The Hydra Protocol Read online

  Nadia wiped sweat from her forehead. It was freezing inside the buildings, but the two of them had been working hard. “I wonder if the people who lived here knew what they protected. Not the workers in the factories, of course. But there would have been a commanding officer in charge here. Someone perhaps who was given this post as a punishment. I wonder if even he knew what he was hiding.”

  In the beam of the flashlight Chapel could see her face. The concern there, the worry. Maybe even doubt. “We’ll find it,” he told her, his voice soft.

  “Of course we will,” she said, but there was a sigh underneath the words.

  He thought of how long she’d looked for this place. How much of her dwindling life she’d sacrificed for it. Had she really done all this work just because she wanted to leave the world better than she’d found it? Maybe a grand obsession was the only thing that could keep her from really thinking about the ugly death that was coming for her.

  He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. Gave it a friendly squeeze that turned into something more, his fingers trailing across her back.

  For once, though, she didn’t respond. For the first time since he’d met her, it seemed she had better things to do than flirt with him.

  “It will be dawn soon,” she told him. “I had hoped to find it and dismantle it tonight. We will be stuck here all day, now—it is still too dangerous to move when the sun is up. It might be dangerous to stay, as well.”

  “No one has any idea we’re here,” Chapel told her. “Look at this place—it’s been lost for decades. Even if they were looking for us, how would they find us? This place isn’t on any map. Nobody knows about it.”

  She shrugged. “If I could find it . . . no, never mind. I was thinking we might check the canyon walls. Something could be hidden in the rocks, camouflaged to look like natural stone.”

  “Good idea,” Chapel told her. He threw his sledgehammer into a corner of the room. Walking past her he stepped out into the night. The sky was turning a weird electric blue—the sun was coming up, as she’d said—but it was still dark enough out that he could barely see the truck sitting in the intersection. They’d turned off all its lights for security and to save battery power.

  Bogdan was fast asleep in the driver’s seat. Chapel climbed up the side of the cab and looked in the window. “Wake up, buddy,” he said. “Come on. We need your help.”

  The hacker opened one bleary eye, which rotated in Chapel’s direction. He did not look happy. Chapel laughed and patted him on the arm. “Come on. Time to earn your pay, right?”

  “What do you want?” Bogdan asked.

  “Nadia wants to check the canyon walls, but we can’t see a thing out here. I need you to move the truck to the end of this street and get all its lights on the rocks over there. Think you can handle that?”

  “Yes, yes, is possible,” Bogdan said. “I am driver now. Tell me where to go, boss, and there I go. Good boy Bogdan, the driver man.”

  “Best-paid driver man in Eurasia,” Chapel told him. He waved one finger in a circle. “Let’s get moving.”

  He jumped down from the cab as Bogdan woke the engine. Nadia had come outside to stand in the road, clutching herself for warmth. Chapel started heading over to her, intending to put his arm around her. Behind him the truck started to move, its big tires moaning as they dug into the sand.

  “We’ll spend all day looking, if we have to,” Chapel told Nadia, raising his voice over the noise of the truck engine. “And tomorrow, too. If that’s what it—”

  “Bogdan!” Nadia cried out. “You’re in the wrong gear! Reverse! Reverse!”

  Chapel whirled around to see the truck rolling steadily forward. He heard Romanian words coming from the cab that sounded pretty nasty. His eyes went wide as he saw the truck slam into the big statue of Lenin in the middle of the intersection.

  The statue rang like a bell—and then made a horrible crumpling noise as the impact smashed in one side of its base. Lenin started to lean forward as if he were giving a benediction.

  “Jesus, if that thing falls on the truck we’ll be stranded out here,” Chapel said. He rushed forward and grabbed for the ladder on the side of the cab, intending to shove Bogdan aside and take the wheel himself. Lenin shifted another few degrees forward as Bogdan stripped the gears, trying to move the truck. Just as Chapel reached the truck’s ladder, the bronze statue made a horrible groaning noise and then something snapped, a horrible, popping noise like a whole piece of the statue had just broken off under tension and shot off into the dark.

  Somehow Bogdan managed to get the truck into reverse and move it away from the statue, back toward the canyon entrance. It turned out not to be necessary, because the statue never did fall over.

  Chapel was less concerned about Lenin’s fate, though, then what had broken off the statue base. Moving around behind it, keeping a close eye on the shifting metal mass above him, he came around to the back and saw there was a large hole in the base, now. The outline of the hole was strangely regular, not what he expected at all.

  It was rectangular in shape, about six feet high and three feet wide. The corners of the hole were neatly rounded.

  It looked like nothing so much in Chapel’s experience as the shape of the hatches on the Kurchatov. It looked like a doorway.

  “Nadia,” he called out. “Nadia! Bring the flashlight over here!”

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 05:02

  The base, and the statue above it, were both hollow, but they weren’t empty. Inside the base was a little room, just big enough for three people to cram inside. Set into one wall was a Cyrillic keyboard and a bank of lights. All of them were dark.

  Inside the statue was a pipe rising straight up into the air. A wire ran from the base of the pipe, down along the wall, and into the floor. “Konyechno,” Nadia said. “I wondered why a town of this size needed such a large monument.”

  “Not just to remind Russians far from home what they were working for?” Chapel asked, though he’d guessed what she was going to say.

  “It’s a shortwave antenna,” she told him. “Perimeter must listen, always, for data from its monitoring stations and for the buzz tone from Moscow. Remember? It does not activate until that buzz tone goes silent.” She played her light along the pipe, up toward the inside of Lenin’s head. “A shortwave antenna out here might be noticed, but not some grandiose statue. Clever, clever.”

  “This is the lock, yes?” Bogdan said, reaching toward the keyboard.

  Nadia slapped his hand away. “Yes, it is. Do not touch it, whatever you do.” She ushered them all back out into the predawn light. “We must take our time, now. Though I want to very much to get started.”

  Chapel nodded, thinking of all the prep work they should do. He ran down the job assignments in his head. “Honestly, we’re all tired. It’s been a long night, and we should get some sleep. But I know that isn’t going to happen—none of us wants to wait any longer; we want to do this. First I should tell Angel what we found,” Chapel said. “She can get our escape route ready for us.” The timing would be crucial—the submarine had to appear on the coast of the Caspian Sea just when they arrived. If it was spotted in Kazakh waters, it would be fired on without warning. Angel needed as much advance warning as she could get. “We need to move the truck, too, just in case the statue falls over. We need to check all our equipment, everything we’ll need once we’re inside. That’s Bogdan’s department. As for you—”

  “Yes?” she asked, looking at him. Before he answered her, though, her eyes strayed back to the door in the base of the statue. She couldn’t not look at it.

  “Why don’t you just take a second and pat yourself on the back?”

  When she looked at him with uncomprehending eyes, he couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

  “You did it, Nadia,” he told her. “You made it happen.”

  “Don’t shout hop-la before you jump,” she told him.

  It was his turn to look confused. />
  Bogdan sneered in disgust. “Is Russian proverb. Means, not to be counting chickens before they are born.”

  Chapel laughed again. He knew it was true—nothing was finished, not yet. But he couldn’t help but be excited. The mission was nearly complete. He ran all the way back to the truck.

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 05:23

  “Jim, do you have the one-time pad?”

  Chapel took it from his pocket and turned it over in his hands. When he’d went diving for the pad in the wreck of the Kurchatov, he’d had no idea it would lead him here. The little black book still smelled of an ocean on the other side of the world. He handed it to her as if it was dangerous in itself, as if it might explode.

  “A code word must be enciphered, then entered very carefully into this keyboard,” she told them. “Only this will open the way.”

  “So let’s get started,” Chapel told her. “You know how to work the pad?” He’d studied the matrices of numbers and Cyrillic characters in the one-time pad and never been able to make hide nor hair of it. “You know the code word?”

  “I do,” she said, but raised both hands for patience. “It must be done precisely, though. One mistake and—pfft—it is over. The panel and the door will lock themselves down, and the system will know we are intruders.”

  “What will it do then?” Chapel asked, looking around at the metallic walls of the statue. “Electrify this thing?”

  “Worse,” Nadia replied. “It will switch Perimeter into active mode. Arm the system. Then only a special signal from Moscow will turn it off again.”

  “You’re saying if you press the wrong button, we will have made this damned thing worse than it was before? More dangerous?”

  “Indeed.”

  Chapel shook his head. “Better let Bogdan do it, then.”

  Nadia looked almost hurt.

  “He has the nimblest fingers I’ve ever seen,” he told her. “You brought him along for a reason, right?”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment and pressed the one-time pad to her chest. “All right.” She opened the book to the last page, the one dated 25 December 1991. Christmas Day, the last day of the Soviet Union.

  Bogdan went over to the panel. He cracked his knuckles a few times, then let his fingers hover over the keyboard. “Am ready,” he said.

  Nadia inhaled deeply. She looked at the pad, matching each letter of the code word with the matching entry on the grid. Then she spoke each enciphered letter out loud, one at a time, very slowly.

  “Kah. Ehr. Ah. Ehs. Ehn. Ee kratkoyeh. Ee kratkoyeh. Ehl. Oo. Cheh.”

  As she spoke each letter, Bogdan dutifully typed it on the keyboard. When he was finished, he drew his hands away quickly so as not to accidentally type an additional letter.

  On the row of lightbulbs above the keyboard, a single lamp lit up with a dull yellow glow.

  Nothing else happened.

  “Did it—was—” Chapel had no idea what to say.

  Nadia looked at the two men, a growing horror writ on her face. Had they got it wrong? Had they just armed Perimeter and left the world in constant danger of nuclear annihilation?

  “Does it—maybe this is just the code entry panel, the actual door is somewhere else,” Chapel said, which sounded stupid to his own ears. “Maybe—”

  He stopped then because he’d heard something, very soft and far away. It came from below his feet, the sound of a machine moving on a rusty track.

  Then the floor of the statue lurched and dropped half an inch. Chapel and Bogdan staggered back away from the walls, toward the door. Nadia dropped into a crouch, one hand on the floor. She looked like a cat.

  The floor dropped another few inches without warning. There was a horrible grinding noise, and the rattle of a massive chain. Something broke with a snap, and then the floor started lowering, smoothly and slowly, sliding down into the earth with all three of them still on it.

  It was an elevator. It was an elevator and it was going to take them to Perimeter. The code had worked.

  BELOW ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 05:33

  The elevator descended through a concrete tube, its walls stained with white sediment. There was no light inside the tube except the flashlight that Chapel held. He shone it at the wall and saw some markings there—numbers, telling them how far they had descended.

  -5, he read. He imagined that meant they’d already dropped five meters below the canyon floor.

  He realized he was holding his breath. He let it out noisily.

  As if they’d been waiting for his example, Nadia and Bogdan exhaled, too.

  -10. Something was written on the wall in Cyrillic. He could just make out the word sekretno before it passed out of the light again. Probably some kind of dire warning about unauthorized access, and what would happen to any traitor who dared enter this place.

  -15. Bogdan sat down on the floor. Maybe he thought the elevator was taking too long.

  -20.

  -25.

  -30. A few more meters and the elevator stopped. One side of the tube was open, with just a metal folding gate blocking the way. Chapel reached out and grabbed the handle. The gate was rusted and didn’t want to open. He put a little elbow grease into it and it screeched in its track, opening wide enough to let them out.

  Nadia jumped, her shoulders rising toward her ears.

  “What’s wrong?” Chapel asked. His voice echoed weirdly in the underground chamber.

  “Nothing. Nothing,” she said, shaking her head so her hair swung around. “We just need to be careful. Perimeter is designed to resist what we plan. The keyboard panel above was not its only safeguard. If it decides we do not belong here, it will activate itself.”

  “Moving a gate might do that?” Chapel asked.

  “No. No, almost certainly not.”

  Chapel made a mental note not to touch anything else.

  The three of them stepped out of the elevator onto a shiny concrete floor, painted battleship gray. A thunking noise sounded above their heads and lights came on, revealing a short corridor ahead of them. The walls were a dismal green, and as shiny as the floor. There was surprisingly little dust.

  An archway led off to their left, into a little room with some tool cabinets and a single cot. The sheets on the cot stank of mildew—which Chapel found reassuring. It meant this place hadn’t been used in a long time. The tools were placed neatly in their racks, and they were as shiny as when they’d been made. Maybe they had never been used. “What’s all this for?” Chapel asked. “I thought this system was completely automated.”

  “Every system needs maintenance, sometimes.”

  Chapel shrugged and looked down the hall. There were more thunking noises, and lights came on down there, too, illuminating a spiral staircase leading downward. The steps were made of steel that had been perforated to keep them light. They didn’t look as rusted as the gate had been.

  Nadia led the way down the stairs. Lights kept coming on as they advanced, anticipating what they might want to be able to see. At one point they heard the sound of a tape being rewound—Chapel might have been the only one of them old enough to remember what that sounded like—and then music started playing from speakers mounted on the ceiling. Classical, he thought.

  “Tchaikovsky,” Nadia told him, as if she’d read his mind.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why does it play music for us? Do you know about Chernobyl, about the Excluded Zone?”

  “Sure,” Chapel said. “All the land around the nuclear plant there is irradiated, so nobody’s allowed inside. There’s a whole city in there that’s fenced off and abandoned.”

  “Pripyat,” Nadia said. “It is called Pripyat. In the early days, just after the disaster, when someone did have to go there—scientists, mostly—they would get very frightened. Not because of the radiation but because it was too silent. There were no other people for miles. No birds sang—the birds all died. So they had loudspeakers mounted throughout the zone, l
oudspeakers that played music all the time, all day. I’ve seen video and it is very haunting, that music. But perhaps better than nothing at all.”

  “So Perimeter is playing us music so we don’t get creeped out down here?” Chapel asked. “I have to say, it’s not working.”

  The spiral staircase took them down into a cave, a mostly spherical space hollowed out of the bedrock. Like a vast bubble in the stone. At the end of the staircase was a narrow catwalk that led to a circular platform that seemed to hover in empty air. Chapel shone his flashlight down and saw that the platform was mounted on huge springs, each coil as thick as one of his legs.

  “Shock absorbers,” Nadia told him. “If there is an earthquake, or a nuclear strike shakes the earth, those will absorb all vibration.”

  Sitting on the platform were a number of upright rectangular boxes, each about the size of a bookcase. Together they looked to Chapel like some kind of space age Stonehenge. A simple desk stood in the middle of the boxes, and sitting on the desk was a television screen and a keyboard.

  The cave had not been designed for comfort or human convenience. Big klieg lights shone down from above, illuminating the platform in a harsh light that made for long, stark shadows. Heavy cables snaked across the platform and disappeared into the darkness below the springs. If you tripped over one of those, you might fall off the platform and drop twenty feet before you hit the jagged rocks below. Chapel wondered if now he knew the purpose of the cot in the tool room. Even if you didn’t plan on spending the night down here, the tool room was a human space, a place that was actually designed to be used by people. The platform certainly wasn’t.