The Hydra Protocol (43 page)

Captain Mahen climbed back down to the bridge and looked around at his officers. They looked to him for any sign that the wait might be over, but he had nothing to give them. They were in danger of losing their edge through sheer inactivity and loss of sleep, but he couldn’t even sigh and shake his head.

He went aft to his cabin and switched on his laptop. Even the gentle hum of its fans was a risk, but he needed to know. He waited for the machine to make contact and then typed a quick message, careful not to let his fingers click too loudly on the keys.

STANDING BY. REQUEST NEW INFORMATION.

The response came almost instantly. He had no idea who spoke to him through this particular link, but he had to admit they were diligent—he had never had to wait for more than a few seconds to get a return message.

NO NEW INFORMATION. MISSION PARAMETERS UNCHANGED.

This time the temptation to sigh was almost unbearable. The
Cincinnatus
had vital work to do south of here, off the coast of Iran. For the last six weeks, she and her crew had been monitoring training exercises by the Iranian navy’s newest Hendijan class missile craft, learning all they could about the boats’ capabilities, range, and armament. They had been dragged away for this secret mission on very little notice, and already it had cost them dearly.

Still, his orders came from very high up. He was to approach a certain point on the Kazakhstan coast and take aboard three individuals. They had been expected to arrive almost a full day ago, and still there was no sign of them.

Captain Mahen’s orders had come from very high up, indeed—straight from the Pentagon. But aboard his submarine the captain was one rank below God. The decision to stay and wait longer was entirely at his discretion—his duty to keep his crew safe had to come first.

The time had come.

ABORTING MISSION AS OF 00:30 LOCAL TIME, he typed.

For once the reply took longer than expected. Was the person on the other end of this connection hesitating? Was he or she waiting for instructions from a superior? An icon on the screen flashed to indicate that a new message was incoming, but for long minutes Captain Mahen could only listen to his laptop drone away and wonder if anyone up on the surface could hear it. Hydrophones were very sophisticated these days, very sensitive, and the slightest sound could betray the presence of the
Cincinnatus
. . .

REQUEST ONE MORE DAY.

Captain Mahen stared at the screen in amazement. Another twenty-four hours? His crew would be useless if he kept them at alert that long. Unthinkable. He had no idea who these people were he was supposed to pick up, but he was certain of one thing—they weren’t coming. They had to be covert operatives, if he was smuggling them out of Kazakhstan like this. People like that knew better than to be late for an exfiltration.

His hands hovered over the keyboard. He made up his mind.

ABORTING MISSION.

The reply came almost before he’d finished.

PLEASE, it said.

This time he couldn’t resist an actual grunt of frustration, though he clapped his hand over his mouth as the noise escaped him. No naval officer would ever send a message like that. Had he been talking to a civilian the whole time?

He didn’t take orders from civilians.

ABORTING MISSION. I WISH YOUR PEOPLE LUCK, BUT THAT’S ALL I CAN OFFER. COMMUNICATION ENDS.

Everything hurt.

Chapel had experienced enough physical pain in his life to know the difference between sore muscles and actual tissue damage. He knew what it felt like to wake up after having been beaten while one was unconscious. He knew what gunshot wounds felt like, and how to tell if he had broken bones.

He’d also had enough training to know that internal damage was tricky. You might feel a little achy for a day or two and then drop dead because of bruising on your liver. You might feel horrible agony, racking, excruciating pain, and be just fine after a few days resting in a soft bed.

He tried to assess how badly he’d been injured and realized he just couldn’t be sure. He might be dying, or he might just have been hit by a freight train. He knew that the idea of sitting up was laughable. The way his torso felt he would be lucky to open his eyes and see that he was still in one piece.

He opened his eyes.

Eye, anyway. He opened one of them. The other was too swollen to budge. His good eye gave him a very blurry image of a lot of sunlight and a sky so blue it looked like you could just step into it and fall forever, fall upward until you hit outer space.

Opening the eye had been a bad idea. The light buzzed around in his head, chasing any rational thoughts around. There were multicolored halos around every object he looked at—not that he could focus enough to make out what those objects were. He knew what that meant: a concussion. And a bad one, definitely.

Which meant that, as much as he wanted to close his eye again and go back to sleep, he absolutely shouldn’t. You could go to sleep with a concussion and never wake up. He forced himself to keep the eye open. Fought back each wave of exhaustion as it came for him, pushed back until it was gone and he could brace for the next one.

Damn, everything really hurt.

He tried to concentrate on piecing together what had happened to him. There had been a helicopter—no—two helicopters, there had been—there had—

He felt the desperate need to throw up, and a certainty that he shouldn’t, that throwing up was another bad idea, just like falling asleep. He was lying on his back, he thought. He could drown in his own vomit if he threw up now.

Concentrate
, he told himself.
What happened? How many helicopters?

One, at first. He had not quite shot it down, but it crashed. Nadia and Bogdan had—had they gotten away or not? Had they—

That thought brought on a new wave, one of panic. A desperate need to move, to run, to
do something
. Yet another bad idea. If his neck was broken, or if—

Concentrate
.

The helicopter had crashed. He’d been Tased, then kicked. He had blacked out for a while. Most likely he’d been beaten while he was unconscious, because he couldn’t remember hurting this much when he blacked out.

When he came to, another helicopter was on its way. Descending, getting bigger as it came down from the sky. It looked like it was going to land on top of him. He had seen a flag painted on its side and for a second he’d been excited, thrilled, because he saw red, white, and blue.

Wrong flag, though. The colors had been horizontal stripes, white, blue, and red.

Shit
, he thought. That was the Russian flag. The Russians had him.

Now he was here under this incredibly blue sky. There were people around him, people who weren’t paying any attention to him. He couldn’t make out their faces. He heard them talking, heard at least one word he understood.
Glas
. That was the Russian word for eye, or for sight. They had noticed that his eye was open.

He didn’t think that was a good thing.

The people around him started moving faster. He couldn’t see what they were doing. One of them was above him, another beneath, and then he felt himself moving, being moved. He tried to warn them, tried to tell them his neck might be broken, but either they weren’t listening or they couldn’t hear him. He wasn’t sure his throat was working right. Wasn’t sure he was making a sound.

They moved him for a long time. Occasionally someone else would loom over him, another human shape. A few words would be spoken and then he would start moving again.

They took him into a dark place. That was a little better—the light had really been hurting his eye. But the darkness was going to make it hard to stay awake. The dark place stank, enough to make him gag. It smelled of something foul and . . . rusted metal? Maybe. Maybe that was the smell of blood.

His eye adjusted to the darkness, though it took a very long time.

A shape appeared above him, in the dark. A human face. He could see it more clearly this time, without all the sunlight blasting his vision. He could tell this new person had a long, thin face, and that he wore a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie. The high contrast helped. The person in the black suit studied him for a very long time.

“Who are you?” Chapel asked. He could hear the noise he’d made, at least. He was certain he’d said something, though whether or not he’d actually formed words was debatable.

He must have made himself understood on some level, because the person in the black suit answered him. In English. “I am Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin. I’m going to be doing your interview. I’ll get you something for the pain in a moment, but first I need you to answer some basic questions.”

Name, rank, and serial number
, Chapel thought—the three things you were supposed to provide to your captors when you were taken prisoner. Except he couldn’t even provide that much. Announcing that he
had
a serial number would be the same as saying he was an American serviceman and therefore a spy. “I can’t . . . can’t . . .”

“Are you allergic to codeine or any other painkilling medications? What about penicillin, erythromycin, sulfa drugs? I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Where . . . where am I?”

“The sooner you provide us with your medical information, the quicker we can get moving,” Kalin told him. “No? You don’t wish to cooperate with your treatment personnel?” Kalin took something from his pocket. A little notebook. He jotted down a quick entry and then put the notebook away. He waved someone over, someone in a white coat who put a hypodermic needle in Chapel’s neck. He was too beat up to fight them off.

“Can’t . . . sleep,” he managed to rasp out. “Concussion . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Kalin told him. “If your heart stops, we’ll resuscitate you. As many times as necessary.”

When Chapel woke next, he was moving. The room he was in was moving. He could feel it swaying back and forth, bouncing up and down. He had no idea what was going on.

He was naked. His left arm was gone—just missing, nowhere to be found. He was lying on a pile of blankets that hadn’t been washed in a while, or maybe it was him that stank. It was unbearably hot in the room, and sweat crawled across his skin like prickling ants.

He wasn’t dead. He was groggy and weak, but he wasn’t dead. He could move, crawl even, if he was careful. His body still ached everywhere, and standing up was impossible in the moving room, but he could just about get around. There was a tiny bit of light coming in from one side of the room. He moved over there as best he could and found that the source of the light was a crack in the wall. He pressed his eye up against it and for a second saw nothing but dazzling light. Even though it hurt his eye, it felt good after the near total darkness of the moving room.

When his eye had adjusted to the light, he saw a dashed white line streaming away from him. A road, then—a highway. The “room” he was in must be a shipping container mounted on a flatbed truck. He was being taken somewhere. They had simply stuffed him in the back of a cargo container and then shipped him off. He had no idea where he was going or what would happen there, no idea if they were going to—

Best to focus on what he
could
know.

The light was coming in through a crack between two doors at the back of the container. He pushed against the doors, tried lifting them with his hand, but they wouldn’t budge. They were locked from the outside, and he was too weak to do much but strain against them.

Crawling around the inside of the container, he defined his world very quickly. There were only two things in the container beyond himself: a pile of blankets he’d been using as a bed, and a bucket in one corner. The bucket was the source of the terrible smell in the container. It had been used before Chapel arrived, and no one had bothered to clean it out.

He sat down and watched the bucket for a while. It rattled and bounced and constantly threatened to fall over and spill its contents all over the floor. Somehow it never did.

He might have slept again. Without anything to do but watch the bucket, it was hard to tell.

Time passed.

A lot of time.

Eventually the container stopped moving. He heard the squeal of the truck’s brakes. He heard someone talking outside, but he couldn’t understand the words.

The doors at the back of the container opened and he was blinded again. Men in uniforms came inside and grabbed him, hauling him to his feet. They pulled a thin gown over his head and then he was dragged out of the container and along the side of a building. They came around a corner and Senior Lieutenant Kalin was there, waiting for them.

Kalin took a quick look at Chapel and nodded. The soldiers carrying him started moving again.

They marched him through an alleyway between two brick buildings, neither of which had windows, just blank walls. He let his head fall back and looked up and saw a sky grimy with smog, streaked with trails of smoke.

Up ahead, the alleyway ended in a broad courtyard. At its far side was a big building with curved walls, so that it looked like a drum. It was made of concrete stained black in places. It had a lot of windows, but all of them were covered with bars. An ambulance stood out in front of the building, with Cyrillic lettering on its sides.

“Where am I?” he asked.

Surprisingly, Kalin answered. “Magnitogorsk,” he said. “A municipal asylum for the mentally ill.”

Chapel stared up at the round building. He was marched toward its front doors, wide glass doors that looked like the entrance to a hospital emergency room. Inside a team of doctors and nurses waited, staring out at him. Ready for him to rant and rave or grow violent or just start screaming. Ready for anything he might try.

So this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.

He could only hope it wasn’t going to be a long one.

They threw him in a little empty room—a cell, no point in giving it a prettier name—and locked the door behind him. They left him there in the dark, and no matter how many times he pounded on the door and shouted, nobody came.