Chapel nodded. “Then that’s not some random Kazakh patrol.” The idea had been unlikely, anyway. What reason would the Kazakh military have to be out here, in the middle of an uninhabited desert? There was no sign anyone had visited Aralsk-30 in years. Why would they do so now?
No, this helicopter was Russian, and the pilot didn’t care if he was seen violating Kazakh sovereignty. There was only one explanation. The assassins had come back for Nadia, and this time they weren’t foolish enough to just send a couple of thugs with pistols. This time they intended to finish the job.
“How did they find us?” Nadia asked. “We were so careful to hide our movements. They couldn’t have been following us all this time.”
Chapel shook his head. “Maybe they didn’t need to.”
The helicopter looked like it wasn’t moving at all, just slowly getting bigger, which meant it was headed directly for them. Chapel estimated they had a minute at most before it arrived.
He turned to Nadia. “Who knew you were coming to dismantle Perimeter? Besides you and the marshal, did anyone—”
“No! I can only think they tracked us by satellite, or — oh, no. They killed Marshal Bulgachenko. But they must have… questioned him first.”
Chapel wished he had time to comfort her, but there was no time left for anything but tactics. “It doesn’t matter right now. Come on — we need to get into that building over there.” He pointed at one of the buildings that had partially filled with sand. “Maybe they won’t see us. Maybe we can just wait them out.”
“You think this likely?” Bogdan asked.
“No,” Chapel said, and jogged across the intersection, away from the statue.
They crouched low under the sill of a broken window inside the shade of the building. Chapel risked a quick glance over the edge and saw the helicopter circling Aralsk-30, high enough up to avoid the walls of the canyon. He held his breath and closed his eyes and listened to the sound of its rotor chopping up the air, silently praying for that sound to diminish, to lessen, to indicate that the helicopter was moving away. That the pilot had given up his search, having found nothing.
Instead the noise got louder. The Ka-60 was coming closer, lower. He heard its noise echo off the dead faces of the buildings and knew it was coming in to land.
Beside him Nadia looked terrified. One of her hands reached for his and he took it. He would give her what comfort he could, as pointless as it might seem.
Bogdan had curled up, his knees up in front of his chin. He looked like he might be asleep, though Chapel doubted even the Romanian could relax at a moment like this.
He waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then took another quick peek over the windowsill.
The helicopter had landed near the mouth of the canyon, its rotor kicking up great clouds of dust that obscured much of what was going on. But dark shapes moved through that dust and Chapel knew that the chopper had off-loaded its passengers. He couldn’t get a good head count on them through the dust, but he thought there might be half a dozen. Six armed assassins, then. And no way out. The only way to escape the canyon was through its mouth, right past those men.
He whispered to Nadia, telling her what he’d seen.
“Even if we could get past them all, even if we could get the truck out of here — the helicopter could just follow us. There’s no way we could outrun it, not over the desert, and there’s no cover for us to make for. And that’s even if we could get to the truck. I have my rifle, you have a pistol. Not much firepower, considering what we’re facing.”
Nadia set her jaw, accepting the inevitable, perhaps.
“They’ll try to take you alive, for questioning,” he told her.
“I’m more worried about Bogdan,” she said.
Chapel grunted in surprise. It might have been a laugh, under different circumstances.
“If they take Bogdan, if they question him — he can tell them what he did to Perimeter. Tell them how to change the program back. All our work would be for nothing, then.”
Chapel hadn’t thought of that.
A different kind of man, the kind of agent that Hollingshead should have sent on this mission, would have been able to think about the situation without passion, without qualm. Such a man might have come to one inescapable conclusion.
The course forward was to shoot Bogdan, to make sure his information couldn’t be retrieved. And then probably shoot Nadia, and himself, for good measure. If none of them could be questioned — call it what it was, Chapel thought, tortured—then their secrets would remain safe.
If Hollingshead had picked some twenty-five-year-old Navy SEAL for this mission, or some MARSOC jarhead, some kid with no ties, no family, no obligations to anything but his country — such a man wouldn’t have hesitated.
But Chapel wasn’t one of those men. He thought of what his old trainer, Bigelow, had said about him.
You’re a smart guy, Chapel. But for some reason when you’re beat, you get dumb. You get too dumb to just give up.
So shooting each other in a horrific game of round robin was just out of the question. They were going to have to live through this, or at least try. Chapel racked his brain trying to think of a plan. Anything at all.
What he came up with sounded absurd even as he outlined it to Nadia. She didn’t laugh, though. Maybe she was willing to clutch at straws just as much as he was.
“You’re going to have to take out those assassins, as best you can. You’re going to move from building to building, cover to cover, and get to the truck. There are better weapons for you there — assault rifles, anyway, and the two of you can use those to shoot your way out of the canyon.”
“And what about the helicopter?” she asked.
“That’s my job,” he told her.
Chapel headed up to the roof of the building, up where he could get a better view. The building had a flat top lined with tar paper that burned in the sun. A two-foot-high lip ran all the way around it, providing enough cover for Chapel to lie down on the scorching roof and be invisible from the street level. He could poke his head over the lip just enough to see what was going on without exposing himself unduly to enemy fire.
It would have been a great position to set up a sniper nest, if he had a sniper rifle. The AK-47 he carried just didn’t count. He could theoretically give Nadia some covering fire from up there. If he’d had enough bullets.
He didn’t, though. He had one magazine of thirty rounds, and he was going to need all of them. So as the assassins spread out through the streets, covering doorways and starting their search, Chapel could only watch and hope.
A little voice in the back of his head kept nagging at him. She’s a terrible shot, it said. She’s outgunned, and she doesn’t have any body armor. Bogdan will slow her down.
He tried to ignore that voice. He’d seen her fight before, and he knew she was dangerous. The Spetsnaz training she’d received would have to see her through.
Once they were clear of the helicopter’s rotor wash, Chapel could see that the assassins were a different breed than they’d faced before. These wore heavy kit, ballistic vests and helmets with neck protection. They carried short-barreled carbines, probably the AKS-74U variant of the rifle Chapel held. Those stumpy little weapons sacrificed a lot of range, but they made up for it by being easier to use in urban warfare scenarios — just like this one. At least one of the assassins had grenades hanging from his harness, and another one was carrying some kind of tactical shotgun.
They broke into teams of two so they could cover more ground. One group approached the statue — and the truck that was parked next to it. If they thought to shoot out the truck’s tires, or its engine block, Chapel’s plan would be ruined. Luckily the thought didn’t seem to occur to them. One of them climbed inside the truck and looked around while the other covered him. After a few seconds, the assassin climbed back out of the cab and gave a hand signal that had to mean the truck was all clear. The two of them moved on.