Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

Being half Japanese, the ethnic tensions inside the Soviet Union intrigued Palmer. He had no doubt that, like all empires before it, the Union would one day collapse. And he believed that the cracks were widening by the day inside its borders.

The phone on his desk rang. The Boston Globe. A visiting correspondent wanting an interview with the Ambassador. Palmer said he would see what he could do. He logged the inquiry.

Where the Kremlin made its mistake was in regarding true Soviets as the inhabitants of the fifteenth and largest republic and suppressing nationalist feeling elsewhere. Well, pretty soon the Russian Republic would no longer have an overall majority and pressing hard behind it would be all the other factions of the USSR led by the forty-five million Ukrainians. True, the Kremlin had tried to appease the Ukrainians by giving them some central powers but, in Palmer’s opinion, these were quite inadequate.

The OUN, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, was still active despite KGB attempts to exterminate it and it was to their ranks that Palmer’s mind turned as he searched for a replacement for Brasack.

Next to Plesetsk, Russia’s military space centre, Kapustin Yar, the test launching site for ABMs, and Saryshagan the missile base on the Chinese border where they were testing charged particle beam weapons, Tyuratam and Leninsk were the most difficult places in the Soviet Union into which to infiltrate an agent.

In the file in his mind Palmer ran through the list of OUN agents who also worked for the CIA. It was a formality. Already he knew there was only one man for the job but he hesitated to nominate him.

His real name was Rybak. Years ago he had assumed another identity and had once been Olympic middle-heavyweight weightlifting champion and was therefore nachalstvo, privileged. This meant that he could travel far more freely than most of his fellow countrymen, an inestimable asset if you were engaged in espionage.

By profession, Rybak was an electrical aeronautical engineer specialising in Yakovlek jets. Yak-42s had begun to fly into Leninsk. So, with his nachalstvo, there was a chance that Rybak could get himself posted to Rocket City.

Rybak, Palmer reflected, had a lot going for him. He also had a lot running against him. Although he was grossly fat he was still immensely strong and whenever he was engaged on a clandestine operation a body seemed to surface, ribcage crushed as though it had been embraced by a bear.

Palmer needn’t have worried about the immediate transfer of Rybak to Leninsk: on 12 December Talin, Massey and ten other cosmonauts and mission specialists were transferred to Moscow for medical examinations at the Institute of Aviation Medicine.

Before he left, Talin inspected the three Doves that had arrived by rail from the Tupolev factory at Voronezh. One squatted wingless in an annexe; the second was stretched out on a ramp in the Processing Facility, the third was suspended inside the shell of the fifteen-storey vehicle assembly building ready to be joined to the giant external tank and solid rocket boosters which would be shed as she escaped from the pull of the earth.

The Dove suspended in the assembly building was the shuttle Talin would shortly fly – rumour had it on 23 February, Armed Forces Day; the bird on the ramp was the one in which Massey, as an observer, would later accompany him; the wingless cripple was scheduled to fly in the summer.

Talin showed his ID, waited while he was checked out electronically, then climbed into the flight-deck of the hanging Dove.

He sat in the Pilot seat, scanned the dials, touched the hand controller; then he moved to the other controls that would concern Sedov and himself while they were in orbit. As before, the cargo bay would be Sedov’s responsibility.

Indisputably, this mission was more important than the previous maiden flight. They would, for instance, be testing a space arm that could flex its metal muscles and reach out from the cargo bay to deliver the components of stations being constructed in space. To do this Sedov would have to turn the Dove upside down so that the instruments in the bay faced earth; but that was no problem because when you were weightless in space it didn’t matter which way up you sat or stood.

The Americans had already successfully tested a similar arm: the Soviet version was far more sophisticated, designed to build in space.

It must have been the fitting for the arm that had struck Talin as out of place at Voronezh. He climbed out of the flight-deck and examined the cargo bay. There was an additional fitting there. Perhaps that had been it. But it was odd. Frowning, he walked out into the daylight.

Far away, on the other side of the space centre, a conventional rocket screamed, bloody-tailed, into the air.

They were married at the Palace of Weddings in Moscow’s Leningrad Prospect.

Sonya wore a white taffeta gown made by the Bolshoi costumiers. Her parents flew from their dacha on Lake Ladoga near the Finnish border; Talin’s mother sent a cable from Khabarovsk – she was sixty-nine and 4,000 miles was a long way to travel.

The sun shone, fresh snow sparkled.

Theirs was the thirty-second wedding that day and they were married by the Director of the Palace, a matronly woman wearing a purple dress. With them at the ceremony were the best man, Oleg Sedov – accepted without complaint by Sonya – and the bridesmaid, a member of the Bolshoi Corps de Ballet, a girl with flirtatious eyes named Anna.

As they entered the lofty wedding chamber a tape of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 poured from two loudspeakers. On the Director’s desk stood a bust of Lenin and a vase of pink and white carnations flown in from Georgia. When they stopped in front of her desk the music stopped and the Director told them that the State had empowered her to marry them. Talin didn’t care who had empowered her. Nor did he care that they were being married on an assembly line. Sonya looked beautiful, a dusty shaft of sunlight finding the fragility and not the strength in her face, her fine blonde hair loose on her shoulders. She was his and he was hers and these moments were theirs, outside the thrall of the State.

Sedov nudged him. The Director had finished her homily, there were papers to be signed.

Then the Director handed them two gold rings. He and Sonya exchanged them and he looked into her eyes and saw love.

The Director smiled for the first time. She talked to them about sharing. The sunshine felt warm. He could smell the carnations. She pronounced them man and wife. They kissed. As they walked out of the chamber taped music flowed again, When the Saints Come Marching In.

Then more Tchaikovsky as another couple prepared to go in.

In the foyer they drank champagne and Talin kissed the bridesmaid and Sedov kissed Sonya. Sedov, Talin thought, looked touchingly proud.

A Zil limousine festooned with streamers, a plastic bear on its bonnet, took them to the Aragvi for the reception. There were two hundred guests from the Arts and from Aerospace present. Among them Robert Massey who congratulated them; Sonya received him coolly and, fleetingly, it occurred to Talin that she had transferred her hostility from Sedov to the American.

The Press were there in strength. The interviews went on interminably. Finally when a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda asked Talin whether he thought he and Sonya had been united by ‘ideological concord’ Talin snapped: ‘No, by sex,’ and was led firmly away by Sedov.

As they cut the cake, surmounted by a ballerina doll, the restaurant was lit with electronic camera flashes.

Then, as though a starter’s pistol had been fired, the guests turned to the food and drink. Sweet champagne, vodka and brandy and a larder of zakuski – smoked salmon, black and red caviar, salted herring, salami, chicken, gherkins, black bread, bowls of beetroots. It disappeared at astonishing speed. ‘Locusts,’ Sedov remarked.