The Hydra Protocol (52 page)

Nadia had no way of knowing whether the Russian government would agree to her demands. The weapon she possessed—the Perimeter launch codes—made her incredibly dangerous to Moscow. But the danger was even greater for America, since all those missiles were pointed at American cities.

If Nadia did launch, if she pushed the button, the death toll in America would mount to the tens of millions. Maybe the hundreds of millions. There was no way for America or Russia to stop all those missiles once they were in the air.

It was not out of the realm of possibility that the president might reach out to her, to try to find some way to defuse this situation. Hollingshead had actually gone to the White House to brief the president and see what he chose to do.

The president had responded that America refused to negotiate with terrorists. Judging by what Hollingshead had told Chapel, the commander in chief didn’t believe that Nadia would actually launch. And he was willing to call her bluff.

So Chapel couldn’t really offer Nadia anything of value. But he didn’t need to negotiate with her, not really. He just needed to get her talking.

Chapel waited five minutes. The chop of the helicopter rotor sounded like an echo of his own heartbeat as the time ticked away.

When nothing happened after five minutes, Chapel nodded to himself. Then he repeated his message. “Nadia,” he said, “this is Jim Chapel—”

The reply came before he could finish.

“Jim? Is that really you? You woke me up. If it is you, I don’t mind. But I need to know it is you. I was certain you were dead. Tell me,” Nadia said, “what was the worst part of our journey through the Kyzyl Kum?”

Chapel’s eyes went wide.

He heard a click on the line. That, he knew, would be Angel shutting down the signal. She came back on a different frequency—he could hear the difference in audio quality. “Okay, sugar—give me a minute to crunch the numbers. It’s better if you don’t respond to her, just in case she has some way of tracking where
you
are.”

“Understood,” Chapel said.

He turned around and saw Senior Lieutenant Kalin staring at him. The man looked as patient but as insidious as a spider. As the seconds went by and Chapel said nothing, Kalin slowly raised one eyebrow.

He was ready, Chapel knew. There was no doubt in Kalin’s mind what to do when word came in with Nadia’s location. Chapel glanced around at the soldiers crouching in the helicopter’s troop compartment. They’d been briefed. They knew what to do as well.

Just as soon as that location came in.

Chapel fought the urge to ask Angel how it was going. When she had something, she would let him know.

Maybe a minute passed. Maybe two.

When Angel came back on the line, Chapel nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Sweetie,” she said, and he could hear it in the tone of her voice. He didn’t need to hear what came next.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. You’re not close enough. I’ve got nothing.”

No.

No.

“No!” Chapel howled. He beat on the metal fuselage of the helicopter with his hand. He couldn’t believe it—he’d been so sure. He’d been certain.

No. He’d wanted to be certain. He’d had one chance, and he’d convinced himself he knew how to finish this. But it had always been a crapshoot.

And now Nadia was going to get away. She had betrayed him, used him—seduced him—and now he would never get to her, never be able to look her in the eye and tell her—

“I take it,” Kalin said, “that you were unsuccessful.”

Chapel looked up at the man with burning eyes. “We weren’t able to get a location on the signal, no,” he said.

A playful little smile crossed Kalin’s face. The man was enjoying this—enjoying watching Chapel rage in his moment of failure. Kalin had once had Chapel in his clutches, had been completely in control of Chapel, body and soul. Then Colonel Valits had come in and taken that away.

Now, that smile on Kalin’s face said, things would return to their natural order. Chapel would be taken back to the hospital in Magnitogorsk. Kalin would use every method available to him to find out what Chapel knew. To break him down completely.

Chapel didn’t care about that, though he knew he should. He knew what was in store for him. But his rage, his need for revenge, towered over any mere concern for his survival, any fear of what Kalin could do.

He’d been so close. He had screwed up, royally, by trusting Nadia, but he’d been given one chance at turning that around and now . . . now . . .

“Honey,” Angel said in his ear, “maybe we can still get something out of this. I was able to track the signal enough to know that you were kind of right.”

Chapel barely heard her. Kalin was barking orders at the pilots of the helicopter, telling them to turn around, to head back to Yakutsk.

“I picked up . . . something. Just an echo, really. But I can track her to an area of about a couple of thousand square miles, just based on that,” Angel went on, whether anyone was listening or not. “I know she’s no farther away from you than that.”

Chapel looked down at his hand. It was balled into a fist. Maybe he could push open the side door of the helicopter. Maybe he could use that hand to grab Kalin, throw him down into the pit mine below—

“Sugar, did you hear me?” Angel asked. “She is in Siberia. I can verify that much.”

The soldiers would open fire the second he grabbed Kalin. They would tear him to shreds with high velocity rounds. But if he was quick, if he moved now—

Wait.

“Angel? Say again?”

“She’s definitely in Siberia. Somewhere near you, though near is kind of a relative term—”

“She’s here?” he asked.

“Somewhere there, yes,” Angel confirmed.

“Kalin!” Chapel shouted.

The torturer turned around to face him. “Yes?”

“She’s here. Asimova is here, in Siberia. We just weren’t quite close enough. But maybe—we can move the helicopter, and try for a second fix.”

Kalin pursed his lips. He looked like he was weighing something in his head. Maybe the relative merits of avoiding nuclear war versus the pleasure he would take in turning Chapel into a sniveling, broken wreck of a man.

“You have failed us once,” Kalin said. “Why should I think you would succeed a second time?”

Chapel shook his head. “We can find her. Still. We just need to get closer.”

“And in which direction does this ‘closer’ lie?” Kalin asked.

It was a good question. A very good question. If Nadia was to the south, and Chapel ordered the helicopter to the north, he would waste this second chance. He needed more information. He needed to know roughly where she was, before he could find exactly where she was. Just like before, except this time he needed to be absolutely right.

“We are already nearing the operational range of the aircraft,” Kalin pointed out. “We cannot stay airborne for more than an hour more.”

“Then give me that hour,” Chapel said. He couldn’t bring himself to beg the man, but maybe logic would work. “One hour so we can save both our countries from burning up in nuclear fire. Do you really want to go down in history as the man who threw away the world just because he hated the man who could have saved it?”

“Please,” Kalin said, sneering. “Such melodrama.”

“If I’m wrong, one hour more won’t make a difference. I’ll be just as wrong then. I’ll lose the protection of Colonel Valits, and you’ll have me. But if I’m right—”

Kalin lifted his hands in resignation. “
Konyechno
. One hour.”

One hour to figure it out.

Less than that. A lot less. An hour in which to figure out the puzzle, get to the right location, and convince Nadia to come back on the line.

There wasn’t enough time to get clever. He had to go back to his original intuition, the guess that had brought him this far. Nadia had returned to Siberia because she wanted to see it again before she died. She wasn’t looking for pit mines or overcrowded cities, though. She would be looking for the land where she’d spent summers with her grandfather, riding around on the back of his reindeer.

He’d been an Evenk, one of the traditional ethnic groups of Siberia. Chapel turned to Kalin. “Where do the Evenks live?” he asked. “Do they have their own territory?”

“They do,” Kalin said, lifting his shoulders. “The Evenkiysky District. It’s west of here, over the border of Sakha.”

Chapel nodded and touched the hands-free unit in his ear. “Angel, are there any villages in the Evenkiysky District? Any places that might have been there thirty years ago, where Nadia’s grandfather might have been born?”

“More than a few, but they’re spread pretty thin. That’s an area of three hundred thousand square miles and less than twenty thousand people live there.”

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. “We know he lived in Gurangri once, back when it was an actual village. He can’t have gotten very far from there if his chief method of transport was riding on a reindeer.”

“You’re probably right,” Angel told him. He could hear her clacking away at a keyboard and imagined her fingers flying along as her screens showed one database after another, as she zoomed in on maps and then clicked away, zoomed in further on satellite pictures . . .

“Head west by southwest,” she said, finally. “There’s a cluster of villages about sixty miles that way—most of them just collections of tents, though some have permanent buildings. It’s a little more densely populated there, north of Lake Baikal. But Chapel—even if she’s somewhere in that cluster, you still need to get within fifty miles of her actual location. The cluster’s spread over hundreds of square miles of terrain. She could be there and you still might miss her.”

“Damn,” Chapel said. He was running out of time and out of options at an alarming rate. “Angel,” he said, “do we need to be stationary for you to get a fix on her transmission?”

“No,” Angel said, and he could hear breathless excitement in her voice. “No—even if your helicopter was moving at top speed, I could still capture the signal. All I need is one packet of the direct transmission.”

“So if we fly over this area, if we cover it from end to end and I can keep her talking long enough—”

“It might work,” Angel confirmed. “It just might.”

Chapel relayed his plan to Senior Lieutenant Kalin. The torturer didn’t like it—already the helicopter was in danger of not having enough fuel to make it back to base, and flying at high speed would only drain the tanks faster. But he seemed to have accepted that this was the only way he would ever find Nadia.

The aircraft lurched as the pilot leaned on the throttle, and Chapel had to grab on to a stanchion or be thrown from his seat. Below he could see the forest hurtling by, just a green blur. After a few minutes, he had Angel set him up on Nadia’s frequency again.

He took a couple of deep breaths. Forced himself to get into character. If his voice betrayed how much he wanted to catch Nadia, to avenge himself, she might shut down the broadcast immediately. He had to sound like he had the last time they’d spoken, in Aralsk-30. Like a man talking to his lover.

“Nadia,” he said into his microphone, “you asked me a question. You asked me what was the worst part of crossing the Kyzyl Kum. I don’t know what the worst part for you was,” he said, “but for me it was probably having a giant lizard chomp my arm.”

He heard a click and knew that Angel had muted his microphone. The helicopter’s engines were screaming now—if Nadia heard that sound on the line, there was a small chance she might guess where Chapel was, and that he was close enough to be a threat.

Still, even with the mike muted, he made no sound. He held his breath while he waited for her to reply. Maybe he had waited too long before answering her. Maybe she already suspected this was a trap. If she was smart, she wouldn’t transmit more than she absolutely needed to.

But no, he thought. She would think she was safe. Having stolen Angel’s special frequency-hopping packet-switching whatever-it-was signal technology, she would know the Russians had no way of tracing her. She would know that only Angel, out of everyone in the world, had even the slightest clue how she was communicating.

Still, she took her time about it. Chapel had to let go of his trapped breath. He sagged against the fuselage of the helicopter, suddenly feeling very, very tired.

Then there was a click in his ear, and he heard Nadia speak.

Or laugh, rather. He remembered that laugh—it had always come to her so easily. “Jim, it is you,” she said. “I’m so very glad you’re still alive.”

“That makes two of us,” he told her.

“Jim,” Nadia said, “how did you get out of there? The last time I saw you, you were down on the ground, and a Russian soldier was standing over you with a shotgun.” She laughed again. He used to like that laugh. “I wept for you, because I was certain you were dead.”

“They had orders to take us alive,” Chapel told her. He tried to think of a cunning lie, something close enough to the truth she might actually believe it. “That shotgun was loaded with Taser rounds. One of them hit me in my artificial arm, and the silicone flesh protected me from the worst of the shock. I dropped to the ground and the soldier thought I was down, that he’d incapacitated me. I let him believe that. Once I took him down, there wasn’t much left of the Russians to deal with.”

“You’re saying if Bogdan and I had come back for you—if we had doubled back—but instead we left you there, stranded . . .”

“Don’t worry about that,” Chapel told her. “Angel was able to get me some transport to the submarine.” Maybe it could have gone down that way, if the Taser had hit him in his artificial arm instead of his chest. “But what about you—how did you get out of Kazakhstan?”

“Bogdan and I drove north, away from Aralsk-30. We were panicked. We thought that if you were not with us, your friends wouldn’t pick us up. So we drove to a little oasis not far away and ditched the truck. I called Varvara and she had some of her friends come and get us and help us cross the Russian border—on camels, of all things. It was a frightening voyage but we made it.”