THE RED DOVE

Derek Lambert

COPYRIGHT

Collins Crime Club

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1982

Copyright © Derek Lambert 1982

Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008268428

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2018 ISBN: 9780008268411

Version: 2017-12-20

RED ALERT!

Dove lurched violently to one side when it was seventy-five miles above the earth.

A beam weapon, Talin guessed, gripping the hand controller. 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. And it was then that Talin 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 …

DEDICATION

For Frank and Marsha Taylor,

friends and advisers

EPIGRAPH

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

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

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.