Читать книгу The Red Dove - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHe 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.
