The Red Dove

‘That’s fine, George,’ the President said. ‘Just fine.’ He picked up his axe.

In Moscow that day it was even hotter than in California.

But, unlike capital cities such as Washington and London, Moscow wasn’t adversely affected by the heat; here summer was a luxury and a sweltering day encouraged energy rather than torpor.

Sightseers thronged the Kremlin grounds; ice-cream and kvas sellers sold their wares as chirpily as Cockney barrowboys selling hot chestnuts in winter; on the packed beaches on the outskirts of the city bathers swam energetically to the rhythms of ping-pong balls traversing the nets on the promenade tables; in Gorky Park love blossomed feverishly while young men in black-market jeans strummed their guitars.

In a walled garden near the memorial erected to mark the line where the Russians halted the German advance on Moscow in World War II, the heat collected like soup. But despite their age, despite their infirmities – one had been fitted with a pacemaker, the other with a steel plate in his skull – the two men in open-neck white shirts playing chess in the shade of a birch tree displayed no discomfort because that would have been an admission of frailty.

The garden, clotted with blooms trying to beat the axe of the executioner winter, was attached to a dacha belonging to the Minister of Defence, Marshal Grigori Tarkovsky. Unlike the other members of the Politburo who chose weekend dachas in a sylvan setting twenty miles to the west of Moscow, Tarkovsky preferred to spend as much time as possible in the city that, as a younger man, he had helped to save from the Germans. Tarkovsky’s favourite record was the ‘1812 Overture’ but when the cannons fired it was Hitler, not Napoleon, who was on the run and the steel plate in his skull that had replaced the bone removed by a German bullet seemed to throb with triumph.

Tarkovsky, sturdy and bleak-faced, grey hair clipped as short as an Army recruit’s, leaned forward, moved a pawn one square and said: ‘So what do you think, Comrade President?’

The President of the Soviet Union – his real power lay in the leadership of the Communist Party, not the Presidency – didn’t reply immediately because he was stunned by Tarkovsky’s previous words.

After a while he moved a knight and reflected that, a few years ago, he would have reacted with tigerish speed to both Tarkovsky’s move on the chess board and his cataclysmic suggestions.

But I am an old man, brooded the President, who was seventy-six, three years older than Tarkovsky; the leader of a pack of old Kremlin wolves whose decisions are all affected by their years. Some, like myself, move ponderously with elaborate caution; others, like Tarkovsky, act with rash impetuosity seeking acclaim before death.

In fact, if you accepted that it was governed by Moscow and Washington, the world was in the hands of old men because the American President was seventy-two.

It was frightening. But, in the Soviet Union at least, it had to be: none of the younger males snapping at the heels of the old wolves had yet attained the political maturity needed to lead Country and Party.

Or do I delude myself? Is a man such as Tarkovsky, whose attitudes were frozen in a war when we lost more than twenty million men, women and children really preferable to a younger contender? Especially now that those attitudes had found such a terrifying outlet.

‘Well, Comrade President?’ Tarkovsky stared at the President across the chess board.

‘I’ll grant you this, Grigori, if you’d put such policies into practice in this game I would have resigned half an hour ago. Now if you’ll excuse me for a few moments …’

As he crossed the lawn a yellow butterfly danced in front of him. It made him more aware of the weight of his big body; he raised his head and straightened his back; sweat trickled down his chest and, like so many Russians, he masochistically longed for winter.

Inside the yellow-walled mansion where Tarkovsky, a widower, lived alone attended by a cook and housekeeper, the President paused in the lofty hall adorned with military memorabilia, and gazed critically at an oil painting hanging above the fireplace. It was a portrait of a man staring defiantly into the future; a middle-aged man, glossed with youth by the artist, with black hair and powerful, shaggy features that had the look of a buffalo about them.

We picked them younger in those days, thought the President as he turned away from the picture of himself painted nearly twenty years ago when he first came to power, and headed for the bathroom.

As he washed his hands he could see through the barred window the figure of Tarkovsky bowed over the chess board. What disturbed him so deeply about Tarkovsky’s plan was that, despite its horrendous potential, it might just work. As a last resort.

Because today, despite the furore they always created, conventional disarmament talks were really academic: the answers to the future of the Earth lay in the space surrounding it, not on its crust. And it was into space that Tarkovsky’s ideas were directed.

As he returned to the chess board on the white-painted table a thrush sang blithely on a branch of the birch tree. Little did it know. Tarkovsky had made his move, a singularly unenterprising one in the circumstances, and was sipping iced tea.

The President sat down and studied the board. An end game and a dull one at that. Chess, too, needed young and agile brains.

‘You have considered my proposition?’ Tarkovsky’s voice quivered with expectation.

‘I have considered it, Grigori.’

‘It’s a startling concept.’

‘Without a doubt. Anything that envisages bringing the United States of America to its knees must be startling.’

‘But it could work. Would work,’ he corrected himself.

‘Ah yes. But at what cost?’

‘There would be sacrifices, of course. But nothing compared with –’

The President held up one hand. ‘I know what sacrifices were made in the Great Patriotic War. I was thinking of the cost to humanity as a whole.’

The thrush stopped singing.

‘Not so great,’ Tarkovsky said, ‘in relation to the benefits Mankind would subsequently enjoy.’

‘You refer to the benefits of Communism that would expand across the world after your coup?’

‘Of course.’ A half lie because, as the President knew, Tarkovsky thought in strategies, not ideologies. Although he wasn’t the only member of the Kremlin élite – Politburo or Presidium – to prefer patriotism to socialism. ‘By the way, I have moved.’

‘I’m aware of that.’ Since the discussion had begun the game had assumed another dimension: the President felt he had to win. He considered the few pieces that each of them had left; positionally he had a marginal advantage over Tarkovsky who was playing black; when he was younger he would have pressed it home until, grudgingly, Tarkovsky would have been forced to resign; but that was before Kremlin scheming had sapped his chess skills; now, at this crucial stage in the game, he found it difficult to concentrate. He swept his bishop across the board with a show of confidence that he didn’t feel and said: ‘Can you really be so sure that it would work?’

‘Quite sure. Provided the aero-space industry can meet the challenge. As you know they have been suspect in the past.’

‘And if they do prove themselves equal to it when would you be ready to act?’

Tarkovsky moved one of his foot-soldiers, a pawn, and said: ‘Early next year.’

Six months. The President put his hand to his chest; sometimes he fancied he could hear the pacemaker. Two veterans, each reliant on a foreign body; what a combination.

Too hastily, Tarkovsky added: ‘Naturally I would only recommend such action in the event of hostile action by the United States.’

‘Naturally.’

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.