The Hydra Protocol (55 page)

He had to find a way to make sure she didn’t have to make that choice.

“You’re about a minute from catching up to her,” Angel reported.

“And she still isn’t answering her phone?” Chapel had asked Angel to open a line to Nadia, but so far without success.

“She might be too busy flying the plane to pick up,” Angel pointed out.

Chapel shook his head. Across the helicopter’s cabin, Kalin looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Her only chance is to talk . . . come on, Nadia. Come on!” He struck the fuselage with his hand. “She’s got to have a plan.”

“Are you sure? She wasn’t expecting you to find her at that house in the woods. She wasn’t expecting you to break Bogdan’s hands. You seem pretty good at wrecking her schemes, now that you’re not on her side.”

“What are you saying, Angel? That I’ve betrayed her, like she did me?”

“Not at all,” Angel said. “I was just pointing out that she had a plan, a solid one, but now it’s messed up. Maybe she just panicked and ran.”

Chapel almost started to say that this was Nadia, that she would always have a plan, but hadn’t he just said a few minutes earlier he had no idea what she was capable of?

But he did know her, at least a little. He’d known where she would go to hide out and hatch her master plan. And he knew now that she would improvise something, come up with some wild, final scheme to achieve something before she died.

A sharp point of guilt stabbed him right through the chest. He thought of Bogdan, standing sullen and unsurprised amid his guards. What had he delivered Bogdan into? Kalin would take him back to Magnitogorsk, when this was done. The Romanian was hardly innocent, but he didn’t deserve that.

And what of Nadia? She deserved something, some punishment for betraying Chapel, for holding the world hostage. But was it right to shoot her down just hours from the border, from freedom? At the very least she should be given a trial, a chance to speak for herself. Kalin was going to make sure that didn’t happen.

Chapel couldn’t let guilt get in the way of his mission. Director Hollingshead had ordered him to kill Nadia, to make sure this was truly over, with no loose ends.

Kalin cleared his throat. “We will begin negotiations,” he said. “If she does not wish to speak, so be it.” He picked up a microphone handset and nodded at the helicopter’s copilot. There was a painfully loud squawk as the helicopter’s loudspeaker system switched on.

“Asimova,” Kalin said, and the name echoed like a thunderclap from the helicopter’s undercarriage. “Set down immediately,” the torturer said, in Russian. “This is your only chance for survival.”

“That’s your idea of negotiation?” Chapel demanded. “What about the launch codes on her phone?”

Kalin gave him a look of utter disdain, but then he spoke into the microphone again. “If you have demands, they will be passed on to the authorities, but only after you set down at the nearest landing strip.” He switched off the microphone. “Kapitan, you know nothing of dealing with terrorists. It is my entire line of work. Perhaps you will let the expert perform, now?” When Chapel started to protest, Kalin added, “I will not put ideas into her head. If she intends to threaten her way across the border, she must be the one to say so.”

Chapel shook his head and looked down at the floor. He counted to a hundred in his head. Only when he’d finished did he speak to Angel.

“Any reply?” he asked her.

“None,” Angel said, just as he’d known she would.

Chapel nodded. Then he stood up and went to the viewport in the side hatch. He couldn’t see anything but trees, far below. He wrestled with the handle—it wasn’t easy with only one arm—and shoved open the hatch, letting cold air rush inside the cabin. Some of the soldiers protested, but Chapel was already sticking his head out—he needed to see. He needed to see Nadia, or at least her plane, one more time before they shot her down.

Looking straight ahead he saw her tail assembly instantly. The helicopter pilot had moved up behind Nadia so close he felt like he could almost reach out and touch the plane. Neither aircraft seemed to be moving—it was like they were both hanging motionless in the sky, separated by just a short gap of air, while the world moved beneath them.

Chapel had a sudden idea. It was crazy, of course. No, more than that. It was stupid. But maybe it was better than just sitting in the helicopter and waiting for Kalin to open fire.

The copilot shouted something back at Kalin, and the torturer nodded. “We have enough fuel for another twenty minutes of flight. After that we must set down at Irkutsk,” he told Chapel. “To be safe I will give her another fifteen minutes before I open fire. Though I think we both know already that she will not set down or speak to us. She must think I do not have the will to kill her.”

“I guess she doesn’t know you that well,” Chapel said.

It was now or never, then.

“Kalin,” he said, “does this helicopter have any rappelling equipment on board? Even just a hoist I can hang a line from so I could hot rope?”

Kalin almost smiled. “Nothing of the sort.”

Damn. That would make things a lot harder. Still . . .

“Tell me you are not thinking—” Kalin began.

“If I can get on her plane, if I can get inside, I can talk to her. I can talk her down, I’m sure of it,” Chapel said, even though he wasn’t sure of anything. Expressing his doubts wouldn’t help him make his case. “Look, if we could just get above her, get as close as possible, I could jump over.”

“Utter folly,” Kalin said. “You would fall.”

“Maybe,” Chapel admitted.

“You will fall and die for nothing.”

“Or maybe I stop her from launching.”

“Moving closer to her aircraft might be seen as an aggressive move,” Kalin pointed out. His smile was getting wider by the second. Apparently Chapel’s idea amused him. “She might launch if we approached like that.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a risk I’m going to have to take. Not to mention the risk of jumping out of this helicopter. I don’t suppose you have any parachutes?”

Kalin laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “Oh, Kapitan, you are not just a fool, you’re a maniac as well. I admit I am impressed that you refuse to give up, even now.”

Too dumb to just give up. Maybe they would write that on Chapel’s tombstone. After he fell a couple of hundred feet into all those pine trees down there.

“It’s a chance. It’s worth doing. It—”

Kalin raised a hand for peace. “I will allow you to try,” he said. Of course, that had been the real obstacle all along. Chapel was more or less Kalin’s prisoner, and he couldn’t take any action now without Kalin’s say-so. Chapel was a little surprised Kalin had agreed to his plan. “I will allow it because it would amuse me to see you die. Either falling through the air, or on board the plane when I shoot it down.”

Chapel glanced around at the soldiers in the cabin—but of course, none of them spoke English. “Just get me as close as you can,” he said.

Kalin gave the pilot an order. He had to confirm it—the pilot didn’t refuse, but clearly he thought the idea was insane. But eventually the helicopter started moving closer to the plane and lifted above it. Chapel watched the plane get bigger. When he’d come up with this idea, the plane had looked motionless in the sky, as if it were just hanging there. As they drew near, however, he saw it was moving quite a bit, side to side, up and down. It didn’t matter how good a pilot Nadia might be, currents in the air would keep the plane from holding to a smooth course.

He tried not to look at the ground, at the endless expanse of trees. That wasn’t where he was headed, he told himself. Looking forward, he could see the blue stretch of Lake Baikal, and then the plane came close enough it blocked out the view.

He studied the top of the plane as they approached. The wings were mounted high up on the fuselage, above the cabin, which gave him a good, broad surface to land on, but they were also made of metal smoothed down to reduce wind resistance. There was a radio antenna he might grab onto, though he wasn’t sure it would hold his weight. He was just going to have to get lucky.

The helicopter pilot brought them closer, and closer still, until they were right on top of the plane, maybe ten feet above it. Chapel could have just stepped out of the side hatch and fallen onto Nadia’s wings. If he slipped, though, it wasn’t like he would get a second chance. “Closer,” he called out. “As close as you can get!”

The helicopter sank a few feet in the air.

Kalin leaned out the side hatch to look down with Chapel. It occurred to Chapel that he could just grab the torturer and toss him out in that moment. But doing that, as satisfying as it might be, wouldn’t help him convince Nadia not to launch.

“Twelve minutes, Kapitan,” Kalin said. “Best to go now, and not hesitate.”

The wind that buffeted Chapel was cold enough to freeze the water in his eyes, if he didn’t keep blinking. He would have to jump forward, ahead of the plane, or the wind would tear him off into empty space.

He went through all the motions in his head, all the different ways this could go wrong and how to avoid them. There was a lot he couldn’t account for, though, plenty of variables he couldn’t know in advance.

He braced his legs against the fuselage of the helicopter. Took a deep breath. Released his grip and—

Jumped.

The free fall seemed to last far too long, time stretching out as adrenaline flooded his veins, every neuron in his brain firing at once with one single message: what the hell did you just do? He hung there in the air with his legs and arm outstretched and the wing surface of the plane came looming toward him, a white cross like the X that marked the spot where he was going to die, the spot where he pushed his luck just a little too hard—

And then he hit, much harder than he’d thought he would, his whole body slamming against the top of the plane, his chin striking a rivet in the white metal that made him feel like he’d loosened his teeth. The hands-free unit in his ear popped loose and disappeared behind him, torn away by the wind. All the breath exploded out of him in a single burst, and spots swam before his eyes.

And then, over the whirr of the plane’s propeller and the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter’s rotor he heard a horrible, soul-crushing sound, a squeaking, squealing noise of rubber being dragged across metal.

His feet were sliding across the wing top, the soles of his shoes trying desperately to grip as the wind tried to push them off.

Chapel shot his hand out, trying to grab for the radio antenna.

It was too far away. He couldn’t reach.

Desperately he tried to extend his fingers, to get even the slightest grip on the thing, but even as he strained and pushed he was sliding backward, his belt buckle grinding against the wing. He was going to slip off, he was going to fall—

Forgetting about the radio antenna, he looked desperately around him for anything else he could grab. One of his feet slipped over the back of the wing and there was nothing there—he brought his knee up, tried to get his shoe back on the wing, tried to push himself forward but only managed to speed up his slide, and then both his legs were hanging off the back of the wing. He splayed his fingers out, tried to hold on to the wing with just friction, knowing it was a losing battle, knowing—

He swiveled himself around, trying to get more of his body up onto the wing, and his hand went underneath, under the back of the wing surface. And touched something—yes, there! On either side of the plane a diagonal strut stuck up at an angle to support the weight of the wings, a thick bar of steel exactly the right diameter to be used as a handhold. He could just brush it with his fingertips, but if he shoved himself backward a little more, gave up a little more of his hold on the wing . . . yes! He grabbed it solidly in his hand, just as his body started to slip over the edge, faster and faster. If he fell from the wing, he knew his own momentum would tear him from the strut, so he rolled off carefully, getting his legs down, swinging them toward the plane. He couldn’t see the landing gear but he kicked around until he got one foot on the wheel and pushed himself against the side of the plane.

His hand couldn’t hold on to the strut for much longer. It was holding up almost all of his weight—his foot on the landing wheel couldn’t get a stable hold. He brought his other foot up and wrapped his leg around the strut. That would hold a lot better than his hand. It gave him a chance to breathe, a chance to think of what to do next.

Looking around, he found the hatch on the side of the plane that would let him inside. It looked like it was miles away, but maybe, if he really extended his arm he could just reach it . . .

His fingertips brushed the latch, and the hatch popped open, torn backward by the wind. It bounced back and forth on its hinges, threatening to slam closed again. He was going to have to jump for the hatch, and there was nothing beneath him this time, nothing to catch him if he fell.

He knew there was no other option. He pushed himself off the strut, launching himself toward the hatch just as it flapped open again. His hand shot out and found something to grab onto and he pulled himself inside the plane, just as the hatch flapped shut and latched itself behind him.

He lay on the carpeted floor of the plane, in the leg well between two rows of seats, and just focused on breathing. It was quiet and warm there, so quiet and warm after the freezing sky of Siberia. He would just give himself a second, just rest for half a second before—

“Jim?” Nadia asked.

Chapel scrambled up onto his feet. He lifted his hand to show it was empty, then took a step forward between the two rows of seats.

Up ahead of him, Nadia sat strapped into the pilot’s seat, looking at him over her shoulder. One of her hands was on the steering yoke. The other held her phone.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t do anything rash. I just came to talk.”

“You jumped out of a helicopter and onto my plane to talk? Jim, that was . . . that was insane.”