ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 09:12
The helicopter drifted slowly toward the center of town, toward the Lenin statue, staying low but not so low it risked colliding with any of the buildings. It moved through the air like a starving predator, hunting desperately for any sign of prey. Chapel kept his head down so the pilot wouldn’t see him, waiting for his chance.
Down in the intersection, the tear gas cloud was already beginning to disperse, shredded by the downward wash of air from the chopper’s rotor. One of the assassin teams moved through the thinning cloud toward the factory, their carbines swiveling back and forth in case Nadia showed herself.
Chapel couldn’t see the other team, the one that had gone into the dormitories. They must be holding back, as a reserve, or simply as spotters. The Russians weren’t taking any chances.
Time to give them something new to worry about. As the helicopter neared Chapel’s position, he readied himself, then jumped up and started firing. His rifle’s bullets tore through the thin metal skin of the helicopter, leaving bright holes in the dark paint of its fuselage. He didn’t hit anything vital—this was a military helicopter, and all its important equipment would be protected by armor plate—but he definitely got its attention.
Its beak-shaped nose started to swing around in slow motion, and he got a good look into the canopy. He cursed when he saw there were two people in there, a pilot and a copilot. The Ka-60 had a big rectangular front viewport, much like the windshield of a car. In Ranger school they’d taught Chapel just how difficult it was to snipe someone through a windshield—the curved glass distorted your view, and it also tended to refract the trajectory of any bullet that passed through it. He tried for a shot at the pilot anyway. That was one vital piece of equipment he could conceivably hit.
His bullets starred the viewport, sending a gentle rain of glittering glass cubes falling toward the street below. The helicopter jerked sideways and raised its nose, looking very much like a startled dragonfly. Chapel had time to see that he hadn’t hit either of the pilots, though the copilot had shed his safety webbing and was running back toward the main body of the aircraft.
Then the nose came up farther and he could only see the belly of the helicopter as it reared back and fell away from him, pulling out of range. Chapel let it go and looked down into the streets. Both members of the assassin team he could see were looking up at him, though their carbines were still aimed at street level. He desperately wanted to fire a burst into them, to make them jump, but he didn’t dare waste bullets. He’d already fired twelve rounds of his thirty into the helicopter and there was a long fight coming.
Nor, it turned out, did he need to shoot at them. Even as he watched them watching him, Nadia was sneaking up behind them, crouched so low she was nearly walking on her knees. She fired a quick salvo into their backs and then darted away, into the shadowy interior of an administration building.
Chapel wanted to cheer as he saw them dance and jump. One of them was bleeding from a wound at his hip as they ran for cover. Chapel ignored them and studied the dormitory buildings, looking for any sign of the third team. He was so intent on his search he almost missed what the helicopter was doing.
The Ka-60 had turned broadside to him, hovering over the statue fifty yards away. It bobbed slightly as it hung in the air there, then stabilized itself until it was motionless, seeming almost glued to the air.
Its side hatch slid open—the movement was enough to make Chapel look—and the copilot peered out for a moment, then ducked back inside. A second later the long narrow shape of a heavy machine gun rolled forward, four barrels sticking out through the side hatch to glint in the sunlight.
Chapel recognized the gun—a Yak-B Gatling gun that could pump out four thousand rounds every minute. Standard equipment on most Russian attack helicopters, though the Ka-60 normally didn’t carry one. The helicopter must have been modified to carry it at the expense of crew seats. It opened fire almost instantly with a grinding noise that made every muscle in Chapel’s body twitch.
He dove backward, under the short wall that screened the rooftop. His face hit the searing tar paper as bullets lanced over him, chewing up the roof only a few feet from where he lay. If the pilot ascended even a few dozen feet, the gunner would have a perfect view of Chapel, wherever he was on the roof.
It was definitely time to move.
He waited until he heard the Gatling gun start to spin down, then pushed himself up on his hands and dashed for the stairway that led down inside the building. The helicopter started firing again before he reached the stairs, but he managed to get down into cover behind thick walls, even as dust and shards of broken concrete rained down on him. Something hurt, but he didn’t have time to think about it. He hurried into the center of the building where he would be safe from the Gatling gun and pressed himself up against a wall, gaining just a little space to breathe.
Something really started to hurt by then. It didn’t matter—he could walk. And he had to find some way to deal with the helicopter. As long as it was airborne, there was no way to get away in the truck, no hope for him or for Nadia or Bogdan.
He checked his rifle, even though the pain was getting pretty intense. His clip was still half full, and everything looked in order . . .
Goddamnit, that hurt.
He realized he was being foolish. If he was really injured, he could bleed out in minutes. He just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that he was wounded. He looked down, then, and saw a huge oblong gash in his leg. It was bleeding profusely, but he didn’t think any arteries were pierced, and none of the bones were broken.
Still, it had to be taken care of. He tore off his shirt and ripped it into strips. He could barely manage a quick field dressing, but at least that would slow the blood loss. While he was tying off the bandage, he heard something, and he stopped rigid in place.
He’d heard someone whisper.
He grabbed his rifle and almost fired a burst into the shadows—
—before he realized it was Nadia, and she was calling his name.
ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 09:19
He realized that he’d lost track of her, and that she must have run into his building as she moved around the intersection. She would have known he was still there, of course—she only had to look for the building currently being demolished by the helicopter. It was a terrible risk, though, for them to be in the same building at the same time. If the assassins had a bomb or even just more tear gas grenades—
“Jim,” she breathed. “Oh, thank God you are still alive!”
She came out of the shadows and rushed over to put an arm around him. He thought she was trying to embrace him and wanted to tell her there was no time for that, but then he realized he had been falling over and she was coming to support him.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“I’ll be fine. What’s the situation?”
“We are about to be killed,” she said.
Chapel grunted in frustration and pushed his back up against the wall. “That’s not what I meant. There were six of them on the ground. You got two over by the factories, then wounded another one when they spotted me. I’m pretty sure two of them are still holed up in the dormitories; they’re probably watching the entrance to the canyon, ready to gun us down if we try to run into the desert, and—”
“Eight,” she said.
He shut up and just stared at her.
“What?” he asked, when she didn’t elaborate.
“There were eight of them on the ground, by my count.”
Chapel wanted to close his eyes and sit down and just stop thinking then. He wanted to pretend like none of this was happening.
He couldn’t do that, of course.
“I counted six,” he told her. “I was planning on six.” But it had been hard to get an accurate count when they jumped out of the helicopter. The rotor had been kicking up so much dust, and he’d been far enough away he could have counted wrong. “Okay, there we
re eight. Now there are six and one is wounded. Then there’s this helicopter. The second we step out of this building, it’s going to mow us down.” He thought of something, then. Something that should have always been there, in the middle of his plans. “Where’s Bogdan?” he asked.
“In the truck,” she said. “Hiding under some crates. I got him in there while the killers were still distracted.”
Chapel forced a grin, despite the pain in his leg. Damn, but Nadia was good at this. The truck was probably the safest place for the hacker to be. The assassins had already checked the vehicle and cleared it. They would have no reason to check it again, at least not until they were sure they’d secured the area.
“It might be possible,” Nadia said. “Not likely, mind you. But possible that we could draw enough attention away from the truck that he could drive out of here alone. Of course, we would have to sacrifice both our lives to get him clear.”
“If we don’t take care of the helicopter, he won’t get very far. And do you think it would even occur to him to take that kind of initiative?”
Nadia’s shoulders swiveled around in a complicated shrug as she wrestled with her thoughts. “No,” she said, finally.
Chapel nodded. “Okay. So, slightly different plan. I go up on the roof and shoot down this helicopter—if I can, which is a big hypothetical. In the chaos you run for the truck and drive the hell out of here. Assuming these assholes don’t shoot out your tires or get a lucky shot and kill you at the wheel, you can get to the Caspian Sea and meet the submarine there; it can take you to—”
“That is the most foolish plan I have ever heard,” Nadia told him.
“You have a better one?”
“Yes,” she told him. “I go to the roof. You drive the truck.”
Chapel could guess her logic. He knew perfectly well what she was thinking. She had only a few months to live, even if she did escape from Aralsk-30. Sacrificing herself here and now wouldn’t do much to shorten her life expectancy.
He knew he couldn’t let her do it, though. He couldn’t let this woman, this incredible person, just throw her life away, no matter how short it might be. He didn’t understand his feelings for her. He didn’t know that he ever would. But they were real.
He would do everything in his power to make sure she lived, for as long as she could. To make sure she escaped.
He also knew that she would try to argue him around if he said anything like that. She would tell him he was being an idiot, an emotional idiot, and maybe she would be right. So he needed another reason why it couldn’t be her.
“You’re a lousy shot,” he said.
Her eyes flared with something similar to—but not quite the same as—anger. He could tell she knew he was right. She pressed her lips together very hard, until they turned white. She twisted her face away from his. Then she brought it back very fast and kissed him, deeply, passionately. For what they both knew was the last time.
She broke away from him and ran toward the front of the building. He headed back toward the stairs.
ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 09:25
Even before he could reach the roof, the helicopter came for him, strafing the broken windows on the upper floor of the building. Concrete dust puffed from each of the windows in turn, and the windowsills crumbled away, rotten after years of exposure to the desert sun. Debris crunched under his feet as he ran for cover between two windows, then ducked down to keep out of sight.
The Gatling gun spun down and he took his chance, leaning out the window to fire off a quick burst at the gunner in the side hatch. He didn’t hit anything important, but the helicopter bobbed away a little—clearly the pilot didn’t want to risk a stray shot hitting a fuel line or an ammo box.
The likelihood of that was minimal, though. Chapel needed to kill the pilot if he was to have any chance of bringing the helicopter down. That was going to take a miracle. He wished he had his tablet with him, that he could talk to Angel—not just because she could give him an idea of what the battle looked like at ground level. He wanted to tell her good-bye as well.
He wasn’t going to get his miracle by hiding in cover. He ducked low under a windowsill and dashed over to another window, several yards down. If he could keep the gunner guessing where he was going to shoot from next, that might buy him a little time.
He heard shots from below, carbine rounds. That could be Nadia or it could be one of the assassins. Clearly they planned on storming this building, finishing him off if the helicopter couldn’t. He could only hope Nadia was ready for that kind of assault.
He poked his rifle barrel out of the window, then risked a quick look. The nose of the helicopter was ten yards away from him. He could see right through the viewport, could see the pilot hunched over his controls.
He was never going to get a better chance than this. He lifted his weapon, lined up the sights—
And saw the pilot glance up and see him, the Russian’s face instantly going white with fear. Chapel took his shot, firing a tight burst right into the viewport.
Glass splintered and flew, but the pilot was already moving. The third shot of Chapel’s burst didn’t even hit the viewport, instead digging into the fuselage between the canopy and the side hatch. Worthless.
Except—Chapel wasn’t sure it was even possible, but yes, he could definitely see a tinge of red on the broken glass of the viewport. The helicopter didn’t just fall out of the sky, but he knew he had struck the pilot, wounded him at least.
Not that it mattered. The helicopter was already pulling away, drawing back to a range where Chapel would be unlikely to hit the aircraft at all. He howled in frustration—then cut himself off in midgrowl as he saw the Gatling gun’s barrels moving, tracking around. In an instant it would fire again; he needed to move—
—Except the Gatling gun wasn’t turning toward him. The gunner had lowered his elevation, tilting the barrels down so they could fire into the street.
No. No, no, no, Chapel thought, the words hammering in his brain like fists on steel. Nadia was down there, moving already, dashing for safety as the Gatling gun homed in on her position. It didn’t need to be accurate. It didn’t need to conserve ammunition. It could just hose her down with bullets, chop her to pieces.
Roaring with anguish, Chapel leaned far out of the window and pointed his rifle at the gunner, barely visible behind the mass of his weapon. Chapel held down his trigger and sprayed bullets as best he could into the man, so far away, so far out of reach. His rifle clicked dry and he wanted to throw the damned thing at the gunner, as useless a gesture as it might be.
Down in the street Nadia zigged and zagged, trying to keep the gunner from drawing a bead on her. She was fast, so very fast, but in a second it wouldn’t matter, the gunner would just start painting the ground with lead—
And that was when Chapel got his miracle.
Or was it even a miracle? Maybe Nadia had planned for it to happen. Maybe she’d been that smart. Maybe Chapel had hit the helicopter pilot harder than he thought, maybe the pilot was losing blood and getting dizzy, not paying attention like he should.
Chapel would never know why it happened. But it did happen, so fast Chapel couldn’t even process the details.
The helicopter had to move back to give the gunner a good angle of fire on Nadia. It had to move back to get away from Chapel and his AK-47. It had already been flying very low, only a few dozen feet off the ground, below the level of the surrounding buildings. The pilot must have assumed he had plenty of clearance, though, because he was in the middle of the wide intersection.
He didn’t have enough clearance. The very tip of one of his rotor blades brushed, ever so gently, the bronze face of Vladimir Lenin.
The blade was made of a tough composite material, but it was thin and the statue was thick, hard bronze. The blade twisted and bent faster than any human eye could follow and knocked backward into another blade in the space of an eyeblink. Suddenly there was nothing holding the helicopter up in
the air and it fell, its rotor like the crooked wings of a squashed bug. It hit the ground hard, its nose smashing into the base of the statue, its tail twisting around and around until it snapped off and flew across the intersection to collide with a building on the far side.
It brought up an incredible cloud of dust and debris, a vast wave of murk that hid everything from Chapel’s view. He saw flashes of light inside the cloud—gunfire—and knew that Nadia was making her move, running for the truck.
Something buried deep in Chapel’s brain, some survival instinct, started shouting at him then. If he could reach the truck himself, if he could run over there in the dust, when the assassins couldn’t see him, if he could get away with Nadia and Bogdan—
He didn’t let it turn into a full-fledged thought, much less a concrete plan. He just started running and hoped for the best. Down the stairs, two at a time. He missed one riser when his wounded leg went out from under him, but he was so full of adrenaline at that point he caught himself on the handrail and just kept running. Down to the ground floor, the door just in front of him. A shape appeared in the doorway, a human form in silhouette. Chapel didn’t waste time trying to make out any details. He brought his shoulder down and smashed into the shape like a linebacker, bowling over one of the assassins. He didn’t even slow down as he plunged into the debris cloud, even as things whizzed and rocketed past his head. Maybe they were bullets, maybe they were parts of the helicopter that flew off in the crash. He didn’t care. If one of them struck him, he would go down, he knew that much, but there was nothing he could do about that, no way to prevent it.
The truck was ahead of him, a big square shape slightly darker than the dust and sand blowing up around him. It was still so far away, and he heard shouting, and knew he was being chased, but if he kept running, if he kept moving—his leg hurt, bad, but—but—
He came out of the cloud gasping for breath, moving as fast as his wounded leg would carry him. The truck was no more than sixty yards away. Its taillights were lit, and he knew Nadia was in the driver seat, waiting for him, Bogdan sitting next to her; if he could just make it over there, they could be gone, laughing as they rocketed through the desert, just like before, before they’d found Perimeter—
The Hydra Protocol Page 33