The Devil’s Alternative – Frederick Forsyth, 1979 ★★★½

Doomsday on the North Atlantic

While the world keeps turning on the same axis, old problems persist. Back in 1979, subjects of popular dread included Russo-Ukrainian conflict, high seas piracy and a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe.

They even wrote best-selling thrillers about them.

After a five-year break, spy fiction master Frederick Forsyth was back with a twist. This time he was Tom Clancy, even though it was the 1970s and no one had heard of Clancy yet. The Devil’s Alternative is a Cold War cliffhanger set on a global scale with a variety of players conducting their own intrigues that feed into the overall plot.

The novel seems almost forgotten today, perhaps because it was set in what was then the immediate future and is now a distant past, spotlighting thinly veiled stand-ins for Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher. But The Devil’s Alternative is still gripping.

While a grain mishap threatens the U. S. S. R. with national famine, a British spy is contacted by a former lover. She holds transcripts of secret Politburo meetings. It is revealed several ranking Soviet leaders are acting to use the crisis as justification to topple their moderate leader and launch a full-scale invasion of Western Europe. They believe the U. S. will do nothing; why would Uncle Sam risk Armageddon for Paris?

David Lawrence, the U. S. Secretary of State, recommends giving up grain for arms: “There is a parallel here with the Japanese position forty years ago. The oil embargo caused the fall of the moderate Konoye faction. Instead, we got General Tojo, and that led to Pearl Harbor. If Maxim Rudin is toppled now, we could get Yefrem Vishnayev in his place. And on the basis of these papers, that could lead to war.”

A Soviet wheat harvest, circa 1973. In The Devil's Alternative, an overdose of fungicide on crop dressing reduces the entire Russian harvest by about two-thirds. To forestall famine, Kremlin hardliners recommend a first-strike attack on western Europe.
Image from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-21/soviet-era-grain-record-seen-tumbling-on-bumper-russian-harvest?embedded-checkout=true

This looming crisis is brought to a flashpoint when the world’s largest tanker, bearing a million tons of oil, is hijacked just off Amsterdam. The hijackers are Ukrainian partisans, who want to humiliate the Russian regime and force global attention on their plight.

As the partisan leader explains to the captain of the captured Freya: “That’s my advantage: within a hundred-mile radius of us here, there is no one else who loves something more than his life.”

Forsyth explains: People were concerned about airliners because they could crash on houses, but not about tankers, which travelled out of sight of land. So the politicians had not insisted, and the merchants had not volunteered. Now, because supertankers could be taken as easily as piggy banks, a captain and his crew of twenty-nine might die like rats in a swirl of oil and water.

Forsyth the detail maven is back in force in this one, explaining everything from North Sea tidal currents to the inner workings of the KGB to the flight of an SR-71 Blackbird supersonic jet. It can be exhausting, but also immersive, especially when delivered with Forsyth’s narrative talent for dispatch and dry authority.

The plot of The Devil's Alternative begins and ends with a ship. In the beginning, it is a humble freighter, a "rust bucket" named the Garabaldi which rescues a Ukrainian refugee adrift on the North Atlantic, setting in motion the rest of the book. Above, a freighter off Hamburg, circa 1980.
Photo by Wolfgang Fricke from https://www.shipspotting.com/photos/3344577

What The Devil’s Alternative lacks in comparison to most of his books, even lesser ones, is a linear plot. Instead, a reader must juggle a dozen subplots trying to keep focus on what is essential and what is merely diverting. This makes for a challenging first half:

·       In the Politburo, Maxim Rudin doles out ready punishment to underlings and adversaries alike, knowing his time is short to prevent an overthrow by more militant elements of his cabinet.

·       In the White House, President William Matthews sees a chance to bring terms to the Russians that will mean a less threatening balance of power for the West and a better legacy for himself.

·       Ukrainian partisan Andriy Drach understands just how a successful assassination, and the exposure of that assassination to the West, could cause the sort of chaos from whence revolution comes.

·       Norwegian sea captain Thor Larsen just loves his job, his family, and the chance to pilot the world’s newest, largest tanker, little dreaming what awaits him off the Dutch coast.

The TI Asia, today one of the largest oil tankers in the world, has but half the capacity of the fictional Freya. The Freya's Swedish owner is left heavily in debt, but optimistic he can recoup much of his investment after one voyage.
Image from https://www.wartsila.com/encyclopedia/term/ultra-large-crude-carrier-hellespont-alhambra

There is also an East German prison guard whose family is threatened if he doesn’t help commit a murder, a Special Boat Service commander who faces certain death if his team can’t reach the bombs aboard the tanker in time, and enough story ideas to fill a dozen paperbacks.

The least gripping element of the story, perhaps not so oddly, is the romance between the spy, Adam Munro, and the Russian woman he left behind. She is asked to risk her life multiple times in order to bring vital intelligence to the West. Amid banal banter about love and risk and family commitments, you just wonder how she still isn’t caught.

The most vividly enjoyable part of the book is set in the Kremlin. Forsyth paints a vividly detailed portrait of how the place operates. Rudin wonders which one of his comrades is going to pull a “Suslov” on him, forcing his abdication the same way Khrushchev got axed. He sits at the head of the table, chain-smoking cigarettes that have already all but killed him, listening forlornly as his agricultural minister explains how the summer grain got poisoned, wondering which head he should chop.

The KGB chief looks on in cruel, cunning bemusement:

He had scented fear many times: in the arrest procedures, in the interrogation rooms, in the corridors of his craft. He smelled it now. He and the men around him were powerful, privileged, protected. But he knew them all well; He had the files. And he, who knew no fear for himself, as the soul-dead know no fear, knew also that they all feared one thing more than war itself. If the Soviet proletariat, long-suffering, patient, oxlike in the face of deprivation, ever went berserk...

Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (third from left) stands with his Politburo and other Eastern bloc leaders. In The Devil's Alternative, Forsyth has Brezhnev peacefully replaced by the fictional Maxim Rudin by 1982. In reality, Brezhnev would remain in office until his death late that year.
Image from https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-gerontology-of-power/

That a lot of the action is chair-bound might be a reason The Devil’s Alternative isn’t more remembered. When we aren’t at one table watching the Russians argue who should do what, we’re at another where the Americans debate what the Russians are going to do next.

Even the hijacking of the Freya is mostly talking and waiting, the action we see taking the form of planning clockwork execution. The focus is on strategy, what it will take to stop this or that mad plan and whose agenda will have to be sacrificed for the greater good.

The novel’s title alludes to the dilemma facing President Matthews and other Western leaders. If the hijackers’ demands are met, Rudin can expect to be toppled and his internal adversaries will be free to launch their first-strike against Western Europe. If they are not met, the Freya will be blown up with all hands lost and an epic oil spill to clean up, “poisoning the whole North Sea for weeks.” It is a fantastic set-up.

Rudin is presented as a cutthroat boss, even if he is a moderate. Likewise, while the Ukrainian partisans’ anger with the Russians is presented as worthy, they make for dogmatic adversaries and not rooting interests. True to the title, what you get in The Devil’s Alternative is textbook realpolitik from beginning to end, everyone in it ready to kill someone else for reasons they seldom ponder for long.

Members of the British Special Boat Service, tasked with ending the Freya hijack. Forsyth introduces their leader: "The marine major was barely five feet eight inches tall, but he seemed about the same across the shoulders."
Image from https://www.how2become.com/careers/special-boat-service/

Forsyth channels Munro: In his time he had learned that, in principle, politicians have little enough objection to loss of life, provided that they personally cannot be seen publicly to have had anything to do with it.

The novel began as a screenplay, “No Alternative,” which Forsyth wrote and tried to get produced. All three of his earlier novels had strong runs as movie adaptations; it made sense to seek out success there on his own terms. But for some reason “No Alternative” never got made.

This may have worked to the novel’s advantage: The Devil’s Alternative boasts an especially well-honed and clever plot, maybe the finest showcase for Forsyth the craftsman. He still has the jaded edge that made his earlier novels so bracing and bitter. Here again he leaves you expecting the worst, sometimes correctly.

Other times, he sets the reader up for one outcome only to deliver another. Even when you expect a twist, he catches you off-guard. In the end, Forsyth turns over cards you didn’t even know he was playing.

Frederick Forsyth. One of the staples of fiction best-seller lists from the early 1970s to the present day is a Frederick Forsyth novel somewhere near the top in every decade. The Devil's Alternative peaked at #2 on the New York Times list of best selling fiction in February, 1980, below John le Carre's Smiley's People.
Image from https://quillette.com/2022/02/18/frederick-forsyth-and-the-fate-of-ukraine/

For someone who remembers the dawn of the 1980s, The Devil’s Alternative hits some familiar buttons. There are no cell phones or laptops, just people at telephones and TV sets. The President has a special recessed wall for instant communications, where satellite reconnaissance photos give the first signs of the wheat crisis.

The most high-tech the book gets is aboard the Freya, which Forsyth lavishes attention upon nearly as much as Russians: From the computer, endless messages were flashed automatically to the gigantic rudder, which, far below the stern transom, flickered with the sensitivity of a fish’s tail.

It is a techy novel from an era where such novels were still in their analog days. Boffins discuss weather patterns and flight patterns, while computerized missile tracking is still escapable by a sharp pilot with a few fast maneuvers. The focus throughout is on the human element, and while Forsyth may not be the most nuanced conveyer of people’s emotions or dialogue, he knows how to sell a nightmare scenario.

The Devil’s Alternative is from an era where the bestseller lists were crowded with offerings like The Fourth Horseman and The Third World War. Forsyth’s version of World War III is more convincing for his refusal to take a clear side. This adds not only to the verisimilitude but also the suspense. I only wish it weren’t so relevant still.