The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  A flash of deep worry passed across Nadia’s eyes. “I will . . . elaborate in a moment. First, I need to tell you about the third, and most vital, component of the system. This is a computer complex located in a hardened bunker south of Moscow. The computer is one hundred percent automatic, requiring no operators or maintenance to keep it running. It has its own dedicated radiothermic power plant and multiple redundancies in its circuits in case any of them ever burn out or are damaged. The system exists at a sort of minimal state, performing only self-diagnostic functions on a daily basis, as long as the shortwave signal is continuous. Only if that signal stops will Perimeter awaken. If it does, its first action will be to query the array of sensors. If there is no result, Perimeter takes no action. If, however, it detects the signature of a nuclear blast, it will automatically send a signal to every nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal. Our weapons are hardwired to receive this signal—upon reception they can and will arm and launch themselves without human action and despite any attempt at human interference. The system was designed to resist tampering or sabotage and eliminate human error from the decision to launch.”

  Hollingshead pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed at his eyes. “You can imagine how we must feel about this.”

  “I imagine,” Nadia said, “that you feel frightened by it. That was the intention of its designers.”

  “I think ‘outraged’ is the more, ah, appropriate term. Ms. Asimova, your leaders have built a veritable sword of Damocles and dangled it over our heads. Though it sounds like there are some basic fail-safes built in, thank God. The shortwave signal from Moscow keeps the whole thing asleep.”

  Nadia sat down hard in her chair. “Except when it fails.” She put both her hands on the glass tabletop and pressed down on them, as if she were trying to keep them from shaking. “It has happened twice. Both times in 2010. Once for a full twenty-four hours, and then again for only a few minutes, the buzz tone fell silent. The cause—”

  “Wait a minute,” Chapel said. “Your people let this thing lapse, the one thing preventing the end of—”

  “Please,” Nadia said, holding up her hands to implore for peace. “The signal has remained active ever since that time. The failure was a human error. The problem here is that the men in charge of this buzz tone do not understand what it is they guard. They do not know about Perimeter. They did not know that when they were derelict in their duty, they put the whole world at risk.”

  Chapel could feel his jaw fall open. “Nobody told them?”

  Nadia looked sheepish. “It is a secret. Secrets in my country are . . . like a sacred thing.”

  Hollingshead cleared his throat. “The sensor, ah, array,” he pointed out. “Another fail-safe there. It detects what, again?”

  “Sound, light, and atmospheric overpressure,” Nadia said.

  “It looks for an atomic explosion, yes,” Hollingshead said, nodding vigorously. “No real worries there, are there? No one is about to detonate a nuclear device on Russian soil. Your country doesn’t even do nuclear tests anymore, as I understand.”

  Nadia bit her lip. “We cannot rule out the possibility that a rogue state would detonate a bomb inside Russia. Though the sensors are looking for a megaton-scale blast, not just the much smaller explosion of, say, a dirty bomb. We believed until recently, in fact, that an event on the scale that would trigger Perimeter was of negligible threat.”

  “Something changed that?” Chapel asked. The look on her face definitely suggested as much.

  She looked down at her hands. “In February of 2013, a meteor exploded in the air over the city of Chelyabinsk.”

  “I remember that,” Chapel said. “The YouTube videos were pretty incredible.”

  Nadia inhaled sharply. “As it burned up in the atmosphere, the meteor was large enough to light up the sky like a second sun. When it exploded, its sonic blast created an air overpressure wave that shattered windows across the city.” She looked from one man to the other. “Heat, light, overpressure.”

  Chapel fell back in his chair. Looking over at Hollingshead, he saw the director’s mouth moving as if he were trying to speak but the words wouldn’t come.

  “My government has wanted to take Perimeter offline for some time. We thought we had time, time enough at least to . . . to fix things,” Nadia said. “The last few years have convinced us otherwise. If the shortwave signal had faltered at the same time the meteor hit Chelyabinsk—if these two conditions ever happened again at the same time . . .” She pushed down on the table until her hands turned white. “It would be the end of the world.”

  The silence in the briefing room had felt flat before, all the ambient sound soaked up by the hard concrete walls. Now it felt like it buzzed with an angry energy. Chapel knew the effect was purely psychological, but it didn’t matter. He felt a nasty headache coming on when he thought about what Nadia had just said.

  “You need to turn this thing off now,” he told her. “You need to shut it down.”

  Hollingshead nodded. “We’ve been asking for that for years. Every time, the Russian government has brushed us off. Most often they simply tell us that the Dead Hand—Perimeter—never existed, that it was only ever a thought experiment and it was never built. Sometimes they contradict themselves and say it was switched off years ago, before the fall of the Union. Most often they just say they won’t discuss matters of state security. But clearly the time has come, Ms. Asimova. Clearly the time has come.”

  Nadia looked over at the director with a sad smile. “This feeling is one shared by my superiors. We are not insane. We know that a Perimeter launch would be the end of our country, as well. The reason it has not been done, the reason I am here today, is a matter of great national . . . embarrassment. I can think of no better term.”

  Something occurred to Chapel. “You said earlier you could only estimate the number of functional sensors in the network,” he said.

  She nodded. “That’s correct. We don’t know how many of them are still active, because we do not know exactly where they are. Until recently, we didn’t know where the Perimeter computer was located, either.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Hollingshead asked.

  Nadia turned to look at him directly. “On 25 December, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially ceded power to Boris Yeltsin. Famously, on that day he handed over the nuclear launch codes, effectively surrendering the Soviet military to what was then called the Commonwealth of Independent States, the precursor of the Russian Federation. It is unclear to my office whether Gorbachev even knew about Perimeter—it was considered then of utmost secrecy, and even Gorbachev was kept in the dark on some things by the KGB. What is known is that Gorbachev never mentioned Perimeter to Yeltsin. He did not tell him where it was, or how to turn it off.

  “You must understand how strenuously they kept their secrets in the Soviet Union. No one was given information they did not immediately require. Even now the men who work at MDZhB, the shortwave station, have no idea why it is so important that the buzz tone is played night and day. The technicians who work on our nuclear missiles do not know that they can be activated without warning. Even my office, which is in charge of maintaining security around the nuclear arsenal, had no confirmation that Perimeter existed until a few years ago.”

  “This keeps getting worse and worse,” Chapel said.

  Nadia did not disagree. “It took me years to track down the Perimeter computer. Between August and December of 1991, the KGB knew that the Union was going to fall. They used that time to destroy every bit of secret material they could—they thought that the new regime would seek to prosecute them for their atrocities, and they wished to destroy all evidence of their crimes. There were seven secret KGB libraries in the Union at one time. Six of them were burned to the ground that year. A seventh, on an uninhabited island south of Vladivostok, was spared, but even its existence was nearly lost. I had to go there personally to find the information I needed. To find out where Perimeter is located,
and how to stop it.”

  “So you do have a plan,” Chapel said.

  “That’s why I’m here,” she told him. “And why I am speaking to you two. It is my intention to personally end the Perimeter project. But I need your help.”

  THE PENTAGON: JUNE 14, 09:12

  Chapel frowned. “Why?” he asked.

  Hollingshead cleared his throat. “Son, we’re being given an extraordinary opportunity here. A chance to eliminate a grave threat. Let’s not, ah, examine our gift horses altogether too closely.”

  Chapel shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t mean any disrespect. I just don’t see why the Russians would bring us in on this. It seems like their problem—and one I’d think they’d be happy to take care of internally, and quietly.”

  “Quietly, yes,” Nadia said. “We will have no official support from my country, not even any contact with my organization once we begin. This must be done in absolute secrecy. If the world never finds out that we lost control of Perimeter, it is for the best. For the operation to be conducted internally, well, that is not possible in any case.”

  Chapel raised an eyebrow.

  “Most reports of the system describe it only as being located south of Moscow. When Perimeter was constructed,” Nadia said, “the designers looked for a place unlikely to be attacked in a war, conventional or nuclear. A spot of limited strategic value, and a place they knew their enemies would never occupy. Unfortunately, they did not take into account that the real threat to their power would come from within. The place is no longer inside Russian borders. It is now in foreign territory.”

  “Where?” Hollingshead asked.

  “Kazakhstan. Near the Aral Sea.”

  “That certainly adds a, to put it mildly, wrinkle to things,” the director said. “I assume the Kazakhs don’t know what they have. And that you’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Correct,” Nadia said. “It will not be easy, but we must enter the country unknown, take down Perimeter, and exfiltrate before they know we were there. Diplomatic relations between Kazakhstan and Russia are good, right now. We want to keep it that way.”

  “I can think of another reason, besides diplomatic relations,” Chapel said.

  Hollingshead shot him a nasty glance—but then nodded for him to continue.

  Chapel’s eyes narrowed. “If you make this an American op, and something goes wrong, you won’t take the blame.”

  Nadia shrugged. “If you wish to see it that way, fine. Though I imagine if the Kazakhs capture me, it will not take long for them to determine who I work for. I am not asking you to take this risk alone.”

  “There’s another reason for our involvement,” Hollingshead said. He reached out and tapped the one-time pad where it sat on the table. “When Ms. Asimova first came to me, she said this was what she was after. She knew where it was and how to use it. We had the ability to retrieve it.”

  “Russia does not possess the resources it once did, not in the Western theater,” Nadia explained. “Getting a Russian frogman into Cuban waters would have proved difficult. We knew you had the capacity.”

  “But what do you even want that thing for? The codes in it are twenty years out of date,” Chapel said.

  “So are the codes Perimeter uses,” Nadia told him. “Perimeter was given daily ciphers by the KGB. When they were driven from power, they stopped updating its clearances.”

  “You mean it’s still running off that pad,” Chapel said.

  “As far as Perimeter is concerned, it is still 25 December 1991, because no one told it otherwise.”

  Chapel couldn’t help but grin. He nodded at this pad. “You needed this thing pretty badly, I guess.”

  “Simply to enter the Perimeter bunker, one needs a code sequence. If it is entered incorrectly, the system automatically arms itself and cannot be reset locally.”

  “We’d better make sure we enter the right code, then,” Chapel said.

  Nadia’s eyes flashed as if she’d just caught Chapel in something. “So you agree to come with me? To do this together?”

  Chapel grinned. “Wouldn’t miss it. Though I’m still not clear on why this is a joint operation. You have the one-time pad—we would give it to you even if you said you wanted to run the rest of this mission yourself. So I’ll ask again. Why do you need us? Why me?”

  “As a svidetel. A . . . witness, if nothing else,” Nadia told him.

  “A witness?”

  “If I am successful, if I deactivate Perimeter, there will be no visible sign. Nothing overt will happen. I could turn it off tomorrow, but if I then came back here and told you it was done—”

  “We wouldn’t believe you,” Hollingshead said. “Exactly right. The president would have to assume you were lying. Attempting to deceive us so that we would relax our guard.”

  “Indeed. Trust, but verify, yes? That is the policy. Once Perimeter is defeated, Agent Chapel can vouch that it was done, and our two countries can start talking about disarmament again. We are going to make the world a safer place,” Nadia said. “Even if only the three of us in this room ever know about it.”

  “When do we leave?” Chapel asked.

  THE PENTAGON: JUNE 14, 09:36

  Nadia was escorted out of the Pentagon by a pair of marine sergeants who weren’t told who she was. On her way out, she turned and glanced back at Chapel. She gave him a hopeful smile that he tried to return. Once she’d turned a corner, he closed the door again and turned to look at Hollingshead.

  “You trust her?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t without my doubts when she first came to me,” the director said. He laid a hand on Chapel’s artificial shoulder. “I vetted her personally. She’s definitely an agent of FSTEK, though like you she doesn’t show up on their official payroll. Her direct superior, Marshal Bulgachenko, gave a message to our ambassador in Moscow vouching for her. Beyond that she’s a mystery.”

  “Is that good enough?”

  “In this business if she wasn’t mysterious, I would worry. It’s the best we’re going to get, son.”

  Chapel nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Of course, I don’t want you to think I’m selling her the shop, either. Just because the Russians are our allies now doesn’t mean we don’t spy on each other. Even if, as I suspect, she’s completely on the level, she’s got perfectly functional ears. She’ll take any chance she can get to learn things she isn’t supposed to know. It’s vital you don’t give anything away—for instance, she can’t learn about Angel. I know you’re used to relying on our friend while you’re in the field. That won’t fly this time. If she sees you talking to an invisible helper, she’s going to get curious.”

  “So I’m going in blind?” Chapel asked. He relied on Angel for everything during a field operation—for intelligence, for insights, just for someone watching his back. Working without her would be a severe handicap.

  “No. You’ll be able to contact her. You’ll just have to be discreet about it. As in all things.”

  “I am a silent warrior,” Chapel said, quoting the motto of the intelligence service.

  “I know you are, son. Fair enough. Are you all right with taking Asimova’s lead? This is going to be her operation. You’ll be playing second fiddle, I’m afraid.”

  “Understood.”

  Hollingshead nodded and turned to go. But then he stopped. He looked back at Chapel with a questioning eye. “There’s just one more thing. It’s, ah. I suppose this isn’t my place. But if it affects your operational efficiency—”

  “Sir?”

  Hollingshead frowned. “Back there, in the briefing. You seemed . . . angry. That’s not like you. A couple of times there, you got downright confrontational.”

  “You have my apologies, sir.”

  Hollingshead nodded. “Chapel. Son. I said I wasn’t going to talk about your personal life, and I’ll stick to that. But I need to know you’re truly ready for this. That if I send you into the field right now, your head will be squarel
y in the game. I expected to find you distracted and a little dazed, given the circumstances.”

  “May I ask how I seem right now, sir?”

  “Focused. Maybe a little too focused. You’re blocking out everything else but your work. If that becomes a problem—”

  “It won’t,” Chapel said. He sounded curt even to his own ears. He hadn’t intended that.

  Hollingshead flinched a little. He blinked. Straightened his cuffs. “It’s not too late,” he said. “I can still send someone else on this.”

  It wasn’t a threat. Hollingshead was asking a question, Chapel knew. He was offering a lifeline.

  Maybe he wasn’t in the perfect head space for a mission like this. But he thought he could get there. And the alternative—going back to an empty apartment in New York, checking his phone every thirty seconds for a call that wasn’t going to come—was unacceptable.

  “I can do the job, sir,” he said, forcing a measure of calm into his voice. “I can do it right.”

  “Hmm.” Hollingshead looked him right in the eye for an uncomfortably long time. Chapel made sure not to look away. Then the director shook his head as if clearing it of unpleasant thoughts and said, “Very well. Let’s talk about how we get you to Kazakhstan.”

  WASHINGTON, DC: JUNE 14, 13:24

  Chapel would have left for the mission then and there, if he could. Unfortunately, the doctors had grounded him for a month after his bout with decompression sickness, and Hollingshead wouldn’t let him fly until it was safe. The intervening time wouldn’t be wasted. Papers had to be readied, cover stories established, travel arrangements made. The hardest part was that Chapel could do so little of it himself. Most of the preparations were made by low-level functionaries in the State Department who had no idea what they were working on, only that credentials for certain people had to be readied at the shortest possible notice. Chapel would never even meet the people working on his behalf.

  Chapel’s official orders were to get some sleep. The best therapy for the bends was sleep and fluids. Chapel tried to maximize the latter, keeping a water bottle with him at all times, but he knew he couldn’t just sleep away the remaining time. He checked into a hotel in Washington—it was far too tempting to go back to New York, to try to find Julia and talk to her—and spent his days haunting various military archives.