by Ian Maxwell
“Otto we are fine. Let’s get going. I don’t have all day for your antics,” chided the President.
“Sure madam. Follow me to the eastern wall.” The group headed by Otto went to a bare white-ish wall. Otto felt up the wall and touched something. The wall slid away and exposed a shiny metal door with a vertical slit down the middle.
“Madam, I present to you….”
“An elevator?”
“Yes of course.”
As Otto depressed the down button, the elevator opened with a traditional chime. Like many of its contemporaries, it was shiny steel on the inside, no pansy mirrors, an emergency phone, and just two buttons on the panel that read ‘0’ and ‘1’. It was certified to carry twelve.
Otto hit ‘0’ and said “We should be out in four minutes.”
“Four minutes? How far does your rat hole go?” asked a petrified Vlad.
“Oh it’s pretty, pretty deep. But don’t worry, its air conditioned and we got entertainment too.”
“What kind?” asked the President.
As the elevator tumbled down, Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer began playing. But instead of playing the whole song, it kept repeating “…we are half way there…”
Four minutes later the piper and his followers exited into a dazzling underground metro station.
Trains whizzed in and out as busy crowds scurried along. “Jeez this don’t look like Moscow …” said Marat the guard.
“No,” confirmed Otto, who looked like the cat that barbecued canaries.
“So where are we?” asked the President.
Mika muttered something under his breath.
“Whats that Mika?” asked the President.
“It’s the D-6,” Mika hissed.
“No! D-6? Come on that’s an urban legend.”
Legend aka the CIA, had it that after the war, the paranoid Stalin had built a deeper and more extensive Metro system below the Moscow Metro. This purported Metro, the ‘D-6’ supposedly linked various ministries and key installations and doubled down as a mega bunker in case of a fallout with the West. Legend, again the CIA book of facts, suggested that Stalin’s orders had been carried out well beyond the initial scope.
Feigning curiosity, Otto shook his head smugly. He probably deserved another punch. Mika went into motion. Fist tightened. Elbow in line with Otto’s face. Pull back… and boom.
Instead of receiving the punch politely, Otto dodged the hurtling fist. As Mika’s knuckles, with an incredibly poor coefficient of drag, a lowly 0.5, searched for some skin, the butt of an AK 108 rifle with a better coefficient of drag (0.3), crashed into Mika’s skull.
The Police dudes patrolling this secret railway encircled the survivors. Marat and Vlad also met with rifle butts and collapsed like a sack of rotten cabbage.
President Petrova was more surprised than scared. There were still a ton of people milling around them.
“Hey what the fuck….I thought…” protested Petrova.
“Sorry for the inconvenience Madam. We still mean no harm to Russia or… you, the President. It’s just precautions,” announced an ebullient Otto. “Our guys will take care of your guards. Trust me it’s for their own good. They won’t be harmed…”
“Otto, I don’t trust your brutes…”
“Oh a small correction… they are your brutes.”
“Take me to this weapon.”
“Absolutely Madam, this way please.”
As Otto and the President walked, the new guards formed a security cordon around her. A few onlookers tried to observe, but the President’s entourage shooed them away.
“Ok. So if this isn’t the D-6, is this an extension of the Moscow metro? What line is this?”
“Madam, the D-6 is real… but rather unspectacular. Unlike…”
“Unlike?”
“Rossiya-2 or R2”
“There is an R2?”
“Yes.”
“My head is spinning.”
“Of course Madam, totally understandable… this way please, Madam I present to you the Express One.”
They stood in front of a sexy streamlined, fast looking train, whose livery beautifully complemented the Russian flag.
“Express One – The Presidential Train. Trust me Madam, this is sort of the train’s maiden journey.”
“No one’s ever ridden it?”
“It’s been waiting for you.”
“Aww.”
As Otto and the President strapped in, a group of stewardesses buzzed around efficiently. They offered everything from caviar to king crabs.
“Alright Otto, shoot,” ordered Petrova.
“Ya like I said, the D-6 exists, but it’s just a glorified taxi service for the FSB brass… ill planned, underutilized.”
“Well I will add it to my agenda. So whats up with your Rossiya-2 or R2 is this some secret metro below the D-6 built by Beria and Yezhov?”
“Not those buffoons Madam. No way. Haha, Beria… what an excuse for a security chief. No, this train, this station, this network is bigger than anything you can imagine.”
“Bigger than the D-6?”
“Think Bigger...”
“Bigger than the Moscow Metro and D6 put together?”
“Bigger.”
“Shanghai Metro?”
“Try even bigger.”
“Otto you are nice and all. But I am getting a little tired of your antics. Its 3AM, well past my nappy time ….”
“Madam, I got three words.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
“Underground Trans-Siberian.”
Chapter 12
Beneath Moscow
“Underground Trans-Siberian?” Anna Petrova stumbled with her thoughts.
As the stunned President was bombarded with reiterations on the scale of this secret railway, the maglev train chugged out of the Kremlin Station.
Its cruising speed was a cool 1941 Km/hr on the long and sexy maglev tracks. As they exited the station the cabin began to fill with brilliant sunlight. The sudden change in lumens forced Anna Petrova to swivel away from the bragging Otto. One second it seemed like the eastern suburbs of Moscow and the next they were whizzing past the glorious Russian country side. Gentle rolling fields… on both sides.
“Oh that’s beautiful… Otto… Hey wait, I thought we were underground, plus it’s just 3 in the morning… What the fuck?”
“Ah it’s just an illusion, Madam. All our trains are super long and the little ones tend to get bored. So we tiled our tunnels with giant LCDs.”
“Oh boy. Oh boy…” President Petrova was afraid to ask the obvious question. “Where is this ‘all the way’?”
“Muhahaha. V to the L to the A to the D, to the I… wait to the O to the T to the … wait V-L-A-D-I-V-” Otto was a terrible rapper.
“Vladivostok, so the entire Underground Trans-Siberian is paneled with LCDs?”
“There you go, Madam,” Otto grinned like proud pug.
“All the way to Vladivostok? So how long does this thing take?
“About eight hours tops. But this being the Express One, we should do it in seven forty five.”
“I don’t know what to say,” admitted the completely bamboozled President. She downed a vodka shot, closed her eyes and shook her head in an effort to wake up from this nightmare.
When she reopened her eyes, the President saw the conniving dick Otto, the obsequious attendants and the historic downtown of Nizhny Novgorod.
“Are we already at Nizhny? Was that the fucking Novgorod Kremlin?” Nizhny Novgorod the once super-secret closed Soviet city was five hundred Kms east of Moscow and most surface trains clocked in at 15hrs. Otto confirmed her fears. They had breached the gates of Nizhny in forty minutes.
“Madam, maybe we should invite the pilot for a drink. He is doing a fine job and I’m sure it would be a great honor for him to meet his President for the first time.”
“I appreciate your offer. But no. I think I am going to be sick.”
Otto clapped at a stewardess and ordered some honeyed lemon tea to suppress the rebellion in Anna’s gut. “Don’t worry Ms. President we’ll Tiananmen the shit out of it.”
A bad commie joke? Ughh. Otto had tipped the rebellion and lost.
Anna Petrova rushed to the restroom as a deferential stewardess held the door. One moment the President was trying to quell some half masticated caviar and the next she found herself falling into an untamed Volga. The President screamed as she fell headfirst into the Russian river…
At about a meter from impact, the tumbling President caught herself and cursed these freak shows for going overboard with their damned LEDs and LCDs. The restroom’s floor was one massive LED screen that made these Under-Russians seem like the South Koreans of the Korean peninsula. After some frantic searching, Anna Petrova finally unloaded onto the correct basin… which was a shaped like a hydroelectric dam…
After several minutes and sodas Anna was feeling better. Or so it seemed.
“Decembrists Station, Krasnoyarsk,” announced the train.
“Krasnoyarsk? Jesus, how long was I in there?”
“Perm… yeah since Perm. An hour maybe… perhaps a tad more.”
“Fuck. Ok. So what’s the agenda here?”
“This is one of our bigger facilities from a weapons stand point. We don’t have time to go all the way to Magadan or Norilsk. Unless you insist…”
“Magadan? I thought this was only a Trans-Siberian? Is there an underground Rail of Bones too?”
“Madam, I can assure you one thing… no bones were used to build any of this.”
That actually sounded great. Relieved, Anna said, “Let’s go see this weapon.”
The Presidential party exited the gleaming station and entered a cool Under-Krasnoyarsk city. Apparently the Underground Trans-Siberian line was the highest point in Otto’s world. Cities, due to lack of space had been dug out and they had gone deeper and wider over time. The sprawl was inevitable.
This underground Krasnoyarsk had everything from streets, avenues, street cars, trams, shops, parks, universities and a ton of people. It even had stars in the fake sky. “At night, the LEDs mimic nights and during the day they crank out sunlight,” offered Otto.
“Of course.”
A five minute ride on a Zil limo, brought them to a modern looking office building.
A tall gangly guy, with unsettled hair introduced himself as the Lead Weapons Scientist, Mueller. After the perfunctory exchanges, they went into the conference room. Mueller explained everything. He showed Petrova the weapon. He explained its ins and outs. But there weren’t too many ins or outs. They were done within fifteen minutes.
Anna Petrova was super disappointed for the second time that night. That was insanely anticlimactic. This weapon, was just a new missile based on existing ICBMs. But instead of stock ICBMs the new ICBM looked like a regular commercial aircraft. Essentially they could be sent into enemy territory like a scheduled commercial airliner and go kaboom.
According to Mueller, these ICBM-AVIs could be customized to look like any major airliner in operation like the 777, 320, 737, 330, etc. Before Anna Petrova could protest, Otto interjected “We also got most of the Antonovs, Tupolevs, Sukhois, and Ilyushins.”
“Good.”
“Well we are pretty much done here Ma’am,” said Mueller.
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much Ma’am,” added Otto.
President Petrova sighed. “Ok, have a few obvious questions here. What’s your source of power, how do you get the materials and what about your economy here? What do you guys eat?”
“We mine,” fired Otto.
“You mine?”
Mueller took the lead, “Yes. We mine iron ore, we drill oil and we mine diamonds… pretty much anything we need for research. Trust me it’s not easy.”
“Ughh... no wonder Gazprom is a perennial loser.”
“But these were the Koba’s orders... Stalin himself authorized this.”
“Fine, whatever. What happens when you run out of stuff or you can’t get something here? Say vodka or diapers?”
“Well there is more to it Ma’am,” replied Otto as Mueller shifted uneasily, “it’s not just the ores, sometimes when we can’t keep up with our weapon’s demands, we go overboard… we borrow actual stuff from above the ground…”
“You mean Russia… Russia on the surface?”
“Yep,” nodded Otto.
“You mean you come up and literally steal our shit. Jeez. Like what?”
“Borrow Madam, borrow. We have built a few ‘special corridors’ or tunnels under industrial centers... like say Magnitogorsk for steel, Samara for vehicles, Moscow-St. Petersburg for everything, Komsomolsk for aircraft parts, Norilsk for nickel, Volgograd-Makhachkala for food. We ‘borrow’.”
“Fuck,” said the stunned Russian President.
“But we were,” justified one of the scientists, “… following Herr Stalin’s orders… to do whatever it takes to build this weapon.”
“No… just do it… that’s what he said,” interjected another nameless scientist.
President Petrova continued with the questioning, “Stalin said, just do it? Hmm. So what else do you steal?”
After some murmuring someone said, “People.”
“FUCK. Let me guess you abduct Russia’s brightest to develop this super lame decoy missile?”
“Yes Ma’am. But I wouldn’t call it lame,” it was Otto the rat.
It hit Anna like a Soviet hammer. It was hard. It was cold. It was heavy. It also explained every one of Russia’s maladies. They stole her goods, her people’s productivity, they stole resources, Russia’s resources and then they stole grown Russians… for what…? To build this dipshity lame ass weapon… that was so pre-2001.
Otto began, “Ma’am, I know what you are thinking. We get news down here too. But we are not the reason why Russia has lagged….”
Petrova had had enough with these co-opting retro-Nazis.
Petrova let it rip, “You assholes are the reason… the only reason… why Russia has underperformed and disappointed and imploded for so long. It wasn’t communism or military pending. Neither the noble rouble, nor Afghanistan or even the CIA, that brought down the USSR. It was you. You…. bastards…. you conniving little Nazi bitches.”
“Madam you aren’t getting the point. We were following…” it was Mueller.
“What… Stalin’s orders? Dude get a grip.”
Petrova puffed like a 70s era steam loco hauling a mile of coal across the tundra, “And, and this so called weapon of yours… what a fucking joke? Let’s get real for a minute! Forget the DARPA or the CIA, I bet even excuses like Ukraine and Serbia have something in their panties to shoot your fucking… fugly planes…”
President Petrova pushed on, “… haha… Russian people turn around and bend over… and planes? That was your big friggin idea? Planes? Have you fucking seen the news lately, you fucking retards?”
It seemed like the tirade was getting through as the scientists and Otto bowed and looked about nervously. Mueller tried a fresh sorry.
“Stuff your sorries in your assholes… I want you all arrested… executed right now. Purged. Yes that’s right, purged off the face off the earth. I never thought I would say this. PURGED. I get it. Stalin’s had to do what he did. Coz he was just dealing with morons.”
The President turned to the lead security guy, “GUARDS, are we gonna purge or what?”
The group of guards instantly went into attention and saluted their real President. Allegiances had changed. After weighing the options they had decided to ditch the nerds and back the politician. And now they were ready for their first ever purge. Yeah!!!
Even the President was slightly surprised by the flipping of the guards. While she had found the answers to some of Russia’s maladies, the eagerness of the Presidential guards to carry out a purge was still a mystery.
Sensing a seismic shit storm, Otto and Mueller blurted o
ut something in unison.
“What?”
“We have another project... another weapon…”
“Really?” Anna asked sarcastically expecting more bullshit from this posse of insane clowns.
“The new weapon can ████████████ ████████████ America ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ by the balls ████████████ smash ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ ████████████.”
“Are you for real?” asked the still suspicious President. After getting a resounding yes, she said, “Go on.”
“████████████ ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ arctic =████████████████████████ monkeys ████████████ ████████████. ████████████ ████████████ rusty trombone =████████████ silver back ████████████ Tim Hortons ██████████████ Tbilisi ████████████ double hump ████████████ snow patrol ████████████.”
Anna Petrova sat on a plush couch. She kept shaking her head. She had been doing so for half an hour.
“Madam trust me, this weapon is real.”
Finally she looked up. “If this thing is half as good as you suggest… this is beyond revolutionary... and you better not be bullshitting me… to avoid the purge.”
“The thought never crossed our minds.”
“Better not. Every Russian Leader has purged at some point. Mine is still due.”