Derek Lambert: The Red Dove

His mind cleared as the CPB site materialised in the falling snow. Its fortifications were only partly constructed, as though the beam weapons had been rushed here prematurely, poised for a declaration of war.

Weapons… an anachronism. Massey didn’t know too much about CPBs but he understood that you couldn’t bracket such devices, once the property of science fiction comics, with orthodox guns or even nuclear missiles.

CPBs, which would out-date military lasers even before they were perfected, were powered by generators that converted explosive bursts into electricity that dispatched beams charged with particles such as electrons and protons at the speed of light.

Blithely, the Americans had long believed that the Russians couldn’t aim them into space; but they had reckoned without the adaptation of magnetic mirrors which could bend the beams on to their target.

The CPB’s overwhelming asset, however, was that so far no one had come up with an effective counter-measure.

The sentries guarding the makeshift, sand-bagged entrance seemed to be disturbed; by now Massey recognised their confusion as the state of mind induced in a totalitarian state by the arrival of a VIP. An Army staff car, an old-fashioned, khaki-brown Chaika, with a driver at the wheel, was parked outside.

Robert Massey parked the Zhiguli and Major Mikhail Vlasov of the KGB identified himself to one of the sentries. Robert Massey marched into the compound.

He walked down a corridor, concrete walls still wet. Builders’ materials lay in heaps on the floor. At the end of the corridor stood a Red Army captain, bareheaded, wearing flak jacket and webbing belt with a holster containing a pistol.

Hand on the flap of the holster, the captain told Massey to identify himself. He glanced at the ID, handed it back, one thumb unbuttoning the flap of the holster. ‘No one goes in there,’ he snapped. ‘No one.’

‘But I—’

‘If you knew who my orders came from you wouldn’t argue, Comrade Major.’

‘Well look at this,’ Massey said, casually slipping his hand into the pocket of his topcoat and producing the automatic, ‘and now that you’ve seen it turn around. Now!’ jabbing the barrel of the gun into the captain’s flak jacket.

As he turned round Massey hit him beneath the ear with the butt of the automatic.

Gun in hand, he burst through the door. Two men, one a Red Army general, the other a civilian, were crouched over a console studded with dials.

He shouted to them to stand away from the console. The civilian stepped back but the general lunged at a black button at one side of the dials.

Massey shot him through the chest as his finger pressed down. The building trembled and Massey knew that the beam weapon had been fired but, hopefully, in the panic, without accuracy.

The civilian, a pale young man wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, stood motionless staring at the body of the general. Down the corridor came the sound of pounding footsteps.

With the gun Massey broke the glass in a window and jumped through it. In front of him was a half-finished brick wall with a steel door leading through it. He tried the door, it opened.

Beyond was a space fifty yards wide cleared of snow. In the middle stood a sloping concrete platform; mounted on it was what looked like an elephantine telephoto lens; one end was attached to a power unit, the other pointed towards the sky.

Beyond was another wall and another door. Massey sprinted round the death ray projector and crouched beside the door. He tried the door-handle, the door opened.

He took the fragmentation grenade from his pocket and drew the ring as the two sentries who had been guarding the entrance burst through the door on the other side of the CPB. He released the lever, paused, then, as the sentries started across the space, tossed it on to the concrete firing pad under the cylinder.

He ducked through the door and slammed it shut. The explosion shook the wall; debris thudded against it. When it was over he opened the door; the two soldiers lay among the wreckage; the CPB, hurled from the firing pad by the explosion, lay on the ground, its barrel ruptured.

If a grenade dating back to World War I could wreck space age weaponry then there was still some sort of hope, Massey thought as he slammed the door behind him.

Ahead lay another walled area, empty. The door this time was to his left. He opened it; outside was a path between two concrete outhouses. He turned left at the end, skirting the main compound in the direction of the entrance.

The entrance was unguarded.

He ran through it, spinning round and falling as a bullet hit him in the arm. As he fell he fired at the driver of the staff car crouched behind the bonnet. The driver reared up and fell across the bonnet, blood pouring from his shattered jaw.

With one hand Massey pulled him off the bonnet. On the ground was a greasy rag that the driver had been using before the shooting started; Massey used it to wipe his blood off the bonnet.

Then he climbed into the driving seat and headed for the secondary exit at the far end of the space centre.

He stopped once and took off his topcoat. In the glove compartment he found some cotton wadding and a flask of vodka. He poured the vodka on to the wound gasping as it burned; he decided it was only a flesh wound; he pressed the wadding on to it and, using his teeth and his free hand, managed to tie a handkerchief round it. Then he put on his coat and drove off again.

‘Now, Comrade Major, we shall see what sort of stuff you’re made of,’ he told himself.

Dove lurched violently to one side when it was seventy-five miles above the earth.

A beam weapon, Talin guessed, gripping the hand controller – it was the only answer they had left. Not a direct hit but it must have passed within a few feet of the fuselage.

Dove began to turn on her side, shuddering.

Talin fought the manual controls. Dove settled again, then suddenly dipped her nose.

Talin pulled, coaxed, shouted; but his arms were as heavy as lead as the earth pulled at them and his reactions were as slow as a drunk’s. Gradually Dove raised her beautiful, aristocratic nose; Talin grinned fiercely, loving her. And it was then that he noticed that the red light beside the unconscious body of Sedov was glowing red. The bomb in the cargo bay must have been primed by shock waves from the beam.

Down plunged the Dove. With enough nuclear power inside her, Talin thought, to devastate a city. His brain froze; his head slumped forward.

When he came to he could see a curvature of land below. Snow-capped mountains falling away to plains. He concentrated on the clock nestling among the sophisticated dials: it was 1410 hours Moscow time.

If his calculations were correct he should touch down at Kennedy Space Center in twenty minutes. But he had no idea if his calculations were correct because the dials, air-speed and altitude indicators, artificial horizon… all had gone crazy.

But in any case could he now risk putting Dove down on land? His mind leapt out of its icy lethargy: it was out of the question. He had two alternatives: to fire the new engines designed to put her back into orbit or to ditch in the ocean and hope divers would salvage her if the bomb didn’t explode.

If he went back into orbit, assuming that the subsidiary engines hadn’t been damaged, then he would be hit again by another beam and the whole operation would have been for nothing.

No, he would overshoot Kennedy Space Center and ditch far out to sea where, if the bomb exploded with the force of the impact, relatively little harm would be done.

Ahead the air glowed with heat, 2,500 degrees of it. If the beam had loosened the protective tiles then they would fly off and Dove would burn up.