Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

Steam rose thickly from the warm water. Like the fog in those old movies about London, the Hunter thought. Heads wearing bathing caps bobbed like corks in its swirling depths. High above he could see snow falling and melting at the frontiers of the steam.

He removed his robe and dived immediately so that no one would notice the knife. Surfacing, he began to search for his prey.

He passed Massey who looked at him without recognition. A pretty girl and a muscular young man were flirting boisterously, the girl’s shrieks and laughter muffled by the steam. He swam with a slow, steady crawl, head turning from side to side.

He finally spotted Brasack treading water in the deep end. He must have lost sight of Massey but he obviously knew that the American always spent exactly ten minutes in the pool.

The Hunter changed to the breast stroke so that he could approach Brasack more silently, peering across the surface of the water. Two youths splashed past racing each other on their backs. A fat man belly-flopped from the side, flesh smacking water.

Now Brasack was alone.

The Hunter approached to within five yards. Brasack spotted him, frowned, then smiled his recognition. The smile said: ‘We shared that stupidity about the bird.’

The Hunter lowered one hand beneath the water and slipped the knife from the black rubber sheath, feeling both its razored and saw-toothed edges with the ball of his thumb.

He raised the other hand in a gesture of recognition, at the same time propelling himself forward with his legs.

When he was within striking distance the expression on Brasack’s face changed. This is no friendly approach, the new expression said. Excellent. The Hunter liked to see fear on a victim’s face before he killed.

He was gorged with excitement.

He struck to the far left of Brasack’s rib cage knowing that the curve of the blade would slice it into the heart.

Brasack’s face registered surprise then, as he saw his blood staining the water, primeval terror. His scream lost itself in the steam.

The Hunter pulled the knife across Brasack’ chest with a sawing motion; the shark’s teeth on the blade cut through the sternum.

Brasack opened his mouth once more to scream but died with the sound drowned in his throat. As he died the Hunter reached his climax.

When Brasack’s friendly face submerged beneath the blood-stained water he swam rapidly to the side of the pool.

On his way to the storeroom he heard a woman scream.

Within minutes he was dried and changed. Outside the pool he took up a position beside an ice-cream vendor – ice-cream in this weather! – and tried to anticipate how long it would be before Massey emerged. Half an hour? Longer, he decided as a police car skidded to a halt outside the pool. Everyone would be questioned, many detained. A foreigner, an American at that, would attract more than his share of suspicion. But he could always call his KGB contacts. Vlasov’s name would make the homicide detectives twitch a bit, the Hunter thought with a smile. He had been told Massey was an intelligent man… Yes, he would call the KGB. Half an hour hadn’t been such a bad estimate. Then he would be able to resume surveillance. Meanwhile all I can do is wait. When my time comes, the Hunter mused, it will be while I’m waiting. He bought an ice-cream.

It was Oleg Sedov who told Talin about the murder. As usual nothing had been reported in the Press. You only read about crime when Party or State were publicising an offender’s punishment as a deterrent. Usually the crime was black-marketeering. Rarely, if ever, murder. According to Sedov this was defensible: violence was contagious and in the West it was spread by publicity. Talin believed that it could also be encouraged by suppression.

‘Do you know why he was killed?’ Talin asked.

He increased his pace across a field of snow. They had been cross-country skiing for two hours. He felt tired but exhilarated. The sky was blue, jewels glittered in the white expanse stretching unbroken to the horizon.

Sedov caught up with him. ‘The police haven’t the slightest idea. Brasack was a journalist from East Berlin. Brilliant apparently. He was writing an article about Tyuratam and Leninsk – restricted, of course – for circulation in all the Warsaw Pact countries.’

‘Perhaps,’ Talin ventured, watching an eagle swoop across the sky, ‘he discovered something that he wasn’t supposed to know about.’ From where the eagle was flying he and Sedov in their crimson parkas would look like drops of blood on the snow.

‘Then he wouldn’t have written about it. In any case the article would have been censored.’

‘Wasn’t he accompanied by a guide? Someone from Intourist or Novosti or the Ministry?’

‘Only at Tyuratam. He was an experienced man.’ Sedov pointed at a cluster of pine trees isolated in the snow. ‘We’ll stop there.’ He accelerated, leaving Talin behind.

Beneath the trees he unbuckled the ungainly cross-country skis. From the pocket of his parka he took a leather-covered flask. He handed it to Talin who tipped it into his mouth. The vodka slid down his throat, exploded in his stomach. He shivered pleasurably, handed the flask back to Sedov.

‘So,’ he said, ‘when do we fly Dove II?’

‘In the New Year. And I have news for you, hence the vodka.’ He held up the flask. ‘We’re celebrating, Nicolay, you and I.’

Talin looked at him questioningly.

‘You have been appointed commander of the whole shuttle fleet. You take over after Dove II’s inaugural flight. Which, incidentally, will be my last excursion into space.’

Stunned, Talin reached for the flask. Started to speak but choked on the firewater. Finally he said: ‘I’m very honoured,’ conscious of the triteness of the words. He cleared his throat. ‘But what about you, Oleg?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll still be there on the ground. There are a lot of new cosmonauts in the shuttle programme. I have my own particular responsibilities.’

Reminders that Sedov was jointly employed by the Ministry of Defence and the KGB, always came as a slight shock to Talin.

‘But,’ said Sedov, ‘they haven’t thought up a new title for me yet. The Grandfather of Space, perhaps.’ Sedov was forty-eight. ‘I am very happy for you, Nicolay.’

If Sedov’s son had been born alive he would now be twenty, thirteen years younger than me, Talin thought.

‘And I’m very grateful to you, Oleg. You must have had a lot to do with this.’

‘Very little.’ Sedov’s voice was gruff. ‘Now, one last drop of rocket fuel and then we must get back to Leninsk. When is the wedding?’ he asked as they took to the snow once more.

‘We haven’t fixed a date yet. But Sonya’s flying here tomorrow with a Bolshoi company for a trial performance of this new space opera of theirs. I’ll let you know,’ he said. ‘And the First Deputy Commander in Chief of the Soviet Air Force,’ he added.

It was the first sour note of the day.

The second came as they neàred the stark outlines of Leninsk silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. The hollows in the snow were filled with shadows, the cold had acquired a brooding quality.

Sedov said: ‘There was one thing I forgot to tell you about Brasack’s murder. Your friend Robert Massey was in the pool at the time.’

Friend?

The following morning Oleg Sedov flew back to Moscow. The flight took three hours. By 11 a.m. he was in a taxi taking him to the belt of forest twenty miles to the west of the city where the crème de la crème of Muscovite nachalstvo, the élite, have their weekend homes. The President and other Kremlin leaders, academicians, poets, authors (for a while Solzhenitsyn lived in a cottage here), KGB generals, Party theorists… Here, among the cathedral-quiet pine trees overlooking the Moscva River, these exalted personages enjoy their rewards – magnificent dachas built in anything from clapboard to Stalinist yellow brick – for their contributions to a Marxist-Leninist society.