The Hydra Protocol

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The Hydra Protocol Page 41

by David Wellington


  “I know,” he said.

  “What makes you think she would go looking for her grandfather’s village, anyway? She could carry out this blackmail plan from anywhere in the world.”

  “Sure. But she’s a Sibiryak, a Siberian separatist. And when she told me she wanted to see her homeland again before she died, I think she was being sincere.”

  “You’re saying she basically told you what her next move was, right before you were captured by her enemies,” Angel pointed out. “We know she’s lied about a lot of things.”

  “And maybe she did lie about this one,” Chapel told her. “But I have to think otherwise. You didn’t see the way her face lit up when she talked about her grandfather, about how he used to carry her with him on the back of his reindeer.” Chapel shook his head. “I have to believe in this, Angel.” He glanced around to make sure Kalin wasn’t within earshot. “Because otherwise I’m all out of ideas.”

  GURANGRI, SAKHA REPUBLIC: JULY 28, 09:34

  Midmorning, according to his watch. Chapel’s body barely knew what day it was, much less whether it was natural that it should be morning now. He’d moved through so many time zones since leaving Washington that his internal clock had broken a spring.

  “We should see the Gurangri facility soon,” Kalin said, coming up behind his shoulder. Chapel had been glued to one of the helicopter’s side viewports for hours, as if he was going to see Nadia down there in a clearing in the trees, waving up at him. As fast as they were moving and as thick as the tree cover was, he would have been lucky to see her if she had set out road flares to make an impromptu helipad.

  They had followed a river for a while, a thin stripe of water the color of white wine that had twisted through the rough terrain of Siberia. After they’d left the river behind, the view hadn’t changed much at all. Trees and more trees. Siberia seemed in some ways as desolate at the Kyzyl Kum, just more green. It didn’t seem real; it couldn’t be as big and as empty as it looked. He started to feel like he was flying over a miniature on a sound stage, as if those trees could be no bigger than ferns, and that Siberia was no bigger than a backyard garden.

  Then he saw Gurangri, and the scale came back to him in a hurry. Angel had said the old village had been bulldozed and the land strip-mined. Chapel still hadn’t expected this. Gurangri was a massive brown pit in the earth, easily two miles across. Its sides were terraced in concentric circles, the walls sharply rectilinear except where old mud slides had created meandering ramps down toward the bottom. Rusted digging machines stood on the various levels, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hole they’d gouged out of the earth. The lowest level was flooded and glared with an angry white light as the sun filled it.

  It looked like a bruise on the side of the earth. Like a hole dug by a massive worm in a giant green fruit. It looked like Dante’s Inferno, more than anything else. As the helicopter cut right across the middle of the pit, it was hard not to think that the pit was a giant maw about to swallow them whole. They wouldn’t even make a fitting morsel for such a giant mouth.

  All around the pit the excavators had cut short lengths of road, places where metal sheds and concrete buildings had once stood. Now these were all collapsed, their roofs fallen in and their walls crumbled down to debris.

  “It looks like this place was saturation bombed,” Chapel said.

  He knew Angel would be able to see it even better than he could, through her eyes on the satellites. “It was abandoned around the turn of the century, when the diamonds ran out. The damage you see is just Siberia reclaiming its own—permafrost makes it impossible to build anything that lasts on this soil.”

  “Diamonds? They dug diamonds out of this hole?”

  “There are diamond and gold deposits all over this forest,” Angel told him. “Nadia wasn’t kidding when she told you this was where Russia kept all its natural resources. There’s probably oil and natural gas nearby as well—there’s so much here, and so much land to cover they haven’t even had a chance to survey it all.”

  Nadia would hate the pit mine, Chapel knew. It would be yet another symbol of Moscow despoiling her homeland and taking all the profits. A village that might have meant something to her once had been completely wiped from the face of the earth to build this obscenity. She would never have come to a place like this. But beyond, on the other side of the pit, there were plenty more trees. Lots of forest to block your view of the gaping wound in your native soil.

  “This is the place,” Chapel shouted to Kalin. “This is where we start looking. Tell the pilot to take up station.” It was time to lay the bait.

  GURANGRI, SAKHA REPUBLIC: JULY 28, 10:13

  The helicopter pinned itself to the air, hanging motionless over the center of the pit. Angel came on the line to tell Chapel she’d finished her satellite survey and there were three villages and over a hundred solitary houses within a fifty-mile radius of the pit. Nadia could be hiding in any of them.

  The plan was to send a message over Angel’s special frequency band, the same one Nadia had used to make her demands after firing the missile at Izhevsk. That signal couldn’t be traced by normal means—it would be bounced around several satellites before it reached the Kremlin or Angel or anyone who could intercept it, and there was no way to trace it back through the electromagnetic labyrinth.

  It had to be broadcast from the ground, though, beamed up to the satellites from somewhere. If Chapel was close enough to Nadia when she transmitted, his equipment could pick up the signal direct from the source. The signal would be faint when it came from the ground—it wasn’t meant to be picked up by ground-based receivers—but it would be clear enough that it could be used to home in on her location.

  Assuming, of course, that Chapel had picked the right spot. He needed a very strong signal to make the plan work, which meant he had to be within fifty miles of Nadia when she broadcasted. If he’d chosen the wrong spot, if she was more than fifty miles away from Gurangri, she might as well be on the moon. They would never find her.

  “You all set, Angel?” he asked, staring out at the trees to the west of the pit mine.

  “Go ahead. The next thing you say will go out on my band.”

  Chapel licked his lips. He’d considered very carefully what he could say—what would make Nadia respond. He knew that just calling to say hello wouldn’t make her break radio silence. He had to give her something she wanted to talk about.

  “Nadia,” he said, “this is Jim Chapel. I know you can hear me on this band. I’m calling on behalf of the United States government. We know what you have, and the threat it represents. We’d like to discuss how we can help you. Please respond.”

  Chapel closed his eyes and waited to hear what came next.

  Nadia had no way of knowing whether the Russian government would agree to her demands. The weapon she possessed—the Perimeter launch codes—made her incredibly dangerous to Moscow. But the danger was even greater for America, since all those missiles were pointed at American cities.

  If Nadia did launch, if she pushed the button, the death toll in America would mount to the tens of millions. Maybe the hundreds of millions. There was no way for America or Russia to stop all those missiles once they were in the air.

  It was not out of the realm of possibility that the president might reach out to her, to try to find some way to defuse this situation. Hollingshead had actually gone to the White House to brief the president and see what he chose to do.

  The president had responded that America refused to negotiate with terrorists. Judging by what Hollingshead had told Chapel, the commander in chief didn’t believe that Nadia would actually launch. And he was willing to call her bluff.

  So Chapel couldn’t really offer Nadia anything of value. But he didn’t need to negotiate with her, not really. He just needed to get her talking.

  Chapel waited five minutes. The chop of the helicopter rotor sounded like an echo of his own heartbeat as the time ticked away.

  When nothing happene
d after five minutes, Chapel nodded to himself. Then he repeated his message. “Nadia,” he said, “this is Jim Chapel—”

  The reply came before he could finish.

  “Jim? Is that really you? You woke me up. If it is you, I don’t mind. But I need to know it is you. I was certain you were dead. Tell me,” Nadia said, “what was the worst part of our journey through the Kyzyl Kum?”

  Chapel’s eyes went wide.

  He heard a click on the line. That, he knew, would be Angel shutting down the signal. She came back on a different frequency—he could hear the difference in audio quality. “Okay, sugar—give me a minute to crunch the numbers. It’s better if you don’t respond to her, just in case she has some way of tracking where you are.”

  “Understood,” Chapel said.

  He turned around and saw Senior Lieutenant Kalin staring at him. The man looked as patient but as insidious as a spider. As the seconds went by and Chapel said nothing, Kalin slowly raised one eyebrow.

  He was ready, Chapel knew. There was no doubt in Kalin’s mind what to do when word came in with Nadia’s location. Chapel glanced around at the soldiers crouching in the helicopter’s troop compartment. They’d been briefed. They knew what to do as well.

  Just as soon as that location came in.

  Chapel fought the urge to ask Angel how it was going. When she had something, she would let him know.

  Maybe a minute passed. Maybe two.

  When Angel came back on the line, Chapel nearly jumped out of his seat.

  “Sweetie,” she said, and he could hear it in the tone of her voice. He didn’t need to hear what came next.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry. You’re not close enough. I’ve got nothing.”

  GURANGRI, SAKHA REPUBLIC: JULY 28, 10:29

  No.

  No.

  “No!” Chapel howled. He beat on the metal fuselage of the helicopter with his hand. He couldn’t believe it—he’d been so sure. He’d been certain.

  No. He’d wanted to be certain. He’d had one chance, and he’d convinced himself he knew how to finish this. But it had always been a crapshoot.

  And now Nadia was going to get away. She had betrayed him, used him—seduced him—and now he would never get to her, never be able to look her in the eye and tell her—

  “I take it,” Kalin said, “that you were unsuccessful.”

  Chapel looked up at the man with burning eyes. “We weren’t able to get a location on the signal, no,” he said.

  A playful little smile crossed Kalin’s face. The man was enjoying this—enjoying watching Chapel rage in his moment of failure. Kalin had once had Chapel in his clutches, had been completely in control of Chapel, body and soul. Then Colonel Valits had come in and taken that away.

  Now, that smile on Kalin’s face said, things would return to their natural order. Chapel would be taken back to the hospital in Magnitogorsk. Kalin would use every method available to him to find out what Chapel knew. To break him down completely.

  Chapel didn’t care about that, though he knew he should. He knew what was in store for him. But his rage, his need for revenge, towered over any mere concern for his survival, any fear of what Kalin could do.

  He’d been so close. He had screwed up, royally, by trusting Nadia, but he’d been given one chance at turning that around and now . . . now . . .

  “Honey,” Angel said in his ear, “maybe we can still get something out of this. I was able to track the signal enough to know that you were kind of right.”

  Chapel barely heard her. Kalin was barking orders at the pilots of the helicopter, telling them to turn around, to head back to Yakutsk.

  “I picked up . . . something. Just an echo, really. But I can track her to an area of about a couple of thousand square miles, just based on that,” Angel went on, whether anyone was listening or not. “I know she’s no farther away from you than that.”

  Chapel looked down at his hand. It was balled into a fist. Maybe he could push open the side door of the helicopter. Maybe he could use that hand to grab Kalin, throw him down into the pit mine below—

  “Sugar, did you hear me?” Angel asked. “She is in Siberia. I can verify that much.”

  The soldiers would open fire the second he grabbed Kalin. They would tear him to shreds with high velocity rounds. But if he was quick, if he moved now—

  Wait.

  “Angel? Say again?”

  “She’s definitely in Siberia. Somewhere near you, though near is kind of a relative term—”

  “She’s here?” he asked.

  “Somewhere there, yes,” Angel confirmed.

  “Kalin!” Chapel shouted.

  The torturer turned around to face him. “Yes?”

  “She’s here. Asimova is here, in Siberia. We just weren’t quite close enough. But maybe—we can move the helicopter, and try for a second fix.”

  Kalin pursed his lips. He looked like he was weighing something in his head. Maybe the relative merits of avoiding nuclear war versus the pleasure he would take in turning Chapel into a sniveling, broken wreck of a man.

  “You have failed us once,” Kalin said. “Why should I think you would succeed a second time?”

  Chapel shook his head. “We can find her. Still. We just need to get closer.”

  “And in which direction does this ‘closer’ lie?” Kalin asked.

  It was a good question. A very good question. If Nadia was to the south, and Chapel ordered the helicopter to the north, he would waste this second chance. He needed more information. He needed to know roughly where she was, before he could find exactly where she was. Just like before, except this time he needed to be absolutely right.

  “We are already nearing the operational range of the aircraft,” Kalin pointed out. “We cannot stay airborne for more than an hour more.”

  “Then give me that hour,” Chapel said. He couldn’t bring himself to beg the man, but maybe logic would work. “One hour so we can save both our countries from burning up in nuclear fire. Do you really want to go down in history as the man who threw away the world just because he hated the man who could have saved it?”

  “Please,” Kalin said, sneering. “Such melodrama.”

  “If I’m wrong, one hour more won’t make a difference. I’ll be just as wrong then. I’ll lose the protection of Colonel Valits, and you’ll have me. But if I’m right—”

  Kalin lifted his hands in resignation. “Konyechno. One hour.”

  GURANGRI, SAKHA REPUBLIC: JULY 28, 10:41

  One hour to figure it out.

  Less than that. A lot less. An hour in which to figure out the puzzle, get to the right location, and convince Nadia to come back on the line.

  There wasn’t enough time to get clever. He had to go back to his original intuition, the guess that had brought him this far. Nadia had returned to Siberia because she wanted to see it again before she died. She wasn’t looking for pit mines or overcrowded cities, though. She would be looking for the land where she’d spent summers with her grandfather, riding around on the back of his reindeer.

  He’d been an Evenk, one of the traditional ethnic groups of Siberia. Chapel turned to Kalin. “Where do the Evenks live?” he asked. “Do they have their own territory?”

  “They do,” Kalin said, lifting his shoulders. “The Evenkiysky District. It’s west of here, over the border of Sakha.”

  Chapel nodded and touched the hands-free unit in his ear. “Angel, are there any villages in the Evenkiysky District? Any places that might have been there thirty years ago, where Nadia’s grandfather might have been born?”

  “More than a few, but they’re spread pretty thin. That’s an area of three hundred thousand square miles and less than twenty thousand people live there.”

  Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. “We know he lived in Gurangri once, back when it was an actual village. He can’t have gotten very far from there if his chief method of transport was riding on a reindeer.”

  “You’re probably righ
t,” Angel told him. He could hear her clacking away at a keyboard and imagined her fingers flying along as her screens showed one database after another, as she zoomed in on maps and then clicked away, zoomed in further on satellite pictures . . .

  “Head west by southwest,” she said, finally. “There’s a cluster of villages about sixty miles that way—most of them just collections of tents, though some have permanent buildings. It’s a little more densely populated there, north of Lake Baikal. But Chapel—even if she’s somewhere in that cluster, you still need to get within fifty miles of her actual location. The cluster’s spread over hundreds of square miles of terrain. She could be there and you still might miss her.”

  “Damn,” Chapel said. He was running out of time and out of options at an alarming rate. “Angel,” he said, “do we need to be stationary for you to get a fix on her transmission?”

  “No,” Angel said, and he could hear breathless excitement in her voice. “No—even if your helicopter was moving at top speed, I could still capture the signal. All I need is one packet of the direct transmission.”

  “So if we fly over this area, if we cover it from end to end and I can keep her talking long enough—”

  “It might work,” Angel confirmed. “It just might.”

  Chapel relayed his plan to Senior Lieutenant Kalin. The torturer didn’t like it—already the helicopter was in danger of not having enough fuel to make it back to base, and flying at high speed would only drain the tanks faster. But he seemed to have accepted that this was the only way he would ever find Nadia.

  The aircraft lurched as the pilot leaned on the throttle, and Chapel had to grab on to a stanchion or be thrown from his seat. Below he could see the forest hurtling by, just a green blur. After a few minutes, he had Angel set him up on Nadia’s frequency again.

  He took a couple of deep breaths. Forced himself to get into character. If his voice betrayed how much he wanted to catch Nadia, to avenge himself, she might shut down the broadcast immediately. He had to sound like he had the last time they’d spoken, in Aralsk-30. Like a man talking to his lover.

 

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