The Hydra Protocol

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The Hydra Protocol Page 40

by David Wellington


  “You mean because of how she was arrested for attending a protest rally,” Chapel said.

  “Exactly,” Kalin said, as if Chapel was finally getting the point. “Add to this that she had charmed Marshal Bulgachenko, the head of FSTEK. He would have given her the moon for a New Year’s present had she asked for it.”

  “Did she—” Chapel hated to even ask, especially of an officious monster like Kalin, but he had to know. “Did they—”

  “Fuck?” Kalin asked, turning the vulgarity over in his mouth like a candy. He left Chapel hanging for a long, cruel minute. Once a torturer, always a torturer, perhaps. “No,” he said, finally. “The marshal had never had children, and he saw Asimova as a surrogate daughter. He was very proud of her, especially given her Siberian upbringing.”

  Chapel frowned. “You have a surprising amount of information on a dead man’s inner thoughts and feelings.”

  “I was the man who killed him,” Kalin said. His smile didn’t crack or even chip. “He was a traitor to the Fatherland. He deserved to die. But he was also a hero of our military, and I felt it was worth knowing why he had become corrupted.”

  Jesus, Chapel thought. How long had Kalin tortured the marshal before he killed him? The man might well have been a separatist—a terrorist, even—but nobody should ever be subject to the mercies of a man like Kalin. Nobody.

  “I would have watched Bulgachenko even if he hadn’t promoted Asimova so quickly. He was a known troublemaker, from even before my time. When the Soviet Union fell, there was some interest among the Sibiryaks in splitting off from the Federation. It was a short-lived political moment, but in that time Bulgachenko added his voice to the chorus. He even petitioned Yeltsin in person for self-determination for the Siberian republics. He believed he could form a government in Vladivostok, with, of course, himself as president. Yeltsin was a drunk, but he understood that Russia could not survive without Siberia—”

  “Without its resources, you mean.”

  “Exactly,” Kalin said. “Yeltsin grew angry and threw Bulgachenko out of his office. Before that day Bulgachenko was well on his way to being in control of the entire state security apparatus. Afterward he was relegated to FSTEK, which at the time meant he was put in charge of ordering around a few border guards. FSTEK was a kind of very well-paid gulag. Bulgachenko, of course, was an intelligent man, and he knew better than to protest. Instead he took this as an opportunity. When plutonium started disappearing from the stockpiles, he volunteered to go after it. He only needed a field agent, someone who could actually go out and recover the stuff.

  “Asimova must have seemed like a gift from Jesus. She was capable, she was brilliant, and she was beautiful. A perfect symbol of the Siberia of his dreams. She would be a—ah, I know there is an American term, for a person who is the perfect image of—”

  “A poster girl,” Chapel suggested.

  “Yes! That is it. She would be the poster girl for a new Siberia that was not beholden to Moscow. She doesn’t even look Russian. So of course he confided everything in her. Told her all his plans. Told her that simple political pressure, even nonviolent protest of the kind she had tried, would be useless in creating an independent Siberia. By then they had both seen what happened to Chechnya and South Ossetia under Putin. The Federation has finished giving away territory. It will fight to hold on to what it has left. If Siberia was to gain independence, it must be able to fight back. But how? There is no military presence out east that is not staffed completely by those loyal to Moscow. A coup was out of the question. Bulgachenko’s original plan was to use the confiscated plutonium to make dirty bombs. Put one in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg—perhaps a third in Nizhny Novgorod, just for good measure. Threaten to detonate them if demands were not met.”

  “That’s—” Chapel shook his head. “That’s—”

  “Terrorism, yes,” Kalin said. “The last resort of the politically deranged. It was Asimova who talked him out of it.”

  “Nadia?”

  Kalin’s eyes crept over Chapel’s face until he felt like he was covered in bugs. “It would perhaps be better if you stop calling her by that name.”

  Chapel realized his mistake and shook his head. “I’ll call her what I want to,” he said. In his head the reply had been I’ll call her what I want to, asshole, but he had some sense of decorum left.

  Kalin shrugged. “Yes, Asimova convinced him his dirty bomb plan was folly. Which anyone but Bulgachenko could have seen. FSTEK is not some miraculous organization that can act unobserved. The plutonium it recovered was quite carefully logged and monitored by other agencies. If it went missing again, the theft would be discovered very quickly. And the response of my group—the Counter-Intelligence Division—would have been swift, decisive, and without qualm. Beyond this, dirty bombs are notoriously dangerous to build and deploy—and she already knew far too well the danger of handling plutonium.”

  “So it was her idea to hijack Perimeter?”

  “They developed the plan together. But, yes, it was her brainchild. She knew, of course, that I would try to stop her. She knew that to get access to Perimeter she would need to become a rogue agent. She also knew she would be dead within the week if she did not find some protection somewhere. This, I believe, is why she went to the Americans. To you.”

  “You could have shut her down then with one phone call,” Chapel pointed out. “You could have told us she was a terrorist. We would have arrested her in Washington and then held her for you.”

  Kalin’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes did. They became weary suddenly, weary and resigned. “That would have meant sharing information with the Pentagon. Giving away secrets—telling you about Perimeter, for one thing. In Russia, some secrets are buried so deeply they can never be brought to light.”

  Chapel nodded. “We have a few of those in America, too.”

  “I was convinced,” Kalin said, “that I could run her down myself. I did, in fact, call the authorities in Cuba and tell them she was violating their national waters. Unfortunately, the photographs I sent did not make it in time and she slipped through their fingers.”

  That explained the mysterious boarding of Donny’s party yacht off Cay Sal Bank, Chapel thought—and why the Cubans hadn’t arrested them then and there.

  “Next I thought to catch her in Bucharest, and again in Uzbekistan, but both times you helped her get away,” Kalin pointed out. “It seems she picked her protection very well.”

  “She convinced me that your agents were gangsters chasing Bogdan Vlaicu,” Chapel admitted, since it seemed there was no point keeping that from Kalin now. He did not confess that after Vobkent he’d known she was being chased by the Russians, that they wanted her dead or alive. No need to give everything away.

  “Indeed. She can be very persuasive.” Kalin folded his hands in his lap. “Kapitan Chapel, I want to be clear on our roles in what is unfolding now. We need you to find her. That is all. Once we have a location, I will not permit you within earshot of the woman. I’d hate for her to charm you once more and have you switch coats again.”

  Chapel bit his lip. He could hardly complain or protest. After all, she had done just that—charmed him—once.

  But he had his orders, and he knew what he needed, personally. Whatever Kalin thought was going to happen, however this was going to go down, Chapel planned on looking Nadia right in the eye at the last moment. If Kalin didn’t like it, maybe he had to be taken out, too.

  It wasn’t the most unattractive prospect.

  YAKUTSK, SAKHA REPUBLIC, RUSSIA: JULY 28, 05:37 (YAKST)

  It was a clear night over Siberia, and as the plane swung north toward its destination, Chapel got to see the sun set, then peek back over the horizon and set again. Yakutsk was close enough to the Arctic Circle that its nights were only six hours long this time of year. When they landed, the sun was rising again and the first pink tinge of dawn was still lining one side of all the airport buildings.

  It was enough to give h
is jet lag jet lag. Chapel hobbled out of the plane, his legs cramped from the flight and still sore, bruised, and lacerated from the beating he’d taken at Aralsk-30. He stepped down a short flight of stairs to the tarmac and thought he could feel the world turning under his feet.

  His guard detail emerged behind him, weapons in their hands. Kalin came down last, looking fresh and ready for whatever happened next. If Chapel hadn’t already hated the man with an undying passion, that would probably have been reason enough to start.

  They were met by a Russian army officer in a long greatcoat with fur trim around the collar. He looked overdressed. Yakutsk was the coldest city of its size in the world, Chapel knew, but this was the height of summer and it couldn’t be less than fifty-five degrees out. Windbreaker weather, as far as Chapel was concerned.

  The officer looked confused as to whom he should salute. He finally settled on Kalin, who returned the gesture with a perfunctory touch of his forehead. The two of them spoke in Russian. Chapel could follow most of what Kalin said, but the officer’s accent was so thick he might have been speaking ancient Etruscan.

  They’d been expected, of course, and the officer had a car waiting to take them to an army base where they would be quartered. Kalin replied that wasn’t necessary, that they needed to get to work right away. He ordered that the local troops ready a long-range helicopter at once.

  The officer seemed a little put out that his offer of hospitality was rejected. He relayed the order, though, then waved for his troops to come over. There were about fifty of them, and they looked tired. Chapel gathered that they had been part of the detail that was turning the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for Nadia—for the terrorist Asimova. They had searched about a third of the entire city, going door-to-door and checking every house and place of business. They’d gone into cellars and up into attics and found no trace of her, but they were sure that with a little more time—

  “She’s not here,” Chapel said, in Russian.

  The officer turned to look at him with genuine curiosity. Chapel wasn’t surprised. His presence here was a state secret, not the kind of thing Valits would have passed on to his low-ranking officers. Beyond that, a foreigner in civilian clothes with one arm was always going to stand out on an army base.

  “She’s not stupid enough to come to Yakutsk,” Chapel went on, carefully sounding out the words in his head before he said them. “She knows you will look here first.”

  The officer opened his mouth to ask a question, but Kalin cut him off. He spoke slowly, perhaps for Chapel’s benefit, but his words had the sound of true command. “This man is an American who specializes in advanced signal technology. His role is to help us find the terrorist Asimova. However, he does not possess a security clearance. Your men will not speak to him unless it is absolutely necessary, and under no circumstances are they to accept any order he tries to give.”

  The officer nodded in understanding. He looked distinctly relieved. Chapel had been a soldier long enough to understand why. No matter what rank you held in the military, someone was always your boss, and someone else probably took orders from you. You had to answer to the former for the mistakes of the latter. You always needed to know where everyone around you fit in, what category they belonged to. Now that Chapel was squared away, the officer could just write him off.

  The officer led them to a nearby building where there was coffee and a simple meal of coarse bread and pickled fish. For about fifteen minutes they waited there until the helicopter was ready to receive them. Nobody spoke a word to him the whole time.

  The helicopter turned out to be an Mi-8, recognizable by the twin turboprop power plants mounted over its canopy. It was a beast of a machine, a huge fuselage with the tail assembly sticking out the back like the tail of a tadpole. Drop tanks full of fuel studded its sides. Kalin led his troops onboard—twenty men in full body armor, each of them carrying a carbine and enough grenades to make them jangle as they jumped on board. He waved Chapel in last, putting him close to the hatch where he would at least get a good view of the ground. It occurred to Chapel that placing him there would make it convenient for Kalin to throw him out of the helicopter at altitude, if the need arose.

  Kalin bellowed some orders over the noise of the screaming engines, but Chapel didn’t bother translating in his head. He knew what his job was here.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 28, 06:14

  From the air, from the crew compartment of the helicopter, Yakutsk was an island of concrete buildings huddling around the Lena River, surrounded on every side by close ranks of high pine trees that stretched away to the horizon. Here and there Chapel caught the reflection of moonlight on water glinting through the trees, but the pines were tall enough he couldn’t ever figure out where the ponds and rivers were. He put his hand over his left ear and spoke to Angel through the hands-free unit in his right.

  “Did you find it?” he asked.

  “Sweetie, I’m a miracle worker, but some miracles are harder than others,” she told him, sounding apologetic. His heart sank. If she hadn’t found the information he needed, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. “You asked me to find anything on Nadia’s grandfather, but you couldn’t even give me his name.”

  “He was a shaman who rode around on a reindeer,” Chapel said. He forced himself to make a joke to cover how nervous he felt. “Did you try looking up Santa Claus?” He glanced north, over the endless landscape of trees. “I know he lives at the North Pole, and we’re close here.”

  “Cute. But weirdly appropriate. Where you are now, they call Santa by the name Ded Moroz and he lives east of Finland. Believe it or not, his name basically means Grandfather Frost, and he’s always accompanied by his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden.”

  “You’re kidding me. You don’t think she made the whole thing up—”

  “I’d hardly put it past her,” Angel said. “But at least this time, no, I don’t think she was lying. I don’t think she gave you a children’s legend as her cover story. I looked back through her genealogical records. She had a grandfather on her father’s side who was an accountant in Novosibirsk—there’s lots of information on him; you have to love accountants for the way they keep such nice, tidy records. As far as her maternal grandfather goes, there’s basically nothing. No national identification in the databases, no tax records, no death certificate, even. Not surprising if he really was a tribal shaman. Communications and transportation in Siberia were very spotty up until recently, and there’s never been an accurate census for the more northern settlements. There are probably whole ethnic groups out there in the woods that don’t even know that they’re Russians yet, because nobody from Moscow has found them to tell them.”

  Chapel closed his eyes. “So you couldn’t find what I need.”

  “I didn’t say that. I did find something, but it’s thin. I started poking around Nadia’s parents’ records. There was a lot more there. Her mother was a metallurgist, but she didn’t start out that way. She was born in a village somewhere southwest of Yakutsk, an Evenk village where her stated occupation was ‘herder.’ She ran away from home when she was fourteen and ended up in Yakutsk—it’s the only decent-sized city in a thousand square miles. That’s where she got her training and where she met Nadia’s father. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, so I don’t even know what the name of her village was—”

  “That’s starting to sound familiar.”

  Angel tsked him. “I’m working with obsolete database software in a language and even an alphabet I don’t know. You’re lucky I was able to find anything. Now, as I was saying, Nadia’s mother doesn’t have a birth certificate. But she does have a marriage certificate. And that certificate lists her father’s name, Nadia’s grandfather’s name, and his place of residence.”

  “That’s—that’s amazing, Angel.”

  “Hold your applause. We know he was an itinerant shaman, that he moved around a lot. The village name on the marriage certificate might just be the last p
lace he came from. But it’s something. The name of the village was Gurangri. It’s closest to a little town called Aldan, in the southernmost part of the Sakha Republic.”

  “Gurangri,” Chapel repeated. He shouted over the noise of the helicopter’s engines to Senior Lieutenant Kalin—the only person on board he was supposed to talk to directly. “We’re headed for a village called Gurangri, near Aldan.”

  Kalin nodded and headed forward to tell the pilot.

  Angel wasn’t finished, though. “There is one problem. Gurangri isn’t really there anymore.”

  “It’s not?”

  “In the nineties it was bulldozed, and then the land was strip-mined. It’s a diamond mine, now. The native people were all relocated, a lot of them shipped south to Mongolia. Even if Gurangri was Nadia’s grandfather’s hometown, there won’t be anything left there to connect her to him. No ancestral home, no relatives to visit, nothing.”

  Chapel shook his head. “That’s not good. But you said that might just be the last place he came from.”

  He could almost hear Angel shrugging. “There are a bunch of other villages in the area. He could have been born in any of them, and anyway, when we talked about what to look for, we said that it might not be one specific place. You have some place to start, now, but that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid.”

  “As usual,” Chapel said, “you’ve been more helpful than I deserve.”

  “Just doing my job, sugar.” Angel was quiet for a moment. “Chapel, if she’s not there, if she’s not within fifty miles when we triangulate her signal, you know this won’t work, right? This is our only chance to find her.”

 

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