Tsar

“With a name like Smirnoff, it’s got to be good, right?”

Paddy shoved his glass over for a refill, and the guy said, “So, your boss must be pretty smart, huh? Invent the Zeta and all that shit. He’s what, a Russian, right? What’s his name again?”

“Only name I’ve ever heard is somebody calling him Tsar Ivan. Tonight’s my first shot at actually seeing the guy up close and personal.”

“Well, guess what?” the bartender said, backing away from the bar and looking straight up, “I think you’re about to get your shot. Holy shit. Will you look at that?”

Paddy backed away from the bar and looked up, too. He was so startled and amazed at what he saw that he dropped his glass, and it shattered on the marble floor. In the roar of the crowd, he never heard it hit.

WHAT PADDY SAW floating high above the glass ceiling was nothing less than a flying miracle. It was not an airplane. And it was not a blimp, exactly, though it moved like one. It had to be some new kind of airship. But it was like nothing he or anybody else had ever seen before. It was this four-hundred-foot-long zeppelinlike thing, its hull a gleaming silver. On its flank, forward, was the huge word TSAR illuminated in bright red. On her tail section, the great Russian red star, restored to respectability by President Putin before he’d mysteriously disappeared off the face of the map.

But the thing wasn’t shaped like any blimp he’d ever seen before, either. For one thing, there was a big opening at the nose, huge, and then the thing tapered back to a much smaller section at the tail. It didn’t look like a Goodyear blimp at all, not in the slightest.

It was a strange shape, weird, but it reminded him of something. The only thing Paddy could compare it to, what it actually looked like, was one huge flying jet engine. As if a giant jet engine had fallen off some giant jumbo jet’s wing and was just flying along all by itself. There were triple rows of windows along the side, and you could see all of the people in there, looking down at the party below.

Yeah, that was it, an enormous silver jet engine, moving very slowly toward the big aerial at the very top of the Empire State Building.

He kept backing up, trying to see more of the thing, and he backed right into somebody, knocking him to the floor.

“Hey, jeez, I’m sorry,” Paddy said, turning around and offering the guy a hand, pulling him to his feet. He was a little guy, and Paddy almost jerked him off his feet into the air.

He’d been wearing thick black glasses, and they were tilted sideways on his face. Paddy adjusted them for him and tried to brush whatever he’d been drinking off the front of his thick wool sportcoat. Bloody Mary, it looked like from the stalk of celery balanced on his shoulder. Not good.

“Never mind,” the man said. “It’s all right. It was an accident.”

Paddy thought the little guy was pissed off, but maybe he wasn’t, so Paddy stuck out his hand and said, “Paddy Strelnikov, nice to meet you.”

“Dr. Sergei Shumayev,” the guy said in a thick Russian accent, readjusting his coke bottle glasses.

“Hell of a deal, huh? That thing up there?”

“Yes. What exactly do you do for us, Mr. Strelnikov?”

“Me? I’m in the, uh, ‘analytical department.’”

Shumayev smiled at the egregious euphemism. Every large Russian corporation created its own mini-KGB, usually known as the “analytical department.” It was staffed with people good at collecting information, eavesdropping on rival companies, and stealing documents. They also performed other, less sanitary services, what the American thriller writers referred to as wet work.

“What’s your specific role in the department, Mr. Strelnikov?”

“Well, special assignments. Security, mostly. My section deals with industrial espionage, stuff like that. Here in the U.S., I also provide personal security to some of our high-level executives when they’re traveling here and abroad.”

“Ah, very good. A bodyguard.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“That’s a very unusual ring you are wearing. Does it have some special significance to your job?”

Paddy laughed. He loved it when people noticed his ring. “No, sir. This ring here I bought in a pawn shop in Hoboken for fifty dollars. Nobody knew what it was. See the lightning bolt? And the letters TCB? Well, that stands for Taking Care of Business. It’s the exact ring that Elvis Presley gave to everyone in his posse. Back in the sixties. That was their motto, TCB, and I made it mine, too.”

“Fascinating.”

“How about you, Doc? What do you do?”

“Aeronautical engineering. That’s my baby up there.”

Both of them watched as huge dangling cables were thrown down from the front and sides of the hovering airship and made fast to the mooring mast. Floating there in the clouds, with the searchlights playing on it, Paddy thought it was the most beautiful man-made thing he’d ever seen.

“No kidding! Wow! You worked on that?”

“Vortex 1 is its name. I designed it. With a great deal of technical help from our chairman, of course. It was entirely his vision. His original concept. I was lucky enough to be able to execute it for him.”

“No offense, but how come you’re not up there on the platform with all the other big shots meeting him?”

Now the little fellow really was pissed off. “Officially, I’m supposed to be, of course. It’s just that I’ve lost my wife in the crowd. She went to the ladies’ powder room twenty minutes ago, and I haven’t seen her since. She’d kill me if I went up there without her.”

Paddy winked and said, “I know what you mean. Women, huh? I could write a book myself. Hey, let me ask you, Doc, what is that big hole in the front of the airship for? It’s wild-looking.”

“It’s called a plenum,” Shumayev said. “It draws in atmospheric air through a spiral-vortex-generating cone, hence the name of the ship. The air is then accelerated through a BDP Tesla bladeless disc air pump system. This accelerated and pressurized air is then forced out through a central ring of slits located along the side of the craft. You follow?”

“Sort of.”

“Think of a fish’s gills.”

“Gotcha. So, what makes it go?”

“All that pressurized, oxygenated, and velocitized air flowing in through the plenum forms vortices along the outside hull of the airship. This reduces friction and creates a slip effect as the craft travels through the air. So, the craft is first pulled into a frontal vacuum, into the vortex, as it were, and additionally squeezed through the air, compliments of the greater pressure exerted by the expelled air traveling aft along the hull of the craft. That’s pretty much it.”

“How do you steer it?”

“See those outboard pods with the blinking red lights? They’re fitted with smaller electric-drive BDP propulsion systems. We mounted them at different locations around the hull to provide a high degree of directional control and afford vectored thrust stability in any weather conditions.”

“Wow.”

“In a word, yes. Wow. That mast tower up there was originally intended to be a dock for mooring airships back in the 1930s. However, after several futile attempts at mooring a zeppelin in the strong winds present up here at 1250 feet of altitude, the idea was scrapped. So, Mr. Strelnikov, you and I have the honor of witnessing a very historic moment.”

“How many passengers will it carry?”

“Exactly one hundred. Just like the late Concorde aircraft. But our passengers will travel in a great deal more comfort and style, I promise you.”

“How fast?”

“A bit slower than the Concorde,” the little guy said with a smile. “She’s capable of 150 miles per hour. Considerably faster than the new Queen Mary 2, I might add, if one’s crossing the Atlantic as she’s just done.”

“I think I just found your wife,” Paddy said, grabbing the little guy’s elbow. A huge red-haired woman in a black