The Hydra Protocol (32 page)

The quickest route to Kazakhstan would have been to drive straight north, through the desert, but that way lay danger. To curb drug trafficking, the Kazakhs had built a high fence with barbed wire and floodlights along the border. Patrols swept the area every night, focusing on the main roads from Tashkent to Astana, the Kazakh capital. To the west, however, where there were no roads and only a few farms, the border was much more porous.

So they took the truck northwest, past Vobkent, using the best roads they could find. As long as they weren’t being actively pursued, they wanted to make the best time they could, and that meant sticking to graded surfaces. The truck was designed to cross sand and slickrock, but it was still a lot faster on a highway.

Chapel worried at first that the truck was going to give them away, that it was just too conspicuous with its eight wheels and its high cab. It turned out that wasn’t a problem. North of Vobkent the roads were almost deserted, and what little traffic they did see was all construction vehicles and big segmented trucks hauling goods back toward Tashkent. The desert-crossing truck didn’t stand out at all—if they’d been driving a late-model sedan,
that
would have drawn more attention.

“The northern half of Uzbekistan is all desert,” Nadia explained. “The Kyzyl Kum, three hundred thousand square kilometers of nothing but sand. Almost no one lives there, other than a few herders. The people who come there come for work, to dig for gold, uranium, natural gas, live back in the cities. They are all headed home now for their dinners, tired and uninterested in us.”

“Fine,” Chapel said. “I won’t feel comfortable until we’re out of anyone’s sight, though.” He still wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision. How much had Nadia’s story affected him? He thought of himself as a logical person, a smart guy who at least tried not to make dumb mistakes. But her revelation, the fact that she was dying—he wasn’t heartless, after all. Had he allowed himself to be swayed?

He supposed it didn’t matter now. In for a penny, in for a pound.

He glanced at the tablet sitting between them, wedged under the emergency brake. Angel would be sending their pursuers in the wrong direction, he knew. She was too busy to talk, and now was hardly the right time, with Nadia sitting next to him, but he desperately wanted to know what she thought.

In the backseat Bogdan was busy, too. Chapel had returned his makeshift computer, and the hacker was raiding the SNB’s archives, looking for anything they thought they knew about Jeff Chambers and his mysterious assistant Svetlana. So far Bogdan had turned up nothing to worry them, but if Mirza had left some case notes behind, or even a voice mail to his superiors telling them where he was headed before he disappeared—

“Jim,” Nadia said. “I want to thank you.”

He glanced over at her. “For changing my mind?”

“For allowing me to finish my mission,” she said. “It means . . . a great deal that you trust me. That you believe in me.”

“I believe in what we’re doing,” he told her, and left it at that.

This woman had lied to him. She could do it again. Maybe there was more to her story she wasn’t sharing, maybe—

“Sugar,” Angel said, “you’re going to see the town of Zarafshan coming up in a few miles. You might want to detour around it.”

“Understood,” he told the tablet.

Diverting around the population center took enough of his attention to keep his doubts and fears in the back of his mind for a while. The town wasn’t very big, but there weren’t a lot of roads around it, either, so he had to go off-road for a while. He had to admit he was impressed when the big tires grabbed at the sandy soil and they barely lost any speed. Varvara had done right by them.

Beyond Zarafshan the road turned into little more than a gravelly track that stretched on for many more miles, slowly but steadily turning into nothing more than a ribbon of slightly paler dirt in the midst of the desert. At one point they saw the lights of a village up ahead and had to go off-road for a few miles to stay clear. Eventually the road disappeared altogether, and they entered the Kyzyl Kum proper. To either side there was nothing to see but sand dunes, no oases or rivers or even many trees to break up the horizon.

There was no turning back. Chapel might have his doubts, but it was time to put them aside.

They took turns, one of them driving through the night while the other rested. Both of them were too alert to really sleep, though, and driving through the desert was never going to be a restful experience.

The truck was an old military vehicle designed by the Soviet Union for prospecting work in the open desert, and it had been built extraordinarily well. It had special filters in its air intakes to keep out blown sand. It had a doubly redundant coolant system to cope with the heat of the desert sun, and special heating filaments wrapped around the fuel lines to handle the bitterly cold night. Even the groove pattern on its massive tires had been designed to offer the best possible grip on the sand.

After driving for nearly four hours, Chapel cursed the designers anyway, cursed them for not considering what a thinly padded seat could do to a human tailbone.

Nadia shrugged when he told her how sore his ass was. “The Soviets, they were brilliant in their way. They understood machines, basic engineering, so much better than anyone else,” she told him, “because they had to. They had such a large country to conquer. But they never built a car seat that a human being would want to sit on, and their chocolate is terrible.”

“Got to have your priorities, I guess,” Chapel said, shifting on what felt like a bare metal bench. The rivets in the steel dug into him no matter how he held himself.

It didn’t help that the damned landscape wouldn’t just lie flat. The desert was a great rumpled sheet of long crescent-shaped barchan dunes, giant mounds of sand that moved grain by grain as the wind carried them along. There was no way to drive around the dunes, so the truck had to constantly climb the face of each one, powering its way up the face, then scramble down the far side with the engine almost idling. It was like riding the world’s most boring roller coaster, and at the bottom of every dune the truck came down with a jolt no matter how carefully Chapel steered into the impact, launching him into the air. He thought Bogdan had the right idea. After moaning for nearly an hour about the rough ride, the Romanian had wedged himself down into the leg well between the front and back seats. Maybe the carpeting on the floorboards was thicker than the seat upholstery.

Chapel peered out through the windshield, anticipating the next dune. They had gotten lucky in that the moon was new, and only starlight lit up the landscape. With the truck’s banks of lights turned off, that would make them hard to spot, even by satellites. It gave them a fighting chance. “You really hate the Soviets, don’t you?” he asked. “Ever since we started this mission, all you’ve done is tell me how awful they were.”

Nadia shrugged. “It is a national pastime. We all live in their shadow now. We live with their mistakes every day.” She clutched her arms around herself. Even in the heated cab it was cold—outside the night winds would be truly bitter, despite the warmth of the day.

“And the Russians, now? The Russian Federation? How do you feel about them? They’re trying to kill you, after all.”

Nadia looked over at him with guarded eyes. He’d touched something, but he wasn’t sure what. “You doubt my patriotism? Tell me, do you support everything your government does? Every member of your Congress, every elected official?”

Chapel frowned as he peered ahead into the endless waves of sand. “My government tried to kill me, once,” he said. “Well, one of its organizations did, anyway. Governments, even good ones, aren’t ever really of one mind. As for Congress, well, I guess hating Congress is
our
national pastime. Sometimes I think we elect our politicians just so we’ll have something to be angry about. Yeah, there are things about America I don’t like. It doesn’t stop me loving my country. Fighting for it. I guess I’m asking how you feel about your country, not its leaders.”

“My country,” she said, a little bitterness in her voice. “This is the problem with Russia, calling it one country.” She shivered a little. “Strange that I feel so cold now, when in Siberia this might be a pleasant day in spring. I’ve been away so long. Siberia is my country. I hope to see it again before . . . well. Before I die.”

“Nadia, I didn’t mean to—” he began.

She shook her head to stop him. “I do not want your pity. Moscow, where I have lived for many years . . . it is very nice, in its own way; you can buy nice clothes any time of the day or night. You can see all the foreign movies there. But the people throw their trash into the street. The river stinks. My people would never let that happen. My grandfather was an Evenki shaman. Do you know what that is?”

“Not even a clue.”

Nadia never turned to look at him. Whatever she saw through the windshield, he was pretty sure it wasn’t the desert. “He went from village to village in the forest, healing the sick, fighting with ghosts. He rode around on a reindeer. When I was an infant, he would hold me on his lap, on the back of his reindeer. I can almost remember that. I can definitely remember how it smelled.”

She smiled at the thought. Closed her eyes and lay back in her seat.

“That is my country, the back of that reindeer. The trees of the taiga. The people of the forest. I will fight and die for them, to keep them safe. Whether Moscow approves or not.”

“I believe you,” Chapel said.

She opened her eyes. Turned and looked at him.

“That was what got you arrested, wasn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Chapel thought back to what Angel had told him. “You were arrested a few years ago at a protest rally in Moscow. One that was calling for Siberian independence, among other things. You didn’t give your name, and you were released right away. But you were there, weren’t you?”

“Angel is very, very good at what she does,” Nadia said. She shifted away from him in her seat, as if she might throw open her door and jump out of the truck.

He’d definitely hit a nerve. “Yeah,” he said. “She is.”

“If you have a question to ask, then ask it,” Nadia told him.

Chapel was careful not to push too hard. What he was getting at was a tricky thing to talk about, even now. “You say that Siberia is your country, not Moscow. That makes me wonder something. Why is Siberia still part of Russia?”

“Now you’re asking me riddles.”

He shook his head. “No. Listen, I’m curious about this. When the Soviet Union fell, just about everybody jumped ship. Everybody from Belarus to Tajikistan decided they wanted nothing to do with Russia anymore. But not Siberia.”

“It’s true,” Nadia said.

“Why is that?”

“When the Union fell, every ethnic group in the Union was given a choice to declare for self-determination. But Moscow wished to hold as much territory as possible. Some groups were . . . urged more strongly than others to stay. The truth is, Russia could not afford to lose Siberia. All the country’s wealth is there.”

“Oil, you mean,” Chapel said.

“Yes, definitely there is oil in Siberia. Not to mention gold, and diamonds, and rare metals. And of course there is Vladivostok, which is the only way Russia has to reach Asian markets, and one of its very few port cities that does not freeze over every winter. No, Yeltsin was very much interested in holding on to Siberian territory, and Putin agrees. At the time of the breakup, perhaps, something could have been done. There was political momentum, then. But now—Putin has made it very clear that Moscow will not give up any more territory. Look at what he has done to Chechnya.”

“But you think it would be a good thing, if Siberia split with Moscow?”

Nadia sighed and wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold. “The Soviets plundered Siberia for its resources, without much compunction. Putin has been, if anything, worse. The land is being strip-mined, the trees cleared in great swaths. No one seems to care if the forest is poisoned, as long as they get what lies beneath. Do I think the people who actually live there would make better stewards of the land? Yes.
Konyechno
.”

“You feel strongly enough to get arrested for saying so,” Chapel pointed out.

“What is this?” Nadia demanded. “What are you asking?”

He turned and gave her a hard look. “You lied to me once. When you said that you had the blessing of Moscow for this operation. I want all the cards on the table. You don’t work for FSTEK anymore. You’ve shown political leanings in the past. Who are you working for now?”

“You’ll never really trust me again. I see that,” Nadia told him. “But you already know the answer to that question. I work for Marshal Bulgachenko.”

“Who’s dead,” Chapel pointed out.

“Yes. I work for his memory. And I work to make the world safer for everyone. Jim, I have very little time left. I have dedicated all of it to bringing down Perimeter. Is that so hard to believe?”

Chapel started to answer, but he stopped when his tablet chimed and the screen lit up with a map.

Talk about timing
, he thought.

“You’re almost there,” Angel told him. “The border’s just a few miles up ahead. Time to get careful.”

“I’m getting the live feed from a weather satellite that’s about to break your horizon,” Angel told him. Chapel nodded, even though he knew she couldn’t see him. “You’re still clear of the border, though if you get too much closer, you’ll definitely draw some attention.”

Ahead of the truck was nothing but sand—endless dunes of it, a slightly paler black than the night sky. There were no posted warnings, no signs telling him where the border was. He only had Angel’s word for where the dividing line fell. She was being very careful with that—she didn’t trust Google maps, which could be off by whole miles in places, so she had downloaded some very, very detailed maps from the CIA’s databases. Using the GPS in the tablet, she was able to tell where the truck was within a few yards.