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
“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
“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,
“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
