From the belly of the helicopter Chapel looked back at the wounded soldiers on the ground below. Those who could were standing, holding their weapons still so they could guard Bogdan. The hacker looked up, and for a moment Chapel met his eye. There was no rancor there, no accusation, even if Chapel had nearly crippled him. Bogdan looked like he’d expected things to end this way.
Chapel pulled the side hatch shut, and the helicopter lifted into the air without wasting another moment. “Neither of us is going anywhere until this is done,” Chapel told Kalin. “What direction did she head?”
“South. I imagine she is attempting to flee to Mongolia,” Kalin said. “There are Evenks there, a few of them, and they would certainly take her in. She knows we will not be able to send a major force after her there, for fear of angering the Chinese.”
Chapel couldn’t worry about the politics or what Nadia had planned. He just wanted to know how they were going to reach her. “Is this helicopter fast enough to catch up with her?”
Kalin sneered. “That old crate she is flying? We can spin circles around it,” Kalin told him.
“Good — then this won’t take long,” Chapel said.
“It had better not. Thanks to how long it took you to find her, we are running low on fuel. Already we are down to our reserves. We can force her down, then fly to Irkutsk to refuel, but only if we catch her in, say, the next hour.”
Chapel shook her head. “We can’t afford to antagonize her. We have to talk to her, get her to surrender peacefully. Don’t forget what she’s capable of. She could start World War III at any moment. If she feels she has nothing left to lose—”
Kalin inhaled sharply. “I wish to bring her in alive, if possible. But this situation is straining the bounds of possibility. We will attempt to negotiate a surrender. If she does not agree, I fully intend to shoot her down. This craft carries a heavy machine gun that could shred her plane in less than a second.”
“That might be all the time she needs to launch.”
“A risk I’m willing to accept. I have specific orders — she is not, under any circumstances, to be allowed to leave Russian territory. No matter the cost.”
Chapel stared at the man. “If she does launch,” Chapel said, “if all those missiles fire at my country — you really think America won’t shoot back?”
“Konyechno,” Kalin said. “But it will not come to that. She is bluffing.”
Chapel turned away in frustration. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“I wonder, Kapitan… I have been chasing Asimova for many months. You knew her a few weeks. Which of us came to know her better? The real woman?”
“It doesn’t matter what either of us knows. The risk is just too great.”
“That is not your decision to make. Your part in this is already done. You brought me to her — now I will determine her fate.”
Chapel moved to one of the round viewports on the other side of the fuselage. He couldn’t get a good look forward, not without barging his way into the cockpit, and he doubted Kalin would stand for that. He desperately wanted to look where they were going, but… maybe he could get the next best thing. “Angel,” he said, “I need some intel.”
“Go ahead, sugar.”
“Nadia just took off in a small civilian plane, a six-seater, it looked like. She’s headed south. Toward Mongolia, we think. Can you pick her up on the satellites?”
“Give me a sec… something that small’s going to be hard to zoom in on while it’s moving… okay, I see her. And there you are, in your helicopter. She’s got a good head start on you, but you’re gaining quickly.”
“How long before we catch up?”
“I’d estimate nine minutes,” Angel said. “Sweetie, you said she’s headed for Mongolia? If she is, she’s got a long flight ahead of her. The border’s about five hundred miles away.”
“She has nowhere else to go.”
“I get that. But it’ll take her hours to reach the border, and that gives the Russians a lot of time to bring her down.”
Chapel frowned. “The problem is, we’re running low on fuel. She might still get away from us if we’re not careful.”
“You’re not the only aircraft in Siberia,” Angel told him. “Let me check something. Okay, sure. There’s an air force base at Irkutsk, not that far from your location. There are three fighter jets being wheeled out onto a runway right now. Sweetie, the Russians are not going to let her get away. Those jets are designed to take down heavy bombers. They’ll have no trouble shooting down a little plane like hers.”
Chapel knew she was trying to be helpful. She was telling him that he could just sit back and let the Russians take care of his problem — finish his mission for him. She didn’t know. “Angel — she has the codes. On her smartphone. She could launch at any time.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Yeah,” Chapel said. “I’m willing to bet we hear from her very soon. I think she’ll threaten to launch if they don’t let her cross the border. And I know for a fact that my partner Kalin here won’t give his bosses time to negotiate. We need to find a way to contact her, to start talking to her, right now.”
“You don’t think — I mean,” Angel said. “If.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her at a loss for words. Finally she asked him, in a very small voice, “You think she’ll do it?”
“I have no idea,” Chapel said. She had lied to him about so many things. Lied about who she was, what she wanted. He had no way of knowing what she might actually do, when the time came.
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.