The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  “It’s beautiful,” Chapel said.

  “Moscow wants to build a nuclear plant here. They’ll have to relocate all the Buryat people, who have lived a traditional life along the shore for ten thousand years. Moving them is a small price to pay for development of the region, Moscow says.”

  “Nadia,” he sighed, “we don’t have time for—”

  She reached over and handed him the phone.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 28, 12:16

  Chapel closed his eyes and clutched the phone in his hand. For a second he just breathed deeply, releasing some of his pent-up tension. Then he ejected the SIM card from the phone and shoved it in his pocket. He took the battery out for good measure.

  Only then did he consider the fact this wasn’t over.

  He took out his own phone and lifted it to his ear.

  “What are you doing?” Nadia asked, staring at him.

  “I’m going to tell Kalin that he doesn’t need to shoot us down,” he told her.

  “Don’t.”

  “Look, Nadia—we have to figure out some way to end this where nobody gets hurt.”

  “Unlikely,” she pointed out. “Even if I were to put down at Irkutsk and surrender myself, do you think they would just let me go?”

  He knew perfectly well that if Kalin took her alive, he would ship her to Magnitogorsk and make every day she had left a new kind of hell. He couldn’t let that happen to her, not now . . . no. He wouldn’t do that to his worst enemy.

  Director Hollingshead had ordered him to kill Nadia. That would be cleaner than what would happen if she lived.

  But he was still Jim Chapel. He was still too dumb to just give up. “There has to be a way—there has to be some way we can get you out of the country—you were headed for Mongolia, right? To the Evenk community there?”

  She laughed. “That’s an interesting idea. I wish I’d thought of it.”

  He stared at her with wide eyes. “That wasn’t your plan? But then what did you think you were going to do?”

  “Fly until they stopped me,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “No. No, I won’t let you kill yourself.” He switched on his phone. “Angel, do you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, sugar,” the sexy voice said.

  “I have the phone,” he told her. “It’s over—this can end now.”

  Nadia looked over at him with an expression of pure regret. He knew what he was doing to her—taking away her last, romantic gesture—but he refused to accept that she had to die. Not now, knowing what he knew.

  “I’ll connect you to the helicopter,” Angel said.

  He waited while she routed the call. In the silence he looked over at Nadia and wondered what he could have done differently. How this could have worked out, in a more perfect world. But what would that even mean? If she had come to the Pentagon, back at the beginning, and asked for his help, asked him to help her free her people—he would have declined. He would have said it wasn’t in America’s interest. That it wasn’t his job.

  Maybe, back in Uzbekistan, when she had told him she was a rogue agent, when he had tried to abort the mission—maybe if he’d stuck to his guns, he could have gotten her out of there, taken her to the States and gotten her asylum.

  But she wouldn’t have accepted that. She would have pressed on toward Aralsk-30 without him. She would have walked into the desert on foot if she had to.

  Maybe if they hadn’t gotten separated after they shut down Perimeter—

  “Kapitan?”

  On the phone Kalin sounded annoyed. As if Chapel was distracting him from important work.

  “Senior Lieutenant,” Chapel said, “I’ve recovered the phone. Asimova is no longer a threat. I want to talk about—”

  “I’m sorry, Kapitan,” Kalin interrupted, “this line is not very clear. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Kalin, don’t be an ass,” Chapel said. “I have the codes! This doesn’t have to end badly for any of us!”

  “Perhaps you should call back later,” Kalin told him.

  And then the connection went dead.

  Nadia looked over at him with frightened eyes. “What did he say?” she asked. “What is he going to—”

  Chapel jumped out of his seat, grabbing her to pull her down to the floor of the plane, as if that would make any difference.

  At that same moment, the helicopter opened fire.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 28, 12:18

  The Russian PKT machine gun could fire eight hundred rounds of 7.62 x 54 mm R ammunition every minute. Each of those bullets, which were as big as Chapel’s index finger, left the barrel traveling 2,700 feet per second and carried more than 3,500 joules of energy. The PKT had been designed to chew through armored vehicles at a range of nearly half a mile.

  Nadia’s airplane, which was a civilian model made mostly of wood and very thin sheets of aluminum, had no armor whatsoever.

  Kalin fired an entire belt of ammunition into the plane—two hundred fifty rounds—over the course of roughly nineteen seconds. The gunner was a soldier trained in airborne fighting, and the range was very short. All but a handful of the rounds struck the plane.

  The majority of them struck the tail assembly, which was deformed by the impacts. Parts of it fell away completely as debris. Some of the bullets struck the wings, boring deep holes through the aluminum and breaching the plane’s fuel tanks. Others entered the engine compartment and destroyed delicate and vital components.

  One bullet struck the propeller, which was a carefully constructed piece of laminated strips of wood, hand carved and painstakingly shaped by a master craftsman in a factory in Volgograd. The propeller cracked and disintegrated instantly.

  Seventy-three rounds found their way inside the cabin of the aircraft. These were able to smash out every piece of glass in the cockpit and destroy some of the plane’s instrumentation. Other rounds lodged in the three rows of seats, which were actually some of the sturdiest components of the plane. Others were absorbed by the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cabin, and some passed through the plane and out its front end without meeting serious resistance.

  Six rounds entered the volume of space where Nadia and Chapel lay in a heap in the leg well of the front row of seats.

  Three passed close enough to Chapel that he felt them pass him by and heard them buzz like bees. One of them grazed his back, digging a trench through his skin and muscle tissue and causing blood to trickle down his side. One passed directly through the place where his artificial arm would have been, if Kalin hadn’t taken it away.

  One bullet entered Nadia’s left side just above her navel, passed through her chest cavity and emerged from her right shoulder, at a substantially slower rate than when it had emerged from the machine gun’s barrel.

  The bullet went through one of her lungs. It missed her heart by a fraction of an inch, instead nicking her aorta, the main vessel that brings blood to the heart. Blood immediately began to leak into her chest cavity and found its way through the hole in her lung. There was additional trauma from hydrostatic shock and from broken fragments of her ribs, which moved around inside her chest like shrapnel.

  It was not the kind of injury the human body was designed to survive.

  IN TRANSIT: JULY 28, 12:19

  The wind howled through holes in the fuselage. The temperature in the cabin had dropped twenty degrees. Chapel opened his eyes.

  He saw Nadia’s face, her eyes looking into his.

  Blood speckled her lips.

  “Nadia,” he said. “Nadia, are you hit?”

  “I think so,” she said. Her voice was very small.

  “Hold on,” Chapel begged. “You’re going to be okay—just stay with me.”

  There was blood on Nadia’s face, but her eyes were still clear. They looked around at the devastation of the plane, then up at Chapel.

  “Help me up,” she coughed. Her breathing didn’t sound good, but her voice was firm and strong.

  “We shou
ldn’t move you—there could be damage to—”

  “Jim,” she said, “we are falling out of the sky.”

  He got his arm around her and helped her slide back into the pilot’s seat, not without a few screams of agony. Red bubbles popped inside her shirt and he knew that couldn’t be good, but when she was sitting up, she gave him a smile.

  Chapel forced himself to look forward, through the void where the windscreen had been. He could see nothing but blue water. It was impossible to tell how quickly it was coming toward him, but he imagined it would be faster than he might wish.

  Nadia reached out and tapped some of the controls—those that hadn’t been smashed to pieces. She grabbed the steering yoke. “No power,” she said. “No response from the rudder. I think the ailerons still work, but the elevators . . .” She pulled back on the yoke. The effort made her scream again. “Jim—help me.”

  He moved behind her, then reached around and grabbed the yoke in the middle, pulling it toward her. “You think you can still land this thing?”

  Laughing clearly caused her pain, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “What I can do,” she said, pausing now and again to cough up blood, “is allow us to crash at a slightly more shallow angle than nature had planned.” She looked up at him. “Jim, you know how to swim, don’t you?” She closed her eyes. “What am I saying? When I met you, you were about to go diving.”

  “You’re going to try a crash landing on the lake?”

  “There is no choice in that,” she told him.

  “But this isn’t a seaplane—it’ll sink like a rock.”

  “Yes.”

  Chapel shook his head. “There has to be—there must be another—”

  “Jim, you should learn a little Slavic fatalism. What goes up must come down, yes? Konyechno.”

  She wrestled with the yoke in silence for a while. A band of sky appeared over the water ahead of them, but only the merest line of light blue.

  “The water will be very cold,” she told him. “You must be careful of hypothermia.”

  “We’ll hold on to each other, to share our body heat,” Chapel promised her.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if in a hundred years, will the Sibiryak sing folk songs about the woman who flew into Baikal? I wonder if they will be free, then.”

  “Nadia, I’m going to get you to shore, we’ll find a doctor—”

  “Jim,” she said, “this is what I wanted from you. Not professions of love, not poems and flowers. Just that you would be with me at the end. Holding my hand. You must strap yourself in—the landing will be very rough.”

  He started to protest, but he knew she was right. He strapped himself into the seat beside her. Then he reached over and took her hand.

  They hit the water fast enough that the wings tore off the plane. Water flooded in through the broken windscreen, a great wave of it smashing over Chapel, almost cold enough to stop his heart. It filled his mouth, crushed him back in his seat. Water filled the cabin almost instantly, and he clamped his mouth shut to hold on to a desperate breath. His hand was yanked free of hers by the wave. He wrestled with his straps, got loose somehow. He reached for her, found her face.

  There was nothing left in her eyes.

  He waited—almost too long. But in the end he kicked his way out through the windscreen, kicked his way to the surface until his mouth and nose crested the water and he could suck in another breath.

  Lake Baikal is one of the world’s clearest lakes. He could look down and see what remained of the airplane, slowly shrinking below him, for a very long time. He watched it go—until the very end, her svidetel. Her witness.

  UST-BARGUZIN, RUSSIA: JULY 28, 13:17 (IRKT)

  The crew of a fishing boat dragged the one-armed american out of the water and took him back to shore. There the fishermen wrapped him in a blanket and left him sitting on the dock, because he said he wanted to stay by the water. He was shaking with cold and bleeding from several wounds. The fishermen called in the local policeman to talk reason to this american stranger. But the policeman just threw up his hands. Of course the american did not have to go to the hospital, if he did not want to. “Konyechno,” he said.

  The American looked up at him with a gaze so piercing it made the policeman flinch. “You are Siberian?” he asked, in a deplorable accent.

  “Ya Russkiy,” the policeman replied, I am a Russian.

  The man from the lake said nothing. He just went back to looking over the water.

  Most of the people who had come to take a look at the stranger went back to work. A few children stayed down by the docks, playing on the cold shore, shooting each other with finger guns, swooping around with their arms out like the wings of airplanes.

  The policeman came back a while later with a mug full of some yeasty-smelling yellow liquid. “Kvass,” he said.

  “What’s it made of?” the man from the lake asked.

  “Fermented bread. I put raisins and lemon in it,” the policeman told him. “It will help you regain your strength.”

  The man from the lake grimaced—clearly he was no Russian—but he drank down the contents of the mug. Then he ate the raisins from the bottom. The policeman smiled. He took off his hat and ran a hand over his close-cut hair. “I have called the pertinent authorities, I thought you should know. They are sending someone.”

  The man from the lake just nodded. “It will be a man in a black suit, who comes here to kill me,” he said.

  The policeman started to protest—it was his job to protect people from being killed, not help the killers, but the man from the lake held up his hand in protest.

  “You have done the correct thing,” he told the policeman. “I am an enemy spy. The man in the black suit is FSB.”

  The policemen nodded sagely. “Ah, I see. You are crazy.” That explained a great deal. Though not, perhaps, how the man got in the lake in the first place. “You . . . you are a madman, yes?”

  “Konyechno,” the man from the lake said, and he gave the policeman a weak smile.

  But a little while later a helicopter landed on the rocky beach. It drove the children away like frightened gulls, though they did not go far—mostly they ran for the shelter of the pilings under the dock.

  The helicopter took its time setting down. The pilot could not seem to find a flat surface to put his wheels to. Eventually, though, he did find the right patch of rocky ground, and the rotors spun down with a sad whine. The side hatch opened and a man stepped out, then started walking smartly toward the dock and the man from the lake. The policeman watched with his hands laced across his stomach, unsure of what he should do.

  He was especially confused because the man who jumped out of the helicopter was not wearing a black suit. Instead he had on a very grand military uniform, with many medals and golden insignia, some of which identified him as being a colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces.

  Maybe, the policeman thought, the man from the lake really was a foreign spy.

  The colonel took the man from the lake away. Together they boarded the helicopter and flew off. Eventually the children came out from under the dock and started to play again.

  The policeman wondered if he would ever know what that had all been about. In the end, he shrugged, because he knew the answer. “Konyechno, nyet,” he said to himself. Of course not. That wasn’t how things worked.

  THE PENTAGON: AUGUST 13, 14:06 (EST)

  Director Hollingshead fiddled with a loose bit of thread on one of his sleeve buttons. “My apologies, son, for, well. For your having to take the long way home.”

  Chapel said nothing. There had been a lot of paperwork and rooms full of arguing people, back in Russia, before he was finally allowed to leave. Bureaucracy was the same everywhere, it seemed. Colonel Valits had made sure he didn’t slip through the cracks. He’d been a man of his word—once Nadia was dead, he made sure Chapel got to go home.

  The mission was over.

  “Not, altogether, ah, a glorious succ
ess,” Hollingshead said. “Would you agree?”

  Chapel stood at attention, just inside the door of the converted fallout shelter that Hollingshead used as his office. The old man was sitting in a leather-covered armchair across the room. He had not, so far, ordered Chapel to be at ease, nor asked him to come any farther into the room.

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said. He was back in uniform, which always made him feel a little better. One sleeve of his tunic was pinned up at his side, because he had yet to be issued a new prosthetic arm.

  “The Russians, of course, won’t speak of what happened. Ever, well, again,” Hollingshead went on. “I don’t think diplomatic relations will be affected, but . . . you know. How these things . . . well.”

  Rupert Hollingshead had a cast-iron spine—Chapel had seen him give orders that would make a normal man’s blood run cold. He was one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence community.

  When he stammered, when he hemmed and hawed and put on this absentminded professor act, it was just that—an act. Designed to either put people at their ease or fool them into thinking he was as ineffectual as he looked. He looked like a jovial old Ivy League academic, but it had been a long time since he had acted like one when he was alone with Chapel. His performing like this now worried Chapel very much.

  “Sir, if you would like my resignation, I will have it for you by—”

  Hollingshead took off his glasses and stared openmouthed.

  “Resignation?” he asked. “Son, what exactly are you suggesting?”

  “I failed you, sir,” Chapel said. He was speaking a little too candidly for protocol, but he supposed there were times when you had to be honest. “I allowed myself to be emotionally compromised by Asimova. I put my country at risk as a result.”

  Hollingshead shook his head. He dropped one arm over the side of his chair and let his glasses dangle there. He cleared his throat noisily.