“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.