Derek Lambert: The Red Dove

The Hunter didn’t attempt to follow Massey into the firing room. Instead he parked the white Volga, provided by the KGB in Leninsk, fifty yards down the access road and settled down to wait. He checked his knife, running his thumb lightly down its saw-toothed blade, and the TK automatic in the pocket of his hooded, fur-lined hunting jacket, fashioned in white to blend with the snow.

Like any other bureaucratic structure addled with delegated responsibility, the KGB tended to lose direction in an emergency and the order issued at 12.24 by Vlasov to ‘get Massey’ hadn’t reached the Hunter on his radio set until 12.48.

Get Massey. It was almost too good to be true. The Hunter licked his lips. Then the qualifying message reached him. ‘Get him alive.’

‘Message understood,’ the Hunter said resignedly into the hand-set.

As he waited it began to snow.

Which suited Rybak who, parked a further fifty yards down the road in a blue Moskvich, was beginning to feel conspicuous, although, having been enlisted to help cure the Proton booster, he was entitled to be there.

A voice came over the Hunter’s radio.

‘Do you have Massey?’

‘Located in Launch Control.’

‘Take him as soon as possible.’

Other cosmonauts were leaving the complex, heading on foot for the canteen. Rather than risk a chase and a shoot-out among the consoles in the firing room the Hunter decided to overpower Massey as he emerged.

He inched the Volga closer to the complex and, leaving the engine running, crossed the road on foot. As he waited beside the entrance, he was an almost-invisible predator.

But not to the Ukrainian who had also approached closer and was peering through the switching blades of the Moskvich’s windshield.

At 1 p.m. when TV and radio transmission was curtailed everyone left in the firing room suspected that something had gone terribly wrong. Replies to queries through direct channels to Yevpatoriya were evasive. One reply, however, clinched it: ‘Dove has broken contact.’

So it was on. Now, Massey thought, you’re on your own.

He was about to head for the rest rooms when a young cosmonaut who had been standing beside him said: ‘If Dove looks as if it’s going to land anywhere outside the Soviet bloc then God help Nicolay Talin.’

Massey paused. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘No way is the Kremlin going to allow it to land in the West.’

With a terrible presentiment assembling, Massey asked: ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Why, they’ll hit it with a beam weapon. A CPB – they’ve assembled them over there,’ pointing through a window. ‘About five kilometres…’ stopping in mid-sentence. ‘Hey, you’re the American, aren’t you?’

But Massey was gone, hurrying towards the rest rooms.

At 1.20 a clean-shaven man with a bald head emerged from Launch Control and stood for a moment staring into the snow that had thickened into a blizzard. Then he put on his fur shapka and, head tucked into the driving flakes, headed for the car lot at the end of the access road.

According to the Hunter’s calculations there should still be one cosmonaut left inside. Massey. But now he had to make sure. Showing his ID to the guard he entered the lobby.

A cosmonaut he recognised walked briskly across the marble floor. It wasn’t Massey.

The Hunter stopped abruptly. There had been something about the bald man who had just left. A spot of blood on his clean-shaven lip. Clean shaven? Just shaven!

The Hunter outwitted by his prey. He turned, pushed past the guard, sprinted across the road to the white Volga. Tyres skidding, he made a U-turn and accelerated towards the car lot.

The Ukrainian gave him a second then followed in the blue Moskvich.

Both of them saw the black Zhiguli pass them on the other side of the road heading in the opposite direction, Massey crouched at the wheel.

The Volga slewed round and, swerving wildly, took off again. Followed by the Moskvich.

A hundred yards past Launch Control the road forked. There was no sign of the Zhiguli and the falling snow was a white wall. From the glove compartment the Hunter took a map of the space centre. The fork to the right led to the assembly bays; the fork to the left to nowhere.

The Hunter took the left fork because it was at nowhere that the charged particle beam weapons had been assembled.

While the three cars converged on the CPB site Dove was hurtling towards the entry interface of the earth’s atmosphere approximately half way round the world from its chosen landing strip at Kennedy Space Center. Talin had calculated that this manoeuvre would take eighteen minutes thirty-three seconds.

He had, he believed, estimated the entire defection with precision, choosing an orbit that would give the West maximum tracking time. Once inside the earth’s atmosphere he intended to re-establish radio contact, but this time with Mission Control at Houston, Texas.

Inevitably he would be stripped of many of the safeguards programmed into the computers. And he had an H-bomb in the cargo bay; the cargo bay was on top of Dove – a pilot would have to turn her upside down to discharge it – and if the bomb wasn’t primed, he comforted himself, it was quite harmless.

The Volga drew level with the Zhiguli a mile past Launch Control. With a delicate nudge it pushed it off the road into deep snow.

The little black car butted its way a couple of yards to the right before stopping, engine still running, a buffer of snow in front of the bonnet.

Cautiously, gun in hand, knife in belt, the Hunter approached it. Massey had cracked his head on the windscreen. He was unconscious, his shapka had fallen from his head and there was a trickle of blood on his shaven skull.

The Hunter stuck the TK back in the pocket of his hunting jacket and pulled open the door. The sound of the Moskvich pulling up behind him was drowned by the noise of the Zhiguli’s still-running engine.

The Hunter reached into the car and grabbed Massey by the lapels of his coat.

As two arms encircled him from behind.

He could feel the strength and the girth of the man and he said: ‘Rybak’ before the air was expelled from his lungs.

A rib cracked.

Another snapped; he heard the sound inside him.

To start with there wasn’t any pain. Until the Ukrainian increased the pressure and more ribs broke, digging into the Hunter’s lungs.

With his first gasp of pain blood sprayed into his mouth and, peering through the falling snow, seeing the taiga, he remembered how cornered prey had fought back, snarling and lunging and he thought: ‘This isn’t any way to die.’

He went limp, letting his body slump forward. The Ukrainian relaxed his grip. When the Hunter turned, straightening up at the same time, the knife was in his hand.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a fraction of a second before the Ukrainian squeezed again, buckling the Hunter’s rib cage and driving the saw-edged knife into his own heart.

When Massey regained consciousness he went first to the two bodies, sprinkled with bloodstained snow. Finding that they were both dead, he returned to the Zhiguli and tried to back it onto the road. But the wheels merely spun, spitting out snow.

He returned to the bodies and removed the Hunter’s white hunting jacket and, after pulling out the knife, the Ukrainian’s parka. He placed one garment beneath each driving wheel.

The wheels spun, gripped and, with a jerk, the car was back on the road. Before heading into the blizzard he peered into the driving mirror and wiped the blood from his shaven scalp. Then he replaced his shapka.

His head ached, he felt sick and, for a moment, he imagined he was in space.