The Hydra Protocol (51 page)

“She’s not stupid enough to come to Yakutsk,” Chapel went on, carefully sounding out the words in his head before he said them. “She knows you will look here first.”

The officer opened his mouth to ask a question, but Kalin cut him off. He spoke slowly, perhaps for Chapel’s benefit, but his words had the sound of true command. “This man is an American who specializes in advanced signal technology. His role is to help us find the terrorist Asimova. However, he does not possess a security clearance. Your men will not speak to him unless it is absolutely necessary, and under no circumstances are they to accept any order he tries to give.”

The officer nodded in understanding. He looked distinctly relieved. Chapel had been a soldier long enough to understand why. No matter what rank you held in the military, someone was always your boss, and someone else probably took orders from you. You had to answer to the former for the mistakes of the latter. You always needed to know where everyone around you fit in, what category they belonged to. Now that Chapel was squared away, the officer could just write him off.

The officer led them to a nearby building where there was coffee and a simple meal of coarse bread and pickled fish. For about fifteen minutes they waited there until the helicopter was ready to receive them. Nobody spoke a word to him the whole time.

The helicopter turned out to be an Mi-8, recognizable by the twin turboprop power plants mounted over its canopy. It was a beast of a machine, a huge fuselage with the tail assembly sticking out the back like the tail of a tadpole. Drop tanks full of fuel studded its sides. Kalin led his troops onboard—twenty men in full body armor, each of them carrying a carbine and enough grenades to make them jangle as they jumped on board. He waved Chapel in last, putting him close to the hatch where he would at least get a good view of the ground. It occurred to Chapel that placing him there would make it convenient for Kalin to throw him out of the helicopter at altitude, if the need arose.

Kalin bellowed some orders over the noise of the screaming engines, but Chapel didn’t bother translating in his head. He knew what his job was here.

From the air, from the crew compartment of the helicopter, Yakutsk was an island of concrete buildings huddling around the Lena River, surrounded on every side by close ranks of high pine trees that stretched away to the horizon. Here and there Chapel caught the reflection of moonlight on water glinting through the trees, but the pines were tall enough he couldn’t ever figure out where the ponds and rivers were. He put his hand over his left ear and spoke to Angel through the hands-free unit in his right.

“Did you find it?” he asked.

“Sweetie, I’m a miracle worker, but some miracles are harder than others,” she told him, sounding apologetic. His heart sank. If she hadn’t found the information he needed, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. “You asked me to find anything on Nadia’s grandfather, but you couldn’t even give me his name.”

“He was a shaman who rode around on a reindeer,” Chapel said. He forced himself to make a joke to cover how nervous he felt. “Did you try looking up Santa Claus?” He glanced north, over the endless landscape of trees. “I know
he
lives at the North Pole, and we’re close here.”

“Cute. But weirdly appropriate. Where you are now, they call Santa by the name Ded Moroz and he lives east of Finland. Believe it or not, his name basically means Grandfather Frost, and he’s always accompanied by his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden.”

“You’re kidding me. You don’t think she made the whole thing up—”

“I’d hardly put it past her,” Angel said. “But at least this time, no, I don’t think she was lying. I don’t think she gave you a children’s legend as her cover story. I looked back through her genealogical records. She had a grandfather on her father’s side who was an accountant in Novosibirsk—there’s lots of information on him; you have to love accountants for the way they keep such nice, tidy records. As far as her maternal grandfather goes, there’s basically nothing. No national identification in the databases, no tax records, no death certificate, even. Not surprising if he really was a tribal shaman. Communications and transportation in Siberia were very spotty up until recently, and there’s never been an accurate census for the more northern settlements. There are probably whole ethnic groups out there in the woods that don’t even know that they’re Russians yet, because nobody from Moscow has found them to tell them.”

Chapel closed his eyes. “So you couldn’t find what I need.”

“I didn’t say that. I did find something, but it’s thin. I started poking around Nadia’s parents’ records. There was a lot more there. Her mother was a metallurgist, but she didn’t start out that way. She was born in a village somewhere southwest of Yakutsk, an Evenk village where her stated occupation was ‘herder.’ She ran away from home when she was fourteen and ended up in Yakutsk—it’s the only decent-sized city in a thousand square miles. That’s where she got her training and where she met Nadia’s father. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, so I don’t even know what the name of her village was—”

“That’s starting to sound familiar.”

Angel tsked him. “I’m working with obsolete database software in a language and even an alphabet I don’t know. You’re lucky I was able to find anything. Now, as I was saying, Nadia’s mother doesn’t have a birth certificate. But she does have a marriage certificate. And that certificate lists her father’s name, Nadia’s grandfather’s name, and his place of residence.”

“That’s—that’s amazing, Angel.”

“Hold your applause. We know he was an itinerant shaman, that he moved around a lot. The village name on the marriage certificate might just be the last place he came from. But it’s something. The name of the village was Gurangri. It’s closest to a little town called Aldan, in the southernmost part of the Sakha Republic.”

“Gurangri,” Chapel repeated. He shouted over the noise of the helicopter’s engines to Senior Lieutenant Kalin—the only person on board he was supposed to talk to directly. “We’re headed for a village called Gurangri, near Aldan.”

Kalin nodded and headed forward to tell the pilot.

Angel wasn’t finished, though. “There is one problem. Gurangri isn’t really there anymore.”

“It’s not?”

“In the nineties it was bulldozed, and then the land was strip-mined. It’s a diamond mine, now. The native people were all relocated, a lot of them shipped south to Mongolia. Even if Gurangri was Nadia’s grandfather’s hometown, there won’t be anything left there to connect her to him. No ancestral home, no relatives to visit, nothing.”

Chapel shook his head. “That’s not good. But you said that might just be the last place he came from.”

He could almost hear Angel shrugging. “There are a bunch of other villages in the area. He could have been born in any of them, and anyway, when we talked about what to look for, we said that it might not be one specific place. You have some place to start, now, but that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid.”

“As usual,” Chapel said, “you’ve been more helpful than I deserve.”

“Just doing my job, sugar.” Angel was quiet for a moment. “Chapel, if she’s not there, if she’s not within fifty miles when we triangulate her signal, you know this won’t work, right? This is our only chance to find her.”

“I know,” he said.

“What makes you think she would go looking for her grandfather’s village, anyway? She could carry out this blackmail plan from anywhere in the world.”

“Sure. But she’s a
Sibiryak
, a Siberian separatist. And when she told me she wanted to see her homeland again before she died, I think she was being sincere.”

“You’re saying she basically told you what her next move was, right before you were captured by her enemies,” Angel pointed out. “We know she’s lied about a lot of things.”

“And maybe she
did
lie about this one,” Chapel told her. “But I have to think otherwise. You didn’t see the way her face lit up when she talked about her grandfather, about how he used to carry her with him on the back of his reindeer.” Chapel shook his head. “I have to believe in this, Angel.” He glanced around to make sure Kalin wasn’t within earshot. “Because otherwise I’m all out of ideas.”

Midmorning, according to his watch. Chapel’s body barely knew what day it was, much less whether it was natural that it should be morning now. He’d moved through so many time zones since leaving Washington that his internal clock had broken a spring.

“We should see the Gurangri facility soon,” Kalin said, coming up behind his shoulder. Chapel had been glued to one of the helicopter’s side viewports for hours, as if he was going to see Nadia down there in a clearing in the trees, waving up at him. As fast as they were moving and as thick as the tree cover was, he would have been lucky to see her if she had set out road flares to make an impromptu helipad.

They had followed a river for a while, a thin stripe of water the color of white wine that had twisted through the rough terrain of Siberia. After they’d left the river behind, the view hadn’t changed much at all. Trees and more trees. Siberia seemed in some ways as desolate at the Kyzyl Kum, just more green. It didn’t seem real; it couldn’t be as big and as empty as it looked. He started to feel like he was flying over a miniature on a sound stage, as if those trees could be no bigger than ferns, and that Siberia was no bigger than a backyard garden.

Then he saw Gurangri, and the scale came back to him in a hurry. Angel had said the old village had been bulldozed and the land strip-mined. Chapel still hadn’t expected this. Gurangri was a massive brown pit in the earth, easily two miles across. Its sides were terraced in concentric circles, the walls sharply rectilinear except where old mud slides had created meandering ramps down toward the bottom. Rusted digging machines stood on the various levels, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hole they’d gouged out of the earth. The lowest level was flooded and glared with an angry white light as the sun filled it.

It looked like a bruise on the side of the earth. Like a hole dug by a massive worm in a giant green fruit. It looked like Dante’s Inferno, more than anything else. As the helicopter cut right across the middle of the pit, it was hard not to think that the pit was a giant maw about to swallow them whole. They wouldn’t even make a fitting morsel for such a giant mouth.

All around the pit the excavators had cut short lengths of road, places where metal sheds and concrete buildings had once stood. Now these were all collapsed, their roofs fallen in and their walls crumbled down to debris.

“It looks like this place was saturation bombed,” Chapel said.

He knew Angel would be able to see it even better than he could, through her eyes on the satellites. “It was abandoned around the turn of the century, when the diamonds ran out. The damage you see is just Siberia reclaiming its own—permafrost makes it impossible to build anything that lasts on this soil.”

“Diamonds? They dug diamonds out of this hole?”

“There are diamond and gold deposits all over this forest,” Angel told him. “Nadia wasn’t kidding when she told you this was where Russia kept all its natural resources. There’s probably oil and natural gas nearby as well—there’s so much here, and so much land to cover they haven’t even had a chance to survey it all.”

Nadia would hate the pit mine, Chapel knew. It would be yet another symbol of Moscow despoiling her homeland and taking all the profits. A village that might have meant something to her once had been completely wiped from the face of the earth to build this obscenity. She would never have come to a place like this. But beyond, on the other side of the pit, there were plenty more trees. Lots of forest to block your view of the gaping wound in your native soil.

“This is the place,” Chapel shouted to Kalin. “This is where we start looking. Tell the pilot to take up station.” It was time to lay the bait.

The helicopter pinned itself to the air, hanging motionless over the center of the pit. Angel came on the line to tell Chapel she’d finished her satellite survey and there were three villages and over a hundred solitary houses within a fifty-mile radius of the pit. Nadia could be hiding in any of them.

The plan was to send a message over Angel’s special frequency band, the same one Nadia had used to make her demands after firing the missile at Izhevsk. That signal couldn’t be traced by normal means—it would be bounced around several satellites before it reached the Kremlin or Angel or anyone who could intercept it, and there was no way to trace it back through the electromagnetic labyrinth.

It had to be broadcast from the ground, though, beamed up to the satellites from somewhere. If Chapel was close enough to Nadia when she transmitted, his equipment could pick up the signal direct from the source. The signal would be faint when it came from the ground—it wasn’t meant to be picked up by ground-based receivers—but it would be clear enough that it could be used to home in on her location.

Assuming, of course, that Chapel had picked the right spot. He needed a very strong signal to make the plan work, which meant he had to be within fifty miles of Nadia when she broadcasted. If he’d chosen the wrong spot, if she was more than fifty miles away from Gurangri, she might as well be on the moon. They would never find her.

“You all set, Angel?” he asked, staring out at the trees to the west of the pit mine.

“Go ahead. The next thing you say will go out on my band.”

Chapel licked his lips. He’d considered very carefully what he could say—what would make Nadia respond. He knew that just calling to say hello wouldn’t make her break radio silence. He had to give her something she wanted to talk about.

“Nadia,” he said, “this is Jim Chapel. I know you can hear me on this band. I’m calling on behalf of the United States government. We know what you have, and the threat it represents. We’d like to discuss how we can help you. Please respond.”

Chapel closed his eyes and waited to hear what came next.