The Hydra Protocol (36 page)

“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Chapel shouted, yanking his arm back, trying to free it from the monitor’s grip. Those teeth wouldn’t let go, but at least he managed to get up on his feet again. He looked around and saw half a dozen of the bigger lizards coming toward him, taking their time, their tails lashing the sand into deep furrows.

He’d lost his pistol when he was knocked down. The rifle was still slung across his back, but there was no way to reach it with one hand. His only hope was to get back, closer to the truck. He shouted for Bogdan and Nadia to get in, then dug his feet into the shifting sand and danced backward, pulling the monitor along with him. The monster didn’t even try to dig its claws into the sand—it let itself be pulled along, saving all its energy to use to hold on to the arm. The other reptiles scampered after Chapel, but at least for the moment they didn’t attack.

If Nadia had been a better shot, maybe she could have driven some of them back. As it was, especially in the fading light, he was glad she didn’t try. Inch by inch, step by agonizing step he moved toward the truck, the alpha just digging his teeth deeper and deeper into the artificial arm. Chapel considered releasing the arm, just loosing the clamps that held it to his body and leaving it behind, but he couldn’t bear the thought. He staggered backward, through the stink and the hissing, and suddenly his back rammed into the side of the truck.

The monitors came after him, moving faster now. The pack knew it was in danger of letting its prey escape and they would do anything they could to stop that. Chapel reached up with his free arm, trying to find the handle of the truck door without looking.

Then Nadia reached down and grabbed him with both hands and pulled. “Drive!” she shouted to Bogdan. “The pedal on the right!”

With his free hand Chapel found the ladder on the side of the cab. He wrapped his good arm through and around one of the rungs and just held on as the truck roared to life and started moving away from the rock and the pack of lizards. The monitors tried to chase after it, but in seconds it was moving too fast for them and they fell behind.

All of them except the alpha, who hadn’t so much as loosened its death grip on Chapel’s arm. It was dragged along, its feet paddling wildly on the sand but unable to gain purchase.

On the outside of the cab Chapel clung on for dear life as Bogdan took them straight up the side of a dune and then over the top. Chapel’s legs swung free—as did the alpha, whose big eyes showed no terror at all as its body flopped through the air.

Nadia leaned out of the window of the truck, a pistol in her hand. She pointed it at the monitor’s eye, but the lizard flopped around so much she couldn’t seem to line up a shot. “I can’t risk shooting you!” she shouted over the noise of the engine.

“Hit it between the eyes!” Chapel shouted back.

Nadia twisted around until she was sitting on the windowsill. She held the pistol by its barrel and brought its grip down hard on top of the monitor’s head.

It was enough to make the monitor blink its nictitating membranes, but nothing more. Its grip didn’t loosen at all.

Chapel cursed and shouted at the monitor, but that didn’t help either. The truck crested another dune at speed and nearly threw him, his legs flying out wide from the body of the cab. One foot got tangled with the monitor’s front leg.

Maybe, he thought—just maybe—

Chapel lifted his feet and planted his boots on the monitor’s shoulders. The reptile thrashed but there was nowhere for it to go to get away from him. Chapel braced himself as best he could and then pushed down with his feet, shoving the monitor’s body away from him, using every bit of strength he had.

The alpha responded by tightening its grip still further. Its teeth tore deep into the silicone flesh of Chapel’s artificial arm and then, with a sickening slowness, tore right through it. The flesh came away in one big chunk, no longer attached to the arm at all.

For a moment the monitor seemed to float in midair, its jaw already chewing at the chunk of prosthetic arm, but then it disappeared as it fell away from the truck, rolling over and over along the sand. Chapel just had time to see it spit out a mouthful of silicone before it fell away behind them.

He looked down at his artificial arm. The silicone sleeve was just a ragged mess, still brown at the edges with venom. He tried flexing the arm and it worked—apparently the reptile hadn’t damaged any of the actuators under the skin.

Using both hands, he climbed up and through the window of the truck, landing in Nadia’s lap.

“Are they after us still?” Bogdan asked. He was hunched over the steering wheel, his eyes wide and staring.

“Just drive,” Chapel told him.

In the backseat, Chapel poured water over the torn flesh of his arm to try to wash away the last of the venom.

“One of those little sticky bandages you carry isn’t going to be enough,” Nadia said, prodding the torn skin with a pen. The motors and pistons underneath whined a little as his arm moved, even though he was trying to hold it still. “This saved your life, did it not?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Chapel reached one-handed for the truck’s bulky medical kit and flipped its catch. Supplies spilled out onto the seat beside him—suture kits, antihistamine tablets, a thin plastic splint. He picked up a roll of gauze and brought it toward his mouth to unspool it.

“Let me,” Nadia said. She spun out a long length of fabric and started wrapping it tightly around Chapel’s arm. The damage was all confined to the forearm and the wrist and it didn’t take long for her to wrap it all up.

He looked into the kit and found a small pair of scissors secured to the lid of the case with a nylon loop. He handed them over and she cut the gauze, then tucked the end neatly inside the wrapping and used white tape to keep it in place. She looked up at him with questioning eyes. “In America, do mothers kiss their children’s scrapes to make them better?”

“Better not,” he told her. “There might still be some venom on there.”

She shook her head and laughed. “You are infuriating, Mr. Chapel. But I will let you run hot and cold a while longer before I simply attack you out of unbearable desire. Otherwise you might think me too aggressive. I am told this is unattractive to American men.”

He knew she was fishing for a compliment, so he said nothing. There was a perverse kind of pleasure to torturing her like that, as if he could get back at Julia for all the pain she’d caused him by being cruel to Nadia. Even as he realized that he felt like a jerk, but not enough to give in to her charms.

She shrugged dramatically and then climbed back into the front passenger seat. He didn’t seem to have broken the buoyant mood that had come over her in the last few hours. Nothing could—they were getting close to Perimeter, and she could barely sit still. Ignoring him, she chattered amiably with Bogdan in Romanian. Chapel couldn’t follow the language so he didn’t bother to try.

Instead he lay back in the seat, trying to ignore the way Bogdan’s inexpert driving tossed him up and down every time they passed over a dune. Even as the night darkened, he could see the landscape beyond the windows was changing, getting rougher. Instead of an unbroken sea of sand, now when he looked outside what he often saw was rocks, big rocks—more than boulders. Small hills, then the start of big ones.

He realized with some surprise they were coming to the edge of the desert.

How long had it been since they’d left Uzbekistan? It felt like no time at all—or forever, he couldn’t decide. Maybe it was more like they’d left Earth altogether, that they’d been driving across the face of the moon. What he’d seen of Kazakhstan had been just as desolate, as uninhabited. The Kyzyl Kum seemed to belong more to the desert monitors than to people.

For Chapel, who had grown up in the suburban sprawl of Florida where he’d never been more than a mile from the nearest town, it was unimaginable that you could have all this land, this huge expanse, and not fill it up with strip malls and housing developments. Sure, it was a desert, ridiculously hot during the day and freezing cold at night—but that hadn’t stopped western expansion back in the States. Then again, the Soviet Union had been a lot bigger than America—a whole empire, with room enough for tracts of land that just went unused, like this place, like Nadia’s Siberia.

In the distance, ahead of them, part of the night sky was obscured. Above it spread a wealth of stars, a glittering abundance of the kind you never saw in America, a night sky paved with light. Below the dividing line was only darkness. It took Chapel a while to realize those were mountains ahead of them, blocking out the sky.

Nadia glanced back over her seat to look at him. “There,” she said, pointing at the shadow. “That is where we are going. That is where we find Perimeter.”

Even in the dark cab of the truck, her eyes shone.

“It will not be much longer,” she said. “The northern shore of the Aral Sea is over there,” she said, pointing west. “The coordinates I have for Perimeter suggest it is some fifty kilometers inland from there.”

Chapel moved to look between the seats and out the windshield. Bogdan’s driving was erratic, and he couldn’t seem to keep a steady speed, but it wasn’t like he was going to crash into anything—even as the landscape grew rockier and less sandy, there was still plenty of room to maneuver. The mountains ahead looked just as far away as they ever had, still off in some impossible distance.

“How will we know when we arrive?” he asked. “I doubt there’s going to be a big neon sign announcing the location.”

“Hardly,” Nadia said. “I do not actually know if we will see anything. The installation will be all underground, dug out of bedrock deep enough that it can survive a direct hit from an atomic weapon. There will be some way to enter, a cover as if for a manhole or the like, perhaps. Even that will be camouflaged, though. Perimeter was designed never to be found by the wrong people.”

Chapel nodded. “And how accurate are your map references? Are we going to have to hunt for this entrance when we get there?”

“They are accurate to one-tenth of one second of a degree,” Nadia claimed. “Do not worry. I did not come so far just to miss it now.”

As they got closer, the low hills gave way to looming pinnacles of rock, towers of limestone carved into incredible shapes by ancient oceans. They rose up ahead and blocked out the stars, and Chapel couldn’t help but see them as silent guardians, soldiers standing watch to make sure no one ever discovered the secret buried here.

The dark mass on the horizon, the mountains Chapel had been watching for hours, started to gain a little definition. Dead ahead stood a long massif of rock that lifted above the sand dunes like the curtain wall of a castle. As they drew closer still, Chapel could see the rocky barrier was broken in some places, cracked open by ravines and even winding box canyons. One of those canyons seemed darker than the others.

“Perimeter will be there,” Nadia said, consulting the GPS on the tablet. “Those shadows—I hope it is not overgrown with brush that we will have to clear away.”

A few seconds later Chapel said, “I don’t think that will be a problem.” The shadows were too regular, too blocky in shape. That wasn’t brush. It was a collection of structures definitely built by human hands. Nature didn’t build that straight or that repetitively.

Bogdan stepped on the brake, and the truck rocked to a stop a few hundred meters from the entrance to the canyon. From there it was quite easy to see that the defile was full of buildings. It looked like there was a whole town sheltered between the walls of the canyon.

For a while the three of them stared at the canyon in hushed silence, trying to make out features in the shadowy place. Moonlight lit up the sand and rocks on either side of them, but the canyon hid its secrets well, casting a pall of darkness over the sleeping buildings.

“You weren’t expecting this,” Chapel said.

“No,” Nadia said. She unlatched her door and jumped down into the sand.

“Wait,” Chapel called, and jumped down after her. No lights showed in the town, but that didn’t mean it was uninhabited—or for that matter, that it wasn’t surrounded by a minefield. He hurried after Nadia as she staggered forward, across the desert floor, toward the dark interior of the canyon. Toward the town there. As Chapel raced after her he saw a sign hung in front of the closest building. He struggled to make out the words, then to transliterate the Cyrillic characters. “Aralsk-30,” he whispered.

Nadia turned and faced him. Her hair blew across her eyes in the breeze that came down the canyon. She hugged herself, perhaps against the night’s chill, perhaps to contain some of her excitement. “A secret city,” she said. “Of course!”

Chapel knew something about the secret cities.

They had been built by Stalin, mostly back before the Space Race. Back before reconnaissance satellites, when the Soviets still believed they could keep big secrets hidden inside their borders. People had lived and worked in the secret cities, just like normal cities, but they were also secret installations—weapons laboratories, factories constructing biological weapons or atomic bombs, even farms where experimental livestock could be raised. They were constructed by slave labor, dissidents and criminals and sometimes just people who belonged to ethnic groups the politburo didn’t like. When the building was complete, the slaves would be shipped off to the next project and the city’s actual residents would move in—scientists and workers who could be trusted to tell no one, not even their families, where they lived. The cities were built far from civilization, in places where people weren’t likely to stumble on them, and they were never, ever mentioned in official documents. They didn’t appear on any maps, and they didn’t even get their own names—they just took the name of the nearest town and a number to describe how far away they were, so they had names like Arzamas-16 or Chelyabinsk-65—or Aralsk-30.