The Hydra Protocol Page 32

  Bogdan nodded. He tapped some more keys and more, but different, text appeared on the screen. Just as meaningless to Chapel. “I have put small subroutine in this program. Nothing that looks out of place. In normal times, if Perimeter activates, its first step is to query its atmospheric sensors, yes? It looks for heat, for light, for change in the barometer. If a signature is found, a specific signature for nuclear blast, then, and only then, Perimeter launches all missiles.”

  “Sure,” Chapel said. “That’s what we don’t want it to do.”

  Bogdan nodded. “So now, is extra step. If Perimeter checks sensors and finds such a signature, it goes to a new line in program that tells to check whether Perimeter has been activated. If is activated, it checks sensors. If sensors show signature, it checks for activation. If activated, check sensors . . . goes on forever, like this, but never gets to launch codes.”

  “An infinite loop,” Chapel said, finally getting it. “It can never finish the program.”

  Nadia clapped her hands in delight. “That’s perfect! And you hid your work?”

  “Yes, yes. No one will find it unless they know exactly where to look. No sign of tampering, no obvious code insertions. No one will know system is broken, unless they make Perimeter launch, and nothing happens.”

  “That’s . . . kind of brilliant. Bogdan, you’re a genius,” Chapel said. He fought back an urge to grab the Romanian and give him a hug. He turned to Nadia. He knew there was a big goofy grin on his face, but he didn’t care. “This is what you had planned all along, isn’t it? I thought you were going to blow Perimeter up, or just take a fire axe to those data banks. But you knew that wouldn’t work. You did it, Nadia. You did it!”

  “I could not have come this far without you, my svidetel,” Nadia said, smiling at him. “My dear witness. You will tell the Americans it is done? That Perimeter is no longer a threat?”

  “Absolutely. And then—who knows. This thing has been holding back any kind of nuclear disarmament talks for years. Maybe, someday we can live in a world without all these nukes. Maybe the world can finally stop worrying about the apocalypse and start getting things turned around . . . there’s just one last thing we need to consider.”

  Nadia shook her head, but she was close to laughing with joy. “There is? What is it?”

  “What did Bogdan think I was supposed to know?”

  Her face fell instantly. She frowned and started to turn away, but then she stopped and looked him right in the eye. “Bogdan will not be going with you to America,” she said, “because he’s coming with me.”

  “Where?” Chapel asked.

  “That’s the big question.” She inhaled sharply. “There is something I have wanted to tell you. Something about my mission—something you are not cleared for, but I think, at this point, such niceties are unnecessary.”

  Chapel could feel the muscles tensing up in his neck. She had lied to him once already about the mission—when she claimed she had unequivocal support from the Russian government. If there was more, if she had misled him further—

  “You know I am an agent of FSTEK. At least, I was. If Marshal Bulgachenko is dead, then the bureau for which I worked is . . . no more. He was that office. I am an agent now with no agency.”

  Chapel shook his head. “It’s not like that matters anyway. You can’t go back to Moscow. They’d shoot you the second you stepped off the plane.”

  She nodded. “Konyechno. But my plan was never to return to Moscow, not even at the start. You see, the marshal and I, we had something in common. Something we believed in. It was why he chose me, why he allowed me to take on this mission, even after he knew I was dying. We thought we could make a grand play, a great leap that would carry our common dream forward, to—”

  She stopped in midsentence, as if she’d been frozen in place.

  Chapel frowned but just watched as she tilted her head to the side. “Bogdan,” she whispered. “What does that mean?” She pointed at the terminal desk.

  Bogdan and Chapel both turned to look at the screen there. A line of Cyrillic characters had appeared in bright green. They flashed alarmingly as if demanding attention.

  “Oh,” Bogdan said. “This is shit.”

  “What kind of shit?” Nadia asked.

  “Is saying, someone is here. Up top,” Bogdan said. He looked almost ashamed, as if it were his fault.

  “It can tell that? That there’s something out of place up in Aralsk-30? Tell me it’s just picking up our truck,” Chapel demanded.

  “If it makes you happy, yes, yes, I will tell you this. But is lie.”

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 08:59

  Bogdan grabbed his MP3 player off the top of the data bank where he’d left it. Chapel checked the assault rifle he had carried down into the cave. None of them said anything. There was nothing to say, until they knew what they faced.

  They came up the elevator into punishing sunlight—after the cool darkness of Perimeter’s cave, the heat and brightness of the desert above hit Chapel like a wall and it took him a second to adjust. Even with his eyes clamped shut, though, he could hear the helicopter just fine.

  Shielding his eyes with his hands, he cursed when he saw it not a mile away, floating over the desert floor as if it were pinned to the air. It looked like a standard Russian military chopper—a Kamov Ka-60. Something occurred to him about it, though. “Nadia—that helicopter’s a newer Russian model. Does Kazakhstan have any of those?”

  An agent of FSTEK, he knew, would have that information memorized. “No, none—they use Mil Mi-24s, only.”

  Chapel nodded. “Then that’s not some random Kazakh patrol.” The idea had been unlikely, anyway. What reason would the Kazakh military have to be out here, in the middle of an uninhabited desert? There was no sign anyone had visited Aralsk-30 in years. Why would they do so now?

  No, this helicopter was Russian, and the pilot didn’t care if he was seen violating Kazakh sovereignty. There was only one explanation. The assassins had come back for Nadia, and this time they weren’t foolish enough to just send a couple of thugs with pistols. This time they intended to finish the job.

  “How did they find us?” Nadia asked. “We were so careful to hide our movements. They couldn’t have been following us all this time.”

  Chapel shook his head. “Maybe they didn’t need to.”

  The helicopter looked like it wasn’t moving at all, just slowly getting bigger, which meant it was headed directly for them. Chapel estimated they had a minute at most before it arrived.

  He turned to Nadia. “Who knew you were coming to dismantle Perimeter? Besides you and the marshal, did anyone—”

  “No! I can only think they tracked us by satellite, or—oh, no. They killed Marshal Bulgachenko. But they must have . . . questioned him first.”

  Chapel wished he had time to comfort her, but there was no time left for anything but tactics. “It doesn’t matter right now. Come on—we need to get into that building over there.” He pointed at one of the buildings that had partially filled with sand. “Maybe they won’t see us. Maybe we can just wait them out.”

  “You think this likely?” Bogdan asked.

  “No,” Chapel said, and jogged across the intersection, away from the statue.

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 09:01

  They crouched low under the sill of a broken window inside the shade of the building. Chapel risked a quick glance over the edge and saw the helicopter circling Aralsk-30, high enough up to avoid the walls of the canyon. He held his breath and closed his eyes and listened to the sound of its rotor chopping up the air, silently praying for that sound to diminish, to lessen, to indicate that the helicopter was moving away. That the pilot had given up his search, having found nothing.

  Instead the noise got louder. The Ka-60 was coming closer, lower. He heard its noise echo off the dead faces of the buildings and knew it was coming in to land.

  Beside him Nadia looked terrified. One of her hands reached for his a
nd he took it. He would give her what comfort he could, as pointless as it might seem.

  Bogdan had curled up, his knees up in front of his chin. He looked like he might be asleep, though Chapel doubted even the Romanian could relax at a moment like this.

  He waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then took another quick peek over the windowsill.

  The helicopter had landed near the mouth of the canyon, its rotor kicking up great clouds of dust that obscured much of what was going on. But dark shapes moved through that dust and Chapel knew that the chopper had off-loaded its passengers. He couldn’t get a good head count on them through the dust, but he thought there might be half a dozen. Six armed assassins, then. And no way out. The only way to escape the canyon was through its mouth, right past those men.

  He whispered to Nadia, telling her what he’d seen.

  “Even if we could get past them all, even if we could get the truck out of here—the helicopter could just follow us. There’s no way we could outrun it, not over the desert, and there’s no cover for us to make for. And that’s even if we could get to the truck. I have my rifle, you have a pistol. Not much firepower, considering what we’re facing.”

  Nadia set her jaw, accepting the inevitable, perhaps.

  “They’ll try to take you alive, for questioning,” he told her.

  “I’m more worried about Bogdan,” she said.

  Chapel grunted in surprise. It might have been a laugh, under different circumstances.

  “If they take Bogdan, if they question him—he can tell them what he did to Perimeter. Tell them how to change the program back. All our work would be for nothing, then.”

  Chapel hadn’t thought of that.

  A different kind of man, the kind of agent that Hollingshead should have sent on this mission, would have been able to think about the situation without passion, without qualm. Such a man might have come to one inescapable conclusion.

  The course forward was to shoot Bogdan, to make sure his information couldn’t be retrieved. And then probably shoot Nadia, and himself, for good measure. If none of them could be questioned—call it what it was, Chapel thought, tortured—then their secrets would remain safe.

  If Hollingshead had picked some twenty-five-year-old Navy SEAL for this mission, or some MARSOC jarhead, some kid with no ties, no family, no obligations to anything but his country—such a man wouldn’t have hesitated.

  But Chapel wasn’t one of those men. He thought of what his old trainer, Bigelow, had said about him.

  You’re a smart guy, Chapel. But for some reason when you’re beat, you get dumb. You get too dumb to just give up.

  So shooting each other in a horrific game of round robin was just out of the question. They were going to have to live through this, or at least try. Chapel racked his brain trying to think of a plan. Anything at all.

  What he came up with sounded absurd even as he outlined it to Nadia. She didn’t laugh, though. Maybe she was willing to clutch at straws just as much as he was.

  “You’re going to have to take out those assassins, as best you can. You’re going to move from building to building, cover to cover, and get to the truck. There are better weapons for you there—assault rifles, anyway, and the two of you can use those to shoot your way out of the canyon.”

  “And what about the helicopter?” she asked.

  “That’s my job,” he told her.

  ARALSK-30, KAZAKHSTAN: JULY 21, 09:07

  Chapel headed up to the roof of the building, up where he could get a better view. The building had a flat top lined with tar paper that burned in the sun. A two-foot-high lip ran all the way around it, providing enough cover for Chapel to lie down on the scorching roof and be invisible from the street level. He could poke his head over the lip just enough to see what was going on without exposing himself unduly to enemy fire.

  It would have been a great position to set up a sniper nest, if he had a sniper rifle. The AK-47 he carried just didn’t count. He could theoretically give Nadia some covering fire from up there. If he’d had enough bullets.

  He didn’t, though. He had one magazine of thirty rounds, and he was going to need all of them. So as the assassins spread out through the streets, covering doorways and starting their search, Chapel could only watch and hope.

  A little voice in the back of his head kept nagging at him. She’s a terrible shot, it said. She’s outgunned, and she doesn’t have any body armor. Bogdan will slow her down.

  He tried to ignore that voice. He’d seen her fight before, and he knew she was dangerous. The Spetsnaz training she’d received would have to see her through.

  Once they were clear of the helicopter’s rotor wash, Chapel could see that the assassins were a different breed than they’d faced before. These wore heavy kit, ballistic vests and helmets with neck protection. They carried short-barreled carbines, probably the AKS-74U variant of the rifle Chapel held. Those stumpy little weapons sacrificed a lot of range, but they made up for it by being easier to use in urban warfare scenarios—just like this one. At least one of the assassins had grenades hanging from his harness, and another one was carrying some kind of tactical shotgun.

  They broke into teams of two so they could cover more ground. One group approached the statue—and the truck that was parked next to it. If they thought to shoot out the truck’s tires, or its engine block, Chapel’s plan would be ruined. Luckily the thought didn’t seem to occur to them. One of them climbed inside the truck and looked around while the other covered him. After a few seconds, the assassin climbed back out of the cab and gave a hand signal that had to mean the truck was all clear. The two of them moved on.

  The second group of two headed for the dormitory buildings near the mouth of the canyon. They disappeared through a doorway and Chapel lost sight of them.

  The third group headed for the factories at the end of the canyon, their weapons tracking the broken windows. They moved fast, but they didn’t leave themselves exposed—wherever they went they kept a wall at their back, or one of them twisted around to cover their rear. These guys were professionals, and they weren’t going to take any chances.

  At the entrance to one of the factories, one of them readied a grenade—probably a CS tear gas grenade, by the look of it—while the other covered the intersection with his rifle. They gestured back and forth, not making a single sound, then stepped inside the factory together.

  The second they were through the empty doorway, into the darkness of the factory building, Nadia appeared in the door of an administration building across the street. She glanced up at Chapel where he hid on the rooftop.

  He looked around for the other groups. Both of them were inside buildings, out of sight. Chapel risked a quick wave at Nadia to let her know it was momentarily clear.

  Nadia ducked low and ran across the street, to press herself up against the outside wall of the factory.

  For a long, tense minute nothing happened. Chapel had an idea of what Nadia had planned, and he also knew that if either of the other two groups emerged from their buildings in that time, they would see her in a second. Nadia stood perfectly exposed to anyone watching from the street.

  Then the group in the factory came back out into the light. It would take them a second for their eyes to adjust to the light, Chapel knew.

  Nadia didn’t give them the chance. She swung around in one fluid motion, raising her pistol and holding it in front of her in both hands.

  She was a terrible shot. The assassins were wearing body armor.

  It didn’t matter.

  She knew they would kill her if she didn’t kill them, so she went for the best possible shot. Her pistol was only inches from the lead assassin’s face when she fired. Even from the other side of the intersection Chapel could see the man’s eye explode in a cloud of blood.

  He dropped his grenade and brought his hands up to his face, but he was already collapsing, already dying. The grenade hit the ground and bounced away from the door, and for a second C
hapel thought Nadia was diving to catch it. But she had something else in mind. The dead assassin’s carbine was on a strap around his neck. It would have taken too long for her to get it loose so she just slid in under his falling body and used him as a shield, grabbing the carbine and twisting it upward to fire into the body of his partner. At that range she couldn’t miss, and the carbine was powerful enough to tear through his body armor.

  It also made one hell of a racket, clearly audible all over town, even with the noise of the helicopter. Chapel saw movement in one of the dormitory buildings, a flash of dark fabric in one of the second-floor windows. The other assassins had heard Nadia’s shots, and it wouldn’t be long before they ran over to investigate.

  Meanwhile the tear gas grenade went off in the street, a huge white cloud jumping out of it instantaneously. Nadia freed the carbine from its strap and cradled it to her chest as she rolled inside the factory building, away from the cloud.

  Two assassins came out of an administration building that fronted on the intersection, just as the wind carried the cloud of tear gas straight at them. They wore gas masks and it didn’t affect them, but it did cut down on their visibility. They jogged toward the factory building, clearly intent on investigating what had just happened.

  Surely Nadia would have expected that. Surely she would have moved on already, slipping out the back of the factory. The only way to win a fight like this was to move constantly, to maintain the element of surprise. Chapel was sure Nadia knew that—she’d been trained for this kind of fighting, just as he had.

  He wanted to keep watching the factory, to see what happened next, to make sure she was okay. But he didn’t get the chance to see her next move.

  Up at the mouth of the canyon, the helicopter was already lifting into the air. It was going to provide air support to the assassins on the ground. If it spotted Nadia, even for an instant, the jig was up.

  Chapel had to make sure that didn’t happen.