Derek Lambert: The Red Dove

The President, staring at the TV picture of the Dove through exhausted eyes, said: ‘Because, Joe, I don’t know for sure whether there’s a bomb on board or whether there isn’t.’

‘The President of the Soviet Union said there wasn’t?’

‘Sure he did and I’ve always found him to be an honourable man. The trouble, Joe, is that he’s an old man. Like me,’ he added.

Dove had begun to respond more positively to the controls. Talin glanced to his left – and saw that Sedov was gripping his hand controller.

Sedov said: ‘I don’t know what happened up there but I do know that if we hit water the impact will break Dove up and the bomb could explode.’

Dove began to veer east across the Bay round Downtown Manhattan and the most famous skyline in the world.

At the rear of the flight deck Genin and Vinnikov were regaining consciousness, staring through the observation windows in bewilderment.

As Dove, guided by Sedov and Talin continued to turn, Sedov said: ‘You should build a shrine to that old Volga of mine, she’s showing us the way again.’ He looked down. ‘I figure we’re over Brooklyn now but where the hell are all the lights?’

‘There.’ Talin pointed ahead at Kennedy’s jewelled pathway. ‘The ones that matter. Can we make it?’

‘Radio would help. I had a radio in that Volga. Whenever it died on me I used to revive it like this.’ Sedov leaned back and hit the radio console with his fist.

A voice crackled into Talin’s headset: ‘Kennedy here… Kennedy here… do you read me, Dove?’

‘I read you,’ Talin said.

The runway at Kennedy Space Center is 15,000 feet long. The longest runway at Kennedy International Airport is 14,572 feet.

The Chief Controller at the airport’s ten-storey high tower, equipped to handle fifteen aircraft simultaneously, was a grizzled ex-pilot named Rooke.

Alternatively peering at the single blip on a radar-scope and staring out through the green glass window, he said: ‘A DC-9 lands at 130 mph, right? This baby’s coming in at 220 mph. If she overshoots and she has gotten a warhead on board then goodbye JFK. Goodbye Queens.’

Thousands of staff and passengers had sought shelter underground; others, figuring that if you were this close to a nuclear explosion it didn’t matter where you were, had massed on the observation platforms. Fire engines and ambulances hovered ready to pounce; a bomb disposal unit stood by.

Rooke’s deputy made an adjustment to his headset and said: ‘I have you at 2,000 feet, Dove.’

Ahead, closing, Talin could see the threshold markings on the illuminated strip; he could also see the fire engines and ambulances.

Sedov said: ‘Once again she’s all yours.’

Talin hauled up Dove’s nose. The altitude indicator still wasn’t working.

From the tower: ‘A thousand feet… eight hundred…’

At 300 feet Talin threw the switch to lower the landing gear and, praying, told Control.

A split-second pause. Then from Control: ‘Gear down.’ Followed by: ‘A hundred feet.’

He was over the runway.

‘Eighty… seventy…’ and finally: ‘Twenty…’

The 500 feet fixed-distance markings were streaming past. He was going to overshoot….

‘Okay down,’ he shouted.

The tyres squealed. Talin braked. Dove bounced. The wheels touched again. Talin could see the fire engines and ambulances starting to move. Another bounce. The tyres shrieked…

Dove stopped five feet from the end of the runway and stood there in the glare of the landing lights looking sublimely innocent.

But there was nothing innocent about the bomb that was defused and removed from her cargo bay later that day. It was calculated that it could have killed at least a million people.

News of Dove’s safe landing, her deadly cargo, Talin’s defection and the revelations about the gunships the Russians planned to build in space with their shuttle fleet dominated the media for several days.

Everywhere, that was, except inside the Communist bloc. But even there the propagandists couldn’t simply ignore the disappearance of their revolutionary shuttle and brief reports were circulated to the effect that, owing to a ‘computer malfunction’ Dove’s mission had been aborted. (The première of The Red Dove at the Bolshoi had already been cancelled owing to the ‘indisposition’ of Sonya Bragina; instead the first-night audience saw Swan Lake. )

On the day after Talin’s defection the Politburo held an emergency session in the Kremlin. The resignation, owing to ill health, of Grigori Tarkovsky was accepted and a younger man was appointed. He was only sixty-seven.

Nicolay Vlasov, anticipating a call for his own resignation, had taken the precaution of calling upon the President and several other Politburo members carrying with him what he euphemistically called their biographies; he also informed the President he had received a report from Los Angeles via the Soviet Embassy in Washington indicating that the situation was not completely irretrievable.

Vlasov was not asked to resign.

One day, he thought, as he left the building and gazed at the Kremlin’s golden cupolas riding high in the blue sky above the city’s quilt of snow, he would write a book called Survival. And when they read it perhaps his children would understand. Who knows, by that time he might have been promoted to the very summit of Soviet power; the latest report from the Kremlin Clinic on the President’s heart condition was ominous and with his dossiers on the other leaders to hand there was every reason to hope…

They faced each other outside a pale, clinical building at 136 East 67th Street, New York, the Mission of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the United Nations.

Around Talin stood a group of Secret Service bodyguards. Behind Sedov, clustered around the door that had already swallowed Genin and Vinnikov, stood a group of Soviet officials.

Talin said: ‘Why did you do it, Oleg? Why did you allow them to put a bomb in Dove?’

‘Because I was ordered to. And it so happens that I believe in a nuclear deterrent.’

‘Here on earth, perhaps, but not in space.’

‘That’s only an extension of its deterrent potential.’

Talin said quietly: ‘I know you better than that, Oleg. There was another reason, wasn’t there?’

‘Very well…’ Sedov’s voice faltered. ‘The mission was a proving flight for the bomb as well as Dove. Word reached me from Marshal Grigori Tarkovsky that if I didn’t agree to carry the bomb then not only would you never become commander of the shuttle fleet but you would never be sent into space again…’

Softly, Talin said: ‘You should have told me.’

‘And then you would have refused the mission.’

Awkwardly Talin stuck out his hand. ‘I was going to plead with you to stay. But there’s no hope, is there?’

Sedov took his hand. ‘None. You see I’m a Russian. I presumed you had the same blood; I was foolish. But I wish you good luck as I would have wished my…’

But the last word wouldn’t come and Sedov turned on his heel and walked briskly towards the waiting officials. Talin noticed that even in New York he had managed to clothe himself with a shabby coat and shoes that were down at heel. But he walked erect.

Talin turned and strode, surrounded by strangers, towards the waiting limousine. He turned once and stared across the street; but Sedov had disappeared and the door to the mission was closed.

As he climbed into the car a few flakes of snow peeled from the grey sky. He wondered if it was snowing in Moscow.

In a bar in Yokohama, the usual arrival port for passengers completing their Trans-Siberian Express journey to Japan by sea, a cropped-haired Mikhail Vlasov reverted to Robert Massey.