The Hydra Protocol (37 page)

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 and 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.

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.”

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.