‘You assume, Mr Ginsberg?’ said Captain Hanks through his teeth. ‘Only a few degrees south, for Chrissake? I am here on a goodwill visit, a peaceable tour and well advertised as such. I have my signal to exit and I have set my course and I do not intend to change my mind or my bearing, if there were a hundred Soviet ships out there!’

‘The
Minsk
is equipped with torpedoes, and Forger vertical take-offs, sir, and the
Ivan Rogov
has a battalion strength of Marines aboard with support helos and Sam-2 or Sam-4 missiles.’

‘Why do you pick this exact moment to tell me that, Mr Vaduz? You assume I know nothing about two of the best ships in the enemy’s navy?’

‘With respect, sir, I simply remind you that this is the largest and best equipped naval task force the Soviets have ever sent to the Persian Gulf.’

‘And?’

‘Well, sir, according to my logs on all signals received from
SATCOM,
three days ago the
Minsk
and the
Ivan Rogov
were refuelling at Aden, South Yemen.’

‘For warm-water exercises in the Gulf of Oman,’ said Captain Hanks. ‘So?’

‘Sir, if the computer prediction is correct, they must have been ordered to leave their exercise area fourteen hours ago, which means—’

‘Which means,’ interrupted Commander Daniels,
Okinawa
’s
Executive Officer, ‘that the Soviet Seventh Fleet was ordered to the Persian Gulf before the Saudi coup had begun.’

The Captain’s eyes narrowed as he absorbed the arithmetic and its implications. The arms of the radar sweep on the green screens had made another seven turns before he spoke again, and so slowly and so softly that the officers at his side had to lean forward to hear and wonder later whether they had heard it correctly.

‘They’re trying another Cuba,’ he said. ‘On another Kennedy. By Christ they are. And this time they may even make it.’