Derek Lambert: The Red Dove

It would be pleasant to believe that Tarkovsky thought in terms of deterrents but it would be misleading. Tarkovsky was the personification of Russia’s national complex: she had been attacked and betrayed so often that her reasoning was always belligerent. And who could blame men such as Tarkovsky who had witnessed the German treachery in 1941? No, Tarkovsky would interpret the flicker of a presidential eyelid as ‘hostile posturing’ and, from a position of indisputable superiority, would advise a pre-emptive strike.

And what a strike!

The President advanced a pawn with minimal hopes that he might be able to queen it. Perhaps Tarkovsky, too, was tiring. Pacemaker versus metal plate.

‘At least we agree,’ Tarkovsky said, eyeing his depleted black army, ‘that whoever commands space commands the world. That, with space stations and gunships armed with beam weapons, Man is entering an era more revolutionary than anything it has experienced before.’

A Malev jet taking off from Sheremetyevo airport climbed steeply into the blue sky.

‘It’s ironic.’ the President remarked. ‘that Man can’t even share infinity.’

Tarkovsky shrugged. ‘Whoever rules infinity rules the world. If we don’t take command then America will.’

‘But our first objective must be peaceful co-existence.’

‘Through strength,’ Tarkovsky countered.

The Minister of Defence moved his rook. A mistake. He should have been tightening his meagre defences in preparation for a counter attack. But a man’s true character, stripped of pretence, was always revealed on the chess board. Tarkovsky wanted to be Minister of War, not Defence.

But what of my true character? There it was on the black and white squares. Calculated calm. To the Soviet Union he had brought stability after the twenty-five blood-stained years of Stalin’s reign and the eleven erratic years of Krushchev’s rule.

True, a housewife still had to queue for a loaf of bread but she had a home and she had security and she had a future. That will be my epitaph, decided the President. He Brought Stability. But, of course, Tarkovsky was right: it had been achieved through strength. Military might and political guile.

But when he had taken office he had never contemplated extending his authority into the cosmos. Certainly not beyond the limits of the Space Race. But now, as Tarkovsky had said, Man was poised to colonise space, to inhabit the heavens. Mother Russia had to be as strong in the firmament as she was on Earth.

But am I too old to grasp what has to be done? And is Tarkovsky’s solution the only practical answer?

Tarkovsky cleared his throat.

The President moved another pawn, consolidating. The flamboyant move with the bishop had been a mistake; Tarkovsky’s swagger was infectious.

Tarkovsky reached across the board. They exchanged pawns.

The President said: ‘It’s also ironic that your proposition involves the fleet of Dove space shuttles that we’re building.’

Tarkovsky’s grey eyes appraised the President across the chequered board. ‘Not ironic, Comrade President, deliberate.’ He moved his rook again. ‘Check.’

The President blocked the threat with his bishop, at the same time putting the black rook in jeopardy. And, as Tarkovsky withdrew it, said: ‘I suggest,’ by which he meant order, ‘that you personally draw up a plan of campaign and present it to me. Have you discussed this with anyone else?’

Tarkovsky shook his head.

‘Then don’t.’

Tarkovsky’s hand strayed to the area of skin on his scalp covering the metal plate, a sure sign that he was tired.

The President leaned back in his chair. ‘A draw, Grigori?’ He was tired too.

‘I think I am in a stronger position.’

‘I beg to differ. There’s a long haul ahead but eventually we’ll fight each other to a standstill.’

Stubbornly, Tarkovsky brooded over the board. A gesture, the President guessed, from an old warrior who would never have settled for a draw with the Germans. But finally he accepted the President’s offer. ‘Well played, Comrade President.’

‘Perhaps we both learned from the game.’

‘Perhaps. I feel that I played too cautiously.’

The President sighed: the lesson surely was that Tarkovsky had played too rashly.

When he got back to his apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospect in the centre of Moscow the President summoned to his presence Nicolay Vlasov, the Chairman of the KGB, who lived in the same block.

Vlasov, astute and sophisticated, was a schemer. He was also unrivalled in the arts of survival. He was, therefore, the obvious choice – especially as his survival was currently at stake – to produce an alternative plan to Tarkovsky’s. A plan that would cripple the US in space without introducing the spectre of Armageddon.

But the President didn’t tell Vlasov about Tarkovsky’s proposition.

By consulting Vlasov, the President was, without realising it, establishing a neatly tiered battle order between the reigning colossi of the world, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The stakes: Final victory in a conflict that had lasted for nearly forty years.

Later, as dusk descended on the sweating city, Nicolay Vlasov – silver-haired, with greenish eyes and a skull that looked peculiarly fragile – stood at the window of his study, glass of Chivas Regal whisky in his hand, watching the traffic far below and digesting the President’s requirements.

They were formidable – perhaps insoluble would be a more apt description! – but in a way he welcomed them because they gave direction to his current campaign for survival. Ever since the débâcle in 1980 when his plan to debase the American dollar with a disinformation operation at the Bilderberg Conference, the annual get-together of Capitalist clout in the West, had failed ignominiously, his star had been in the descent.

To ensure survival, without resorting to blackmail based on KGB surveillance, he had to mastermind a sensational intelligence operation. Then and only then could he retire honourably and, perhaps, explain to his family why he had neglected them. If, that was, you could ever explain to anyone that, if you were born a schemer, your intrigues possessed you.

From one wall of the study the photographs of his three children, quick with youth but now middle-aged, reproved him. He went into the living-room where his wife was watching television, poured himself another whisky and returned to the study. It was dark now and the cars below were beads of light being pulled on invisible threads; he imagined for a moment that he could control those threads as he controlled the destinies of Russia’s people.

But it is your direction, that should concern you, Nicolay Vlasov. Sipping his whisky, listening to the ice tinkle like wind chimes, he applied his mind to what, at the moment, seemed an insuperable problem.

But he wasn’t to know that a man named Robert Massey was about to be asked to take a hand in his destiny.

Robert Massey said: ‘Pick it up, please.’

Startled, the young jock showing his muscles to three girls in bikinis sitting on the almost deserted beach exclaimed: ‘Huh?’

Massey pointed at the can of Tab sugar-free soft drink that the jock had just tossed on the sand. ‘I asked you to pick it up. We’re trying to keep this beach clean.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ The young man’s tone was mild.

I don’t even merit truculence, Massey thought; but he understood the lazy contempt; when you were eighteen, weighing around 200 lbs with an iron-pumper’s muscles, you didn’t get upset by an old man of forty-five, wearing patched jeans and a tattered black sweater, with two days’ stubble on his jaw and whisky on his breath.