Tsar

by Ted Bell

  “He’s back in Miami?”

  “Not anymore. He gave them the slip. They searched the building top to bottom. Nada. They think he might have gotten aboard the airship, the Pushkin.”

  “Listen to me. Did anyone actually see him board?”

  “No. But he was in a stairwell to the roof minutes before that thing was getting ready to go.”

  “Tell me it’s not gone yet, Shark.”

  “Left for Stockholm hours ago. Man, I woulda called you sooner, you know, but I just found out myself.”

  Stoke snapped his phone shut.

  “Canisters?” he said, looking at Flood. “Oxygen tanks?”

  “What?”

  “Those tanks were full of gas, not oxygen. He was experimenting with poison gas on the mayor and her family. See how much it would take to put them to sleep before it was lethal. What the Russians did at that theater rescue in Moscow, pumped gas through the AC to put everyone to sleep. But they got the formula wrong, and most of the hostages died. Happy may have smuggled his goddamn poison gas aboard the airship.”

  “I’m sorry, but what are you talking-”

  “Fancha,” he said under his breath, and then he started scrambling up the steep ravine faster than John Henry Flood would have ever believed a man his size could move.

  48

  TVAS, RUSSIA

  Early-morning bars of gold light streamed across the gilded furniture, the sumptuous bed, and the Persian carpets. Anastasia swept into the room and found Hawke alone in her big canopied bed. He had the quilted blue silk duvet pulled up under his neck, wearing nothing but a grin.

  “Hawke, get up!”

  “Are you quite sure I’m not up already, darling?”

  He’d barely managed to reach down and slide his portable sat phone under the bed without her noticing. He’d just rung off with Harry Brock. It had been a most disturbing conversation. He’d told Brock about last night’s confrontation between Rostov and Korsakov. And thanks to Harry, he now knew what President Rostov had been so angry about the previous evening. What the “insanity” had been. An entire American town had been obliterated. Rostov’s rage could mean only one thing, however far-fetched it might seem. The Russians had been behind the bombing of an American city. Which meant they were clearly willing, ready, and able to risk all-out nuclear war with the United States.

  Korsakov had clearly ordered this unprovoked attack without the Russian president’s knowledge. Last night, Hawke had witnessed a power struggle at the very pinnacle of Russian politics. Brock was now communicating this intelligence to his superiors at Langley and the Pentagon. The White House would soon be buzzing as well.

  And Hawke? Korsakov’s gorgeous daughter was standing at his bedside, treating him like a naughty schoolboy, her dainty foot inches away from the sat phone hidden beneath the bed.

  As a distraction, he flashed what he hoped was a winning smile.

  “Alex! There’s no time for that. Seriously. Come along, now, go into your room and get yourself dressed. And packed. We’re leaving in one hour.”

  “Leaving? We just got here.”

  “Out!” Anastasia whipped back the duvet. The sight of her aroused lover, naked in the morning sunlight, was almost sufficiently diverting to advance Hawke’s cause.

  “Look at you.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Nyet, nyet, nyet. Get up and go. I mean it. Papa will be furious if we’re not ready.” She grabbed his wrist and began to pull him from her bed.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll get up,” Hawke said, laughing. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it? God’s in his heaven and all that?”

  Hawke climbed down from the bed and slipped his arms into the silk robe she held open for him, surreptitiously kicking the phone further beneath the bed. He’d fetch it later. He then turned inside her embrace, kissed her on the mouth, and patted her lovely rounded bottom. She was still in her dressing gown, he noticed, and naked beneath it. Ah, well, time’s winged chariot, nothing to be done.

  “Okay, I give up. Why on earth are we leaving, by the way? I was just getting accustomed to this palatial life you filthy-rich Russians seem to enjoy.”

  “Papa just called me to his room. He needs to get back to Moscow. Political events there require his presence. He’s invited you and me to go with him, and I accepted. He’s offered to give us his box at the Bolshoi tonight. Swan Lake with Nasimova. Her opening night. It will be spectacular, I promise. Now, go.”

  “How are we getting there, by the way? Troika, one hopes…”

  “Even better. We’re taking his private airship.”

  “How wonderful. I’ve been dying to climb aboard that thing and have a look. Do you think he’ll let me fly it?”

  “The famous Royal Navy flyer? I should think so. Now, get moving.”

  She rushed into the bathroom, and Hawke snatched his phone from beneath the bed before going to his own room to pack.

  HAWKE WATCHED WITH open admiration as the ground crew slowly backed the gleaming silver zeppelin out of the massive hangar, each blue-uniformed man handling one of the many cables hanging down from the fuselage. She was extraordinary to look at, four hundred feet in length, he’d guess, with a gaping round opening at the front. Quite a radical design, he thought, but then, it had sprung from the mind of quite a radical guy.

  Her name, appropriately enough, was emblazoned on her flanks. Tsar. At her tail section, from which a boarding staircase was now emerging, the bright red Russian stars adorned each fin. In the brilliant snow-reflected sunlight, she was a gleaming machine from another world.

  “What do you think?” Anastasia asked, suddenly appearing at his side. She was wrapped in her white sable and matching hat and looked lovely.

  “Stunning.”

  “We can board now, if you’d like. Our luggage has already been taken aboard and stowed. Father is already aboard as well. He’s having a series of private meetings with his closest business associates. I’m afraid we won’t be seeing much of him until we arrive in Moscow.”

  “Ah, well. I’m glad I had a bit of time with him last evening. Got the chance to get acquainted.”

  “So is he.”

  “How fast is Tsar? Remarkable-looking thing, I must say.”

  “A hundred and fifty miles an hour is pretty much her top end. But the captain tells me we’ve got a good tailwind this morning. We should be in the capital for lunch.”

  “I should make arrangements for a place to stay,” Hawke said. “Do I have time to make a call?”

  “Already taken care of, darling. I booked you a suite at the Metropol. Just adjacent to Red Square and very close to the Bolshoi. Shall we go aboard? I think Father would like to get going as quickly as possible.”

  “What’s going on in Moscow?” Hawke asked, taking her arm as they crunched through the snow toward the hangar.

  “I never ask,” she said with a wry smile. “And he never tells.”

  Once aboard and aloft, they went all the way forward to the Jules Verne Observation Lounge, a semicircular room below the nose of the ship. It was all glass and steel, comfortably furnished with leather club chairs. A steward took their breakfast order, and they sat back to enjoy the spectacular view. Speeding silently over the vast white landscape, flying in such comfort less than a hundred feet above the endless snowy forest, was hypnotic. Hawke, however, was most interested in seeing the inner workings of the airship, especially the pod containing the flight deck.

  As soon as they’d finished breakfast, he left Anastasia alone with her American novel (he’d brought her a copy of Huckleberry Finn along as a present) and went exploring. He went from stem to stern, only avoiding those areas where security forces looked at him forbiddingly and shook their heads. But Anastasia had made a call to the bridge and arranged a visit with the captain.

  The airship’s flight deck was a separate pod, hung beneath the central fuselage, an elongated crystal-clear egg in the embrace of perforated metal girders connected to the underside of the ship
. A circular staircase led from the lowest deck down to the bridge deck. The single security man at the top smiled and said, “They are expecting you, Mr. Hawke.”

  A minute later, Hawke saw they’d gained some altitude. He was standing behind the captain’s right shoulder, staring down between his feet at snow-covered mountains two hundred feet below. Off to the right, there was a deep gash in the snow, a partial fuselage and black pieces of wreckage scattered about. He saw a long black blade protruding from the snow like a huge runaway ski and put it together. A chopper had gone down. Recently. The charred main wreckage was still burning a bit, black smoke spiraling upward in the clear blue air.

  “What happened down there?” Hawke asked the man at the helm.

  “A crash,” the man replied, in a blinding glimpse of the obvious, his English softly laced with Russian. “We’ve just radioed it in. Looks as if it happened just a short time ago.”

  “No sign of survivors?”

  “None. But medevac rescue teams are already en route.”

  “Captain Marlov, I’m Alex Hawke. I believe Anastasia Korsakova may have told you I might be stopping by the bridge for a quick look round this morning.”

  “Yes, yes, of course!” the captain said. He was a slight fellow with a shock of blond hair under his cap. He wore a sky-blue uniform with four gold braids at his sleeves. “Welcome aboard, sir. Enjoying the voyage so far?”

  “Indeed. Mind if I just hang about for a few minutes? Watch you fellows at work?”

  “Not at all. As you can see on the digital readouts displayed above, we’ve got a lovely day for flying. A good stiff breeze on our tail, and we’re making nearly one hundred sixty over the ground.”

  “How much gas does it take to keep this monster afloat?”

  “We carry thirty million cubic feet of helium,” the captain said proudly. “Pushkin carries three times that.”

  “Still use helium, do you? I thought it was explosive.”

  “On the contrary, helium is a natural fire extinguisher. And while it was once rare, it is available worldwide as a byproduct of natural-gas production.”

  “Fascinating.”

  Hawke smiled and let his gaze drift over the controls and the instrument panel. Fairly straightforward and a fairly simple craft to fly, he decided after watching the crew at work for ten minutes. The deck he was standing on was made of thick, clear Lexan, shaped like an elongated egg. In the center was a large round metal hatch with a stainless-steel wheel for opening and closing. About a hundred feet of coiled nylon line encircled the hatch.

  “Escape hatch?” Hawke asked the captain.

  “Da, da, da. For the crew in an emergency. Also for the passengers on the decks above, should a fire break out somewhere aboard that blocked the normal exits.”

  “Where do you head from Moscow, captain?”

  “To Stockholm. For the Nobel ceremony. We are meeting our sister ship there. The great passenger liner Pushkin. Perhaps you’ve heard of her. She’s en route to Stockholm now, from Miami.”

  “A magnificent vessel, from pictures I’ve seen. You should be very proud.”

  “One day, the count hopes to see hundreds of these great airships crisscrossing the world’s oceans and continents. It’s a marvelous way to travel, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  “It’s a very civilized mode of transportation. Captain, thank you. I’ll leave you to it, then. Pity about those chaps in the chopper, isn’t it?”

  Hawke was still mulling over the downed helicopter when he returned to the observation deck, where Anastasia remained engrossed in her novel. He picked up an English edition of Pravda and scanned the headlines. Nothing hinted at the unrest inside the Kremlin walls. No surprise, since the government controlled all the media. He picked up an ancient copy of Sports Illustrated, pretending to read it, privately going over recent events.

  He planned to call the White House as soon as he could. He needed to speak to the president himself, tell Jack McAtee what he thought was going on.

  The rest of the short voyage was uneventful. Only the mooring inside the walls of the Kremlin brought Hawke out of his reverie. He went to the window and peered down at a snow-covered Red Square. “Red Square is such a surprisingly beautiful place,” Hawke said. “Pity it’s still saddled with that discredited old Commie name.”

  “Red has nothing to do with Communism,” Anastasia said.

  “No?”

  “No. It’s been called that for centuries. Red, in Russian, means beautiful.”

  “Beautiful Square. Well, that’s much better.”

  The square was filled with throngs of people looking upward as the great airship descended slowly toward the mooring mast. They seemed to be cheering.

  “What’s all that about?” Hawke asked Anastasia, who had joined him at the window.

  “I’m not sure. There’s to be an emergency session of the Duma this evening. Papa was asked to appear. We’ll find out more after the ballet, I’m certain.”

  “I’m sure we will,” Hawke said, gazing down at the cheering masses waving up at the airship. Near Lenin’s Tomb, on the periphery, a few protesters, mostly elderly Communists waving tattered red banners, were closely watched by OMON security forces in their trademark blue and black camo. Their armored personnel carriers were parked nearby. Tsar’s mooring lines had been heaved, and a ground crew had taken control of the ship as she neared the mooring mast. Hawke felt a shudder aft and assumed the boarding staircase was being lowered to the ground.

  He was still thinking about the burning chopper in the mountains. It figured in this, but how?

  “What time shall I pick you up for the Bolshoi?” he said, stroking Anastasia’s cheek.

  “Oh. Are you off, darling?”

  “Yes. I’ve got to meet a friend at the Metropol. Sorry, I should have told you earlier. Blue Water is doing a new business presentation tomorrow, and I need to make sure we’re ready.”

  “Who is your friend?”

  “Simon,” he said, hating the lie but unable to say Harry Brock’s name. “Simon Weatherstone. An American. He’s staying at the Metropol. I’m supposed to meet him in the bar.”

  “Meet me in front of the theater a few minutes before seven. Since we’ve got Papa’s box, we don’t need to arrive early.”

  He said good-bye, kissing her lips, hating himself for lying to a woman he might be falling in love with, knowing he had no other choice, still finding it an utterly distasteful part of his chosen career.

  War was hell.

  With a side order of heaven.

  49

  MOSCOW

  Inside the lower house of the Russian parliament, the state Duma, the mood of the emergency session was initially somber and tense, then increasingly restive. Rumors were rampant. Supporters of the late President Rostov were already claiming privately that he’d been assassinated. His helicopter having crashed mysteriously en route to Moscow from Korsakov’s winter palace in perfect weather, there were many eager to lay the blame at the count’s feet.

  The siloviki, the ten most powerful men in the Kremlin, and many more, were more than ready to defend Korsakov, angrily denying such blasphemy and implying political or even physical threats should these blasphemers not immediately cease such sacrilege against the revered man’s name.

  Naturally, in such a power vacuum, there was an enormous amount of jockeying going on inside the chamber. Some of the Nationalist Party lawmakers, given to near-hysterical rhetoric, were eventually shouted down. Others, mainly Communist diehards, who threatened to turn violent, had been forcibly removed by Gennady Seleznyov, speaker of the Duma. The Ten, of course, sat silently, stoic, holding their cards very close to the chest.

  Rostov’s most likely and logical successor, Prime Minister Boris Zhirinovsky, had been at the podium for more than two hours, striving for a ringing rhetoric that had fallen woefully short of the mark. He needed three hundred votes to secure his position. He had perhaps half that. And those numbers were going do
wn, not up. He droned on, and a sleepy stupor descended over the ornate, rococo-style room.

  Now, a fresh rumor swept the great hall. The airship belonging to the reigning hero of all Russia, Count Ivan Korsakov, had arrived in Moscow. Reports said he was even at this hour en route to the Duma to make a plea for reason and calm in the wake of the morning’s tragedy. A prescient few guessed he had other, far more ambitious agendas to place before the legislature.

  The prime minister, oblivious to all this, droned on.

  Suddenly, the wide doors at the rear of the chamber were flung open, and a large cadre of heavily armed OMON security forces in full camo regalia marched inside, their heavy boots marking quick time on the marble floors, half of the men moving rapidly along the far left aisle of the room and the other half going right. They positioned themselves exactly one foot apart, backs to the wall, weapons down, eyes forward as if awaiting further orders.

  Entering the room like a conquering hero was General Nikolai Kuragin, resplendent in his sharply tailored black uniform, a black leather briefcase attached to his wrist. He strode alone down the center aisle toward the podium, head high, jaw thrust forward, his eyes on the prime minister.

  Upon seeing his approach, the prime minister stopped his speech in midsentence, struck mute, unable to continue. The room erupted in pandemonium. After a moment, the speaker ushered the prime minister away from the podium and returned to call for order. When the four hundred legislators in the hall had calmed to a dull roar, he invited General Kuragin to the podium and asked him to address the assembly.

  The general cleared his throat and gazed out at the assembled legislators with the look of a man whose hour had come at last.

  “My great good friends, patriots all, I’ve come here today in grief but also in hope,” the general began. The reaction was instantaneous and overwhelming. Applause, loud and sustained, greeted this declaration. Some already knew and many were beginning to guess at what was to follow.

  “My good friend President Vladimir Vladimirovich Rostov served our nation with great distinction and honor. We, in turn, honor his memory and mourn his tragic passing. But at this historic-”