The Hydra Protocol (57 page)

The bullet went through one of her lungs. It missed her heart by a fraction of an inch, instead nicking her aorta, the main vessel that brings blood to the heart. Blood immediately began to leak into her chest cavity and found its way through the hole in her lung. There was additional trauma from hydrostatic shock and from broken fragments of her ribs, which moved around inside her chest like shrapnel.

It was not the kind of injury the human body was designed to survive.

The wind howled through holes in the fuselage. The temperature in the cabin had dropped twenty degrees. Chapel opened his eyes.

He saw Nadia’s face, her eyes looking into his.

Blood speckled her lips.

“Nadia,” he said. “Nadia, are you hit?”

“I think so,” she said. Her voice was very small.

“Hold on,” Chapel begged. “You’re going to be okay—just stay with me.”

There was blood on Nadia’s face, but her eyes were still clear. They looked around at the devastation of the plane, then up at Chapel.

“Help me up,” she coughed. Her breathing didn’t sound good, but her voice was firm and strong.

“We shouldn’t move you—there could be damage to—”

“Jim,” she said, “we are falling out of the sky.”

He got his arm around her and helped her slide back into the pilot’s seat, not without a few screams of agony. Red bubbles popped inside her shirt and he knew that couldn’t be good, but when she was sitting up, she gave him a smile.

Chapel forced himself to look forward, through the void where the windscreen had been. He could see nothing but blue water. It was impossible to tell how quickly it was coming toward him, but he imagined it would be faster than he might wish.

Nadia reached out and tapped some of the controls—those that hadn’t been smashed to pieces. She grabbed the steering yoke. “No power,” she said. “No response from the rudder. I think the ailerons still work, but the elevators . . .” She pulled back on the yoke. The effort made her scream again. “Jim—help me.”

He moved behind her, then reached around and grabbed the yoke in the middle, pulling it toward her. “You think you can still land this thing?”

Laughing clearly caused her pain, but she couldn’t help herself.

“What I can do,” she said, pausing now and again to cough up blood, “is allow us to crash at a slightly more shallow angle than nature had planned.” She looked up at him. “Jim, you know how to swim, don’t you?” She closed her eyes. “What am I saying? When I met you, you were about to go diving.”

“You’re going to try a crash landing on the lake?”

“There is no choice in that,” she told him.

“But this isn’t a seaplane—it’ll sink like a rock.”

“Yes.”

Chapel shook his head. “There has to be—there must be another—”

“Jim, you should learn a little Slavic fatalism. What goes up must come down, yes?
Konyechno
.”

She wrestled with the yoke in silence for a while. A band of sky appeared over the water ahead of them, but only the merest line of light blue.

“The water will be very cold,” she told him. “You must be careful of hypothermia.”

“We’ll hold on to each other, to share our body heat,” Chapel promised her.

“I wonder,” she said, “if in a hundred years, will the Sibiryak sing folk songs about the woman who flew into Baikal? I wonder if they will be free, then.”

“Nadia, I’m going to get you to shore, we’ll find a doctor—”

“Jim,” she said, “this is what I wanted from you. Not professions of love, not poems and flowers. Just that you would be with me at the end. Holding my hand. You must strap yourself in—the landing will be very rough.”

He started to protest, but he knew she was right. He strapped himself into the seat beside her. Then he reached over and took her hand.

They hit the water fast enough that the wings tore off the plane. Water flooded in through the broken windscreen, a great wave of it smashing over Chapel, almost cold enough to stop his heart. It filled his mouth, crushed him back in his seat. Water filled the cabin almost instantly, and he clamped his mouth shut to hold on to a desperate breath. His hand was yanked free of hers by the wave. He wrestled with his straps, got loose somehow. He reached for her, found her face.

There was nothing left in her eyes.

He waited—almost too long. But in the end he kicked his way out through the windscreen, kicked his way to the surface until his mouth and nose crested the water and he could suck in another breath.

Lake Baikal is one of the world’s clearest lakes. He could look down and see what remained of the airplane, slowly shrinking below him, for a very long time. He watched it go—until the very end, her
svidetel
. Her witness.

The crew of a fishing boat dragged the one-armed american out of the water and took him back to shore. There the fishermen wrapped him in a blanket and left him sitting on the dock, because he said he wanted to stay by the water. He was shaking with cold and bleeding from several wounds. The fishermen called in the local policeman to talk reason to this american stranger. But the policeman just threw up his hands. Of course the american did not have to go to the hospital, if he did not want to.
“Konyechno,”
he said.

The American looked up at him with a gaze so piercing it made the policeman flinch. “You are Siberian?” he asked, in a deplorable accent.

“Ya Russkiy,”
the policeman replied,
I am a Russian
.

The man from the lake said nothing. He just went back to looking over the water.

Most of the people who had come to take a look at the stranger went back to work. A few children stayed down by the docks, playing on the cold shore, shooting each other with finger guns, swooping around with their arms out like the wings of airplanes.

The policeman came back a while later with a mug full of some yeasty-smelling yellow liquid.
“Kvass,”
he said.

“What’s it made of?” the man from the lake asked.

“Fermented bread. I put raisins and lemon in it,” the policeman told him. “It will help you regain your strength.”

The man from the lake grimaced—clearly he was no Russian—but he drank down the contents of the mug. Then he ate the raisins from the bottom. The policeman smiled. He took off his hat and ran a hand over his close-cut hair. “I have called the pertinent authorities, I thought you should know. They are sending someone.”

The man from the lake just nodded. “It will be a man in a black suit, who comes here to kill me,” he said.

The policeman started to protest—it was his job to protect people from being killed, not help the killers, but the man from the lake held up his hand in protest.

“You have done the correct thing,” he told the policeman. “I am an enemy spy. The man in the black suit is FSB.”

The policemen nodded sagely. “Ah, I see. You are crazy.” That explained a great deal. Though not, perhaps, how the man got in the lake in the first place. “You . . . you are a madman, yes?”

“Konyechno,”
the man from the lake said, and he gave the policeman a weak smile.

But a little while later a helicopter landed on the rocky beach. It drove the children away like frightened gulls, though they did not go far—mostly they ran for the shelter of the pilings under the dock.

The helicopter took its time setting down. The pilot could not seem to find a flat surface to put his wheels to. Eventually, though, he did find the right patch of rocky ground, and the rotors spun down with a sad whine. The side hatch opened and a man stepped out, then started walking smartly toward the dock and the man from the lake. The policeman watched with his hands laced across his stomach, unsure of what he should do.

He was especially confused because the man who jumped out of the helicopter was not wearing a black suit. Instead he had on a very grand military uniform, with many medals and golden insignia, some of which identified him as being a colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces.

Maybe, the policeman thought, the man from the lake really was a foreign spy.

The colonel took the man from the lake away. Together they boarded the helicopter and flew off. Eventually the children came out from under the dock and started to play again.

The policeman wondered if he would ever know what that had all been about. In the end, he shrugged, because he knew the answer.
“Konyechno, nyet,”
he said to himself. Of course not. That wasn’t how things worked.

Director Hollingshead fiddled with a loose bit of thread on one of his sleeve buttons. “My apologies, son, for, well. For your having to take the long way home.”

Chapel said nothing. There had been a lot of paperwork and rooms full of arguing people, back in Russia, before he was finally allowed to leave. Bureaucracy was the same everywhere, it seemed. Colonel Valits had made sure he didn’t slip through the cracks. He’d been a man of his word—once Nadia was dead, he made sure Chapel got to go home.

The mission was over.

“Not, altogether, ah, a glorious success,” Hollingshead said. “Would you agree?”

Chapel stood at attention, just inside the door of the converted fallout shelter that Hollingshead used as his office. The old man was sitting in a leather-covered armchair across the room. He had not, so far, ordered Chapel to be at ease, nor asked him to come any farther into the room.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Chapel said. He was back in uniform, which always made him feel a little better. One sleeve of his tunic was pinned up at his side, because he had yet to be issued a new prosthetic arm.

“The Russians, of course, won’t speak of what happened. Ever, well, again,” Hollingshead went on. “I don’t think diplomatic relations will be affected, but . . . you know. How these things . . . well.”

Rupert Hollingshead had a cast-iron spine—Chapel had seen him give orders that would make a normal man’s blood run cold. He was one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence community.

When he stammered, when he hemmed and hawed and put on this absentminded professor act, it was just that—an act. Designed to either put people at their ease or fool them into thinking he was as ineffectual as he looked. He looked like a jovial old Ivy League academic, but it had been a long time since he had acted like one when he was alone with Chapel. His performing like this now worried Chapel very much.

“Sir, if you would like my resignation, I will have it for you by—”

Hollingshead took off his glasses and stared openmouthed.

“Resignation?” he asked. “Son, what exactly are you suggesting?”

“I failed you, sir,” Chapel said. He was speaking a little too candidly for protocol, but he supposed there were times when you had to be honest. “I allowed myself to be emotionally compromised by Asimova. I put my country at risk as a result.”

Hollingshead shook his head. He dropped one arm over the side of his chair and let his glasses dangle there. He cleared his throat noisily.

Only then did he speak.

“Son, if she fooled you, well . . . she fooled me first.”

Chapel said nothing.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hollingshead said, jumping up from his chair. “Come inside and sit down. I’m not a dragon you need to beard in its lair. Let me fix you a drink.”

It was then that Chapel realized the jovial professor act hadn’t been for his benefit at all. It had been Hollingshead’s way of attempting to deal with his own guilt and doubt. Once the drinks were poured and handed out, Hollingshead put his glasses back on and studied the contents of a manila folder for a while. “You accomplished all the tasks I set for you. You rendered Perimeter nonfunctional, and from all our chatter analysis it looks like they don’t even know what you did—which means they won’t know the damned thing is broken, so they won’t try to fix it. They think Asimova went to Aralsk-30 only to steal the codes, not to rejigger the computer.”

“So the system is really down?” Chapel had wondered about that. He only had Bogdan’s word that Perimeter had been sabotaged—the Romanian might have spent all that time at the terminal just playing
Minesweeper
or something.

“There’s really no way to tell, of course,” Hollingshead replied. “Ah, well, there is one way. We could nuke Moscow and see if their missiles all launch automatically.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I think that kind of testing would be counterproductive,” Chapel said.

It had been meant as a joke. Hollingshead laughed, though not very convincingly. “Asimova is also dead. I ordered that, as well, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. That I ordered the execution of that charming young girl. Of course, they never found her body. Baikal is the world’s deepest lake. It would take them years to search the bottom, to find her bones. I doubt they’ll make the effort.” He glanced at Chapel out of one eye, as if trying to catch him in some compromising facial expression.

There was nothing there for him to find.

“I watched the plane go down. I nearly drowned myself. There was no way for her to survive—even before the crash, she was dead, I think.”

Hollingshead nodded agreeably. “Case closed, then. The Russians don’t wish to talk about it—I suppose we do the same.”

“Very good, sir.”

“There are a couple of loose ends, of course, but we’ll just get those out of the way. There was a bit of a media to-do in Russia. A couple of Siberian journalists saw a military helicopter shoot down an unarmed civilian plane. There have been . . . inquiries. A man named Pavel Kalin, formerly a senior lieutenant of the FSB, has been stripped of his rank and forced to resign. He hasn’t been seen in nine days.”

“Is he dead, sir?” Chapel asked.

“No way to know. They may just be keeping him out of sight until the media flap blows over.” Hollingshead turned to a new page of his dossier. “Then there’s Bogdan Vlaicu, a Romanian national. He was detained by the authorities on July the twenty-eighth. Officially, he’s never mentioned again in any documents.”