Page 34 of Air Force One
“Get a tanker out here that can swallow however much fuel she and Jeremy said. With long hoses and a big supply of high-pressure nitrogen. It will drive the fuel out and fill the tanks with an atmosphere that won’t flash over.”
Randy surveyed the water. No oil slick. The fuel tanks were still intact. That was some equipment he didn’t have aboard; the USCG Bear was only so big for storing contingency items. The ability to pump tens of thousands of gallons of highly combustible fuel wasn’t among them. Also, he didn’t have any spare tanks for thirty thousand gallons of fuel. He carried five times that, but in diesel tanks for his ship. His jet fuel load for servicing his lone helo was a tenth that, and it was still half full. No help there. He called out a fueler.
“What was all that about loads anyway? She and that young guy on your team got very strange on the topic.”
Mike didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “Holly was yanking your chain a bit, but it got away from her. Her competence isn’t people.”
“What is then?”
Mike’s soft smile told Randy plenty about the man’s feelings. “She’s a survivor. You wouldn’t believe what she’s been through, even if I was authorized to tell you, yet she’s walked out the far side each time.”
“So far.”
“Yeah,” his sigh was long suffering, “Yeah, so far.”
Randy laid a hand on his shoulder like he was one of the ship’s crew. “Well, this may be urgent, but it shouldn’t be all that dangerous.”
Mike didn’t look any happier before he answered softly, “Not yet. These things have a habit of going sideways.”
Randy looked out at the small boats gathering around the tail section of Air Force One. Mike made it sound as if it hadn’t merely been some stupid mistake or bird strike or something rational.
Zeb, his XO, had tracked down a replay of the President’s speech. Randy hadn’t had time to watch it yet, but Zeb had told him about Feldman’s threat. Somewhere there was going to be hell to pay. He just hoped that it wasn’t by him.
The first news helicopter hove into view thirty seconds later.
Shit!
28
Inessa managed to get Artemy to bed. She then showered and scrubbed but felt no cleaner. He was now one of the elite. Enough so to have a mistress who was important in her own right rather than merely some whore or naïve girl. If it was the latter, she wouldn’t worry—she’d simply squash them like a bug. But now he’d feel powerful enough to believe he could get away with anything. That was much harder to deal with.
How did the wives who were cast aside tolerate it? Her first husband, she’d known what he was when she’d married him, and he’d been very useful—until he accidentally killed himself in Antarctica. His tastes had run far more to the slut category. She hadn’t minded being shut of him, but she’d thought Artemy was cut from a better cloth.
Apparently not.
Returning to her third-floor sanctuary, she didn’t sit. The television now showed a view from above the crash site through a long telephoto lens. A cluster of ships and small boats all circling an area where something washed in and out among the waves. She didn’t have the background to make sense of the odd shape that appeared stuck there. A graphic came on the silent screen of a plane nose down in the ocean bed with its tail sticking up through the water. That explained it.
Some ghoul had created a counter that tallied bodies as they were brought to the surface; thirty-two and counting.
She surveyed the room. The tasteful balance of gentle colors. The subtle accent pieces in the white, blue, and red of the Russian flag. A vase here, the trim of a curtain there, a cushion on a pale lavender couch. Too subtle to connect unless one studied the space. It had worked. Her social salon of women felt comfortable and safe enough here to share freely.
So many stories had happened in this place. The warning of pending international sanctions from the commerce secretary’s wife had allowed her and others to reposition several key business assets, mostly cash, overseas—without enriching the Chinese after all other international banking routes were severed.
The authorization to launch military operations against Ukraine that General Sokolov’s mistress had shared in such an excited whisper. It had allowed Inessa to send the crucial twelve hours’ warning to Kyiv of the coming invasion. Her warning had stopped the immediate takeover and stymied the Russian President’s plans to expand his brutal dreams of empire. Every decision had its consequences though. She hadn’t expected that he would bleed his own country of its young men as no one since Hitler had—a quarter million dead and a million wounded, almost all men. Not the twenty-four million of World War II…yet.
Worse, it wasn’t to stave off an invader, but rather to feed his own dreams of a perfect dictatorship. Would Russia again require that a man take multiple mates to repopulate the country as the Soviets had quietly mandated after Hitler’s demise?
Inessa ignored the irony that it was the same General Sokolov who a friend of the same mistress had spotted leading Artemy into Club Cloud 99 earlier this afternoon. At least she’d been unsurprised by Artemy’s state on his return home, no matter how depressing it was. Her attempt to hide from the consequences in her private space had been naïve—not a mistake she’d repeat.
No longer a sanctuary for women, it had been violated far more by Artemy’s entrance than the sex he had demanded. She could have defused that easily—in retrospect. But some part of her had chosen not to think of how. Perhaps it had been a final chance to believe that she could preserve her own small slice of the world if she held him close enough.
Such illusions were for dreamers, not realists. Definitely not for survivors.
There was only one solution, and her inner pragmatist knew it had to happen very soon. Artemy, or whoever had arranged for Sokolov to escort him to Cloud 99, would quietly arrange her removal.
Why had Sokolov taken Artemy there? It had certainly surprised his mistress. He’s never been there, his young mistress had been desperately upset, but several friends confirmed it was him. Sokolov’s mistress was of the proper age for that young-persons-of-power gathering place; he was not. Artemy still was, though she was unsure why they’d let him in.
That was why Sokolov had gone, to take Artemy.
