The Hydra Protocol Page 29

  “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.

  KARAGANDY PROVINCE, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 20, 23:41

  “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!”

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 00:02

 
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.

  The most advanced science that the Soviets did happened in the secret cities. So did some of their worst atrocities. The NSA had compiled a list of all the cities and what was known about them, but it was believed it was incomplete—some of them had been hidden so carefully that they still hadn’t been found, decades after spy satellites had mapped every inch of the former Soviet Union. Some of the secret cities hid in deep forests or on the tops of mountains. Some were believed to be housed in enormous underground bunkers, though that might just be an urban legend.

  Whatever reason the Soviets had had for building Aralsk-30, they’d hidden it very well. The walls of the box canyon would shield it from view from all but one side, the direction from which they’d approached it, and the shadows of the canyon walls might hide it even from eyes in the sky.

  “Have you ever heard of this place?” Chapel asked.

  Nadia shook her head. She seemed too overwhelmed to speak. Years of her life to find this place and it had still surprised her. Without a glance backward she raced down the main street of the town, deep into the canyon.

  “Wait!” Chapel called after her, but she was already gone.

  In the dark of night she was likely to get lost, or trip over something and break a leg. Chapel called back to Bogdan, telling him to turn on the truck’s lights. The sudden blast of illumination blinded Chapel for a second, so he had to put one hand over his eyes and look away. He hadn’t realized just how dark it was out here and how much his eyes had adapted.

  He jogged back to the truck and climbed up the ladder on the driver’s side, so he could look in the window and tell Bogdan to start moving forward, slowly, into the town.

  Jesus, Chapel thought. Secret cities tended to be guarded with fences and watchtowers and sentry patrols. What if Nadia ran in there and stumbled right into an ambush?

  The truck rumbled forward, off the sand and onto the first paved road it had touched since they passed Baikonur. The lights swept across a row of squat, square buildings with broken windows and boarded-up doors. There was a searchlight on the roof of the cab. Chapel scrambled up on top of the truck so he could move its beam around manually. He shone it through empty, open windows and saw nothing but broken furniture and old dust.

  The noise and the light seemed perverse in that dead place. It made him jumpy and anxious. He felt like at any second people should come pouring out of these old buildings, maybe the descendants of the old inhabitants, devolved into savagery after being left behind for so long. Or maybe they had all left because the place was contaminated, maybe some old experiment had gone wrong and flooded this place with radioactivity or plague germs—

  He shook his head. He was letting his imagination spin out of control. This was just an old ghost town, nothing to be afraid of. He shone his light down into a guard post at the corner of two intersecting streets. Nobody there. The booth was empty.

  “Nadia!” he called out. There was no answer.

  Aralsk-30 wasn’t very large. There were only the two main streets, which met at the center of the town. The squat buildings near the canyon entrance must be dormitories, he decided, living quarters for the people who had worked here. Past the intersection lay big buildings that must be factories, judging by the forest of smokestacks that stuck up from their rooftops. Maybe there had been other things here once, shops and bars and places for the workers to blow off steam, but now it all just looked like decaying concrete and broken glass. Sand was everywhere, in a thin film over the streets, in great drifts up against the lee sides of the buildings. It had blown in through any open doorway and clogged some of the buildings until it poured out through second-story windows. Falling rocks from the canyon walls had crushed in some of the smaller structures. At least there was no sign of barbed wire or mass graves, and if there were mines, the truck hadn’t rolled over any of them so far.

  Bogdan drove up to the intersection and stopped. “Which way?” he called out, over the noise of the truck’s engine.

  “Just park it here,” Chapel shouted back. He tilted the searchlight back to illuminate the intersection. It was just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, but a little space in its exact center had been cleared for a bronze statue that stood twenty feet high. The light washed over the face of Vladimir Lenin, then down his chest to show that he held an oversize hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other.

  There had been statues like that in every town in the Soviet Union, once, dozens of them in some places. Chapel had read recently that while the Russian Federation officials did their best to tear them all down, there had been so many they still hadn’t managed to get them all, not even twenty years after the end of communism. Well, here was one more to add to the list.

  He climbed down the side of the cab, then ducked in through the passenger-side window. In the big glove compartment he found what he was looking for—a flashlight, a big model with a rubberized grip and a body that could hold an old dry cell battery. He climbed back out of the truck and shone his light around the buildings that surrounded the intersection. “Nadia!” he called out again.

  There was no answer, but when he pointed his light at the ground he saw the footprints she’d left in the blown sand. They were clear enough that he could read them like a map of how she’d moved through the town, stopping to look in a window here, ducking through a sand-clogged doorway there. They ended at a side door of one of the big factory buildings. Its door had been sealed with rotten boards, but it looked like Nadia had just pulled them free with her bare hands so she could get inside. The wood was silvered and smooth with age on the outside, but where she’d broken it he could still see the yellowish grain inside, bright in his flashlight beam.

  He trotted after her, though before he went inside he took one last look around. If people were hiding in the shadows, squatting in the abandoned buildings, they’d done a good job of staying hidden. He had to assume this place was deserted.

  As he passed into the darkness of the factory he felt cold air wash over his face. It was frigid inside, colder even than the desert night outside. He could smell rusting metal and rotting plaster, and something else, something sharp and organic. Maybe some birds or wild sheep had gotten inside and died there.

  He heard a noise ahead of him and swung his beam around. He nearly jumped when it lit up a human form, but then he saw it was just Nadia. The electric light washed out her features and turned her eyes to glass, making her look spooky and unreal.

  She blinked in irritation—the light must have hurt her dark-adapted eyes—so he swung it away again, pointing it up at the rafters of the building. The factory floor seemed to be one vast open space, the ceiling held up by a spiderweb of thin steel beams, punched with regular round holes to keep them light. He brought the light down the wall, illuminating old posters showing happy workers being safe a
nd productive. Blotchy white mold had eaten into the ancient paper.

  “This is the perfect place,” Nadia said, her voice strange and disembodied in a place that must have known silence for so many years. “If you want to hide something of crucial importance, where do you put it? Underneath something that is already hidden. Even I never guessed they would put a city on top of Perimeter.”

  Chapel kept his light moving. Sitting on the factory floor were dozens of big machines, what looked like hydraulic presses festooned with handles and wheels and pull-chains. He had no idea what they were for, what kind of work had been done here. Maybe the workers of Aralsk-30 had built components for the rockets that were launched at Baikonur. Maybe they’d been working on nuclear weapons.

  “Is this place safe?” he asked.

  Nadia laughed. “It’s the unfeeling black heart of the Russian nuclear arsenal. You’re worried there might be asbestos in the walls?”

  He brought the light around to shine on her again. She didn’t blink so painfully this time.

  “We must find the entrance to Perimeter,” she said. “It could be in any of these buildings.”

  “Let’s get started,” he said.

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 04:47

  They’d looked everywhere. Twice.

  The entrance to the computer facility wasn’t in any of the dormitories. Well, they’d expected that, but still they’d gone over every wall looking for concealed doors, sliding panels, hollow places in walls that should have been solid. Where the sand had piled up, they’d dug it away. Chapel had found some tools, including a sledgehammer, and he smashed a hundred or so holes in all the floors and walls, finding only solid concrete beneath.

  They had no better luck in the guard posts or the empty buildings whose purposes were not immediately evident. The factories took a long time to search but were in fact easier than the smaller buildings since they had fewer walls. They learned a little about Aralsk-30 in their search, for all the good it did them. From what little evidence remained it seemed that the secret city had been devoted to making white phosphorous bullets. There had been a time when those had been controversial, forbidden by international treaties, so it made sense that they would be manufactured in a secret place. They weren’t important enough, however, that enemies of Russia would bother raiding the canyon city. “They were smart when they hid Perimeter here,” Chapel said, with a sort of grudging respect. “Even if you knew this place was secret, you wouldn’t bother with it.”