The Hydra Protocol (56 page)

“That’s my job. Doing stupid things for America.”

She gave him a smile. It wasn’t a match for the warm, excited smiles she used to give him, back when . . . before she . . .

He fought down his anger, his need for revenge. There were bigger things at stake here than getting back at her. “Nadia, you’ve really painted yourself into a corner here. The Russians are going to shoot you down in about ten minutes if you don’t start talking to them. You have to give them something.”

“Do I?” she asked. She glanced back through the windscreen. “They seem to be backing off. I thought for a moment they intended to ram this plane.”

“They’re holding back right now. But they don’t need to ram you. They’ve got a machine gun that can cut the wings off this thing.”

She sighed. “Come forward. I can’t talk to you over my shoulder like this and fly at the same time.”

He made his way to the front of the plane and sat down next to her. There was no copilot’s position, no controls in front of him. He wouldn’t be able to fight her over who got to fly. Not that he even knew how, though he supposed Angel could talk him through it . . . damn. He’d lost his hands-free unit when he jumped. He could still call Angel on the phone in his pocket, but for all practical purposes he was on his own.

“Just—just put down the phone, for now,” he told her. “Please? I know what you can do with that thing.”

“If I put down the phone, you’ll have no reason not to kill me.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” he said, before he could stop himself. “But I won’t. I plan on living through this. If I tried something, you would lose control of the plane, and then we’d both die.”

“Perhaps you think it would be worth it, after everything I did.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with his hand. Then he looked over at her and met her eyes. And realized he had no idea what to say next.

She kept the phone in her hand.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve seen you fight. You could probably take me.”

That made her smile again. There was a little more light in her smile this time. “Count on it.” But still she didn’t put down the phone.

“Okay,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. He had to think of this like a hostage negotiation—with three hundred and fifty million people, the population of America, as the hostages. “All right. You don’t want to put down the phone. So tell me what you do want. Tell me where we go from here.”

“You know what I want.” She glanced through the windscreen at the helicopter, which was keeping station just clear of her wing tip. “It looks like I’m not going to get it.”

“So what’s your plan?” he asked.

“My plan?”

“You have one, don’t you?” he said, as gently as he could.

“Oh, certainly.” She laughed. “I did. But as usual, you came along and made it impossible.”

“I—what? As far as I can tell I’ve just been along for the ride this whole time. I was there to help you make things this desperate.”

“Come now,” she said. “I won’t believe that. You knew right away when you met me—you knew I was up to something. That’s why you spied on me, isn’t it? That’s why you kept looking for the gaps in my story. It’s why you seduced me.”

“I didn’t—wait, what?” Chapel asked, blinking rapidly. “I did what?”

“I didn’t seduce you—you seduced me,” Chapel said, very slowly, as if he was working out a complicated math problem. “You led me on, you used the fact that Julia had just dumped me—you knew I was weak, vulnerable—”

“You knew I was attracted to you,” she said, “and you played hard to get, driving me crazy.”

“You made the first move!”

“Only after you made me want you. And what about in the desert, in the tent, when you woke me to kiss me, then turned away?” She shook her head. “You were trying to weaken my resolve, and it worked.”

“It . . . did?”

She looked over at him. “I would have told you everything. I would have brought you in on my scheme, even if it meant wrecking everything the marshal and I had worked to attain. Back in Aralsk-30, just before the soldiers arrived—I was going to tell you about Siberian independence, and stealing the launch codes. I was going to give you a chance to join me—or stop me.”

Chapel’s eyes went wide.

“I thought,” she said, and clearly it took some effort to dredge up the words, “that I could go it alone. When I left Marshal Bulgachenko for the last time, when I went rogue, I thought I could live the rest of my life without any human comfort or warmth. It wasn’t going to be very long, was it? But I had no idea what people need when they must face up to their own mortality. The loneliness was incredible. It was like winter had come and I knew the sun would never rise again. And then you came along. Jim, we were never going to be happy marrieds. We were never going to have children or a nice little house with a lawn you would mow every weekend. I knew that. But the thought of just having someone there, someone to stand beside me, someone to be with me at the very end . . . I suppose it is easiest just to say that I did not want to die alone.”

Chapel forced himself to blink his eyes. It made him realize he’d been staring at her, unable to believe what he heard.

“When you called me, when you told me America wished to help me,” she said, softly, “I knew it was a ruse.” She shook her head. “It was just so good to hear your voice.”

“Seriously?” he asked.

“When I thought you were dead . . . it was almost too much to bear.”

Chapel couldn’t believe it. Her feelings for him had been real? He’d been running on rage for so long, convinced she had seduced him to keep him in line, to keep him moving in the direction she wanted to go. But this changed everything—

He shook his head.

She had still betrayed him. Lied to him. Used him to forward her political cause. That hadn’t changed.

“No. No. You lied to me from the start,” he said. “You used me.”

“I know you hate me, Jim. I understand why.”

“Because you used me and my country to steal a weapon of mass destruction?”

“Yes,” she said. “I won’t deny it. I will say I did it for the best of reasons. To free my people from Moscow.”

“Through an act of terror,” he insisted.

“After all we’ve been through, you can’t even call me a freedom fighter?”

“That’s just semantics. What you did was wrong, Nadia. You put my entire country in jeopardy. And if you launch those missiles, the United States will be forced to retaliate—it’s just the way things are. You’ll destroy Russia as well. Some of our missiles are aimed at Siberia, you know.”

“It’s that clear, is it? There is no moral quandary in your mind. I’m one of the bad guys.”

“As long as you’re holding that phone, yes,” he said.

She turned to face him. Looked deeply into his eyes. What would she find there? He didn’t even know himself, anymore. Despite what he’d said, this situation was anything but clear. Would she find hatred still burning in him, or something else? Maybe just a wish that things could have been different?

She pursed her lips and looked back through the windscreen. Lake Baikal filled most of the view, now, as big as a sea, an ocean. Mongolia lay just a few dozen miles from its southern shore.

“I wanted to see this,” she said. “This lake—it’s the heart of Siberia. It is the deepest lake in the world, did you know that?”

“No,” he said.

“Perhaps the oldest lake, as well. We—the
Sibiryak
—we sing folk songs about the ‘glorious Baikal sea.’ We tell the story of a fugitive from the gulags who rowed across Baikal in a lard barrel, to return to his family.”

“It’s beautiful,” Chapel said.

“Moscow wants to build a nuclear plant here. They’ll have to relocate all the Buryat people, who have lived a traditional life along the shore for ten thousand years. Moving them is a small price to pay for development of the region, Moscow says.”

“Nadia,” he sighed, “we don’t have time for—”

She reached over and handed him the phone.

Chapel closed his eyes and clutched the phone in his hand. For a second he just breathed deeply, releasing some of his pent-up tension. Then he ejected the SIM card from the phone and shoved it in his pocket. He took the battery out for good measure.

Only then did he consider the fact this wasn’t over.

He took out his own phone and lifted it to his ear.

“What are you doing?” Nadia asked, staring at him.

“I’m going to tell Kalin that he doesn’t need to shoot us down,” he told her.

“Don’t.”

“Look, Nadia—we have to figure out some way to end this where nobody gets hurt.”

“Unlikely,” she pointed out. “Even if I were to put down at Irkutsk and surrender myself, do you think they would just let me go?”

He knew perfectly well that if Kalin took her alive, he would ship her to Magnitogorsk and make every day she had left a new kind of hell. He couldn’t let that happen to her, not now . . . no. He wouldn’t do that to his worst enemy.

Director Hollingshead had ordered him to kill Nadia. That would be cleaner than what would happen if she lived.

But he was still Jim Chapel. He was still too dumb to just give up. “There has to be a way—there has to be some way we can get you out of the country—you were headed for Mongolia, right? To the Evenk community there?”

She laughed. “That’s an interesting idea. I wish I’d thought of it.”

He stared at her with wide eyes. “That wasn’t your plan? But then what did you think you were going to do?”

“Fly until they stopped me,” she told him.

He shook his head. “No. No, I won’t let you kill yourself.” He switched on his phone. “Angel, do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, sugar,” the sexy voice said.

“I have the phone,” he told her. “It’s over—this can end now.”

Nadia looked over at him with an expression of pure regret. He knew what he was doing to her—taking away her last, romantic gesture—but he refused to accept that she had to die. Not now, knowing what he knew.

“I’ll connect you to the helicopter,” Angel said.

He waited while she routed the call. In the silence he looked over at Nadia and wondered what he could have done differently. How this could have worked out, in a more perfect world. But what would that even mean? If she had come to the Pentagon, back at the beginning, and asked for his help, asked him to help her free her people—he would have declined. He would have said it wasn’t in America’s interest. That it wasn’t his job.

Maybe, back in Uzbekistan, when she had told him she was a rogue agent, when he had tried to abort the mission—maybe if he’d stuck to his guns, he could have gotten her out of there, taken her to the States and gotten her asylum.

But she wouldn’t have accepted that. She would have pressed on toward Aralsk-30 without him. She would have walked into the desert on foot if she had to.

Maybe if they hadn’t gotten separated after they shut down Perimeter—

“Kapitan?”

On the phone Kalin sounded annoyed. As if Chapel was distracting him from important work.

“Senior Lieutenant,” Chapel said, “I’ve recovered the phone. Asimova is no longer a threat. I want to talk about—”

“I’m sorry, Kapitan,” Kalin interrupted, “this line is not very clear. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Kalin, don’t be an ass,” Chapel said. “I have the codes! This doesn’t have to end badly for any of us!”

“Perhaps you should call back later,” Kalin told him.

And then the connection went dead.

Nadia looked over at him with frightened eyes. “What did he say?” she asked. “What is he going to—”

Chapel jumped out of his seat, grabbing her to pull her down to the floor of the plane, as if that would make any difference.

At that same moment, the helicopter opened fire.

The Russian PKT machine gun could fire eight hundred rounds of 7.62 x 54 mm R ammunition every minute. Each of those bullets, which were as big as Chapel’s index finger, left the barrel traveling 2,700 feet per second and carried more than 3,500 joules of energy. The PKT had been designed to chew through armored vehicles at a range of nearly half a mile.

Nadia’s airplane, which was a civilian model made mostly of wood and very thin sheets of aluminum, had no armor whatsoever.

Kalin fired an entire belt of ammunition into the plane—two hundred fifty rounds—over the course of roughly nineteen seconds. The gunner was a soldier trained in airborne fighting, and the range was very short. All but a handful of the rounds struck the plane.

The majority of them struck the tail assembly, which was deformed by the impacts. Parts of it fell away completely as debris. Some of the bullets struck the wings, boring deep holes through the aluminum and breaching the plane’s fuel tanks. Others entered the engine compartment and destroyed delicate and vital components.

One bullet struck the propeller, which was a carefully constructed piece of laminated strips of wood, hand carved and painstakingly shaped by a master craftsman in a factory in Volgograd. The propeller cracked and disintegrated instantly.

Seventy-three rounds found their way inside the cabin of the aircraft. These were able to smash out every piece of glass in the cockpit and destroy some of the plane’s instrumentation. Other rounds lodged in the three rows of seats, which were actually some of the sturdiest components of the plane. Others were absorbed by the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cabin, and some passed through the plane and out its front end without meeting serious resistance.

Six rounds entered the volume of space where Nadia and Chapel lay in a heap in the leg well of the front row of seats.

Three passed close enough to Chapel that he felt them pass him by and heard them buzz like bees. One of them grazed his back, digging a trench through his skin and muscle tissue and causing blood to trickle down his side. One passed directly through the place where his artificial arm would have been, if Kalin hadn’t taken it away.

One bullet entered Nadia’s left side just above her navel, passed through her chest cavity and emerged from her right shoulder, at a substantially slower rate than when it had emerged from the machine gun’s barrel.