The Hydra Protocol (42 page)

“In the truck,” she said. “Hiding under some crates. I got him in there while the killers were still distracted.”

Chapel forced a grin, despite the pain in his leg. Damn, but Nadia was good at this. The truck was probably the safest place for the hacker to be. The assassins had already checked the vehicle and cleared it. They would have no reason to check it again, at least not until they were sure they’d secured the area.

“It might be possible,” Nadia said. “Not likely, mind you. But possible that we could draw enough attention away from the truck that he could drive out of here alone. Of course, we would have to sacrifice both our lives to get him clear.”

“If we don’t take care of the helicopter, he won’t get very far. And do you think it would even occur to him to take that kind of initiative?”

Nadia’s shoulders swiveled around in a complicated shrug as she wrestled with her thoughts. “No,” she said, finally.

Chapel nodded. “Okay. So, slightly different plan. I go up on the roof and shoot down this helicopter—if I can, which is a big hypothetical. In the chaos you run for the truck and drive the hell out of here. Assuming these assholes don’t shoot out your tires or get a lucky shot and kill you at the wheel, you can get to the Caspian Sea and meet the submarine there; it can take you to—”

“That is the most foolish plan I have ever heard,” Nadia told him.

“You have a better one?”

“Yes,” she told him. “I go to the roof. You drive the truck.”

Chapel could guess her logic. He knew perfectly well what she was thinking. She had only a few months to live, even if she did escape from Aralsk-30. Sacrificing herself here and now wouldn’t do much to shorten her life expectancy.

He knew he couldn’t let her do it, though. He couldn’t let this woman, this incredible person, just throw her life away, no matter how short it might be. He didn’t understand his feelings for her. He didn’t know that he ever would. But they were real.

He would do everything in his power to make sure she lived, for as long as she could. To make sure she escaped.

He also knew that she would try to argue him around if he said anything like that. She would tell him he was being an idiot, an emotional idiot, and maybe she would be right. So he needed another reason why it couldn’t be her.

“You’re a lousy shot,” he said.

Her eyes flared with something similar to—but not quite the same as—anger. He could tell she knew he was right. She pressed her lips together very hard, until they turned white. She twisted her face away from his. Then she brought it back very fast and kissed him, deeply, passionately. For what they both knew was the last time.

She broke away from him and ran toward the front of the building. He headed back toward the stairs.

Even before he could reach the roof, the helicopter came for him, strafing the broken windows on the upper floor of the building. Concrete dust puffed from each of the windows in turn, and the windowsills crumbled away, rotten after years of exposure to the desert sun. Debris crunched under his feet as he ran for cover between two windows, then ducked down to keep out of sight.

The Gatling gun spun down and he took his chance, leaning out the window to fire off a quick burst at the gunner in the side hatch. He didn’t hit anything important, but the helicopter bobbed away a little—clearly the pilot didn’t want to risk a stray shot hitting a fuel line or an ammo box.

The likelihood of that was minimal, though. Chapel needed to kill the pilot if he was to have any chance of bringing the helicopter down. That was going to take a miracle. He wished he had his tablet with him, that he could talk to Angel—not just because she could give him an idea of what the battle looked like at ground level. He wanted to tell her good-bye as well.

He wasn’t going to get his miracle by hiding in cover. He ducked low under a windowsill and dashed over to another window, several yards down. If he could keep the gunner guessing where he was going to shoot from next, that might buy him a little time.

He heard shots from below, carbine rounds. That could be Nadia or it could be one of the assassins. Clearly they planned on storming this building, finishing him off if the helicopter couldn’t. He could only hope Nadia was ready for that kind of assault.

He poked his rifle barrel out of the window, then risked a quick look. The nose of the helicopter was ten yards away from him. He could see right through the viewport, could see the pilot hunched over his controls.

He was never going to get a better chance than this. He lifted his weapon, lined up the sights—

And saw the pilot glance up and see him, the Russian’s face instantly going white with fear. Chapel took his shot, firing a tight burst right into the viewport.

Glass splintered and flew, but the pilot was already moving. The third shot of Chapel’s burst didn’t even hit the viewport, instead digging into the fuselage between the canopy and the side hatch. Worthless.

Except—Chapel wasn’t sure it was even possible, but yes, he could definitely see a tinge of red on the broken glass of the viewport. The helicopter didn’t just fall out of the sky, but he knew he had struck the pilot, wounded him at least.

Not that it mattered. The helicopter was already pulling away, drawing back to a range where Chapel would be unlikely to hit the aircraft at all. He howled in frustration—then cut himself off in midgrowl as he saw the Gatling gun’s barrels moving, tracking around. In an instant it would fire again; he needed to move—

—Except the Gatling gun wasn’t turning toward him. The gunner had lowered his elevation, tilting the barrels down so they could fire into the street.

No. No, no, no
, Chapel thought, the words hammering in his brain like fists on steel. Nadia was down there, moving already, dashing for safety as the Gatling gun homed in on her position. It didn’t need to be accurate. It didn’t need to conserve ammunition. It could just hose her down with bullets, chop her to pieces.

Roaring with anguish, Chapel leaned far out of the window and pointed his rifle at the gunner, barely visible behind the mass of his weapon. Chapel held down his trigger and sprayed bullets as best he could into the man, so far away, so far out of reach. His rifle clicked dry and he wanted to throw the damned thing at the gunner, as useless a gesture as it might be.

Down in the street Nadia zigged and zagged, trying to keep the gunner from drawing a bead on her. She was fast, so very fast, but in a second it wouldn’t matter, the gunner would just start painting the ground with lead—

And that was when Chapel got his miracle.

Or was it even a miracle? Maybe Nadia had planned for it to happen. Maybe she’d been that smart. Maybe Chapel had hit the helicopter pilot harder than he thought, maybe the pilot was losing blood and getting dizzy, not paying attention like he should.

Chapel would never know why it happened. But it did happen, so fast Chapel couldn’t even process the details.

The helicopter had to move back to give the gunner a good angle of fire on Nadia. It had to move back to get away from Chapel and his AK-47. It had already been flying very low, only a few dozen feet off the ground, below the level of the surrounding buildings. The pilot must have assumed he had plenty of clearance, though, because he was in the middle of the wide intersection.

He didn’t have enough clearance. The very tip of one of his rotor blades brushed, ever so gently, the bronze face of Vladimir Lenin.

The blade was made of a tough composite material, but it was thin and the statue was thick, hard bronze. The blade twisted and bent faster than any human eye could follow and knocked backward into another blade in the space of an eyeblink. Suddenly there was nothing holding the helicopter up in the air and it fell, its rotor like the crooked wings of a squashed bug. It hit the ground hard, its nose smashing into the base of the statue, its tail twisting around and around until it snapped off and flew across the intersection to collide with a building on the far side.

It brought up an incredible cloud of dust and debris, a vast wave of murk that hid everything from Chapel’s view. He saw flashes of light inside the cloud—gunfire—and knew that Nadia was making her move, running for the truck.

Something buried deep in Chapel’s brain, some survival instinct, started shouting at him then. If he could reach the truck himself, if he could run over there in the dust, when the assassins couldn’t see him, if he could get away with Nadia and Bogdan—

He didn’t let it turn into a full-fledged thought, much less a concrete plan. He just started running and hoped for the best. Down the stairs, two at a time. He missed one riser when his wounded leg went out from under him, but he was so full of adrenaline at that point he caught himself on the handrail and just kept running. Down to the ground floor, the door just in front of him. A shape appeared in the doorway, a human form in silhouette. Chapel didn’t waste time trying to make out any details. He brought his shoulder down and smashed into the shape like a linebacker, bowling over one of the assassins. He didn’t even slow down as he plunged into the debris cloud, even as things whizzed and rocketed past his head. Maybe they were bullets, maybe they were parts of the helicopter that flew off in the crash. He didn’t care. If one of them struck him, he would go down, he knew that much, but there was nothing he could do about that, no way to prevent it.

The truck was ahead of him, a big square shape slightly darker than the dust and sand blowing up around him. It was still so far away, and he heard shouting, and knew he was being chased, but if he kept running, if he kept moving—his leg hurt, bad, but—but—

He came out of the cloud gasping for breath, moving as fast as his wounded leg would carry him. The truck was no more than sixty yards away. Its taillights were lit, and he knew Nadia was in the driver seat, waiting for him, Bogdan sitting next to her; if he could just make it over there, they could be gone, laughing as they rocketed through the desert, just like before, before they’d found Perimeter—

“Ostanovis!”
someone shouted.
“Ya pristelu tebya!”

Another shape appeared in front of Chapel, a human shape again. He tried to swat it away, but the shape just took a step backward. Then it lifted a tactical shotgun and pointed the barrel right at Chapel’s chest.

He stared at the man, suddenly very focused, very clear. He could grab the barrel of the shotgun, push it away from him. He knew a couple different techniques to twist it out of the assassin’s hands, to get it away from him. Then it would be his shotgun.

Now that he was thinking clearly, though, he knew how stupid that idea was. In his head he could hear Bigelow’s voice, as clear as if his ranger instructor was standing next to him. “There’s no way you’re going to win this. The lesson I’m supposed to teach you today is that up against a man with a gun, you can’t win if you’re unarmed. You have to put your hands up and surrender.”

Chapel glanced over at the truck. Nadia hadn’t moved. She was waiting—waiting for him. She must have seen him running toward her. She must be watching right now in her mirrors.

If she hesitated even a few seconds more, the assassins would regroup and go after her and it would be over. They would shoot out her tires, leave her stranded, surround the truck and just fill it full of bullets or pump it full of tear gas and take her alive. Chapel didn’t know which would be worse.

She was waiting for him.

He looked at the assassin facing him. Looked into the man’s eyes. Then he grabbed for the barrel of the shotgun.

It went off before he even touched it. Something thudded into his chest, and he felt like he’d been hit by a hammer. It didn’t knock him over, though. He glanced down and was surprised by what he saw—a little yellow plastic box was sticking out of his ribs, anchored by two tiny barbs that had pierced his skin.

It wasn’t lead shot or a slug the assassin had fired. It was a Taser round, a self-contained electric incapacitation device. It went off in the same moment he realized what it must be.

Every muscle in Chapel’s body triggered at once. He curled in on himself, screaming in pain, as he dropped to the ground. He twitched and shook and drooled and there was nothing he could do—he stayed conscious through the whole thing; his eyes were open, but he could do nothing but look over at the truck and beg Nadia, silently, to drive away.

Just go
, he told her.
Just go
. If she could get Bogdan to the submarine—if she could get away—

He saw the truck sit motionless for way too long. He could feel her hesitating.

Go
, he urged her.

He saw the taillights flare as the engine was thrown into gear. And then the steel toe of a combat boot hit him in the head, and he didn’t see any more.

Captain Ronald Mahen walked on rubber-soled shoes from the engine compartment of his submarine, the USS Cincinnatus, up to the bridge. He placed each foot carefully, to make as little sound as possible.

The seamen he passed saluted smartly but made a point of not coming to attention—that would mean moving their feet, and their shoes might squeak on the deck plating. When he reached the bridge, he climbed up to the conning tower and saw his SEAL team exactly where he’d left them, crammed into a space too small for them, much too small when you included the mass of the inflatable boat they would use if he sent the order for them to go ashore.

He nodded at them, and they nodded back. No words were exchanged.

For nearly thirty-six hours now the
Cincinnatus
had been keeping station off the coast of Kazakhstan, just outside national waters. Twice in that time a vessel had passed overhead, well within passive sonar range. It was impossible to know who owned those craft—they could be fishing boats, or they could be naval ships of one country or another, equipped with hydrophones. For nearly thirty-six hours, not a word had been spoken aboard the submarine. Most of the crew remained in their quarters, passing the time as best they could without making a sound.