“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…