Derek Lambert

THE RED DOVE

For Frank and Marsha Taylor,

friends and advisers

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

PART ONE

Scenario

CHAPTER ONE

The absurd possibility that he, a Hero of the Soviet Union, could ever become a traitor occurred to Nicolay Talin when he was 150 miles above the surface of the Earth.

The absurdity – it was surely nothing more – was prompted by an announcement over the radio link from Mission Control:

‘We know that you will be proud to hear that at 05.00 hours Moscow time units of the Warsaw Pact Forces crossed the Polish border to help their comrades in their struggle against the enemies of Socialism attempting to subvert their country.’

Proud? Involuntarily, Talin shook his head. Such timing! While he was acting as ambassador of peace in space the Kremlin had perpetrated an act of war on Earth.

‘So they finally did it,’ was all he said.

He felt Oleg Sedov, Commander of the shuttle, Dove 1, on its maiden flight, appraising him. Sedov, forty-seven years old and as dark and sardonically self-contained as Talin was blond and quick, had been appraising men all his adult life.

Sedov, separated from Talin by a console of instruments, leaned forward in his seat, cut the radio and smiled at Talin.

‘You didn’t exactly glow with patriotic fervour,’ he remarked.

Talin gazed at Europe, bathed in spring sunshine, sliding away below them. There was a storm gathering over the sheet of blue steel that was the Mediterranean; to the north lay a pasture of white cloud; beneath that cloud was Poland, beneath that cloud war. In ninety minutes they would be back, having orbited the Earth. How many would have died during that time?

He tried to relax, to banish the spectre of treachery that had suddenly presented itself. True, he had often doubted before; but his doubts had never been partnered by disloyalty. He unzipped his red flight jacket and said: ‘You know better than I do, Oleg, that what goes on down there,’ jabbing a finger towards an observation window, ‘doesn’t have much impact up here.’

‘So you’re suppressing your joy until we land?’

‘If we land,’ said Talin who was piloting Dove.

‘Ah, there I share your doubts. But let’s keep them to ourselves,’ Sedov said, re-activating the radio.

‘Dove one, Dove one, are you reading me?’ The voice of the controller in Yevpatoriya in the Crimea cracked with worry. When Sedov replied his tone changed and he snapped: ‘What the hell happened?’

Sedov shrugged at the panels of controls, triplicated in case of a failure, and said: ‘Just a temporary fog-out. Also I had to use the bathroom.’

The controllers had long ago learned to accept Sedov’s lack of respect: not only was he the senior cosmonaut in the Soviet Union, he was a major in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.

‘Is everything still going according to schedule?’

‘Affirmative,’ Sedov replied.

‘We were worried about Comrade Talin?’

Sedov frowned. ‘He looks healthy enough from where I’m sitting.’

‘His heart-beat went up to a hundred and twenty just now.’

Again Sedov’s dark eyes appraised Talin as he said to the controller: ‘Maybe he was thinking about Sonya Bragina.’

‘That,’ said the controller, ‘is a remarkable observation, because it so happens that we have Sonya Bragina here waiting to talk to Comrade Talin.’

This time Talin himself felt his pulse accelerate as he heard Sonya’s voice, pictured her at Mission Control, wearing her severe, dark blue costume to make her look more like a Party member than a dancer, blonde hair braided and pinned – remembered her the last time he had seen her, naked on the bed in her apartment in Moscow.

What was happening was obviously the dream-child of a Kremlin publicist. Bolshoi ballerina converses with lover in space; as subtle as a Pravda editorial but more effective. And if Dove 1 crashed into the Siberian steppe then the Russian people would always remember the last, space-age conversation and weep delightedly.

Ironic, he thought, that at this historic moment I should be hurtling towards the United States of America.

‘Hello, Nicolay, how are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Right above you.’

‘Your mother sends her love. And—’

‘Yes?’

‘I love you.’

Talin guessed that someone had prompted her because, although she was by nature passionate, she wasn’t demonstrative in public, certainly not for the benefit of the millions watching and listening on television and radio.

Now he was expected to respond: ‘And I love you,’ but he rebelled because the whole exercise was so gauche; there was nothing they could do about that and she would understand.

He said: ‘Do you know what I fancy now?’

A nation held its breath. Sedov raised an eyebrow.

Talin said: ‘A plate of zakuski, salted herring perhaps with beetroot salad, followed by a steak as thick as a fist washed down with a bottle of Georgian red.’

He thought he heard her laugh but he couldn’t be sure; the laugh would be surfacing all right but she had the discipline to fight it back. Anyway, their audience would appreciate the remark: a man wasn’t a man unless he indulged his belly.

She hesitated, the Kremlin script in tatters. ‘Aren’t they feeding you all right up there, Nicolay…?’ Her voice faded as she realised that she had made a mistake, implied criticism.

He came to her rescue. ‘I was only joking. The food’s fine.’ Well, not bad, if you liked helping yourself to re-hydrated vegetable soups, blinis and coffee in slow motion to combat weightlessness.

‘I miss you, Nicolay.’

Another cue. He ignored it.

‘Ten more orbits,’ he said, ‘and we’ll be down.’

‘Goodbye, Nicolay.’

‘Goodbye, darling.’ Sweet compromise. ‘Don’t forget the zakuski.’

And she was gone.

‘Well,’ said Sedov, ‘I didn’t realise I was in the presence of a great romantic.’

‘I’m not a ham from Mosfilm,’ Talin told him.

Even that was a perversity: Mosfilm made good movies. Perhaps space had got to him; it could cause disorientation, which was why cosmonauts underwent so many psychological examinations.

That would explain his aberration when he heard about the invasion of Poland. A side effect of the transition into space, awareness of the curve of the globe below and the void above.

The Soviet Union occupied a sixth of the world’s land but in orbit he had seen the other five sixths. The pendulous sacks of South America and Africa, oceans scattered with fragments of land… Space and freedom had become one, the breeding ground of fantasy.

Beneath them now was the cutting edge of the United States. In eleven minutes thirty-eight seconds they would have crossed the North American continent. Dove had reached the Mid-West when another irrational notion presented itself unsolicited to Talin: what would happen if, because of a malfunction, they were forced to land in America?

Far away in the Crimea one of the scientists monitoring the shuttle reported that Talin’s heartbeat had increased to 125.

When darkness returned to Earth, when, that was, the globe was between Dove and the sun, the disturbing spectres fled, the reverse of the norm on earth when the fantasies of night vanish with the dawn. And Talin and Sedov began to prepare for their return to Mother Russia.

Both shared one doubt about the shuttle: they feared that, like the spaceship destined for Venus that had exploded on the launch-pad in October 1960, killing Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin and scores of technicians, it had been put into production too quickly.

The Kremlin was obsessed with firsts. The first satellite into space, Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first man in space, the late Yuri Gagarin in 1961. They had been mortified when, in 1969, American astronauts had made the first landing on the moon, paranoic when, in April 1981, the Americans had soft-landed their shuttle Columbia in California.

That achievement had heralded the dawn of an age when Man could commute in space, when passengers could visit floating hotels and return home in a winged ship that looked like an ordinary jet airplane – a ship that could be used time and time again.

It had also heralded the possibility of a titanic power struggle. With a shuttle a super-power could deposit convoys of spy satellites in orbit equipped with beam guns and telescopes that could sight a kopek coin 400 miles away.

The Russians had been poised to launch this new age but they had been beaten to it by the Americans who had also had the gall to make the launch on 12 April, 1981, the twentieth anniversary of Gagarin’s first orbit.

So they had postponed the launching of their prototype scheduled for 18 January, 1982, and concentrated on another first: building a fleet of space trains modified to construct, rather than merely deposit, stations in space.

Fears that the Kremlin was dangerously obsessed with the race to overtake the US initiative were realised in September 1982 when the first unpublicised launch aborted on blast-off.

There were two more trials, one successful, one not, before Dove 1 finally went into orbit with Sedov and Talin at the controls on 9 May 1983, Victory Day. Not all the refinements had yet been incorporated; but the Kremlin could boast that it possessed the command ship of its construction fleet in space.

The military potential of Dove, including some of the refinements, was the responsibility of the Commander, Sedov. Talin accepted that it would have to be armed: you had to defend yourself. But, projecting the dreams of his youth into the firmament, he saw himself as a pioneer of peace in space.

And the Kremlin backed him. Having accused the Pentagon of building Columbia to lay a trail of nuclear mines in orbit they assured the world that their aim was the peaceful exploration of the heavens.

Dove not Hawk.

The red and white ship looked much the same as its American sisters. It was 190 feet long with swept-back wings and brutish engines in its tail; on its back it bore a cargo bay with a capacity of forty tons, ten more than Columbia; in its inquisitive-looking nose there were three decks – storage area, living quarters and flight deck.

It was to the living quarters, as Dove 1 orbited at 18,000 mph on this May day in 1983, that Talin now walked with ponderous, weightless steps to prepare for re-entry.

On one side was a bathroom, on the other bunks and lockers, in the centre a table. From the dispenser Talin took a small tray wrapped in plastic marked Day 3, last meal. Into the dehydrated food inside he squirted water through a hollow needle attached to a faucet; then he removed the plastic, clamped the tray to the table and slowly began to eat cold beef and potato salad.

He drank a glass of synthetic orange – it was impossible to re-hydrate natural orange because water and crystals don’t mix – took off his flight jacket and put on an anti-gravity suit with inflatable trousers. The pressure of the oxygen on legs and belly in these stopped the blood from plunging to the lower extremities: puncture those pants and you blacked out.

Back in the flight deck Sedov had prematurely begun the pre-burn check-out. It was only Talin’s second trip into space but he had spent 300 hours in a simulator and he knew this was unusual for a veteran such as Sedov. Talin shivered and glanced into the star-strewn darkness for comfort.

Sedov was sitting on his high-backed seat, one hand on the rotational hand controller, staring at the computer screen. He was frowning.

‘What’s wrong?’ Talin asked.

‘I wish I knew. She just doesn’t feel right. Maybe space is getting to me.’ Sedov stood up. ‘You take over the check-out while I get into my anti-gravity gear.’

As he plodded away Talin strapped himself into the seat next to Sedov’s and examined the indicator lights, computer readouts, dials. Nothing wrong there. And yet… Sedov’s concern was contagious.

Sedov who had circled the moon, Sedov who had spent ninety-six days on a SALYUT space station, Sedov the laconic cosmonaut/intelligence officer who had been personally chosen by Nicolay Vlasov, Chairman of the KGB, to represent the MPA, which maintained Party control over the military, in space. Hardly the sort of man to be fanciful.

What worried most cosmonauts was their reliance on computers. If a computer could foul up your electricity bill then it was perfectly capable of abandoning you with only manual glide control over the Pacific Ocean.

Figures on the screen in front of Talin danced with blurred speed.

Sedov returned, strapped himself into his seat and slipped on his white helmet and headset. His lean, Slav face was expressionless as he spoke to Control.

Turning to Talin, he said: ‘We’re just half way round the world from touch-down.’

Green light shone below them, gaining strength by the second. They were over the Atlantic which was just emerging from a night blanket of cloud.

Again Sedov disconnected the radio link. ‘Stop thinking about Poland,’ he said. ‘They had it coming to them.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about Poland,’ although his doubts had begun with the announcement of the invasion.

The trouble was that Sedov, his mentor, knew him too well. Read his thoughts. Sedov had known him when he was a young rebel and because he admired his talent for space navigation, because he had no son of his own, had taught him to quell – not kill – the rebellion. He had also persuaded Military Intelligence, GRU, even then little more than an arm of the KGB, that he was politically acceptable.

In a way Sedov’s insight into his own reactions was another conscience. To betray Communism, even in thought, was to betray Sedov.

At 06.00 hours, one hour before the scheduled landing, Sedov, having re-contacted Mission Control, nodded at Talin and said: ‘It’s all yours.’

It was the crucial moment, no abort possibilities after this. Forget Poland, forget Sedov’s doubts.

First Talin had to reduce the impetuous speed of Dove. He turned her round and ignited the retro-fire engines. She quivered, slowed down and, with the two small engines thrusting forward, began to descend backwards towards the Earth’s atmosphere. A dozen dangers now lurked in her straining body. If, for instance, the skin of ceramic tiles protecting her from heat peeled off she would explode into a ball of fire.

After the retro-burn that took Dove out of orbit Talin turned her round again and pulled up her nose; inconsequently, he remembered pulling the reins on a recalcitrant horse he was riding as a boy on the steppe.

Their altitude was now seventy-five miles. The temperature on the outside of Dove was between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the melting point of aluminium, from which her body was made, was 1,200 degrees they couldn’t afford to lose many ceramic tiles. In front of them the air glowed with heat.

As Dove dipped towards the land masses of Europe and North Africa and the Earth’s gravity began to pull, Talin’s arms felt heavier and he became weighted to his seat.

He checked the instruments. They were 3,000 miles from the landing strip which was itself 100 miles north of the launch pad at Tyuratam in the Soviet central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

Talin spoke to Control to reassure them. Not that there was any real need because every reaction of Dove was monitored on forty-eight consoles. Even my heart beat, he remembered.

‘Everything under control,’ he reported. ‘I reckon I can see Russia ahead and that’s always a beautiful sight,’ which it was; he only wished that, being a Siberian, they were homing down from the East Coast, over the Sea of Okhotsk with the fish-like body of Sakhalin Island beneath.

He glanced at the digital clock. In less than half an hour they would touch down on the established flight path. Sedov had been wrong: there was nothing wrong with their beautiful red and white bird. Talin gave a thumbs-up sign to Sedov.

Which was when the radio link with Mission Control went dead.

Don’t panic. Talin’s preparation for any emergency in the simulated shuttle on the ground asserted itself. Controlled panic. His arms felt even heavier than they should, a rivulet of sweat coursed down his chest.

He glanced at Sedov. Sedov was smiling. Smiling!

Sedov spoke into his mouthpiece: ‘You can hear me?’

Talin nodded, remembering as Sedov spoke.

‘The black-out we anticipated,’ Sedov. ‘You were prepared for it?’

‘Of course, the heat…’ The lie stood up and took a bow; Sedov ignored it because that was his way and said: ‘It won’t last long.’

When Control returned Talin suppressed the relief in his voice. At 250,000 feet he began to fly the ship a little, using elevons, brakes, rudders and flaps, correcting flight path and speed.

At 80,000 feet over the Sea of Aral the engines cut and, as planned, Dove became a glider. From Control: ‘Perfect ground track.’

They were wrong. At that moment the shuttle veered sharply away from the runway laid out like a white ceremonial carpet. Talin took over completely from the autopilot and tried to correct the flight path. Nothing. Panic returned but was instantly disciplined, a wild dog on a lead.

Beside him Sedov was also struggling with the dual hand controller and rudder pedals. But the Dove had become a wilful bird of prey that had sighted a far-off quarry.

Sedov’s face was a mask, a single muscle dancing on the line of his jaw. He said: ‘This is crazy,’ and Talin knew what he meant: rockets, computers, all the most sophisticated technology that Man could devise had worked, but elementary controls used by any weekend glider pilot had failed. That was Russia for you.

They were below 50,000 feet, supposedly descending for the final approach and landing on a twenty-two-degree glide slope.

Sedov took over and raised the Dove’s nose. As they headed away from the strip in a wide arc he said: ‘I once had a car like this.’

His voice calmed Talin. ‘A car?’ He peered down. A ten-mile radius around the strip had been levelled in case of a forced landing; beyond this circle of black earth and shale lay the desolate steppe still patched with snow.

‘Sure a car. It wasn’t much of a car, an old Volga that looked like a tank. And it developed this trouble, it would only steer in one direction.’

From Mission Control came a hoarse voice: ‘What’s going on up there?’ Talin could picture the consternation as both screen monitors and visual trackers reported Dove’s deflection.

‘A minor technical fault,’ Sedov said.

‘At this stage?’

‘This bird doesn’t want to return to its cage,’ Sedov said.

Talin noticed that he was no longer trying to correct the flight path of the shuttle.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Sedov cut the radio link.

He said to Talin: ‘About that old car of mine. I was lecturing at Moscow University in those days but I lived in lodgings off Russakouskaya Street. Now as you know that’s on the other side of the city but in a direct line—’

‘I don’t see…’

‘You will, you will.’ The lack of noise was eerie and Talin wondered again if space had at last affected Sedov. What sort of impact would 100 tons of spaceship make on the steppe? They could always eject – but only to disgrace; in any case Sedov would never permit it. ‘You see,’ Sedov was saying, ‘all I did was to drive in a semi-circle round the city until I arrived at the University.’ He leaned back in his seat. ‘There,’ he said, ‘now you take this old Volga back to base.’

Talin took over. There was no manoeuvrability to the left, only to the right. That meant that, although he was committed to a curving glide, he could bring the ship right round again to the strip.

He tightened the circle. Dove completed its northward arc and began to return on a southward curve towards the runway.

‘Just tell me one thing,’ Talin said. ‘How the hell did you get home again after you’d lectured at the University?’

‘Easy. I just continued on round the other side of the city.’

‘If I miss the strip this time I’ll have to go round again.’

‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Sedov said. ‘You should have touched down at 235 mph. By the time you get there on this lap you’ll have lost so much speed that we’ll probably land like a spent meteorite.’

‘You should have been a doctor,’ Talin said, ‘you have a perfect bedside manner.’

‘Take her down a little,’ Sedov advised.

Talin began his approach at 12,000 feet. He could feel Dove straining down: she didn’t want to glide any more, she wanted to answer the call of gravity.

The great tail engines, the heaviest part of the ship, tipped back jerking the nose up. Talin grappled with the hand controller, tendons on his wrists standing out like cords. Fleetingly he saw himself again as the boy on the horse, a grey, pulling on the reins as, mane flowing, it galloped through a copse of silver birch. He summoned Sonya to him, Sonya naked on the bed and, loving her, determined to keep that last picture with him. But he discovered that such pictures don’t stay, only survival stays.

Dove’s nose levelled. Below, to the right, Talin could see the strip. To one side, scattering, were the spectators. No massed crowds like those who swarmed to the launch and landing of the first American shuttle Columbia; fatalistically the Kremlin always anticipated failure.

Sedov was staring ahead, private as always. What picture had he tried to lock in his mind? Even as he wondered Talin knew; Sedov had seen a blond teenager from Khabarovsk in Siberia who wanted to become a cosmonaut.

The strip was almost beneath them. Air speed too slow, descent speed which should have been about three feet a second too fast. Talin lowered the undercarriage.

The tail was sagging again; with one last effort Talin fought the earth’s magnetism.

Tail up fractionally. A little more. The strip directly below.

They bounced. Hit again. Bounced. Dove was veering away once more, out of control, a beautiful bird hellbent on suicide. Tarmac raced past. Then they were onto the hard black soil, chasing the fleeing spectators.

Brake, brake…

Dove shuddered, stopped.

Talin closed his eyes, kept them tight shut for a moment.

Sedov said: ‘As a matter of fact I’ve still got that old Volga. You just qualified to drive it.’

Three hours later in the debriefing centre Talin switched on the radio to pick up the news.

‘Dove 1, command ship of what will one day comprise a fleet of space shuttles, today completed its maiden flight without a hitch.’

Talin switched off the radio.

CHAPTER TWO

He was seventy-two years of age and he enjoyed chopping down trees.

You could almost feel his enjoyment, his companion thought, observing the play of muscles on his naked chest, hearing his grunts of satisfaction as the blade of the axe bit into the young redwood.

Feel it but not share it; the axeman’s companion had never enjoyed physical exertion, although to keep fit he exercised, working out thoroughly as he did most things he put his mind to. He didn’t enjoy dispatching men to their deaths but he did it competently enough.

With awe he watched the veteran take another swing at the redwood that was shading his ranch-house. His sun-reddened torso was slicked with sweat and his breathing had accelerated, but there was no evidence of real stress. God almighty! He would be an octogenarian in eight years. Yet his muscles, except perhaps around the neck, had none of the stringiness of old age, his hair was still shiny dark – possibly doctored to stay that way – and his skin was smooth.

And as if all that wasn’t enough he talked between swings. They say I’m a hard man, mused the observer who was fifty-four, but, hell, I’m a lightweight beside this guy.

The lightweight was George Reynolds, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His companion was the President of the United States.

Wood chips flew, the tree trembled. Reynolds wondered if it would eventually fall on the small, red-roofed ranch-house.

The President smiled and said: ‘Don’t worry, George, it won’t,’ and prepared himself for another swing.

Patiently, Reynolds waited for the dénouement: the reason for his summons from his headquarters near Washington, DC, to the presidential ranch in California, high in the Santa Ynez mountains, 160 miles north-west of Los Angeles and six miles off Coastal Highway 101.

While he waited he surveyed the terrain the way he had been trained to as a young man. He noted the lemon and avocado groves below, the glint of the Pacific, the ranch fences hewn from old telegraph poles – show the man wood and he reached for an axe – the cattle grazing in the heat of this August day in 1983.

But Reynolds didn’t observe with aesthetic appreciation. For him the woods behind the ranch were cover for an assassin who could easily out-shoot the two guards standing fifty yards from them. In the expanse of ocean he pictured a gunboat. The President had been shot once; it must never happen again. And it was with relief – although security was the responsibility of the Secret Service, not the CIA – that he heard the clatter of a surveillance helicopter.

The President leaned on the axe handle, polished by his hands, as though the helicopter had disturbed his rhythm. One hand strayed to the puckered scar on his chest left by the bullet fired by the would-be assassin; he pulled it away as if the scar had burned his fingers. From the pocket of his blue jeans he took an orange handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

Grinning, he said to Reynolds: ‘How about a few swings, George? Could do wonders for your golf. In any case you look far too neat for this kind of country.’

Reynolds became aware of his grey lightweight suit, black Capitol Hill shoes, red and blue striped tie, button-down collar. With his prematurely silver hair, as fine as a baby’s, his disciplined features and his jogger’s physique, he looked like any Washington bureaucrat who had almost made it. But Reynolds could adapt. He took off his jacket and tie and he was a countryman.

The President handed him the axe and he swung it, efficiently but without pleasure. The redwood swayed – in the direction of the ranch. As Reynolds swung, as the helicopter slanted away, the President began to talk.

‘Thought I’d get you out here, George, because it’s a place where a man can talk, where the air is clean – and free of your kind of bugs.’ He shaded his eyes and stared at the branches of the redwood with their hemlock leaves. ‘You know it’s a real shame to cut down a young tree like this. Did you know one of them once grew to 364 feet?’

‘It looks like a sequoia to me,’ Reynolds said.

‘If it was I sure as hell wouldn’t cut it down, George. They’re pretty damn rare.’ And then: ‘Hey, I didn’t know you knew anything about trees. Did you read it up on the jet?’

‘I like to be prepared,’ Reynolds admitted, ‘for every eventuality.’

‘Cattle too?’

‘I read up on farming, sure.’

‘You’re a wily old bird, George.’

‘Dumb birds don’t keep this job, Mr President.’

‘And a rare bird,’ the President said.

Reynolds paused before lifting the axe. He was pleased there wasn’t any ache in his muscles. ‘Rare?’

‘You enjoy your profession in an age when it’s fashionable to be masochistic about it. Do you ever read about happy spies these days?’

Reynolds considered this. Was he happy? He’d never really thought about it. Perhaps that indicated happiness; no, a more neutral condition, at best contentment. What ensured that contentment was the knowledge that he was the only man to do his job, the only man in an age of doubt to acknowledge that to help your country to survive you had to be devious and ruthless.

In his devious and ruthless way Reynolds was the ultimate patriot and his life was littered with sacrifices. No wife and children, no real home. No social life to speak of. He had dispensed with these in the interests of efficiency.

A warm breeze ruffled Reynolds’ baby-silk hair as he said: ‘I never read about fictional spies, Mr President.’ He swung the axe.

‘But you are human and you are wondering why I brought you here.’ The President’s voice became more incisive. ‘My term of office comes to an end in just over a year in November 1984.’

‘But not necessarily your Presidency.’

‘I’m a bit old in the tooth to stand again for election.’

‘Not you,’ Reynolds said.

‘Well, I’m going to anyway, George.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Reynolds paused. ‘Really glad.’

‘But I need something to rejuvenate me in the public eye.’

Reynolds tugged the axe from the trunk of the redwood. The tree was beginning to lean, trapping the blade. ‘Not necessary,’ he said. ‘You’ve still got the looks, the brain, the body. Hell, you don’t look any older than—’

‘Leonid Brezhnev?’

‘Twenty years younger.’

‘Thank you, George. Old men need flattery. Then let’s put it another way, a way that will appeal to you: the United States needs a boost. The Russians have been calling the shots lately, it’s time we called the tune.’

‘What had you in mind?’ Reynolds asked cautiously. He leaned on the axe. The wood at the apex of the triangular wound made by the axe groaned as the tree swayed.

‘First there was Afghanistan,’ the President said. ‘Then there was Poland.’

‘But they withdrew from Poland.’

‘In their own good time.’

‘They’d still be there if it wasn’t for the stand you made.’

‘Never mind, they made their point, re-affirmed their strength. Then they threw out twenty of our diplomats from Moscow. All your men, George.’

‘We reciprocated,’ Reynolds reminded him.

‘Fantastic! Great PR. Reciprocation – diplomatic bullshit for playing second fiddle.’

The conversation was being honed into an attack. But what, Reynolds wondered, was he being set up for? The helicopter returned; the two guards looked up, hands instinctively moving towards their guns; one of them spoke into his radio-set, they both relaxed.

Reynolds waited.

The President said: ‘Here, let me finish the job, put the tree out of its agony.’ He reached for the axe. ‘What we need, George, is a spectacular.’ To the two guards he shouted: ‘Better move your asses, she’s about to go.’

The two big men, one bald, one heavily moustached, moved away looking ruffled – their vantage point had been carefully calculated and falling trees had no part in their scheme of things.

‘A spectacular?’

‘Before the election,’ the President said. He examined the wound in the tree, stared calculatingly at the ranch. To Reynolds who was only a rustic by default it still looked as though the tree would smash through the roof. ‘Three more strikes should do it.’

The President walked to the other side of the leaning redwood and measured his swing. The blade sliced into the hinge of wood still holding the trunk.

Reynolds joined the President who was spacing his last blows. ‘What sort of a spectacular?’ he asked.

‘Think like a Russian,’ the President said. ‘Think what they’d like to do to us – then do it first.’

The second blow thudded into the tree.

‘How long did I invite you for, George?’

‘Three days,’ Reynolds told him.

‘Then that’s how long you’ve got. I’d like an outline of your project before dinner on Saturday.’

‘And if I can’t make it by then?’

‘The atmosphere over dinner will be strained.’

The President wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The muscles on his arms and chest tensed. He had said the third blow and the third blow it had to be.

Steel met wood. The tree creaked. Swayed. Leaned into space and crashed to the ground twenty-five yards to the right of the ranch-house.

As it happened the idea came to Reynolds just before dinner that night. He wondered if it had occurred to him before only to be rejected by his subconscious because of its sheer audacity.

He was drinking a martini with the President and his wife in the lounge of the ranch-house, a long beamed room stamped with the President’s personality. There were islands of skins on the tiled floor, historical bric-à-brac from the Wild West on the walls and shelves. A stone fireplace that still smelled of winter fires occupied one corner; through an opened window the great outdoors breathed indoors.

The President’s wife, slight and blonde and astute with a smile that was both practised and genuine, held up the cocktail shaker. ‘Another, George?’

He shook his head. One on working days, two on vacations; today, like most days, had developed into a working day.

She didn’t pursue it; she was an accomplished hostess who had brought back The Grand Style to the White House. Dressed now in a French-blue dress, the First Lady even managed to instil sophistication into the Ponderosa setting. Her husband hadn’t tried, he wore a check shirt and slacks.

She said to Reynolds: ‘We thought we’d watch the touchdown before dinner. Is that all right with you?’ Without waiting for an answer she switched on the TV set beside the wall-to-ceiling book-shelves.

Mission Control at Johnson Space Center, Houston, flickered into view, followed by a shot of the 15,000-foot runway at the Kennedy Center in Florida where the fourth Space Train to be sent into orbit was due to land.

The first shuttle had landed on Rogers Dry Lake at the Dryden Space Center in California’s Mojave Desert. Now Kennedy was geared to take most of the traffic.

As far as Reynolds was concerned the space centre that mattered was Vandenberg, not far from the Presidential ranch. From its $200 million launch complex shuttles flew over the North and South Poles keeping most of the populated world under surveillance. Even more important was the Military Mission HQ inside Cheyenne Mountain in Wyoming where they concentrated on spy satellites, beam weapons, war in space…

Shots of the approach to Florida taken by cameras inside the shuttle appeared on the TV screen. But the crowds waiting for landing were nothing compared with the great concourse that had assembled for the first touchdown. Commuting with space had been accepted more smoothly than the first railroad engine.

It was a remark by the First Lady while they were watching the TV that first exploded possibilities in Reynolds’ brain.

The President was talking about a future in which space stations, laboratories, hotels, whole complexes would orbit the globe, their occupants flying back and forth from the earth like New Yorkers commuting between Long Island and Manhattan.

On the screen Columbia with its stocky, delta-winged body and foraging beak, was making its last turn before its final approach. Beneath it Florida and the cobalt-blue Atlantic looked like a relief map.

‘But who owns space?’ she asked. ‘How can it be divided?’ In the same tone, Reynolds reflected, that a president’s wife might once have dismissed pioneers’ claims to the West.

He finished his cocktail and told her: ‘I don’t know the answers to your questions but I do know that, if it is divided, it will be divided through strength. Through strength, not necessarily aggression,’ holding up one defensive hand.

‘At least we got the shuttle up there first,’ the President said. ‘We’ll bargain from power.’

‘That depends,’ Reynolds said, ‘on what the Soviets have got up their sleeves. We know they shelved their own basic shuttle because we got up there first. We know they’ve now launched their own modified ship and we know they plan to assemble a space station in space. What we don’t know is the capability of their new ship and how many of them they’ve got.’

On the screen the Columbia was gliding towards the runway, smoother than a conventional jet.

‘What sort of capability are you talking about?’ the President asked.

‘The capability to command space,’ Reynolds said crisply. ‘To win the next war – if the Russians want one.’

‘Beams?’

‘To put it more definitively CPBs, charged particle beams. Rays capable of travelling at the speed of light,’ he explained to the President’s wife, ‘and penetrating a target instead of just melting its surface like an ordinary laser. You may recall that in ’77 General George Keegan, head of Air Force Intelligence, quit his job because your husband’s predecessor didn’t take his warnings seriously. Well, a lot of people at the Pentagon figure that the Russians have been working on a scheme to equip their shuttles with CPBs. That way they could command the heavens.’

‘Pearl Harbor in space,’ the President said. ‘Except that I have heeded the warnings.’

‘Star Wars,’ murmured his wife. ‘Unbelievable, terrifying.’ And, as Columbia straightened out over the runway, she pointed at the screen and said: ‘If there was such a war that could be a crippled Soviet shuttle landing in the United States,’ which was the remark that, like a depth charge, projected inspiration from the depths of Reynolds’ subconscious.

As he watched Columbia touch down he imagined red stars on its wings. From the cockpit he heard Russian voices. At the head of the stairway he saw a cosmonaut emerge, wave wearily and depart for the medical centre leaving behind at the end of the runway the greatest military prize ever deposited in the lap of the United States.

But why do I only see one cosmonaut? he wondered.

‘George, it’s all over.’ It was the President’s voice but Reynolds heard it from a long way off. ‘George, I’m speaking to you. Dinner’s ready for God’s sake.’

Reynolds followed them into the dining room, sat down and began to eat his prawn cocktail.

The First Lady poured chilled Californian white wine and said: ‘George, are you all right? You look as though you’ve seen a vision.’

Which he had. It seemed extraordinary to him that neither the President nor his wife had seen it. But why only one cosmonaut? There should have been at least two on board, more with mission specialists.

He sipped the wine, held it up to the light of the sunset flaming on the horizon. As he did so he re-focused his attention on his hosts. ‘Forgive me,’ he said to the President’s wife. ‘I was thinking about something your husband said this afternoon.’

Later, over T-bone steaks and green salad, he resurrected the shuttle landing but only circumspectly because, at this stage, he didn’t want to share his vision with anyone, least of all the President, in case it had no substance.

‘You would have thought,’ he said casually, ‘that both the astronauts would have emerged at the same time.’

They stopped eating and looked at him in surprise. The President said: ‘But we didn’t see any of them come out,’ and his wife asked: ‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Reynolds said, ‘I was thinking ahead,’ and before they could work that one out he added: ‘I guess I’ll turn in early tonight. Chopping down trees is okay for a 72-year-old Peter Pan but not for a middle-aged mortal.’

After dessert he excused himself and went to his room. For a time he lay on the bed fully dressed, hands behind his head, thinking. Why only one cosmonaut?

He closed his eyes. He was back in Moscow in the early seventies when he was counsellor and CIA co-ordinator in the US Embassy. And he was at a rendezvous in Sokolniki Park with a double agent from GRU.

It was sweaty hot, he remembered, and in front of the bench where he was waiting a group of children on bicycles and tricycles were learning road drill on a mock-up street complete with traffic lights.

The man who joined him was well cast for the meeting. The park had once been a hunting ground for the Tzars – Sokolniki was a derivation of sokol meaning falcon – and Vadim Muratov looked like a bird of prey. Lean, greying and greedy.

The exchange was a cliché but still the way they did it in the eighties. One crumpled copy of Pravda containing Muratov’s payment, 300 roubles-worth of coupons which he could spend in the beryozka shops; one crumpled copy of Trud containing the information Muratov was selling.

Each picked up the other’s newspaper and, after watching the children for a few moments, went their respective ways. The mock-up traffic lights, Reynolds recalled, had jammed at red as he left.

In his office in the embassy Reynolds studied Muratov’s 300 roubles-worth of information. It wasn’t calculated to set either the River Moskva or the Potomac on fire. Not then.

According to Muratov a young cosmonaut named Nicolay Talin, quite brilliant apparently, a future captain of space, had been investigated by GRU because of his outspoken views. He was a bit of a rebel, not a totally unacceptable attitude – the Soviet Union had been founded on rebellion – but his views were idealistic and if idealism didn’t conform with the Communist dream then it was criminal.

But Talin was getting away with it for two reasons. (1) He was an exceptionally gifted candidate for aerospace travel; (2) He was being protected by a senior KGB officer named Oleg Sedov.

And that was all. Reynolds instructed a junior CIA officer to check out Talin and then, because it wasn’t that urgent, sent the details to Washington by courier and forgot them. Until today.

Suddenly Reynolds knew why, in his vision, only one cosmonaut had emerged from the Russian shuttle; the others were either dead or wounded. Nicolay Talin had been persuaded to defect and had overcome the rest of the crew. The President just might have his spectacular. Reynolds reached for the bedside telephone and called CIA headquarters.

Reynolds slept fitfully that night, dreams and waking thoughts merging into a confused interrogation. The subject of the interrogation was himself, the topic truth – an elusive quality when you were the director of an organisation specialising in deception.

And, under this jumbled third-degree, he admitted that, although he was the ultimate patriot, his sentiments regarding the President’s spectacular were not entirely chauvinistic. There was an element of personal interest in them, a touch of self-preservation.

Recently, yet another Congressional inquiry into the activities of the CIA had been mounted. In Reynolds’ opinion the KGB couldn’t do a better hatchet job on the Company than some of the United States’ own politicians. What he couldn’t abide was their naïvety, assuming, that was, that there were no darker motives. Why, in God’s name, undermine your own clandestine defences while your enemies systematically expanded theirs?

In a waking moment Reynolds recalled the words of a certain crusading politician:

‘If we accept this idea of secrecy for secrecy’s sake, we will have no way of knowing whether we have a fine intelligence service or a very poor one. Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA – its cost, its efficiency, its successes and its failures.’

That had been said way back in 1956 by Senator Mike Mansfield from Montana. Nothing had changed. Secrecy for secrecy’s sake… How the hell could a secret service be overt?

Since taking office, immediately after the President had been elected, Reynolds had survived every investigation, arguing coldly and contemptuously that CIA duplicity was a necessary evil designed to combat the far more sinister intrigues of the Soviet Union and its lackeys. In the anti-Soviet mood prevalent in the US Reynolds had coasted home.

But the latest inquiry was the most dangerous yet.

An audio-visual surveillance operation had been mounted on a group of foreign businessmen visiting the fleshpots of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Sex, drugs, gambling, alcoholic intake – every peccadillo had been photographed and recorded. All well and good except that (1) the operation had been blown and (2) the foreigners were Arabs.

With the result that the Arab government in question was now threatening to cut off oil supplies to the United States because of a ‘gross impertinence’ authorised personally by none other than George Reynolds, Director of the CIA.

Not that they would because the tide of oil was beginning to turn against Arab domination of the market. Nevertheless, America had been put in an embarrassing position, which was a windfall for the lemming-like critics of the CIA. Reynolds had no doubts about the wisdom of authorising the surveillance – the Washington-based Arabs had been engaged in espionage – and his only regret concerned the foul-up his agents had made of it.

But to survive he needed a coup that would dwarf the Arab misadventure into insignificance.

He needed a spectacular.

It was at times like this, he thought as he turned restlessly in the bed, that you needed someone beside you. Someone to bring warmth to icy calculation. Someone to share.

But at least I’ve been honest with myself, he thought as dawn began to creep into the bedroom.

The two computer print-outs were flown from Washington to Los Angeles within six hours of Reynolds’ call and brought by automobile along Coastal Highway 101 to the ranch.

The first was a routine assessment; the second and more interesting document was the result of an intensive and prolonged exchange between operator and computer.

The assessment was based on the investigation Reynolds had authorised on Nicolay Talin in August 1971, which had been revised annually.

Reynolds read the assessment first, sitting in the sunlit bedroom; from outside he could hear the lowing of cattle.

NICOLAY LEONID TALIN.

BORN 10 OCT. 1950, NEAR KHABAROVSK, EASTERN SIBERIA.

ATTENDED WORK—POLYTECHNICAL SCHOOL 14 AT AGE 7 (NORMAL SCHOOL STARTING AGE IN SU). BY GRADE 2 SINGLED OUT AS POSSESSING EXCEPTIONAL ACADEMIC POTENTIAL.

AT AGE SEVEN JOINED LITTLE OCTOBRISTS, AT AGE NINE YOUNG PIONEERS. GROUP LEADER REPORTED TO PARTY COMMITTEE THAT TALIN WAS BOTH HIGHLY INTELLIGENT AND QUOTE UNUSUALLY ADVENTUROUS UNQUOTE. LATTER POSSIBLE EUPHEMISM FOR EARLY SYMPTOMS OF REBELLION.

EMOTIONALLY AFFECTED AT AGE 12 BY DEATH OF FATHER THROUGH RADIATION SICKNESS CONTRACTED IN COBALT MINE NEAR YAKUTSK REPUTEDLY COLDEST PLACE ON EARTH. MOVED WITH MOTHER TO NOVOSIBIRSK AND ENTERED FOR ELITE PHYS-MAT SCHOOL NO. 5.

The climatic observation, Reynolds reflected, pin-pointed the fallibility of computers: the feed-in. The operator, probably working on a sweltering day in Washington, had been unable to resist this totally irrelevant morsel of information about Yakutsk.

AT SCHOOL SCHOLASTIC ABILITIES CONFIRMED AS OUTSTANDING. EARLY COMPUTER ASSESSMENT CHANNELLED POTENTIAL TOWARDS AVIATION. THIS SUBSEQUENTLY AMENDED TO AEROSPACE. PLACE RESERVED MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY.

Early computer! As if the sophisticated brain machine spewing out Talin’s life was sneering.

CAREER ENDANGERED BY OUTBREAKS OF DEFIANCE DURING YOUNG PIONEER INDOCTRINATION INTO PARTY DOGMA, LENINISM ETCETERA. SAVED BY SYSTEM SO RIGID THAT, HAVING FILED SUBJECT AS FUTURE HERO, IT COULD NOT QUESTION ITS OWN JUDGEMENT.

SYSTEM CONCENTRATED ON WIDOWED MOTHER, BRIBED THROUGH USUAL CHANNELS AVAILABLE TO SOVIET ELITE, TO REASON WITH SON. PLOY LARGELY BUT TEMPORARILY BRACKET SEE LATER UNBRACKET SUCCESSFUL.

Why the hell did this computer write commas but not brackets and quotes?

AT AGE 16 JOINED KOMSOMOL BRACKET YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE UNBRACKET. LATER DEPARTED NOVOSIBIRSK FOR MOSCOW. AT UNIVERSITY AND DURING KOMSOMOL ACTIVITIES REBELLIOUS SPIRIT AGAIN NOTICED. IN CONVERSATION REPEATED DOUBTS EXPRESSED BY YOUNG PEOPLE IN ’50s FOLLOWING KRUSHCHEV’S DENUNCIATION OF STALIN AT TWENTIETH PARTY CONGRESS.

Put an S in front of Talin’s name, Reynolds thought, and there was Stalin.

APPROACH MADE AT THIS STAGE BY OLEG SEDOV COSMONAUT AND OPERATIVE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DIRECTORATE OF FIRST CHIEF DIRECTORATE OF KGB WORKING IN CONJUNCTION WITH DOSAAF RESPONSIBLE FOR INDOCTRINATION OF YOUTH BEFORE MILITARY SERVICE.

UNDER INFLUENCE OF SEDOV MARKED CHANGE NOTED IN OUTWARD ATTITUDE OF TALIN. RELATIONSHIP SEEMS TO HAVE PROGRESSED BEYOND MENTOR-PUPIL NORM. POSSIBILITY OF HOMOSEXUAL TENDENCIES INVESTIGATED BUT REJECTED IN RELATION TO TALIN ON GROUNDS OF HIS UNDOUBTED HETEROSEXUALITY.

FROM UNIVERSITY SUBJECT TRANSFERRED TO NEW YURI GAGARIN COSMONAUT TRAINING CENTRE AT STAR TOWN, ZVEDNY GORODOK, IN EASTERN SUBURBS OF MOSCOW. THERE TO TYURATAM, BETTER KNOWN IN WEST AS BAYKONUR COSMODROME, IN KAZAKHSTAN.

INTENSIVE TRAINING CONTINUED IN PREPARATION FOR SPACE SPECTACULAR….

Was Washington inhabited totally by movie buffs?

…INVOLVING SOYUZ AND SALYUT CRAFT. AT SAME TIME ROMANCE FIT FOR FUTURE HERO ARRANGED WITH DANCER AT BOLSHOI DESTINED TO BECOME PRIMA BALLERINA. LUCKILY FOR SOVIETS TALIN AND GIRL, SONYA BRAGINA, WHOLE-HEARTEDLY ENDORSED ARRANGEMENT PRESUMABLY ASSUMING IT HAD BEEN FORTUITOUS.

TALIN’S SPACE FLIGHT CONSUMMATELY SUCCESSFUL. SUBJECT ELEVATED INTO SOVIET ELITE COMPLETE WITH RED PASSBOOK. BECAME YOUNGEST HERO OF SOVIET UNION IN HISTORY. ACCOMPANIED BY OLEG SEDOV PILOTED FIRST SOVIET UNION SHUTTLE DOVE 1 IN MAY 1983.

CONCLUSION:

TALIN REPRESENTS POSSIBLE MATERIAL FOR MANIPULATION. BEHAVIOURAL PATTERN INDICATES CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF REPRESSED RECALCITRANCE. FACT THAT SUBJECT IS IDEALIST SUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE THAT SOVIETS HAVE NOT INVOLVED HIM IN AGGRESSIVE ASPECTS OF SPACE PROJECTS. PRINCIPAL OBSTACLE THAT WOULD HAVE TO BE OVERCOME – UNDOUBTED PATRIOTISM OF SUBJECT.

Reynolds called the kitchen and asked for coffee. Through the window he could see the President; he had abandoned his axe and was digging a posthole. Beside him stood his wife in jeans and shirt carrying a basket of flowers. Reynolds envied them their togetherness.

The cook brought the coffee. He drank it black and began to read the second print-out.

The document wasn’t as crisp as the Talin assessment. Questions and answers hadn’t yet been synthesised because Reynolds had emphasised that the priority was speed. But the direction of the conversation between man and machine was easy enough to follow.

Relentlessly, the operator had picked the computer’s brains to find an agent capable of subverting a young Hero of the Soviet Union. Into its electronic intelligence he had fed Talin’s age, background, environment, sexual inclinations, physical appearance, aerospace career details, ambitions, pastimes, IQ, character estimate…

The operator had then fed his machine with the specialised qualifications needed by the CIA agent. Knowledge of Russian, ability to mix – here the computer had been very much taken with the word simpatico – unswerving devotion to country, fatalistic attitude to death….

The computer had then responded with the shattering conclusion – NO SUCH AGENT AVAILABLE.

Which was hardly surprising, Reynolds brooded. What sort of agent was it who would be able to travel undetected through the Soviet Union to Leninsk, known in Russia as Rocket City, where cosmonauts working at the Tyuratam space centre lived, and single-handedly persuade a Hero to defect?

But the operator hadn’t given up. The conversation between master and machine – or was it the other way round? – had continued.

Reynolds guessed where it was leading. He should have known all along. He stopped reading and opened an envelope marked PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARE that had accompanied the print-outs.

There was Nicolay Talin descending the steps from Dove 1; thick blond hair brushed back in timeless style, keen features, slight cleft in the chin. Triumphant – and yet the eyes seemed to be searching for someone, something. A Viking, Reynolds thought. No, a Siberian.

He looked at the second photograph and came face to face with a man who had once briefly obsessed him. Had the mug shot been taken before or after that obsession? After. The experience had drawn lines from nose to mouth, pouched the eyes, changed the expression.

Nevertheless, there were still traces of youthful appeal in the face staring accusingly at him. The moustache that made him look like a cop, the aggressive features, the slant of the brown eyes that softened the aggression. Also discernible was the intellect that had earned him a summa cum laude BS in physics at Rice University, Houston. The casual observer might also suspect that the face in the photograph had been supported by an athlete’s body, and he would have been right – both the Dallas Cowboys and the Los Angeles Rams had tried to sign him as a quarterback only to discover that, for him, sport was only a diversion from his real purpose.

And that purpose had been to fly. First with the USAF, graduating to F-15 Eagles, but always viewing the Earth’s atmosphere as a step ladder to space. He had subsequently been selected for training with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and that selection had been a mistake.

Reynolds returned to the print-out, speed-reading because he knew the details and he didn’t enjoy them, returning finally to the abridged service biography.

MASSEY, ROBERT S. (B. 14 APRIL 1939). PILOT USAF. SELECTED NASA DEC. ’65. COMMAND MODULE PILOT FOR APOLLO MOON LANDING 1972. TRANSFERRED SHUTTLE EXPERIMENTS, DESTINED FOR FIRST TEST OF ORBITER 101 SHUTTLE IN 1977 BUT WITHDREW: DIVORCED. INACTIVE.

Inactive! A euphemism of the space age.

But it was all there in the extended print-out. Every requirement for the plan that had been evolving in Reynolds’ brain since the computer had told him to forget trying to find a trained agent. Right down to aerospace experience, right down to ‘fatalistic attitude to death’…

Now all he had to do was persuade Massey. All? After what I did to him? Sometimes Reynolds wondered at his own icy optimism.

He locked the print-outs and photographs in his attaché case and left the room. Outside the President was leaning against a fence drinking root beer and talking to his wife.

Reynolds told him that he was leaving. ‘But I’ll be back for dinner Saturday,’ he said.

‘That’s fine, George,’ the President said. ‘Just fine.’ He picked up his axe.

In Moscow that day it was even hotter than in California.

But, unlike capital cities such as Washington and London, Moscow wasn’t adversely affected by the heat; here summer was a luxury and a sweltering day encouraged energy rather than torpor.

Sightseers thronged the Kremlin grounds; ice-cream and kvas sellers sold their wares as chirpily as Cockney barrowboys selling hot chestnuts in winter; on the packed beaches on the outskirts of the city bathers swam energetically to the rhythms of ping-pong balls traversing the nets on the promenade tables; in Gorky Park love blossomed feverishly while young men in black-market jeans strummed their guitars.

In a walled garden near the memorial erected to mark the line where the Russians halted the German advance on Moscow in World War II, the heat collected like soup. But despite their age, despite their infirmities – one had been fitted with a pacemaker, the other with a steel plate in his skull – the two men in open-neck white shirts playing chess in the shade of a birch tree displayed no discomfort because that would have been an admission of frailty.

The garden, clotted with blooms trying to beat the axe of the executioner winter, was attached to a dacha belonging to the Minister of Defence, Marshal Grigori Tarkovsky. Unlike the other members of the Politburo who chose weekend dachas in a sylvan setting twenty miles to the west of Moscow, Tarkovsky preferred to spend as much time as possible in the city that, as a younger man, he had helped to save from the Germans. Tarkovsky’s favourite record was the ‘1812 Overture’ but when the cannons fired it was Hitler, not Napoleon, who was on the run and the steel plate in his skull that had replaced the bone removed by a German bullet seemed to throb with triumph.

Tarkovsky, sturdy and bleak-faced, grey hair clipped as short as an Army recruit’s, leaned forward, moved a pawn one square and said: ‘So what do you think, Comrade President?’

The President of the Soviet Union – his real power lay in the leadership of the Communist Party, not the Presidency – didn’t reply immediately because he was stunned by Tarkovsky’s previous words.

After a while he moved a knight and reflected that, a few years ago, he would have reacted with tigerish speed to both Tarkovsky’s move on the chess board and his cataclysmic suggestions.

But I am an old man, brooded the President, who was seventy-six, three years older than Tarkovsky; the leader of a pack of old Kremlin wolves whose decisions are all affected by their years. Some, like myself, move ponderously with elaborate caution; others, like Tarkovsky, act with rash impetuosity seeking acclaim before death.

In fact, if you accepted that it was governed by Moscow and Washington, the world was in the hands of old men because the American President was seventy-two.

It was frightening. But, in the Soviet Union at least, it had to be: none of the younger males snapping at the heels of the old wolves had yet attained the political maturity needed to lead Country and Party.

Or do I delude myself? Is a man such as Tarkovsky, whose attitudes were frozen in a war when we lost more than twenty million men, women and children really preferable to a younger contender? Especially now that those attitudes had found such a terrifying outlet.

‘Well, Comrade President?’ Tarkovsky stared at the President across the chess board.

‘I’ll grant you this, Grigori, if you’d put such policies into practice in this game I would have resigned half an hour ago. Now if you’ll excuse me for a few moments…’

As he crossed the lawn a yellow butterfly danced in front of him. It made him more aware of the weight of his big body; he raised his head and straightened his back; sweat trickled down his chest and, like so many Russians, he masochistically longed for winter.

Inside the yellow-walled mansion where Tarkovsky, a widower, lived alone attended by a cook and housekeeper, the President paused in the lofty hall adorned with military memorabilia, and gazed critically at an oil painting hanging above the fireplace. It was a portrait of a man staring defiantly into the future; a middle-aged man, glossed with youth by the artist, with black hair and powerful, shaggy features that had the look of a buffalo about them.

We picked them younger in those days, thought the President as he turned away from the picture of himself painted nearly twenty years ago when he first came to power, and headed for the bathroom.

As he washed his hands he could see through the barred window the figure of Tarkovsky bowed over the chess board. What disturbed him so deeply about Tarkovsky’s plan was that, despite its horrendous potential, it might just work. As a last resort.

Because today, despite the furore they always created, conventional disarmament talks were really academic: the answers to the future of the Earth lay in the space surrounding it, not on its crust. And it was into space that Tarkovsky’s ideas were directed.

As he returned to the chess board on the white-painted table a thrush sang blithely on a branch of the birch tree. Little did it know. Tarkovsky had made his move, a singularly unenterprising one in the circumstances, and was sipping iced tea.

The President sat down and studied the board. An end game and a dull one at that. Chess, too, needed young and agile brains.

‘You have considered my proposition?’ Tarkovsky’s voice quivered with expectation.

‘I have considered it, Grigori.’

‘It’s a startling concept.’

‘Without a doubt. Anything that envisages bringing the United States of America to its knees must be startling.’

‘But it could work. Would work,’ he corrected himself.

‘Ah yes. But at what cost?’

‘There would be sacrifices, of course. But nothing compared with—’

The President held up one hand. ‘I know what sacrifices were made in the Great Patriotic War. I was thinking of the cost to humanity as a whole.’

The thrush stopped singing.

‘Not so great,’ Tarkovsky said, ‘in relation to the benefits Mankind would subsequently enjoy.’

‘You refer to the benefits of Communism that would expand across the world after your coup?’

‘Of course.’ A half lie because, as the President knew, Tarkovsky thought in strategies, not ideologies. Although he wasn’t the only member of the Kremlin élite – Politburo or Presidium – to prefer patriotism to socialism. ‘By the way, I have moved.’

‘I’m aware of that.’ Since the discussion had begun the game had assumed another dimension: the President felt he had to win. He considered the few pieces that each of them had left; positionally he had a marginal advantage over Tarkovsky who was playing black; when he was younger he would have pressed it home until, grudgingly, Tarkovsky would have been forced to resign; but that was before Kremlin scheming had sapped his chess skills; now, at this crucial stage in the game, he found it difficult to concentrate. He swept his bishop across the board with a show of confidence that he didn’t feel and said: ‘Can you really be so sure that it would work?’

‘Quite sure. Provided the aero-space industry can meet the challenge. As you know they have been suspect in the past.’

‘And if they do prove themselves equal to it when would you be ready to act?’

Tarkovsky moved one of his foot-soldiers, a pawn, and said: ‘Early next year.’

Six months. The President put his hand to his chest; sometimes he fancied he could hear the pacemaker. Two veterans, each reliant on a foreign body; what a combination.

Too hastily, Tarkovsky added: ‘Naturally I would only recommend such action in the event of hostile action by the United States.’

‘Naturally.’

It would be pleasant to believe that Tarkovsky thought in terms of deterrents but it would be misleading. Tarkovsky was the personification of Russia’s national complex: she had been attacked and betrayed so often that her reasoning was always belligerent. And who could blame men such as Tarkovsky who had witnessed the German treachery in 1941? No, Tarkovsky would interpret the flicker of a presidential eyelid as ‘hostile posturing’ and, from a position of indisputable superiority, would advise a pre-emptive strike.

And what a strike!

The President advanced a pawn with minimal hopes that he might be able to queen it. Perhaps Tarkovsky, too, was tiring. Pacemaker versus metal plate.

‘At least we agree,’ Tarkovsky said, eyeing his depleted black army, ‘that whoever commands space commands the world. That, with space stations and gunships armed with beam weapons, Man is entering an era more revolutionary than anything it has experienced before.’

A Malev jet taking off from Sheremetyevo airport climbed steeply into the blue sky.

‘It’s ironic.’ the President remarked. ‘that Man can’t even share infinity.’

Tarkovsky shrugged. ‘Whoever rules infinity rules the world. If we don’t take command then America will.’

‘But our first objective must be peaceful co-existence.’

‘Through strength,’ Tarkovsky countered.

The Minister of Defence moved his rook. A mistake. He should have been tightening his meagre defences in preparation for a counter attack. But a man’s true character, stripped of pretence, was always revealed on the chess board. Tarkovsky wanted to be Minister of War, not Defence.

But what of my true character? There it was on the black and white squares. Calculated calm. To the Soviet Union he had brought stability after the twenty-five blood-stained years of Stalin’s reign and the eleven erratic years of Krushchev’s rule.

True, a housewife still had to queue for a loaf of bread but she had a home and she had security and she had a future. That will be my epitaph, decided the President. He Brought Stability. But, of course, Tarkovsky was right: it had been achieved through strength. Military might and political guile.

But when he had taken office he had never contemplated extending his authority into the cosmos. Certainly not beyond the limits of the Space Race. But now, as Tarkovsky had said, Man was poised to colonise space, to inhabit the heavens. Mother Russia had to be as strong in the firmament as she was on Earth.

But am I too old to grasp what has to be done? And is Tarkovsky’s solution the only practical answer?

Tarkovsky cleared his throat.

The President moved another pawn, consolidating. The flamboyant move with the bishop had been a mistake; Tarkovsky’s swagger was infectious.

Tarkovsky reached across the board. They exchanged pawns.

The President said: ‘It’s also ironic that your proposition involves the fleet of Dove space shuttles that we’re building.’

Tarkovsky’s grey eyes appraised the President across the chequered board. ‘Not ironic, Comrade President, deliberate.’ He moved his rook again. ‘Check.’

The President blocked the threat with his bishop, at the same time putting the black rook in jeopardy. And, as Tarkovsky withdrew it, said: ‘I suggest,’ by which he meant order, ‘that you personally draw up a plan of campaign and present it to me. Have you discussed this with anyone else?’

Tarkovsky shook his head.

‘Then don’t.’

Tarkovsky’s hand strayed to the area of skin on his scalp covering the metal plate, a sure sign that he was tired.

The President leaned back in his chair. ‘A draw, Grigori?’ He was tired too.

‘I think I am in a stronger position.’

‘I beg to differ. There’s a long haul ahead but eventually we’ll fight each other to a standstill.’

Stubbornly, Tarkovsky brooded over the board. A gesture, the President guessed, from an old warrior who would never have settled for a draw with the Germans. But finally he accepted the President’s offer. ‘Well played, Comrade President.’

‘Perhaps we both learned from the game.’

‘Perhaps. I feel that I played too cautiously.’

The President sighed: the lesson surely was that Tarkovsky had played too rashly.

When he got back to his apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospect in the centre of Moscow the President summoned to his presence Nicolay Vlasov, the Chairman of the KGB, who lived in the same block.

Vlasov, astute and sophisticated, was a schemer. He was also unrivalled in the arts of survival. He was, therefore, the obvious choice – especially as his survival was currently at stake – to produce an alternative plan to Tarkovsky’s. A plan that would cripple the US in space without introducing the spectre of Armageddon.

But the President didn’t tell Vlasov about Tarkovsky’s proposition.

By consulting Vlasov, the President was, without realising it, establishing a neatly tiered battle order between the reigning colossi of the world, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The stakes: Final victory in a conflict that had lasted for nearly forty years.

Later, as dusk descended on the sweating city, Nicolay Vlasov – silver-haired, with greenish eyes and a skull that looked peculiarly fragile – stood at the window of his study, glass of Chivas Regal whisky in his hand, watching the traffic far below and digesting the President’s requirements.

They were formidable – perhaps insoluble would be a more apt description! – but in a way he welcomed them because they gave direction to his current campaign for survival. Ever since the débâcle in 1980 when his plan to debase the American dollar with a disinformation operation at the Bilderberg Conference, the annual get-together of Capitalist clout in the West, had failed ignominiously, his star had been in the descent.

To ensure survival, without resorting to blackmail based on KGB surveillance, he had to mastermind a sensational intelligence operation. Then and only then could he retire honourably and, perhaps, explain to his family why he had neglected them. If, that was, you could ever explain to anyone that, if you were born a schemer, your intrigues possessed you.

From one wall of the study the photographs of his three children, quick with youth but now middle-aged, reproved him. He went into the living-room where his wife was watching television, poured himself another whisky and returned to the study. It was dark now and the cars below were beads of light being pulled on invisible threads; he imagined for a moment that he could control those threads as he controlled the destinies of Russia’s people.

But it is your direction, that should concern you, Nicolay Vlasov. Sipping his whisky, listening to the ice tinkle like wind chimes, he applied his mind to what, at the moment, seemed an insuperable problem.

But he wasn’t to know that a man named Robert Massey was about to be asked to take a hand in his destiny.

CHAPTER THREE

Robert Massey said: ‘Pick it up, please.’

Startled, the young jock showing his muscles to three girls in bikinis sitting on the almost deserted beach exclaimed: ‘Huh?’

Massey pointed at the can of Tab sugar-free soft drink that the jock had just tossed on the sand. ‘I asked you to pick it up. We’re trying to keep this beach clean.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ The young man’s tone was mild.

I don’t even merit truculence, Massey thought; but he understood the lazy contempt; when you were eighteen, weighing around 200 lbs with an iron-pumper’s muscles, you didn’t get upset by an old man of forty-five, wearing patched jeans and a tattered black sweater, with two days’ stubble on his jaw and whisky on his breath.

Sizing up the bare-chested jock wearing cut-offs Massey said: ‘Pick it up, boy,’ and thought: ‘You’re looking for a fight again, Massey, and you’ll get beat up but you’ll hurt him a little, the old training will see to that.’

The jock kicked the can towards Massey and, winking at the girls, said: ‘Pick it up yourself, grandpa.’

Apart from the old training Massey also had another hidden weapon. Surprise. Moving quickly despite the whisky inside him, Massey hacked the jock’s legs from under him with one foot and, as he fell, hit him on the jaw with his fist.

The jock sat up spitting out sand. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘what kind of nut are you?’

Massey understood his dilemma; if the two of them had been alone he would have torn him apart and thrown the pieces to the sharks. But in front of three girls who might appreciate chivalry as well as muscle you didn’t beat the bejaysus out of an ageing freak.

Massey solved his problem by kicking him on the side of the face.

‘All right, asshole,’ the jock said, ‘you asked for it.’

Scrambling to his feet, he came at Massey two-fisted, but his muscles got in the way. Massey side-stepped and tripped him again. As he fell the girls giggled. Enraged, the jock got up, the desire to kill plain on his face. Massey didn’t have any surprises left. But he was still trading blows when one of the girls shouted: ‘Come on, Mr Massey, you give it him.’ He was so astonished that she knew his name and was rooting for him that he dropped his guard, enabling the jock to hit him on the neck. Even then, if it hadn’t been for the whisky, he might have recovered his balance; as it was he staggered and fell and the jock kicked him in the face and belly. He managed to get up, felt one fist flatten his nose, another land below the ribs; as he doubled up a knee caught him in the crotch.

He lay submissively in agony as the bare-footed kicks came in. He was dimly aware of female voices shrieking, of scuffling, of a phrase from the voice that had known his name: ‘Get away from him, you animal.’

When he opened his eyes he heard the waves washing the sand, smelled tanning oil, became aware that his head was being cradled against firm young breasts. He looked up into worried blue eyes.

The girl said: ‘He would have killed you, Mr Massey.’

‘You hauled him off?’ incredulously.

‘I helped. But it was Sharon mostly. She’s an El Al stewardess and, you know, they’re into karate, judo, all that stuff.’

‘Where’s Sharon now?’ He touched his split nose and winced; he didn’t move because he liked the feel of her breasts; he tried to smile but that hurt too.

‘Gone to get someone to patch you up. Jeannie went off with the animal. You know, she was kidding him along just to get rid of him.’

‘I don’t need anyone to patch me up,’ Massey told her. This time he did move a little and pain stabbed him in the groin.

‘You just stay right where you are,’ her voice maternal. And then: ‘A lot of us are worried about you, Mr Massey.’

‘How did you know my name?’

‘I knew it when I was a kid. You were one of my heroes. I even had your picture pinned up in my room.’

‘You mean you still recognise me?’

‘Well no,’ she admitted. ‘But I recognised your name when you came to live here and I did a little checking. I – we, that is – are grateful for the way you help to look after the island. The trouble is, you don’t look after yourself.’

A wind was ruffling the sea and combing the long grass in the dunes, and gulls were crying in the sky.

‘I manage,’ Massey told her.

Hesitantly, she said: ‘They say you drink a little too much.’

‘You sound like Rosa.’

‘Is that the woman you live with?’

He nodded and that hurt too. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Jane,’ she told him. ‘Plain Jane.’

‘Not plain,’ he said, ‘beautiful,’ and began to struggle to his feet because she might think he was making a pass and it must be embarrassing enough for her as it was cradling the head of a crock who, in addition to the stubble and the whisky, sported a rapidly-closing eye and a busted nose.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘where are you going?’

‘Home.’

‘But—’

‘And thank you,’ he said. ‘And Sharon and Jeannie.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’

He wasn’t but he said: ‘Quite sure.’

‘Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come with you?’

He shook his head and it still hurt but not so much because his attention was diverted by the pain in his groin. It was on fire.

As he turned away she called: ‘You had him beat, Mr Massey, until I called out to you.’

One of his feet struck an object in the sand. He bent down, picked up the Tab can and handed it to her. ‘There is something you can do for me,’ he said. ‘Get rid of this.’

He smiled at her and limped off down the beach.

Robert Massey chose Padre Island because it reminded him of space. The skies were wide and deep, the beaches went on forever, the quiet enfolded you.

Padre Island is, in fact, two main islands, South and North, that form a scimitar 140 miles long off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It consists mostly of grass and sand although the smaller South Island, only twenty-five miles long, has been developed and boasts a Hilton in Port Isabel. What is said to be the world’s largest shrimping fleet anchors here and a little further down the mainland at Brownsville.

Hearing the machine-gun fire of the constructors’ drills, Massey headed for the North Island which has its own port, Aransas, (actually on a fragment of island known as Mustang linked to the North Island by Route 53), and long, lonely stretches of land inhabited by gophers and ground squirrels below skies where herons and falcons join the gulls.

At the turn of the seventies Padre Island’s tourist industry received two publicity boosts: an army of 200 unemployed armed with shovels managed to clear the residue of a massive oil-spill from the beaches and a local girl, Gig Gangel, was featured as a Playboy centrefold. But still the lovely wastes of North Padre, where treasure hunters seeking Spanish gold are prohibited, remain untarnished, protected by Padre Island National Seashore Trust at Corpus Christi and conservationists such as Robert Massey.

Massey, with a gratuity and pension supplied by ‘a grateful Government’, patrolled the North Island protecting wild life from tourists, moving on the gold hunters with their metal detectors, clearing jetsam from the beaches, scanning the sea by helicopter for oil slicks, caring for birds and turtles crippled by the oil, taking the latter to Ila Loetscher, an old lady who cared for them on South Island.

When he was sober he was regarded by the conservation authorities as a Godsend; when drunk, which was frequently, as a pain.

As he limped towards his old green Chev to drive back to Port Aransas the wind strengthened. The grass in the dunes bent with it and the ocean was plucked with white feathers of foam; ahead of him scuttled a flock of sanderlings. The sky was still blue but it had a metallic sheen to it. Massey spotted a marsh hawk flying high. He cupped a hand to his swollen eye and stared at the hawk with his good one; but he peered far beyond the hawk, to a platform in space where, among the stars, he looked on an island far bigger than Padre. The island was the world.

He climbed into the Chev and drove along the highway to the shack on the fringe of the little port, where Rosa would be waiting for him. Once loving, still comforting, sad for him and herself, the Mexican girl, now on the plump side, from across the border in Matamoros who only reminded him that she had sacrificed her youth for him when he was very drunk.

When she heard the car she ran across their patch with its top-heavy sunflowers and bolting lettuces, the only part of Padre Island that he didn’t seem to care about. When she saw his face she put a hand to her mouth as though in pain herself, then opened her arms to him.

As they walked across the patch she said to him: ‘We have a visitor.’

‘Yeah? Who?’

‘A man called Reynolds,’ she said.

The green dossier lay on the cracked glass surface of the cane table standing between them. Reynolds tapped it with one finger and said: ‘I want to level with you; that’s why I want you to read it.’

The dossier was marked TOP SECRET and bore the coding SI 202, Massey’s name and, in the bottom right hand corner, a round coffee stain. Massey picked it up and flipped the pages, 183 of them.

‘Didn’t you always level with me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to discuss anything now. I want you to read that, then we’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘Why the hell would you suddenly want to level with me after all this time?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Reynolds said.

Massey poured himself whisky from a half-full bottle of J & B. Reynolds sipped an orange juice. After bathing Massey’s face Rosa had gone into town to buy groceries; the only other occupant of the shack was an old green turtle crippled with oil-tar that two boys had brought to be cleaned up. Outside the wind pushed at the fragile walls of the shack and played music in the bamboo roof.

‘Now,’ Massey said. He sat down opposite Reynolds.

Reynolds shrugged. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ he said.

‘So, you’ve got a favour to ask. The man ruins my life and then comes round to ask a favour!’

‘It’s vitally important,’ Reynolds said. ‘That’s why you’ve got to read the dossier. Otherwise you won’t believe me.’

Massey stared at Reynolds; the innocence was still there, just as it had been in 1974 when he had been Deputy Director (Operations) of the CIA: but the innocence was a deception, like everything about Reynolds; it derived, Massey had long ago decided, from that brand of patriotism that is viewed through a gunsight, the illusion compounded by the silver hair so soft that it stirred in the draughts creeping through the walls.

Massey went into the kitchen and fetched a bowl of water, washing-up liquid and a dish-cloth. He knelt beside the turtle and squirted some of the liquid on to its scarred old shell; in the morning he would take it to Ila Loetscher.

‘Believe you? You’ve got to be kidding. I’d only believe you if you told me you were lying.’ Delicately he cleaned the polished, jig-saw patterns on the head of the turtle. ‘You’re wasting your time, Reynolds. Go find yourself some other lunatic.’

‘That’s just the point,’ Reynolds said, ‘you weren’t crazy.’

The turtle, who had been enjoying the rhythmic movements of Massey’s hand looked up, head bobbing, when the movements stopped.

Massey splashed more whisky into his glass. Finally, he said softly: ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Reynolds? You said I was crazy, everyone said I was crazy.’

Pointing at the dossier, Reynolds said: ‘It’s all in there, read it.’ He finished his juice and stood up. ‘I’ll be back in the morning. Early.’

‘What makes you think I’ll be here waiting?’

‘I know you’ll be here waiting.’

Massey started cleaning the turtle again; it lowered its head contentedly.

Reynolds opened the door. In the wind-blown dusk Massey fancied he could see another man standing outside but he couldn’t be sure. The wind charged the room. ‘Until tomorrow,’ Reynolds said, shutting the door behind him.

A flake of bamboo parchment fluttered round the room before settling on the table beside Massey’s empty glass. Massey picked up the dossier, put it down again and said to the turtle: ‘I’m more interested in getting you clean than reading this bullshit,’ which was a lie.

Nevertheless, he finished cleaning the turtle; then he took the dossier into the bedroom, lay on the big sighing bed and, while Rosa, who had returned from the store, clattered about in the kitchen, began to read.

As he turned the pages his hands trembled. The words became pictures and fearfully he joined them.

Massey had always known that the perils of space flight were not confined to the obvious, accidents which NASA always described as malfunctions. There were more insidious dangers locked inside the minds of the astronauts. The Earth-bound lives of some of those early, crewcut pioneers had been totally disrupted; they had parted from their wives, plunged into manic depressions, taken to drink; a lucky few had become evangelists as though in space they had seen God.

Massey had triumphantly passed the early medicals in which ear, nose and throat disorders, faulty eyesight, internal diseases, neuro-circulatory weakness and motion sickness were the most common causes of rejection. His reactions to hypoxia and loss of atmospheric pressure in a chamber simulating an altitude of 38,000 feet had also been excellent.

The tests he feared most were the vestibular checks designed to examine balance and orientation in space. Some astronauts had experienced illusions which could prove fatal. ‘You might be making a lunar trip but you don’t want to be a lunatic,’ a comical scientist had observed. Funny. When he had completed the tests sweat was running from his body; but he had passed according to the electrodes attached to his body, according to his voice patterns.

Then he had gone to school. Space navigation, astronomy, meteorology, geography and technical preparation – manual control, life-support system, etcetera – for the moon shot in a mock-up of Apollo. He had also been prepared for weightlessness, simulated by immersion in water, free-fall parachuting and, briefly, in a curving flight in a supersonic jet, and introduced to the phenomenon of acceleration on launch and re-entry in a flight chamber where scientists monitored fifty physical and mental reactions.

He joined the other two crew members for lunar education – how to operate on the Moon in one-sixth gravity conditions – but, as he was piloting the command module, it was unlikely that he would ever follow in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong who on Monday, 21 July 1969, became the first man to step on to the moon.

During the final medicals Massey’s mind was re-examined. How would he relate to the other crew members? How would he react to an emergency? How high was his level of emotional stability? To ascertain the latter they isolated him in a soundproof chamber – and questioned his wife, Helen. She, having an extremely high emotional stability, confirmed that he was ‘cool’.

It took three and a half years to train Massey, and all the time he sensed that somewhere there was a flaw in the system. A hidden place in his subconscious – his soul? – that no electrode, no voice stress analyser, no computer, had reached.

In his shack on North Padre Island Robert Massey turned a page of the dossier. Rosa came into the bedroom, undressed and stood for a moment naked beside the bed before slipping into bed and kissing him; then she turned away from him because she knew he was somewhere else.

Massey was in orbit round the Moon. Alone.

On the Moon, on the fringe of the Sea of Serenity, the commander and a geologist were collecting samples in the Lunar Rover.

So far everything was proceeding as planned except for a Master Alarm warning which, as far as they and Houston could determine, was without foundation. But every astronaut still remembered the explosion amid the oxygen tanks that had, in 1970, ripped open Apollo 13. A warning during testing had gone unheeded, according to Commander Jim Lovell.

But Massey wasn’t worried. The reverse, in fact: he was euphoric. Below the pocked surface of the Moon was silver green, ahead in the darkness another moon was inching over the horizon, only this wasn’t a moon, it was the Earth. A repeat of the Earthrise photograph that Frank Borman had taken on Christmas Day, 1968.

Massey smiled.

Space enfolded him, no – released him. The warring factions on the blue and silver ball that was Earth seemed spiteful and immensely unimportant when you were a privileged spectator to the infinite scheme of things.

Surely the cosmos had to be shared, the Earth-bound factions plucked from their little planet and given the freedom of the heavens. The idea was so bounteous, so joyous, that Massey laughed.

A sonorous voice from Houston inquired: ‘You okay up there, Bob?’

‘Just happy,’ Massey replied.

‘That’s fine,’ a note of doubt in the voice.

They were probably feeding his voice level into the computer. Petty. Massey stared beyond the Moon, beyond the Earth, into the star-dusted void of time.

When the lunar module re-docked and the other two astronauts rejoined Massey he was still grinning.

‘Did we do it that well?’ the geologist asked.

‘You did it just fine,’ Massey said dreamily.

‘You okay, Bob?’

‘Sure I’m okay.’

‘I guess I’ll take over now,’ the commander said. ‘You get some rest.’

‘You’re the guys who should be resting.’

‘I’ll take over,’ the commander said more firmly.

They completed five more orbits of the Moon before firing the SM engine to start the journey back to Earth.

The trouble started during the descent debriefing after which they were expected to give a TV Press conference from the descending ship.

In answer to questions from Mission Control about two possibly volcanic craters that Massey had reported seeing in orbit he replied: ‘That’s what we all need, space to live in, to breathe…’

The controller addressed himself to the commander. ‘I’ve cut all outside transmission. What is it with Massey?’

‘A little stress problem,’ the commander said. ‘Nothing to worry about. But,’ he added, ‘I guess you’d better cancel that Press conference. You never know.’

For the rest of the descent Massey remained silent, still smiling, in communion with himself. After splashdown in the Pacific he was rushed to a private clinic at River Oaks, Houston.

It was there that he suggested sharing all America’s space knowledge with everyone, including the Russians.

Massey lowered the dossier, stared across the bedroom, then raised it again. Rosa watched him. It was 1 a.m. and she hadn’t slept. But there were only fifty or so pages of the dossier left. She could wait.

As he read on Massey’s breathing quickened. This section was by a psychiatrist:

After five hours the condition of the subject (not patient, Massey noted) returned to normal and I formed the opinion that he had been suffering from temporary spatial disorientation aggravated by a vestibular – inner ear – condition. There is no reason to suppose that, if this latter condition was treated by passive methods, linear acceleration etc., the subject’s normality would not be maintained.

So I wasn’t crazy! And yet….

The next passage was by Reynolds.

In my opinion the subject may, under earlier psychiatric examination, have deliberately suppressed his desire to impart information to foreign agencies such as the Soviet Union. Such a phenomenon was not unknown among Servicemen returning from Vietnam, but whereas, in the majority of such cases, they had nothing of value to impart, Robert Massey is in possession of information – the embryonic plans for a space shuttle is a case in point – that, if divulged, could do immeasurable harm to the United States’ aerospace programme. In this context it should be remembered that any future war between superpowers will be directed from space.

It must also be appreciated that the fact that the Press briefing was cancelled, and that the subject has subsequently been incommunicado, has caused intense speculation in the media and it is now generally accepted that Massey suffered a stress problem. In my submission we should not only support that conclusion, we should embellish it to the extent that any plausibility he might have with representatives of the Soviet Union will be totally destroyed.

Hatred replaced relief.

Next a report from another psychiatrist after Massey had been flown to a CIA clinic near the Agency’s headquarters at Langley, eight miles from downtown Washington.

Acting on instructions, I decided to submit the subject to a course of hallucinogenic drugs that would simulate the required mental attitude for this operation. The appropriate drug was selected with care to minimise the risks of paranoia, chronic anxiety and other symptoms of psychosis. It was finally decided to administer lysergic acid diethylamide which has fewer detrimental effects than other hallucinogens, although the possibility of some chromosomal damage cannot be ruled out. Within two hours of the initial administration the desired hallucinations with characteristic synaesthesia – crossing of the senses, colour being heard etcetera – had manifested themselves. The principal disadvantage in the use of this drug is increased tolerance. As the treatment was to be prolonged this necessitated increased dosage.

He had believed they were trying to cure him and all the time they had been launching him on a series of LSD trips.

Massey remembered asking the CIA operative during a period of lucidity about the silver-haired man who was often in the background. The operative had replied: ‘That’s Reynolds, he’s in charge.’

When he had first learned that the CIA had leaked the fact that he was crazy he had despised Reynolds. Now…

‘The bastard,’ he whispered. The dossier dropped from his hands on to the bed, twenty pages of conclusions unread.

Then he wept.

When he had finished Rosa’s arms were around him, long black hair curtaining her face, big soft breasts touching his chest. ‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Tell me what it’s all about, Roberto. Tell me I needn’t be scared…’

‘I don’t know what it’s all about. Not yet.’

‘That man Reynolds, he frightens me.’

‘Reynolds is a dedicated man.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She picked up the dossier. ‘What is this writing that has made you shiver, cry out and,’ her voice gentle, ‘weep?’

He took the dossier from her and dropped it on the floor. ‘It’s a murder without a death,’ he said, and before she could question him again he drew her to him finding, to his astonishment, that despite everything, he was aroused; then he was inside her and together they found a little comfort.

When finally she slept Massey got out of bed and went to the chest of drawers beneath the window. Reynolds had been right: he would be waiting for him in the morning.

He opened a drawer and took out a World War II Colt .45 automatic.

Dawn. Two figures walking on the hard sand beside the gentle waves, their presence emphasising the emptiness around them.

Reynolds wore a camouflaged windcheater and grey trousers tucked into rubber boots. Massey, shaved for the occasion, wore sneakers and jeans and an old tweed jacket, leather-patched at the elbow, over a white, roll-neck sweater. He wore the jacket to hide the gun stuck in the belt of his jeans.

The storm had blown itself out leaving its signature on the sand – driftwood, seaweed, cans and plastic bottles. The sea was milky calm and pink-flushed. Sanderlings pattered among the jetsam and in the sky a single, low-flying pelican kept the two men company.

‘I understand how much you hate me,’ Reynolds said. His hands were plunged deep in the pockets of the windcheater, his stride was measured; his voice rang with sincerity.

‘I don’t hate you any more,’ Massey told him. You don’t hate a doomed man. ‘I despise you, sure, but I don’t hate you.’

‘It had to be done. You were a risk. In war millions die for their country. Peace is merely a euphemism for another kind of war, an undeclared war, when men are equally expendable in the interests of the majority. In the Soviet Union,’ he said, glancing at Massey, ‘they would have eliminated you.’

Massey kicked a plastic bottle. Later in the day the debris would be cleared from the beach, Reynolds’ body with it. Now was the time to kill, while the sky to the west was still cold, while the day was primitive. But still he delayed. Once, while Reynolds’ attention was distracted by a leaping fish, he slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the butt of the automatic.

Reynolds said: ‘We in the intelligence agencies attract a lot of criticism, some of it justified. But mostly it’s misguided. Without such agencies the United States, the whole Western concept, would be submerged by the Soviet Union, by tyranny. They talk about our Dirty Tricks Department: it’s lily white compared with its Russian counterpart. These people,’ Reynolds continued, an edge to his voice, ‘would have us haul down our defences, self-destruct. They remind me of a crowd demonstrating for the Communist dream: if they got that dream they wouldn’t be allowed to demonstrate, they’d be shot instead.’

‘What do you want from me?’ Massey asked, thinking: ‘I have to know before I kill him.’

The pelican veered away and headed out to sea. There were a few fleecy clouds in the sky and the pearl-pink of dawn had strengthened to blood-red.

‘I’ve got a lot to give you,’ Reynolds said enigmatically.

‘You should, you took enough away.’

‘I want to give you back your self-respect. To give you a cause. You had one once.’

‘Sure, to explore space. And to safeguard it.’

‘Which by definition means keeping ahead of the Russians. When we get to Washington I’ll show you the documented evidence of Soviet aggressive intent in space.’

‘So we’re going to Washington?’ Massey stopped walking and stared at the rays of the sun splintering on the water. He said: ‘Stop crapping around, Reynolds, what do you want?’

When Reynolds told him he wondered whether he was experiencing another hallucination.

He said: ‘You mean you want me who once babbled about sharing our secrets with the Russians to persuade a Soviet cosmonaut to defect?’

Reynolds said: ‘That’s one of the reasons why it has to be you. When you were…’ Reynolds hesitated, choosing his words, ‘…when you were ill the Soviets discovered that you wanted to communicate with them. Therefore they will be sympathetic, now that you are cured, when you make contact with them prior to meeting Talin.’

‘Why didn’t they ever try to contact me?’ Massey held up one hand and answered himself: ‘Because they thought I was out of my mind, a raving, 22-carat lunatic. You made sure of that.’

They walked on, more slowly now. Behind them their footprints had moved a little closer together. Before I kill him, Massey thought, I have to know everything. He picked up a small branch of driftwood scoured bone-white by sea and sun; it was shaped like a hand-gun; he pretended it was the gun in his belt.

Reynolds said: ‘You see now why I had to let you read the dossier? You would never have believed that I would seriously ask you to undertake a mission like this when I had once dismissed you as crazy.’

Reynolds had done more than dismiss him as crazy: he had emblazoned his craziness across the world. As a result Helen had divorced him; if you were the Vassar-educated daughter of an oil-rich fat cat in River Oaks it was fine being married to an astronaut; being married to a madman was different.

Massey asked: ‘What makes you think the Russians will take me seriously now? I presume you mean I would have to pull a fake defection.’

‘I’ll come to that later,’ Reynolds told him. ‘First the other reasons why it has to be you.’

‘Because the computer says so?’

‘Of course.’ Reynolds turned in his tracks. ‘Let’s go back.’ Massey followed because he still had to know.

A jet flew high over the Gulf spinning a white thread behind it. Reynolds took his hands from the pockets of his windcheater – the sun was beginning to warm the day – and ticked off the other reasons on his fingers.

‘One: in a way you’re Talin’s double. Older, sure, and badly out of condition. But, like him, you’re an idealist. Two: you had started training for the shuttle so you’ve got a lot of common ground there. Three: Talin’s stability was slightly suspect but he had a mentor who covered up for him.’

‘As unstable as me?’

‘You weren’t unstable,’ Reynolds said. ‘You had a vestibular condition which could have been corrected.’

‘You didn’t think so at the time.’

‘Like I said, it wasn’t a risk I was prepared to take.’

‘But you can now.’

‘What I can do now,’ Reynolds said carefully, ‘is utilise the unfortunate events of the past. Talin will be sympathetic to your experiences, especially when he sees that you’re eminently sane.’

‘You’ve got two faucets,’ Massey said. ‘One marked sane, one marked nuts. You turn them on and off at will.’

‘Four: you speak Russian.’

‘I often wondered in the past whether that would be held against me.’

‘Why should it? I understand that you decided to learn it when the possibility of the Soviet-US joint venture with Apollo and Soyuz ships docking with a Salyut space station was first mooted.’

‘Some computer,’ Massey observed. ‘In fact the Apollo and the Soyuz ultimately docked directly. Any more reasons?’

‘A few.’

‘But you’re not telling?’

‘That’s right,’ Reynolds said.

Massey, disappointed with himself for trading conversation with Reynolds, said: ‘You still haven’t told me just how the hell you think I’m going to persuade a man like Talin to defect.’

‘If I explain you’ll do it?’

It would be satisfying, Massey decided, to get a concession from Reynolds before shooting him. He said: ‘I would only consider co-operating with you on one condition—’

‘That you are allowed to return to space? Don’t worry, that’s already in the pipeline. As soon as this operation is completed you are to be allocated a fresh place in a training programme for service in the shuttle.’

Massey’s thoughts blurred; the initiative left him. Without realising it he straightened his body. He saw the curve of the Moon, the bright shining globe that was Earth. Infinity beckoned. Everyone had their price.

Reynolds said: ‘So you agree?’

When he didn’t reply Reynolds took his arm and said: ‘Don’t let that gun in your belt confuse you. You don’t want to kill me now: you want to fly to the stars.’ He increased the pressure on Massey’s arm. ‘In any case that old Colt’s crocked. You don’t think I’d have walked down the beach with you if it worked, do you?’

When Reynolds finally got around to explaining how Russian scepticism to his reported mental condition would be overcome, and how Talin would be persuaded to defect Massey said: ‘But that’s real Dirty Tricks Department.’

‘Do you want to be an astronaut again?’

Beaten, Massey nodded.

Reynolds got back to the President’s ranch at 5 p.m. on Saturday. Half an hour before dinner he handed the President a cardboard folder containing five sheets of typescript. ‘The scenario for your spectacular,’ he said.

CHAPTER FOUR

Many people imagine the Kremlin to be a brooding mausoleum. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On a fine day the gilded husks of its cathedrals sail majestically in the blue sky and the sunlight finds gold in its green-roofed palaces; during fog or blizzard it is baronial and snug.

For Nicolay Talin the Kremlin was a joy. Not because it was the fount of an ideology, far from it, but because its epic history appealed to the Siberian in him. As he walked through its grounds this November day, with the first snow on the ground freshly crisped by frost, with ice-dust sparkling in the sunlight, he marvelled at its fragile elegance conceived in violence.

Talin knew his Kremlin as well as he knew his spacecraft. Here in the twelfth century the natives built a wooden stockade, a kreml, to protect themselves against the Mongol hordes. Thereafter it was taken, sacked, freed, by Mongols, Tartars, Turks, Poles, Swedes… Here Ivan the Great reigned – demanding the title Tzar (Caesar) – and built the cathedrals of the Annunciation and Assumption; here was born Ivan the Terrible who terrorised his own countrymen and was not above stuffing his enemies full of gunpowder and exploding them – to his credit he built St Basil’s Cathedral, with its cluster of spun-sugar baubles, in Red Square.

Here in 1613 the Romanov dynasty was born, to last three centuries until in 1917 it reached its bloody end and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin installed the Supreme Soviet in the Grand Palace.

Napoleon reached the Kremlin, Hitler failed; both were ultimately beaten by a land and its people whose spirit was crystallised here in the Kremlin, and both should have known better.

Talin and Sonya often visited the parts of the Kremlin grounds open to the public when Talin was on leave. They met beside the dumb 200-ton hulk of the Tzar Bell, which crashed from its tower during the fire of 1737, they walked the cobbled squares, they held hands watched inscrutably by a bronze and granite Lenin.

This morning Sonya wasn’t with him, she was rehearsing at the Bolshoi. But he feit she was beside him and smiled at her, and two fur-hatted militia stamping through Cathedral Square agreed that the blond, arrogant-looking man in the Western-styled topcoat and sealskin shapka was as drunk as Ivan’s Bell Tower, knocked out of alignment by Napoleon’s gunners.

They were not to know that, later that day, he intended to ask the girl they couldn’t see to marry him.

But first he had to meet Oleg Sedov in a bar off Petrovka Street, not far from the Bolshoi. He left the Kremlin and walked across Red Square, heels tapping on the cobbles. Sometimes Talin felt like grabbing a clutch of gawping tourists and telling them that its real name was Krasnaya Ploshchad, Beautiful Square, and that Red had nothing to do with politics, only its colour. Or hauling them off to see the real Russia outside the Intourist guide books. Siberia, of course; or the bar where he was meeting Sedov for that matter.

The cold crackled in his nostrils, he breathed it deep into his lungs as others inhale cigarette smoke.

On the far side of the Square he climbed into his red Moskvich, an ageing but neat little car that butted through the sparse traffic.

He was lucky to have a car, but he was a cosmonaut and therefore one of the élite, like authors (approved by the State), officers of the Party and the Services, academics, doctors, footballers… Privilege it was true, but that didn’t bother him. He was entitled to it and, in his book, Communism should be the equal distribution of wealth not poverty.

Sedov thought otherwise.

You could see it the way he dressed as he leaned against the bar peeling shrimps and small crabs and dropping their shells on the floor. His bruised shoes looked as though they were made from cardboard, his fawn suit beneath his blue parka was East German rubbish tailored to fit a coathanger.

Talin had come to tell Sedov that tonight he was going to propose to Sonya; he told him most things.

‘Beer?’

Talin nodded, pointing at the plate of crustacea, prawns on a good day but not today. ‘And some of those.’

Sedov ordered two brown bottles, fluted like barley sugar, of tepid beer, black bread and more seafood. The bar, as basic as a barn, was crowded with men, cheeks polished by the cold, talking and guzzling. Listening while Sedov ordered, Talin picked up snatches of football – Dynamo’s prospects – sex, wages… no politics.

They drank. Sedov wiped foam from his lips. ‘You’re looking remarkably cheerful,’ he said.

‘I’ve got reason to be.’

‘Good news?’

‘I think so.’

‘I have news, too. From the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force.’

‘Really?’ Talin refused to look surprised; he was used to Sedov’s dark humour; he searched the face of his friend and mentor, eyebrows charcoal black, shadow of a cleft in the chin. ‘And what does the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief have to say?’

‘He wants you to get. married,’ Sedov said, popping a morsel of crab meat into his mouth.

Talin grinned, waiting for the rest of the joke; when it didn’t come he began to roll a pellet of black bread between his thumb and forefinger; the sparkle that had been with him all morning faded.

‘He wants me to get married?’

‘He’s a romantic,’ Sedov said. ‘But, to be fair, he’s merely conveying a message from the image makers.’

‘Married to anyone in particular?’

‘To Sonya Bragina, of course.’

‘Supposing I don’t want to marry Sonya Bragina?’

‘But you do, don’t you?’ Sedov stared at him over the rim of his glass.

‘I did.’

Sedov ordered another couple of beers from the headscarved woman behind the bar and said: ‘I don’t know why you’re being perverse. Both you and the General want you to marry Sonya.’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with him or anyone else?’

Two men in spaniel-eared fur hats pushed their way into the bar bringing a gust of cold air with them. ‘You know how it is,’ Sedov told him, ‘you and Sonya are featured in every magazine in the Soviet Union. Readers are beginning to think it’s time you made it legal. It’s quite permissible for husbands to be unfaithful to their wives but young people living in sin… that’s a different story.’

‘I thought,’ Talin said, flattening the pellet of black bread, ‘that the Cult of Personality was discouraged.’

‘Ah, if you’re a big wheel in the Kremlin, yes. If you’re a young man and a beautiful girl who personify the spirit of Soviet youth, no.’

‘Some big wheels seem to get their fair share of publicity.’

Sedov held up a warning finger.

The sunlight outside had faded. Or was it the grime on the windows? Talin said: ‘As a matter of fact I was going to ask Sonya to marry me this evening.’

He noticed a fleeting change of expression on Sedov’s face. Pleasure? Regret? It was a difficult face to read; theirs was a difficult – no, unusual – relationship; it had endured since university when Sedov, responsible for indoctrination of young cosmonaut hopefuls, had singled him out for special attention. In appointing Sedov for that job the KGB had chosen well; he hadn’t been too old – mid-thirties – and he had himself been a cosmonaut and therefore a hero. Talin who had lost his father when he was twelve had responded to his advice: Don’t kick the system, it kicks back. And Sedov whose only child had been stillborn had responded to him.

So here we are, Talin thought, father-and-son, adviser-and-pupil, fellow cosmonauts, friends, discussing my marriage. An unusual relationship.

‘She will accept, of course,’ Sedov said.

‘I said I was going to ask her. Before a bureaucratic match-maker interfered.’

A chunky man wearing a blue boiler-suit barged past Talin saying: ‘Sorry, Comrade, we mustn’t spill beer on that fancy coat of yours, must we,’ but when he noticed Sedov he moved away: there was something about Sedov.

Sedov said: ‘In three months’ time, in February 1984 – and let’s not believe everything Comrade Orwell had to say about that year – you and I will be flying together in space again in Dove II. May I suggest that before the flight, in December perhaps, you take a couple of weeks off training and go to the Black Sea for your honeymoon?’

‘I wish,’ said Talin tightly, ‘that you and the Comrade General would stop trying to market my life. Perhaps Orwell wasn’t so wrong…’

‘Our lives have always been arranged, you know that. And let me assure you that it’s not so different in the West. Lives are regulated just as methodically there but the people don’t realise it: they believe they are masters of their own destiny. But they still set their alarms for seven, catch the eight-twenty train, leave the office at five-thirty, switch on television at seven-forty-five and go on vacation every August. Life is a timetable, Shakespeare knew that. All we can do is enjoy the ride in between the stops.’

‘I’ve never heard you talk so much,’ Talin remarked. ‘You must be nervous.’

‘I’m just telling you not to let our version of the timetable interfere with your feelings for Sonya.’ Sedov zipped up his parka. ‘Personally I think I instilled a little humour into the situation. Imagine a general acting as a go-between.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Well, I must be off.’

‘To report on the success of the mission to the Comrade General?’

‘To buy a bottle of vodka to celebrate your engagement,’ Sedov said.

They shook hands and walked into the street and went their separate ways in the cold bright sunshine.

The swan died. The curtain fell. The audience erupted.

In his box in the great red and gold well of the theatre Talin watched the audience clapping and cheering. Sedov should have been with him: nothing was arranged here.

Beneath him a stout woman dressed in grey was crying; her husband, a balding man in a black suit and open-neck white shirt, put his arm round her.

The Bolshoi, the gold domes of the Kremlin, wooden cathedrals in the countryside, dachas, Tzarist treasures, icons… they were all the scourge of the Party publicist trying to accommodate the decadent past in the present. The publicist’s mistake was in trying; the extremes and contradictions were an entity, part of the exquisite torment of Russia.

In the front stalls they were on their feet, these discriminating judges. If they departed after a mere couple of encores then the ballerina might as well retire to teach dancing in Archangel. Tonight Talin lost count of the encores for Bragina who, according to his companions in the box, was comparable with Pavlova. Her arms were full of flowers.

Talin excused himself from the box; outside he drank a glass of pink champagne in which a glacé cherry bobbed like a cork. Communism! He fetched his coat from the cloakroom and in the street, beneath the Quadriga of Apollo, hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Georgian restaurant where he had reserved a table for two.

Three quarters of an hour later she joined him; she wore a white gold-threaded dress cut low – for her that was – and her shining blonde hair was loose, which was also unusual, so that he wondered if she had sensed that he was going to propose. Worse, if she had been told. Could the whole relationship have been set up from the beginning? Had she known all along? Angry with himself, Talin thrust aside such suspicions. This was a day for gossamer, not cobwebs. He told the waiter to bring the champagne he had ordered.

‘You’re very extravagant.’

But she was smiling. She must know the reason for the extravagance. Stop it!

The cork popped, the champagne fizzed; expertly the waiter, wearing black jacket and drooping bow-tie, poured it and replaced the bottle in the ice bucket. Several people stared. Talin was rarely recognised alone, Sonya occasionally, betrayed by the mole on her cheek; together they attracted attention as though they had stepped out of a magazine page. Twenty years ago, reflected Talin, the only couples photographed in the Press would have been workers on an assembly line or a combine harvester; no longer – today a few stars were allowed to glitter.

‘Would you like to order now?’

She nodded, watching the bubbles spiral to the surface of her glass of champagne. Waiting!

He called the waiter who handed them a menu. The restaurant was ordinary, its only concession to style a few silk screens, but the food was good, if expensive, prepared exclusively for tourists and the Muscovite élite. Such blatant class-consciousness was part of the unique Georgian approach: even their graft was arrogantly obvious. They ordered a dish made out of Georgian grass, lamb shashlik and Kinzmarauli wine.

On the table the waiter placed a carnation flown from Tbilisi. The set-up! Talin drank more champagne inwardly cursing the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief and Oleg Sedov.

She said: ‘You don’t seem in a very good mood, Nicolay.’

‘I’m jealous,’ he said, ‘of all the men looking at you.’

It was true that they were looking at her. So they might. With her high cheek bones and her assurance, which was mistaken for aloofness, she looked unattainable, and yet at the same time she exuded sensuality and Talin had a good idea what form the men’s fantasies took when they glanced slyly at her. It was not true that he was jealous.

His reactions, however, would have been more extreme had he known what the man recalling a photograph of Sonya on an Ilyushin 62 airliner high above the Atlantic was thinking at that moment.

Robert Massey was wondering whether such a girl was capable of forestalling the plot to subvert Talin.

Reynolds had shown him two photographs to memorise, Sonya Bragina and Oleg Sedov. Reynolds believed that these were the two Russians most likely to loosen any hold Massey might obtain over Talin.

Remembering the black and white photograph of Sonya Bragina – like a Hollywood casting photograph from the thirties – Massey could, in her case, believe it. The beauty spot on her cheek did nothing to disguise the strength in the set of her eyes and mouth. Ballet graces cast in steel.

The pictures of Sedov had been more enigmatic. Massey had detected loneliness in his eyes. According to the terse CIA biography he was married but after a child, a son, had been stillborn his wife had suffered a breakdown from which she had never recovered; she was believed to be a patient in a clinic among the VIPs’ summer dachas to the west of Moscow.

A stewardess stopped beside Massey’s seat with a trolley bearing Russian champagne, Stolichnaya vodka, Kinzmarauli wine, Long John whisky, amber beads, lacquer boxes, beaming wooden dolls and jars of caviar glistening in the cabin lights. Massey had been steered away from hard liquor but, hell, he wasn’t being totally dried out; his hand hovered over the Long John, picked up the vodka.

The woman with the blue rinse sitting beside him bought a jar of caviar, confiding: ‘I’ve never tasted it, but it looks like blackberry jam.’ If the woman, a member of the same package deal as Massey, wanted a conversation she was out of luck; Massey had too many thoughts to contend with.

He went to the bathroom and, while washing his hands, glanced in the mirror. He surprised himself. His eyes were clear, his skin, although prematurely lined here and there, was healthy, even his thick moustache seemed to have a gloss to it. His face was… jaunty, that’s what it was. The face of a man with a purpose who had, for the moment, forgotten his doubts about the means to the end.

When he returned to his seat the woman said: ‘Have you ever been to Russia before?’ and Massey said: ‘Why, is that where we’re going?’

She took his hand and kissed it and said: ‘Of course I will, Nicolay.’

Happiness expanded inside him but didn’t quite banish the doubt. ‘Did you know I was going to ask you?’

‘I guessed.’

‘Only guessed?’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘No one told you?’

She let go of his hand. ‘How would anyone know?’ Enlightenment dawned. ‘You told Sedov first?’

‘I told him this morning,’ on the defensive.

‘Always Sedov,’ she said bitterly. ‘You even share your marriage proposal with him. Do you intend to share the marriage itself with him?’

‘I see no harm in telling my oldest friend that I’m going to ask the girl I love to marry me.’

‘It’s too late,’ she said.

‘What’s too late?’

‘Words like that. The girl I love… you can’t escape under camouflage, Nicolay.’ With a sudden movement she swallowed the rest of her champagne as the waiter arrived with the wine and the shashlik. ‘Why don’t you marry Sedov?’

‘Shush.’

‘Why should I shush? You ask me to marry you and then tell me you’ve already consulted Oleg Sedov. What if he had said no? Would you still have asked me?’

‘Please.’ Talin nodded towards the waiter who had backed away.

Sonya’s hand tightened on the champagne glass. The fragile stem snapped and a spot of blood appeared on her finger.

Both the waiter and Talin reached forward to stem the blood with napkins but Sonya reached into her purse and brought out a tiny pink handkerchief. ‘I can manage,’ she said.

The waiter cleared away the broken glass and served the food and wine. Then he lit a candle on the table. The flame burned without movement in the silence between Talin and Sonya.

Talin began to eat, slowly and without appetite.

Sonya said after a while: ‘I’m sorry, Nicolay, it’s just that I thought this at least would be between the two of us.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Talin remembered, picking at his food.

‘I told you, I guessed you were going to ask me. I felt it.’

He drank some of the red wine and began to relax. It was, after all, he who had been clumsy; she hadn’t known, merely sensed – feminine intuition.

He held up his glass. ‘Here’s to us.’

They touched glasses; she smiled, lips trembling, and he noticed that there were tears in her eyes.

‘I wish,’ Talin said after a while, ‘that you liked Sedov a little more.’

‘I wish I did,’ she said, ‘for your sake.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘I think he’s a poseur. I find his act boring and irritating.’

‘What act?’

‘You know, the dull clothes, the drab little apartment. All perfectly understandable if you are poor but Sedov isn’t; he’s the most respected cosmonaut in the Soviet Union. Among other things,’ she added to show that she understood his dual role. ‘So what, I wonder, does he do with all his money?’

‘That’s his business,’ Talin said. He didn’t mind any of this: it was good to have it out in the open.

‘And I don’t like his attitudes. He acts as though he were one of the old Bolsheviks, as though he were a sage; he’s not that old for God’s sake. What’s more,’ Sonya hurried on, encouraged by Talin’s good humour, ‘I don’t trust his brand of Communism, it’s too cynical.’

‘There,’ said Talin placidly, ‘I think you’re wrong. True, he seems cynical but that’s only a façade.’

‘I think his outlook is out of date but he won’t admit it,’ Sonya blurted out. ‘He’s the sort of Party hack who would like us still to be in the dark ages of Communism when revolution was the only answer. Now that we have so much he finds refuge in cynicism.’

Sometimes, Talin thought, Sonya couldn’t see far beyond the walls of the Bolshoi. He and Sonya and the like had so much, it was true, but millions had very little. Her beliefs were as bright and true as a crusader’s sword but confined, the philosophy of the élite.

And my beliefs? he pondered. Essentially they were the same, except that he gazed beyond the perimeter of privilege and saw hypocrisy. The Kremlin vilified colonialism and yet it colonised; it preached peace and waged war. Talin had been into space.

Glimpsing the obstacles that lay ahead of them, Talin poured more wine and said: ‘Let’s forget Sedov for today.’ The flame of the candle wavered, then found strength.

‘I do love you,’ Sonya said.

In the background a violinist with a brigand’s face began to play music from the mountains of Georgia.

Later in Sonya’s apartment in the Arbat they made love; and their love-making was more acutely satisfying than it had ever been before, the love-making of the betrothed.

The Ilyushin on the delayed Flight SU-318 from Washington to Moscow touched down at Sheremetyevo Airport just before midnight.

Massey and the rest of the package party were driven by mini-bus through dark, snow-patched streets to their hotels. His companions chattered excitedly but, sensing cruelty outside, Massey was silent.

It was beginning to snow. The flakes charged the bus like moths before veering away. Woods of silver-birch flitted past, skeletons on the march.

Massey noticed the blurred outline of looming wooden crosses tilted to look like battlefield fortifications. ‘Where the glorious armies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics defeated the forces of German Fascism in the Great Patriotic War,’ their girl courier recited into a microphone.

‘Is where they stopped the Krauts in World War II is what she means,’ a man in the party translated.

Could anything defeat the Russians? Massey wondered as the mini-bus crossed a bridge and dived into a brightly-lit tunnel.

Their hotel, the Ukraina, reminded Massey of Grand Central Station. It took the party an hour to register.

In his room at last, Massey undressed and climbed into bed. The sheets were cold. He closed his eyes and wondered whether, if he talked in his sleep, his words would be recorded on a hidden microphone.

When he awoke in the morning the room was filled with bright snow-light and his fears had fled. Today, he thought, the battle for the soul of Nicolay Talin begins.

PART TWO

Treatment

CHAPTER FIVE

‘It’s arrived,’ Talin said, standing at the window in his dressing-gown gazing at the falling snow.

‘What’s arrived, Nicolay?’ Sonya’s voice, buried in the pillow, was muffled and sleepy.

‘Winter. The first snow was a warning. This is the real thing. Moscow will be locked up for seven months now.’

She turned lazily on the bed. ‘Don’t sound so cheerful about it,’ she said, ‘and before you start telling me about winters in Siberia go and make some tea.’

Smiling, he bent down and kissed her. ‘Did I ever tell you—’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tea.’

In the tiny kitchen he boiled water and sliced a lemon. Faintly he could hear the scrape of the babushkas’ shovels on the sidewalks. That meant the snow had stopped for a moment; during each pause the old women pounced, then retired fatalistically to watch the next fall cover their handiwork.

He brought the tea into the bedroom. The snow had stopped but the sky was still full of it. Sonya’s apartment was on the top floor of an old, four-storey block; from the window he Could see the white, envelope roofs of the few antique wooden houses still standing in the Arbat; beyond towered high-rise blocks; through a gap he could see the gold dome of a disused church.

Sonya sat up in bed and took the cup of tea. ‘We should buy a samovar,’ she said. She was wearing a filmy white nightdress with flowers embroidered at the neck; through the material he could see her breasts and was instantly aroused.

Carrying his cup of tea, he left the blue and white bedroom and went into the living room. It contained the usual dark furniture, fumed oaks and mahoganies, but Sonya had lightened the atmosphere with touches of grace and comfort. A small chandelier hung with cut-glass tears was suspended from the ceiling; one wall was crowded with photographs of ballet dancers – Pavlova was there, frozen in a pirouette – a low-slung, modern chesterfield imported from Finland was scattered with red and orange cushions; a rubber plant with shiny green leaves was climbing around two icons that glowed with the colours of winter fires.

Talin sipped his tea. He glanced at his watch. 8.20. In one hour and ten minutes he had to meet Sedov to fly to the factory where they were building the fusilages of the fleet of Doves.

In the bedroom he heard the chink of cup on saucer, the rustle of sheets. He was still aroused: this almost-married state acted like an aphrodisiac. What would their honeymoon be like?

He went back to the bedroom. She was sitting on the edge of the bed searching for her slippers with her feet. He returned to the window and said: ‘Come here and look at the snow,’ and thought: Sly dog.

He put his arm round her. He could feel her warmth and the curve of her hip. Her body wasn’t as soft as those of other women he had known: it was fit and disciplined and supple.

He slipped a hand inside her nightdress, cupping one firm breast.

‘Nicolay,’ she protested, without removing his hand.

He turned her towards him and pressed her to him so that she could feel his hardness.

‘Nicolay!’

He removed his hand from her breast and, with both hands, lifted the nightdress from her body and threw it on the bed. She stood naked, nipples hard. Every time they made love they made progress; this was the first time she had stood like this, previously she had always slipped swiftly between the sheets, like a shy schoolgirl in a dormitory – although she had soon discarded her inhibitions. The snow, now pouring from the sky, probably helped, made her feel that she was veiled from outside. He undid the belt of his dressing-gown and they were both naked and his penis ached to be inside her.

He was a little ashamed of the directness of his need. It was too much part of the old image of the selfish Russian male. Impatient thrusts, duration decided by the intake of vodka, climax followed by snores as crude as belches. Selfish? Well, those old goats missed a lot.

Talin remembered the intense pleasures of the previous night, pleasures derived both from arousing and being aroused. From kissing her lips and kissing her breasts and kissing her lingeringly between the golden curls between her thighs while she…

He pulled her towards the bed. She lay down, thighs open and, despite his slavering lust, he started to make love the selfless, enlightened way, but huskily she said: ‘No, not now,’ and pulled him down on to her and, as he slid easily into her, he realised that they had both wanted it this way.

There was a time, he mused afterwards, for sophistication and there was a time to be an old goat. He smiled and she asked him what was so amusing him and he told her; that, too, was progress.

‘But no children yet,’ she said. ‘You understand, don’t you Nicolay? I have to dance… for a few years, anyway.’ She snuggled up to him. ‘And now I’ll let you into a secret.’

He stroked her cheek, outside the snow fell steadily. ‘Well?’

‘They’re writing a ballet especially for me. Do you know what it’s about?’

He shook his head.

‘It will be performed next year, sixty years after Lenin’s death. It’s a choreographer’s dream. It’s all about the future, about space. It’s called The Red Dove,’ she whispered into his ear.

On the way to Domodyedove, Moscow’s domestic airport, in the back of a black Volga provided by the Ministry, Talin considered the tail-end of his conversation with Sonya.

She had remarked how simple it was for Soviet women to avoid pregnancy by taking contraceptive pills, apparently unaware that more than half of them still relied on the abortion service provided by the State for birth control.

That was typical of Sonya, typical of her class.

Beside him sat Sedov. His eyes looked as though they hurt and he barely spoke. Too much vodka to celebrate the engagement, Talin guessed. And probably drunk alone.

The Volga swung through the gates of Domodyedove. They climbed out of the car and ducked through the snow into the departure lounge.

It was very different from the antiseptic smartness of Sheremetyevo, the international airport. Soldiers and peasants lounged on worn seats as though they had been left over from summer; queues stood becalmed in front of Aeroflot check-in desks; passing stewardesses looked like the ugly sisters of the svelte girls on the foreign routes.

Every one of the 350 seats on the elephantine 11–86 was taken. Sedov closed his eyes and fell instantly asleep. Ten minutes before they were due to land at Voronezh, 360 miles south of Moscow, Talin woke him.

As Sedov opened his eyes he said: ‘It’s a boy, my love,’ and, transiently, there was pain in his eyes that owed nothing to vodka before he asked: ‘How much longer?’

The car waiting to take them to the Tupolev factory was a new Lada, pale blue and snappy. A wind from Siberia was driving misty rain across the city; the driver, overcome by the presence of his passengers who were actually going to fly the Doves, answered questions in monosyllables.

Yes, the shuttles were almost finished. No, the ordinary citizens of Voronezh weren’t supposed to know what was being made at the factory. But, yes, they did.

‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ Sedov said, ‘the Americans have got satellites and spy planes which can pin-point a single missile silo on the Chinese border but they can’t find out where we’re building a dozen shuttles.’

‘It can’t be that easy,’ Talin said.

‘Why not? Their embassy in Moscow is crawling with CIA. It doesn’t take a superhuman intelligence to work out that if Tupolev abandons building the TU-144, the Concordsky as the Americans called it, then they must be building something exceptionally important instead.’

‘You’d think they’d make the connection,’ Talin agreed. ‘After all we stole the TU-144 from them. Much good it did us,’ referring to the disaster at the Paris Airshow in 1973 and the two subsequent crashes in Soviet territory.

‘One Minuteman missile here,’ said Sedov as the Lada stopped at the heavily-guarded gates of the factory, ‘and we’ve lost the heavens to the Americans.’

‘You make it sound like a war,’ Talin said, showing a militiaman his red passbook.

Sedov didn’t reply.

The Chairman of the Works Committee was much like any other factory manager whose mind buzzes with quotas; he was worried, fussy, pompous and intimidated by anyone who could fly his products. Talin decided that the manager himself had been conceived as part of a five-year plan. But he displayed his merchandise with commendable pride.

The line of Doves looked awesome, but only when you knew their capabilities. Otherwise they didn’t look all that different from conventional jets. The set of the main engines in the rear with a sea-level thrust of 400,000 lb was frightening, the set of the nose endearing.

Talin smelled oil and paint and power.

‘Which is Dove II?’ he asked the Committee Chairman.

‘You’re standing in front of it.’

Talin stared curiously at the bird. It stared back; impudently, he thought. ‘I should have known,’ he said.

Could you form an attachment to an inanimate object? More fancifully, could it form an attachment to you? The former certainly, the latter well… no harm in believing it as long as you didn’t communicate your feelings to humans and get carted off to a clinic. He restrained an impulse to wink at Dove II.

Instead he appraised her with a professional eye. Within the next few months he would be flying her and the Russian people would be following ‘another giant step forward into space’ – Talin could hear the commentator’s words.

They would be told that Dove II was more revolutionary than any American shuttle; that it was more manoeuvrable and could return to orbit if anything went wrong on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere; that the flight was the final rehearsal for actual construction of a station 150 miles above the globe.

What wouldn’t be laboured was the fact that the great asset of a shuttle, its re-usability, hadn’t yet been implemented, because, in addition to the fault in its glide controls, three other potentially disastrous flaws had been discovered in Dove I and she had been scrapped.

Talin frowned. There was something different about Dove II. Different, that was, apart from obvious modifications such as the emergency engines designed to take her back into orbit if there was a failure in the earth’s atmosphere.

He asked the Committee Chairman if there were any other differences.

An infinitesimal pause. A moment’s understanding between the Chairman and Sedov. Or is it my imagination?

‘Apart from the engines it’s virtually the same,’ the Chairman told him. ‘There have, of course, been some refinements. I don’t believe your landing,’ clearing his throat, ‘was quite all it should have been.’

Irritably, Talin said: ‘I know all about the modifications to the manual controls. Is that all?’

‘As far as I know. Major differences, that is.’

‘Well you would know, wouldn’t you.’

Sedov clumped an arm round Talin’s shoulders and said: ‘Come on, Nicolay, just because you’re getting married there’s no need to sound like a nagging wife.’

Talin shrugged. There could be a thousand minute differences which would never concern him. A bolt here, a hinge there… And yet.

The Chairman said: ‘Now perhaps you would like to meet the men who are building the fleet.’

‘Of course.’

Talin and Sedov shook a hundred hands. The regimentation of the exercise depressed Talin: this wasn’t what space was all about.

What had been achieved? Talin wondered on the way back to the airport. A boost for the factory workers to meet the men who were going to take Dove II into space? Work plans were full of incentives like that. A fillip to the cosmonauts who had been languishing since the flight of Dove I?

The rain had hardened to sleet. The wheels of the Lada threw up wings of slush.

‘Impressive, wasn’t it?’ Sedov remarked. ‘But I thought you were a little hard on the Chairman.’

‘He was a pompous little Tzar.’

‘A word of warning,’ Sedov said quietly. ‘Don’t let the Cult of Personality go to your head. Not everyone can look down on the frailties of Mankind from up there,’ jabbing a thumb towards the leaking heavens.

But that wasn’t it. There had been an understanding between Sedov and the Committee Chairman to which he hadn’t been admitted. It worried him.

At the same time that Talin and Sedov were shaking aching hands with the men building the Doves, Nicolay Vlasov, chairman of the KGB, was studying the daily reports from his deputies.

They were the key pages in his survival manual.

The reports were digests of intelligence from scores of KGB departments employing a secret army 500,000 strong. (Divide and Rule was the sub-title of the chairman’s manual.)

Within a few minutes Vlasov had digested pro and anti-Soviet intent throughout the world on information supplied by embassies, consulates, trade missions, spies, traitors – and satellites.

All this intelligence was supplied by the First Chief Directorate. Vlasov studied it dutifully but because treachery as well as charity begins at home it was the reports from the Second and Fifth Chief Directorates dealing with domestic matters that most interested Vlasov, the survivor. The activities of dissidents in the Ukraine, the activities of the Jews everywhere, suspicions of espionage at Saryshagan where scientists had developed CPB weapons, anti-State rumblings in cultural circles – even the Bolshoi was troublesome these days – protests smuggled out from camps housing Prisoners of Conscience…

At the domestic level Vlasov also had his priorities. First he absorbed any significant items about the behaviour of members of the Party hierarchy. The Politburo had tried to safeguard itself from its own secret police by establishing a watchdog, the Administrative Organs Department of the Central Committee: the KGB had retaliated by penetrating the private lives of Party VIPs through high-class stukachi, informers.

Watchdog watched watchdog and. Vlasov survived. But only just. What he desperately needed was an intelligence brilliancy to re-assert his power. With his instructions to find a way to negate America’s aspirations in space the President had given him a direction; what he still lacked was a vehicle.

Externally Vlasov’s grey-stone headquarters at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, did not flaunt power. They were dingy, in fact. Long ago, before the Revolution, they had belonged to the All-Russian Insurance Company. Today, below ground, they also housed Lubyanka Prison; Lavrenti Beria, Vlasov’s most infamous predecessor, had been processed in Lubyanka before being shot, a salutory lesson to all his sucessors.

Vlasov’s third-floor office, however, did look like a seat of power. It had a lofty ceiling, long windows overlooking Marx Prospect and a king-sized desk with a battery of phones linking him to the Kremlin, the home of the President of the Soviet Union, his six KGB deputies and various other lackeys.

When he had time Vlasov examined some of the more detailed reports that accompanied the daily digests. Today he did have a little time. You never knew, there might be a vehicle of salvation among them.

He picked up a report from the Seventh Chief (itself comprising six sections) of the Second Chief Directorate which monitored the movements of foreign tourists in the Soviet Union, and perused some earnest prose from a girl named Natasha Uskova, Intourist guide to a package deal party from the United States. She had singled out one man as being worthy of consideration. Robert Massey.

The next paragraph would elaborate. Frowning, Vlasov lit a cardboard-tipped cigarette and tried to anticipate it. The name Massey rang bells. An American movie star? No, that was Raymond. Irritated with himself, Vlasov paced the spacious office: he prided himself that his memory was as keen as it had been in his youth but Robert Massey was testing him. Severely.

Space.

An astronaut.

A report from the KGB co-ordinator in the Soviet Embassy in Washington supplemented by information supplied by a paid informant at the Johnson Space Center at Houston.

Robert Massey had flown to the moon!

And come back crazy. Which was why the KGB co-ordinator in Washington had advised Moscow against pursuing rumours that Massey wanted to collaborate. He had been barking in the night, by all accounts.

Pleased with himself, Vlasov returned to his desk and read the paragraph that corroborated his memory.

But men who were still barking in the night didn’t get places on package deals.

Old zests – and new hopes – stirred inside Vlasov. The thrill of the chase when, as a young man employed by the MGB, forerunner of the KGB, he had been actively engaged in espionage in the West.

Why had Massey suddenly materialised in Moscow, apparently sane – according to Natasha Uskova? Had the Intourist operatives in Washington reported his booking to their superiors at the Embassy? If so, had the Embassy informed Dzerzhinsky Square? And, if they had, why hadn’t the information been promoted to the daily digest?

What so many agents lacked was instinct; they lost it in the labyrinths of bureaucracy. Well, he hadn’t lost his. He picked up a blue telephone and summoned Yuri Peslyak, head of the Second Chief Directorate.

It was five minutes before Peslyak put in an appearance. He had probably been speed-reading his underlings’ reports in case he was going to be put on the spot.

Peslyak, a bulky man with raggedly-cut black hair, a fleshy nose and quick dark eyes, sat in front of Vlasov’s desk and waited. He was a Georgian, like Stalin, and therefore a schemer.

Vlasov offered him a cigarette, lit it with a table-lighter shaped like the first sputnik and said: ‘So, what about Massey?’

‘An interesting case,’ Vlasov said smoothly, exhaling smoke.

So, he had managed to read the report. But had he given himself time to make further inquiries? It must have been an agonising decision: everyone knew that Nicolay Vlasov was fanatical about punctuality.

Vlasov attacked. ‘Did Intourist report the booking immediately?’

‘That, Comrade Chairman, is surely the responsibility of the First Chief Directorate.’

‘A joint responsibility, comrade. The booking was made abroad but as Massey was flying into the Soviet Union, he was entering your territory.’

‘Well,’ Peslyak said, composure unruffled, ‘you can see that we have it in hand.’

‘A chance reference in a routine report by some chit of a girl. Is that what you call having it in hand?’

‘We are following it up. Surely you don’t want to be bothered in the digests with every lead we encounter?’

True. If he did the digests would become tomes. But he had picked up this lead and he was a young man again scenting a quarry. Big game?

‘What I do want,’ Vlasov snapped, ‘is selectivity in the digests. See to it in future.’

Peslyak’s eyes flickered, his bulky body straightened a little. ‘Very well, but—’

‘I want Grade 1 surveillance mounted on Massey.’

‘If I may ask—’

‘I want the surveillance taken away from your Seventh Department and handed over to Department V of the First Chief Directorate.’

Peslyak’s eyes slitted. ‘Is that really necessary? My men are perfectly capable.’

‘Department V,’ Vlasov repeated. He had once worked for Department V, formerly known as Line F; its true title was the Executive Action Department and it was responsible for foreign sabotage and assassinations, mokrie dela, wet jobs. Not that Massey was necessarily a mokrie dela, it was merely that Department V possessed the most competent agents, with the bonus that Peslyak, who had been gunning for Vlasov since the 1980 fiasco, was being humiliated. ‘I’ll make the necessary arrangements with Moroz,’ the head of the First Chief Directorate.

‘This Massey,’ Peslyak said thoughtfully, ‘must be very important.’

Vlasov ignored him. ‘This girl Natasha Uskova – do her duties extend beyond routine observation?’

‘You mean is she a swallow?’ Peslyak rubbed his fleshy nose as though trying to reshape it. ‘She has slept with visitors from the West, yes. The photographs were excellent…’

‘Then tell her to make an approach to Massey. He might be weak in such matters. Most men are vulnerable in some area of sexuality, even ambassadors.’

Peslyak said abruptly: ‘I don’t understand.’

Vlasov picked up a red telephone and said: ‘Get me Moroz.’ Within seconds Moroz was on the line, a lesson in response to Peslyak. He told Moroz to find the best agent in Department V and alert him to stand by for a home-based operation.

Moroz agreed without question. Another lesson.

Vlasov hung up and said to Peslyak: ‘Thank you for coming, that will be all.’

‘I think I have a right to know what this is all about,’ Peslyak said stiffly, ‘as it comes within my jurisdiction.’

‘It’s all about instinct,’ Vlasov said softly. And survival, he thought.

Massey’s morning was interesting but he was preoccupied with what he had to do later.

After breakfast the package deal party wandered around the lobby of the Ukraina; a tour in itself, Massey thought. The queues of guests were still there, like refugees waiting for a last boat; crowds swarmed round the kiosks buying foreign Communist newspapers such as the British Morning Star and picture postcards; children played among groups of tourists; from time to time the main door opened admitting a shaft of white light.

At 10 a.m. Natasha Uskova rounded them up and announced brightly: ‘And now we’re going to see Moscow’s wonderful subway system.’

‘Whoopee,’ said the man who had translated Great Patriotic War the previous night. He was balding with a creased face and he smoked cigars; he had been to Moscow before and he wasn’t going to let anyone forget it.

Ignoring him, Natasha Uskova said: ‘I hope you are all dressed up warmly. Not that we shall be in the cold very much. You will find that in winter Moscow is the warmest place on earth – indoors.’

‘I know what she means,’ the man with the cigar said.

She led them outside. The minibus was waiting, pumping out clouds of white exhaust. The snow was ankle deep, still falling. They drove over the Moskva River in the direction of the Kremlin.

The man with the cigar pointed at Tchaikovsky Street. ‘Get in any trouble,’ he said, ‘and that’s where you go, the little old United States Embassy.’

Natasha Uskova said: ‘You speak from experience, Mr Belton?’

The rest of the party laughed. Massey warmed to the girl. She was black-haired, wearing sensible clothes and a fur-hat that, with the collar of her coat, framed her face and softened it. You could only guess at her figure beneath the clothes; Massey guessed it was generous, like Rosa’s.

The memory of Rosa saddened him. Her quiet acceptance when he had departed had been more of a recrimination than tears.

‘Will you be back?’ she had said. Not ‘When will you be back?’ As if she knew.

He had kissed her and boarded the airplane at Corpus Christi and, when he had arrived at Washington, told Reynolds to make available to her 100,000 dollars, but to invest it and pay it to her in monthly cheques because Rosa would have been frightened by such a sum of money.

Reynolds had agreed without question.

‘Your Mr Belton is a pain in the ass.’ Natasha Uskova sat down beside him.

‘That’s a very American expression.’

‘I worked in the Aeroflot offices on Fifth Avenue in New York before joining Intourist.’

‘You mustn’t be too hard on Mr Belton. He’s had a hard life making a few bucks. This is probably the first time he’s felt important.’

‘Now you make me feel ashamed.’

‘Control him,’ Massey said, ‘for all our sakes, but don’t ride him.’ He nodded across the gangway. ‘Who’s the new guy?’

‘He’s Herr Brasack from East Berlin. He’s a journalist writing a series of articles for the East German Press.’

Brasack was staring through the falling snow. He was a man of medium height with sandy hair and a dab of a moustache to match; he wore a brown leather overcoat and brown gloves; in the hotel he had been eagerly affable and Massey suspected that he was a bore.

The minibus stopped outside a subway station near another building that, like the Ukraina, looked like a wedding cake. ‘Stalinesque Gothic,’ Natasha Uskova whispered to Massey. ‘There are seven of them. Even now we don’t know whether to admire them or ridicule them.’

As they hurried into the warmth of the subway Massey wondered why he was being singled out for such confidences.

The station was beautiful, like an underground church except that, instead of a crucifix, the centrepiece was a bronze sculpture of muscular Soviet workers. It was as clean as a hospital ward and, when Belton tossed his cigar butt on the floor, Natasha Uskova pointed accusingly at it; grinning awkwardly, he picked it up.

Remembering the New York subway, Massey was impressed. In this area, at least, Communism had a lot going for it.

A train pulled into the station; Natasha Uskova took his arm to jerk him from his daydream; a small shock passed between them. She smiled. ‘That often happens in the winter. It’s static electricity.’

In the train he sat beside Brasack who was full of the marvels of the Metro. So much so that Massey began to tire of the mosaics and sculptures sliding past the windows.

‘Such beautiful architecture,’ Brasack breathed. ‘Such heroic achievement.’

‘Then why are they ashamed of it?’

‘What do you mean?’ Brasack fingered his sandy moustache nervously.

‘Why do they keep it all underground?’

Brasack smiled. ‘I see we’re going to have a lot of interesting ideological conversations,’ he said.

They left the train at Byelorusskaya station. For a few moments they stood huddled on the edge of the platform. In the distance they heard the rumble of another train approaching; the platform trembled; the nose of the train emerged from its burrow just as Brasack stumbled against Massey. For a moment Massey teetered on the edge of the platform. Fleetingly he thought: So this is how it is going to end. How mundane. Hands reached for him. He stepped to safety as, with a hiss of brakes, the train stopped. Brasack apologised profusely.

They went to the revolving restaurant half way up the Ostankino TV tower for lunch. Below them Moscow draped in white wraps circled slowly.

From Natasha Uskova, Massey learned that the tower was the tallest structure of its kind in the world. Moscow apparently had many superlatives. The biggest cinema, the largest hotel in Europe, the Rossiya –‘Twenty cafeterias and ten miles of corridors,’ she breathed.

‘So you’re not so different from us Americans,’ Massey said.

He, Natasha and Brasack were led to a table for three. Could it have been pre-arranged? Massey glanced at the toy-bricks of Moscow 1,090 feet below. He said to Brasack: ‘How about you sitting next to the window?’

In the afternoon they visited the treasure chambers of the Kremlin. Stood dazzled by the array of thrones, crowns, carriages, jewel-encrusted robes, vestments and mitres; gold, silver, and precious stones as plentiful as pebbles on a beach.

Quoting from her script, Natasha told them that when he saw these riches the first Soviet Minister of Education had commented: ‘Workers in the museum ate only brown bread but preserved diamonds.’

Back in the lobby of the Ukraina, Brasack suggested a drink. Massey said: ‘Later maybe.’ Brasack looked disappointed.

In his room, No. 2604 overlooking both Kutuzovsky Prospect and the river, he checked to find out if it had been searched. It was one of the lessons he had learned in a crashcourse at the CIA training establishment at Camp Peary between Williamsburg and Richmond, Virginia. That and communications, co-operation with other agencies (in particular Britain’s MI6, Britain being less suspect in Russia than the US), penetration of hostile agencies such as the KGB, encoding and decoding, para-military and psychological (PP) operations, flaps and seals i.e. secretly opening mail, diplomatic pouches, etc.

Even more importantly he had been beckoned into the Soviet Mind through Russians who had been turned. Mind? An enigma. But one thing he had learned from an old Russian who had fled the Stalin purges after World War II:

‘Never doubt their patriotism. That is their strength. Never mind Communism, they joke about it too. But never criticise Mother Russia. Westerners wonder why Russians put up with Communism; they don’t understand – everything, but everything, is endured for Country. All they have ever known is oppression. They expect it and they’ve got it. They’re masochistic patriots. Knock Party as hard as you like, but never country.’

When he had finished speaking the old Russian, who had been a major in the Red Army, had turned away and, with his new knowledge, Massey guessed why. Country.

In between lessons Massey had been reconditioned. Jogging, exercising, swimming, unarmed combat… if he met any jock dropping Tab cans on Padre Island Beach now he would break him in half.

He had also been interrogated via a polygraph to see if he had any tendencies that could abort the operations, apart from disorientation in space, that was. They had attached a cuff to his arm to measure blood pressure and pulse variations, a band round his chest to register changes in respiration and electrodes to his hands to measure his sweat output, and asked him questions. Scores of them. Then they had taught him how to beat the polygraph.

He decided that his room had been searched. Objects such as his attaché case in the wardrobe that the maid needn’t have touched had been marginally moved – he had checked their alignment with scratches on the walls; the pen in the inside of his jacket that had covered the first B of Brooks Brothers on the tab now covered an O; there were tiny, finger-tip whorls in the dust above the cupboard drawers where he had put his shirts and underclothes. The search hadn’t been particularly professional, but they hadn’t expected a professional to check them out. At least that was reassuring.

Massey wondered where they had placed the bugs. He surveyed the room. The furnishings were an incongruous clash of heavy wood and cheap plastic. The plastic lightshade was printed with pink roses; probably a microphone up there somewhere; another possibly in the bed-head; almost certainly one in the bedside telephone. According to the agent who had trained him at Camp Peary a whole floor of the Ukraina was set aside for surveillance equipment; all the eavesdroppers had to do was activate the connection to a particular room and listen. ‘Don’t make the mistake businessmen make,’ the agent had warned. ‘They wait till they get in their car to mouth their indiscretions. But, of course, the car’s bugged, too.’

Massey didn’t bother to try and locate the microphones; it would only arouse suspicion and, in any case, he wouldn’t be in the room much longer. He glanced at his watch: 8 p.m. He planned to leave at nine, although Natasha Uskova wouldn’t like it – dinner was scheduled for tonight at the National.

A knock at the door.

‘Who is it?’ Massey called out.

‘It’s me, Natasha.’

Which wasn’t scheduled.

Massey opened the door.

‘May I come in?’

‘I was just going out,’ Massey said.

But she was in the room, smiling, closing the door behind her. She wore a dark blue skirt and a white blouse. ‘I like to visit all the members of my party,’ she said, sitting down on the only chair in the room and crossing her legs, ‘to see if there’s anything they want.’

Massey looked at her legs, good legs, wondering if he had just been propositioned.

‘Is there anything you want, Gaspadeen Massey?’ She hitched her skirt up her thighs; if this was seduction Soviet style it was pretty basic.

The words of another of his Camp Peary advisers came back to him. ‘Don’t kid yourself that you’ll be above that sort of thing, Bob. We had a saying at college – a standing prick knows no conscience.’

‘Everything’s just fine,’ he told Natasha Uskova.

‘I think Gaspadeen Brasack would like to be friends with you.’

‘And me with him. Only not too friendly.’

Scintillating stuff for the eavesdroppers. Massey sat on the edge of the bed. From there he could just see the tops of her stockings. The most traumatic day of his new life and he was looking up a girl’s skirt… ‘knows no conscience.’

‘Are you enjoying Moscow?’ she asked.

‘What I’ve seen so far is beautiful,’ he said truthfully.

‘Not how you imagined it? Nor was New York how I imagined it. It’s bad PR on both sides of the Atlantic. Western photographers always take pictures of Russians with their heads bowed into a blizzard to show what a miserable existence they lead. How would the photographers look, bowed into a blizzard? And Soviet cameramen search the sidewalks for fat Americans smoking cigars.’ Had she forgotten the eavesdroppers? ‘Would you like a drink, Mr Massey?’ dropping the Gaspadeen. ‘On Intourist, of course.’

‘Not just now, thanks.’

‘We have nearly an hour till dinner…’

Three-quarters of an hour till I make my move. ‘Just a mineral water,’ he said.

‘Before I went to New York I thought all Americans liked hard liquor.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘I found out I was right.’ She picked up the phone and called room-service; miraculously she was put through immediately. She ordered a bottle of Narzan and tea for herself.

He offered her his pack of Marlborough; she took a cigarette and, when he had lit it for her, puffed out small jets of smoke without inhaling them. She should have been languorously smoking a Balkan Sobrani in a holder!

She sat down again. The legs again. He concentrated on Rosa. The saying from the Camp Peary agent’s college was wrong.

A waiter brought the tea and mineral water and departed.

She poured herself tea, and said: ‘Having lived in both American and Russian environments gives me an advantage. I know what’s good and what’s bad about both. Here we have bureacracy gone crazy, shortages, five-year plans that never materialise, a certain uniformity.’ Perhaps the room wasn’t bugged; then again perhaps she was permitted indiscretions to elicit indiscretions. ‘In the West you have riots, violence, unemployment and smog.’

He wanted to say: ‘And freedom,’ but, if the room was bugged, that wouldn’t help his cause. Instead he said: ‘An interesting equation.’

‘What do you do for a living, Mr Massey?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

She smiled conspiratorially. ‘Well, I have you down as pilot, retired. But you look too young to be retired.’

He made a performance of looking at his watch. ‘Well, if we’re not going to be late for dinner…’

‘We still have half an hour.’

‘I have to change.’

She shrugged. Put down her cup and saucer. At the door her breasts brushed against his chest. He smelled her perfume. Rosa. The college axiom was wrong.

She said: ‘Perhaps after dinner—’

‘Perhaps,’ closing the door behind her.

Twenty minutes later he put on his sheepskin jacket containing the microfilms sewn into the lapels, and made his way to the elevator doors. His step was springy, a man with a cause.

In the cavernous lobby a swarm of tourists from Cuba had just arrived. ‘You always know where to find them,’ his political adviser had told him. ‘At the end of the line-up in the worst restaurants in town. Ivan doesn’t have much respect for Cubans, much better to be an American in Moscow.’

Massey thought he sported Natasha Uskova across the lobby but he couldn’t be sure. He pushed his way through the Cubans, past tottering piles of luggage. As more Cubans came through the doors he squeezed between them. Outside it was snowing lightly; the snow in front of the doors had been trampled into cobblestones of white ice, beyond it was thick and soft.

Massey glanced behind him. More Cubans. He climbed into a battered black taxi and told the driver to take him to the Metropole Hotel; there were certain destinations, he had been advised, that taxi drivers didn’t question, or report.

As the cab swung away from the hotel a white Lada 2105 parked by the kerb took off. It was still behind the cab at Arbatskays Square.

As they drove along Kalinina Prospect, Massey caught a glimpse through the falling snow of the illuminated red star on the spire of St Saviour’s Tower overlooking Red Square. He told the driver to stop. Startled, the driver braked and the cab skidded to a halt. The white Lada sailed past, stopping farther along the avenue of high rise.

Massey stuffed some rouble notes in the driver’s hand and ran towards it. The taxi began to follow; then accelerated away throwing up slush.

Massey yanked open the door of the Lada. ‘Good evening, Bob,’ said Herr Brasack, ‘I have a message for you from Mr Reynolds.’

After the first pulse of shock Massey thought: ‘Anyone could get hold of Reynolds’ name.’ He began: ‘Who—’ but Brasack interrupted: ‘No time for questions, Bob. How about 512 937 2621?’

It was the Padre Island National Seashore phone number, agreed in Washington as identification.

Massey asked: ‘What do you want?’ peering inside the car.

‘Just making contact. We wanted you to know that you weren’t alone.’

‘Protected by an East German?’

‘That’s the way it’s done, Bob.’ Brasack’s voice was still friendly but now it had a cutting edge to it. ‘The Company can’t rely on Embassy operatives. Too obvious. So they farm out the work to foreigners like me. East German journalist. What could be better?’

‘What was the message from Reynolds?’

‘A quotation. All this and heaven too. Mean anything to you?’

Massey nodded: for heaven read space.

Brasack leaned across and grasped the door handle. ‘I’ve got to be going now, Bob; it doesn’t pay to hang around in Moscow. Are you making your move now?’ he asked abruptly.

‘On schedule,’ Massey said. He shut the door and walked briskly away. On schedule but with a change in plan; he saw no point in telling Brasack that, instead of defecting at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, he had decided to go straight to the altar of intrigue, No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square.

CHAPTER SIX

The spool of tape was labelled ROBERT MASSEY. POLYGRAPH INTERROGATION BY YAROSLAV DRABKIN. NOV. 14, 1983.

Vlasov pressed the white ON button on the console recorder built into the wall and, elbows on his desk, fingertips to his fragile-looking temples, listened.

At first trivialities.

Then: ‘When did you decide to defect?’

A pause. ‘A long time ago, I guess.’

Q: How long?

A: When I was ill.

Q: When you were crazy?

A: No, ill.

A splice of fresh tape had been inserted at this point for a comment by Yaroslav Drabkin. ‘The question was deliberately brutal to discover whether subject had been trained to deceive the polygraph. Such brutality would have produced extreme pulse, blood pressure and sweat reaction in a genuine subject, minimal reaction in a subject coached to control emotions.’

A pause. Drabkin clearing his throat.

‘Well?’ Yuri Peslyak who was sitting opposite Vlasov, addressed the recorder.

‘The subject’s reactions were extreme.’

Q: Why did it take you so long to implement your decision?

A: Because I was sick. At least I thought I was.

Q: Please explain.

A: The Central Intelligence Agency shot me full of drugs to make everyone think I was crazy. Me included.

Q: Why did they do that, Mr Massey?’

A: So that no one would take me seriously.

Q: Are you sane?

A: As sane as that machine of yours.

Q: Why have you defected?

A: Think about it, Mr Polygraph. Think what they did to me.

Q: They?

A: America.

Q: So your motives changed?

A: I guess so. The first time I was… disorientated. Space can do that to you. I wanted to share…. Now I hate.

Q: How did you discover you had been drugged?

A: A psychiatrist at the Company clinic in Washington suddenly got guilty. He was dying of cancer. Said he didn’t want to meet his Maker with me on his conscience.

Q: You realise we can check this out?

A: Not him, you can’t – he’s dead.

Q: Who did you speak to in the white car?

A pause.

Vlasov said: ‘This Drabkin, he’s good.’

‘The best,’ Peslyak agreed. ‘Married to his lie detector. I sometimes wonder how he would react under interrogation. If he lied to his machine it would be like lying to himself.’

‘We all do that from time to time,’ Vlasov said.

A: What white car?

Q: The white car that stopped in front of your taxi two nights ago.

A: I think the driver was an intelligence officer from the United States Embassy.

Q: Think?

A: Know.

Q: Why did you meet him?

A: I didn’t. I realised a car was following me so I told the cab driver to stop.

Q: What did he want?

A: He wanted to know what the hell I was playing at. The CIA has kept tabs on me ever since I went sick, I guess. Suddenly I book a passage to Moscow. They want to know why.

Q: Did they question you in the United States?

A: Sure they did. I told them I was taking a vacation. They seem to think that was okay. As far as they knew I was no longer a threat to security – any information I might have had was years out of date.

Q: So they didn’t know that you had gained access to secret material?

A: I figure the fact that I’m here speaks for itself.

Another splice in the tape. Drabkin’s voice: ‘The question about the white car was vital. If Massey had been trained to deceive a polygraph then he would have been able to control his reactions to such a question because he would have been taught to anticipate shock tactics. Again his reactions were extreme.’

Vlasov leaned across his desk and pressed the STOP button. ‘What about that white Lada, Peslyak?’

Peslyak consulted a blue notebook. ‘According to the operative from the Executive Action Department who was working a two-man surveillance they traced the number to the Lada export outlet, Avtoexport, at 14 Volkhonka. It was a demonstration model on loan to a Dutchman whose company was said to be considering a big order.’

‘And he hasn’t been seen or heard of since?’

‘Correct. The Lada was abandoned outside Avtoexport that night.’

‘The surveillance team did well to get the registration,’ Vlasov said, realising that he was defending Department V and, indirectly, his own judgement.

‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Peslyak replied. ‘The second half of the team was driving Massey’s taxi.’

Vlasov grunted and pushed the ON button.

In a dimly lit but comfortably furnished room in the same building, close to the interior entrance to Lubyanka Prison, Robert Massey listened to a duplicate of the same tape. With him was his interrogator, Yaroslav Drabkin, a small bespectacled man with a fringe of black hair across his studious brow. They sat on leather armchairs, their manner appreciative as though, Massey thought, they were listening to a ball game. But he guessed that he was participating in an extension of the interrogation; that even now Drabkin was observing him.

Thank God for the instruction in defeating the lie detector at Langley. His tutor had looked a little like Drabkin; he, too, had conducted a long love affair with his polygraph and didn’t enjoy teaching anyone how to deceive it.

First priority: anticipation. If you had anticipated the questions and prepared the answers, got them word perfect, then the needles on the dials wouldn’t flicker LIES. If the interrogator was worth his salt, the tutor had said, he would try to shock – ‘throw in a couple of hand grenades into the Q and A.’ That was fine, because Massey’s reaction would make him appear all the more genuine. Massey might even find himself indulging in some low key lying; that too would be fine… The white Lada! The other trick was to concentrate on some inanimate object during the questioning, a picture maybe. Massey had concentrated on a painting of Lenin.

Q: How did you get access to classified material?

A: Through a contact at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the headquarters for the US military shuttle operations.

Q: Did he contact you?

A: I contacted him when I found out about the drugs.

Q: Where?

A: At Shelter Island, San Diego. He was on vacation.

Q: What does he do at Vandenberg?

A: Computers. He’s into computers like you’re into polygraphs…

Drabkin’s dark eyes regarded Massey across the room. Unsmiling. He lit a parchment-coloured cigarette and blew a jet of smoke into a shaft of sunlight.

Q: What is this man’s name?

A: Vogel.

Q: Why did you choose Vogel?

A: Because I knew him when I was an astronaut. I knew his strengths… which some people might interpret as weaknesses. As far as I know he only confided in me.

Q: What were those strengths… or weaknesses?

A: Like Fuchs, Nunn-May and Pontecorvo before him he believed that weapons of mass destruction should be shared. That the balance of power would save the world. They were concerned with atomic weapons: Vogel was concerned with military aggression from space – the logical progression from the nuclear weaponry that those idealists – or traitors, according to your view – sought to spread evenly among the super powers.

Q: He believed all this when you were still a cosmonaut?

A: Sure he believed it. But he was more of an idealist than a man of action. In any case in those days the United States wasn’t that much ahead of the Soviet Union in military application in space.

A long pause.

Q: And they are now?

A: Light years ahead.

Peslyak pulled at his fleshy nose. Vlasov pressed the REWIND button. The tape gave a clattering whine.

Q: He believed all this…

Vlasov speeded up the tape.

Q:… are now?

A: Light years ahead.

Vlasov switched off the recorder and asked Peslyak: ‘Do you believe that?’

‘That’s up to the First Chief Directorate.’

‘I asked you.’

Peslyak shrugged. ‘Of course not.’ He smoothed his crumpled suit. ‘What has Massey got to offer?’

‘A lot,’ Vlasov said, ‘if he’s telling the truth.’ He restarted the recorder.

Q: You seem very sure of this.

A: Vogel is.

Q: What exactly is Vogel’s job?

A: Director of communications at Vandenberg.

Q: The microfilm that you gave us, did that originate from him?

A: It did. It contains details of the latest Elint satellites.

Q: Elint?

A: Electronic Intelligence, known as ferrets in the States. Your people at Tyuratam, or wherever, know all about them. They orbit 400 miles up and photograph other satellites.

Q: And is that all you have to offer?

A: All?

Q: We understood you had something a little more ambitious in mind.

A: Ambitious – the understatement of the decade.

Q: Could you elaborate, Comrade Massey?

A: Okay. I brought the microfilm as an act of good faith. I also brought you the means to control space and therefore the globe.

Peslyak spread his hands incredulously. ‘He is crazy.’

Vlasov held up a hand. ‘Listen.’

Q: (an uncharacteristic note of excitement in the interrogator’s voice)… explain yourself, Comrade Massey.

A: It’s quite simple. Computers are the most sophisticated pieces of machinery Man has invented: they are also the most vulnerable. If you know the codes it’s relatively easy to penetrate their brains.

Q: If you know the codes… and all the other security checks. The terminal identification number, for instance – that must change every day.

A: So you’re into computers as well as polygraphs.

Q: (another uncharacteristic note, irritation) Even a street sweeper would appreciate such difficulties.

A: Like I said, not so difficult. Staggeringly easy, in fact. If you know the codes.

Q: You do?

A: I don’t, Vogel does.

Drabkin said: ‘I think we’ve listened to ourselves long enough, don’t you?’

‘I was enjoying it,’ Massey said.

Drabkin stopped the tape. He switched on the electric light and offered his pack of cigarettes; Massey refused. He put on a pair of steel-framed spectacles and went to a cupboard in the corner of the room. ‘Drink?’ taking a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and mineral water from a shelf piled with polygraph spares.

‘If you’re having one,’ Massey said.

‘A word of warning,’ Drabkin said, pouring vodka into two none-too-clean glasses. ‘Whenever you drink fire-water stoke the fires. In other words eat, Comrade Massey.’ From a biscuit tin he took a handful of small salted crackers and put them in a saucer on the table between the two armchairs. ‘Nasdarovya.’ He raised his glass.

‘Mud in your eye.’

They each drank half the measures of vodka, washed them down with mineral water and bit into their crackers.

‘What you are suggesting is quite incredible,’ Drabkin remarked.

Massey assumed that the conversation was still being recorded. Friendship was not being tentatively proffered. The hot-cold technique, as old as interrogation itself, so he had been told at Camp Peary.

Drabkin ran one finger through his fringe of black hair. ‘I’m not really “into computers” as you put it. But could we really penetrate a computer system as sophisticated as Vandenberg’s?’

Massey said: ‘Look, I’m not “into computers” either. I can only interpret Vogel. According to him, all you need is a communication terminal, i.e. a distant terminal from which you can make contact with a central computer system, i.e. Vandenberg.’

Drabkin refilled Massey’s glass; not his own, Massey noted. ‘Come now, Comrade Massey, there must be more to it than that.’

‘Not, as I understand it, if you have (1) a terminal identification number; (2) a key code; (3) a data code.

‘You say Vogel has access to such codes?’

‘Sure he does, but they’re changing all the time.’

‘How would he convey these codes to us?’

Massey smiled at Drabkin. ‘He wouldn’t.’ He sipped his vodka, crunched up another cracker.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘If your computer experts and Vogel set up a two-way communications system then I could become… dispensable. I wouldn’t want that, Comrade Drabkin, so I’ve taken precautions to make sure that Vogel will only communicate with me. That also puts me in a strong bargaining position.’

‘Bargaining?’ Drabkin lunged again with the vodka bottle but Massey pushed his hand away. ‘You are seeking asylum, yes?’

‘More.’

Drabkin frowned. The splash of vodka into his own glass disturbed the gathering silence. Finally Drabkin broke it: ‘What more could you possibly want. Money?’

‘A very bourgeois observation. I was thinking on a much higher plane.’

Patches of red had appeared on Drabkin’s pale cheeks. Vodka or anger or both. ‘Please be more precise, Mr Massey.’

‘Very well. I want to return to space. I’m giving you access to the United States military programme for space: in return I want to be taken to Tyuratam and retrained as a cosmonaut.’

Massey returned to the room provided for him in an annexe in Dzerzhinsky Square at 5.14 p.m. By 5.20 Vlasov and Peslyak were listening to a tape of his final exchanges with Drabkin.

After he had expressed his wish to return to space, Drabkin said: ‘So, if you are to be believed, the Soviet Union could ultimately obtain details of all the United States’ classified military material in space.’

Massey replied: ‘I think you’ve missed the point but I doubt whether others listening to the tape have…’

Peslyak glanced at Vlasov; Vlasov stared back impassively.

‘…It’s not a question of extracting information, it’s a question of inserting it. Input not output. By feeding Vandenberg’s computers incorrect information you could totally wreck the American space programme. You would then command space – and thus the world.’

Drabkin and Massey parted company. A door closed. The tape ran out.

Vlasov stood up and walked to the window. The sky was dark with a few clear black pools among the clouds. ‘Crazy, Comrade Peslyak?’

‘Still highly suspect.’

‘There will be other interrogations. Narcoanalysis, hypnosis. Meanwhile I’m going to try something more practical.’

Peslyak looked at him inquiringly.

‘I’m going to see if Massey’s scheme works.’

To see if he really is the vehicle to follow the direction indicated by the President.

My salvation!

Vlasov stared into the sky. From one of the black pools a star glittered back at him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In a small house located in coastal desert in south California, forty-two miles south-west of Santa Barbara, Daniel S. Vogel, Director of Communications at Vandenberg Air Force Base, lay in bed fighting the temptation to take his temperature.

Like many men and women who seek perfection in their calling – in Vogel’s case computers – he had allowed a personal weakness to run riot.

That weakness was hypochondria. ‘I’ve got it so bad,’ he once told a friend, ‘that I’m hypochondriac about hypochondria.’

It was at its worst when he was worried. And this morning he was very worried. Often his wife could dispel the fears about his health, but not this morning; with the new day only a green rim on the horizon it wouldn’t be fair to wake her.

His mouth felt dry, his eyes tired despite eight hours’ sleep. Had he got a fever? Only the cool, mercury-filled bulb of a thermometer beneath his tongue could answer the question. And the pulse, of course. He didn’t have to take that: he could hear it against the pillow. As he listened it began to gallop.

Don’t give in to the temptation. Lying on his back so that he couldn’t hear his heartbeat, Vogel forced his thoughts away from the symptoms of fever, away from the crisis that lay ahead of him later that day, and guided them towards his vision, his refuge.

It was Vogel’s ambition to be alive when the UIM was perfected, UIM representing Ultra-Intelligent Machine.

The UIM, he figured, would be a reality within the next twenty years; that would put him at around seventy, well within the average life expectancy if, that was, his health held out.

But there were many obstacles ahead. Not the least of them the speed of light which limited electronic signals within a machine to around 300,000 kilometres a second, thus making computerised brains slower than their human counterparts that could process thousands of impulses simultaneously. And Mankind’s own resistance to producing a phenomenon that could be as intelligent as himself, and, one day, more intelligent.

Vogel, however, believed there was a more immediate and much more dangerous obstacle. Communism. The future was computers, of this there was no doubt. But, because its system stifled enterprise, Russia was at least a decade behind the West in electronics.

Vogel feared that, appreciating this fatal flaw in its scheme of things, the Soviet Union might launch a limited nuclear attack on the United States to redress the balance. Thereby aborting the birth of the UIM within his lifetime and retarding, perhaps annihilating, a computerised future or, for that matter, any future at all.

Vogel had therefore offered his brain, and his machines’ brains, to the United States Government, which had accepted gratefully, because Daniel Vogel was acknowledged to be the best in his field, and posted him to Vandenberg Air Force Base, also known as the Western Test Range, on the Californian coast.

Ten thousand Service personnel and their families live at Vandenberg. It is not only a launch site for shuttles, spy satellites and other items of esoteric hardware, it is a storehouse for intercontinental ballistic missiles housed in underground silos; as such it is not the most popular posting in the United States Air Force.

But it was not the pressure of the IBMs or the threat of an attack by Soviet missiles that bothered Daniel Vogel this fine late November morning. What concerned him so acutely was the first phase in an exercise in computerised disinformation that was to be launched later in the day. An exercise on a scale never attempted or envisaged before. An exercise that scared the shit out of Daniel Vogel.

He looked hopefully at his wife, but her freckled, still-pretty face was in deep repose. Outside the dawn had flushed red.

Vogel swung his legs out of bed and made for the bathroom. He contemplated opening the window and breathing deeply of the saline air blowing in from the Pacific but decided that, if he had a fever, it wouldn’t be a good idea. He opened the cabinet, picked up the thermometer, replaced it abruptly in the tumbler of diluted disinfectant.

What upset Vogel most about his weakness was that he knew damn well it was just that, a weakness, because he was a strong, ruddy-faced man of fifty who still scuba dived and played a mean round of golf.

Firmly closing the door of the cabinet, Vogel, wearing old-fashioned striped pyjamas and carpet slippers, walked along the corridor to a door marked PRIVATE NO ADMITTANCE. Not that the notice would deter a determined intruder; but the two Secret Service guards outside the house would. Vogel unlocked the door and went into his private brain centre.

By Vandenberg standards the equipment in the room wasn’t extensive or sophisticated. It consisted of a single-user operating system of the Digital PDP-11 Family. But it was sufficient for Vogel’s needs before he went to the big, humming nerve centre of the Air Force base where he was king.

It was also sufficient to make contact with Massey in Moscow.

But that wasn’t for another six hours.

He activated the equipment. Next to his wife, he liked best to have intercourse with his private computer, to tap the resources of the data banks. The room was lit with soft green light, the screen glowed.

He sat in a chair with a back specially moulded to offset lumbar complications. He would have liked to smoke a cigarette but he had long ago heeded the health warnings.

Into the computer he fed basic details of the planned deception. Finally, he asked the question that had been bothering him all night. Back came the answer: IT IS POSSIBLE.

Vogel sighed. It wasn’t the answer he had hoped for. He switched off the current and, locking the door behind him, returned to the bathroom.

Resistance shattered, he opened the door of the cabinet, took out the thermometer and placed it beneath his tongue. He gave it two minutes in case it was slow in reacting. Fatalistically, he read the level of the mercury. 98.4 F. Normal.

Reynolds’ Boeing YC-14 touched down at Vandenberg airfield to the north of the base at 10.38 a.m., one hour and twenty-two minutes before the Moscow connection was to be made.

Standing on the tarmac, the breeze ruffling his soft silver hair, he gazed around with satisfaction. Not so long ago the coastal scrub had been the habitat of a few farmers and their stock – sea birds, Californian Valley quail and rabbits. Today it was the launch pad to dominance of space. From Space Launch Complex 6, on a plateau above the ocean, military shuttles would soon be launched as regularly as the phases of the moon.

Vogel was waiting for him in his ’79 silver Mercedes. With him was his deputy, Carl Wonner, who had been brought into the deception in case anything happened to Vogel. Wonner was in his early thirties, studious, crew-cut and quiet; the few friends that he possessed reported that he released all his inhibitions watching ball games; he became a man possessed, they said, and figured that he was an athlete born without muscles.

Vogel’s wife was leaving the house as they arrived. Vogel, wearing tartan jacket and grey slacks, led him into the living room and poured coffee. Reynolds thought how fit he looked.

‘Well,’ Reynolds said, sipping his coffee, ‘is it going to work?’

‘No reason why it shouldn’t work this end. The other end? Well, that’s down to Massey.’

‘What do you think?’ Reynolds turned to Wonner who was glancing at a sports magazine lying open at an article about Jack Quinn who had pitched for twenty-three years at the beginning of the century.

‘I reckon it’ll work,’ Wonner said.

According to Vogel, Wonner was a genius, young enough to take full advantage of the exploding age of the computer. Vogel was right – Wonner’s CIA assessment confirmed that – but, Reynolds thought, he didn’t inspire confidence.

Reynolds glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got an hour, let’s run through it.’

Vogel led them into his private brain centre. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so we know that Massey has got access to a terminal. As a matter of fact all he needs is a telephone and a portable digitronics audioverter and a typewriter. But let’s assume that he – and the guy sending the message for him, my counterpart – is working from some sort of conventional terminal. So they connect with my terminal identification number. This is a private thing between me and Massey, remember.’

‘I remember,’ Reynolds said. ‘It was my idea.’

‘Provided they identify themselves correctly – and Massey will be using a different identification each time he makes contact so that he doesn’t become expendable – this box of tricks,’ patting the equipment, ‘will come up with the answers to his questions.’

‘Which will be the terminal identification, key code and minimum access code to the central processer at Vandenberg,’ Wonner said.

‘Or what we want them to think are the codes and identification,’ Vogel corrected him. ‘Okay, so Massey gets his codes for the day, now let’s move to where the action’s going to take place.’

Vogel drove to the NASA complex in the centre of the base. There was considerable activity on the roads. ‘An ICBM test launch down there,’ Wonner explained, pointing towards the launch area at Point Arguello to the south.

‘I know,’ Reynolds said.

Vogel drew up outside a small white-painted building sprouting with aerials. It was guarded by Air Force police. Vogel, Reynolds and Wonner identified themselves and went into the building.

The interior of the building was stacked with computer hardware. Consoles, flickering screens, data files, spools of magnetic tape as big as automobile wheels gently on the move.

Vogel was proud of the real time complex. He was also very apprehensive about it. Because it was fraudulent. ‘The most elaborate fraud ever conceived by an intelligence organisation,’ was how Reynolds described it. With the infinite permutations of facts at its electronic fingertips, it had to be.

Under Vogel and Wonner there was a staff of six. Controller, programmers, engineers. Reynolds went behind the programmers glancing at the flickering digits on their screens. Vogel, he conceded, had performed a miracle in the three months allocated to him.

Into the main store facts about Vandenberg’s role in space, specially tailored for the operation, had been fed. The leeches in Russia bleeding the system would receive a plausible blend of truth (information already known to have been obtained by the KGB), half truths, quarter truths, and downright lies.

Reynolds returned to Vogel who was pacing the floor nervously and said: ‘I don’t profess to know too much about the intricacies of your profession. Am I right in assuming that you’re using the FORTRAN language?’

Vogel said: ‘You know more than most laymen. And you’re right, FORTRAN. Formulatranslation. Input and output inplemented through statements recognising the peripheral unit—’

‘The Russians, of course, are familiar with FORTRAN?’

‘They’ve got to be. They rely on American systems and imitations. So they’ve got to be into all the high level programming languages. FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL and a few others besides.’

It wasn’t until they had returned to his private control centre, ten minutes before Moscow was due to make contact, that Vogel voiced his fears.

He activated the computer and asked: ‘Have you ever wondered, Mr Reynolds, what might happen if there was a traitor with access to Vandenberg’s central processor?’

Reynolds nodded. ‘Or the processor at Fort Knox for that matter. Or the FBI or CIA headquarters. Or the Pentagon.’

‘Because now we’ve given the Russians the idea…’ Vogel sat down in front of the green-glowing screen. ‘I asked the computer this morning if what the Soviets are about to try could ever succeed.’

‘And?’

‘It said it was possible.’

‘I entirely agree,’ Reynolds said, sitting down beside Vogel.

Vogel felt tension building up inside him. His heart seemed to flutter. He decided that, as soon as Reynolds had left, he would take his blood pressure.

In a modern block, situated in the north-east suburbs of Moscow on the route to Kaliningrad, Vogel’s innocent partner in deception crouched over a computer terminal. He, too, was consumed with worry.

Like Vogel, his worry also had a physical manifestation: it made him hungry. As he was frequently worried Sergei Yashin, who was thirty-two, was almost always famished, but as skinny as many a French chef.

At that moment, with five minutes left before the California Connection, he could have put away a saucepanful of borscht thick with cream, followed by Chicken Kiev washed down with a litre of tea.

Yashin’s worry had been seeded early in his career when he had discovered that Russia’s domestic computers were at least eight years out of date. In America they had already perfected memories with a million switching units etched on a micro chip: in the Soviet Union they couldn’t manage more than 100,000.

Why? Because the whole Soviet effort was channelled towards military might, that was why. Without any thought for the benefits that computers could bring to society. Benefits that would give people time to enjoy their world. That sort of thing.

Yashin’s exceptional appetite took a gluttonous turn on his twenty-fifth birthday. Standing in Red Square on 7 November watching the elephantine missiles trundle across the cobblestones, he suddenly thought: Most people in this city are lucky if they’ve got a car.

He worried and he ate and he got thinner.

Within the past few days his anxiety had been complicated by guilt. By taking part in this plot to rob the American computers of their space secrets, he was furthering Russia’s militarism. At the expense of the micro chips of peace.

In fact the only difference between the immediate worries of Daniel Vogel and Sergei Yashin was that, whereas Vogel feared that one day the Russians might truly penetrate Vandenberg, Yashin feared that day was today.

As he crouched, fingers touching the keyboard of the out-of-date terminal, poised to make contact with an extremely up-to-date system, Yashin was a very confused young man.

And his confusion wasn’t helped by the presence in the KGB communications HQ of Nicolay Vlasov, Chairman of the KGB, and Yuri Peslyak, head of its Second Chief Directorate. Vlasov had always seemed as remote as the President of the USSR to Yashin; Peslyak a little less so because Department 8 which employed Yashin was part of his Directorate.

The American named Massey who seemed to be the key to the whole thing, said in passable Russian: ‘Three minutes. Are you ready?’

‘Ready,’ Yashin said, rubbing his finger-tips together like a cardsharp.

Peslyak brushed cigarette ash from his jacket. ‘You look worried,’ he said.

Worried? He was weighted to his seat with guilt and apprehension. ‘I’m fine, Comrade Director.’

Vlasov said to Massey: ‘I hope for your sake, Mr Massey, that this works,’ the tone soft, the words threatening.

‘Now!’ snapped Massey. He dictated Vogel’s terminal identification number, XR 58437219, to Yashin. Yashin’s thin fingers danced across the keys.

A pause. Then the screen responded. Massey handed Yashin a scrap of paper bearing the figures 97639914. ‘Send that,’ he said and explained to the other two: ‘That’s the personal identification between Vogel and myself. It’s untraceable. It will also be different every time you want to make contact. A personal safety-guard,’ he said to Vlasov.

Another pause, longer this time.

‘I’ve also taken another precaution,’ Massey said pleasantly as they waited. ‘It only takes effect if you should one day decide that my presence is an embarrassment, i.e. the day you figure you’ve penetrated Vandenberg completely.’

‘We shall never consider you an embarrassment, Comrade Massey.’ Vlasov’s greenish eyes appraised Massey. ‘But, out of interest, what is this precaution?’

‘I’ve arranged to make contact with Vogel every six days. If he doesn’t hear from me for a period of longer than seven days then he blows the whole operation – without incriminating himself, of course. In fact he’ll come out smelling of roses.’

‘Interesting,’ Vlasov said, ‘but an academic exercise because we shall never cease penetrating Vandenberg. Why should we? American scientists will continue to make progress. We shall continue to keep up with it.’

Peslyak said: ‘What I don’t understand is how Vogel thinks he’s going to get away with it. What we’re perpetrating is grand larceny. American security must have contingency plans for such a theft.’

The pause continued. Yashin’s belly ached with hunger. He stared at the screen and saw a bowl of stew, smelled the spicy fragrance from its bubbles. His mouth watered and his stomach whined.

Massey said to Peslyak: ‘What you don’t understand is how vulnerable these highly sophisticated pieces of hardware are. And what you’re forgetting is that Vogel’s in charge. He is security. As soon as he’s given us the codes he’ll erase the entire communication from the computer’s memory.’

Figures appeared on the screen. The first sequence, Massey told them as they recorded them, was the terminal identification for the day for Vandenberg’s central processor; the second was the key code; the third the minimum access code.

‘Cut the connection,’ Massey ordered crisply.

Yashin looked inquiringly at Peslyak and Vlasov. Vlasov nodded. ‘Cut it. And now,’ he said, ‘we come to the interesting part.’ He handed Yashin a photostat of a report received by Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) from which the source had been erased. ‘We know this about Columbia’s activities is true. So we’re going to ask the computers at Vandenberg about it. If they come up with the same information then your idea will begin to assume some credibility. I have to admit,’ he added, ‘that the information is far from new.’ He touched Yashin on the shoulder. ‘Start transmitting.’

Yashin tapped out the first number.

A moment’s hesitation. Then they were through.

The second number. Through again.

The third. And they had access.

Yashin immediately requested information on the project described in the GRU report. The reply came back in a snowstorm of letters and algebraic formulae. ‘FORTRAN,’ Yashin explained, glancing over his shoulder.

He disconnected the line, stood up and removed the print-out from the adjacent machine that had simultaneously translated the FORTRAN. He handed it with the original report to Vlasov.

Vlasov began to read aloud, pausing to compare the print-out with the GRU report: ‘Deposited by Columbia OV-103… deuterium fluoride… lasers of five megawatts directing 500 joules of energy…’

He folded print-out and report together and slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket. He smiled thinly at Massey: ‘So far, so good. Vandenberg has confirmed what the GRU report said. That your compatriots are planning to use a shuttle to deposit a satellite in space armed with lasers. The object of those lasers, Mr Massey, is to destroy our satellites – and to think we signed an agreement with the United States to do no such thing. However,’ he shrugged, ‘we’re not here to discuss the politics of space. The point is that it would appear – and I put it no higher – that we have gained access to Vandenberg.’

‘It would appear,’ Massey repeated. ‘What sort of proof do you need for Christ’s sake?’

‘The object of the exercise is to feed information into those computers. I’ll only be convinced when I’ve seen the results of such misinformation. In other words, Mr Massey, I want to see something go wrong with the United States space programme. Something for which the Americans blame themselves while we know we are responsible.’

Yashin said: ‘Will that be all, Comrade Chairman?’ looking at Vlasov. His stomach made a noise like a violin string being plucked.

Peslyak said: ‘Get out of here and fill that miserable gut of yours.’

As Yashin departed Massey turned to Vlasov and said: ‘The next connection is scheduled for Thursday, in six days’ time.’

Vlasov shrugged. ‘Very well. We won’t attempt anything sensational. Not just yet.’

‘There is something pretty sensational as far as I’m concerned,’ Massey told him. ‘The connection will be made from Tyuratam. By that time I want to be enrolled as an advanced student in a cosmonaut training programme.’

Nine thousand five hundred miles away in California Carl Wonner handed Reynolds a print-out confirming the Russians’ electronic heist. As Reynolds had predicted, they had tested the leak by extracting information they could check, information that the CIA already knew had been lifted through routine espionage channels.

‘It was what I would have done in their place,’ Reynolds remarked as Vogel drove them to the airfield in the silver Mercedes. He snapped his fingers. ‘Which gives me an idea.’

Vogel glanced at him nervously. ‘Involving us?’

‘Oh yes,’ Reynolds said, ‘it sure as hell involves you.’

When he got home Vogel took his blood pressure. 150. Good for his age! Obviously there was something wrong with the apparatus.

PART THREE

Script

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rocket City, according to Novosti Press Agency, ‘cannot boast a mild climate’.

Cynics have suggested that the author of this observation must have got wind of some award for understatement because in summer, Leninsk, to give it its real name, is as hot as a sauna and in winter the cold can take your ears off.

It is situated in Kazakhstan, one of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics, some 1,500 miles south-east of Moscow. It has a population of 60,000, most of whom are connected directly or indirectly with the Tyuratam space centre whose launch pads are located twenty-one miles away.

The Soviet authorities have always been coy about the very existence of Leninsk. It isn’t marked on any Russian maps designed for public consumption – and the charitable suggest that this is because it is so brash, square and ugly, built in haste as the dormitory for the space centre.

It stands on the banks of the Syr Darya river on desolate steppe, once the crossroads of tribes from China and Mongolia seeking plunder in the West. Today it boasts a university, three theatres, a couple of hotels and a sports stadium. It is saved from uniform drabness by its shops which are stocked with relative luxuries for the privileged from the space centre.

But if the Russians are coy about Leninsk they are positively paranoiac about Tyuratam, which they still insist on calling Baykonur even though the railway station of that name is 230 miles to the north-west. To compound this deception they have stated categorically that the map reading for the space centre is 47.3 degrees N and 65.5 E, the reading, that is, for Baykonur and not Tyuratam.

Thanks to photographs from Landsat no one takes these figures seriously any more. And, when American observers visited the space centre for the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975, the Russians bashfully admitted that the highway leading to it passed ‘near the Tyuratam railway station’.

Tyuratam itself looks not unlike Kennedy with its hulking great assembling buildings, towering gantries, launch pads, skeletal crawler transports and featureless roads. Like Lubyanka Prison a lot of its vitals are underground and, with their periscopes, the command cellars have been likened to submarines.

Few employees from the space centre like living in Leninsk and most of the cosmonauts prefer staying in the pre-launch hotel, complete with swimming pool, to the small houses provided for them by the State. But there are exceptions, among them Nicolay Talin. The city, with its geometric high rise, reminded him of Khabarovsk, minus the old wooden houses with their fretted eaves, and in the bleak surrounding countryside he observed stark beauties not apparent to others.

But, thrusting his way along the sidewalk through a blizzard, he wondered if Sonya Bragina would observe them. Or for that matter if she would like anything at all about Rocket City. For her a city had to possess a soul: in Leninsk you had to bring your own.

At least she wouldn’t be short of home comforts. He had even bought a washing machine with a spin-dryer for her. And now, although he loathed shopping, he was intent on stocking the deep-freeze.

He pushed his way into one of the stores and surveyed bologna sausages, cheeses, polished fruits, peppers and tomatoes, cold meats, jars of black and red caviar, dishes of gherkins and black olives and pickled herring, lying on long counters beneath neon lights. His face began to ache, his heavy, fur-lined topcoat to steam.

He remembered shopping with his mother. Keeping her place in a line-up in Khabarovsk for scrag-ends of meat while she queue-jumped to a faster lane for bread; standing red-faced while a brawny woman harangued her for making a small boy her partner in crime; reaching the head of the queue as the last scrag-end was sold. Well, it wasn’t so different in many parts of Russia today; but at least his mother, whose son had become one of the élite, could now shop at her leisure.

He took off his mittens and fur shapka and began to shop.

He was examining a bag of apples from Alma Ata when a man wearing a green parka jostled him. The apples fell and the bag burst; together they knelt to pick them up. While they rescued the apples from passing feet the man apologised. He spoke Russian with an American accent.

‘Forget it,’ Talin told him, picking up the last apple. ‘An accident.’

‘Beautiful apples,’ the stranger remarked as they straightened up. ‘Quite a store this. I didn’t realise you had shops like this over here.’

Talin resisted the temptation to tell him it was exceptional; that would have seemed disloyal to the women all over Russia doing battle in their food stores. He contented himself with: ‘And we don’t have violence in the streets either.’

‘Sorry,’ said the stranger. ‘Gaspadeen—’

‘Talin.’ He regarded the stranger curiously. ‘May I ask what an American is doing in Leninsk?’

‘I wish I could tell you.’

Like everyone else in Rocket City, Talin lived with secrecy and he accepted what the American said. ‘Your name?’ he asked.

The American smiled, one of those smiles that can transform a face. ‘No harm in divulging that, I guess. It’s Massey. Robert Massey.’

He shook Talin’s hand and walked away.

The man who had been examining the box of chocolates from Hungary at a counter near the exit followed Massey into the blizzard, walking almost immediately behind him. That was the trouble with snow: you had to stick close to your man. You ran the risk of blowing your surveillance, the alternative was to lose him.

Massey appeared to be heading for the small black Zhiguli loaned to him by the Ministry of Defence. Good. That meant that, with luck, the rest of the day’s work could be conducted from the warmth of his own Volga M-124.

Normally he liked to work out of doors, but not when the snow sweeping into the city from Siberia was so hard that it stung your face.

The man following Robert Massey was known to colleagues in Department V of the first Chief Directorate of the KGB as the Hunter. Off duty he hunted moose and wild boar on the taiga: on duty he hunted men, sometimes women.

Few – animals or humans – ever realised they were being pursued because, although he was a stocky man with an outdoor face and powerful, hair-tufted hands, the Hunter was capable of great stealth. He was also a chameleon: on a river beach on the Volga in summer he looked like a truck driver on vacation; at a diplomatic cocktail party, wearing a blue mohair suit and white shirt, black hair slicked back, he looked like a military attaché and his company was much coveted by women.

When, as now, he was part of the outdoors he always carried a knife. A special knife that he had designed. Like some bayonets it was grooved to facilitate withdrawal from a dead or dying body; it was also slightly curved so that if, for instance, it entered the back close to the spine its long blade would slice through the heart horizontally. But its great assets were the cutting edges of the blade: one was razor sharp, the other delicately saw-toothed so that, if the kill wasn’t clean, it could rip through tendon and bone and finish the job. He also carried a small Tula-Korovin 6.35 mm automatic, much favoured by the KGB because it was easy to conceal, but he much preferred to kill at close range with his knife.

A killing was for the Hunter the climax that rightfully lay at the end of any pursuit. He saw no moral objections to killing – death was ordained and he was merely its executioner – and he usually had an orgasm as the knife sunk home.

He was disappointed, therefore, that word had come from the top that this was not to be a mokrie dela, a wet affair. It was like sex without penetration. If, however, he discovered that an operative from a foreign intelligence agency was also keeping Massey under surveillance then he had authority to kill.

Massey reached the Zhiguli, a Fiat made in Russia under licence, and settled behind the wheel. The Hunter slid into the driving seat of his grey Volga. Both cars took off immediately because their engines had been left running to prevent them from seizing up in the cold. (The Hunter had poured vodka into his radiator because it was more efficient than Soviet anti-freeze.)

Massey drove in the direction of the block in which he had been allotted an apartment. The Hunter followed fifty yards behind; it was like pursuing a phantom. Snow pellets bounced off the windshield; above the whirr of the heating he could hear the tyres crunching the frozen slush.

When they stopped at a red light suspended in the snow the Hunter checked the TK in the shoulder holster beneath his jacket and the knife, sheathed and docile, strapped to his thigh.

The lights changed to blurs of green. Massey’s rear wheels spun, gripped. Two minutes later he turned into the parking lot behind the apartment block; he left the Zhiguli beside an area hosed with water to make a skating rink. The Hunter drew up beside the wall of the block and showed his identification to a fur-hatted militia-man who practically knelt when he saw it. ‘Just get the fuck away from me,’ the Hunter said, and the militiaman slunk back to his sentry box.

Head bowed, Massey ran across the lot to the entrance. As soon as he had disappeared the Hunter moved his Volga forward and switched on the receiver tuned to the bugs in Massey’s apartment. He heard a door open and slam; simultaneously a light came on in Massey’s apartment on the fourth floor.

As the light cut a square in the wall of the block the Hunter became aware that a fawn Moskvich had pulled into the lot. He waited for the driver to get out; the driver stayed put. The Hunter became interested. The snow had thinned but the late afternoon light was poor and he could only make out a silhouette. The silhouette removed its shapka and the features became sharper. Male. The Hunter assessed the tilt of the man’s head: it seemed to be aimed at Massey’s apartment; but that could be my imagination, wishful thinking.

Over the radio from Massey’s flat came the sonorous voice of a Voice of America newscaster. Something about a shuttle launching in Florida.

The Hunter climbed out of his Volga on the passenger side, out of the vision of the Moskvich driver, and made his way to the sentry box. The guard sprang to attention, relaxed a little when the Hunter said: ‘I’m not a general, you stupid prick.’ Although he was a major.

‘What can I do for you, Comrade?’ the sentry asked.

‘The Moskvich that just came in. Who was the driver?’

The sentry began to shiver. ‘I don’t—’

‘You must know. It’s your duty to identify any stranger who comes here.’

‘I don’t remember his name. But I did see from his identification papers that he was from East Germany.’

The Hunter made his way back to his Volga, blending with the dusk. He would be able to trace the Moskvich from its licence plate. An operative from a foreign intelligence agency… It was just possible that he was going to get lucky. The realisation made him sexually aroused.

Two days after Nicolay Talin gave a lecture at Tyuratam to a class of cadet cosmonauts in the last year of their training. His subject: First Impressions in Space. The idea was to teach the trainees to adapt to infinity; disorientation was still a problem despite all the attention psychologists had given it.

As he talked he was vaguely bothered by a face in the fifth row. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

‘…as you probably know, considerable changes take place in your body in space due to the lack of gravity. Your face becomes larger due to the flow of blood from the lower extremities of your body. If you’ve got any wrinkles you’ll lose ’em. I know a few ladies who would like to have a journey in space…’ (Laughter).

The man in the fifth row was older than the other cadets.

‘…your waistline will shrink, your posture will change – you’ll crouch a little – and you’ll grow taller by anything up to two inches because, without the pull of gravity, the discs between your vertebrae won’t exert any restricting influence…’

And he had the air of a man who had heard it all before.

‘…Why’s he telling us all this old stuff? you’re asking yourselves. I’ll tell you – so you’ll ask yourselves, If this can happen to our bodies what can happen to our minds?’

Apples! The man who had bumped into him in the food store.

‘…I don’t mind telling you that the first time you gaze down on the earth and see how minute it is in relation to the rest of the firmament your brain seems to expand…’

Massey. Robert Massey. After the lecture Talin asked him to stay behind.

‘So,’ said Talin, ‘your work is secret. Do you mind telling me why you, an American, are being trained as a cosmonaut in the Soviet Union?’

‘Do you have half an hour?’

Talin consulted his wristwatch. ‘I was going for lunch…’

The help-yourself canteen was clinically clean with stainless steel chairs and white plastic tables. The food was wholesome, stuffed with vitamins. They chose tumblers of natural orange juice tinkling with ice, steaks and salad and yoghourt.

‘All right,’ Talin said, slicing a tomato, ‘explain.’

‘I defected,’ Massey said.

‘Mmmm.’ Talin drank some orange juice. ‘No one likes a traitor, Gaspadeen Massey.’ He frowned. ‘But I remember you now. You piloted the command module on a lunar flight. Why-’

‘– did I defect? Have you ever felt you were going crazy?’

‘Frequently.’

‘I mean really crazy. I went really crazy. At least I was persuaded to think I was…’

Blow by blow, pill by pill, shot by shot, Massey told Talin what the CIA had done to him. ‘All because I was disorientated. A vestibular complication. It could have been put right just like that.’ Massey snapped his fingers. ‘But the CIA weren’t going to take the chance.’

‘And when you found out what they had done you decided to defect?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I doubt it.’ Talin stared through the window misted with condensation. Outside he could see a 100-foot high gantry built years ago to test a G-l-e rocket. ‘I doubt it,’ with unnecessary emphasis, hearing again the voice from Mission Control announcing the invasion, albeit short-lived, of Poland.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ Massey said. He put down his knife and fork. ‘You don’t understand my reasons. I’m not a traitor.’

‘What are you then, a patriot?’

‘I believe in Mankind. We are participants, you and I, in the greatest Revolution Man has ever known: he is stepping off the Planet Earth and establishing himself in space, in eternity. And he has a chance, this one chance, to share eternity in peace. To leave tribal warfare behind him on earth.’

Talin listened, fascinated, but all he said was: ‘I still don’t understand what any of this has got to do with your defection.’

‘To share space the super powers have got to have access to each other’s information. They’ve got to know if one or the other is planning a criminal act. I’ve brought that access.’

When he had explained about the computers Talin said: ‘But that’s one way traffic’

‘At the moment,’ Massey replied. He picked up his knife and fork and tackled his steak; it was the tenderest he had ever eaten.

Talin who always ate fast, a legacy of Siberia where, in the outdoors, you gobbled your food before your lips froze, started on his yoghourt. He was disturbed by the visions that Massey was conjuring up. An engineer whom Talin vaguely knew came to the table but Talin waved him away. He said: ‘When did you first have these ideas?’

‘You know where. In space.’ And when Talin looked puzzled: ‘Don’t forget I was listening to your lecture. You were talking about disorientation. Right, well I know all about that. A vestibular condition. I’ve got no reason to disbelieve the diagnosis. But there is something else up there, isn’t there, Nicolay? A vision?’

To disguise his confusion Talin asked Massey if he wanted tea. He went to the counter and turned the tap on a stainless steel urn. Scalding water hissed into two mugs containing tea bags. Talin took the cups to the table and returned for slices of lemon.

The canteen was filling up. They wouldn’t be able to keep the table to themselves much longer. Squeezing lemon into his tea, Talin said: ‘I got the impression to start with that your motives in defecting were far more commonplace.’

‘Revenge? You’re right. That was the detonator. The fuse had been lit a long time before.’

Talin finished his tea. He stood up. ‘I have to go. Three Doves are being brought in today.’ He didn’t say from where. As they collected their coats and fur hats from the cloakroom attendant he asked Massey about his cosmonaut training.

‘It’s a refresher course. Private tuition. Nothing too daunting because I’ll only be orbiting as an observer. Your lecture wasn’t part of my curriculum. I went along because I wanted to.’

Which, at the time, didn’t strike Talin as odd.

Driving back to Leninsk later that day, Massey brooded on the success of the first phase of the campaign drawn up in five stages by an expert in psychological warfare at Camp Peary.

Phase 1: Contact, common ground to be established.

Phase 2: Relationship development, sow seeds of doubt.

Phase 3: First hit, with devastating revelation, preferably personal.

Phase 4: Second hit. The clincher.

Phase 5: Exit.

The CIA psychologist had been one of the first to interrogate Lt Viktor Belenko who, on 6 September 1976, had defected to Japan at the controls of a top-secret MiG-25. He had based a lot of Massey’s campaign on that interrogation.

What disturbed Massey was the ease with which Phase 1 had been accomplished. The blandishments had flowed too freely. Why? Because I believed in them. I believed.

Worse, he knew that Talin also believed. They had both looked down! That was the ‘common ground’ of Stage 1 – idealism. And I’m using it to betray.

The only mitigation that Massey could summon was the genuine argument that what he proposed to do would curb Russia’s hostile intentions in space. He discovered that he was a hard man to convince.

He stopped the Zhiguli at the gates to the apartment block. He identified himself to the militiaman and drove into the parking lot.

It was dark now. Snow was no longer falling and teenagers and children were skating on the hosed area lit by the headlights of parked cars. A bonfire sent sparks spiralling into the night; skates flashed like yellow flames in its glow.

Massey drove the Zhiguli to a corner of the lot outside the penumbra of light. As he locked the door a figure approached through the parked cars. Massey tensed himself to fight or run.

‘Good evening, Mr Massey,’ Herr Brasack said. ‘Washington wants to know if you’ve made contact.’

CHAPTER NINE

On 29 November the President of the United States and the President of the Soviet Union both held private meetings to discuss Robert Massey.

The 72-year-old American President was sitting at the breakfast table in the residential quarters of the White House buttering a muffin when George Reynolds was ushered in.

On the table beside him were copies of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. In front of him a tiny, dead-eyed TV set, and a bowl of freesias and anemones, his wife’s favourite flowers.

The President wore a silk Paisley dressing-gown over slacks and crisp white shirt, a very different man from the axe-wielding champion of the Great Outdoors on the West Coast, Reynolds thought. Thank God.

To the White House the President and his wife had brought elegance; a little self-conscious, perhaps – the style of the self-made man – but tailored to impress, not apologise like the style of his predecessor. There’s nothing wrong with success, the music of Society bandleader Lester Lanin seemed to throb at Society functions at the Executive Mansion.

The President waved the muffin and said: ‘Help yourself to coffee, George,’ and when Reynolds had sat down at the table: ‘So, how’s the spectacular progressing?’

‘Massey made contact. Phase One is complete.’

‘Phase Two?’

‘That should follow naturally from Phase One.’

The President drank some orange juice, tapped a black desk diary embossed with gold. ‘Less than one year of the Presidential term left. We need the spectacular pretty damn soon so that the smart-asses can’t say it was engineered as an election stunt.’

‘You can’t rush this one, Mr President.’

‘We both know that in a way it is an election stunt. But it’s more than that. The West needs our type of diplomacy, George. If a President who advocates appeasement is elected then we’ve lost the world. The Soviets don’t acknowledge compromise – to them it’s weakness and they use it. One of the saddest phenomena I’ve witnessed during this term is the manipulation of ideals. Kids demonstrating for disarmament encouraged indirectly by a régime hellbent on building a holocaust of weapons.’

Reynolds said: ‘A defection of this scale would knock hell out of their prestige. And, if Massey deals his cards skilfully, then Talin should bring back with him enough information to win the war in space.’

‘From the top of the deck or the bottom?’

‘From the middle,’ Reynolds said.

‘When do you figure we can expect our spectacular?’

Reynolds sipped his coffee and shrugged. ‘It depends on Massey and the Soviet authorities. Hopefully they might put Dove II into orbit in about ten weeks because over-eagerness has always been their problem. Our problem is to maintain Massey’s credibility for as long as that.’

And my problem, he thought, is to keep the Congressional inquiry into the CIA guessing – for the same period of time.

That day the President of the Soviet Union held two audiences in his sprawling apartment at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospect, near the Ukraina Hotel. One with a soldier, one with a spy.

To the soldier, Grigori Tarkovsky, his winter-faced Minister of Defence, the President advised caution.

The President sat at his desk in his study on which stood photographs of his wife, a grey-haired, homely woman rarely seen in public, his three children and his two grandchildren; all were on vacation by the Black Sea.

Tarkovsky sat opposite him in a deep brocade armchair in which he vainly tried to maintain an upright, military posture. Like the armchair, the rest of the furniture in the apartment was dark and solid, more comfortable and reassuring, the President felt, than the Finnish rubbish that Vlasov imported into his home two floors below.

Tarkovsky had brought with him a red dossier containing his proposals relating to the fleet of Dove shuttles and their role in containing (Tarkovsky’s own euphemism) American expansionism in space.

The President flipped through the pages, twenty-five of them; at least Tarkovsky’s impetuosity had been retarded to that extent. He tapped the dossier and said: ‘This is roughly as you explained it to me over the chess board?’

Tarkovsky nodded. ‘Only in more detail.’

‘And you haven’t discussed it with anyone?’

‘No one, Comrade President.’

‘I didn’t know you could type, Grigori,’ opening the dossier at a typewritten page.

‘Very badly, as you can see. But I take your point – it wasn’t seen by a secretary.’

‘Did you make a rough copy?’

‘And destroyed it.’

The President scanned a page. ‘You seem to have acquired a great deal of esoteric knowledge about spaceships.’

‘I repeat, Comrade President, that I have not discussed the project with anyone. But I am Minister of Defence and I have made it my business to study these matters.’

The President had little doubt that Tarkovsky had imparted his inspiration to others because discretion wasn’t his strong suit. (How little, the President thought, the public knows about our frailties when they see us as implacable as statues watching the parades on Red Square.) What’s more, he had most probably implemented some of his suggestions; but there was no way he could put them into practice until the shuttles were ready to orbit. For the sake of Mankind the President hoped that Vlasov’s scheme involving the American Massey bore fruit first.

He stood up and walked to the silver samovar in the corner of the room. His movements felt clumsy; tomorrow he was due for a check-up at the Kremlin Clinic. He poured tea, sharpened it with lemon and looked inquiringly at Tarkovsky thinking: ‘Once upon a time we would have argued over a carafe of vodka.’ But the President’s doctors had told him to cut down drastically on alcohol.

Tarkovsky waved away the invitation and said: ‘As I’ve said before the final battle will be fought in space. But the bases for the troops and guns of space will be on earth, at least to begin with. So to win the battle, the war, we have to destroy those enemy bases. To the best of my knowledge there are five such locations from which the Americans could operate.’

The President put his cup and saucer on the desk and sat down. Staring at the snow pouring past the window behind Tarkovsky, he began to count them on his fingers. ‘Houston, Kennedy, Vandenberg…’ He paused. ‘Wallops Flight Center off the Virginian coast?’ looking at Tarkovsky for confirmation; but after Tarkovsky, impressed, had nodded he ran out of bases; and he had memorised them only a few minutes before Tarkovsky’s arrival!

‘And White Sands, New Mexico,’ Tarkovsky said. ‘For short range vertical flights and sounding rockets. Knock out all five in one limited nuclear attack and you have the United States at your mercy.’

The President said: ‘I don’t have to remind you that we’re talking about a deterrent not unprovoked aggression.’

‘And I don’t have to remind you, Comrade President, that at this moment the Americans are pushing ahead with plans to dominate space. If they succeed they would be in a position to knock out our bases – Baikonur, Kapustin Yar, Saryshagan, Plesetsk…’

‘But a deterrent nevertheless.’

‘Depending on the circumstances.’

The President, appreciating that he was dealing with that most dangerous of phenomena, old age seeking a climactic exit, said: ‘But you mustn’t be impetuous, Grigori. After all, the Politburo would have to authorise any action you took.’

Or would it? Presented with a successful fait accompli the Politburo, and the Presidium for that matter, would doubtless greet Tarkovsky’s pre-emptive strike as masterly anticipation.

And I would be relegated to the role of unenterprising reactionary.

Until the Apocalypse occurred.

Then I might be re-instated. But too late.

We are all old men, he thought and to Tarkovsky he said: ‘Very well, Grigori, I accept that what you say might be right. But first we have to try other alternatives.’

‘Such as?’

‘That needn’t concern you. But if I hear that you are making any moves without higher authority then you will be disciplined.’

Tarkovsky said: ‘With respect, what intrigues me is the other alternatives’

‘I told you – forget them.’

‘How can I if they’re opposed to my proposals?’

From the depths of the armchair the old war lord’s strength reached the President. He did, after all, command forces numbering more than three and a half million. Nevertheless, of those 100,000 were zampolit, political officers under the direction of Nicolay Vlasov.

The President said: ‘I’m ordering you to forget them. Or not to consider them, rather. I promise you, Grigori, that if the alternatives don’t prove practical then I shall advise the Politburo to implement your proposals – as a deterrent.’

‘Very well.’ Tarkovsky shrugged. ‘We have known each other a long time. I have learned to trust you.’

But I have not learned the same about you.

Tarkovsky said: ‘Whatever happens I can assure you that the forces of the Warsaw Pact countries will be behind us…’

As they should be, without any assurances from the Soviet Minister of Defence. The President said: ‘For God’s sake, Grigori, stop addressing the troops,’ reflecting that, in moments of stress, Russian atheists still invoked a Christian deity.

‘Then I have your promise that, if the alternatives,’ his voice stiff with reproach, ‘don’t prove to be acceptable, you will recommend my proposal?’

Looking at Tarkovsky through the steam rising from his lemon tea, the President said: ‘I don’t have to promise you anything, Grigori.’

To the spy, Nicolay Vlasov, his urbane secret service chief, the President urged speed.

If the coup suggested by Robert Massey was feasible then there was still hope.

The trouble was that the President didn’t trust Vlasov. In fact he sometimes wondered if the KGB Chairman had ever authorised his agents to plant microphones in the apartment in which they were now sitting because it would surely be the easiest thing in the world to deposit bugs when you were pretending to search for them.

We are all survivors, he thought, but Vlasov is just a little too adept at the game.

Standing at the window, gazing into the thick veil of snow, he said: ‘Are we to assume that this man Massey is above suspicion?’

‘No one is above suspicion, Comrade President. But we have exposed Massey to every possible test. Excluding some of the more refined procedures, of course.’

How typical of Vlasov to describe torture as a procedure.

‘You say the information he extracted from the Vandenberg computer was genuine?’

‘Genuine, yes. But if this is an elaborate deception then it would be. The whole object of our exercise is to feed destructive material into the real time computer at the American base. If we carry out a trial run and an accident directly traceable to what we’ve inserted occurs then I think we can be reasonably sure that Massey is genuine.’

‘When do you hope to implement this trial run, Comrade Vlasov?’

Vlasov took a gold watch, complete with calendar, from his waistcoat pocket. ‘In five days’ time,’ he said, ‘when Massey next makes contact with Vogel. Then we’ll extract information about a forthcoming American mission. Six days later we’ll inject instructions that should wreck that mission.’

‘And after the trial run?’

‘Then we begin to consider the possibilities very seriously.’

‘The sooner the better,’ the President said.

‘Is there a time limit?’

‘Please believe me, Nicolay, the sooner the better.’

‘With respect, Comrade President, is there something else I should know?’

‘Not at this stage,’ the President said. He turned from the window and sank into the armchair recently vacated by Tarkovsky. ‘But be quick, Nicolay.’

So, he thought as Vlasov left the room, I have two options. And neither Tarkovsky nor Vlasov knows about the other’s intentions. If you are a Kremlin schemer like me, that is the way it has to be.

But to the God his creed didn’t acknowledge the President prayed: ‘Let Vlasov succeed before Tarkovsky.’

His heavy lids closed over his eyes. He slept. Outside the snow continued to pour from the sky.

In the elevator returning him to his apartment beneath the President’s, Nicolay Vlasov considered the set of circumstances that had been offered to him.

Coincidence? Well, that wasn’t a word that Vlasov readily accommodated in his vocabulary. In his book coincidence was merely a facile expression for events that had a logical explanation.

The President had now urgently consulted him twice about measures to confound American ambitions in space. Both consultations had been immediately preceded by discussions between the President and Grigori Tarkovsky.

That wasn’t coincidence: Tarkovsky had proposed a plan so extreme that the President had felt obliged to seek an alternative.

Vlasov had found an alternative. But to what? That was what he now had to discover.

CHAPTER TEN

Cold must be confounded. You mustn’t cower before it, head tucked into its bitter presence. That way it shows its contempt by biting the flesh, creeping into the bones. Instead you must thrust out your chest, tame it. That way it becomes an ally provided good sense also prevails – shapka, felt boots, woollen mittens… In parts of Siberia you have to cover every part of the body because the Wind Chill Factor can kill flesh within seconds.

The ultimate defiance of the cold is swimming in the open air. Not as suicidal as it sounds. In Moscow there is an openair pool with water so warm that steam rises to a height of 100 feet to meet the falling snow; in Leninsk, where nothing is too much trouble to keep the space employees happy, a similiar pool has been constructed.

To maintain his new fitness, Robert Massey liked to swim there every morning. Sometimes he walked to the pool, sometimes when it was snowing heavily he drove.

This morning, the first day of December, he walked. It was warmer than it had been, the snow was falling lightly in Christmas flakes and there was a blue sheen to the sky. Ahead of him, as he walked through the ravines of high rise, a plough spewed fountains of snow into the gutters.

Behind him, at a distance of a hundred yards, walked Brasack. Massey sensed his presence but he didn’t bother to look round. He did not sense the presence of the man known as the Hunter and, even if he had, it was doubtful whether he would have spotted him walking fifty yards behind Brasack, because he was a chameleon again.

A babushka scraping the snow from the sidewalk with a shovel grabbed Massey’s arm. She pointed to his cheek. ‘The teeth of winter,’ she said. ‘Take care.’

Massey felt his cheek; the skin was numb, the first sign of frostbite. He should have tied the flaps of his shapka beneath his chin: they deflected the cold. But the warm water in the pool should do the trick; he had been warned never to rub frostbite, that destroyed the tissues.

When he stopped to talk to the babushka Brasack also stopped; so, too, did the Hunter, pausing at a kiosk to buy a copy of Pravda.

At the next set of traffic lights Massey turned right. Ahead he could see the mushroom of steam above the pool. He paid his entrance fee to a big woman in white and went into the changing rooms followed at spaced intervals by Brasack and the Hunter.

The Hunter and Brasack both had to hire trunks. Brasack glanced at the Hunter without interest. They both began to undress hidden from Massey by a row of dark green lockers.

The changing room smelled of ozone and carbolic. At one end naked men, goose-pimpled and winter-white, washed themselves with bars of red soap watched by another implacable woman in white.

Brasack stripped down to his underpants. The Hunter noted that, beneath the friendly face with the ridiculous dab of a moustache, his body was packed with hard muscle. He presumed that he carried his gun in his coat pocket.

The Hunter had left his gun behind. He had not left his knife behind.

Just as Brasack was about to make his way to the wash-basins the woman from the cash-desk came running into the room shouting hysterically and pointing at the ceiling. A sparrow, seeking warmth, had flown in from the street. When the woman overseeing ablutions saw it she too began to scream.

Peasants, thought the Hunter. Betraying their origins by their superstitions. The sort of stock that wouldn’t shake hands across the threshold because it was a prelude to a quarrel; the sort that clamped a hand across your mouth if you whistled indoors because it brought bad luck. Such people believed that a wild bird flying inside a building was accompanied by death… Some of the Hunter’s contempt for superstition evaporated because this sparrow, fluttering terrified against a window, was accompanied by death.

After the two women had dispatched the sparrow into the street with brooms Brasack went to the wash-basins and began to lather himself. Crotch and armpits, these were the suspect areas. The Hunter watched him from a distance, his excitement mounting but controlled. He waited until Brasack had slipped into the tunnel, waist-high in warm water, leading to the pool, then returned, still wearing trousers and shirt, to the woman at the cash-desk.

He explained what he wanted. When she protested he showed her his identification. She stopped protesting. When he told her that a murderer was believed to be loose in the pool area she began to tremble. The bird! She took him to a room where soap, towels and swimming trunks were stored. He removed the rest of his clothes, glancing at his hirsute body in the mirror, noting that his penis was semi-erect. He took a light blue bath robe from the grip he was carrying and put it on to cover the knife strapped to his thigh. The woman unlocked a door for him and he walked into the pool area.

Steam rose thickly from the warm water. Like the fog in those old movies about London, the Hunter thought. Heads wearing bathing caps bobbed like corks in its swirling depths. High above he could see snow falling and melting at the frontiers of the steam.

He removed his robe and dived immediately so that no one would notice the knife. Surfacing, he began to search for his prey.

He passed Massey who looked at him without recognition. A pretty girl and a muscular young man were flirting boisterously, the girl’s shrieks and laughter muffled by the steam. He swam with a slow, steady crawl, head turning from side to side.

He finally spotted Brasack treading water in the deep end. He must have lost sight of Massey but he obviously knew that the American always spent exactly ten minutes in the pool.

The Hunter changed to the breast stroke so that he could approach Brasack more silently, peering across the surface of the water. Two youths splashed past racing each other on their backs. A fat man belly-flopped from the side, flesh smacking water.

Now Brasack was alone.

The Hunter approached to within five yards. Brasack spotted him, frowned, then smiled his recognition. The smile said: ‘We shared that stupidity about the bird.’

The Hunter lowered one hand beneath the water and slipped the knife from the black rubber sheath, feeling both its razored and saw-toothed edges with the ball of his thumb.

He raised the other hand in a gesture of recognition, at the same time propelling himself forward with his legs.

When he was within striking distance the expression on Brasack’s face changed. This is no friendly approach, the new expression said. Excellent. The Hunter liked to see fear on a victim’s face before he killed.

He was gorged with excitement.

He struck to the far left of Brasack’s rib cage knowing that the curve of the blade would slice it into the heart.

Brasack’s face registered surprise then, as he saw his blood staining the water, primeval terror. His scream lost itself in the steam.

The Hunter pulled the knife across Brasack’ chest with a sawing motion; the shark’s teeth on the blade cut through the sternum.

Brasack opened his mouth once more to scream but died with the sound drowned in his throat. As he died the Hunter reached his climax.

When Brasack’s friendly face submerged beneath the blood-stained water he swam rapidly to the side of the pool.

On his way to the storeroom he heard a woman scream.

Within minutes he was dried and changed. Outside the pool he took up a position beside an ice-cream vendor – ice-cream in this weather! – and tried to anticipate how long it would be before Massey emerged. Half an hour? Longer, he decided as a police car skidded to a halt outside the pool. Everyone would be questioned, many detained. A foreigner, an American at that, would attract more than his share of suspicion. But he could always call his KGB contacts. Vlasov’s name would make the homicide detectives twitch a bit, the Hunter thought with a smile. He had been told Massey was an intelligent man… Yes, he would call the KGB. Half an hour hadn’t been such a bad estimate. Then he would be able to resume surveillance. Meanwhile all I can do is wait. When my time comes, the Hunter mused, it will be while I’m waiting. He bought an ice-cream.

It was Oleg Sedov who told Talin about the murder. As usual nothing had been reported in the Press. You only read about crime when Party or State were publicising an offender’s punishment as a deterrent. Usually the crime was black-marketeering. Rarely, if ever, murder. According to Sedov this was defensible: violence was contagious and in the West it was spread by publicity. Talin believed that it could also be encouraged by suppression.

‘Do you know why he was killed?’ Talin asked.

He increased his pace across a field of snow. They had been cross-country skiing for two hours. He felt tired but exhilarated. The sky was blue, jewels glittered in the white expanse stretching unbroken to the horizon.

Sedov caught up with him. ‘The police haven’t the slightest idea. Brasack was a journalist from East Berlin. Brilliant apparently. He was writing an article about Tyuratam and Leninsk – restricted, of course – for circulation in all the Warsaw Pact countries.’

‘Perhaps,’ Talin ventured, watching an eagle swoop across the sky, ‘he discovered something that he wasn’t supposed to know about.’ From where the eagle was flying he and Sedov in their crimson parkas would look like drops of blood on the snow.

‘Then he wouldn’t have written about it. In any case the article would have been censored.’

‘Wasn’t he accompanied by a guide? Someone from Intourist or Novosti or the Ministry?’

‘Only at Tyuratam. He was an experienced man.’ Sedov pointed at a cluster of pine trees isolated in the snow. ‘We’ll stop there.’ He accelerated, leaving Talin behind.

Beneath the trees he unbuckled the ungainly cross-country skis. From the pocket of his parka he took a leather-covered flask. He handed it to Talin who tipped it into his mouth. The vodka slid down his throat, exploded in his stomach. He shivered pleasurably, handed the flask back to Sedov.

‘So,’ he said, ‘when do we fly Dove II?’

‘In the New Year. And I have news for you, hence the vodka.’ He held up the flask. ‘We’re celebrating, Nicolay, you and I.’

Talin looked at him questioningly.

‘You have been appointed commander of the whole shuttle fleet. You take over after Dove II’s inaugural flight. Which, incidentally, will be my last excursion into space.’

Stunned, Talin reached for the flask. Started to speak but choked on the firewater. Finally he said: ‘I’m very honoured,’ conscious of the triteness of the words. He cleared his throat. ‘But what about you, Oleg?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll still be there on the ground. There are a lot of new cosmonauts in the shuttle programme. I have my own particular responsibilities.’

Reminders that Sedov was jointly employed by the Ministry of Defence and the KGB, always came as a slight shock to Talin.

‘But,’ said Sedov, ‘they haven’t thought up a new title for me yet. The Grandfather of Space, perhaps.’ Sedov was forty-eight. ‘I am very happy for you, Nicolay.’

If Sedov’s son had been born alive he would now be twenty, thirteen years younger than me, Talin thought.

‘And I’m very grateful to you, Oleg. You must have had a lot to do with this.’

‘Very little.’ Sedov’s voice was gruff. ‘Now, one last drop of rocket fuel and then we must get back to Leninsk. When is the wedding?’ he asked as they took to the snow once more.

‘We haven’t fixed a date yet. But Sonya’s flying here tomorrow with a Bolshoi company for a trial performance of this new space opera of theirs. I’ll let you know,’ he said. ‘And the First Deputy Commander in Chief of the Soviet Air Force,’ he added.

It was the first sour note of the day.

The second came as they neàred the stark outlines of Leninsk silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. The hollows in the snow were filled with shadows, the cold had acquired a brooding quality.

Sedov said: ‘There was one thing I forgot to tell you about Brasack’s murder. Your friend Robert Massey was in the pool at the time.’

Friend?

The following morning Oleg Sedov flew back to Moscow. The flight took three hours. By 11 a.m. he was in a taxi taking him to the belt of forest twenty miles to the west of the city where the crème de la crème of Muscovite nachalstvo, the élite, have their weekend homes. The President and other Kremlin leaders, academicians, poets, authors (for a while Solzhenitsyn lived in a cottage here), KGB generals, Party theorists… Here, among the cathedral-quiet pine trees overlooking the Moscva River, these exalted personages enjoy their rewards – magnificent dachas built in anything from clapboard to Stalinist yellow brick – for their contributions to a Marxist-Leninist society.

The forest is divided into hamlets, each an island of rank or calling. Writers live at Peredelkino, once the home of Boris Pasternak who wrote the unwelcome epic Dr Zhivago, Politburo members reign near Usova, while Zhukovka, perhaps the loveliest of the hamlets is itself divided into two rustic ghettos, one for high-flying politicians, the other for pioneers of space, nuclear physicists and luminaries of the Arts. It is possible in this part of Zhukovka to meet a man who may have given the world a weather satellite, a concerto or a refinement of the hydrogen bomb.

It was to Zhukovka that Sedov told the taxi driver to take him. To a clinic. Not the Sanatorium for the Central Committee on the Podushkino Highway but to a more humble establishment on a side road half a mile away.

The driver handled the taxi badly, nerves reacting to Sedov’s destination. His face was grey, his eyes bloodshot, vodka eyes.

Sitting in the back, clutching the strap as the taxi skidded round bends, Sedov considered the killing at the pool at Leninsk. No way was it his concern but, since the KGB had taken over the investigation, he had heard details. Taken over? Killed stone dead was a better way of putting it.

As far as Sedov could make out Brasack had been a CIA spy who had tried to make contact with the American defector Robert Massey. Probably to threaten him – maltreatment of relatives back in the US perhaps – possibly to kill him. Whatever the plans were they had been terminated by Department V.

What worried Sedov was Talin’s acquaintanceship – not friendship, that had been an exaggeration – with Massey. The more he worried the more the worries multiplied.

Ostensibly the reason for his anxiety was plain. Massey was a traitor. No one wanted to pass the time of day with a traitor – look how the Philbys and their ilk in Moscow were boycotted – unless he had come armed with some gentle persuasion.

Persuasion of which I know nothing! This led to a worry about the state of Talin’s mind. Long ago he had taught the brash and handsome young Siberian to stifle his rebellion. Stifle – not necessarily exterminate. God knows what protests pounded away inside his skull. His heartbeat, for instance, when Mission Control had announced the incursion into Poland.

This led to a worry about his own motives. Exhaustively, he cross-examined himself to see if he could identify jealousy. He found himself Not Guilty. All that he uncovered during the examination was intuition. A policeman’s intuition which was a far more positive force than the dictionary definition. If the dead CIA agent had been making contact with Massey then Massey was tainted. And he would taint Talin.

The taxi skidded on hard-packed snow and sailed along majestically broadside. The driver spun the wheel; the cab skidded right around, straightened up. Sedov swore at him.

But how can I warn Talin? He won’t believe me. He will believe that I… Sedov’s mind baulked at what Talin might believe.

Fur-hatted militia appeared in the road. One, hand on pistol, gestured to the driver to open the window. ‘Zdrastvuite,’ he said, but Sedov already had his ID in his hand and the militiaman stepped back smartly, waving the driver on.

At this display of Sedov’s authority the driver became even more nervous. Sedov tapped him on the shoulder: ‘Take the next left.’ They took it on two wheels.

The clinic was an old dacha from Tzarist times. A rambling wooden mansion with fretted eaves, ochre-washed annexes added more recently. It was besieged on all sides by regiments of pine trees; it was suspended in time; it was a home for incurables. Sedov left the cab at the entrance to the drive.

When he rang the bell a finger of snow fell from the porch. He heard the bell peal in the depths of the dacha.

The door was opened by a girl in a starched white uniform. Her youth looked out of place, an anachronism. But not to Sedov who had been there many times before.

She smiled at him and led him down a long corridor. On either side the doors were shut. Luxury condemned cells where life and death could hover entwined for decades.

She opened the door of No. 23 and left him with the woman inside. She lay on a couch staring at the snow-covered lawns outside. She wore an eggshell blue dressing gown patterned with roses; her hair was grey and wild, the skin on her face was parchment; she had once been beautiful.

He sat beside her. She smiled at him vaguely. At least she wasn’t unhappy, better off than many in the clinic. She looked seventy: it was her thirty-ninth birthday.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said. He took a small packet from the inside pocket of his jacket. She took it from him and placed it on the table beside her. ‘It’s perfume,’ he said. ‘The one you like.’ The one she had worn on their honeymoon.

Her eyes focused on him, a flicker of interest in them. ‘And how is our son today?’ she asked.

He took her hand. ‘We should be very proud of him,’ he said. ‘He has been promoted to take command of a whole fleet of space-ships.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Bolshoi touring company arrived complete with costumes, sets and discord.

Talin heard about the latter when he took Sonya on a tour of Leninsk stage-managed so that she could appreciate its merits which, he had to admit, were few and far between.

He started off with his own small house down the street from the cottage where Yuri Gagarin had lived. Gagarin had died in a conventional air crash, of all things, and the cottage was now a shrine.

If Gagarin’s house was a shrine then Talin’s home had become a showpiece. The kitchen was packed with gadgetry, even a dish-washer from Helsinki, and in the living-room stood a television. A colour one at that.

The deep-freeze was stuffed with good food, the furniture dusted, parquet floors polished. The place was an invitation – to Sonya to live there whenever the Bolshoi gave her leave from Moscow.

First they went to the bedroom where Talin had installed a double bed. They had been apart for several weeks and they made love eagerly, without bothering to undress completely.

Half an hour later Sonya inspected the house. She approved but, Talin noted, took it as her birthright, as an annexe of Bolshoi nachalstvo. She switched on the television; for a couple of minutes they watched Yuri Senkevich plugging his Sunday evening programme Film Travel Club; briefly the Himalayas beckoned them.

‘In colour,’ Talin pointed out.

She smiled. ‘So it is.’

Talin switched it off.

Just before they left to tour the city the phone rang. It was Massey. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ he said. ‘You remember how we talked about space?’

Of course he did.

‘Well, the Bolshoi has sent a touring company to Leninsk. They’re performing a ballet about space. Giving it a trial run. I’ve been told that you are engaged to be married to one of the dancers.’

Talin glanced at Sonya who was staring through the window at the other small detached houses. ‘One of the dancers?’

‘Sorry, the dancer.’ Sonya had turned round, interested. ‘I wondered if you could—’

‘Get you a ticket? I’ll see what I can do.’

Sonya crossed the room and kissed Talin. ‘Who was that?’

‘A man called Massey.’

‘English?’

‘American.’

‘What’s he doing in your secret city?’

‘Advising,’ Talin said and, hurrying on: ‘Can you get an extra ticket?’

She looked doubtful. ‘An American? Well, I’ll try,’ shrugging away the request. ‘Anyway, we won’t be dancing the whole ballet here, just the highlights. The director doesn’t think that Leninsk is quite ready for the extended version!’

It was while they were walking through the centre of the city, a route intricately plotted by Talin to embrace the theatre, cinemas and best shops, that Sonya mentioned discord at the Bolshoi. The trouble, he gathered, was divided into two categories; the first he vaguely appreciated with the indulgence of the layman peering into the artistic temperament; the second he understood utterly.

A lot of the dancers, apparently, were disenchanted with the artistic director, Boris Pudovkin. He was pigheaded and he had favourites.

When Talin pointed out that she was one of the favourites she replied with spirit: ‘That’s not the point. Favouritism has no part in either our society or its artistic expression.’

The pig-headedness, she told him, was evident in his choice of new ballets. Surely not in the space ballet The Red Dove? No, that was acceptable. But some of his ideas were, well, degenerate. Not only that but he seemed unable to distinguish between traditional and modern ballet. ‘He has done dreadful things to Romeo and Juliet,’ Sonya said, tucking her arm into Talin’s.

He stopped and kissed her cold cheek. Her face framed in mink looked lovely. They walked past a cinema showing Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s Siberiada. He would like to see it, Talin decided: it was the story of a village in Siberia.

The complaint about the Bolshoi that he really understood was a clamp-down on foreign tours and increased KGB surveillance.

Hurrying her past two particularly ugly barrack-block apartments, Talin asked: ‘Why have they done that?’

She looked at him in surprise. ‘Don’t you know? Because of the defections on the last tours of Britain and the United States, of course.’

Talin’s interest quickened. ‘How would I know? Such things aren’t reported in our newspapers.’

‘Why should they be? We aren’t proud of them.’

Today he didn’t want argument so he contented himself with: ‘Why did they defect?’

‘The usual pathetic reasons. The freedom of life in the West. Artistic liberty, all that hypocritical nonsense.’

‘But I thought—’ Talin stopped himself.

‘Thought that I was complaining about loss of liberty in the Bolshoi? You misunderstood, Nicolay. I was merely telling you how others felt.’ She withdrew her hand from his arm.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful,’ he said, hailing a taxi to whisk them past a monstrous hotel, ‘if we could solve this equation in our lifetime.’ They climbed into a taxi. ‘The rival merits of Communism and Capitalism, that is.’

‘Impossible,’ she said, as the taxi accelerated in the direction of Talin’s house, ‘because there is no such equation.’

The equation, or lack of it, made several more appearances during the day, in between love-making, eating, planning and dancing. It augured well for their marriage, they agreed, that they could argue without rancour.

When they made love for the second time that day it was more leisurely – to begin with at any rate – and experimental. Every time there was something new, every time Sonya shed a veil of reserve. He, too, amazed himself. He found that lying beneath her was just as pleasurable as dominating on top; it was more comfortable, he could fondle her breasts and, more importantly, they could see each other. Tell an old Russian goat that and he would assume you were a cripple.

He tried to make their orgasms synchronise. But, biting him, she said it didn’t matter a damn when it happened as long as it happened, crying out and digging her fingernails into his back.

Later while she was searching for a needle and cotton to sew a button on her blouse she introduced defitsitny, shortages, into the day’s debates. You couldn’t buy a needle or cotton in Leninsk for love nor money, Talin told her.

Defensively, she said: ‘So, you can’t buy a needle and cotton but you can buy food and for that we should be grateful.’

Such an illogical response startled Talin. Until he realised that, without comprehending it, she was embarking on the stock defence of defitsitny drilled into her since childhood. The defence had one great merit: it was true. Until the Revolution the peasants had lived on their wits, during the last war too. Even Talin could remember existing on potatoes, buckwheat and fish plucked silver-bright from holes in the ice. The flaw in the defence was that it didn’t attempt to explain why defitsitny existed at all nearly forty years after the war.

‘And an apartment only cost a fraction of the rental in the United States,’ she said, taking the next step in the defence and by doing so brandishing aloft Russia’s inferiority complex about the West.

Wishing fervently that Sonya had found a needle and cotton, Talin said: ‘True. But a Russian worker only earns a fraction of his American counterpart.’

So there it was, the equation. A vacation could cost an American a fortune: a Russian could have a month by the sea for a song. A tiny Soviet car was twice the price of an American compact: a visit to the dentist could cost a New Yorker an arm and a leg whereas a Muscovite had his teeth fixed for nothing.

What we lack is freedom. He didn’t voice the thought. Sedov had taught him well. Perhaps when he and Sonya were married…

When she began: ‘Sometimes you seem to admire the West more than—’ he took her arm and said: ‘Come on, let’s go and buy you another blouse.’

They had dinner in a hot little restaurant with misted windows and lots of shiny-leaved plants that gave it the feel of an aquarium. There, over coffee, it was the American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games back in 1980 that surfaced.

Followed by Afghanistan and then, of course, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

And space? Again the thought passed unspoken.

Overjoyed at their capacity for friendly debate, they strode gaily from the restaurant and crossed the street to the city’s only disco, a dark concrete cave thumping with bold music. A rash of light-spots spun round the walls and the floor was crowded with young people dancing. The records were three or four years old but who cared? It was rock ’n’ roll and the skirts swirled and the blue jeans swayed.

Sonya danced with uninhibited inspiration, he with strength and agility. They were given the floor. When they returned to their table they were applauded.

They drank beer. Briefly, following up a remark that, a few years ago such exhibitionism would never have been allowed, they touched on decadence and hooliganism. All right, Sonya agreed, the crime rate, especially among young people, was alarming but it was nothing compared with crime in the States.

Always the comparison. The ever-brooding complex that had so much to do with Soviet aggression.

‘Let’s just blame vodka,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s the scapegoat for most of our evils.’ He took her hand. ‘I thought we should get married soon.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Two weeks?’

She leaned across the table and kissed him. ‘Two weeks. Did you discuss this with Sedov?’

‘No,’ he lied.

‘This man Massey?’

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘Why should I discuss it with him?’

‘No reason. I just wondered. It just struck me as odd that he should ask you to get him a ticket to the ballet.’

‘I’ve only discussed space with him,’ Talin said.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, tracing the outline of his cheek with her fingers, ‘I think of you in space when I’m dancing.’

‘And how does it affect your performance?’

‘I feel as though I’m going to fall. You can’t know what it feels like – to know that the man you love is… severed from the earth.’ She looked into his eyes. ‘How many more times, Nicolay?’

‘I don’t know. The shuttle, it’s a different concept. Soon we will be flying up and down into space just like jet pilots.’

‘But when will you stop?’

‘When you stop dancing,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s jive again and give them a treat.’

When they went to bed Sonya immediately fell asleep in his arms. After a few moments he, too, slept and dreamed about shooting stars burning themselves out in the darkness of infinity wherein lay the answer to all things, even equations.

At first she was a dove fluttering around a village square but chained, figuratively, to a cote. When she beat her wings in protest at her captivity she was also beating them against the mockery of the other doves. Then into the square came a young man, the Prince of Light. He and the dove danced a pas de deux in which he enticed her towards freedom, towards space. Her wingbeats grew more frantic until with a ringing chord of music, he severed her invisible ties. Pink spotlights bathed the spinning figure of Sonya Bragina as she was lifted on a trapeze towards the heavens.

‘The second act is our act,’ said Massey consulting the programme as the lights came on. ‘Let’s hope they get the flight path right.’

Sonya hadn’t been able to get him a ticket; hadn’t tried, Talin suspected. But Sedov was still in Moscow so Talin had given his ticket to Massey.

‘The audience don’t look as if they care one way or the other,’ replied Talin. One man at the end of their row was asleep. This wasn’t Moscow.

But the audience became more attentive in the second act. The stage was space; stars glittered, beams of light swept the heavens, shivering and deflecting when they touched. The Red Dove was now more incisively graceful in her solo, circling the stage in adagio movements, in orbit. Then from the wings sprang the Prince of Darkness.

‘He’s got to be an American,’ Massey whispered to Talin.

The Prince of Darkness gave chase. The beams of light became sharper, slicing through the star-shimmering darkness above the dancers. Lasers, thought Talin.

But the Red Dove was saved by the Prince of Light. In a crescendo of music he bore down on the Prince of Darkness who was hurled from orbit to drift eternally in space.

In the last act the dove returned to the village square to be welcomed by the other doves. She no longer minded being a prisoner: she knew what lay beyond the earth’s horizons. As she danced her last solo she gazed upwards and there in the firmament was a spaceship.

Massey and Talin were deeply moved; they, too, had been where the dove had been, looking down.

The audience responded cheerfully. But there was none of the feverish applause that the company might have expected in Moscow.

Talin went backstage because he knew Sonya would be despondent; he took Massey with him.

Sonya, sitting in front of a mirror removing her make-up, was certainly despondent, but angry with it. ‘Peasants,’ she said, the familiar dismissal of the unappreciative; an unfortunate expression, Talin always thought, because it dismissed half the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Sonya barely acknowledged Massey.

Talin put his hands on her bare shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it was fantastic. Wait till you dance it in Moscow. And London and Paris and New York.’

She was mollified because she valued his opinion. ‘You really think it was good?’ and Massey, answering for Talin, said: ‘It was the best thing the Bolshoi has done since Spartacus.’

For a moment the remark hung incongruously; Talin wasn’t sure why, but it contained a flawed note. The remark of a man who had done hurried homework?

Sonya said: ‘You’ve seen Grigorovich’s work, Gaspadeen Massey.’

A tiny pause? Or is it my imagination? In any event Massey answered convincingly enough: ‘Sure, I saw it in New York in 1979 when the Bolshoi toured the States,’ and Talin forgot his doubts.

In the foyer of the theatre, emptied now of ‘peasants’, Massey hesitated before leaving Talin. Almost shyly, he said: ‘We have a lot in common you and I, Nicolay. Did you know that I learned quite a lot about you in the States?’

Intrigued, Talin said: ‘What sort of things?’

‘Perhaps,’ Massey said quickly as Sonya approached, ‘you’d like to drop round to my apartment one day this week for a drink? Say Tuesday?’

‘I look forward to it,’ Talin said. Why not? After all the ballet had been all about freedom.

Depressed, Nicolay Vlasov examined the photographs of his children, two boys and a girl, on the wall of his study on Kutuzovsky. They seemed to be appealing to him to try to understand them. But their appeals had gone unheeded.

At least, Vlasov thought, I am not so hypocritical that I ask myself: Where did I go wrong? I know where I went wrong and, given my time again, I should probably do so again.

Because it had been written. He had been born a schemer and he would die one. A curse, a blessing, he knew not which. But his scheming had lost him his children and the respect of the stranger in his home, his wife.

Wherever he went suspicion accompanied him. It was with him now in the pink dossier on his desk marked ROBERT MASSEY. Only the faintest breath of it, true, and quite possibly unfounded. Just the same it had to be laid to rest.

What bothered Vlasov was not the arrival – and abrupt departure – of Brasack in Leninsk. The arrival of a CIA agent either to turn or kill Massey had always been on the cards. When Department V had put out a trace on the East German journalist before the killing the SSD, the East German political police, had gained access to his home; he was CIA all right and the SSD director in East Berlin had subsequently been summoned to Moscow to explain his lapse.

No, what bothered Vlasov was Massey’s burgeoning relationship with Talin. The chance meeting in the food store observed by the man known as the Hunter, the lunch in the canteen, the adjacent seats at the ballet… these were the sort of incidents that, by not assigning a minder to Massey, Vlasov had expected to hear about. If Massey was double-dealing then, unrestricted, he might give himself away.

But all the incidents had been perfectly logical. Massey and Talin obviously had a lot in common. Which was why, when Vlasov had acceded to Massey’s demand to return to space, he had decided to put him up there with Talin. Not next time, of course, but soon.

Perhaps that was what had ignited the flame of suspicion: Massey and Talin had anticipated his plans for them.

From the dossier Vlasov extracted Talin’s latest computer assessment. YOUTHFUL SIGNS OF REBELLION COMPLETELY SUBORDINATED. SUBJECT HAS DEVELOPED AS ADVENTUROUS BUT OBEDIENT SERVANT OF THE PARTY…

So he would let the relationship develop naturally. But, at the same time, keep it under scrutiny.

He stared at the photographs on the wall. They stared back at him, through him.

If I bring off the Vandenberg coup, Vlasov decided, then I shall retire. And I shall go and see the owners of those faces on the wall and explain. If I fail then the likes of Peslyak will be baying at my heels.

Phase 2. Relationship development, sow seeds of doubt.

Well I have developed the relationship, Massey thought as he lay on the bed in his apartment. I haven’t yet sowed doubt but I have intrigued Talin. Time to make a progress report.

And it was only then that Massey realised that he no longer had anyone to whom he could report; his only contact was dead.

In Leninsk he was a satellite thrust out of orbit to drift in a void. Like the Prince of Darkness.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The second Russian connection with Vandenberg was OUTPUT FROM THE AMERICANS.

Vlasov wanted details of an imminent US rocket launch that could subsequently be sabotaged through the computers. If the sabotage succeeds, thought Vlasov, then I will be persuaded that the plan may work.

And what a plan! There had never been anything like it. Russia – and Communism – would rule the heavens and thus the world.

Again Sergei Yashin was chosen to steal the information. He was transferred from Moscow to Leninsk and allocated a small apartment which he stocked with enough food to withstand a six-month siege.

Vlasov didn’t fly to Leninsk for the second operation. There was nothing he could contribute and he had to attend a meeting of the Administrative Organs Department which imagined it controlled the KGB. Instead he dispatched Yuri Peslyak and Viktor Moroz, Director of the First Chief Directorate. Broadly speaking Moroz was responsible for clandestine operations overseas, Peslyak for domestic surveillance. As Massey’s scheme was open-ended both had responsibilities.

The link-up was timed for midday. Both Peslyak and Moroz took the 7 a.m. jet from Domodyedove. They sat near the flight deck, screened from the other passengers by curtains; behind the curtains, on the passenger side, sat two KGB guards.

Moroz, small, plump and fastidious, was in ebullient mood. News had been coming in all night of further mass demonstrations in the West in favour of disarmament. The mood, dormant for several years, had been re-activated by Moroz’s agents in 1981 and encouraged to erupt at carefully calculated intervals ever since.

The operation hadn’t presented too many difficulties: idealism and fear were soft targets for manipulation. In fact Moroz had nothing but admiration for the dreams of youth on the march and felt that it was sad that the young crusaders had no idea that they had been manipulated, having no conception of the subtleties of deception.

Sad it might be, but the collective human condition was even sadder. Naïvety was cynicism’s chopping block and if one alliance decided to give the lead in disarmament then the other would be sorely tempted to take advantage of such trust. Far better in the ground scheme of things to let the West take the initiative.

Moroz ordered coffee and Georgian brandy from the stewardess assigned to the two of them and pointed at the headlines in Red Star. WESTERN YOUTH ORDERS CAPITALIST MASTERS ‘LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS’. ‘A satisfactory exercise. Even you must concede that, Yuri.’

Peslyak grunted. ‘Satisfactory until some idiot destroys it all. Like that submarine commander who surfaced in Swedish waters in 1981 with nuclear warheads on board.’

‘Come now, don’t let your jealousy show.’ Moroz poured the brandy into his coffee. ‘You look after your dissidents and your Jews and your ethnic minorities while I take care of the globe. Speaking of minorities, I read the other day that soon we true Russians will be a minority in the Soviet Union. If you don’t watch out, Yuri, they’ll be calling the Muslims to prayer in the Kremlin by the end of the century.’

Moroz thought Peslyak was vulgar. Peslyak, he knew, derided his small stature. This bothered Moroz not at all; Stalin had been a small man.

Peslyak said: ‘If we bring off this computer penetration neither of us need worry. Unless there are more balls-ups.’

‘Such as?’

‘Brasack. He should never have been allowed to enter the Soviet Union. The SSD is under your control, isn’t it, Viktor?’

Moroz said calmly: ‘And once inside the Soviet Union he should have been detected immediately and liquidated. Instead he was permitted to get into a swimming pool with Massey. A swimming pool! The killing was a little… melodramatic, wasn’t it, Yuri?’

Peslyak stared at the pastures of cloud below. He rubbed his fleshy nose and smiled faintly. ‘It must have scared the shit out of Massey,’ he said.

The 11–86 began to descend towards the clouds. Mist swarmed past the windows. Then below them were the pygmy hangars, launch-pads, gantries and access roads of Tyuratam and the toy-bricks of Leninsk.

Sergei Yashin wasn’t hungry: he was ravenous.

It was 11.55 a.m., five minutes before he was due to make contact with Vandenberg, and his stomach was whining, grovelling, for food.

It had been bad enough when he was transmitting from Moscow. But here at Tyuratam his appetite was razored by the knowledge that he was at the core of Soviet expansionism. When micro chips could have been put to so many wonderful uses…

True this terminal wasn’t quite as old as the antique in Moscow. But that was only because it was being used for the colonisation of space.

Onion soup followed by Chicken Kiev as tender as butter.

Yashin’s stomach rumbled. His taste buds popped.

The other three men gathered around the terminal stared at him coldly. Peslyak as roughly brutal as an old-style commissar; Moroz even more forbidding with his venom so neatly packaged; Massey, a man whose features had settled into contradictions.

Massey said: ‘One minute to go.’

Yashin’s fingers trembled on the keys.

Massey handed him a number and said: ‘Go,’ and Yashin fed in Vogel’s terminal identification and, when this was acknowledged, the pass number handed to him by Massey.

As on the previous occasion there was a moment’s pause, presumably while Vogel checked the number. (Numbers were transmitted in orthodox figures but relayed by computers in binary form – the two-digit system using only ones and noughts – and translated back into orthodox notation at the terminal.)

While they waited Moroz observed: ‘If this works then anything’s possible. We could rob Fort Knox.’

Massey said: ‘You can be sure devious minds are already working on it. But so’s Fort Knox.’

‘Is it really as simple as this?’

Massey shook his head. ‘Far from it, there are a whole lot of safeguards. The active file for one. That alerts the people at the other end to the fact that a record, a unit of data, has been referred to. Our trump card is that the guy in charge is on our side.’

Figures materialised on the screen. Yashin looked up. ‘We’ve got the terminal identification for the day, the key code and the data code.’

Moroz handed Yashin two computer print-outs. Old-fashioned ones, Yashin noted. ‘This is what we want to know,’ Moroz told him.

Yashin glanced at the print-outs. Then began to feed the questions into the terminal.

Ten mintues later they had the answers. In seven days’ time the Americans were going to test-fire a modified Minuteman ICBM over the Western Test Range which stretched 4,900 miles across the Pacific from Vandenberg.

Massey said: ‘It couldn’t be better – one day after the next contact.’

As they left the control room Yashin heard Peslyak say to Moroz: ‘Has it occurred to you that we could divert that rocket to fall on Washington?’

Trembling, Yashin switched off the current and hurried towards the canteen, accompanied by the guards who these days never left his side.

Nine thousand five hundred miles away Daniel Vogel turned to Carl Wonner and said: ‘So far so good.’

Six days later Sergei Yashin, watched by Massey, Moroz, Peslyak and, this time, Vlasov, began his INPUT.

They had raided Vandenberg’s smart machine, now they were going to hoodwink it.

If the connection was made satisfactorily counterfeit data would be fed into Vandenberg’s central processor and relayed to the computer in the Minuteman’s launch-control centre in a blast-proof capsule fifty feet below ground.

According to Soviet Intelligence the underground silo housing the sixty-foot long, 70,000 lb Minutemen would be covered by electronically-operated sliding closures four feet thick. And the control room, serving ten launchers, would be guarded by officers of the Strategic Air Command.

All as ineffectual as gossamer floating in the breeze if you could penetrate the silo through a micro chip as small as a baby’s thumbnail.

‘Maybe,’ said Peslyak reflectively, ‘we could even launch the Minuteman prematurely.’

Moroz said crisply: ‘If this works we could probably launch every damn missile in America – and contaminate the world.’

Vlasov interrupted. Addressing Peslyak, he said: ‘Viktor has relayed to me your remark about diverting the missile on to Washington. The object of this exercise, my dear Yuri, is to control space not to destroy the globe. I have assumed your remark was flippant, although in the worst possible taste. The President,’ he added smoothly, ‘has assumed the same.’

Peslyak glared at Moroz and Yashin thought: ‘I am listening to a nightmare. If this power I have at my fingertips got into the wrong hands—’

Massey said: ‘Hit it.’

Yashin made contact.

A fragment of a pause.

He was through.

He began to inject his poison.

As he transmitted he resurrected his own vision of the future. A world in which health, energy and food problems were all solved by micro chips. In America the Cyber 205 could perform 800 million functions in a second, probably more by now. They had smart machines that could both speak and understand spoken words, albeit slowly. One day they’d have machines that talked to each other.

And here I am sabotaging the inertial guidance system and solid propellant ignition of a missile designed to carry a thermonuclear warhead across continents.

‘That’s it,’ he told the four men gathered around him as he completed the INPUT.

Vlasov said: ‘Until tomorrow.’

They left the room.

It was done.

At 09.23 the following morning, when the night cloud and fog that frequently blankets the area had lifted, the United States Air Force embarked on its 483rd launch from Vandenberg.

They needn’t have bothered about the cloud base. The rocket had ascended to only a few thousand feet when its thrusting flames suddenly died.

The rocket faltered and plunged into the Pacific two miles from the shore.

Associated Press and Reuters had the story within an hour enabling the afternoon newspapers to plaster it across their front pages. True, the missile hadn’t been armed with a warhead but what, they speculated, would have happened if it had been? Vandenberg, the Pentagon and the White House were inundated with Press calls but no one pursued the story as zealously as the Washington bureau of Tass, the Soviet news agency.

When the story landed in the head office of Tass on Moscow’s Boulevard Ring the top teletype and three photocopies were rushed to Dzerzhinsky Square.

Vlasov read and re-read the report sitting at his desk. So it had worked. They had penetrated the United States’ military space programme: while Russia dispatched an armoury into orbit America would be crippled.

Eventually, of course, the penetration would be traced. But by that time it would be too late. The military shuttles primed to distribute spy and killer satellites equipped with beam weapons, interceptors and possibly orbital nuclear bombs would be incapacitated.

Unless this was an elaborate CIA set-up. But for what possible reason? Vlasov frowned, then, remembering the photographs on the wall of his study, thrust aside the suspicion; for the time being at least. If his luck held he would soon be able to visit his middle-aged children and explain.

He picked up a telephone and called Moroz. ‘It worked,’ he said.

‘It worked,’ Reynolds told the President on a scrambled line.

‘Glad to hear it, George. Bring me the details at six o’clock this evening.’ The line went dead.

The details were simple enough, Reynolds reflected sipping a plastic cup of coffee in his office at Langley. And relatively cheap.

All they had done was to launch an obsolete Minuteman denuded of most of its equipment with only enough propellant to take it a few thousand feet into the air. Although, of course, none of the leaders of the protests organised around the world was aware of this.

The danger, as always, was the human factor. Technicians involved in the deception had been kept to a minimum; each had been exhaustively screened and sworn to secrecy; none knew the motive behind the exercise. Two known KGB informants normally used to pass on misinformation had been deployed elsewhere.

However, there was always a risk. If the Minuteman deception was blown then the spectacular was blown. And Massey was dead.

Reynolds finished his coffee and paced his office in the modern block on the highway ringing Washington. It was a spartan place furnished with Government-issue desk, chairs and filing cabinets but at least, unlike the office of his Russian counterpart, Nicolay Vlasov, it overlooked trees.

Reynolds respected Vlasov. If the spectacular was aborted it would be his doing. And I will be the sacrificial lamb of the congressional inquiry. Vlasov versus Reynolds… President versus President… Sedov versus Massey… Department V surveillance versus… Who?

Brasack was dead and, now that the shell of the ancient Minuteman had been fired, the first priority was to find a replacement. Otherwise Massey had no way of communicating development.

Supposing the Russians decided to launch their shuttle prematurely, supposing Talin agreed to defect, supposing we knew nothing about it…

Reynolds buzzed his intercom and told his secretary to summon a cypher expert from the Office of Communications to encode a Telex message to the United States Embassy in Moscow.

The American Embassy in Moscow is located on Tchaikovsky Street and looks like a large, bankrupt hotel. It stands flush with the pavement and there is an arch in the centre of the façade, guarded by two militiamen, which leads into a courtyard; at one corner of the building stands a KGB post manned by four operatives. The edifice owes nothing to the spirit of Tchaikovsky.

The brain centre of the CIA and other intelligence agencies is often assumed to be the offices of the military attachés. Wrong. Intelligence is indeed collated in these sections but it is superficial stuff; attachés are far too obvious, accredited spies who at ceremonial occasions are more the stuff of Gilbert and Sullivan than John Le Carré. The strong meat of the CIA operation is contained in other departments and, as with the KGB – intelligence agencies are great plagiarists – seniority bears no relation to diplomatic status; a lowly third secretary in the commercial section could in his clandestine way wield more power than the Ambassador himself.

The CIA head of operations in Moscow was ironically a First Secretary in the Information Department. His name was Palmer, he was forty years old, with slightly oriental features and mild manners and he was on this December morning a very worried man.

A few weeks previously he had been summoned to Langley and briefed on Massey’s mission. The brief: to maintain contact but not to interfere. The operation, Reynolds had said, could produce the biggest coup ever achieved by Western Intelligence. And almost immediately Palmer had lost Brasack.

Next to China, Russia was the most difficult country in the world in which to establish agents. The restrictions on movements for one thing. Any American travelling anywhere was automatically under surveillance. He might just as well carry an ID in his hat-band spelling out SPY.

So Palmer had to enlist other nationalities. Soviet satellite states (Brasack) and Russian citizens who didn’t consider that they owed any allegiance to the Kremlin. Georgia, where corruption was a way of life, was a fertile field as was the Ukraine, particularly its western reaches which, culturally and historically, have always been at odds with Moscow. (In World War II the Ukrainian Division fought with the Germans against the Soviet Union in the hope of winning their freedom; most of them were subsequently butchered for their pains by the Russians.)

Being half Japanese, the ethnic tensions inside the Soviet Union intrigued Palmer. He had no doubt that, like all empires before it, the Union would one day collapse. And he believed that the cracks were widening by the day inside its borders.

The phone on his desk rang. The Boston Globe. A visiting correspondent wanting an interview with the Ambassador. Palmer said he would see what he could do. He logged the inquiry.

Where the Kremlin made its mistake was in regarding true Soviets as the inhabitants of the fifteenth and largest republic and suppressing nationalist feeling elsewhere. Well, pretty soon the Russian Republic would no longer have an overall majority and pressing hard behind it would be all the other factions of the USSR led by the forty-five million Ukrainians. True, the Kremlin had tried to appease the Ukrainians by giving them some central powers but, in Palmer’s opinion, these were quite inadequate.

The OUN, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, was still active despite KGB attempts to exterminate it and it was to their ranks that Palmer’s mind turned as he searched for a replacement for Brasack.

Next to Plesetsk, Russia’s military space centre, Kapustin Yar, the test launching site for ABMs, and Saryshagan the missile base on the Chinese border where they were testing charged particle beam weapons, Tyuratam and Leninsk were the most difficult places in the Soviet Union into which to infiltrate an agent.

In the file in his mind Palmer ran through the list of OUN agents who also worked for the CIA. It was a formality. Already he knew there was only one man for the job but he hesitated to nominate him.

His real name was Rybak. Years ago he had assumed another identity and had once been Olympic middle-heavyweight weightlifting champion and was therefore nachalstvo, privileged. This meant that he could travel far more freely than most of his fellow countrymen, an inestimable asset if you were engaged in espionage.

By profession, Rybak was an electrical aeronautical engineer specialising in Yakovlek jets. Yak-42s had begun to fly into Leninsk. So, with his nachalstvo, there was a chance that Rybak could get himself posted to Rocket City.

Rybak, Palmer reflected, had a lot going for him. He also had a lot running against him. Although he was grossly fat he was still immensely strong and whenever he was engaged on a clandestine operation a body seemed to surface, ribcage crushed as though it had been embraced by a bear.

Palmer needn’t have worried about the immediate transfer of Rybak to Leninsk: on 12 December Talin, Massey and ten other cosmonauts and mission specialists were transferred to Moscow for medical examinations at the Institute of Aviation Medicine.

Before he left, Talin inspected the three Doves that had arrived by rail from the Tupolev factory at Voronezh. One squatted wingless in an annexe; the second was stretched out on a ramp in the Processing Facility, the third was suspended inside the shell of the fifteen-storey vehicle assembly building ready to be joined to the giant external tank and solid rocket boosters which would be shed as she escaped from the pull of the earth.

The Dove suspended in the assembly building was the shuttle Talin would shortly fly – rumour had it on 23 February, Armed Forces Day; the bird on the ramp was the one in which Massey, as an observer, would later accompany him; the wingless cripple was scheduled to fly in the summer.

Talin showed his ID, waited while he was checked out electronically, then climbed into the flight-deck of the hanging Dove.

He sat in the Pilot seat, scanned the dials, touched the hand controller; then he moved to the other controls that would concern Sedov and himself while they were in orbit. As before, the cargo bay would be Sedov’s responsibility.

Indisputably, this mission was more important than the previous maiden flight. They would, for instance, be testing a space arm that could flex its metal muscles and reach out from the cargo bay to deliver the components of stations being constructed in space. To do this Sedov would have to turn the Dove upside down so that the instruments in the bay faced earth; but that was no problem because when you were weightless in space it didn’t matter which way up you sat or stood.

The Americans had already successfully tested a similar arm: the Soviet version was far more sophisticated, designed to build in space.

It must have been the fitting for the arm that had struck Talin as out of place at Voronezh. He climbed out of the flight-deck and examined the cargo bay. There was an additional fitting there. Perhaps that had been it. But it was odd. Frowning, he walked out into the daylight.

Far away, on the other side of the space centre, a conventional rocket screamed, bloody-tailed, into the air.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They were married at the Palace of Weddings in Moscow’s Leningrad Prospect.

Sonya wore a white taffeta gown made by the Bolshoi costumiers. Her parents flew from their dacha on Lake Ladoga near the Finnish border; Talin’s mother sent a cable from Khabarovsk – she was sixty-nine and 4,000 miles was a long way to travel.

The sun shone, fresh snow sparkled.

Theirs was the thirty-second wedding that day and they were married by the Director of the Palace, a matronly woman wearing a purple dress. With them at the ceremony were the best man, Oleg Sedov – accepted without complaint by Sonya – and the bridesmaid, a member of the Bolshoi Corps de Ballet, a girl with flirtatious eyes named Anna.

As they entered the lofty wedding chamber a tape of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 poured from two loudspeakers. On the Director’s desk stood a bust of Lenin and a vase of pink and white carnations flown in from Georgia. When they stopped in front of her desk the music stopped and the Director told them that the State had empowered her to marry them. Talin didn’t care who had empowered her. Nor did he care that they were being married on an assembly line. Sonya looked beautiful, a dusty shaft of sunlight finding the fragility and not the strength in her face, her fine blonde hair loose on her shoulders. She was his and he was hers and these moments were theirs, outside the thrall of the State.

Sedov nudged him. The Director had finished her homily, there were papers to be signed.

Then the Director handed them two gold rings. He and Sonya exchanged them and he looked into her eyes and saw love.

The Director smiled for the first time. She talked to them about sharing. The sunshine felt warm. He could smell the carnations. She pronounced them man and wife. They kissed. As they walked out of the chamber taped music flowed again, When the Saints Come Marching In.

Then more Tchaikovsky as another couple prepared to go in.

In the foyer they drank champagne and Talin kissed the bridesmaid and Sedov kissed Sonya. Sedov, Talin thought, looked touchingly proud.

A Zil limousine festooned with streamers, a plastic bear on its bonnet, took them to the Aragvi for the reception. There were two hundred guests from the Arts and from Aerospace present. Among them Robert Massey who congratulated them; Sonya received him coolly and, fleetingly, it occurred to Talin that she had transferred her hostility from Sedov to the American.

The Press were there in strength. The interviews went on interminably. Finally when a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda asked Talin whether he thought he and Sonya had been united by ‘ideological concord’ Talin snapped: ‘No, by sex,’ and was led firmly away by Sedov.

As they cut the cake, surmounted by a ballerina doll, the restaurant was lit with electronic camera flashes.

Then, as though a starter’s pistol had been fired, the guests turned to the food and drink. Sweet champagne, vodka and brandy and a larder of zakuski – smoked salmon, black and red caviar, salted herring, salami, chicken, gherkins, black bread, bowls of beetroots. It disappeared at astonishing speed. ‘Locusts,’ Sedov remarked.

Replacements were brought by waitresses in black and white uniforms.

As the vodka took hold, moods changed and the chatter rose a few decibels. A weeping poet toasted Love; two Uzbeks retired outside to fight over Anna, the bridesmaid; glasses smashed; a man who looked like a prizefighter found his baritone voice deep in his barrel chest and aired it, singing of tragedy with unfettered relish. As one, the guests mourned and celebrated their lot.

Talin and Sonya left at 1 p.m. to catch a plane to Sochi. No one, except Sedov and Massey, seemed to be aware of their departure. They looked for Anna but she had locked herself in a bathroom with the baritone while her other two suitors slugged it out on the sidewalk.

In Sochi, Talin and Sonya found another Russia. In the late afternoon they strolled in the warm sunshine along the esplanade with its flights of white steps and pergolas, gazed over the cypress-speared forest sweeping down to the shore from the snow-capped peak of Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, watched the hydrofoils skimming the green waters of the Black Sea, smelled blossom on the air. In the evening the streets were alive with guitar music.

That night they went to bed exhausted and didn’t make love.

On successive nights they made up for the lapse.

Daily they grew healthier among Sochi’s spas, solariums, clinics, sanatoriums and rest-homes. Every year 500,000 tourists visit Sochi to take the air, the waters, the tonics. In the cafés the topic is health, good or bad.

They strolled along the beaches, climbed the mountain road to Dagomys, capital of Russian tea, took a coach to a grove fifteen miles from the centre of Sochi to look at yew and box trees reputedly 800 years old; ate trout from a hatchery filled with moss-green water.

Occasionally Talin became aware that a thin man wearing a fawn suit seemed to be haunting them. Following them? Smiling, Talin derided himself: Leninsk security had got to him. There must be a thousand men wearing fawn suits in Sochi.

On Friday, 20 December, they flew back to Moscow.

On the same Friday Boris Rybak got drunk on the Ukrainian circuit in Moscow.

He was not alone in his drinking, Friday being Moscow’s prime night for boozing, closely followed by Saturday and Sunday. Monday was the prime day for absenteeism.

Rybak was always puzzled by the reasons put forward by sociologists for Soviet drinking. Failure to complete their work output, escape from responsibility, the cold, etcetera.

Rybak drank to get drunk.

And, like most Russians, he drank vodka, the libation, liberation and hard currency of the people. If you wanted a job done properly pay the carpenter or plumber with a litre of firewater.

Rybak drank mostly in the homes of Ukrainians where, as the vodka unleashed their tongues, the toasts grew louder and the language of their land, banished by Stalin, lived again.

By and large Rybak was an amiable drunk, disciplined enough, even when carrying half a litre of vodka in his belly, not to be indiscreet about his OUN activities. His one weakness was, paradoxically, his strength; when, after recalling his Olympic endeavours, he demonstrated that strength, a cord of restraint sometimes snapped inside him, particularly if, because of his girth and blubber, his power was questioned. Once at a party a lithe, olive-skinned Armenian who taught judo at night classes remarked: ‘What is the good of muscles if they’ve melted?’ and, with a shrug, accepted Rybak’s challenge to fight. The Armenian swayed at Rybak, trying to use his weight and strength to his own advantage; but whatever he did Rybak just came at him until he was trapped in the corner of the room. Rybak encircled him with his arms; to the onlookers it looked like a friendly embrace, until they heard the Armenian’s ribs crack.

Tonight Rybak resolved not to get excessively, Friday-night drunk because the following day he had to make contact with an American named Massey.

But vodka is a sly drink. Down the throat it slides to ignite small fires which the drinker believes he has extinguished with mineral water and zakuski. What, in fact, he has done is induce internal combustion and it only needs a few breaths of fresh air to set the flames roaring.

Rybak visited four homes, using his sophisticated electrician’s skills at each to detect any bugs before the anti-Soviet toasts became too explicit. On the first three occasions he navigated his exit into the sharp-toothed night reasonably well. It was the fourth visit, to a wooden izba in the Arbat, that was his undoing.

The old cottage with its incandescent stove was built for historical outrage. After the first two litres of vodka the hosts and guests, all Kievans, stormed down their city’s Kreshchatik Street beneath the chestnut trees resurrecting their heritage prior to the October Revolution.

Glasses were hurled at the glowing stove.

Then Rybak demonstrated the latent strength of the Ukraine by lifting above his head a table bearing three guests. He issued a spate of challenges but, remembering the fate of the Armenian who even now breathed with pain, no one took them up.

Out into the street he finally strode, all twenty stone of him. He sucked down the crackling air and, whoosh, the fires inside him were rekindled. Their ferocity spun him round and, to escape them, he took cover in the gutter where, five minutes later, the militia’s vodka patrol shovelled him up and, with considerable effort, piled him into the back of a van and carted him off with the other drunks to a sobering-up station.

He came to gazing at Christ.

The sobering-up station was part of a derelict monastery. Recently the Soviet authorities had been renovating it to prove their respect for religion. Fifty years of dirt, rust and pigeon droppings had been scraped away, blue cupolas had been polished, crosses burnished.

Above the entrance the face of Christ was re-emerging in mosaic pebbles and some of the staff of the sobering-up station asserted that its effect on the drunks was more potent than the usual jets of ice-cold water. To an extent this was true because the boozers believed the Day of Judgement had arrived and immediately began to dry out.

Not so Rybak. Seeing Christ peering down at him, he decided he was reproaching him about his gross appearance and challenged him to a bout of wrestling.

Two attendants turned the water hose on him, then tried to strap him naked on an iron bed, but he resisted. A needle slid into his buttock. He continued to struggle for a few seconds before collapsing on the bed, a great mattress of flesh. They strapped him down and threw two grey blankets over him.

Punctiliously they entered him in their records. ‘The eighth time this year,’ one of them noted. ‘I wish he’d piss off back to Kiev and get drunk there.’

The following morning Rybak departed with the considerable dignity of the very fat and caught a bus to his rendezvous with Massey in one of the establishments where Russians, like the British in their pubs, debate the human condition – the banya, the bathhouse.

Phase 3: First hit, with devastating revelation, preferably personal.

Massey awoke from a nightmare. When he had made his devastating revelation Talin had produced a razor, slit his own throat and, smiling, said: ‘Pray continue.’

Massey felt the sheets. They were wringing wet. Blood? No, sweat. He glanced at the illuminated dial of his wristwatch. 6 a.m. Six hours before he was due to make contact with a Ukrainian named Rybak.

He switched on the bedside lamp. There hadn’t been a vacancy in the military billets in Moscow and he had been put back in his old room, 2604, in the Ukraina Hotel.

He swung himself out of bed and padded round the room. On the glass-topped table lay a magazine published in English for visitors. He flicked the pages. And there were Nicolay Talin and Sonya Bragina staring at him, Talin with his fair hair swept back from his bold features, Sonya smiling up at him.

If everything went according to plan he was going to destroy their happiness. At times like this Massey had to sit down and reaffirm the reasons for what he was doing. The Book According to Reynolds. The President needs a coup to ensure his re-election: only if he is re-elected to bargain through strength can the West hope to survive Soviet aggression. And the coup itself: a spectacular that will both humiliate Russia and – the and was very important – reveal once and for all the full measure of Russia’s hostile intentions. According to Reynolds, that was.

Massey began to read.

Soul mates joined by a common ideology… he spreading the cause of Socialism in the heavens, she in the arts… both the physical and mental embodiment of the glorious spirit that has prevailed since the October Revolution…

Massey put down the magazine. Rubbish like that helped his re-affirmation.

Nevertheless, I am betraying Talin. Nonsense, he is an intelligent man capable of making up his own mind. I’m taking over where Reynolds left off, Massey thought.

He is a happy man. He has a wife whom he loves and his joy is travelling in space. He knows that space must not be violated, he knows there is a greater scheme of things.

How do I know that what I’m supposed to tell him is true? You don’t, but in this case the end indisputably justifies the means.

And my motives? Idealism. At least give yourself that. But compounded by selfishness, the desire to return to space. Well, of course, you could accept the Russian offer – AND HAVE YOUR THROAT CUT WHEN THEY DISCOVER THEY’VE BEEN DECEIVED.

To summarise, Massey thought, I have no choice. He parted the curtains. The windows were covered on the outside with frost patterns; it was still dark.

He lay down on the bed again and closed his eyes and the nightmares returned.

The banya was a relic of Tzarist indulgence. From the outside it was nondescript, a doorway in a row of leaning tenements painted in flaking yellow. Inside, the foyer was fashioned in marble the colour of old teeth but grand just the same. A flight of stairs covered in worn red carpet led down to the changing rooms.

Massey paid his entrance money, one rouble, to the woman at the cash desk and received in return a white towel and a bunch of birch twigs with which to beat the dirt from his own and others’ skins.

He changed and, draped in the towel, made his way into the bathhouse proper. The heat hit him a fierce blow as he entered; he closed the door and peered around. Steam scented with eucalyptus billowed around the chamber. Blinking the moisture from his eyelids, he saw that it was generated by firebricks in an oven; every so often a masochist threw a bucket of water on the bricks and more steam was discharged out of pipes snouting from the walls. The room was shaped like a small amphitheatre with benches rising on all sides. Massey assumed that it was hottest at the top.

He sat half way up. The wet heat seared his eyeballs, scalded his lungs. Around him other bathers were beating the dirt out of each other with their twigs. Massey sat and waited and endured.

The slip of paper making the appointment had been thrust in his hand beside the bookstall in the Ukraina. Just a time, midday, and the location of the banya. He had spun round but he was surrounded by the usual throng, indistinguishable from the crowd that had been there the night he arrived; any one of them could have passed on the message.

‘A barbaric custom.’ The voice issued from the steam on Massey’s left. ‘But part of our character.’

Massey wiped moisture from his eyes with his towel. The voice belonged to an elephant.

‘I can see from your expression that you would not want to beat me with birch twigs. I must admit there is a lot of me.’ A chuckle.

Could this great hulk of blubber be the contact?

Massey said: ‘I’ll beat you if you want but I’ve got a strong arm.’

‘Strength is everything,’ the fat man said inconsequentially. ‘But don’t worry, I don’t want to be beaten.’ Grappler’s hands gestured at the steam. ‘This is enough for me.’ He pointed at the other bathers. ‘Let them beat each other to death. But don’t misunderstand them…’ Had he said Massey or had it been a hiss of steam? ‘…it is not just the pain that they enjoy.’

‘What do they enjoy?’

‘You will see,’ wiping the sweat pouring from his face. ‘Are you English?’

‘American.’

‘I went to America once.’

‘What part?’

‘Texas.’

‘What part of Texas?’

‘An offshore island.’

‘Name?’

‘Padre Island. Even now I can remember the telephone number of the Padre Island National Seashore – 512 937 2621.’

The contact. Enough flesh there for two contacts. Despite everything Massey grinned.

Rybak said: ‘Come, the heat is getting to you. We must go.’ They stood up. Rybak gripped Massey’s arm, fingers like steel hooks. Bodies parted before him. Near the entrance he picked up a bucket and tossed water on to the firebricks. As steam hissed around them he said: ‘Do you have a message?’

‘Just tell them Phase Three starts tomorrow.’

‘Very well. We’ll meet in seven days at the same time at the chess boards in Gorky Park. Is this your first visit to a banya?’ as they made their way into the changing room.

‘First and last.’

‘It’s not so bad. Look.’ Rybak pointed to an area at one end of the changing room that Massey hadn’t noticed.

Men, young and old, fat and thin, were lounging in their towels playing chess and dominoes, laughing, talking, eating and drinking.

‘The banya is the great equaliser,’ Rybak said. ‘Even more so than Communism,’ he whispered. ‘Here you might meet a general literally rubbing shoulders with a peasant. And now you see what I meant about our enjoyment. It isn’t just the suffering in there,’ pointing towards the bathhouse, ‘it’s the blessed relief after it. A beer?’ he asked.

Massey nodded.

‘And something to eat. Some salt fish I think.’ He spoke to a male attendant who departed, returning with tankards of beer and a plate of fish as tough as shoeleather.

As they drank and chewed Rybak observed: ‘You look strong to me. Do you like to arm wrestle?’

‘No,’ Massey said.

‘Not even against a barrel of lard like me?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘I haven’t paid for the beer and fish yet. Shall we arm wrestle to see who pays?’

‘If you must.’

Elbow to elbow, forearm to forearm, hands clasped, they strained against each other on the floor. Three times Massey almost forced Rybak’s arm flat; three times it sprang back as though a spring had suddenly been released. Finally it was Massey who broke.

Rybak wobbled with merriment. ‘You pay,’ he said, popping the remains of the salt fish into his mouth and washing it down with the last of Massey’s beer.

Observing them from across the room where he was reading the latest spy thriller by Julian Semyonov, the Hunter thought: ‘If I ever tangle with that fat slob I shall have to watch my step.’

Nicolay Vlasov read the Hunter’s latest report in the back of the black Zil taking him from the Kremlin, where he had attended a Politburo meeting, to his apartment on Kutuzovsky.

The Zil occupied the centre of the darkened street, a Kremlin privilege. Occasionally the driver glanced in the rear-view mirror at the elegant passenger with the expensively barbered hair and fragile-looking skull. One crack with a blunt instrument and the bone would shatter like china. Greenish eyes glittered from the mirror as though Vlasov had heard his thoughts. The driver shivered.

Vlasov’s eyes refocused on the report.

0555 hours. Subject heard through microphones in his room in Ukraina Hotel to shout: ‘Phase Three!’ then lapse into gibberish.

0600. Heard to rise from bed. Spent fifteen minutes walking round room.

0615. Returned to bed.

0648. Another shout, words incomprehensible.

Phase Three? Vlasov frowned. Probably a reference to the flight of the shuttle. Or was it?

0800. Woken by early call from switchboard. Breakfast.

0900. Called at Passport Office, Room 20, on first floor of Ukraina. Took stairs to ground-floor. Bought newspaper, Pravda, and crossed river across Kalininsky Bridge, strolled along riverbank. Returned to hotel.

1030. Coffee in room.

1104. Travelled by bus to Pushkin Place. Visited Museum of the Revolution.

So far a model morning, Vlasov thought with relief as the Zil pulled up outside his apartment block.

Militiamen snapped to attention. Plainclothes guards hovered. Vlasov entered the lobby, slid a magnetised card into the elevator control.

He continued to read as the elevator glided upwards.

1145. Emerged from museum and made way by foot to banya off Petrovka Street.

Noon, entered banya.

1210, approx. (Perhaps the Hunter had left his watch in the changing room to avoid the steam.) Approached by fat man who struck up conversation.

1220. Moved to recreation room with fat man. Stayed with him until –

1245. Left banya and returned by taxi to hotel.

The rest of Massey’s day until the Hunter handed over surveillance to another agent at 1800 hours was innocuous. Come to that so was the first part. The footnote to the report was the most interesting part of it.

The elevator stopped. Vlasov emerged into a carpeted corridor. A plainclothes guard stood back as Vlasov opened the door of his apartment with three keys.

‘Nicolay, is that you?’

‘Who else?’

In the living room he kissed his wife perfunctorily while she continued to look at the television. Grand opera, La Bohème by the sound of it.

He poured himself a Chivas Regal with ice and, trailing his free hand across the surfaces of the Finnish whitewood furniture, the Hunter’s report under the other arm, adjourned to his study.

There, he considered the deplorable performance he had just witnessed by the Minister of Defence, Grigori Tarkovsky.

There were ten members of the fourteen-man Politburo present. Average age: seventy-one. They normally met on Thursdays but this week’s meeting had been postponed for two days because the President had been indisposed. Indisposition was becoming increasingly common among the septuagenarians.

They assembled in a long, gloomy room dominated by Lenin, in oils, and the President, who was also chairman of the Politburo, in the flesh. Through the windows they could see two gold cupolas floating above the falling snow.

The building in which the Politburo met was closed to the public absolutely and at all times, protected by armed guards, steel doors and electronic switches. It reminded Vlasov of an impregnable coffin set among wreaths of delicate blossom.

Tarkovsky was on his feet astride his hobby-horse: the failure of détente and the ultimate alternative, force of arms. The trouble, Vlasov thought, was that although Tarkovsky mouthed ultimate he meant only. Thank God there was still enough common sense in the granite-faced old men sitting at the long mahogany table to restrain him.

What a bunch of ancients we are, Vlasov mused. But although our bodies might betray us, our minds are icily determined, moulded by the long campaign of survival. Frozen, inflexible? Well, that accusation had been levelled at them many times and it had some validity. But the proof of the pudding was the eating: the old fogies had made Russia a superpower and they intended to keep it that way.

Who were the more dangerous, old men set in their ways, suspicious and cantankerous, or young men lusting for battle? Old hawks dictating from their nests or fledglings flexing their talons?

What we have to do, Vlasov thought as Tarkovsky, the Iron General, continued to address his troops, is to ensure a smooth transfer of power; to hang on until the young hotheads have cooled off a little.

But, before that, someone would have to be chosen to succeed the President, sitting brooding and heavy-lidded – as well he might listening to Tarkovsky – at the end of the table, life in his bulky body sustained by the pacemaker buried in his chest.

Certainly not Tarkovsky: with such a man in power there soon wouldn’t be a world left to rule. Certainly not me; I have never sought that sort of power; in any case the Soviet Union would lose credibility with the chief of its secret police at the helm. The Foreign Minister? No, he might be adept at spitting in the eye of an American Secretary of State – he had been doing it long enough – but he wasn’t for domestic consumption, and it was domestic policy that needed to be shored up – you could hear the groan all the way to the Sea of Okhotsk when another Five Year Plan was announced after another wheat crop had failed. Party Theorist Levich who had recently taken over the job after the death of his illustrious predecessor? Again he was too remote from reality. No, it would have to be one of the young men, a sprightly 65-year-old! The snag there was that three of these weren’t natives of the Republic of Russia and it would never do to install a leader from another ethnic group, despite avowals to the contrary. And, ironically, yet another of the youngsters was Andrei Romanov. If he wanted a crack of the whip he would have to change his name!

But, a young man it would be. Well, not anyone over eighty.

In America, Vlasov reflected, they also had an old age problem, except there it was contained in one man. If the United States President wanted to be re-elected then he would have to pull off some sort of coup proving that his mind was still agile. Idly, Vlasov wondered if he, or George Reynolds, had anything in mind.

‘…the future lies in space…’

Wearily, the President glanced at his wristwatch.

‘…in the absence of co-operation by the United States to agree upon a formula for co-existence…’

Etcetera, etcetera, Vlasov thought.

‘…the logical plan in the event of a limited war would be to knock out US bases for space flights in a pre-emptive strike…’

And so on.

‘…There are several ways in which this can be achieved…’

Vlasov yawned. What Tarkovsky didn’t realise was that he now knew about the plan, involving the fleet of Dove shuttles, that the minister of defence had presented to the President. It had taken him only forty-eight hours to find out.

What alarmed Vlasov was the fact that the President hadn’t confided in him. In other words had taken Tarkovsky’s lunacy seriously.

Which was why he had to expedite the scheme given to him by Massey on a plate. To prove that, in the cosmos, the Americans could be defeated by guile rather than brute spatial force.

Tarkovsky sat down. The troops stood at ease. The President looked around the table inquiringly. No response: Tarkovsky had that effect on them. The meeting was declared at an end.

And if the Vandenberg penetration was to proceed swiftly and smoothly then any suspicion of a flaw had to be dealt with as soon as it materialised. Vlasov sipped his whisky without tasting it.

Phase Three? He would have to find out if such a term was in common usage in shuttle parlance. Perhaps it was an American expression. Or it could have been a generalisation; he would have to listen to the tape to see if the tone was incisive.

His glass was empty; he didn’t remember drinking any of the Scotch. He went back to the living-room. The television flickered in rich colours. ‘Your tiny hand is frozen…’ His wife didn’t look round. He replenished his glass and returned to his study.

The footnote to the Hunter’s report read: ‘At the end of my duty I returned to the banya to check out the identity of the fat man. Luckily he is a regular. His name is Rybak and he is a Ukrainian. That was all they knew.’

A Ukrainian. Our Achilles Heel. Well, one of them.

The Ukrainians were, by Soviet standards, tightly-knit. Forty-five million of them. Which was why, unlike other non-Russians, they had been allowed to infiltrate the Soviet hierarchy. To share so they would not seek to destroy.

Rybak. If he was a suspected member of the OUN then he would be logged in a computer programme. Vlasov called Peslyak. It took Peslyak eight minutes to find out. No Rybak in the OUN data.

So they would have to check out every Rybak living in Moscow. Not such a gargantuan task: all the inhabitants of the Soviet Union were locked somewhere in the computers.

Vlasov called Peslyak again. ‘Think yourself lucky his name isn’t Ivanov,’ he said. While Peslyak launched into a catalogue of the precautions he had taken to suppress the OUN, Vlasov thought: ‘Phase Three… fat Ukrainian… We must take other safeguards.’

He interrupted Peslyak: ‘I want you and Moroz to cooperate on an Indirect Interrogation.’

‘On whom, Comrade Chairman?’

‘On Robert Massey,’ Vlasov said.

A snatched intake of breath. ‘When?’

‘Now. And Yuri…’

‘Nicolay?’

‘Make good use of that swallow of yours. Let her spread her wings.’

She was preceded by a waitress carrying a chromium-plated tray on which stood a bottle of champagne and two long-stemmed glasses.

Here it comes, thought Robert Massey. He began to muster the defensive tactics he had learned at Camp Peary. He wished he was wearing more than slacks and open-neck shirt, but it was insufferably hot in the room.

‘Good evening,’ said Natasha Uskova smiling at him. ‘I decided to celebrate.’

The waitress shut the door behind her.

‘Celebrate what?’

‘Your return to space.’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘There was an item about it in Pravda Ukrainy.’ From her purse she took a brief cutting. ‘There.’ She handed it to him. ‘Perhaps you have connections in the Ukraine?’

‘None.’ He glanced at the clipping: it could have been printed specially for this evening. ‘Well, the Ukrainians know all about you.’ She pointed at the bottle. ‘Will you open it, please?’

While he unscrewed the wire and began to prise off the cork she sat down and crossed her breathtaking legs. She wore a red knitted dress, buttoned from breast to hem, and black, ankle-strapped shoes. Her glossy black hair was parted in the middle, the bow of her lips was exaggerated with wet-look lipstick and her eyeliner was extravagantly applied. In the West her appearance would have been considered old-fashioned but in Russia style was dateless. Indisputably she was dressed for seduction. Effectively for a man who hadn’t had sex for months. Not that he would succumb: he had been trained not to.

The cork hit the ceiling. Champagne fizzed. He poured it frothing into the two glasses. ‘Nasdarovya, here’s to you.’ She stood up. They touched glasses. They were so close that he could feel her body heat. She sat down again.

Massey sat on a green sofa opposite her. ‘Did you ever hear again from Herr Brasack?’ he asked conversationally.

‘No, he went to Rocket City to write an article. I expect he’ll contact me when he returns.’ Changing the subject from the very boring (and very dead) Herr Brasack, she asked: ‘So, what do you think of Soviet women, Robert?’

The Robert sounded incongruous.

‘You see a lot of them but you don’t see a lot of them.’

She frowned.

‘They’re all wrapped up for winter.’

She understood, carried the feeble joke a step further. ‘And underneath, I’m afraid, a lot of them are still all wrapped up. Too much bread, too many potatoes. But we’re changing,’ she said, leaning forward. Somehow the top button of her dress had come undone and he could see her breasts. ‘We’re finding ourselves, becoming more feminine.’

‘Women’s Lib?’

‘Up to a point. But we’ve always had a sort of equality. Lenin was all for it. You know, we do the same work as the men. The trouble is that married women have to come home and become housewives as well. Do two jobs while the man only does one.’

‘While he sits with his feet up watching television?’

‘Or tilting the vodka bottle.’

‘You should visit parts of Brooklyn.’

‘But we are beginning to assert ourselves. No help in the house, no…’ She hesitated.

‘Sex?’

‘Affection.’ She smiled demurely, a contradiction of the undone button. ‘Could I have some more champagne, Robert?’

As he refilled the glasses she said: ‘Russian men are becoming much more sophisticated in their attitude to women. At least the nachalstvo are,’ she corrected herself. ‘A peasant will always be a peasant. The nachalstvo, well, they have learned from the West how to treat women. Are you married, Robert?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Was.’

‘You didn’t leave anyone behind?’

‘Sure I left someone behind.’

‘But it doesn’t matter all that much?’

He drank champagne, shaking his head at the same time. They had taught him to renounce all ties.

‘You must get very lonely.’

A delightful euphemism. ‘Not too much.’ By now she must suspect that he was either gay or a eunuch.

‘You’re a very attractive man.’

When he didn’t reply she followed that up with: ‘I find you so, anyway. You exude – is that the right word? – virility.’

‘It’s the moustache,’ he said.

‘You look as if you’ve suffered. Your face has contradictions.’

She finished her champagne. ‘Here, let me,’ she said as he stretched out a hand to pour them both more. ‘Equality.’ She smiled at him, stood up and, with her back to him, poured the champagne.

His mistake, he realised a few minutes later, had been to let her pour the champagne shielding the glasses with her body.

Stupid!

The words of an instructor at Camp Peary, a willowy young pharmacologist, came back to him: ‘Don’t get totally sold on modern techniques. A few of the old tricks still work. So don’t let the bastards slug your drink.’

Well, he had let the bitch slug it. And it was too late to take evasive action – ‘Stick your fingers down your throat and throw up’ – but, because he had realised what had happened, it wasn’t too late to resist.

‘Even if you are dumb enough to take a slugged drink you’ve still got a lot going for you,’ the instructor had told him. ‘You’ve got the truth going for you. Force yourself to concentrate on what we did to you. The CIA, the Company, those fucks.’

Those fucks, he thought as she led him on folding legs to the bed. The ceiling wavered and he was so cold. Drugs. CIA or KGB, it was always drugs.

Closing his eyes, he saw the rim of the moon that was the earth. The stars chimed. If you had been up there you were different.

Drugs were dragging him to the threshold of madness again. If I topple over this time I shall never return.

The almost naked figure on the bed moaned. With practised hands she removed his shirt and underpants. Then began to take off her own clothes.

He opened his eyes. The stars withdrew. Her breasts were full, swinging as she undressed. Garter belt, panties, stockings… She touched her breasts, smoothed her flat belly.

With her naked body pressed against him she said: ‘Robert’ – not Roberto – ‘why did you come to the Soviet Union?’

Those fucks! ‘Because of what they did to me.’

‘Who?’

‘The Company, the CIA.’

‘What did they do to you, Robert?’

He told her.

Closed his eyes. The nose of the spaceship was pointing at the moon that was the earth and it was rushing towards them. The earth was out of control. When it fills the screen in front of me I will be mad.

Her breasts filled the screen. A hand was stroking his belly, inching downwards, bringing warmth. ‘Who is the Ukrainian, Robert?’

‘They shot me full of drugs, the bastards.’

‘The Ukrainian.’

‘And told me I was crazy. Do you think I’m crazy?’

‘Do you want to make love, Robert?’

‘I’m as sane as—’

‘If you tell me about the Ukrainian we can…’

‘– you are.’

The earth had almost filled the screen. It was spinning. Oceans and continents melted. A spinning top. One colour. Green.

‘Open your eyes, Robert.’

Fingers opening them. Returning to his crotch. ‘You like me doing this? Ah, I can see you do. And this?’ The warm wetness of her mouth.

Those fucks! But not much longer…

A door opened. In my mind? The door to insanity? No, a real door.

A man’s voice, a lascivious whisper. ‘Down again, that’s fine.’ An intake of breath. A flash.

‘He’s a spy, isn’t he?’

‘A spy? Who’s a spy?’

‘The Ukrainian.’

Hatred dispersing. He reached out for its last tattered fragments.

‘That’s why I came to Russia.’

‘The truth, Robert. You want to be inside me, don’t you?’

‘Ah the truth.’ You’ve got the truth going for you. ‘You want the truth?’

‘That’s all. Then I want you inside me. I want you so much.’

Another voice: ‘Give me his jacket.’

‘Then you shall have the truth.’

‘Oh Robert.’

Another flash.

The spinning globe was obliterating the screen, only a perimeter of light left.

‘The truth is that I wanted to share.’

‘To share what, Robert? Quickly, I’m so excited.’

‘The stars.’

Her breasts were above him. She was kneeling astride him.

‘The real truth. Tell me now while I… ah, there… filling me… so big and strong…’

Hatred, where is the hatred?

Only a rim of light on the screen.

The globe a spinning blur.

Madness.

‘Tell me. I’m going to stop now if you don’t tell me. Now, just before you—’

He shuddered.

The spinning globe receded.

He smiled up at her. ‘Rosa,’ he said.

Later that night another fragment from Camp Peary surfaced. ‘After drugs look for bugs.’

He found the tiny microphone sewn into the lapel of his jacket. He decided not to remove it; instead he crushed it with his foot. An accident.

But why did they still suspect him?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Framed between the Presidential Flag and the Stars and Stripes, the President gazed through the bow windows of the White House’s Oval Office at the Rose Garden.

‘Good morning, George,’ he said without turning round. ‘Where do you think we should talk? Out there?’ pointing at the lawns sugared with frost.

Wearing topcoats and scarves, observed at a respectful distance by two guards, they strolled across the lawn, shoes crushing the frost glittering in the sunshine.

‘An appropriate setting,’ the President remarked. ‘This is where the first team of American astronauts was received. Well, how’s it going?’ voice as crisp as the frost.

Reynolds was wearing spectacles. The lenses were plain glass, a defensive disguise. ‘Tight,’ he said. ‘I looked at the latest satellite pictures of Tyuratam this morning and the Dove isn’t even on the pad yet.’

They turned at the end of the lawn on which, in recent years, everyone from a Chinese table tennis delegation to Queen Elizabeth II had been received.

The awkward question from the President came as they began to walk beside a boxwood hedge towards the colonnade. ‘How much longer can we stall?’

‘Maybe a month. You see we always figured that they’d launch Dove Mark II in mid-January. Now it’s beginning to look as though we might have been premature.’

‘So?’

‘We’ll have to box pretty damn clever.’

‘Elaborate, George.’

‘Well, we’ve fooled them twice so far. The next time they’ll want something more convincing than a rocket abort immediately after a launch. They’ll want’ – Reynolds smiled thinly – ‘a spectacular.’

‘Can we give them one?’

‘It will involve a whole lot more people, that’s always a danger.’

‘I asked you if it can be done.’

‘That depends on our budget, Mr President.’

‘How much?’

‘A few million.’

The President was silent. Budget, Reynolds thought, was the key word to silencing Presidents. A jet crayoned a white line across the sky. Above the pulse of the city Reynolds fancied he could hear carols being played. There were two more shopping days to Christmas.

The President said: ‘A spectacular always costs a lot. But think of the returns.’

‘If it’s a smash,’ Reynolds said.

‘We’ll have to write off the cost against NASA military contingency funds.’

‘In that case,’ Reynolds said, ‘we’re still in with a chance. But we need to delay as long as possible.’

As they turned again the President glanced at his wristwatch. ‘We’ll have to hurry it up,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting with the Voice of Democracy script-writing winners in ten minutes.’

Reynolds said: ‘To help Massey delay things I’ve instructed Vogel to leave a one-word coded message in his private computer indicating that he’s sick. In other words he won’t be able to supply the codes for that day for the Vandenberg central processor. The Russians will just have to wait and that will give us a little more time.’

‘They’re going to love that,’ the President said.

‘Then we’ll give them their spectacular.’

‘When?’

‘I figure we should be able to stall them until the New Year. If they make the critical contact on January the First then they can have it on the Second.’ Reynolds looked speculatively at the President through his plain glass lenses. ‘One US satellite knocked out of orbit should keep them happy for a while, shouldn’t it?’

‘A satellite, George?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Reynolds said firmly. ‘That’s what they’ll have at the top of their list, I’ll stake my job on it.’

‘If this doesn’t work you won’t have a job to stake. And if anyone gets to hear the details nor will I.’

‘Time is everything,’ Reynolds said. ‘After they’ve zapped the satellite then they’ll want to clinch our final destruction. We’ll just have to string them along as best we can.’

‘And if they postpone the launch after, say, the beginning of February?’

‘We’ve lost,’ Reynolds said.

‘And Massey?’

‘We’ve lost him too.’

They stopped outside the French windows of the Oval Office. ‘But surely,’ the President said, ‘Massey himself should know when they’re going to launch Dove?’

Reynolds identified the carol reaching them above the noise of the traffic. ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful…’ ‘The trouble,’ he said carefully, ‘is that since making contact with the Ukrainian, Massey has been out of touch.’

Massey had tried to keep in touch. He had walked to Gorky Park to meet Rybak. It had been a sunny day, gold and ermine, and the chess-players had emerged. Despite the cold they sat at the line of battered tables moving their pieces with mittened fingers.

Cherry-nosed children followed by sedate parents skated along the footpaths; the ferris wheel was still, frozen until spring. In the background small figures skied down the Lenin Hills.

Massey felt Christmas. Heard it on the cries of the children and the swish of their skates. Except that here there was no Christmas, only New Year. But the spirit was the same, delayed a week.

It was midday. But of the fat Ukrainian there was no sign. Massey walked up and down the line of players, men of all ages, no women. Those confident of a tactical advantage leaned back in their seats sunning themselves while their opponents brooded darkly.

Massey stopped at a vacant table. A small man wearing a leather hat with flapping earpieces and yards of grey wool scarf round his neck pointed at the board: ‘You play?’

Massey shook his head.

The man’s tone hardened. ‘Today you play,’ he said.

Massey sat down. The man produced a box of chess pieces from the pocket of his Navy reefer jacket and set them up; then he held out two fists. Massey touched the left. White.

The man whose face was lined, bristles missed by the razor buried in the creases, said in heavily accented English: ‘You have the advantage, Gaspadeen Massey.’ His eyes – like dark wet pebbles, Massey thought – were focused on the board.

Massey moved P-K4. He knew how to move the pieces, that was about all.

His opponent did the same.

Massey cast his mind back to college when he had last played and, wondering ‘Who told him my name?’ moved his king’s knight.

‘So far so good.’

‘Who are you?’

‘It is a mistake to talk while playing chess.’ He moved a knight. ‘I like to play black. I enjoy being on the defensive.’

Massey moved a bishop.

‘Ah.’

A brilliancy or a disaster?

His opponent moved his queen’s pawn, glanced at the players on either side, and, voice lowered, said: ‘When playing white you are always one move ahead.’

‘I did know that.’

‘Which means you must always look behind you.’

Involuntarily Massey looked behind. There was no one there.

His opponent stuck a papyros, a cigarette with a hollow cardboard filter, between his lips. He struck a match; over cupped hands, he said: ‘In this instance look to your right but take your time. First make your move.’ He extinguished the match, inhaled and blew a cloud of smoke into the sunlight.

Massey moved his second knight, yawned and glanced lazily to his right. His opponent murmured: ‘Last table, by himself.’

A young man came up to the last table but the sleek-haired, powerfully built man sitting there dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

Behind Massey a little girl on skates fell on the ice now glossed with water by the sun. She was picked up, dusted down and launched again, wobbling, on the footpath.

Three moves later Massey castled.

His opponent nodded, coughing up smoke. ‘Perhaps a little premature?’ And whispered: ‘Rybak says you must shake your tail off. He will meet you the day after tomorrow at Dietsky Mir toy shop. Same time. My move? I’m sorry I wasn’t concentrating.’ He moved his queen with a plundering swoop.

Massey leaned forward and, conceding defeat, turned over his king.

His opponent inclined his head and was gone, trailing cigarette smoke.

Massey stood up, stretched and strolled towards the frozen river. Five minutes later he turned to pat the head of a boy on skates who had cannoned into him. Momentarily he saw the man who had been sitting at the end of the line of chessboards before he dissolved, like a melting snowflake, into the crowds.

Massey turned and headed towards the main gate. Ahead of him that day lay a series of fitness tests. And Phase Three.

The tests were carried out at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre at Zvezdny Gorodok, Star Town, forty miles to the north-east of Moscow, close to Chkalov Air Force base.

Set in pine forest, Star Town consists of a nucleus of high-rise apartments, well-stocked stores and recreation centres adjoining the actual training premises. In the centre of the apartment blocks stands a statue of Yuri Gagarin and close by, in the Cosmonaut Museum, a replica of his study.

As Massey and Nicolay Talin made their way through the dusk to the old red Moskvich in the training centre’s parking lot mist created by the brief thaw swirled around them.

‘A good thing you had your tests this afternoon,’ Talin remarked. ‘By tomorrow you’ll have pneumonia.’ He searched his pockets for the car keys. ‘What did they examine you for today?’

Massey began to recite. ‘Visual acuity, Neurocirculatory conditions, auditory function, water electrolyte balance… Do you want to hear more?’

‘Disorientation?’

Massey glanced at him. ‘Not today.’

They reached the car. With a strip of plastic Talin scraped the frost from the windscreen. ‘Did you pass everything?’

‘You know perfectly well that they’d pass me if I had a wooden leg. They’re going to make a showpiece out of me.’

‘Then we’re both showpieces,’ Talin said. ‘With a lot in common as we’ve discovered over the past couple of weeks.’ Sedov, Talin thought, is my tamer; Massey is the call of the wild.

He slid the key into the lock; it was already freezing and he had to twist hard. He eased himself behind the wheel, unlocking the passenger door from the inside. ‘Did you know,’ he said as Massey sat beside him, ‘they told me to buy a new car? Part of the image. But I refused, I like this little red devil and it would take months to tune a new engine as well as this.’

The engine fired throatily; clouds of exhaust joined the mist.

As the Moskvich accelerated towards Moscow, Talin said: ‘I received good news today.’ He paused, negotiating a long, slithering bend. ‘They gave me a date for the launch. It was to have been 23 February. But they’ve brought it forward. Apparently someone in the Ministry of Defence, possibly Tarkovsky himself, wanted to fire Sedov and me on New Year’s Day—’

‘But that’s much too early, you wouldn’t have time—’

‘So they compromised. 14 January.’

‘Even that doesn’t give you time to get ready.’

‘You forget, we’ve done it before. There aren’t many differences. Not from the flying point of view. Only the return-to-orbit procedure if anything goes wrong when we re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Do the Americans know about that?’

‘Oh yes,’ Massey said, ‘they know about that all right.’

A red light loomed out of the mist; Talin braked, felt the locked wheels continue forwards on the ice; they stopped directly beneath the light strung across the road.

Massey said: ‘What’s it like driving in Siberia?’

‘It’s better by troika,’ Talin told him. ‘Except in the cities.’

‘You were born in Khabarovsk?’

‘Just outside.’ Talin switched up the heating. ‘You once told me that you had read about me in the United States. But, although we’ve seen quite a lot of each other recently, you’ve never elaborated.’

Massey was silent.

The lights changed to green; the wheels spun, gripped.

‘Well?’

‘I know you were born on October the tenth, nineteen fifty.’

‘Some memory.’

‘I remember because we’re both Libra.’

‘You believe in that stuff?’

Massey shook his head. ‘You don’t believe in such things after you’ve been in space. You know that.’

‘What else did you read about me?’

‘There was an article in Aviation Week and Space Technology. You seemed to be emerging as a personality; the editor was obviously intrigued because that’s not allowed, is it?’

‘It’s all right,’ Talin said, braking again as a set of rear lights materialised in front of them, ‘if you’re a footballer or a poet or a cosmonaut.’ He remembered a conversation with Sedov in a bar when Sedov had stopped him from talking about the Cult of Personality within the Kremlin. ‘Did the article reach any conclusions?’

‘They obviously dug.’

‘Dug?’

‘They found out a lot about you. When you were a kid you were a rebel, right?’

‘A lot of kids are.’

‘I guess it had something to do with your father.’

Talin frowned. Why should it? ‘My father?’

‘You were very fond of him?’

‘He died when I was twelve.’

‘Time enough to get very fond of him.’

‘I don’t follow you,’ Talin said.

‘It must have been a shock, the way… he… died.’

‘The way he died?’

‘Let’s not go into it,’ Massey said abruptly.

‘Let’s. He died from pneumoconiosis, the miners’ disease.’

‘According to the article,’ Massey said, ‘he died from radiation sickness.’

‘In a coal mine?’

‘In a cobalt mine.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Persecution didn’t end in 1953 with Stalin’s death,’ Massey said.

‘Are you saying he was killed deliberately?’

‘Many enemies of the State were given the choice of immediate execution or slow death in a cobalt mine.’

Icy calm, hands gripping the steering wheel, Talin asked: ‘What makes you think, what made this magazine think, that my father was guilty of a crime against the State?’

They were nearing the outskirts of Moscow. Tall apartment blocks loomed through the mist.

Massey said: ‘The magazine seemed to have access to a lot of information.’

‘With sources?’

‘I don’t see why they should have made it up.’

‘And what was my father supposed to have done?’

‘Protested, I guess. That was enough.’

‘Protested? Protested about what?’

‘About overcrowding, bad food in winter, conditions in the coal mine where he worked before he was sent to the cobalt mine… He was something of a rabble-rouser, your father. He was tried before No. 2 District People’s Court in Khabarovsk on 8 November 1962, before Judge Zina Orlova.’

‘And sentenced to death for protesting? Don’t give me that shit.’

Talin spun the wheel viciously. The Moskvich skidded round a corner. Talin drove into the skid, righting it.

Massey said: ‘He was accused of embezzling Government property. Stealing coal, maybe, who knows. Anyway they were determined to make an example of him. The charge carried the death penalty.’

‘And you took the word of a journalist about this?’

A pause. The mist was clearing. Talin could see an illuminated red star over the Kremlin.

Massey said softly: ‘No, I checked it out myself.’

‘Who with?’

‘Contacts. It’s all true, Nicolay.’

‘I don’t believe it. Why are you telling me this?’

‘I didn’t want to. But you should know the truth.’

‘My father would have told me the truth.’

‘I doubt it, Nicolay. Would you have told your son such a truth?’

‘I would have found out. Even if my mother hadn’t told me the other kids would have done.’ No, they moved us to Novosibirsk! ‘I don’t believe it,’ he shouted as he jammed his foot on the accelerator, as a motorcycle without rear lights cut across their path, as he braked, as the Moskvich skidded broadside across black ice and somersaulted over a snow-covered embankment.

Dyetsky Mir, the huge toyshop opposite Lubyanka Gaol and the KGB headquarters, was packed.

Gingerly, Robert Massey eased his way through the crowds. The rib cracked in yesterday’s automobile accident throbbed with pain and his body ached all over.

He discovered that the areas nearest the counters were the safest because there some orderliness prevailed. The shoppers had to line up while a salesgirl calculated their bill on an abacus; armed with the bill, they had to line up at a cash-desk; then they had to queue again to collect their purchases.

Massey was conscious of the cuts and bruises on his face but few Muscovites, intent on buying New Year gifts for their children, took any notice.

Exactly where Rybak would make contact hadn’t been stated. Massey skirted counters stacked with rag dolls, toy rifles consisting of a metal pipe, a slab of wood and a trigger, model rockets as primitive as the real Soviet hardware was refined.

The toys were crude, but did it matter? If a child was unaware of the sophisticated playthings of the West he was happy with these. And if Santa Claus was Grandfather Frost in silver robe and tinselled hat, so what?

‘You look as if you’ve been through a combine harvester,’ Rybak said. ‘What happened?’

Massey told him as the Ukrainian led him through the crowds; they parted before him like demonstrators facing a baton charge.

‘And Talin, how is he?’

‘A few bruises. We were lucky.’

‘He knows how to pilot a spaceship but he doesn’t know how to drive a car. Strange, isn’t it? What have you to report?’

Massey stopped at a counter and picked up a toy revolver, its butt jewelled with a plastic red star. ‘The launch is on 14 January.’ He pulled the trigger, nothing happened.

‘Is that all?’

‘At the next penetration they are going to programme our computers for an ASAT attack on one of our own satellites.’

‘ASAT?’

‘Anti-satellite device.’

‘Which satellite?’

‘Elint 23.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Tell them Phase Three has been accomplished.’

First hit, with devastating revelation, preferably personal.

The car was turning over and over; excited voices, hands pulling him out on to the snow.

‘Anything more?’

Massey shook his head. Nothing more except that I am destroying a man’s past and his future.

Rybak’s fingers gripped Massey’s arm. ‘I said the next meeting will have to be in Leninsk. What the hell’s the matter? Are you concussed?’

‘Where?’

‘There is a church beside the railroad a mile from the station to the west. Next Saturday. Six in the evening. But shake off your tail again. Did you have any trouble today?’

‘It was still misty. I lost him in Gorky Street.’

‘And now I shall lose myself, not an easy task when you’re my size.’

But he managed it easily enough.

One life destroyed but millions saved, Massey reminded himself; if, that was, everything Reynolds had told him was true.

Comforted, Massey made his way towards the main door of the store reflecting that, so far, road accidents apart, the campaign was proceeding smoothly. And it wasn’t until that evening that he heard that Talin had disappeared.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

He had to know the truth.

To find it he had to reach Khabarovsk 4,000 miles east of Moscow and to get there he had to employ both guile and arrogance.

First the arrogance to by-pass travel restrictions. In his experience Soviet bureaucracy was so cumbersome that it could easily be toppled.

If he had been a peasant, a clerk or a factory hand it would have been difficult. But he was élite, a cosmonaut, a Hero, with the ID to prove it.

He went direct to the Aeroflot headquarters at 49/51 Leningrad Highway. At the booking counter a stout woman with lacquered blonde hair regarded him phlegmatically.

He told her that he wanted to fly to Khabarovsk. She reached for various forms but when he added: ‘Tonight,’ her hand stopped over the papers.

‘Impossible.’

‘No seats?’

She shrugged; it was impossible.

Knowing that Aeroflot would always throw a humble citizen off an aircraft to make way for a VIP or a tourist from the West, Talin showed her his ID.

She was impressed. Recognition flitted across her features. Nervously she patted her helmet of hair. ‘Even so it is impossible, Comrade Talin, because there is a delegation of geologists on the scheduled flight. There is no room.’

Fine, thought Talin who had no wish to travel on the scheduled flight. He sighed – and switched to guile. ‘I might just as well be trying to fly to Mongolia.’

She smiled, joining in the spirit of the thing. ‘Ah, there you would have no trouble. There are plenty of seats on the flight to Ulan Bator.’

Talin pounced. ‘Then book me on it.’

‘But—’

‘If I’m not mistaken Flight SU-563 to Ulan Bator stops at Omsk and Irkutsk. Book me to Irkutsk.’ From there it would be easy to pick up a connection to Khabarovsk.

She snatched his ID and disappeared. She returned with the manager who asked Talin why he was flying at such short notice. When Talin told him it was the wish of the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force the manager retreated swiftly leaving the blonde woman to cope.

With dimpled fingers she fed his requirements into the desk computer. When the answers came back she took his money and gave him a ticket.

So he was through their first line of defences. But he could still be stopped at the airport. Finding him gone, Sonya would be worried – he had been told to rest after the accident – and might contact Sedov. Sedov, knowing that he was due at Leninsk the following day, would contact Aeroflot. Hopefully, they would check departures for Khabarovsk from the domestic airport whereas he would be taking an international flight from Sheremetyevo. There could be trouble at Omsk and Irkutsk but he possessed deep reserves of guile and swagger.

It was 6 p.m. Three hours and twenty minutes until takeoff. He walked down Leningrad Highway and went into a clinical, neon-lit café. He sat down with a cup of steaming hot coffee to rest his aching body. ‘I don’t believe what Massey told me,’ he thought. ‘They can’t have deceived me for twenty years.’

Half an hour later he stopped a passing taxi and told the driver to take him to Sheremetyevo.

He didn’t report directly to the check-in desk; instead, shark-like, he circled the departure lounge with its marble columns and silver ceilings. It was said that you could always identify a KGB agent by his smart new shoes (Sedov being the exception) but there was no outstanding footwear among the fur-clad Mongols and Muscovite officials lining up for Flight SU-563.

Just before the deadline for check-in Talin presented his ticket. The dark-haired girl behind the counter raised an eyebrow. ‘Ulan Bator, Comrade Talin? It must be much the same as the moon,’ telling him that she had recognised him.

He was given a window seat on the Tupolev 154. The aircraft was only half full and the seat next to him was empty. The engines fired. The aircraft rolled forward, taxied to the end of the runway. The engines screamed, Talin stared through the window at the black and white film of the night flashing past; the body of the aircraft tilted, and he was on his way back to his childhood.

The village near Khabarovsk was a poor place. With its wooden cottages, fretworked eaves painted pink and blue, it was pretty enough when it was washed by rain, but more often than not it was grimed with coal-dust and in the winter it snowed grey snow.

But its grubbiness emphasised the beauty of its boundless surroundings, the taiga, where among the forests of birch, larch and pine shaggy tigers hunted spotted deer, beavers and wild sheep; where, from the melting perma frost, the pale people from the cities dug edible roots to keep them young; where from the River Amur on the border with China fishermen netted gasping sturgeon fat with roe.

Nicolay’s father worked at the mine as an overseer; so did his mother, sorting nuggets on the conveyor belts in between cooking meals in the izba they shared with another family next to the village well. In the summer food was plentiful, bloody meat from the taiga, berries, black bread and fish; in the winter the soup course lasted from November till April.

Being the only child of middle-aged parents, Nicolay was spoiled. At weekends he went hunting, trapping, horse-riding and fishing with his father who had black hair and black eyes and black crystals under the skin of his hands. In the evenings his mother, a plump, jolly woman who sang the sad songs of Siberia with great zeal, taught him to read and write so that when, at the age of seven, he attended Work Polytechnical School 14 in Khabarovsk he immediately impressed his teachers.

When he got home at night after a work-crammed day – he was an Octobrist at seven, a Young Pioneer at nine – he was exhausted. After a summer steak or a winter soup he tied himself in his sleeping bag in the room he shared with three other children and listened to his father and his friends uncorking the vodka bottle and their emotions around the coal-burning stove in the living room. As he retreated into sleep he sometimes heard anger rasping their rowdy good humour, heard oaths spilling from their lips.

Where, they demanded, was the equality they had been promised in the October Revolution? Where were the fruits of the Great Patriotic War that they had won? Was eight in one izba a decent way to live? And while they caroused and berated, while the coal spat and flared, it seemed to Nicolay that injustice also had something to do with a mother who sorted the good coal from the bad and had to make do with the bad.

Nicolay liked all these white-skinned, carbolic-smelling men save one named Konstantin. He was inward looking, always listening; Nicolay knew this because he rarely heard his voice, although none of the other men seemed to realise this, not when they were intent upon washing the coal-dust from their throats with vodka.

One late afternoon after the day shift had been hauled to the surface, his father didn’t return home. Nor did his friends call that night. Next morning, although his mother stayed at home, the cottage had an emptiness about it which at first Nicolay, on holiday from school, couldn’t identify; then he realised that it was her songs that were missing.

That evening Konstantin called. Nicolay and the other children were banished to the bedroom. He heard his mother crying. Then the sound of breaking glass. When he opened the door an inch he saw Konstantin, blood streaming from his cheek, facing his mother. On the floor was a broken vodka bottle. Then Konstantin was gone.

His mother told him that his father had gone to Khabarovsk to be trained in the use of new coal-cutting machines. When he returned three weeks later he was different, all the fun squeezed out of him. He told Nicolay that he had been promoted but he would have to go away for a while to another mine.

They went fishing that day in a hole cut in the ice on the Amur and they caught big fish with tails that snapped like whip-lashes and for a while, as the wind from the taiga polished his cheeks, the fun returned to his father. All the time two men stood in the background; miners going north with him, his father explained.

Outside the izba his father knelt and hugged him and said gruffly: ‘Look after your mother, Nicolay. Remember those fish we caught and the other times in the taiga.’ He didn’t follow Nicolay into the cottage and Nicolay never saw him again.

How can I have been so stupid all these years? Talin asked himself, waving away the stewardess with the plate of food.

Easy. At twelve you ask a lot of questions, you accept the answers and they lodge as facts. ‘Why have we moved to Novosibirsk?’ ‘Because it’s nearer to the mine where Papa’s working.’

A cobalt mine! Bastards.

‘When are we going to see Papa?’ ‘When he’s finished this new course…’

‘Passed on… What do you mean, passed on?’ ‘He became sick, a certain sort of sickness, it happens to a lot of miners…’

Radiation sickness, cobalt miners. Bastards.

But how – and why – had they persuaded his mother to suppress the truth about her husband’s death? Talin could hear their voices: ‘Your son’s bright, he has a great future, don’t blight his chances. Keep quiet and we’ll look after you both in Novosibirsk.’ When she was old they had given her an apartment back in Khabarovsk. ‘There’s no point in telling him the truth now. You don’t want to lose that comfortable home of yours, do you?’

Could the authorities really have predicted that I was destined for the stars when I was only thirteen? According to Sedov, yes: they could spot a winner at ten.

But none of this is true. I am flying to Khabarovsk to see my mother and she will tell me it’s all lies and then I shall go back to Leninsk, face the music and return to Dove.

‘I’m afraid,’ Oleg Sedov said, sitting beside him, ‘that I’m going to be that notorious travel pest, the talker.’

It was from Sonya Bragina that Robert Massey heard that Talin was missing. Not missing exactly, she said over the telephone, but not where he should be – in bed recovering from the accident.

Massey guessed immediately where Talin had gone and he wondered if the story Reynolds had supplied about his father had been wholly true. Or whether, having discovered that he had worked in a cobalt mine, CIA Dirty Tricks had improvised, inventing his crime and his punishment.

Surely not everyone who worked in a cobalt mine was a miscreant sentenced to slow death?

If Talin discovers the story is false then Reynolds’ spectacular is a flop. Talin will denounce me, the computer deception will grind to a halt and I will be sentenced to death.

In a cobalt mine?

‘How did you find me?’ Talin asked dully.

‘You were under surveillance,’ Sedov said. ‘For your own good.’

‘Did you think I might be kidnapped?’

‘You’re a valuable property.’ Sedov’s tone was light but his dark, Slav features were even tighter than usual; his eyes looked tired and he needed a shave. ‘I didn’t authorise the surveillance. The order came from the top.’

‘And you found out about it?’

‘Of course, cosmonauts are my business.’

‘And you took over?’

‘I wouldn’t dare to do that. But one of the failings of the KGB is that it’s so over-staffed that authority is confused. I merely told your surveillance team to keep in touch with me.’

‘Which doesn’t explain how you got on this plane.’

‘It wasn’t difficult. Your shadow at Sheremetyevo didn’t intend to board it anyway: he was merely going to tell headquarters to advise Omsk and Irkutsk.’

‘But he’ll report my departure.’

‘I told him not to hurry because I was going to be on the plane. There’s great scope for pulling rank in the KGB.’

‘And when he does report?’

Sedov shrugged. ‘I can handle that. Why shouldn’t we fly together? We go into orbit together.’

‘Why should we fly together to Khabarovsk when we’re both supposed to be at Leninsk tomorrow?’

Sedov said quietly: ‘I’m not flying to Khabarovsk,’ and added: ‘Nor are you.’

‘You can stop me, of course.’ Talin touched the sleeve of Sedov’s shabby jacket. ‘But I’m asking you, Oleg, not to; I can’t explain why.’

‘I know why.’

Then it was true! ‘How can you possibly know?’

‘Because there’s only one possible explanation – your father. Which is why I didn’t take the easy way and just stop you boarding the plane. I wanted time to talk to you alone. Peacefully, without a scene at the airport.’

Words shrivelled in Talin’s mouth. Sedov beckoned the hovering stewardess who knew that they both carried red passbooks and ordered a coffee and brandy. Talin asked for a vodka.

‘You should have told your wife,’ Sedov remarked.

‘She would have tried to stop me. Just as you’re going to. You can use physical force but there’s nothing you can say that will change anything.’

But there was. Sedov had brought with him a surprise. The Truth. It couldn’t be anything else, Talin decided as he listened.

It was true, Sedov confirmed, that Talin’s father had been convicted of embezzling State property, true that he had been sentenced to death, true that the sentence had been commuted to hard labour in a cobalt mine, the double-talk for slow death.

‘Listen to me, Nicolay,’ Sedov said. ‘Listen!’ Half command, half plea. ‘That was a long time ago. It was a terrible injustice, it can never be put right. Your father should be alive today…’

Remember those fish we caught and the other times in the taiga.

Talin’s eyes stung.

‘But things have got better since then. There is still injustice, true. Everywhere in the world there is injustice. But the Soviet people have never known such good times. For the first time in their history they have sufficient. That’s what the West doesn’t understand: for us sufficiency is a miracle.’

Talin was silent: he hadn’t expected a confession. The aircraft bucked in turbulence; they were over the Urals, the portals of Siberia.

The drinks brought by the stewardess had spilled on to her tray; she apologised. As she departed, swaying expertly with the turbulence, Sedov said: ‘And we have peace.’

‘Through force. Nasdarovya.’ Talin tossed back the vodka.

‘Through strength. Peace has never been won through weakness.’ Sedov was painstakingly carving out his words. ‘And you are one of the men who will project it into space. You’ll be in command of its flagship. Dove.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your sentiments,’ Talin said as the aircraft bucked again. ‘But I’m still flying to Khabarovsk.’

A new note of urgency entered Sedov’s voice. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the car crash was bad enough but Aerospace has accepted your explanation – black ice, a motorcyclist without lights… If they get the idea that you’re emotionally unbalanced then you can forget the launch. Fly to Khabarovsk and you’ll never see space again. In any case,’ voice softening, ‘you’d only upset your mother. Why don’t you leave it till you come back? Then fly out there with Sonya.’

He was right, of course. Sonya… Talin remembered the man in the fawn suit who kept materialising during their honeymoon.

Surveillance!

He said: ‘Tell me one thing, Oleg. Why the hell have you gone to all this trouble?’

‘I think you know. My wife and I should have had a son…’ Sedov stared through the window at the blackness outside. Then he said abruptly: ‘Anyway, I’ve told you the truth.’

Belatedly, the stewardess told them over the PA to fasten their safety belts because of the turbulence. As she spoke the aircraft dipped like a plunging elevator.

Sedov said: ‘Who told you about your father?’

Remembering that Massey had also told him the truth, Talin said: ‘I received a letter from Khabarovsk.’

The stewardess returned to the PA: ‘We are now beginning our descent to Omsk…’

Apparently satisfied by the explanation, Sedov said: ‘Which is where we shall spend the night with Andrei Dyomin, the retired cosmonaut we’ve always been intending to visit. Then we’ll take the early morning flight to Tashkent where there’s a connection to Leninsk.’

Talin said: ‘But I’ve got a ticket to Ulan Bator.’

‘Yet another computer error,’ Sedov said, taking another ticket from his pocket and handing it to Talin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In his mind Nicolay Vlasov had worked out a timetable.

Today, New Year’s Eve, party with the President; possible showdown with Tarkovsky.

1 Jan. Critical Vandenberg penetration.

2 Jan. Proof that penetration has been successful.

13 Jan. Definitive penetration.

14 Jan. Devastating proof that final penetration has succeeded.

The last two dates weren’t positive. But certainly the whole operation had to be concluded by 14 January because that was Tarkovsky’s new date for the Dove launching, brought forward to impress the President – old men admire speed. And what timing: the dramatic Soviet step into space synchronising with the destruction of all America’s cosmic ambitions.

Or put another way, Vlasov thought, drumming his fingers on his desk, I have fourteen days in which to avert a holocaust.

But several suspicions, the crosses he had to bear, were already grouping to threaten the too-neat timetable.

Firstly Massey.

The seduction. Vlasov pressed the start button on the tape recorder in his office.

‘Why did you come to the Soviet Union?’

‘Because of what they did to me.’

‘Who?’

‘The Company, the CIA.’

Vlasov speeded up the tape.

‘Who is the Ukranian, Robert?’

‘They shot me full of drugs, those bastards.’

Vlasov remembered the advice he had been given long ago: ‘Whatever form the interrogation takes concentrate on a truth divorced from the questions.’

Which was what Massey had been doing.

On the other hand what else could he say if he was genuine? If he didn’t know who the Ukrainian was? Careful, Vlasov, lest your suspicions wreck the whole operation.

The photographer was taking his pictures now. Routine – there might be a use for them some day. The KGB had the most comprehensive archives of pornography in the world.

Without emotion, Vlasov imagined the girl lowering herself on to Massey.

‘The truth is that I wanted to share.’

‘To share what, Robert? Quickly, I’m so excited.’

That was the trouble: she had been excited and she had finished the exercise too quickly. Peslyak had employed an amateur.

‘The stars.’

That sounded convincing too, tallied with what he had said during his initial interrogations. To all intents and purposes Massey was exonerated from any suspicion.

And yet everything he said was too pat. What, then, Nicolay Vlasov, is the point of these tests if you don’t accept them?

Massey had smashed the microphone in his lapel.

An accident. He couldn’t have known it was there because the drug they had used obliterates aural reception.

Unless Massey had been trained to take anti-surveillance action after a compromise.

Impatiently, Vlasov pressed the STOP button. He was fast becoming paranoiac.

The Rybak lead had evaporated, as of course it would have done if Massey was genuine. Which he is!

But what about the meeting between Massey and the Estonian named Nosenko over the chess board in Gorky Park?

Vlasov slotted another tape into the recorder. It began with a scream.

Then a reassuring voice: ‘Sorry, comrade, we were a little hasty. We won’t switch on the current again if you tell us the truth.’

‘What truth? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘What was the message for Massey?’

‘Massey? Who’s Massey?’

‘Who won the game of chess?’

‘I did—’

‘Wasn’t Massey any good?’

‘He was lousy but what—’

‘So you do know his name was Massey?’

‘I don’t know anything. I just played a game of chess with a stranger like anyone does in Gorky Park.’

‘With a foreigner?’

‘Why not?’

Scream.

‘Don’t get smart, Nosenko, if these electrodes get overheated they’ll burn your balls off.’

Another voice: ‘Was the message from the Ukrainian?’

‘What fucking Ukrainian?’

‘You know what fucking Ukrainian – Rybak.’

‘Massey, Rybak… I don’t know any… No, please, no…’

The scream was louder this time. Vlasov turned down the volume control.

‘Now, Nosenko, what was the message?’

The first voice: ‘Hold it, Mikhail, I think we lost him.’

‘Shit.’

Bunglers! Vlasov stopped the tape. They should have checked his heart before applying the electrodes. More ammunition to be fired in Peslyak’s direction.

Quite possibly there hadn’t been anything Nosenko could have told them anyway. Why, then, had Massey lost his tail the following day?

It could have been coincidence, of course – there was mist around that day. And Massey had only been lost for eight minutes. Long enough!

You’ve got to stop this, Vlasov, before they cart you off to a psychiatric clinic. Outside the sun was setting coldly over the white rooftops in plumes of pigeon-grey and pink.

Vlasov pressed the intercom and told his secretary to fetch his hat and coat and tell his driver to bring the Zil to the main entrance.

One last suspicion presented itself unsolicited to Vlasov before he left his office. The last contact with Vandenberg had been aborted because Vogel was allegedly sick. Was his indisposition genuine? Or am I being set up for the biggest intelligence double-cross since ULTRA?

He picked up his hat, straightened his back. To hell with it, he was going to a party.

Frosted snow crunched beneath the wheels of the Zil taking Vlasov and his wife to the President’s weekend dacha near Zhukovka. Moonlight added coldness to the night, icing fields of snow, isolating the black pine forest.

Unlike so many Russians, Vlasov didn’t like winter. Like Stalin he was a scheming Georgian and he loved the sun in which to hatch his plots.

Why Intourist couldn’t promote the Soviet summer he couldn’t imagine. July in Moscow with the river beaches packed, kvas vans in the streets, the scent of carnations (from Georgia) heavy on the air, parks full of families unfurled in the sun…

Guards peering into the Zil cut short summer. The driver showed his papers, the militiamen leaped back.

The Zil coasted down the driveway, past relays of guards and electronic warnings, to the presidential dacha, a magnificent anachronism, like a Loire château, with spires and balconies and terraces, its room lit tonight with a festive glow.

In the baronial living room, its walls lined with split pine from Canada, maids circulated among the guests with trays of drinks and zakuski. Like all Russian rooms in the winter it was sweating hot, the area around the log fire like a sauna.

Vlasov’s wife, regal and distant, immediately joined the Politburo wives sipping sweet champagne and, between gossip, monitoring the alcohol intake of their husbands. One vodka too many, one indiscretion, and they might be transferred to a hydro-electric power station in Khatanga. Except, Vlasov reflected, that these days disgrace would probably be confined to the circle of power: old men had to stick together.

Vlasov, aware that, with his portfolio of secret lives, he was the least popular guest in the dacha, joined the foreign minister.

The President, oblivious to the heat, was standing in front of the fire talking to Tarkovsky who was trying to ignore the sweat trickling down his old, warrior face. The President, Vlasov thought, looked magnificent; his bulkiness exuding resolution, heavy features brooding – an old predator in his lair.

The President beckoned him over. ‘I want to have a talk with you and Grigori. We will adjourn to my study.’

Over their glasses other members of the Politburo and their wives observed their departure. A council of war on New Year’s Eve?

Vlasov recalled his timetable… possible showdown with Tarkovsky.

The President poured them vodka, in deference to the New Year and Narzan and stationed himself in front of another log fire. Now that he was in his den rather than his lair, surrounded by books and trophies and photographs of himself with heads of State including a clutch of American presidents, he looked benign. A deception!

He raised his glass, drank the vodka in one gulp and quenched its flames with Narzan. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we are at the beginning of a new year, a fateful one I suspect. We have managed to achieve a measure of arms control on earth but, as Grigori is fond of pointing out, the battleground has shifted to the heavens.’

He replenished their glasses. ‘I am sorry, gentlemen, to strike this sombre note at a time of celebration but we have to agree how we are going to continue this campaign. None of us knows how much time we have left…’

When Tarkovsky began to speak the President held up a hand to silence him.

He hadn’t, he said, been entirely truthful with either of them. Tarkovsky had come up with proposals to maintain Soviet dominance, but then so had Vlasov; and neither had been told about the other’s schemes.

‘It’s quite probable that you, Grigori, still know nothing about Nicolay’s machinations. But I’ll wager that you, Nicolay, have discovered everything there is to know about Tarkovsky’s…’

The statement posed the question and, with a flicker of a smile, Vlasov admitted: ‘I know all about what he intends to do with the Dove shuttles. Finding out about such things is my business.’

Before Tarkovsky could round on Vlasov the President said: ‘Which seems to indicate, Grigori, that you haven’t been entirely truthful with me. Nicolay certainly didn’t get the information from you – or from me for that matter – so he must have obtained it from… Would accomplices be too strong a word?’

Tarkovksy said: ‘Only a few trusted comrades…’

Briskly, the President said: ‘It’s immaterial now. The point is, time is running out and I have decided that very shortly either one plan or the other will have to be adopted. But it’s only fair that you, Grigori, should know what Nicolay has been doing.’ Turning to Vlasov, he said: ‘Tell him.’

Shrugging, Vlasov recounted progress in the computer operation.

‘So,’ the President said to Tarkovsky, ‘what do you think about these tactics?’

‘I don’t consider that such hare-brained intrigues come into the category of tactics. I should have thought the chairman of the most comprehensive secret police force in the world would have been a little less naϊve.’

By accusing Vlasov of naϊvety Tarkovsky was implicating the President. Vlasov decided to let him have his head.

Beneath his thick eyebrows the President’s dark eyes appraised the Minister of Defence. ‘Vlasov’s tactics seem to have worked so far.’

‘So far, perhaps. But has it occurred to either of you that he’s being double-crossed?’

Vlasov said patiently: ‘It was the first thing that occurred to me. Which is the reason why I have insisted on a series of dummy runs. But, in any case, can you give me one good reason why the United States would go to all this trouble?’

The President, one hand inside his jacket in the Napoleonic posture he had adopted since the implant of the pacemaker, said: ‘If Nicolay can’t think of a reason then I’m sure neither of us can.’

‘Perhaps,’ Tarkovsky said gruffly, ‘all will become apparent all too soon.’

The President drank some Narzan. ‘Perhaps. Meanwhile I have to decide which option to recommend to the Politburo. You, Grigori, hope to achieve Soviet supremacy in space through aggression. No disrespect – you are first and foremost a soldier. You, Nicolay, hope to achieve it through cunning. No disrespect – you are first and foremost a conspirator. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise to either of you that I prefer Nicolay’s strategy. Total victory without a shot, missile or beam weapon being fired.’

‘Or total defeat,’ Tarkovsky commented. ‘Isn’t it about time that this man Massey, this renegade American,’ his tone expressing his contempt for deserters, ‘penetrated the United States defence system a little deeper?’

With a nonchalance that he didn’t entirely feel, Vlasov said: ‘Tomorrow, Grigori.’

‘And what are you going to abort this time, a German V2?’

‘No,’ Vlasov replied silkily, ‘I’m going to destroy an American spy satellite.’

The President prodded a thick forefinger at the two of them. ‘Don’t interrupt. I was about to say that what Grigori proposes could be the beginning of the end of the world. But if the Massey connection fails then we have no alternative. We are at the beginning of a new year which will see either one super-power or the other emerge, through space, as the undisputed rulers of civilisation. I don’t have to tell you that the super-power in question has to be the Soviet Union. And to make sure that it is we have to act quickly.’ He turned and stared into the fire.

Looking past him Vlasov saw caverns of fire, towns ablaze. The logs shifted, igniting fresh flames.

The President turned again. Pointing at Vlasov, he said: ‘You, Nicolay, must prove by the second week of January that you have penetrated the United States military programme in space to the extent that it can be paralysed. If not—’

‘We implement Tarkovsky’s plan?’

‘We assemble it,’ the President said. ‘Not launch it. It would only be implemented if we discovered that the United States was about to take a decisive military initiative.’

‘You mean attack?’

Tarkovsky said with elaborate patience: ‘It would be up to my advisers to decide what constitutes military initiative.’

‘But they would be guided by you,’ Vlasov said.

Guided, by an old man seeking glory before death, to a holocaust.

The President tossed back the last of his vodka and put down his glass with finality. To Vlasov he said: ‘It’s up to you, Nicolay, to pre-empt such action,’ and to Tarkovsky: ‘If he fails then the heavens are yours.’

As they walked towards the door Tarkovsky said to Vlasov: ‘Are you quite sure you fully understand what I’ve proposed to the President?’

‘Quite sure,’ Vlasov replied. ‘With the fleet of Dove shuttles you intend to build a series of platforms in space equipped with the latest beam weapons that can destroy every western satellite in orbit.’

‘That’s not—’

‘Furthermore, you intend to use the Doves themselves to launch nuclear attacks on the United States, a course of action that would almost certainly lead to total nuclear war and the destruction of the world as we know it today. Happy New Year, Grigori.’

At what stage in adventurism did you judge a military leader to be crazy?

Was Napoleon crazy when he decided to invade Russia?

Was Hitler crazy when he decided to do the same?

Was Grigori Tarkovsky crazy when he considered arming Dove shuttles with orthodox hydrogen bombs to destroy the United States’ military space centres?

Vlasov sank deep into the leather cushions of the Zil taking him home with his wife to Kutuzovsky Prospect. And stared without seeing at the moonlit countryside merging with the suburbs of Moscow. Instead he saw the latest medical report on Tarkovsky supplied by the Kremlin Clinic. (The medical histories of all Kremlin VIPs eventually reached Vlasov.) According to the report the combination of circulatory weakness and pressure from the steel plate in his cranium were combining to produce symptoms of schizophrenia.

Which didn’t necessarily mean he was crazy. Many august leaders thoughout history had been schizophrenic, meaning that they suffered occasional disconnections between thoughts, feelings and actions. On the other hand schizophrenia wasn’t a certificate of total sanity.

Two factors decided Vlasov against taking steps to have Tarkovsky removed from office: the old men would rally round him (who wasn’t having circulatory difficulties?); his scheme, although it was cataclysmically dangerous, was so bold that it just might work.

Its strength was the military tactician’s oldest weapon – surprise. The early warning system of the West was geared to detect and destroy missiles fired in anger NOT shuttle spacecraft peacefully orbiting the globe.

Certainly the West would be aware of them and would be monitoring them, enviously but indulgently, from the NORAD headquarters deep inside Cheyenne Mountain at Colorado Springs and from NASA’s Goddard Center at Greenbelt, Maryland.

Even as the first Dove plunged earthwards off course there would be no undue alarm. The first H-bomb would be launched with pin-point precision on Vandenberg which would be destroyed and with it the United States ground-based military initiative in space.

Pearl Harbor 1984.

In many ways its concept was not dissimilar to the Orbital Bombardment System when a missile in orbit was slowed down with retro-rockets so that it fell on a selected target. But that had been negated first by the Americans’ OTHR warning system, then by the AN/FPS-85.

But no system could anticipate a Dove (Hawk?) being used as an instrument of annihilation.

After discharging its H-bomb the Dove would fire its new subsidiary engines and return to orbit. A sitting target? By then the space stations assembled by Dove crews would be fully operational gunships equipped with beam weapons which could pick off any hostile US hardware at their leisure.

While the US reeled under this blow other Doves would bomb Wallops Flight Center, and possibly – it all depended on the pressure of the steel plate in Tarkovsky’s skull – the Johnson Space Center at Houston and Kennedy at Cape Canaveral. These second-wave Doves might have to be sacrificed, but they would be a means to an end. An eminently worthwhile end in Tarkovsky’s view. From space the Soviet Union would rule the tiny globe and its pygmy people.

Vlasov’s wife said: ‘Soon we won’t speak at all. Perhaps we should learn sign language. Do you realise we are one hour into 1984?’

‘Orwell’s year,’ Vlasov said absently. He patted her hand.

Theoretically, Tarkovsky was right. Astonishingly, earth-based nuclear missiles would soon be obsolete, their teeth drawn by the balance of power, the fear of reprisal. With the perfection of laser and particle-beam weapons, missiles would soon be conventional weapons. They could, of course, still inflict appalling destruction; but the chances were that they would be detected and destroyed from space.

No, Tarkovsky’s thinking was logical as far as it went: to rule you had to pre-emptively strike in space – no spatial arms races, no interminable disarmament talks, no balance of power. But did his thinking go far enough? In Vlasov’s opinion the answer was a resounding NO. It was flawed logic that appealed to old and inflexible minds.

As the Zil swung into Kutuzovsky, Vlasov listed in his mind the arguments against Tarkovsky’s conclusions:

(1) In 1980 GRU had estimated that the US was five years behind the USSR in the development of high energy lasers, charged particle and neutral particle beam weapons. Well, it was now 1984 and the Americans could have over-taken Russia. Which led to:

(2) The conquest of space would not necessarily be the débâcle envisaged by Tarkovsky. US gunships in orbit might well have the capacity with their own speed-of-light weapons to atomise the Soviet space stations. Which would lead to:

(3) War in space which would inevitably rebound on to the globe with horrendous results.

(4) Tarkovsky’s calculations were based on the assumption that America’s military space programme on earth was concentrated in certain areas, notably Vandenberg. Like the old soldier he was, Tarkovsky should have considered alternative options. Such as:

(5) The San Marco off-shore launching pads close to the Kenyan coast; Japan’s island space centre at Tanegashima; and submarines equipped with long-range beam weapons. From Japan Vlasov’s thoughts switched to:

(6) CHINA, possibly the biggest flaw in Tarkovsky’s scheme of things – the menace which Western disarmament negotiators tended to forget when they accused the Soviet Union of hoarding excessive stocks of missiles. Russia was vulnerable from attack from the West and East. Which explains our persecution complex, Vlasov thought.

And it was perfectly feasible that, while the USSR was engaged in conflict with the West in space, China would attack from the East. You certainly couldn’t dismiss the existence of their space centre at Shuang-Cheng-Tzu, a thousand miles west of Peking: the Chinese had launched satellites from there – and IRBMs which they had fired into a site at Lop Nor 500 miles away.

To sum up, Vlasov told himself, Tarkovsky’s idea is plausible but reckless to the point where it endangers Mankind. Therefore, anticipating the possibility of my own failure, it must be sabotaged.

But how? It came to Vlasov as the Zil pulled up outside the block in Kutuzovsky. It was the most awesome decision he had ever taken.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

New Year’s Day.

At 10.55 a.m. Sergei Yashin, getting hungrier and thinner by the hour as his worries proliferated, sat down at the computer terminal at Tyuratam.

Behind him stood Vlasov, Moroz, Peslyak and Massey.

Today Yashin’s hunger was a slavering animal. Here he was, a man who saw the computer as the agent of peace and plenty, using it as a weapon of war.

If this penetration succeeded then an American satellite would be destroyed in space and worse would follow.

At 11 p.m. contact was made.

At 11.06 Yashin was dismissed. He went straight to the canteen.

At Vandenberg, Daniel S. Vogel also worried.

Not that the Soviet INPUT operation wouldn’t succeed – nothing could stop it – but that one day it would happen for real and the Pentagon wouldn’t know a damn thing about it until it was too late.

Partnered by the crew-cut Carl Wonner who, as usual, said very little, Vogel was monitoring the INPUT which was much as they had expected it would be.

As he stood among the consoles, screens and tapes, Vogel furtively took his pulse. To achieve this he stood with his hands loosely clasped, forefinger of the right hand on the left wrist.

Slow and faint.

Ever since, as a delaying tactic, he had transmitted to the Russians the coded message that he was sick Vogel had felt sick. Nothing specific but today he sensed that his blood pressure was low rather than high.

He caught Wonner looking at him. Guiltily, he moved his finger away from his wrist.

When the operation was over Vogel drove quickly home and went straight to the bathroom; but the do-it-yourself blood pressure apparatus was missing.

When confronted with this his wife said calmly: ‘I know, I threw it away; it was driving both of us crazy.’

He took his pulse again; it was racing.

Carl Wonner also had problems but they were of a vastly different nature.

Because he had been born with inequality – a brain that planned incredible feats of sporting prowess and a body that couldn’t obey it – he believed fanatically, but privately, in equality.

The man seated beside him at the basketball game in his home city, Louisville, Kentucky, between the Kentucky Colonels and the Indiana Pacers had talked about equality.

The Colonels were leading because their giant centre kept scoring from impossible distances. ‘It isn’t fair, is it,’ he said, ‘that one guy should be born with so much going for him.’

Wonner glanced at the man beside him. He wasn’t so deprived; squarely built and solid but, Wonner guessed, clumsy. He had sandy hair and a foreign accent.

After the game, which the Colonels won, the two of them went for a beer. By a lucky chance the man, whose name was Alex Melnik, worked in Los Angeles for IBM and they became friends – a rare relationship for Wonner – because, as Melnik put it, they were both ‘athletes posing as spectators.’

After they had watched a game – football, baseball, basketball or whatever – they went back to Melnik’s apartment where, as often as not after a few drinks, the conversation extended to inequality in general, particularly in the global context.

But it was three months before Melnik suggested sex. And another week until Wonner agreed.

Six months to the day after their first meeting, Melnik suggested that Wonner might like to do something practical about their debates on global equality by helping to ensure that the super-powers enjoyed parity in space.

How? Why, pass over to the Soviet Union some of the US military space secrets, of course, because America was demonstrably ahead in its shuttle orbits, the key to the future.

Wonner realised immediately that this was so much shit; nevertheless he enjoyed the feeling of power he suddenly possessed, not to mention his relationship with Alex Melnik.

Perhaps one day, he reasoned with himself, he could do something that would really establish the balance of power in space instead of tilting it in favour of the Soviets.

None of which solved the immediate problem facing him as, after the last Tyuratam-Vandenberg link-up, he drove towards Los Angeles where he was supposed to meet Melnik at a bowling match.

He solved this problem by taking the Santa Barbara exit. It was, he realised, the most temporary of solutions. After being stood up Melnik would be after him with pleas, threats and blackmail.

Oddly, Wonner rather enjoyed anticipating such perils.

And anticipating the way in which he would deal with them.

In the light of the information received on the afternoon of 1 January from the American Embassy in Moscow the President of the United States introduced two members of his cabinet – the Secretary of State and the Defense Secretary – and the National Security Adviser into the Talin Conspiracy.

They met, with George Reynolds, at 6 p.m. in the Situation Room, the command post sunk beneath the West Wing of the White House. It was in this sombre, secret and economically-furnished chamber that, daily, a picture of global and spatial developments was composed.

The composition was made up from thousands of fragments. Photographs from spy satellites, electronic pulses from radar stations, observations from SR-71 Black Bird surveillance aircraft, digests from the world’s media, reports from embassies, consulates, intelligence agencies, spies…

As an aide had once vulgarly put it: ‘If a sparrow farted in Outer Mongolia its echo would reach the Situation Room.’

Earlier that day, long before the President had decided to spread the responsibility for Talin, the Situation Room had been electrified by another item of intelligence – blown-up surveillance photographs showing the deployment of CPBs, charged particle weapons, in the Soviet Union. It had been known that the Russians had built a CPB generator at Saryshagan on the Chinese border: it had not been known that they were in a position to deploy the generator’s products, far more deadly than lasers.

This disturbing information had been included in the black leather file containing the briefing that was presented to the President in the Oval Office at 9 a.m. every working day. Within fifteen minutes he had digested its contents.

The subsequent meeting in the Oval Office that morning had been dominated by the overnight appearance of the CPBs.

President: How far behind are we, Bill?

Defense Secretary William Fryberg: Not too far, Mr President.

President: How far’s not too far?

Defense Secretary (with shrug): Maybe six months. We’ve made good progress at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Liver-more labs recently. We may be behind now but when we produce the goods we should go ahead. You know, the Soviets always like to produce in haste and repent in leisure.

President: You should have been a lawyer, Bill. Maybe you’ll make Attorney-General yet. (Consulting chart showing deployment of CPBs.) Any idea where they’re aimed?

Defense Secretary: At us, I guess! And the Chinese, of course. And into space. As you can see they’ve moved them into their space centres. Into Tyuratam for instance.

President: Could they have shifted them into space itself?

Defense Secretary: Could be. They’ve sure as hell got lasers on their killersats. But, as you know Mr President, CPBs are way ahead of lasers: they don’t just melt a target’s armour, they sock right through it at the speed of light.

President: It makes neutron bombs seem like kids’ stuff.

But all that had been before the coded message marked URGENT from the US Embassy in Moscow that had prompted the five man emergency meeting in the Situation Room. It was brief and to the point:

Russia’s Dove shuttles are to be used to assemble an armada of gunships equipped with lasers and CPBs.

And if that wasn’t enough:

The Doves themselves are to be armed with conventional hydrogen bombs to be dropped on selected targets in the event of hostile action by the United States.

The source?

An informant.

At one minute past six the President began to address his four confidants – the Secretary of State, Joseph Craig, a bristling sixty-year-old former Army general; Defense Secretary Fryberg, slim and canny with his head cocked like a listening bird; Henry Fallon, the National Security Adviser, archetypal Washington, crisp but cautious; and Reynolds.

The President was backed by a chart showing the deployment of all known satellites orbiting the earth. The table at which the five men sat was flanked by steel filing cabinets. Security was maximum.

The three newcomers to the conspiracy had a ruffled, why-weren’t-we-consulted-earlier air about them; they directed their hostility towards Reynolds who fielded it adeptly – he had been in the field a long time.

The President, Reynolds thought, looked as crisp in a mature way as Fallon. White shirt with button-down collar, striped tie, dark suit, brown hair. Seventy-two, knocking on seventy-three… Jesus!

The President said: ‘I won’t attempt to conceal the fact that this was originally a two-man operation.’ Three sets of eyes focused on Reynolds. ‘Or that you have only been enrolled because of today’s developments.’

Craig began: ‘But why—’

‘Let me finish, Joe.’

Fryberg, Reynolds knew, was too canny to interrupt; where Fryberg led Fallon followed.

‘As George knows,’ the President went on, ‘this was to have been a spectacular aimed at upstaging the Soviets with the bonus that this man Talin would bring us a whole bundle of space secrets. But today the implications have become far graver and, at the same time, far more exciting.’

He glanced at his gold wristwatch; Reynolds knew why.

The President drank some water and continued: ‘We have today received conclusive proof that the Soviets have deployed CPBs. We have therefore got to speed up our own particle beam projects at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.’

‘Project White Horse,’ Fryberg murmured.

‘And then we’ve got to persuade the world that we, as well as the Soviets, have to deploy them as a deterrent,’ emphasising the familiar last three words.

‘A whole lot of people,’ Craig said, ‘were unimpressed in 1981 when we tried to justify the deployment of Pershing II missiles by publicising the deployment of the Soviet SS-20s.’

The President swept on: ‘We have also received information from an unknown source that the Soviets plan to build gunships disguised as space stations in orbit.’

He paused and drank more water.

Fallon took the opportunity to point out: ‘There’s nothing new about that, Mr President. As you know, the Russians have been experimenting with laser weapons firing bullets of light from space stations for years.’

‘So have we,’ Fryberg observed. ‘Not to mention battle stations armed with anti-ballistic missile systems more than 1,000 miles high in orbit. What’s more we’d be goddam self-righteous if we took them to task for launching killer-satellites.’

The President said to Fallon: ‘They have been experimenting with laser-armed space stations. Now they’ve got them. And they’re not armed with lasers they’re armed with CPBs. And they’re going to build a whole armada of them to win the Battle of Space before we’ve got off the ground.’ He paused. ‘But we’ll beat the bastards yet.’

The spectacular, Reynolds reflected, had come a long way since last summer when the President had suggested a preelection coup.

Said the President: ‘If Talin brings down the Dove in America complete with equipment designed to release hydrogen bombs then, gentlemen, we have all the proof we need that we must perfect and deploy death rays.’

Reynolds spoke for the first time. ‘Supposing,’ he said, ‘that the Dove piloted by Talin is actually loaded with an H bomb?’

Fallon said patronisingly: ‘Even if it was carrying the bomb it wouldn’t be primed.’

Craig said: ‘What worries me—’

‘Will have to wait,’ the President interrupted, consulting his wristwatch again. ‘In four minutes’ time we shall know if we have succeeded in maintaining Robert Massey’s plausibility. In other words we shall know if we’ve successfully followed the Soviet instructions on zapping a satellite out of the heavens.’

A shadow of a smile passed between the President and Reynolds. It said: How’s that for shutting them up?

The President’s hand reached for the telephone receiver linking him on a direct line to NORAD.

Apparently the Russians didn’t know a lot about US killer satellites because, instead of instructing a killersat to destroy an item of American spatial hardware, they had given the job to a jet fighter.

No ordinary jet it was true. A McDonnell Douglas F-15, in fact, armed with a two-stage rocket which was itself armed with a Vought impact head.

The weapon, known as a hot-metal kill, was guided to its target by radar and heat seekers; it had so far blasted five exhausted scientific satellites out of orbit.

Today, instructed by Vandenberg computers penetrated by the Russians, the F-15 was intent on zapping Elint 23, an electronic spy satellite designed to record radiation from military manoeuvres.

At 1811 hours, as the two-stage rocket fired by the F-15 sped towards it, Elint 23 was one of 3,483 satellites in space. (Happily for US finances it was also worn out.) All of them tracked by telescopic cameras and radars strung around the globe.

1812 hours. Rockets on target.

At that moment Elint 23, small and exhausted, wasn’t high on the priorities of the majority of duty space scanners and its disappearance would attract minimal attention except at a Soviet tracking station in Camagüey, the east coast province of Cuba, and an American observation post at Elgin Air Force Base, Florida.

1813. The telephone in the hand of the American President trembled a little; as did the telephone in the hand of the Soviet President seated in a chamber beneath the Kremlin not unlike the Situation Room beneath the White House.

1814. Still on target.

1815. A fraction of a second passed…

Zap.

There were now 3,482 satellites in space.

1816. The United States President spoke into the phone, cradled it and, smiling, said: ‘Gentlemen, we’re still in with a chance.’ The Soviet President replaced his receiver and said: ‘Congratulations, Comrade Vlasov. You now have twelve days in which to bring the United States of America to its knees.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The skates sung.

Swish, swish, they went, as, with Sonya at his side, Talin skated round the frozen lake ten miles from Leninsk. Songs that his mother used to sing to him resurfaced. He tasted summer berries, smelled the glowing metal of the stove. ‘Remember those fish we caught and the other times in the taiga.’

Hands clasped behind his back, he skated away from Sonya, accelerating with lunging rhythms, the cold air polishing his cheeks.

He completed a circuit, weaving between skating families, and returned to Sonya with a flourish. On skates, wearing a pale blue ski suit and white boots, she lost none of her grace.

He took her hand and they skated together. Both in blue, they looked, Talin thought, as though they had skated together from childhood.

‘You left me again’ Sonya said.

‘I used to speed skate at university.’

‘I saw you skate away and I thought, one day he’ll leave me for ever.’

He squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘You won’t ever leave me again, will you, Nicolay?’

‘Only—’

‘I don’t mean in Dove. I mean in your spirit.’

‘You know why I flew away from Moscow.’

‘You should have told me. I would have understood.’

Would you?

‘I left a note,’ he said. ‘I was upset.’

‘But we’re husband and wife. We should have been able to discuss it. You discussed it with Sedov.’

‘Only because he followed me. And we have discussed it since.’

‘And I told you that the past was filled with terrible injustices like that. But not any more.’

Not inside the Bolshoi.

In front of them a plump woman with a woollen scarf round her face fell sprawling on the ice. Yelling with laughter, she was pulled to her feet by a husband half her size.

The sun had burned away the morning mist and polished the ice; the low hills and snow-mantled pine forest unfolded in its rays.

Talin began to skate faster, pulling Sonya along with him. ‘You mean there is no injustice any longer?’

‘I don’t mean that; of course I don’t mean that. What I mean is that we don’t live under a tyranny any more.’

‘We certainly don’t have total freedom.’

‘I do, you do…’

With the implication that it was in the interests of the masses not to enjoy such liberty. Ironic how such thinking so closely resembled the philosophy of the rulers overthrown by the bolsheviks.

‘…You could have got into terrible trouble. They might have stopped you from flying Dove.’

‘I was saved by Sedov.’

‘Sedov! Always Sedov. I would have stopped you from going. Comforted you…’

Because it was such a beautiful day he compromised. He said: ‘I should have told you,’ and saw her smile and blink and heard her say: ‘Nicolay, if you’re ever troubled again—’ and interrupted her: ‘Then I’ll come to you.’

Letting go of her hand he said: ‘Now let’s see you dance on skates.’

And off she went circling, speeding, spinning until she stopped in front of him with a curtsey.

He kissed her and she said: ‘And now a surprise.’ Standing back to watch his reactions, she said: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not pregnant. Nothing like that.’

‘Why should I worry?’

‘I’m going to dance in Moscow on January the fourteenth, the day you fly into space. The Red Dove. Isn’t that marvellous?’

Talin said it was.

‘So in a way we’ll be together. And while I’m dancing, I sha’n’t worry.’

‘You will the rest of the time?’

‘Of course.’

‘No need,’ he said, stretching out his arms. ‘They’ll take good care of Dove and me, we’re valuable properties.’

He held her close and looked at her upturned face and knew that he would never forget the conflict of joy and worry he saw there.

It is often assumed that the Church in Russia is virtually defunct. In fact the Russian Orthodox Church boasts fifty million members (more than the Communist Party in the Soviet Union) and is one of the world’s largest religious communities.

Where it differs from other such communities is that it is firmly controlled by the Communists. Its clerics are screened by the Party, its worshippers monitored. Joyously, despite such restrictions, it seems to be on the ascent.

One small outpost of Christianity in Russia is an old church a mile from the railroad station at Leninsk. It is stone-built, small and sturdy, and wears its blue dome with cheerful assurance.

Cosiness, Massey thought as he approached it through the bleak dusk, was the first attribute that came to mind. Mellow light shone from within luring you from the bitter wind driving powdered snow along the street. You smelled burning tallow and incense even before you reached its portals.

Inside a few worshippers, mostly old women with autumn-leaf faces, knelt in prayer. Candles spluttered, lighting icons on the walls.

Rybak knelt in a pew at the rear. Massey knelt beside him. In their bulky winter clothes the two of them occupied four places, the Ukrainian two and a half.

Massey greeted him but, head bowed, hands clasped together, Rybak ignored him and Massey realised that he really was praying. Surprising himself, Massey joined him.

Finally, Rybak said: ‘Well?’

Massey said: ‘The date of the launch is unchanged, January the fourteenth, in one week’s time. We mustn’t meet again, we might blow the whole thing.’

Rybak said: ‘I agree. But we’re safe enough here. The KGB only mounts surveillance during services.’

A tall man wearing a cheap shapka, long grey coat and felt boots came into the church, peered around, then left.

‘KGB?’

Rybak shook his head. ‘A thief. Probably thought we were KGB.’

Massey said: ‘So tell them to assume the defection is on and take all the necessary steps.’

Rybak slid one hand inside his black parka. ‘I bring gifts,’ he said, handing Massey a gun and a grenade. ‘By the way, did you lose your tail again?’

‘In a street lavatory, I’m becoming an old hand.’ Massey slipped the weapons into his coat pocket. ‘Have you got any bullets for the gun?’

Rybak pressed two packets into his hand. ‘A useful automatic,’ he said. ‘A TT 1933. Basic but lethally accurate. The grenade’s an old fragmentation F1. It will blow a man into little pieces. An enemy or yourself if you don’t want to fall into the hands of the KGB. And now the Good Book,’ he said, handing Massey a Bible.

A heavily bearded priest walked past them. He smiled at them. Two new members of his flock.

‘What’s this for?’ Massey asked. ‘Last rites?’ He fingered the soft leather and vellum pages.

Rybak said: ‘Inside it you will find the necessary papers for Talin to read. You will also find documents for yourself – red passbook, etcetera, exit visa, rail ticket to Nakhodka – most of the journey will be on the Trans-Siberian – a boat ticket to Japan which is the ultimate terminal for most travellers on the Trans-Siberian, and a fortune in roubles.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to try and escape westwards?’

‘Perhaps,’ the Ukrainian said. ‘But I figured the KGB would expect you to make contact with your people in Moscow. Either way your chances of escaping are about 80/20 – in the KGB’s favour. What you must do,’ he said producing another small package, ‘is shave off your moustache and hair. The best disguise is always the one you remove, not the one you adopt.’

‘Identity?’

‘A nice touch,’ Rybak said. ‘Your new name is – wait for it – Vlasov.’

‘Nicolay?’

‘Mikhail.’ He handed Massey the package. ‘This is for Talin. A way of dealing with awkward fellow cosmonauts in the Dove who don’t want to defect. It was dreamed up by your Mr Reynolds who, by all accounts, would cut his own throat for President and Country. Reynolds versus Vlasov… Who would you back?’

‘This package, what’s in it?’

Rybak told him, adding: ‘There are also decoded messages among the papers you’re going to show Talin that will help your cause.’ He told Massey about the information that had reached the US Embassy in Moscow relating to the H Bomb and the function of the space stations. ‘Dynamite, eh? Even better than the stuff you were going to show him.’

Massey shivered. ‘Terrifying,’ he said. He paused. ‘And what about you? Will you be around?’

‘God willing. The KGB checked me out at the banya in Moscow but they didn’t get the name I operate under.’

‘You’re not known as Rybak?’

‘Yangel. One of the best aeronautical engineers in the business. Which is how I got myself work at Leninsk airport.’

‘And Tyuratam itself?’

‘I’m working on it. They’ve got some electrical faults on a Proton booster. I met the chief engineer on the project in the Cosmonaut Hotel and almost persuaded him that I could fix it.’

‘I figure you could fix anything,’ Massey told him.

‘One last thing – a message from Washington. Tell Talin to make his move as soon as possible after the launch.’ He gripped Massey’s arm. ‘That’s it. May God be with you.’

And he means it, Massey thought as he watched Rybak stride out of the church, flames of the candles flickering in his wake.

Talin had sold the wreck of his red Moskvich – anything could be repaired in Moscow – and bought a new cobalt-blue Lada 1600 in Leninsk.

Today, Sunday, six days before the launch, he drove Massey back into the city after an intensive day’s work at Tyuratam. Only later did it occur to him that Massey must have manoeuvred him into offering him a lift.

Massey had also inquired when he had bought the car and, when he had replied: ‘Yesterday, why?’ had followed that up with: ‘Has anyone had any opportunity to plant bugs in it since?’ and had relaxed a little when he had replied: ‘No, I parked it beside Dove out on the pad today and last night it was locked up in my garage.’

Now as he drove through the darkness along the almost deserted highway to Leninsk he realised why Massey had been so worried about microphones. Oddly nothing that Massey was saying really surprised him; perhaps he had always known about him.

‘…I told you was true except one thing: my defection was contrived and I don’t intend to stay in the Soviet Union.’

Talin said: ‘So, what’s this all about?’ The calmness of his voice did surprise him.

‘First I want you to know that I meant everything I said about space…’

He continued to speak but Talin heard his earlier words: I believe in Mankind. We are participants, you and I, in the greatest revolution man has ever known: he is stepping off the Planet Earth and establishing himself in space, in eternity. And he has a chance, this one chance, to share eternity in peace. To leave tribal warfare earthbound.

‘…and I want you to realise, to believe, that those are the reasons why I am doing this….’

To share space the super-powers have got to have access to each other’s information. They’ve got to know if one or the other is planning a criminal act.

Talin gripped the steering wheel. ‘What are you hoping to achieve?’ he asked.

Pointing at a lighted café, Massey said: ‘Do you mind if we go in there? I’m being followed and it would look suspicious if we stopped the car and talked.’

Talin shrugged. ‘I’ve probably got a shadow too. They tell me I’m a valuable property.’

He parked the Lada. They went into the café which was shiny new and decorated in red and orange. Steam billowed from a tea and coffee machine which a sharp-featured young man handled inexpertly but with arrogant assurance, like a captain on the bridge of an ocean liner.

They hung up their coats, ordered tea with lemon and took the cups to a table isolated at the end of the café; Massey took a blueprint of the Dove’s vertical tail structure from the inside pocket of his jacket – ‘so we look as if we’re discussing the shuttle.’

From the same pocket he produced a photostat of an official document emanating, Talin noted, from the Science Policy Research Division, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress.

‘This,’ Massey said, ‘was to have been the damning evidence. Since then other material has come to light. But read this first.’

He slid the photostat across the table under the Dove blueprint. Talin’s initial calmness was now followed by a series of shocks as sharp as pistol shots spaced out by a marksman.

The photostat was an extract from a report on the Soviet Union’s space programme. The extract dealt with Doves. One paragraph had been underlined.

It is reliably understood that the stations constructed in orbit by cosmonaut craftsmen carried into space by Dove shuttles could be used to generate radiation on to selected areas of the earth’s surface. In this way the Soviet Union, using equipment manufactured at Sarova, could annihilate the populations of hostile countries and, when the radiation threat had receded, occupy its unscathed cities and countryside.

Talin thought: ‘Doves of Peace used for genocide? Ridiculous. Laughable.’ Then he thought: ‘What was it about the Dove that struck me as different?’

He said to Massey: ‘You’re a spy, of course.’

‘Not a spy. An agent.’

‘I think sub-consciously I always knew.’

‘It’s irrelevant anyway. What matters is our beliefs. That’s why I came to Russia.’

‘And your masters, do they share our beliefs?’

‘Not in the same way. But they do believe that power criminally used in space will destroy the future.’

‘Why should I believe this piece of paper?’ sliding it back under the blueprint.

‘I had no reason to fake it.’

‘But the CIA – I suppose that’s who you’re working for – they would have had reason.’

Massey said: ‘I’m being honest. Yes, I suppose they could have faked it. Anyway it’s not that important now.’

‘Annihilating nations isn’t important?’

‘The document, not its import. These are important.’ Massey passed across the decoded messages from the US Embassy in Moscow. ‘These could have been faked too, but I don’t figure they were.’

Talin read the first message. It told him that the stations the Doves were going to construct in space were to be adapted so that they could fire controlled particle beam weapons at the globe.

Belief and disbelief struggled with each other. Talin’s head ached. Calmly, he sipped his lemon tea and said indulgently: ‘Now that makes more sense,’ but he couldn’t quite manage the ironic smile.

‘It isn’t necessarily a contradiction. The platforms could be designed for both functions. Warships don’t rely on a single weapon.’

‘Tell me something,’ Talin said with determined nonchalance, ‘would you have admitted that the CIA could have faked the radiation report if you hadn’t come armed with this second… lever?’

Thoughtfully, Massey traced a pattern on the condensation on the window. A star, a porthole to the black night outside. Eventually, he replied: ‘I don’t know, but I don’t think I would.’

His honesty reached Talin across the table.

Massey said: ‘Now read the second decode.’ He stared through the star-shaped porthole already dripping out of shape.

Talin picked up the other message.

Dove had been redesigned to carry a hydrogen bomb.

The young man behind the bar pulled a lever and steam whooshed past him.

‘Hard astern,’ Talin said.

‘How was that?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ A hydrogen bomb. Was that all?

‘Have you read it?’ Massey was frowning, puzzled.

‘Yes, I read it.’

A hydrogen bomb. In my Dove. Nothing more?

NOTHING… MORE?

Another question expanded inside him, pushing at the inside of his skull: ‘What was it about the Dove that struck me as different?’

An H-bomb… Dove with a cuckoo’s egg… a mushroom-shaped cloud… a Siberian village built around a pump obliterated… a boy on a horse riding away pursued by death…

The village became a great city, the boy a legion of youth fleeing.

He turned abruptly to stare through the star in the condensation, now a shapeless orb. As he did so he accidentally knocked his mug of tea on to the floor. The mug shattered; the other customers stared at him before, losing interest, they looked away.

Talin said: ‘Do you believe this?’

‘It was supplied to our embassy by a Russian. It has the ring of truth about it though, of course, Dove wouldn’t carry an H-bomb on a proving flight.’ Massey’s voice was gentle. ‘Why don’t you check it out? Ask Oleg Sedov.’

Talin said: ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ And it wasn’t until they were back in the car that, wonderingly, he said: ‘Do you realise that you haven’t actually asked me.’

‘To defect? Then I’m asking you now.’ And at last Massey gave him the details that he had memorised long ago in the presence of George Reynolds, adding Rybak’s message: ‘If you decide to do what I’m asking then don’t waste any time up there.’

‘Time?’ Talin glanced sideways at Massey. ‘But you and I both know that time doesn’t exist – up there.’

There was only one place to confront Sedov – in his own apartment where there would be no bugs.

Talin dropped Massey and drove there, belief and disbelief popping up and down in his mind like puppets, and with them relief and despair.

That extra fitting he had noticed in the cargo bay – they had told him it was for a modification to the space arm.

Tomorrow, Monday, had been scheduled for final instructions about the new pay-load. Had they intended to tell him that it was a bomb bay?

Bomb bay? Who says it’s a bomb bay? The CIA, that’s who. Well, if that was what the CIA claimed he would see what the KGB had to say about it.

Sedov had been watching television. The black and white set still flickered in the corner of the living-room. A member of the Politburo wearing a grey fedora and a black topcoat delivering fraternal greetings to another Warsaw Pact leader wearing a grey fedora and a black topcoat.

Sedov greeted him with surprise and pleasure and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come in, have a drink, where’s Sonya – ah, yes, back in Moscow rehearsing, I’d forgotten.’ He took Talin’s outdoor clothes, cut short the fraternal greetings on the television.

Talin asked for vodka. While Sedov, wearing an old green polo neck sweater and baggy grey slacks, prepared zakuski and fetched the bottle of Stolichnaya from the refrigerator, Talin took in the familiar surroundings.

He had never liked the apartment. It was stifling hot but it contained no warmth. With its easy chairs covered with brown plastic, leaning table, bowl of desiccated fruit, never-opened books on the shelves, it was a stage set for a disorganised bachelor.

Sedov raised his glass. ‘To Saturday.’

‘To Saturday.’

The vodka dropped burning into Talin’s stomach. He didn’t bother with Narzan, nor gherkins and cashew nuts. He held out his empty glass.

Sedov refilled it, the expression on his disciplined features questioning.

Talin explained: ‘I had an unpleasant taste in my mouth.’ He tossed back the vodka. ‘I heard some rumours today at Tyuratam.’

‘Rumours aren’t allowed,’ Sedov said, smiling.

‘About the Dove programme.’

‘Ah.’

As though he had anticipated the confrontation. But I mustn’t be too sensitive, Talin warned himself. It was impossible to read features as controlled as Sedov’s.

Talin said: ‘I heard that the platforms they’re going to build in space are going to be armed.’

‘Of course.’ Sedov replenished both glasses and sat down in front of Talin. ‘You must have known that. We don’t stick them up there for the Americans to shoot down.’

‘With beams.’

‘With beams,’ Sedov agreed. ‘The Americans have got them, we’ve got to have them.’

‘CPBs?’

Sedov’s expression tightened. ‘The weapons of the future. We can’t be left behind.’

‘The rumours,’ Talin said, feeling for words, ‘say that the CPBs are to be aimed at the Earth. Had you heard that?’

‘They’re adaptable. They can be fired up or down.’

‘If they were fired at the Earth that would start a nuclear war.’

‘Or stop it. If the beams were aimed at the American launching sites.’

‘And their submarines?’

‘I’m not a beam ballistics expert,’ Sedov said. ‘What was the source of these rumours?’

But, with cold frosting his soul, Talin kept at him. ‘The rumours also concerned Dove itself.’

There was a new wariness in Sedov’s voice as he said, ‘Really?’ Talin thought: He knows.

‘They say that Dove will be armed with a conventional nuclear bomb.’

Deny it! Please God deny it.

Sedov took a mouthful of vodka, held it in his mouth for a moment, then said: ‘I think you deserve an explanation.’

Hope withered.

Sedov said: ‘The Americans have orbital bombs in space… we have to make some sort of reply… we must always be ahead….’ For the first time that Talin could remember Sedov’s voice had lost its way. ‘…a deterrent, no different in that respect to a missile armed with a nuclear warhead…’

Talin said: ‘Don’t give me shit, Oleg.’ He held out his glass; Sedov filled it. ‘Something I’ve always wanted to do,’ Talin said. He drank the vodka and hurled the glass at the wall.

That night Talin dreamed that he and Sonya and their two blond children, a boy and a girl, sought refuge from a nuclear holocaust in a mine. But it was a cobalt mine and there they met his father. ‘Like me,’ he told them, ‘you have two chances – to die slowly down here or quickly up there.’ When he turned Talin saw that the sockets of his eyes were empty.

Sonya took Lisa’s hand; he took Viktor’s. They began to ascend through a tunnel towards quick death. ‘Where are we going?’ Viktor asked. ‘Fishing,’ Talin answered.

On Friday the thirteenth, the eve of the launch, Robert Massey watched a gaunt-faced Sergei Yashin make the last computer connection with Vandenberg and, indirectly, all the military mission control centres in the US. Vlasov was also there, accompanied by Moroz and Peslyak, the three godfathers of Soviet espionage. Which was hardly surprising, Massey reflected, in view of the fact that, assisted by aerospace experts, they believed they were programming Vandenberg to destroy all American military and spy satellites in space plus any on the ground that could be launched to replace them.

Occasionally Massey became aware that Vlasov’s greenish eyes were staring at him speculatively. Wondering why he had twice eluded his tail? My presence here today, Massey thought, should convince him that it was chance; but Vlasov wasn’t a man who readily accepted chance.

Tomorrow he will know just how right he was to doubt. And he will also realise that it wasn’t coincidence that the Vandenberg penetration had coincided with the Dove launch. It had been planned that way as a means of creating chaos, a stroke of timing by Vlasov’s only equal in the world, George Reynolds.

That evening Talin telephoned Sonya.

Breathlessly, she told him that she was in the middle of the dress rehearsal for The Red Dove that was to have its première at the Bolshoi tomorrow ‘while you circle the world.’

He said: ‘I telephoned to tell you that I love you.’

‘And I love you. Perhaps when we’re together again—’

Perhaps what he never knew because he cut the connection and closed his eyes.

PART FOUR

Première

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Blast off was scheduled for 10 a.m. Talin was called at six but the call wasn’t necessary: he hadn’t slept. And still he didn’t know what he was going to do.

His conscience said defect; his birthright said stay. He looked into the bathroom mirror and saw a saint, he looked again and saw a traitor. Indecision ebbed and flowed. He bent to rinse his face in the basin – and vomited.

He took his pulse. It was strong enough but too fast so he took a tranquiliser in the hope that it would deceive the monitors at Launch Control.

A car arrived to pick him up at seven. The driver talked incessantly but Talin hardly heard him. He was glad that it was still dark because he didn’t want to look at the land, flat and dull though it was, in case he never saw it again. He hoped it would snow; the satellites had forecast a snow-free launch but they were frequently and dramatically wrong. Yes, snow would help. To keep him here or to store as a memory?

At 7.55 Talin, Sedov and their two passengers, a scientist and a military observer described as a meteorologist, arrived at the floodlit launch-pad, wearing their red flight jackets, a far call from the cumbersome suits the space pioneers had worn. They carried their white helmets fitted with radio headsets under their arms.

Dove, Talin thought, looked peculiarly vulnerable, dwarfed by the two rockets and the fuel tank to which she was locked. Not until they were jettisoned after the launch would she come into her own, a high-flying bird of infinite grace.

One day carrying in her womb a lethal egg. How could men perpetrate such a travesty?

As he stood at the foot of the skeletal access tower acknowledging the applause of the ground staff, Talin noticed another pool of floodlight in the distance: the complex where they had installed ground-to-air beam weapons.

A cold wind blew in from the east polishing the stars. Sedov took Talin’s arm and they entered an open-fronted elevator which whisked them to Dove’s entry hatch.

With the two passengers seated behind them – all of them now had their backs parallel to the ground because Dove was mounted on its tail – Talin and Sedov checked their life support systems and began their pre-launch checks. They tapped out queries on one of the spaceship’s four computers; immediately the answers flickered back, green and phosphorescent, on the two screens in front of them.

As the computerised countdown continued the great tank clamped to the exterior of Dove filled with liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

Talin remembered his excitement during the previous countdown; today it was rasped by an intrusive quality. Fear. Of what he might do.

Could they pick up this new tension on the monitors?

Through the headset attached to his helmet came the voice of the Launch Controller: ‘Any messages for the Russian People?’ Like the first Dove’s maiden flight this mission was being followed throughout the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries on radio and television.

The public knew that this Dove was equipped with a steel-jointed arm to deposit and pick up satellites; they knew that it was capable of re-launching itself into orbit if anything went wrong as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere. That was all they knew.

What I should tell them, Talin thought, is that this launch should be made from Plesetsk, the base between Moscow and Archangel from which military missions were launched.

He felt Sedov’s stare.

The Launch Controller’s voice came on again: ‘Do you read me, Comrade Talin?’

‘I read you. Tell them I’m proud to have been chosen to represent them once again in space. That I’m looking forward to returning…’

To where?

‘And a message for your wife?’

This time he played it their way. ‘Tell her I love her.’

After the confrontation six days ago Talin had been scared that Sedov would make a report to his superiors.

The Launch Controller said: ‘And you, Oleg, have you any message?’

But, perhaps because Sedov hadn’t anyone in the world except the surrogate son now sitting beside him, no report had been made.

‘The same as Nicolay. I’m proud to be representing the Soviet people and the Party on this mission.’

Sedov took off his helmet and headset. ‘You know,’ he said to Talin, ‘I meant that. Did you?’

‘About the Russian people, yes. I didn’t mention Party.’

‘That’s the way they’ll infer it.’

‘I don’t care how they infer it,’ Talin said.

‘Is everything… all right, Nicolay?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ Talin said.

In front of them the sky was glowing cold green and the stars were withdrawing.

They returned to the check-list. Letters and figures continued their ghostly dance on the screens.

Occasionally the scientist who was investigating the harnessing of solar heat and the meteorologist asked questions.

Then they were on the brink of beyond.

Ten, nine, eight…

The countdown was followed by two heads of state.

By the President of the Soviet Union watching on television in Moscow and by the President of the United States listening on the radio in Washington where it was the early hours of the morning.

The Russian leader sat in an ornate reception room in the Kremlin; the American in his living room in the White House with his wife.

…seven, six, five…

The heads of the two biggest secret police forces in the world also waited anxiously. George Reynolds in his soulless office at Langley, Virginia; Nicolay Vlasov in his well-appointed room in Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow.

Paradoxically, the two Americans were much more interested than their Soviet counterparts. As people are when they believe that a rival’s hour of glory may disintegrate into catastrophe.

The two Russians were more concerned with another count-down – the last hours before the previous day’s comprehensive penetration of Vandenberg took effect. The débâcle was timed for midday. After that the talons of the American Eagle would be clipped forever. What could be more interesting than that?

…four, three, two…

If anything went wrong now they would have to escape in shutes linked to bunkers 1,000 feet away.

…one, zero…

Talin thought: ‘It hasn’t snowed.’

Dove’s three main engines fired, their 1,100,000 lb thrust momentarily bending her fuselage; then resiliently she sprang back into shape.

Three seconds later, with the engines straining at 90 per cent power, the great rockets to which Dove was clamped also ignited, lending her another six million pounds thrust.

Simultaneously the shackles holding the whole shuttle – spaceship, rockets and tank – were unlocked.

It shuddered.

Talin said into the mouthpiece of his headset: ‘We have lift-off.’

A part of him saw and heard the ascent as though he were on the ground. The great tail of white-gold fire. The billowing nest of gas. The majestic climb into the pale sky. The spectators who had retreated to a stand four miles away would hear a deafening roar; a little later there would be a sonic boom.

Gently, as intended, Dove rolled on to her back as she curved upwards. For much of the mission she would stay that way without any discomfort to her passengers – free of the harness of gravity it didn’t matter which way up you were.

As the messages flickered on to the computer screens Talin glanced at Sedov; he was staring ahead and, with gravity pulling the flesh of his face backwards, there was a desolate quality there that frightened Talin. As if he knows about the decision I have to make.

Talin moved his left hand towards the computer punch-out: with the gravitational pull it felt as though it was encased in plaster.

When they were fifty seconds into their journey the main engines throttled back to 70 per cent power to cope with Max Q, the point at which maximum dynamic pressures were reached.

Upside down, Talin gazed at the mountains and plains of Kazakhstan.

Ten seconds later the engines picked up full power again.

When she had been climbing for two minutes, when her speed was four times the speed of sound, when she was thirty miles high, Dove discarded her two rocket boosters. Their parachutes opened and they began their descent to the Aral Sea.

Dove’s main engines continued to propel her upwards until, nine minutes after launch, at a height of eighty miles, they shut down, having consumed 500,000 gallons of fuel.

Explosives dispatched the external tank. Dove was alone.

Smaller engines fired. Then a last burn planted Dove into orbit travelling at 17,500 mph at an altitude of 160 miles.

The time was 10.41.

Dove, scheduled to stay in orbit for four days, was tracked at seven land bases in the Soviet Union, and at stations in Fort Lamy in Chad, Khartoum in the Sudan, Mirny in Antarctica, Camagüey in Cuba and Kerguelen in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. It was also followed by tracker ships sailing the oceans of the world including the Kosmonaut Yuri Gagarin which boasted 120 laboratories and 100 antennae, and could be patched through by telephone to any part of the Soviet Union via Molniya satellite links.

The West followed Dove’s progress through tracking stations strung across the United States, including Hawaii and Kodiak Island, Alaska, bases in Britain, West Germany, Guam and Australia and from tracker ships. The pride of the US observation posts was the AN/FPS-85 at Elgin Air Force Base, Florida; its radars set in a towering concrete hulk could sweep vast areas of space in a fraction of a second.

Today, 14 January, had begun like any other day in these Western stations monitoring all the satellites – and the debris orbiting the earth like riderless horses in a track race. The station duty officers were aware of the Dove launch and observed it take its place in orbit with casual interest.

Until 0300 hours Washington time when each received a coded radio message from NORAD, nerve-centre of the United States’ early warning system: BE PREPARED FOR UNSCHEDULED MANOEUVRES BY SOVIET ORBITER DOVE AND BE READY TO RENDER ASSISTANCE WHERE POSSIBLE.

Even more urgent messages were radioed to beam and missile-launching sites deployed over the United States and other NATO countries advising them NOT to react to any message mistakenly reaching them that, if the Soviet orbiter plunged towards North America instead of Asia, its intent was hostile.

George Reynolds had said: ‘We need a spectacular not a disaster movie,’ and the President had replied: ‘Holy shit, George, you had us all fooled – you have got a sense of humour.’

Puzzled unit commanders only learned much later that the warning had been deliberately delayed in case Soviet cryptoanalysts decoded the messages and warned Tyuratam to abort the launch. As it happened the Russians didn’t decode the warnings until two and a half hours after their dispatch.

At 11.45 hours Moscow time Nicolay Vlasov joined the Soviet President in the red and gold, chandelier-hung reception room in the Kremlin. Tarkovsky was there, suspended between triumph and doubt. Together the three of them walked into the marble-floored hallway and took the elevator to the briefing room in the basement.

The President sat at the head of the long, mahogany table. On his right squatted a battery of telephones, behind him two maps, one showing the deployment of United States missiles in the States and Europe, the other the location in orbit of US military satellites.

At the far end of the room stood a computer terminal. The walls were painted schoolroom-green and were bare except for the maps, a photograph of the President, a television set and portrait of Lenin. Vlasov and Tarkovsky sat opposite each other.

The President poured himself a glass of water and said: ‘If that telephone,’ pointing at a black receiver, ‘hasn’t rung within fifteen minutes then I shall assume that Tarkovsky has won.’

The telephone was a through line to Yevpatoriya in the Crimea, the deep space tracking station whose functions had been extended to monitor all satellites. (It also housed Mission Control for Dove.) If Vlasov’s comprehensive penetration had worked then at midday blips – American ones – would be leaving Yevpatoriya’s screens like so many shooting stars.

Vlasov thought: ‘The phone must ring. When it does, when those blips go skating off the screens, then the United States of America is defenceless and we have won.’

‘I sincerely hope,’ the President said, ‘that it does ring.’

Tarkovsky said nothing, which was a change.

They were over the Pacific, a glinting lake, and they were weightless. Talin took a pencil from his flight jacket pocket and let go of it. It floated where he had left it.

He unstrapped himself and walked in slow motion round the flight deck inspecting the batteries of buttons, dials, screens.

Standing, he had a better view of the globe. Blue, green and ochre, it was dappled with puffs of cloud.

Talin’s gaze shifted beyond its arc to the realms where there were no dimensions. Didn’t they understand that? If there was no weight why should there be distance? Why should there be time? Perhaps one day, down there, they would realise that they were trying to assess space with false standards evolved from horizons, tides, night and day. Perhaps one day they would stare into the firmament and discover that they were looking at the ultimate truth.

He helped the scientist, an alert, sun-tanned, forty-year-old named Vinnikov, to release his harness, leaving Genin, the meteorologist, an unsmiling man in his thirties with cropped, prematurely grey hair, to free himself.

Genin said: ‘Do you intend to do any work outside the ship?’

‘Maybe on the third day,’ Talin told him.

If there was a third day.

As arranged, Reynolds drove from his office in Langley to the White House while Dove was in ascent. He arrived as it went into orbit, long before there was any possibility that it could deviate from its schedule.

He was directed to the Situation Room to which the President had moved. Secretary of State Craig was there with Defense Secretary Fryberg and National Security Adviser Fallon.

The President, wearing a tweed sports jacket and open-neck cream shirt, looked tired. ‘We old men need our sleep,’ he said as Reynolds sat down. ‘When do you reckon he’s going to make his move?’

Reynolds said: ‘He’s been advised to make it as soon as he can. When our codes are busted and when Nicolay Vlasov realises that he isn’t going to push us out of space the game will be up, or as near as dammit.’

Rasping one hand over the stubble on his jaw – it was the only time Reynolds could remember seeing him unshaven – the President said: ‘What do you reckon they’ll do when they figure it out?’

Craig answered for Reynolds: ‘For starters they could try and hit Dove with a ground-based beam weapon.’

By 12.05 hours Vlasov began to suspect that he had been the victim of the greatest confidence trick in history.

Picking up the black receiver, the President said: ‘We’ll try calling them,’ and, into the receiver: ‘Anything?’ Slowly, without replying, he cradled it. His great head sunk low. ‘We’ll give it another five minutes,’ he said, his voice barely audible.

‘Of course,’ Tarkovksy said.

At 12.10 the President called again.

It was then, from the expression on the President’s face, that Vlasov knew he had been tricked.

A peaceful future dominated by the Soviet Union and achieved by brains instead of brute force disintegrated, so much gossamer. And with it his own peaceful autumn. The children on his study wall would continue to stare contemptuously at him.

Shaking his head, the President replaced the receiver. To Vlasov he said: ‘I’m sorry.’ To Tarkovsky a gesture with his hands – ‘You win.’

So I, the old fox, have been outwitted, Vlasov thought. But why?

WHY?

He was vaguely aware that, on the TV screen at the end of the room, the Dove launch was being replayed.

A telephone rang.

They all started, but it was the red receiver.

The President picked it up and handed it to Vlasov. ‘For you.’

Moroz told him that intercepted coded messages sent that morning to all tracking stations, early warning systems and missile-launching sites in the West had finally been decoded.

It was then that Vlasov finally realised why he had been duped.

He replaced the receiver without replying.

Without seeking the President’s permission, he picked up another telephone and snapped: ‘Get me Peslyak.’

When Peslyak came on the line he said: ‘Get Massey.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Talin realised ten minutes before Vlasov heard about the decoded messages that the moment of decision was almost upon him. Massey had warned him to act as quickly as possible before the Russians got wind of American preparations to receive a rogue spaceship.

He had calculated that, if he went through with it, the critical period would be during the third orbit because that would be the best time to deal with Sedov and the other two passengers. They had now completed two orbits, having opened and shut the cargo bay doors, flexed the manipulator arm, activated the TV cameras and checked out communications with Mission Control at Yevpatoriya which had taken over from Tyuratam.

Could he do it? From space came the call: ‘Cut loose, be free.’ But, without speaking, the implacable presence of Oleg Sedov said: ‘Don’t betray your country.’ Sedov the personification of Russia. Of honour. My mentor on his last flight. And the man who still commands me.

Sedov’s voice intruded into the turmoil of his thoughts. ‘It’s good, you and I up here. For me the last time. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else beside me.’

Talin thought: ‘I can’t do it,’ and said: ‘Yes, it’s good, Oleg.’

‘You know I’ve been worried about you. Ever since that time in my apartment.’ Sedov, sitting in his steep-backed navigational seat, glanced behind him but the two specialists were out of earshot, standing hunched over consoles of instruments. ‘I began to wonder if you would quit.’

Talin, separated from Sedov by a panel of controls, didn’t reply. Below them was Asia. Russia. Ahead Siberia. To the south he could see a snowstorm. He imagined the soft coldness of the flakes on his cheeks.

‘…or if you had some other plan?’

‘Plan? What sort of a plan could I have?’

‘You are a Siberian. A wild one. In space a man can shed the inhibitions he has learned on earth.’

‘The inhibitions you taught me?’

‘If I hadn’t you wouldn’t have survived.’

If I don’t go through with it, Talin thought, the KGB will confront me; men who, unlike Sedov, will be impersonally brutal. Because soon they will know that the Americans expected a defection. That I must have been approached.

Talin’s reasoning raced ahead. But they won’t publicly denounce me because that would be a body blow to the Soviet image. Perhaps they will project me as the supreme example of Russian manhood who contemptuously rejects the blandishments of imperialist agents of disruption.

But what of Massey? Surely as soon as he realises that he has failed he will escape by some pre-arranged route. I will miss him, Talin thought.

Sedov’s words reached him first as an interruption to his reasoning, then as its destruction. Seemingly innocent words that ripped through his patriotism like bullets through a national flag.

‘…so you have a wonderful future ahead of you.’

True, if they let me return to space. And how could they not if they portray me as a gladiator who has sent the forces of corruption packing?

‘…a beautiful wife, children perhaps… The best thing I ever did was arrange that meeting between you and Sonya.’

Arrange?

The first bullet on target. Into his soul.

Talin tried to discipline his voice. Casually, almost nonchalantly, he said: ‘You mean at the Bolshoi that day?’

‘Where else?’ Space had dispersed Sedov’s reserves of caution. ‘You were made for each other.’

But surely that had been for us to decide. ‘I knew I was one of a troop of trainee cosmonauts invited back stage; I didn’t realise you had anything to do with it.’

A warning was sounding in Sedov’s mind. Too late. ‘I suppose arrange is a strong word—’

‘Perfectly apt,’ voice miraculously controlled. ‘And was it arranged that I should stay behind when all the others had left? And that Sonya should stay as well?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And that meeting in the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad two days later, was that arranged? I knew a touring company of the Bolshoi was playing there but I never quite understood why six of us were suddenly selected to tour the landmarks of the Siege of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War.’

‘Does it matter?’ Sedov was pleading now. ‘You fell in love, you’re happy together.’

‘I might have been happier if I had been allowed to choose my own destiny. Did Sonya know that it was all set up?’

‘Stop it, Nicolay. Don’t throw away what you’ve got.’

‘Did she?’ The night he had proposed he had wondered if their romance had been arranged but had rejected such a preposterous notion.

‘She didn’t care, she loved you.’

Talin turned his head and smiled, actually smiled, at Sedov. ‘How can she have loved a man she had never met?’

Behind them the two passengers paused in their work, sensing dissension.

Sedov said: ‘I meant after the first meeting.’ Then, rallying: ‘Not now, Nicolay. We’ll talk about it when we get back to Russia.’

Talin said: ‘I suppose I should have known. That day in the bar when you told me that the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force thought it was about time we were man and wife. Time we met, time we got engaged, time we got married. Time we slept together, Oleg?’

‘I’m Commander of this ship and I’m ordering you to stop this talk.’

From behind them came Genin’s voice: ‘What’s wrong, Comrade Sedov?’

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Sedov snapped. ‘I suggest you get back to your instruments.’

‘I’m entitled to know…’

‘You’re not entitled to eavesdrop on conversations between commander and pilot.’

‘I shall make a report about your attitude when we return.’

‘As it’s my last trip,’ Sedov said, ‘I’ll dictate it for you.’

Talin said: ‘I remember that day in the bar you said, “Our lives have always been arranged.”’

‘And I said that it wasn’t so different in the West.’

And it was then that Talin knew what he had to do. They had arranged his father’s death, they had arranged to transform Dove from an ambassador of peace into an instrument of destruction, they had arranged his marriage and now was the time to find out if it was different in the West.

Odd that it was the last, least important, revelation that had finally decided him. Perhaps it was because it had been perpetrated by Sedov, the one man he had trusted.

Calmly he pointed at the digital clock among the flickering dials and said: ‘I’m going to have some lunch if that’s all right with you?’

Sedov began: ‘You’re not…’ but Talin interrupted him: ‘I’m not going to do anything rash. I just want to think a little,’ he lied.

As he made his way to the galley in the middle deck of the crew compartment he saw below them a river, its tributaries like tendrils. The Ob. To the west the Urals separating European from Asian Russia. From Siberia.

In the galley he went through the motions of injecting a meal with water to re-hydrate it – vegetable soup, steak and rice, followed by apricots, washed down with orange juice – and heating it up. That way he would avoid arousing suspicions. Then he dropped the powder that Massey had given him, a concentrated barbiturate named amylobarbitone, into the water supply. To eat, Sedov and the two passengers would have to inject their food with the water.

Then, because he had no appetite, he washed most of his own food down the closet, the slowness of his weightless movements giving the performance a macabre quality.

Ten minutes later he returned to the flight deck.

Sedov looked at him questioningly. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Everything’s fine. Why don’t you three have your meal now?’

Supposing they weren’t hungry!

‘Okay,’ Sedov said, ‘you take over.’ And to Genin and Vinnikov: ‘Follow me.’

Then Talin was alone.

They had been in orbit for less than three hours. Below them was Japan. He planned to land at Kennedy Space Center on the Florida coast at dawn.

The radio bleeped. Talin put on his headset. The voice from Yevpatoriya was unfamiliar, a nasal twang to it. ‘Is Comrade Sedov there?’

‘No,’ Talin told the voice, ‘he’s in the cabin.’

‘Get him and put him on.’

‘You can talk to me.’

‘I’m ordering you to get Sedov.’

Could they know by now?

‘And I’m refusing.’

Silence followed by the voice of the Mission Controller placating: ‘Please co-operate, Nicolay, this is a private matter between Comrade Kovalenko and Oleg.’

‘And who the hell is Comrade Kovalenko?’

He was tasting freedom already and there wasn’t a damn thing Comrade Kovalenko could do about it because, if he succeeded in defecting in Dove, they would never be able to reach him and, if he failed, then he would kill himself before they got to him.

The Controller, his voice far too calm, said: ‘Comrade Kovalenko works for the Ministry of Defence.’ KGB?

‘Tell Comrade Kovalenko that Comrade Sedov is indisposed at the moment’ – in the bathroom, comrade – ‘and will be in touch as soon as he returns to the flight deck.’

‘Thank you, Nicolay,’ the Mission Controller said.

If they knew what he intended to do what action could they take other than enlist the help of Sedov and the meteorologist who so far had evinced no interest whatsoever in the weather patterns below? Through the computers they could manoeuvre Dove in orbit but he could cancel any attempts to make her re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. So they would have to rely on assistance from within Dove. Hopefully that would shortly be impossible.

Sedov returned with Vinnikov and Genin.

Vinnikov said: ‘Better food than you get at the Metropole.’

Genin said: ‘I thought it tasted bitter.’

They all sat down.

Sedov said to Talin: ‘Well, did you have a good think over your meal?’

‘I calmed down a bit.’

‘And you don’t have any plans for revenge?’

‘You mentioned a plan before. What plan could I possibly have 160 miles above the earth?’

‘Only one thing. You could plan… you could plan…’ His voice was losing direction. Talin looked behind him: the two specialists were unconscious. ‘Could plan…’

‘Don’t try to talk,’ Talin said.

Sedov’s eyes pleaded with him. Suddenly his voice strengthened and Talin thought: ‘He was acting, he didn’t inject the water.’

‘Because,’ Sedov said in a strange, forced voice, ‘I have news for you. Why do you think we’ve got Genin on board? Because,’ voice fading again, ‘…because,’ picking up once more, ‘this is a dummy run,’ fading ‘…they had to test the weight factor, angle, reaction to lack of atmospheric pressure…’

Talin leaned across the instruments and shook Sedov. ‘What is it, Oleg? For God’s sake what is it?’

Sedov said: ‘There’s a hydrogen bomb in the cargo bay. When that red light comes on,’ pointing with one drooping finger, ‘it means it’s primed.’

His hand dropped and his eyes closed.

Behind Talin the radio bleeped.

Still stunned by Sedov’s words, he replaced his headset.

Sonya said: ‘Nicolay, what’s happening, I don’t understand?’

Her voice pierced his senses.

‘There’s nothing to understand.’

‘They say you may do something terrible with Dove. They’re crazy, aren’t they, Nicolay?’

‘Yes, crazy—’ No, he had to be honest with her; he owed her that. ‘There’s something I have to do.’

‘What are you talking about, Nicolay?’

He could smell her perfume, feel her hair, taste her lips and he said: ‘I shan’t be coming back.’

‘But tonight, the ballet, The Red Dove…’

Sadly he thought: ‘Even now she can’t see beyond the walls of the Bolshoi.

He said: ‘One day perhaps I’ll be able to explain. Just remember that I loved you. Then,’ harshly, ‘forget me.’

‘…so in a way we’ll be together. And while I’m dancing, I shan’t worry.’

Skates sang on the ice around them. He held her close and looked at her upturned face, and knew he would never forget the conflict of joy and sorrow he saw there.

Her voice from far away said: ‘But that means you’re a traitor.’

Was she reading hastily scribbled words thrust in front of her? It didn’t matter; her tone was hardening and, because he didn’t want to take that hardness with him, he said: ‘We shared, Sonya,’ and cut the radio connection.

This final black-out in radio communication between Dove and Mission Control was made at 1305 hours Moscow time, five minutes after television and radio coverage of the spaceflight had been mysteriously curtailed.

‘Get Massey.’ That had been gut reaction. Now, as he realised the full implications of what had been perpetrated – why Massey had so assiduously cultivated Talin, why he had evaded surveillance on at least two occasions –, Vlasov virtually took over the control room beneath the Kremlin.

Survivor’s instincts alerted, he told the President and the Minister of Defence what he believed was happening and, over the telephone, issued orders, their crisp authority overriding his own shock waves of panic. On his instructions Sonya Bragina had been patched through from a telephone at the Bolshoi to Dove. He hadn’t expected much from the connection and he had been right.

When his first burst of activity spent itself he leaned back and made what was a brilliant comeback considering the circumstances. Leaning back in his chair, he said to the two men who had been observing his performance: ‘This is just the sort of emergency I feared would be precipitated by Tarkovsky’s plan.’

Not bad in view of the fact the three of them had just learned that American Intelligence might be about to bring off an epic coup.

He attacked again: ‘With a rogue pilot at the controls of a Dove there’s every chance that he’ll bring it down in America providing the West with all the details they need of our strategy in space. And with a Dove transformed into a hawk an anti-Soviet propaganda catalyst that could turn the whole world against us.’

While he waited for Tarkovsky to assemble his forces, Vlasov wondered if Robert Massey would have been able to persuade Talin to defect if he hadn’t been armed with the information about Tarkovsky’s gunships and Dove’s bomb. The information that he, Nicolay Vlasov, had leaked to the United States Embassy in Moscow, in the hope that it would be used to muster world opinion against such madness. But he hadn’t anticipated anything on this scale.

One hundred and sixty miles above the earth Talin manhandled the slumped bodies of Sedov, Genin and Vinnikov into their anti-gravity suits and helmets. Without the suits their blood would drop to the lower parts of their bodies. The result in their comatose state would probably be death. Then he buckled them into their seats, donned his own suit and helmet and strapped himself into his seat.

At 0140 hours Moscow time he took over manual control of Dove, turned her tail-first and fired the orbital manoeuvring engines. Almost immediately Dove began to slip out of orbit.

The premature move by Dove was instantly picked up by American and Soviet radar scanners. Within seconds the information was passed to NORAD and Yevpatoriya, thence to the White House and the Kremlin.

Reactions in the US and Soviet capitals were vastly different.

Jubilantly, the American President replaced the receiver on the direct line from NORAD and said: ‘Here we go.’ At the same time he picked up another receiver and authorised the release of a statement to the media which had been warned to stand by for an important announcement.

The White House Press Room, fully staffed for the occasion, was galvanised into action. So were spokesmen at NASA, the Pentagon and all interested Government agencies.

CBS, NBC and ABC interrupted their programmes from coast to coast. Early risers on the east coast caught the interruptions and spread the word. Cities, towns, villages awoke prematurely.

At the same time the news blitzed across the world. In the morning, afternoon, evening or night, according to the time difference, families took up positions around TV and radio.

In Florida reporters, photographers and technicians raced to Kennedy Space Center where the Dove was expected to land at dawn followed by armadas of cars carrying sightseers. Nothing like it had been witnessed since the landing of Columbia in April 1981.

In the underground control room at the Kremlin the reaction was equally dramatic.

It exploded from Tarkovsky.

He said: ‘We have no alternative. We’ve got to hit Dove. With a charged particle beam weapon.’

He looked inquiringly at the President. Almost imperceptibly the President nodded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Robert Massey had risen at 5.30 a.m.

From the window box on the balcony where he had buried them, he had retrieved the gun, ammunition, grenade and forged documents wrapped in oiled paper. (He had already delivered the powdered barbiturate the Ukrainian had given to him to Talin.)

Then he had driven in his black Zhiguli from Leninsk to Tyuratam because he had to see Dove launched, being as involved as anyone. And then? He would stick around to see if Talin went through with it. If he did then he would have to escape immediately because his involvement would be instantly apparent; if he didn’t then the escape wouldn’t have quite the same urgency.

And it wasn’t until later that Massey realised that he hadn’t heeded his own warning to Talin: that as soon as the messages warning American tracker and missile bases to stand by for a defection from space were decoded then the whole operation was blown – and the KGB would be on the hunt for its instigator, himself.

Being a cosmonaut and a companion of Talin, he hadn’t been body searched for a couple of weeks; he hoped today wouldn’t be an exception; it wasn’t.

After breakfast he was taken with the other cosmonauts on a bus to a box reserved for them in the spectator stand. As Dove roared majestically upwards Massey discovered that he was cleansed of guilt: if the information leaked to the American Embassy in Moscow was true then surely there was no reason for remorse.

After the launch they were driven, privileged observers, to the firing control room at Launch Control to watch Dove’s progress. What finer place than this futuristic chamber with its computer consoles, TV screens and complexes to observe when things started to go wrong – or right, according to your view.

The Hunter didn’t attempt to follow Massey into the firing room. Instead he parked the white Volga, provided by the KGB in Leninsk, fifty yards down the access road and settled down to wait. He checked his knife, running his thumb lightly down its saw-toothed blade, and the TK automatic in the pocket of his hooded, fur-lined hunting jacket, fashioned in white to blend with the snow.

Like any other bureaucratic structure addled with delegated responsibility, the KGB tended to lose direction in an emergency and the order issued at 12.24 by Vlasov to ‘get Massey’ hadn’t reached the Hunter on his radio set until 12.48.

Get Massey. It was almost too good to be true. The Hunter licked his lips. Then the qualifying message reached him. ‘Get him alive.’

‘Message understood,’ the Hunter said resignedly into the hand-set.

As he waited it began to snow.

Which suited Rybak who, parked a further fifty yards down the road in a blue Moskvich, was beginning to feel conspicuous, although, having been enlisted to help cure the Proton booster, he was entitled to be there.

A voice came over the Hunter’s radio.

‘Do you have Massey?’

‘Located in Launch Control.’

‘Take him as soon as possible.’

Other cosmonauts were leaving the complex, heading on foot for the canteen. Rather than risk a chase and a shoot-out among the consoles in the firing room the Hunter decided to overpower Massey as he emerged.

He inched the Volga closer to the complex and, leaving the engine running, crossed the road on foot. As he waited beside the entrance, he was an almost-invisible predator.

But not to the Ukrainian who had also approached closer and was peering through the switching blades of the Moskvich’s windshield.

At 1 p.m. when TV and radio transmission was curtailed everyone left in the firing room suspected that something had gone terribly wrong. Replies to queries through direct channels to Yevpatoriya were evasive. One reply, however, clinched it: ‘Dove has broken contact.’

So it was on. Now, Massey thought, you’re on your own.

He was about to head for the rest rooms when a young cosmonaut who had been standing beside him said: ‘If Dove looks as if it’s going to land anywhere outside the Soviet bloc then God help Nicolay Talin.’

Massey paused. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘No way is the Kremlin going to allow it to land in the West.’

With a terrible presentiment assembling, Massey asked: ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Why, they’ll hit it with a beam weapon. A CPB – they’ve assembled them over there,’ pointing through a window. ‘About five kilometres…’ stopping in mid-sentence. ‘Hey, you’re the American, aren’t you?’

But Massey was gone, hurrying towards the rest rooms.

At 1.20 a clean-shaven man with a bald head emerged from Launch Control and stood for a moment staring into the snow that had thickened into a blizzard. Then he put on his fur shapka and, head tucked into the driving flakes, headed for the car lot at the end of the access road.

According to the Hunter’s calculations there should still be one cosmonaut left inside. Massey. But now he had to make sure. Showing his ID to the guard he entered the lobby.

A cosmonaut he recognised walked briskly across the marble floor. It wasn’t Massey.

The Hunter stopped abruptly. There had been something about the bald man who had just left. A spot of blood on his clean-shaven lip. Clean shaven? Just shaven!

The Hunter outwitted by his prey. He turned, pushed past the guard, sprinted across the road to the white Volga. Tyres skidding, he made a U-turn and accelerated towards the car lot.

The Ukrainian gave him a second then followed in the blue Moskvich.

Both of them saw the black Zhiguli pass them on the other side of the road heading in the opposite direction, Massey crouched at the wheel.

The Volga slewed round and, swerving wildly, took off again. Followed by the Moskvich.

A hundred yards past Launch Control the road forked. There was no sign of the Zhiguli and the falling snow was a white wall. From the glove compartment the Hunter took a map of the space centre. The fork to the right led to the assembly bays; the fork to the left to nowhere.

The Hunter took the left fork because it was at nowhere that the charged particle beam weapons had been assembled.

While the three cars converged on the CPB site Dove was hurtling towards the entry interface of the earth’s atmosphere approximately half way round the world from its chosen landing strip at Kennedy Space Center. Talin had calculated that this manoeuvre would take eighteen minutes thirty-three seconds.

He had, he believed, estimated the entire defection with precision, choosing an orbit that would give the West maximum tracking time. Once inside the earth’s atmosphere he intended to re-establish radio contact, but this time with Mission Control at Houston, Texas.

Inevitably he would be stripped of many of the safeguards programmed into the computers. And he had an H-bomb in the cargo bay; the cargo bay was on top of Dove – a pilot would have to turn her upside down to discharge it – and if the bomb wasn’t primed, he comforted himself, it was quite harmless.

The Volga drew level with the Zhiguli a mile past Launch Control. With a delicate nudge it pushed it off the road into deep snow.

The little black car butted its way a couple of yards to the right before stopping, engine still running, a buffer of snow in front of the bonnet.

Cautiously, gun in hand, knife in belt, the Hunter approached it. Massey had cracked his head on the windscreen. He was unconscious, his shapka had fallen from his head and there was a trickle of blood on his shaven skull.

The Hunter stuck the TK back in the pocket of his hunting jacket and pulled open the door. The sound of the Moskvich pulling up behind him was drowned by the noise of the Zhiguli’s still-running engine.

The Hunter reached into the car and grabbed Massey by the lapels of his coat.

As two arms encircled him from behind.

He could feel the strength and the girth of the man and he said: ‘Rybak’ before the air was expelled from his lungs.

A rib cracked.

Another snapped; he heard the sound inside him.

To start with there wasn’t any pain. Until the Ukrainian increased the pressure and more ribs broke, digging into the Hunter’s lungs.

With his first gasp of pain blood sprayed into his mouth and, peering through the falling snow, seeing the taiga, he remembered how cornered prey had fought back, snarling and lunging and he thought: ‘This isn’t any way to die.’

He went limp, letting his body slump forward. The Ukrainian relaxed his grip. When the Hunter turned, straightening up at the same time, the knife was in his hand.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a fraction of a second before the Ukrainian squeezed again, buckling the Hunter’s rib cage and driving the saw-edged knife into his own heart.

When Massey regained consciousness he went first to the two bodies, sprinkled with bloodstained snow. Finding that they were both dead, he returned to the Zhiguli and tried to back it onto the road. But the wheels merely spun, spitting out snow.

He returned to the bodies and removed the Hunter’s white hunting jacket and, after pulling out the knife, the Ukrainian’s parka. He placed one garment beneath each driving wheel.

The wheels spun, gripped and, with a jerk, the car was back on the road. Before heading into the blizzard he peered into the driving mirror and wiped the blood from his shaven scalp. Then he replaced his shapka.

His head ached, he felt sick and, for a moment, he imagined he was in space.

His mind cleared as the CPB site materialised in the falling snow. Its fortifications were only partly constructed, as though the beam weapons had been rushed here prematurely, poised for a declaration of war.

Weapons… an anachronism. Massey didn’t know too much about CPBs but he understood that you couldn’t bracket such devices, once the property of science fiction comics, with orthodox guns or even nuclear missiles.

CPBs, which would out-date military lasers even before they were perfected, were powered by generators that converted explosive bursts into electricity that dispatched beams charged with particles such as electrons and protons at the speed of light.

Blithely, the Americans had long believed that the Russians couldn’t aim them into space; but they had reckoned without the adaptation of magnetic mirrors which could bend the beams on to their target.

The CPB’s overwhelming asset, however, was that so far no one had come up with an effective counter-measure.

The sentries guarding the makeshift, sand-bagged entrance seemed to be disturbed; by now Massey recognised their confusion as the state of mind induced in a totalitarian state by the arrival of a VIP. An Army staff car, an old-fashioned, khaki-brown Chaika, with a driver at the wheel, was parked outside.

Robert Massey parked the Zhiguli and Major Mikhail Vlasov of the KGB identified himself to one of the sentries. Robert Massey marched into the compound.

He walked down a corridor, concrete walls still wet. Builders’ materials lay in heaps on the floor. At the end of the corridor stood a Red Army captain, bareheaded, wearing flak jacket and webbing belt with a holster containing a pistol.

Hand on the flap of the holster, the captain told Massey to identify himself. He glanced at the ID, handed it back, one thumb unbuttoning the flap of the holster. ‘No one goes in there,’ he snapped. ‘No one.’

‘But I—’

‘If you knew who my orders came from you wouldn’t argue, Comrade Major.’

‘Well look at this,’ Massey said, casually slipping his hand into the pocket of his topcoat and producing the automatic, ‘and now that you’ve seen it turn around. Now!’ jabbing the barrel of the gun into the captain’s flak jacket.

As he turned round Massey hit him beneath the ear with the butt of the automatic.

Gun in hand, he burst through the door. Two men, one a Red Army general, the other a civilian, were crouched over a console studded with dials.

He shouted to them to stand away from the console. The civilian stepped back but the general lunged at a black button at one side of the dials.

Massey shot him through the chest as his finger pressed down. The building trembled and Massey knew that the beam weapon had been fired but, hopefully, in the panic, without accuracy.

The civilian, a pale young man wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, stood motionless staring at the body of the general. Down the corridor came the sound of pounding footsteps.

With the gun Massey broke the glass in a window and jumped through it. In front of him was a half-finished brick wall with a steel door leading through it. He tried the door, it opened.

Beyond was a space fifty yards wide cleared of snow. In the middle stood a sloping concrete platform; mounted on it was what looked like an elephantine telephoto lens; one end was attached to a power unit, the other pointed towards the sky.

Beyond was another wall and another door. Massey sprinted round the death ray projector and crouched beside the door. He tried the door-handle, the door opened.

He took the fragmentation grenade from his pocket and drew the ring as the two sentries who had been guarding the entrance burst through the door on the other side of the CPB. He released the lever, paused, then, as the sentries started across the space, tossed it on to the concrete firing pad under the cylinder.

He ducked through the door and slammed it shut. The explosion shook the wall; debris thudded against it. When it was over he opened the door; the two soldiers lay among the wreckage; the CPB, hurled from the firing pad by the explosion, lay on the ground, its barrel ruptured.

If a grenade dating back to World War I could wreck space age weaponry then there was still some sort of hope, Massey thought as he slammed the door behind him.

Ahead lay another walled area, empty. The door this time was to his left. He opened it; outside was a path between two concrete outhouses. He turned left at the end, skirting the main compound in the direction of the entrance.

The entrance was unguarded.

He ran through it, spinning round and falling as a bullet hit him in the arm. As he fell he fired at the driver of the staff car crouched behind the bonnet. The driver reared up and fell across the bonnet, blood pouring from his shattered jaw.

With one hand Massey pulled him off the bonnet. On the ground was a greasy rag that the driver had been using before the shooting started; Massey used it to wipe his blood off the bonnet.

Then he climbed into the driving seat and headed for the secondary exit at the far end of the space centre.

He stopped once and took off his topcoat. In the glove compartment he found some cotton wadding and a flask of vodka. He poured the vodka on to the wound gasping as it burned; he decided it was only a flesh wound; he pressed the wadding on to it and, using his teeth and his free hand, managed to tie a handkerchief round it. Then he put on his coat and drove off again.

‘Now, Comrade Major, we shall see what sort of stuff you’re made of,’ he told himself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Dove lurched violently to one side when it was seventy-five miles above the earth.

A beam weapon, Talin guessed, gripping the hand controller – it was the only answer they had left. Not a direct hit but it must have passed within a few feet of the fuselage.

Dove began to turn on her side, shuddering.

Talin fought the manual controls. Dove settled again, then suddenly dipped her nose.

Talin pulled, coaxed, shouted; but his arms were as heavy as lead as the earth pulled at them and his reactions were as slow as a drunk’s. Gradually Dove raised her beautiful, aristocratic nose; Talin grinned fiercely, loving her. And it was then that he noticed that the red light beside the unconscious body of Sedov was glowing red. The bomb in the cargo bay must have been primed by shock waves from the beam.

Down plunged the Dove. With enough nuclear power inside her, Talin thought, to devastate a city. His brain froze; his head slumped forward.

When he came to he could see a curvature of land below. Snow-capped mountains falling away to plains. He concentrated on the clock nestling among the sophisticated dials: it was 1410 hours Moscow time.

If his calculations were correct he should touch down at Kennedy Space Center in twenty minutes. But he had no idea if his calculations were correct because the dials, air-speed and altitude indicators, artificial horizon… all had gone crazy.

But in any case could he now risk putting Dove down on land? His mind leapt out of its icy lethargy: it was out of the question. He had two alternatives: to fire the new engines designed to put her back into orbit or to ditch in the ocean and hope divers would salvage her if the bomb didn’t explode.

If he went back into orbit, assuming that the subsidiary engines hadn’t been damaged, then he would be hit again by another beam and the whole operation would have been for nothing.

No, he would overshoot Kennedy Space Center and ditch far out to sea where, if the bomb exploded with the force of the impact, relatively little harm would be done.

Ahead the air glowed with heat, 2,500 degrees of it. If the beam had loosened the protective tiles then they would fly off and Dove would burn up.

He activated the radio, sweeping through the wave bands in search of a contact. Nothing. The CPB might have affected it; on the other hand it might be the usual communication black-out caused by heat on re-entry.

Talin reckoned that his speed had slowed from 17,500 mph at re-entry to about 6,000 mph. He was approaching terminal descent at about 250,000 feet. Gingerly he tried elevons, rudder, speed brake and rudder controls. Dove reacted sluggishly like the wounded bird she was.

The mountains receded, a plain, then lakes.

Talin tried the radio again hoping to contact one of the VOR beacons which could guide Dove’s autopilot just as though she were a conventional airliner.

The faintest crackle reached him through his headset. Faintly he heard a voice.

‘Kennedy… Kennedy…’

Not knowing whether or not they could hear him he said: ‘Soviet shuttle Dove here… believed overflying North America… have primed nuclear warhead on board… attempting ditch in sea… please advise…’

He began to repeat the message but before he had finished he had lost contact again.

The American President slammed down the receiver linking him to NORAD.

He said: ‘Gentlemen, the situation is this: the Soviet shuttle is at this moment out of control and out of contact somewhere over the Mid-West of the United States. It is thought that it may have on board a primed hydrogen bomb but radio reception was so bad that the message was unclear.’

He paused. ‘We have two choices and you all know what they are: we let it land or we blow it out of the sky with an ABM.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Those who think we should hit it raise their right hands.’

Secretary of State Craig and National Security Adviser Fallon raised theirs; Reynolds and Defense Secretary Fryberg remained motionless.

‘So I have the casting vote. Your indulgence, gentlemen, for one moment.’ He picked up a telephone set aside from the others. ‘The hot line; I prayed to God when I was elected that I would never have to use it.’

The Russian President held the receiver away from him, one hand clasped over the mouthpiece. Nodding at Tarkovsky, he said: ‘The President of the United States wants to know if Dove is armed with a hydrogen bomb. What do I tell him?’

Tarkovsky looked at Vlasov; his face was flushed, his small grey eyes bloodshot. He hesitated, then said: ‘Tell him no.’

In the White House the President replaced the receiver and said to the four men sitting around him: ‘We don’t hit, but we do take evasive action.’

To Fryberg and Fallon he said: ‘You both know what to do, move it.’ To Craig he said: ‘You might as well stay here, Joe, there’s nothing you can do,’ and to Reynolds: ‘You too, George, the spectacular could become the disaster movie you talked about and as co-producers we have to stick together.’

He pressed his hands against his forehead. When he removed them he suddenly looked his age.

Between them Fryberg and Fallon, using the White House communications systems, rapped out a string of messages to the NSA (National Security Agency) at Fort Mead, Maryland, to NORAD, the Pentagon and the FBI. Through them police and subsidiary coast-to-coast emergency services were alerted.

All commercial and military aircraft were grounded; where possible stacked aircraft were dispersed north to Canada and south to Mexico, Central and South America. All airports were put on emergency; vessels on the Lakes and Eastern seaboard warned to stand by for a ditching.

In the visual control room at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport controllers scanned the skies through their tinted glass walls; in the approach control room the controllers searched their radarscopes for an errant blip. Elsewhere early warning radar antennae continued to track Dove’s erratic progress.

Across the central plains of the United States and to the east, people left TV and radio to search the skies. Until the media picked up the story about the bomb; then they took cover. And it was then that calls began to pour into the White House: ‘Hit it.’

‘…Kennedy… Kennedy…’

At first the rusty little voice on the radio identifying itself as Kennedy had spelled out HOPE to Talin. But in his mind he had a relief map of what the distant approaches to the space centre should look like; they were nothing like the map far below him at the moment.

Suddenly and sickeningly he understood: Kennedy Airport, New York. That was the signal he had picked up. And the sheets of water below were the Great Lakes. Beyond them lay low cloud.

Too late to even try the orbit re-entry engines.

Dove was a glider flying, he calculated, at about 80,000 feet and travelling at two and a half times the speed of sound.

Theoretically he should by now have been lined up with the landing strip. Except that now all he could see beneath him was cloud and his instruments weren’t working and he wasn’t in touch with anyone.

Tentatively he tried the glider controls. Again the response was sluggish. And for the second time in his life he found he couldn’t navigate to the right.

‘I once had a car like this,’ Sedov said.

His voice was slow and thick. Beside him the red light glowed brightly.

‘Are you all right, Oleg?’

‘An old Volga. It looked like a tank.’

‘I’m sorry…’

‘And I had a son once.’ Sedov closed his eyes again.

Dove sank towards the endless field of cloud. In front of it a Boeing 747 sprang out of the crimped grey surface, like a primeval monster emerging from a marsh, and soared steeply upwards. Talin caught a glimpse of the scared faces of the flight-deck crew and the puppet heads of passengers.

By now Dove should have been below 50,000 feet poised for the final approach, landing on a twenty-two-degree glide slope.

Mist swirled past the observation windows. Behind Talin the solar scientist stirred. Sedov murmured some words but they didn’t make sense.

All I have to do, Talin thought, is to get Dove as far over the ocean as possible.

The cloud thickened.

And the salvage crews will reach us. It can’t all be for nothing.

With luck they were over the sea now. Which was when he saw the tip of a skyscraper probing the cloud and, a moment later, saw Manhattan below him.

In Rome the Pope prayed and in churches all over the world prayers were offered.

In Manhattan traffic came to a standstill as the big red and white bird sailed silently over its highrise, lower than the World Trade Center and the Empire State. It had adopted a south-south west course and was gliding over the Hudson River waterfront.

It was the chief liaison officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose responsibilities included Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia airports, who decided to try and coax Dove into Kennedy.

He said: ‘The sonofabitch is going to ditch in the Bay. At that speed it will break up and, if there is a bomb on board, we’ll lose Downtown Manhattan, half of Jersey City, Staten Island and Brooklyn not to mention the Statue of Liberty.’

He told his deputy to call the Control Tower at Kennedy on the direct line and, snatching up a telephone, called the New York and Jersey City electricity authorities. Seconds later lights went out all over Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Yonkers, Staten Island, Jersey City and Manhattan. In the gloom of a winter afternoon the landing lights on Kennedy’s longest runway shone brightly and enticingly.

Pictures of the runway and the crippled Dove were recorded by TV cameras and relayed by satellite throughout the world.

Secretary of State Joseph Craig said: ‘Tell me one thing, Mr President, if there isn’t a bomb on board why didn’t you release a statement to that effect?’

The President, staring at the TV picture of the Dove through exhausted eyes, said: ‘Because, Joe, I don’t know for sure whether there’s a bomb on board or whether there isn’t.’

‘The President of the Soviet Union said there wasn’t?’

‘Sure he did and I’ve always found him to be an honourable man. The trouble, Joe, is that he’s an old man. Like me,’ he added.

Dove had begun to respond more positively to the controls. Talin glanced to his left – and saw that Sedov was gripping his hand controller.

Sedov said: ‘I don’t know what happened up there but I do know that if we hit water the impact will break Dove up and the bomb could explode.’

Dove began to veer east across the Bay round Downtown Manhattan and the most famous skyline in the world.

At the rear of the flight deck Genin and Vinnikov were regaining consciousness, staring through the observation windows in bewilderment.

As Dove, guided by Sedov and Talin continued to turn, Sedov said: ‘You should build a shrine to that old Volga of mine, she’s showing us the way again.’ He looked down. ‘I figure we’re over Brooklyn now but where the hell are all the lights?’

‘There.’ Talin pointed ahead at Kennedy’s jewelled pathway. ‘The ones that matter. Can we make it?’

‘Radio would help. I had a radio in that Volga. Whenever it died on me I used to revive it like this.’ Sedov leaned back and hit the radio console with his fist.

A voice crackled into Talin’s headset: ‘Kennedy here… Kennedy here… do you read me, Dove?’

‘I read you,’ Talin said.

The runway at Kennedy Space Center is 15,000 feet long. The longest runway at Kennedy International Airport is 14,572 feet.

The Chief Controller at the airport’s ten-storey high tower, equipped to handle fifteen aircraft simultaneously, was a grizzled ex-pilot named Rooke.

Alternatively peering at the single blip on a radar-scope and staring out through the green glass window, he said: ‘A DC-9 lands at 130 mph, right? This baby’s coming in at 220 mph. If she overshoots and she has gotten a warhead on board then goodbye JFK. Goodbye Queens.’

Thousands of staff and passengers had sought shelter underground; others, figuring that if you were this close to a nuclear explosion it didn’t matter where you were, had massed on the observation platforms. Fire engines and ambulances hovered ready to pounce; a bomb disposal unit stood by.

Rooke’s deputy made an adjustment to his headset and said: ‘I have you at 2,000 feet, Dove.’

Ahead, closing, Talin could see the threshold markings on the illuminated strip; he could also see the fire engines and ambulances.

Sedov said: ‘Once again she’s all yours.’

Talin hauled up Dove’s nose. The altitude indicator still wasn’t working.

From the tower: ‘A thousand feet… eight hundred…’

At 300 feet Talin threw the switch to lower the landing gear and, praying, told Control.

A split-second pause. Then from Control: ‘Gear down.’ Followed by: ‘A hundred feet.’

He was over the runway.

‘Eighty… seventy…’ and finally: ‘Twenty…’

The 500 feet fixed-distance markings were streaming past. He was going to overshoot….

‘Okay down,’ he shouted.

The tyres squealed. Talin braked. Dove bounced. The wheels touched again. Talin could see the fire engines and ambulances starting to move. Another bounce. The tyres shrieked…

Dove stopped five feet from the end of the runway and stood there in the glare of the landing lights looking sublimely innocent.

But there was nothing innocent about the bomb that was defused and removed from her cargo bay later that day. It was calculated that it could have killed at least a million people.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

News of Dove’s safe landing, her deadly cargo, Talin’s defection and the revelations about the gunships the Russians planned to build in space with their shuttle fleet dominated the media for several days.

Everywhere, that was, except inside the Communist bloc. But even there the propagandists couldn’t simply ignore the disappearance of their revolutionary shuttle and brief reports were circulated to the effect that, owing to a ‘computer malfunction’ Dove’s mission had been aborted. (The première of The Red Dove at the Bolshoi had already been cancelled owing to the ‘indisposition’ of Sonya Bragina; instead the first-night audience saw Swan Lake.)

On the day after Talin’s defection the Politburo held an emergency session in the Kremlin. The resignation, owing to ill health, of Grigori Tarkovsky was accepted and a younger man was appointed. He was only sixty-seven.

Nicolay Vlasov, anticipating a call for his own resignation, had taken the precaution of calling upon the President and several other Politburo members carrying with him what he euphemistically called their biographies; he also informed the President he had received a report from Los Angeles via the Soviet Embassy in Washington indicating that the situation was not completely irretrievable.

Vlasov was not asked to resign.

One day, he thought, as he left the building and gazed at the Kremlin’s golden cupolas riding high in the blue sky above the city’s quilt of snow, he would write a book called Survival. And when they read it perhaps his children would understand. Who knows, by that time he might have been promoted to the very summit of Soviet power; the latest report from the Kremlin Clinic on the President’s heart condition was ominous and with his dossiers on the other leaders to hand there was every reason to hope…

They faced each other outside a pale, clinical building at 136 East 67th Street, New York, the Mission of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the United Nations.

Around Talin stood a group of Secret Service bodyguards. Behind Sedov, clustered around the door that had already swallowed Genin and Vinnikov, stood a group of Soviet officials.

Talin said: ‘Why did you do it, Oleg? Why did you allow them to put a bomb in Dove?’

‘Because I was ordered to. And it so happens that I believe in a nuclear deterrent.’

‘Here on earth, perhaps, but not in space.’

‘That’s only an extension of its deterrent potential.’

Talin said quietly: ‘I know you better than that, Oleg. There was another reason, wasn’t there?’

‘Very well…’ Sedov’s voice faltered. ‘The mission was a proving flight for the bomb as well as Dove. Word reached me from Marshal Grigori Tarkovsky that if I didn’t agree to carry the bomb then not only would you never become commander of the shuttle fleet but you would never be sent into space again…’

Softly, Talin said: ‘You should have told me.’

‘And then you would have refused the mission.’

Awkwardly Talin stuck out his hand. ‘I was going to plead with you to stay. But there’s no hope, is there?’

Sedov took his hand. ‘None. You see I’m a Russian. I presumed you had the same blood; I was foolish. But I wish you good luck as I would have wished my…’

But the last word wouldn’t come and Sedov turned on his heel and walked briskly towards the waiting officials. Talin noticed that even in New York he had managed to clothe himself with a shabby coat and shoes that were down at heel. But he walked erect.

Talin turned and strode, surrounded by strangers, towards the waiting limousine. He turned once and stared across the street; but Sedov had disappeared and the door to the mission was closed.

As he climbed into the car a few flakes of snow peeled from the grey sky. He wondered if it was snowing in Moscow.

In a bar in Yokohama, the usual arrival port for passengers completing their Trans-Siberian Express journey to Japan by sea, a cropped-haired Mikhail Vlasov reverted to Robert Massey.

He looked haggard and exhausted as though he had been through a terrible ordeal but, thought the barman serving him a Japanese whisky, there was an air of achievement about him.

Massey swallowed the whisky, ordered another and made a collect call from the telephone at the end of the bar to a number at Padre Island.

‘I should be home tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But be prepared for a big change.’

‘Change, Roberto?’ fear visiting the happiness in Rosa’s voice.

‘I’ve shaved off my moustache,’ and, as he heard her laughing and crying, he turned away from the barman so that he couldn’t see that he was doing the same.

After a while she said: ‘I don’t know why you had to go, Roberto. But…’ She hesitated. ‘…was it very bad?’

Very bad? Since his escape from Tyuratam he had jumped the Trans-Siberian Express and hidden from the KGB gunmen in a pine forest with – 30 degrees of cold biting through his clothing; he had been shot – another flesh wound – in a midnight chase through the streets of Nakhodka, the rail terminal and port before the sea crossing to Japan; he had survived a knife fight on the ship, although the Department V operative who had doubted his KGB credentials hadn’t been so lucky.

‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘Not compared with what’s been achieved. You see,’ he explained, ‘we’re going to be together – and I’m going to return to space.’

The President of the United States swung his axe and said: ‘So, George, we did it. And if I’m not elected next fall then you and I will go into the movie business together.’

A breeze blowing across the President’s ranch from the Pacific ruffled Reynolds’ fine silver hair. ‘And make a film about lumberjacks?’

‘George, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, despite what everyone says you have got a sense of humour.’ The President leaned on his axe. ‘But we’ve achieved a lot, you and I. Before our spectacular the Russians were way ahead of us in the military application of space. Now, maybe, with world opinion turned against them we’ll have a chance to pull in front. Equality? It will never happen, George, it will never happen.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Reynolds said. ‘Suppose Vogel quits his job at Vandenberg this year – hypochondriacs often will themselves into wheel chairs. And suppose an agent cultivated by the Soviets takes over. Then the Kremlin would make the connection for real.’

The President began to speak but Reynolds held up his hand. ‘Now suppose we managed to persuade someone in the Russian computer terminal to work for us. Yashin, for instance – I’m told he believes computers should be used for peace not war. Could he not arrange American penetration of the Soviet military programme?’ Reynolds smiled faintly. ‘Then, Mr President, we would have equality. And that’s what deterrence is all about, isn’t it?’

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Derek Lambert was born in 1929, and served in the RAF for two and a half years, before becoming a foreign correspondent, travelling the world to exotic locations that later inspired his novels. His travels gave him first-hand knowledge of his material and his authentic tales of espionage made him a household name and bestselling author. He spent the later years of his life in Spain, where he died in 2001 at the age of 71.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FICTION

Angels in the Snow

The Kites of War

For Infamous Conduct

Grand Slam

The Red House

The Yermakov Transfer

Touch the Lion's Paw

The Great Land

The Saint Peter's Plot

The Memory Man

I, Said the Spy

Trance

The Red Dove

The Judas Code

The Golden Express

The Man Who Was Saturday

Vendetta

Chase

Triad

The Night and the City

The Gate and the Sun

The Banya

Horrorscope

Diamond Express

The Killing House

NON-FICTION

The Sheltered Days

Don't Quote Me But

And I Quote

Unquote

Just Like the Blitz

Spanish Lessons

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COPYRIGHT

Collins Crime Club

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First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1982

Copyright © Derek Lambert 1982

Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

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Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008268428

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Content

Derek Lambert
THE RED DOVE

PART ONE Scenario

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

PART TWO Treatment

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

PART THREE Script

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PART FOUR Première

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

KEEP READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

COPYRIGHT