Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

Vlasov wanted details of an imminent US rocket launch that could subsequently be sabotaged through the computers. If the sabotage succeeds, thought Vlasov, then I will be persuaded that the plan may work.

And what a plan! There had never been anything like it. Russia – and Communism – would rule the heavens and thus the world.

Again Sergei Yashin was chosen to steal the information. He was transferred from Moscow to Leninsk and allocated a small apartment which he stocked with enough food to withstand a six-month siege.

Vlasov didn’t fly to Leninsk for the second operation. There was nothing he could contribute and he had to attend a meeting of the Administrative Organs Department which imagined it controlled the KGB. Instead he dispatched Yuri Peslyak and Viktor Moroz, Director of the First Chief Directorate. Broadly speaking Moroz was responsible for clandestine operations overseas, Peslyak for domestic surveillance. As Massey’s scheme was open-ended both had responsibilities.

The link-up was timed for midday. Both Peslyak and Moroz took the 7 a.m. jet from Domodyedove. They sat near the flight deck, screened from the other passengers by curtains; behind the curtains, on the passenger side, sat two KGB guards.

Moroz, small, plump and fastidious, was in ebullient mood. News had been coming in all night of further mass demonstrations in the West in favour of disarmament. The mood, dormant for several years, had been re-activated by Moroz’s agents in 1981 and encouraged to erupt at carefully calculated intervals ever since.

The operation hadn’t presented too many difficulties: idealism and fear were soft targets for manipulation. In fact Moroz had nothing but admiration for the dreams of youth on the march and felt that it was sad that the young crusaders had no idea that they had been manipulated, having no conception of the subtleties of deception.

Sad it might be, but the collective human condition was even sadder. Naïvety was cynicism’s chopping block and if one alliance decided to give the lead in disarmament then the other would be sorely tempted to take advantage of such trust. Far better in the ground scheme of things to let the West take the initiative.

Moroz ordered coffee and Georgian brandy from the stewardess assigned to the two of them and pointed at the headlines in Red Star. WESTERN YOUTH ORDERS CAPITALIST MASTERS ‘LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS’. ‘A satisfactory exercise. Even you must concede that, Yuri.’

Peslyak grunted. ‘Satisfactory until some idiot destroys it all. Like that submarine commander who surfaced in Swedish waters in 1981 with nuclear warheads on board.’

‘Come now, don’t let your jealousy show.’ Moroz poured the brandy into his coffee. ‘You look after your dissidents and your Jews and your ethnic minorities while I take care of the globe. Speaking of minorities, I read the other day that soon we true Russians will be a minority in the Soviet Union. If you don’t watch out, Yuri, they’ll be calling the Muslims to prayer in the Kremlin by the end of the century.’

Moroz thought Peslyak was vulgar. Peslyak, he knew, derided his small stature. This bothered Moroz not at all; Stalin had been a small man.

Peslyak said: ‘If we bring off this computer penetration neither of us need worry. Unless there are more balls-ups.’

‘Such as?’

‘Brasack. He should never have been allowed to enter the Soviet Union. The SSD is under your control, isn’t it, Viktor?’

Moroz said calmly: ‘And once inside the Soviet Union he should have been detected immediately and liquidated. Instead he was permitted to get into a swimming pool with Massey. A swimming pool! The killing was a little… melodramatic, wasn’t it, Yuri?’

Peslyak stared at the pastures of cloud below. He rubbed his fleshy nose and smiled faintly. ‘It must have scared the shit out of Massey,’ he said.

The 11–86 began to descend towards the clouds. Mist swarmed past the windows. Then below them were the pygmy hangars, launch-pads, gantries and access roads of Tyuratam and the toy-bricks of Leninsk.

Sergei Yashin wasn’t hungry: he was ravenous.

It was 11.55 a.m., five minutes before he was due to make contact with Vandenberg, and his stomach was whining, grovelling, for food.

It had been bad enough when he was transmitting from Moscow. But here at Tyuratam his appetite was razored by the knowledge that he was at the core of Soviet expansionism. When micro chips could have been put to so many wonderful uses…

True this terminal wasn’t quite as old as the antique in Moscow. But that was only because it was being used for the colonisation of space.

Onion soup followed by Chicken Kiev as tender as butter.

Yashin’s stomach rumbled. His taste buds popped.

The other three men gathered around the terminal stared at him coldly. Peslyak as roughly brutal as an old-style commissar; Moroz even more forbidding with his venom so neatly packaged; Massey, a man whose features had settled into contradictions.

Massey said: ‘One minute to go.’

Yashin’s fingers trembled on the keys.

Massey handed him a number and said: ‘Go,’ and Yashin fed in Vogel’s terminal identification and, when this was acknowledged, the pass number handed to him by Massey.

As on the previous occasion there was a moment’s pause, presumably while Vogel checked the number. (Numbers were transmitted in orthodox figures but relayed by computers in binary form – the two-digit system using only ones and noughts – and translated back into orthodox notation at the terminal.)

While they waited Moroz observed: ‘If this works then anything’s possible. We could rob Fort Knox.’

Massey said: ‘You can be sure devious minds are already working on it. But so’s Fort Knox.’

‘Is it really as simple as this?’

Massey shook his head. ‘Far from it, there are a whole lot of safeguards. The active file for one. That alerts the people at the other end to the fact that a record, a unit of data, has been referred to. Our trump card is that the guy in charge is on our side.’

Figures materialised on the screen. Yashin looked up. ‘We’ve got the terminal identification for the day, the key code and the data code.’

Moroz handed Yashin two computer print-outs. Old-fashioned ones, Yashin noted. ‘This is what we want to know,’ Moroz told him.

Yashin glanced at the print-outs. Then began to feed the questions into the terminal.

Ten mintues later they had the answers. In seven days’ time the Americans were going to test-fire a modified Minuteman ICBM over the Western Test Range which stretched 4,900 miles across the Pacific from Vandenberg.

Massey said: ‘It couldn’t be better – one day after the next contact.’

As they left the control room Yashin heard Peslyak say to Moroz: ‘Has it occurred to you that we could divert that rocket to fall on Washington?’

Trembling, Yashin switched off the current and hurried towards the canteen, accompanied by the guards who these days never left his side.

Nine thousand five hundred miles away Daniel Vogel turned to Carl Wonner and said: ‘So far so good.’

Six days later Sergei Yashin, watched by Massey, Moroz, Peslyak and, this time, Vlasov, began his INPUT.

They had raided Vandenberg’s smart machine, now they were going to hoodwink it.

If the connection was made satisfactorily counterfeit data would be fed into Vandenberg’s central processor and relayed to the computer in the Minuteman’s launch-control centre in a blast-proof capsule fifty feet below ground.

According to Soviet Intelligence the underground silo housing the sixty-foot long, 70,000 lb Minutemen would be covered by electronically-operated sliding closures four feet thick. And the control room, serving ten launchers, would be guarded by officers of the Strategic Air Command.