“What do you want?” Bogdan asked.
“Nadia wants to check the canyon walls, but we can’t see a thing out here. I need you to move the truck to the end of this street and get all its lights on the rocks over there. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes, yes, is possible,” Bogdan said. “I am driver now. Tell me where to go, boss, and there I go. Good boy Bogdan, the driver man.”
“Best-paid driver man in Eurasia,” Chapel told him. He waved one finger in a circle. “Let’s get moving.”
He jumped down from the cab as Bogdan woke the engine. Nadia had come outside to stand in the road, clutching herself for warmth. Chapel started heading over to her, intending to put his arm around her. Behind him the truck started to move, its big tires moaning as they dug into the sand.
“We’ll spend all day looking, if we have to,” Chapel told Nadia, raising his voice over the noise of the truck engine. “And tomorrow, too. If that’s what it—”
“Bogdan!” Nadia cried out. “You’re in the wrong gear! Reverse! Reverse!”
Chapel whirled around to see the truck rolling steadily forward. He heard Romanian words coming from the cab that sounded pretty nasty. His eyes went wide as he saw the truck slam into the big statue of Lenin in the middle of the intersection.
The statue rang like a bell — and then made a horrible crumpling noise as the impact smashed in one side of its base. Lenin started to lean forward as if he were giving a benediction.
“Jesus, if that thing falls on the truck we’ll be stranded out here,” Chapel said. He rushed forward and grabbed for the ladder on the side of the cab, intending to shove Bogdan aside and take the wheel himself. Lenin shifted another few degrees forward as Bogdan stripped the gears, trying to move the truck. Just as Chapel reached the truck’s ladder, the bronze statue made a horrible groaning noise and then something snapped, a horrible, popping noise like a whole piece of the statue had just broken off under tension and shot off into the dark.
Somehow Bogdan managed to get the truck into reverse and move it away from the statue, back toward the canyon entrance. It turned out not to be necessary, because the statue never did fall over.
Chapel was less concerned about Lenin’s fate, though, then what had broken off the statue base. Moving around behind it, keeping a close eye on the shifting metal mass above him, he came around to the back and saw there was a large hole in the base, now. The outline of the hole was strangely regular, not what he expected at all.
It was rectangular in shape, about six feet high and three feet wide. The corners of the hole were neatly rounded.
It looked like nothing so much in Chapel’s experience as the shape of the hatches on the Kurchatov. It looked like a doorway.
“Nadia,” he called out. “Nadia! Bring the flashlight over here!”
The base, and the statue above it, were both hollow, but they weren’t empty. Inside the base was a little room, just big enough for three people to cram inside. Set into one wall was a Cyrillic keyboard and a bank of lights. All of them were dark.
Inside the statue was a pipe rising straight up into the air. A wire ran from the base of the pipe, down along the wall, and into the floor. “Konyechno,” Nadia said. “I wondered why a town of this size needed such a large monument.”
“Not just to remind Russians far from home what they were working for?” Chapel asked, though he’d guessed what she was going to say.
“It’s a shortwave antenna,” she told him. “Perimeter must listen, always, for data from its monitoring stations and for the buzz tone from Moscow. Remember? It does not activate until that buzz tone goes silent.” She played her light along the pipe, up toward the inside of Lenin’s head. “A shortwave antenna out here might be noticed, but not some grandiose statue. Clever, clever.”
“This is the lock, yes?” Bogdan said, reaching toward the keyboard.
Nadia slapped his hand away. “Yes, it is. Do not touch it, whatever you do.” She ushered them all back out into the predawn light. “We must take our time, now. Though I want to very much to get started.”
Chapel nodded, thinking of all the prep work they should do. He ran down the job assignments in his head. “Honestly, we’re all tired. It’s been a long night, and we should get some sleep. But I know that isn’t going to happen — none of us wants to wait any longer; we want to do this. First I should tell Angel what we found,” Chapel said. “She can get our escape route ready for us.” The timing would be crucial — the submarine had to appear on the coast of the Caspian Sea just when they arrived. If it was spotted in Kazakh waters, it would be fired on without warning. Angel needed as much advance warning as she could get. “We need to move the truck, too, just in case the statue falls over. We need to check all our equipment, everything we’ll need once we’re inside. That’s Bogdan’s department. As for you—”
“Yes?” she asked, looking at him. Before he answered her, though, her eyes strayed back to the door in the base of the statue. She couldn’t not look at it.
“Why don’t you just take a second and pat yourself on the back?”
When she looked at him with uncomprehending eyes, he couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
“You did it, Nadia,” he told her. “You made it happen.”
“Don’t shout hop-la before you jump,” she told him.
It was his turn to look confused.
Bogdan sneered in disgust. “Is Russian proverb. Means, not to be counting chickens before they are born.”
Chapel laughed again. He knew it was true — nothing was finished, not yet. But he couldn’t help but be excited. The mission was nearly complete. He ran all the way back to the truck.
“Jim, do you have the one-time pad?”
Chapel took it from his pocket and turned it over in his hands. When he’d went diving for the pad in the wreck of the Kurchatov, he’d had no idea it would lead him here. The little black book still smelled of an ocean on the other side of the world. He handed it to her as if it was dangerous in itself, as if it might explode.
“A code word must be enciphered, then entered very carefully into this keyboard,” she told them. “Only this will open the way.”
“So let’s get started,” Chapel told her. “You know how to work the pad?” He’d studied the matrices of numbers and Cyrillic characters in the one-time pad and never been able to make hide nor hair of it. “You know the code word?”
“I do,” she said, but raised both hands for patience. “It must be done precisely, though. One mistake and — pfft — it is over. The panel and the door will lock themselves down, and the system will know we are intruders.”
“What will it do then?” Chapel asked, looking around at the metallic walls of the statue. “Electrify this thing?”
“Worse,” Nadia replied. “It will switch Perimeter into active mode. Arm the system. Then only a special signal from Moscow will turn it off again.”
“You’re saying if you press the wrong button, we will have made this damned thing worse than it was before? More dangerous?”
“Indeed.”
Chapel shook his head. “Better let Bogdan do it, then.”
Nadia looked almost hurt.
“He has the nimblest fingers I’ve ever seen,” he told her. “You brought him along for a reason, right?”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment and pressed the one-time pad to her chest. “All right.” She opened the book to the last page, the one dated 25 December 1991. Christmas Day, the last day of the Soviet Union.