The devil's alternative
The Devil's Alternative is a novel by Frederick Forsyth from the year 1979 .
action
In the spring of 1982, the Ukrainian autonomist Miroslaw Kaminski was shipwrecked in the Black Sea after the resistance movement he founded was betrayed and he had to flee Ukraine on a small boat . Shortly before his certain death, he is found by the crew of an Italian ship and seriously injured and brought unconscious to a Turkish hospital, where attempts are made to clarify his identity.
The Ukrainian sympathizer Andrew Drake found out about the unknown shipwrecked man in London through a shipping magazine and immediately traveled to Turkey .
After initial mistrust, Drake, whose real name is Andrej Drach, and Kaminski fraternize with the aim of forcibly separating Ukraine from the USSR . Both found a new group with like-minded compatriots and two Jews from Ukraine who Kaminski knows personally and who are still there. With these two, Drake, the head of the new group, tries to assassinate the KGB boss in the Ukraine in order to demonstrate to his compatriots in the Ukraine the vulnerability of the Soviet leadership and thus to trigger a revolution against Moscow .
The assassination actually succeeds, but this fact is covered up by the Soviet state and party leadership. The two Jews therefore try to get to the West with a captured Tupolev in order to bring the truth to light there. However, the machine only crash-lands in West Berlin and both are charged and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany . Thus it is not possible for them to bring the truth about the disappearance of the KGB chief to the public.
In order to free both of them, Drake and the rest of the resistance group hijacked a Norwegian oil tanker in the North Sea and threatened to blow it up off the coast of southern England if their two comrades were not released and flown to Israel .
A power struggle in the government had already broken out in the Kremlin , as the country is threatened with famine . Part of the Politburo is in favor of a war against the West to get at its grain reserves. The other part of the Politburo, led by the head of state and party, rejects a war against the West for fear of a nuclear conflict that could also lead to the annihilation of the Soviet Union. This part of the Soviet leadership favors disarmament negotiations with concessions to the West if the West supplies cheap grain to the USSR in return. The Soviet president is under pressure, however: his majority in the Politburo is extremely narrow and two of his supporters are threatening to support the war against the West in the event that the assassins are released and the murder of the KGB chief is publicly announced.
The British secret service agent Adam Munro, through his former Russian lover, who is a secretary in the Central Committee and is given the cover name "Nightingale", manages to get the minutes of the Kremlin meetings and to inform the West about these conflicts within the Soviet leadership. So Western governments are in a bind because no matter how they react, disaster will ensue. Either the demolition of the oil tanker and thus inevitably an environmental disaster in the North Sea, if the terrorists' demands are not met, or nuclear war with the USSR if the governments give in to the terrorists and the murder of the KGB chief is publicly announced.
Munro now first submits a solution for such cases to the American president, when he agrees, and also to the Soviet head of state, which is known by the British secret service as the devil's alternative . The plan provides for the murder of both the KGB chief's murderers and the men who hold the oil tanker practically at the same time. Munro takes part in both operations, he even kills the two Jews himself using poison capsules after the official announcement of their release and transfer to Israel. The remaining part of the group is killed a little later while fleeing from the oil tanker in their own boat by a British special unit on the open sea.
A third world war can be prevented as well as an enormous environmental catastrophe.
In the aftermath of the book there is a final conversation between Adam Munro and the Soviet President. Munro admits that the "Nightingale" did not hand over the minutes of the Kremlin to Munro and thus to the West of its own free will, but that he ordered this personally in order to inform the West about the power struggles in the Kremlin.
success
The book was a bestseller , with around 2 million copies printed. It was number 1 on Spiegel's bestseller list for 3 weeks in 1979 .