Tsar

“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?”