By Scott Casper

Russia in January was really, really cold. The kind of cold that made metal freeze, engines stall, and soldiers just roll over and die at their posts. Flying a plane was perilous business in this weather for all sorts of reasons so it was no surprise that only three Soviet fighters - Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3's - had scrambled from Vnukovo International Airport three minutes ago and arrived in time to intercept the mystery aircraft flying towards Moscow.

By the time the Russian pilots could see the speeding aircraft, they could tell that they had no chance to overtake it. The best they could do was fall in behind it and try to keep up. Attempts to raise a response from the aircraft were met with radio silence. And still they flew closer to Moscow.

"Engage and destroy!" came a harsh Russian voice over the headset of each pilot. Their trigger fingers squeezed and wing-mounted ShKAS machine guns, synchronized with a larger machine gun mounted on the engine, answered with deadly chatter.

Aboard the mystery aircraft, the crew observed they were under attack and turned to their leader. "Sir, their guns pose a threat," one said in Atlantean. "We could boost power to the rear electrical shields…"

"Suffering shad! And slow us down more? I won't tolerate anymore delay. Just take evasive maneuvers!"

"Yes, sir!" the pilot responded.

By the time the evening lights of Moscow could be seen as a glow on the horizon, two fighters had joined the chase, three had fallen back, one held the distance and the last was slowly gaining.

The commander of the mystery aircraft impatiently rapped his fingers on the arm of his seat and stared out the window next to him. "Enough of this!" he said with a wave of his hand. "I will get to Moscow on my own from here! Lose or dispatch the planes pursuing us, it doesn't matter to me, but be back here to pick me up in two hours, understood?"

"Yes, my lord!" the crew said as one.

Outside, there were now a dozen fighter planes the Red Army had scrambled in pursuit of the Atlantean airship, all at varying distances from their quarry.

"Good," Namor the Sub-Mariner said as he stood up and moved to the door in the side of the cabin. "Then it's time to give Joe a little visit."

If Prince Namor of Atlantis noticed the icy cold wind when he emerged from the moving aircraft, he gave no indication of it, despite wearing nothing but black swim trunks. He jumped out and quickly began to lose forward inertia. Instead of being concerned with how close the nearest fighter plane was to being right on top of him, Namor simply spun around in mid-air, waited until the plane was close enough beside him, and punched a hole through the wing. Instead of letting go, he held the wing and swung his body around onto the top of it. He ran up the wing to the body of the plane, slid over the top of it, and punched his hands through the canopy. Ignoring the panicking pilot inside, Namor simply jerked on the plane and, with his bare hands, managed to angle it away from the sharp left bank it had gone into when he landed on the wing. He found that he had overcompensated and the plane was banking to the right now, so he jerked it back a little the other way. Now confident that the plane was entirely in his power, Namor smiled and began looking down over either side for Moscow.

Meanwhile.

Moscow. Vnukovo Airport Control Tower.

"Do you 'zuppose eetz 'zome new German 'zpy plane?" Commander Aleksashkin asked in the Russian tongue to the lieutenant at his side.

"Zir, leesen to this!" a soldier interrupted, taking off his headphones and holding them up for Commander Aleksashkin.

The commander unfolded his arms from behind his back, took the offered headphones and held them up to one ear.

"Help!" he heard through the headphones. "My plane haz' been commandeered! Repeat, I am not in control of my plane!"

"Ridiculous," Commander Aleksashkin said. "How can someone commandeer a one-man fighter plane in mid-air? When he landz', have that pilot court-martialed for beink' drunk on duty."

"Zir," said the soldier on RADAR monitor duty. "I'm trackink' that pilot. He'z broken off from chasink' the unidentified aircraft and headink' this way."

"I want 'wisual confirmation!" Commander Aleksashkin called out.

Two soldiers stood at the west-facing tower windows with binoculars at the ready. It did not take them long. "Zir!" one of them called out. "He'z comink' in low! He lookz' like he'z comink in for an emergency landink'!"

"He'z nowhere near the airstripz', 'zir!" cried the other. "He'z headink' straight for Red Square!"

"No!" the commander cried in alarm. He snatched away the binoculars to see for himself, then sprinted across the room to the phone on the wall and put the receiver to his ear. "Lieutenant, 'zend all emergency 'wehicles to Red Square at once! I want a full regiment of troops there! Eef there eez no explanation for the pilot's behavior, they will act az' heez' firing squad on the spot." Putting the phone down from his ear, he shouted for all to hear, "What are you standink' around for? I want 50 of our planez' 'een the air, 'eef that's what it takes to brink' that plane down!"

Thirty seconds later.

Moscow. Red Square.

Warnings to stay off the streets blared from loudspeakers mounted on transport trucks carrying soldiers, but some people still dared look outside at the fighter plane that came roaring into the square, skittering and skipping off the pavement in a shower of sparks and debris. Most remarkable was the near-naked man riding atop it like a circus performer standing on horseback. The man had pulled cables loose from the cabin and held them up like reins. He was easing the plane down, touching down just enough to slow their momentum, but not bearing down hard enough to roll and crash. But there was not enough square. The plane had stalled at 100 MPH and was in total free fall now – nothing more than a guided missile when it hit the far wall of the square and exploded in a fireball right at the base of the Kremlin. Its mysterious pilot had jumped clear seconds beforehand and was standing in the middle of Red Square, surrounded by an entire regiment of soldiers.

To Lieutenant Yatskaya's eyes, the man before them could have been a statue of a Greek god come to life, so perfectly chiseled seemed his muscular frame. Yet there was something disturbingly triangular about the shape of his head and the widow's peak of his brown-black hair only and his narrow chin only exaggerated the V-shape of his face. His eyes seemed unnaturally wide and he looked through eyes half-closed, as if wincing from the sunlight though it was a mostly cloudy day. And his ears were unnaturally tall and pointy. At the lieutenant's signal, his men raised their PPSh sub-machine guns and took aim.

What no one expected was for the mysterious stranger to take to the air again – on his own! No one had noticed the tiny wings on the ankles of the stranger that flapped as if the man had birds in his feet, nor would ever have guessed that they would let the man vault into the air with such speed. Before anyone could react, he had reached Lieutenant Yatskaya, snatched him off his feet with one hand, and continued flying ahead as if he was burdened by no extra weight at all.

The stranger yelled a question that Yatskaya recognized as English. "Where is Stalin?"

One minute later.

The Kremlin. Office of Comrade Joseph Stalin.

The door burst open so abruptly that Joe Stalin dropped the papers from his hand. Commissar Badenov leaned in and yelled, "Comrade, you must e'wacuate at once!"

Stalin knew Badenov would not dare interrupt him unless it was important. "A German attack?" Stalin asked.

"Nyet. Worse," Badenov answered. "A truck is waiting for you this way."

They took the back stairs at the end of a long hall and came to a back door. A transport truck was backed up to the door with its motor running. Badenov had an auto pistol out in one hand and pushed Stalin into the back of the truck with the other. "Go! Go! Move!" Badenov yelled for the driver.

As the driver shifted the truck into gear, there came a rumbling from the wall behind them and a fist punched some stones out of the wall from the inside. When the driver saw in his rear view mirror the Sub-Mariner knocking a bigger hole in the wall large enough for him to jump through, the driver nearly panicked and jumped out of the truck before he shifted gears again and floored the accelerator.

Commissar Badenov, hanging onto the back of the truck, emptied seven out of eight rounds from his TT-30 semi-automatic pistol at the Sub-Mariner, but the bullets did not seem to faze him. Indeed, the horrifically powerful merman sprinted after the truck and began to overtake it even as it came up to speed. Badenov's last hope was to aim a bullet at the Sub-Mariner's eye at point blank range, but the Sub-Mariner's speed was too great. Before Badenov could aim, Namor seized him by the arm and tossed him out of the moving truck.

Leaping into the back, Namor saw Joseph Stalin cringing at the rear of the compartment. "I would have words with you, if you can be man enough to stand still and hear them," Namor said angrily as he strode forward, grabbed hold of Stalin's shirt, and lifted them both into the air and hovered in place so that the truck moved on without them.

It was not a public street on which Namor and Stalin faced each other. Commissar Badenov was lying on the ground, stunned, some distance behind them.

Joe Stalin looked around. He had 10,000 troops stationed in Moscow and, somehow, not one of them had shown up yet to save him. Determined to buy himself some time, he straightened his shoulders, looked Namor in the eye, and said, "How dare you? How dare you come here and attack me like 'theez? Do you know who I am?"

"Nooo, I thought this was the Joe Stalin of Hoboken, New Jersey," Namor said, emulating the sarcastic tone he had heard countless times in New York. "I trust you know who I am. I am Prince Namor of Atlantis. And I trust you know that the United States of America is an ally of Atlantis."

"You 'eediot! Russia eez' not at war 'weeth the United States! It eez' at war 'weeth Germany!"

Namor raised and pulled back his fist. Stalin cringed and covered his face. "I will be the bigger man and let that slide this once," Namor said, but it was clear from his voice that he was restraining some terrible anger. Namor slowly un-tensed and lowered his fist. "I am sure you are also aware that the Japanese recently attempted to invade the United States by building a secret tunnel from Siberia.* I found them and stopped them. But then I checked a world atlas, and guess who I found is in charge of Siberia? You, Comrade Stalin. And yet, somehow you would have me believe that the Japanese Army somehow snuck into Siberia and spent months building a tunnel that you knew nothing about?"

(*Marvel Mystery Comics #17)

Soldiers started to appear at both ends of the street and on all the surrounding rooftops. Stalin looked up and around and turned to Namor again with more conviction in his voice. "Siberia eez' a 'wast, dez'olate country!" Stalin protested loudly. "Yez', the Japaneez' moved through our territoriez', but 'eet was not with our knowledge! Japan eez' no friend of Russia's!"

Namor looked around at the machine guns being aimed at him from all sides. "Fine," he said, matching Stalin for loudness. They were both playing to a packed house now. "I will accept your word, for now. Consider my visit here a reminder, then. Keep a better watch on your borders, Joe, or next time something like that happens, I'll come back and I won't be so nice!"

Stalin turned his back on Namor and walked back to where some soldiers had just helped Commissar Badenov back on his feet. Stalin walked past Badenov and motioned for him to follow. Soldiers were already throwing a tarp over the hole Namor had broken through the back wall of the Kremlin. Stalin went to the door, not ten feet away, and opened it. He looked back to Namor, standing with his arms crossed in the middle of a street full of armed soldiers. "Give heem' to the count of five to surrender and then keel' the idiot," Stalin said to Badenov, but loud enough to be heard by others around them. Then Stalin shut the door behind him.

A deafening roar of gunfire erupted outside almost at once, so loud that Stalin threw up his arms to protect himself from the noise itself. Then the door he had just shut burst off its hinges into the stairwell and Namor bounded in after it.

"I told you I'd forgive you only once!" Namor said. Then he punched Stalin in the face. Before Stalin could pick himself up off the floor, though, Namor was gone again, having flown away and out of sight.

NEXT ISH: Namor's returns to NYC for a heart-to-heart with Betty Dean!