Putin removed another single vial from the leather box and placed it inside a thick felt pouch with a drawstring. He fastened the metal detonator screw top down tight and shoved the container back into the safe. Shutting the three-inch-thick steel Loc-Tite door firmly, he keyed in the security code once more to lock it. The framed picture of Peter the Great slid down to its original position.
Once he was satisfied that all was secure, they left the library and headed down the long corridor to the central elevator. It was quite a walk. Hawke kept forgetting that he was actually on something so mundane as a boat.
Putin walked very fast everywhere he went when he was in a euphoric mood, but Hawke’s long legs easily kept pace.
“Question,” Hawke said, matching him stride for stride.
“Go.”
“What do you call that stuff, anyway?”
“There was a lot of debate about that inside Moskva House. Herr Schwenke, one of my German scientists, suggested the name ‘Putinwasser.’ Can you imagine such lunacy? My legacy is the world’s most powerful explosive? Ridiculous.”
“Firing squad would be too good for this Schwenke chap.”
“Yes. But, in the end, it is I who came up with the perfect name.”
“Well?”
“Feuerwasser. As the good professor would have it. Or, Firewater, if you prefer.”
“Firewater. That’s good. Even better than White Lightning. You probably didn’t know this, but, firewater, that’s what the American Indians called their—”
“Corn liquor? Please, do not insult me, Alex. Where do you think I got the name? I am a historian, you know. Captain John Crockett, Jamestown, Virginia, calls it that in his notebooks.”
“Sorry.”
Putin displayed one of his more enigmatic smiles.
“Show some fucking respect, Alex.”
“It occurs to me that I’m walking next to a human bomb. You’re not going to explode on me today, are you, Volodya? Down there on the bottom of the ocean at a thousand feet?”
Putin laughed.
“The only way to detonate Feuerwasser is a single charge of electricity passing through the fluid. Each vial, whatever the size, from a test tube to a fifty-thousand-gallon oil tank, is equipped with a suitable lead azide blasting plug. Or a simple cell-phone ring to the detonator will trigger the explosion.”
“So, on the off chance that I zapped you with a stun gun right now, this whole boat goes sky high?”
“This whole fucking harbor goes sky high. The Hôtel du Cap, as well. Poof.”
“Good Lord, Volodya. Are you serious?”
Putin didn’t bother to answer that one. He was always serious.
They entered one of four polished steel elevators and Putin pressed the button for the lowest deck on board. He was bouncing up and down on his toes. Excited, like a little kid. This was a side of the man that few had seen, and few would have believed even had they seen it.
They emerged on deck into golden afternoon sunlight washed with salty air. There was a strong blow coming through the wide opening in the aft section of the hull. Hawke noted that the wind had really picked up while they’d been aboard. Whitecaps, seas running four to five feet. Not that it would be a problem down at three hundred feet. But on the surface? You might get the feeling you were Gus Grissom in the Apollo space capsule after the splashdown in the south Atlantic.
This was the aquatics deck. The crew on duty below, navy guys, obviously, all snapped to attention and gave the Russian leader the kind of salute he demanded and returned.
Here were all the toys one could ever wish for, including two matching Riva Aquaramas and a high-speed Pursuit speedboat with four Sea Hunter 557-horsepower motors hung on the stern.
But what immediately caught Hawke’s eye was the bright yellow submarine dangling from an overhead hoist than ran the length of the launching bay. Sailors were all over the thing, making sure all was seaworthy for the boss. The articulating arm was folded into four ten-foot sections and mounted on the top of the hull. A halo of eight massive pie-plate-shaped underwater halogen lights surrounded the entire structure. The thing was teardrop shaped with the bulge at the bow control station.
“As you can see by the name on her hull, I decided to call her Sputnik II. My romantic feelings about the glories of the old Soviet era are hard to shake, I suppose.”
“Your fondness for all things Soviet is no great secret, Volodya.”
“Titanium hull,” Putin said, ignoring Hawkes’s gibe. “Twenty-five feet long, twelve feet high, nine feet wide. Propelled by five hydraulic thrusters. Equipped with an Israeli manipulator arm that can lift up to two hundred pounds as well as perform more delicate tasks.”
“Impressive,” Hawke said.
“All is in readiness, Excellency,” a young seaman said to Putin. He held a stainless control box in his hands, cables running from the rear of the box to various input ports along the side of the sub’s hull. The Russian president cast his eyes lovingly over his new acquisition, a predive checklist clearly going through his mind.
“Yes.”
He motioned the boy to approach him, bent his head forward, and whispered something in his ear. Putin reached inside his breast pocket and withdrew the slender vial of clear liquid, roughly the size of a man’s forefinger. He held it aloft so it caught the sun’s rays and nodded to the young crewman, who took the vial and disappeared around the starboard side of the sub where more crew was waiting to launch the vessel.
“Lower away, now,” another smartly uniformed blond boy called out to the man on the winch. “Steady as she goes now…”
The wind was really whipping through the tunnel now, and Sputnik II was yawing and twisting on the heavy suspension cable…
“Easy… easy… she’s almost down!”
One crewman grabbed the bow while another steered the stern. The yellow sub slowly dropped until the hull nestled into a cradle on the deck. With a hydraulic hiss, two gull-wing doors to either side of the sub’s hull rose up. Inside was a gleaming high-tech interior, a cross between a Ferrari and the starship Enterprise. There were two black leather seats, mounted abreast of each other and one pilot’s seat mounted slightly forward, the center one, which gave access to the control panels and joystick.
“We’ll communicate through headphones,” Volodya said, slipping a pair of bright red Beats over his ears. Hawke did the same. He suppressed a laugh at what he heard being played over the audio system: the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”
Of course. Putin was Putin, nothing more to it than that.
After Putin hit a button that caused the gull-wing doors to hiss shut and gave a thumbs-up to the crewman standing at the sub’s bow, Hawke felt the sub lifting beneath him.
Slowly, suspended from the overhead track, the sub moved outboard until it was hanging about six feet above the wave-tossed surface of the sea.
“All buckled in?” he heard Putin say in his headphones.
“Affirmative.”
Frothy seawater was soon washing up over the sub’s bulbous forward plexi hatches, resembling nothing so much as the bulging eyes of a fly enlarged by a factor of ten thousand.
“You’ve been deep before, Alex?”
“Nothing like this.”
Their descent seemed rapid, though without casting a glance at the depth instruments, Hawke really had no idea. He contented himself by peering out into the briny stew of life in the biosphere beyond his world and the thin web of pearlescent streams of tiny bubbles rising before his eyes. String theory, he thought, and it made sense in the state he was in…
Mesmerizing… hypnotic. Drug induced? He banished such thoughts immediately as to admit that paranoid notion into current circumstances would seriously… impair his ability to fight.… to resist whatever… besides, would Putin really go to this much trouble to simply dispose of him? Well — best not go there.
Sputnik II dropped into the abyss.
Occasionally his host would comment on what they were seeing.
“See that little goggle-eyed monster?” Putin said, out of the blue-tinged darkness of the sub’s interior. “With eyes on the ends of his stalks?”
“How could I miss it?”
“For centuries scientists believed life was impossible down here. The total absence of light, extreme cold, the unbelievable pressure… all would have combined to extinguish any form of life. Or so they thought. In fact the reverse is true. We will be soon passing through the two-hundred-meter mark into the Mesopelagic wonderland. It’s the ‘Twilight Zone.’ Faint sunlight but no photosynthesis. Most of the light you’ll see will be nonsolar, bioluminescence.”
“Life at this depth?” Hawke said, peering out into the murk. “I can’t imagine.”
“You have to learn to see with new eyes, Alex.”
“Obviously.… What the hell is that?”
“I call it the ‘Death Star Jelly.’ Stunning, isn’t it?”
“Hollywood couldn’t come up with that monster if it tried.”
“Alex, you may find this hard to believe, but the zone below two hundred meters is the most prolific home to organic life on the entire planet. It took the invention of machines like this one to make that discovery.”
“Fascinating. Seriously, Volodya, I’m indebted to you for sharing all this with me.”
He looked over at Putin and saw a grin split his mask of forward-looking concentration.
“As the American darkies down south say, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’…”
They plunged even deeper into the abyss.