The Hydra Protocol (11 page)

Chapel was definitely about to fall down. He sat before that could happen.

“It was Agent Asimova who told us where to find that one-time pad. And why we would want to recover it.”

“Nadia, please,” she said. “Call me Nadia.”

Hollingshead was silent for a second. Then he turned to face Nadia and gave her his warmest, most grandfatherly look. It was a good one—he’d cultivated it for years. “Nadia, thank you. I believe you’re here today to brief us on the Dead Hand system. If Captain Chapel is done with his outburst, maybe you could begin.”

“Of course,” she said. “Jim?”

Chapel rested his head on one hand. “I’m listening,” he said.

Nadia fidgeted as she spoke. Chapel couldn’t really blame her for being nervous—how would he feel, after all, if he were invited to give a speech at the Kremlin? He could sense from her body language that it was more than that, however. She was excited to give this presentation. Clearly it was something she’d been involved with for a long time.

“There are three principal components of the Perimeter system. That is, what you call the Dead Hand. The Russian name for it is ‘Perimetr,’ because it guards the entire border of what was the Soviet Union.”

She got up from her chair and paced behind the table. “I was hoping I would have a whiteboard, or perhaps I could give you a PowerPoint slideshow . . .”

Hollingshead gave her an apologetic smile. “For security reasons we need to keep this as an oral briefing,” he said.

“
Konyechno
. I mean—of course,” she said. She took a deep breath and launched in.

“As I said, three parts. The first is a shortwave radio station located just outside of Moscow. Station UVB-76, or MDZhB, as it is called now. You may have heard of this station, I believe it is called ‘the Russian Buzzer’ in amateur radio circles. It broadcasts a continuous buzz tone, at a rate of twenty-five tones per minute, and it does so twenty-four hours a day, every day, as it has since the 1980s. This is in effect an ‘all-clear’ signal. Its meaning is simple: Moscow still stands. As long as this signal is broadcast, Perimeter remains dormant and is completely safe.

“The second component is an array of sensors buried throughout Russian territory. There are approximately one hundred and fifty acoustic pickups, seventy-five air pressure monitoring scoops, and fifty electric eye sensors spread across the various republics that formerly comprised the Union. They are all dedicated to one function, which is to register the particular signature of a nuclear explosion anywhere inside the former borders.”

“That sounds like some pretty delicate equipment,” Hollingshead asked. “If it was installed thirty years ago, are you sure it’s still functional?”

“The numbers I listed,” Nadia explained, “are our best estimate of how many of the sensors remain intact. Approximately ten times as many were originally built.”

“Just an estimate?” Chapel asked. “You don’t know for sure?”

A flash of deep worry passed across Nadia’s eyes. “I will . . . elaborate in a moment. First, I need to tell you about the third, and most vital, component of the system. This is a computer complex located in a hardened bunker south of Moscow. The computer is one hundred percent automatic, requiring no operators or maintenance to keep it running. It has its own dedicated radiothermic power plant and multiple redundancies in its circuits in case any of them ever burn out or are damaged. The system exists at a sort of minimal state, performing only self-diagnostic functions on a daily basis, as long as the shortwave signal is continuous. Only if that signal stops will Perimeter awaken. If it does, its first action will be to query the array of sensors. If there is no result, Perimeter takes no action. If, however, it detects the signature of a nuclear blast, it will automatically send a signal to every nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal. Our weapons are hardwired to receive this signal—upon reception they can and will arm and launch themselves without human action and despite any attempt at human interference. The system was designed to resist tampering or sabotage and eliminate human error from the decision to launch.”

Hollingshead pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed at his eyes. “You can imagine how we must feel about this.”

“I imagine,” Nadia said, “that you feel frightened by it. That was the intention of its designers.”

“I think ‘outraged’ is the more, ah, appropriate term. Ms. Asimova, your leaders have built a veritable sword of Damocles and dangled it over our heads. Though it sounds like there are some basic fail-safes built in, thank God. The shortwave signal from Moscow keeps the whole thing asleep.”

Nadia sat down hard in her chair. “Except when it fails.” She put both her hands on the glass tabletop and pressed down on them, as if she were trying to keep them from shaking. “It has happened twice. Both times in 2010. Once for a full twenty-four hours, and then again for only a few minutes, the buzz tone fell silent. The cause—”

“Wait a minute,” Chapel said. “Your people let this thing lapse, the one thing preventing the end of—”

“Please,” Nadia said, holding up her hands to implore for peace. “The signal has remained active ever since that time. The failure was a human error. The problem here is that the men in charge of this buzz tone do not understand what it is they guard. They do not know about Perimeter. They did not know that when they were derelict in their duty, they put the whole world at risk.”

Chapel could feel his jaw fall open. “Nobody told them?”

Nadia looked sheepish. “It is a secret. Secrets in my country are . . . like a sacred thing.”

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “The sensor, ah, array,” he pointed out. “Another fail-safe there. It detects what, again?”

“Sound, light, and atmospheric overpressure,” Nadia said.

“It looks for an atomic explosion, yes,” Hollingshead said, nodding vigorously. “No real worries there, are there? No one is about to detonate a nuclear device on Russian soil. Your country doesn’t even do nuclear tests anymore, as I understand.”

Nadia bit her lip. “We cannot rule out the possibility that a rogue state would detonate a bomb inside Russia. Though the sensors are looking for a megaton-scale blast, not just the much smaller explosion of, say, a dirty bomb. We believed until recently, in fact, that an event on the scale that would trigger Perimeter was of negligible threat.”

“Something changed that?” Chapel asked. The look on her face definitely suggested as much.

She looked down at her hands. “In February of 2013, a meteor exploded in the air over the city of Chelyabinsk.”

“I remember that,” Chapel said. “The YouTube videos were pretty incredible.”

Nadia inhaled sharply. “As it burned up in the atmosphere, the meteor was large enough to light up the sky like a second sun. When it exploded, its sonic blast created an air overpressure wave that shattered windows across the city.” She looked from one man to the other. “Heat, light, overpressure.”

Chapel fell back in his chair. Looking over at Hollingshead, he saw the director’s mouth moving as if he were trying to speak but the words wouldn’t come.

“My government has wanted to take Perimeter offline for some time. We thought we had time, time enough at least to . . . to fix things,” Nadia said. “The last few years have convinced us otherwise. If the shortwave signal had faltered at the same time the meteor hit Chelyabinsk—if these two conditions ever happened again at the same time . . .” She pushed down on the table until her hands turned white. “It would be the end of the world.”

The silence in the briefing room had felt flat before, all the ambient sound soaked up by the hard concrete walls. Now it felt like it buzzed with an angry energy. Chapel knew the effect was purely psychological, but it didn’t matter. He felt a nasty headache coming on when he thought about what Nadia had just said.

“You need to turn this thing off now,” he told her. “You need to shut it down.”

Hollingshead nodded. “We’ve been asking for that for years. Every time, the Russian government has brushed us off. Most often they simply tell us that the Dead Hand—Perimeter—never existed, that it was only ever a thought experiment and it was never built. Sometimes they contradict themselves and say it was switched off years ago, before the fall of the Union. Most often they just say they won’t discuss matters of state security. But clearly the time has come, Ms. Asimova. Clearly the time has come.”

Nadia looked over at the director with a sad smile. “This feeling is one shared by my superiors. We are not insane. We know that a Perimeter launch would be the end of our country, as well. The reason it has not been done, the reason I am here today, is a matter of great national . . . embarrassment. I can think of no better term.”

Something occurred to Chapel. “You said earlier you could only estimate the number of functional sensors in the network,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s correct. We don’t know how many of them are still active, because we do not know exactly where they are. Until recently, we didn’t know where the Perimeter computer was located, either.”

“I beg your pardon?” Hollingshead asked.

Nadia turned to look at him directly. “On 25 December, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially ceded power to Boris Yeltsin. Famously, on that day he handed over the nuclear launch codes, effectively surrendering the Soviet military to what was then called the Commonwealth of Independent States, the precursor of the Russian Federation. It is unclear to my office whether Gorbachev even knew about Perimeter—it was considered then of utmost secrecy, and even Gorbachev was kept in the dark on some things by the KGB. What is known is that Gorbachev never mentioned Perimeter to Yeltsin. He did not tell him where it was, or how to turn it off.

“You must understand how strenuously they kept their secrets in the Soviet Union. No one was given information they did not immediately require. Even now the men who work at MDZhB, the shortwave station, have no idea why it is so important that the buzz tone is played night and day. The technicians who work on our nuclear missiles do not know that they can be activated without warning. Even my office, which is in charge of maintaining security around the nuclear arsenal, had no confirmation that Perimeter existed until a few years ago.”

“This keeps getting worse and worse,” Chapel said.

Nadia did not disagree. “It took me years to track down the Perimeter computer. Between August and December of 1991, the KGB knew that the Union was going to fall. They used that time to destroy every bit of secret material they could—they thought that the new regime would seek to prosecute them for their atrocities, and they wished to destroy all evidence of their crimes. There were seven secret KGB libraries in the Union at one time. Six of them were burned to the ground that year. A seventh, on an uninhabited island south of Vladivostok, was spared, but even its existence was nearly lost. I had to go there personally to find the information I needed. To find out where Perimeter is located, and how to stop it.”

“So you do have a plan,” Chapel said.

“That’s why I’m here,” she told him. “And why I am speaking to you two. It is my intention to personally end the Perimeter project. But I need your help.”

Chapel frowned. “Why?” he asked.

Hollingshead cleared his throat. “Son, we’re being given an extraordinary opportunity here. A chance to eliminate a grave threat. Let’s not, ah, examine our gift horses altogether too closely.”

Chapel shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t mean any disrespect. I just don’t see why the Russians would bring us in on this. It seems like their problem—and one I’d think they’d be happy to take care of internally, and quietly.”

“Quietly, yes,” Nadia said. “We will have no official support from my country, not even any contact with my organization once we begin. This must be done in absolute secrecy. If the world never finds out that we lost control of Perimeter, it is for the best. For the operation to be conducted internally, well, that is not possible in any case.”

Chapel raised an eyebrow.

“Most reports of the system describe it only as being located south of Moscow. When Perimeter was constructed,” Nadia said, “the designers looked for a place unlikely to be attacked in a war, conventional or nuclear. A spot of limited strategic value, and a place they knew their enemies would never occupy. Unfortunately, they did not take into account that the real threat to their power would come from within. The place is no longer inside Russian borders. It is now in foreign territory.”

“Where?” Hollingshead asked.

“Kazakhstan. Near the Aral Sea.”

“That certainly adds a, to put it mildly, wrinkle to things,” the director said. “I assume the Kazakhs don’t know what they have. And that you’d like to keep it that way.”

“Correct,” Nadia said. “It will not be easy, but we must enter the country unknown, take down Perimeter, and exfiltrate before they know we were there. Diplomatic relations between Kazakhstan and Russia are good, right now. We want to keep it that way.”

“I can think of another reason, besides diplomatic relations,” Chapel said.

Hollingshead shot him a nasty glance—but then nodded for him to continue.

Chapel’s eyes narrowed. “If you make this an American op, and something goes wrong, you won’t take the blame.”

Nadia shrugged. “If you wish to see it that way, fine. Though I imagine if the Kazakhs capture me, it will not take long for them to determine who I work for. I am not asking you to take this risk alone.”

“There’s another reason for our involvement,” Hollingshead said. He reached out and tapped the one-time pad where it sat on the table. “When Ms. Asimova first came to me, she said this was what she was after. She knew where it was and how to use it. We had the ability to retrieve it.”

“Russia does not possess the resources it once did, not in the Western theater,” Nadia explained. “Getting a Russian frogman into Cuban waters would have proved difficult. We knew you had the capacity.”

“But what do you even want that thing for? The codes in it are twenty years out of date,” Chapel said.