The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  He couldn’t sleep there, either.

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: JUNE 14, 03:12

  He entered the passcode on the phone. The screen lit up and told him the phone was down to reserve power. It didn’t matter.

  He opened the phone app and his thumb hovered over the button that would bring up all his contacts. He shook his head and pressed the button for the keypad instead. He dialed a number he knew by heart, one that he wasn’t permitted to enter into his contacts. The phone picked up before he’d entered the final digit. She must have been waiting, monitoring his phone in case he called.

  “Good news, I hope,” she said.

  That struck him so hard it made him want to laugh. Except it wasn’t funny at all.

  “Chapel? Baby? Are you all right?”

  He ground the ball of his living thumb into his eye socket, trying to push away what he was feeling. This call didn’t require the use of his emotions. “Angel,” he said. “Tell the boss that I’m available. I’ll report for duty first thing in the morning.”

  “Honey, do you know what time it is? Maybe you should—”

  “Just . . . please, Angel. Just tell him that. Okay?”

  “Chapel, tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

  He shook his head, even if she couldn’t see him. Then he pressed the power switch on the phone and made the screen go dark again.

  PART II

  THE PENTAGON: JUNE 14, 08:01

  Even as Chapel made his way through security at the Pentagon, he could tell there would be something unusual about this mission. Rupert Hollingshead was waiting for him just inside the checkpoint. The director looked completely out of place, surrounded as he was by men and women in the uniforms of the various armed forces. No one gave him a second glance, though—he was a fixture here, and even though the vast majority of people working in the aboveground rings of the Pentagon would have no idea what his job was, they knew enough to salute him as he passed by.

  “Son,” Hollingshead said, when Chapel approached him. “Son, you look terrible. Are you unwell? Do you need to sit down?”

  “I’m just tired, sir,” Chapel lied. “Maybe I’m not fully recovered from Miami.”

  “I can imagine,” Hollingshead replied, steering Chapel toward a door that led into one of the inner rings. It was not the way Chapel would have gone to get to the elevator that took one down to H Ring, but he didn’t ask where they were headed. “When Angel told me you were, ah, coming back so soon, I . . . well. I didn’t know what to think. I can guess a little of it. Your homecoming yesterday didn’t go as we expected, did it?”

  “No, sir. Sir, if I can ask for a favor—”

  “Anything. Absolutely anything you need,” Hollingshead told him, a grave look on his face.

  “I’d like to not talk about my personal life right now. If that’s all right.”

  Hollingshead’s face fell, and Chapel felt bad instantly. But the last thing he could handle at that moment was talking about what had happened in Brooklyn. He suppressed a sigh. “It’s just—I’d like to get to work as quickly as possible.”

  Hollingshead nodded. “Keep your mind off things, I’d imagine. Well. I suppose that’s fine for now. But, son—I’m going to need you at the very pinnacle of your game today. If you’re going to be distracted or you’re going to be on the phone all day, well, ah—”

  “No, sir,” Chapel promised. “I’m ready to focus on something else.”

  Hollingshead nodded again. “Then we’ll say no more. Now—as to business. We can’t meet in the usual place for a reason that will soon become apparent. I’ve reserved a briefing room for us and had it swept for listening devices. Sadly, that does not mean we’ll be able to speak with complete candor. Again, for a reason soon to be made manifest. The same reason we’re meeting in a new spot, actually. So before we go in, I need to tell you something.”

  “Sir.”

  Hollingshead lowered his voice. “What you’re going to hear is all true. I’ve had it verified to the best of our considerable abilities. Everything checks out. It may also be the most vital matter my office has ever concerned itself with. Furthermore, it’s one of the most sensitive. I must say, I’m glad you’re here, even if I’m not pleased with the reason you were able to come in.” The director raised his hands in protest. “Never mind, we’re not talking about that.” He walked briskly up to an unremarkable door and put his hand on the knob. “You think you’re ready for this. I’m not, and I don’t mind telling you.” He turned the knob and opened the door.

  Beyond lay a small windowless conference room with a table and a dozen chairs and not much else. The walls were bare concrete—they weren’t even painted. The lighting fixtures were just uncovered fluorescent tubes, and the table was made of glass. That was probably to make it harder to plant a bug underneath it. There was no television screen available, nor any computers—not even a telephone. The back of the door was lined with noise-absorbing egg crate foam and the door itself had a rubber seal around its edges.

  Chapel took out his cell phone and turned it on. It got no reception, not even a single bar, and no wireless signals were available either.

  Hollingshead went to the end of the table and took a seat. When he spoke, his voice sounded oddly flat in the shielded room. “I imagine this all looks quite primitive,” he said, grinning a little.

  “It looks safe,” Chapel said, putting away his phone.

  Hollingshead took the little black book—the one-time pad—from his coat pocket and set it down on the glass table. Even from across the room Chapel thought it still reeked of seawater. That was probably an effect of how odorless the rest of the room was. He ran a finger along the floor and brought it up to his eyes and found no dust at all. When Hollingshead had said the room had been swept, Chapel hadn’t considered that he might have been using the term literally. “Exactly how small can they make a bug these days?” Chapel asked.

  “The size of a grain of rice,” Hollingshead told him. “Even here in the Pentagon we can’t completely eliminate the possibility of being overheard. But this room is, ah, the very best we can do. Needless to say, nothing we discuss here can be spoken of outside these walls.”

  “Of course,” Chapel agreed.

  Hollingshead nodded. Then he glanced at his watch. “We’re waiting on a third. Someone with information we need. They’ll be here in a few minutes, but first—I need you to tell me something. Tell me everything you know about the Dead Hand.”

  Chapel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He sat down at the table. “Well, two things, I suppose. I know what it is.”

  “Go on.”

  Chapel shrugged. “A computer system. The Soviets built it back in the eighties in a secret location south of Moscow. It was supposed to be one of the biggest and most complex computers in the world, at least for the time. It was wired into their nuclear arsenal, with links to every missile silo they had.”

  “And its purpose?” Hollingshead asked.

  Chapel nodded. “It was called the Dead Hand because it was supposed to be similar to the dead man’s switch on a train—a switch the train’s driver has to keep constantly touching or the train won’t go. If the driver has a heart attack or something, he’ll let go of that switch and the train will automatically stop. Except the Dead Hand was designed for the opposite purpose. It was designed to constantly monitor the region around Moscow. If the Kremlin were destroyed—say, by an American nuclear attack—the Dead Hand would turn itself on. And then it would launch every missile the Soviets had at the United States. It was designed so that even if we successfully decapitated the Soviet command structure, they could still have their revenge and make sure we didn’t survive World War III. A completely automated retaliation system.”

  Hollingshead fiddled with the one-time pad on the table in front of him. “Like the Lernaean Hydra, wouldn’t you say? You cut off the head, and a new one grows back—it only gets more dangerous. The ultimate deterrent. We wouldn’t dare attac
k Moscow, knowing the price we would pay.”

  “That was the theory,” Chapel said.

  “You said you knew two things,” Hollingshead prompted. “What was the other?”

  “I know it doesn’t really exist.” Chapel sat up straight in his chair. “It was a ruse. Nobody sane would ever build something like that—a machine that could destroy an entire country with no human input. The possibility of a computer error could never be ruled out. The Soviets floated the story of the Dead Hand as a kind of engineered urban legend. They wanted us to think it existed. But of course after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Russia became our ally, the story wasn’t necessary anymore. A number of Russian officials have denied categorically that the Dead Hand was ever more than a thought experiment—they claim it was never built, and never got past the drawing board.”

  Hollingshead nodded. He wasn’t meeting Chapel’s eye, which was a bad thing, usually. “You know two things,” he said. “One of them is correct.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Son, this may come as a surprise to you, but when you say nobody sane would ever create such a thing, well, that group doesn’t include the leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They were paranoid enough to build the damn thing. It is very real, and it was designed for exactly the purpose you describe. It went online in 1983.”

  Chapel felt like the temperature in the room had just dropped twenty degrees. “And if we’re sitting here talking about it—”

  “It went online in 1983, and it has been functional ever since. It’s still there, still doing its job. Ready to launch every missile in the Russian arsenal at the United States, at a moment’s notice. Nobody ever turned it off.”

  THE PENTAGON: JUNE 14, 08:28

  “You’re kidding me. This thing is still active? It’s a loaded gun pointed right at our heads, and it’s still active?”

  “Yes,” Hollingshead said. “Even though the politics have changed, the launch codes have not.” The director sighed deeply. “It’s an existential threat to the United States, to the, ah, well, the entire world, actually.” He gave a wan smile. “If that many nuclear warheads exploded all at once, it really wouldn’t matter where they landed. The resulting fallout and nuclear winter would mean the end of the world.”

  Chapel couldn’t speak.

  Hollingshead pushed the one-time pad away from him, into the middle of the table. “Now you know everything I know about the Dead Hand. Fortunately, we have another source of intelligence available to us.” He glanced at his watch again. “She should be waiting out in the hall, if you would be good enough to get the door.”

  Chapel stood up and reached for the doorknob. “She?” he asked. “It’s a woman? You don’t mean—”

  He turned the knob and opened the door and there she was.

  Nadia.

  The Asian woman from the party yacht. The one who had saved his life.

  “Jim,” she said, and gave him a warm smile. “You’re looking much better than the last time I saw you. I’m so glad.”

  She held out a hand. It took him a second to collect himself enough to shake it. “Please,” he said, “come in.”

  She walked into the room, and Chapel closed the door behind her.

  She didn’t look exactly like he remembered her. For one thing, she wasn’t wearing a thin sundress and basically nothing else. Instead she had put on a black business suit over a white blouse. The skirt was maybe two inches shorter than would be considered conservative, but she would have passed for a civilian staffer outside in the halls of the Pentagon. She had cut her hair a little shorter. On the boat she had worn subtle but elaborate makeup, but now she had on only a dark red shade of lipstick and maybe a touch of eye shadow.

  She was, though, every bit as striking as she had been the last time he saw her, when she was wearing nothing but panties and sharing a cramped shower stall with him.

  She was empty-handed. No briefcase, no purse. The director indicated with a gesture that she should take a seat. That meant she had to walk past Chapel. Her perfume—very light, very clean—trailed through the air after her.

  “The two of you have met, of course,” Hollingshead said. “Though I imagine you were not, ah, properly introduced.”

  Chapel realized he was still standing by the door, and the two of them were looking at him expectantly. Hollingshead gestured at a chair across from Nadia, and Chapel took it. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until he sat down.

  “Captain James Chapel, United States Military Intelligence,” Hollingshead said, “please meet Nadezhda Yaroslavovna Asimova, Federal Service for Technic and Export Control of the Russian Federation.”

  “Nadia to friends,” she said, with a smile. “Which I hope already includes the both of you.”

  Chapel tried to smile back. He was worried if he moved his mouth too much, his jaw might drop and hit the floor.

  He forced himself to recover a little professionalism. “FSTEK,” he said. “Technic and Export Control—that’s the group that oversees information security and technology transfer. Part of the Russian intelligence community.” He sat up straighter in his chair. “Forgive me for using a loaded term—but we don’t get a lot of Russian spies here in the Pentagon.”

  Nadia laughed to show she hadn’t taken offense and rolled her eyes. “You make us sound so glamorous! Boring stuff, of no interest, truly. We make sure all the Kremlin’s computers have proper antivirus software and oversee sales of Russian information technology to other countries. I am little more than a glorified file clerk back home.”

  Chapel shook his head. He turned to stare at Hollingshead for a while. “Sir,” he said, “are you telling me that you had a Russian agent shadowing me on my last mission?” He couldn’t believe it.

  “A Russian agent who saved your life,” Hollingshead pointed out.

  “I did what I could to help, that is all,” Nadia said.

  Chapel stood up out of his chair and paced around the room. “I’m sorry, I seem to have missed something here. You two are acting like this is all perfectly normal. That an agent of a foreign power was sent—without my knowledge—to accompany me on a top secret mission.” He almost asked if Angel had known—but maybe Nadia still didn’t know about Angel. Maybe that one fact had been kept from her.

  On the boat she had known his name. She had known how deep he was diving, and she had known how important the one-time pad was. It seemed she’d been better informed than he was.

  “Son,” Hollingshead said, his eyes flashing a warning, “please sit down.”

  Chapel went to his chair, but he didn’t sit. He rested his hands on the back of the chair because he felt like he might fall down. “This is not how we do things—”

  “It is today,” Hollingshead said, and the warning in his eyes was very close to turning into flinty anger. “Agent Asimova has vital intelligence to share with us. And that mission you were on—I wasn’t the one who planned it.”

  Chapel was definitely about to fall down. He sat before that could happen.

  “It was Agent Asimova who told us where to find that one-time pad. And why we would want to recover it.”

  “Nadia, please,” she said. “Call me Nadia.”

  Hollingshead was silent for a second. Then he turned to face Nadia and gave her his warmest, most grandfatherly look. It was a good one—he’d cultivated it for years. “Nadia, thank you. I believe you’re here today to brief us on the Dead Hand system. If Captain Chapel is done with his outburst, maybe you could begin.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Jim?”

  Chapel rested his head on one hand. “I’m listening,” he said.

  THE PENTAGON: JUNE 14, 08:37

  Nadia fidgeted as she spoke. Chapel couldn’t really blame her for being nervous—how would he feel, after all, if he were invited to give a speech at the Kremlin? He could sense from her body language that it was more than that, however. She was excited to give this presentation. Clearly it was something
she’d been involved with for a long time.

  “There are three principal components of the Perimeter system. That is, what you call the Dead Hand. The Russian name for it is ‘Perimetr,’ because it guards the entire border of what was the Soviet Union.”

  She got up from her chair and paced behind the table. “I was hoping I would have a whiteboard, or perhaps I could give you a PowerPoint slideshow . . .”

  Hollingshead gave her an apologetic smile. “For security reasons we need to keep this as an oral briefing,” he said.

  “Konyechno. I mean—of course,” she said. She took a deep breath and launched in.

  “As I said, three parts. The first is a shortwave radio station located just outside of Moscow. Station UVB-76, or MDZhB, as it is called now. You may have heard of this station, I believe it is called ‘the Russian Buzzer’ in amateur radio circles. It broadcasts a continuous buzz tone, at a rate of twenty-five tones per minute, and it does so twenty-four hours a day, every day, as it has since the 1980s. This is in effect an ‘all-clear’ signal. Its meaning is simple: Moscow still stands. As long as this signal is broadcast, Perimeter remains dormant and is completely safe.

  “The second component is an array of sensors buried throughout Russian territory. There are approximately one hundred and fifty acoustic pickups, seventy-five air pressure monitoring scoops, and fifty electric eye sensors spread across the various republics that formerly comprised the Union. They are all dedicated to one function, which is to register the particular signature of a nuclear explosion anywhere inside the former borders.”

  “That sounds like some pretty delicate equipment,” Hollingshead asked. “If it was installed thirty years ago, are you sure it’s still functional?”

  “The numbers I listed,” Nadia explained, “are our best estimate of how many of the sensors remain intact. Approximately ten times as many were originally built.”

  “Just an estimate?” Chapel asked. “You don’t know for sure?”