The front pew was reserved for him, Anya, and Nanny Roksana. He waved Pasternak to join them. She’d pinned her hair back in a prim bun and wore an especially frumpy black dress and flat shoes, making her seem forty years older, which was a good thing. He didn’t need anyone thinking his beautiful aide was an affair partner. Not that she ever would be, he thought. With his troubles with potency in the last decade, it would be something of a relief not to be expected to perform sexually. He’d heard about pharmaceuticals that could help with the problem, but that seemed absurd, to take a pill in order to make love to a woman.
When he realized his mind had drifted inappropriately to sex, he bit his lip and forced himself to look up at the massive white and gold coffin made for Larisa, surrounded by flowers piled high around it, a huge portrait of her hanging in the background, the photo one of the few Larisa’s extreme vanity would allow to be published. In life, she usually thought that nineteen out of twenty photos of her made her look ugly or fat, which was insane, since she’d always been gorgeous.
His mind wandered during the eulogies and prayers. He’d be meeting with a parade of foreign dignitaries after the burial service, all having flown in to offer condolences, which he could do without, but it was all part of the pageantry of being head of state — but it was the part he hated.
He wondered who would be in the American delegation. Carlucci would never come. Vostov’s relationship with the American president had had ups and downs, and was currently at a low point after the Panther incident. At best, he would send his vice president. What was her name? He went blank for a long moment, then remembered he’d met her at a Kremlin reception last year. Chushi, he thought. Karen Chushi, a pretty, middle-aged slender woman, friendly enough. He wondered what he should say to her, or what she would say to him.
The funeral procession to Novodevichy Cemetery seemed to take hours, then the tiresome graveside service, but finally they were back in the limo for the ride to the Kremlin. The SPB chief had assured him it was now safe to return to the Moscow apartment, but Vostov already knew that. He’d return Anya with Nanny Roksana to the apartment, then go to his palatial Kremlin office suite to meet with the foreign dignitaries. He glanced at his watch, calculating how many hours it would be until his routine could return to normal.
A knock at the door, and Pasternak jumped up to answer. An aide handed in a fresh black suit in plastic. Pasternak took it and handed it to Vostov, who quickly took off his shoes and pants, dumped his jacket on the floor with them, and pulled the freshly pressed identical suit on. The one he’d worn to the funeral was stained with Anya’s tears and mucus. He was all for theater on the political stage, but wearing that suit would have gone too far.
As Vostov suited back up, he told Tonya to hold off the first visitor until he had time to talk to her. She took a seat in front of his desk, but he stood and waved her to the more informal setting of the four club chairs clustered around the fireplace. He sat and she put her pad computer on the coffee table and sat stiffly, as if she were at attention. She’d changed out of the loose frock she’d worn to the funeral and now had on a flattering black business suit, a beige blouse under her jacket.
“A few thoughts from our Murmansk trip,” he said. She nodded and reached for her pad computer to take notes. “The question the captain of the Belgorod had, about the dangers of sailing under the ice with a submarine that big.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Have Mikhail make sure they will outfit the submarine with arctic supplies, just in case things go to hell under there. Shelters, generator, heater, parkas, emergency food — hell, snowmobiles. That boat’s big, it can store all that stuff inside.”
“Got it, sir.”
“Also, I want an answer from the Navy about getting one or two nuclear-tipped torpedoes loaded onto her.”
“I’ll check, sir, but I don’t think the Navy has that in their inventory. Let me check.” She stroked through the classified search application, arriving finally at an answer. “We haven’t manufactured one for twenty years, sir. There was a hundred-centimeter torpedo with a one megaton warhead. We called it the Gigantskiy. Apparently NATO named it Magnum. It needed a special torpedo tube, it was so big.”
“Get the data on it to that Sevmash chief engineer. What was his name?”
“Director Voronin, sir.”
“Voronin, right. See if he can either find one or make one. And get it on that sub in the next week.”
Tonya scribbled madly for a moment, then looked up at him expectantly. When he stroked his chin and looked at the fireplace, she said to him, “Mr. President, I have to ask. With the time it will take to load all this gear and food and fabricate a new torpedo, plus all the time this journey will take, according to Captain Alexeyev, why don’t you just send the sub into the North Atlantic on a direct route to the targets? What is your thinking?”
He nodded, having expected the question, but from Mikhail, not Pasternak.
“What I told Alexeyev, none of that is what I really think. This whole Poseidon or Status-6 project. Have you seen the budget overruns on this program? And the time they’ve taken? And how much we spent refurbishing an ancient Omega submarine to carry it? And outfitting that deep-diver, Losharik, with the capability to place these things? If you haven’t, I can tell you, it’s billions of rubles. And effort. And time. For a ridiculous weapon that we wouldn’t even control. We can’t even push a button from here to wake it up and make it explode. We’d have to send a plane with a sonar buoy to ping the sound that makes the thing detonate. Or an underwater commando. What the hell good is that?”
“Mr. Putin seemed to think it would be good for deterrence,” Pasternak said. “Plus, you heard the last daily brief’s report of the possibility of nuclear munitions placed by the Americans in our ports. If that is true, it would prove that they started all this, and our placing the Poseidons will be a good way to force the Americans to remove their bombs.”
“Look, Tonya, I’m convinced that these boogeyman bombs in our ports are disinformation — probably planted by the opposition, or the CIA. I’m not taking any action on anything related to these alleged port bombs unless and until FSB or the Navy can find one and show it to me. And as for this ridiculous Poseidon program, I can’t just cancel it. That would be a huge admission of failure. Plus, the way the previous administration trumpeted this so-called superweapon, if we canceled it, we might lose support. The Russkiy Svoboda Party would call us weak, and they’d pile that on to the evidence from the whole Panther mess. Hell, we could lose the election. So the whole program, I can’t just let it sit there with even more funding demands rolling in every day. The only real thing I can do is put it on ice. Quite literally. If the sub and torpedoes are out there, supposedly on the way to American targets, we can use that to show that we’re strong — hell, we could even leak the plan to NATO. The damned Svoboda assholes can’t say we’re lying down for NATO and the Americans then. Plus, that submarine and those weapons will take months to get in place, if they even make it through the polar icecap at all. This will delay the entire issue until well after the election. How many days?”