Maybe if they hadn’t gotten separated after they shut down Perimeter—
“Kapitan?”
On the phone Kalin sounded annoyed. As if Chapel was distracting him from important work.
“Senior Lieutenant,” Chapel said, “I’ve recovered the phone. Asimova is no longer a threat. I want to talk about—”
“I’m sorry, Kapitan,” Kalin interrupted, “this line is not very clear. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Kalin, don’t be an ass,” Chapel said. “I have the codes! This doesn’t have to end badly for any of us!”
“Perhaps you should call back later,” Kalin told him.
And then the connection went dead.
Nadia looked over at him with frightened eyes. “What did he say?” she asked. “What is he going to—”
Chapel jumped out of his seat, grabbing her to pull her down to the floor of the plane, as if that would make any difference.
At that same moment, the helicopter opened fire.
The Russian PKT machine gun could fire eight hundred rounds of 7.62 x 54 mm R ammunition every minute. Each of those bullets, which were as big as Chapel’s index finger, left the barrel traveling 2,700 feet per second and carried more than 3,500 joules of energy. The PKT had been designed to chew through armored vehicles at a range of nearly half a mile.
Nadia’s airplane, which was a civilian model made mostly of wood and very thin sheets of aluminum, had no armor whatsoever.
Kalin fired an entire belt of ammunition into the plane — two hundred fifty rounds — over the course of roughly nineteen seconds. The gunner was a soldier trained in airborne fighting, and the range was very short. All but a handful of the rounds struck the plane.
The majority of them struck the tail assembly, which was deformed by the impacts. Parts of it fell away completely as debris. Some of the bullets struck the wings, boring deep holes through the aluminum and breaching the plane’s fuel tanks. Others entered the engine compartment and destroyed delicate and vital components.
One bullet struck the propeller, which was a carefully constructed piece of laminated strips of wood, hand carved and painstakingly shaped by a master craftsman in a factory in Volgograd. The propeller cracked and disintegrated instantly.
Seventy-three rounds found their way inside the cabin of the aircraft. These were able to smash out every piece of glass in the cockpit and destroy some of the plane’s instrumentation. Other rounds lodged in the three rows of seats, which were actually some of the sturdiest components of the plane. Others were absorbed by the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cabin, and some passed through the plane and out its front end without meeting serious resistance.
Six rounds entered the volume of space where Nadia and Chapel lay in a heap in the leg well of the front row of seats.
Three passed close enough to Chapel that he felt them pass him by and heard them buzz like bees. One of them grazed his back, digging a trench through his skin and muscle tissue and causing blood to trickle down his side. One passed directly through the place where his artificial arm would have been, if Kalin hadn’t taken it away.
One bullet entered Nadia’s left side just above her navel, passed through her chest cavity and emerged from her right shoulder, at a substantially slower rate than when it had emerged from the machine gun’s barrel.
The bullet went through one of her lungs. It missed her heart by a fraction of an inch, instead nicking her aorta, the main vessel that brings blood to the heart. Blood immediately began to leak into her chest cavity and found its way through the hole in her lung. There was additional trauma from hydrostatic shock and from broken fragments of her ribs, which moved around inside her chest like shrapnel.
It was not the kind of injury the human body was designed to survive.
The wind howled through holes in the fuselage. The temperature in the cabin had dropped twenty degrees. Chapel opened his eyes.
He saw Nadia’s face, her eyes looking into his.
Blood speckled her lips.
“Nadia,” he said. “Nadia, are you hit?”
“I think so,” she said. Her voice was very small.
“Hold on,” Chapel begged. “You’re going to be okay — just stay with me.”
There was blood on Nadia’s face, but her eyes were still clear. They looked around at the devastation of the plane, then up at Chapel.
“Help me up,” she coughed. Her breathing didn’t sound good, but her voice was firm and strong.
“We shouldn’t move you — there could be damage to—”
“Jim,” she said, “we are falling out of the sky.”
He got his arm around her and helped her slide back into the pilot’s seat, not without a few screams of agony. Red bubbles popped inside her shirt and he knew that couldn’t be good, but when she was sitting up, she gave him a smile.
Chapel forced himself to look forward, through the void where the windscreen had been. He could see nothing but blue water. It was impossible to tell how quickly it was coming toward him, but he imagined it would be faster than he might wish.
Nadia reached out and tapped some of the controls — those that hadn’t been smashed to pieces. She grabbed the steering yoke. “No power,” she said. “No response from the rudder. I think the ailerons still work, but the elevators…” She pulled back on the yoke. The effort made her scream again. “Jim — help me.”
He moved behind her, then reached around and grabbed the yoke in the middle, pulling it toward her. “You think you can still land this thing?”
Laughing clearly caused her pain, but she couldn’t help herself.
“What I can do,” she said, pausing now and again to cough up blood, “is allow us to crash at a slightly more shallow angle than nature had planned.” She looked up at him. “Jim, you know how to swim, don’t you?” She closed her eyes. “What am I saying? When I met you, you were about to go diving.”
“You’re going to try a crash landing on the lake?”
“There is no choice in that,” she told him.
“But this isn’t a seaplane — it’ll sink like a rock.”
“Yes.”
Chapel shook his head. “There has to be — there must be another—”
“Jim, you should learn a little Slavic fatalism. What goes up must come down, yes? Konyechno.”
She wrestled with the yoke in silence for a while. A band of sky appeared over the water ahead of them, but only the merest line of light blue.
“The water will be very cold,” she told him. “You must be careful of hypothermia.”
“We’ll hold on to each other, to share our body heat,” Chapel promised her.
“I wonder,” she said, “if in a hundred years, will the Sibiryak sing folk songs about the woman who flew into Baikal? I wonder if they will be free, then.”
“Nadia, I’m going to get you to shore, we’ll find a doctor—”
“Jim,” she said, “this is what I wanted from you. Not professions of love, not poems and flowers. Just that you would be with me at the end. Holding my hand. You must strap yourself in — the landing will be very rough.”
He started to protest, but he knew she was right. He strapped himself into the seat beside her. Then he reached over and took her hand.
They hit the water fast enough that the wings tore off the plane. Water flooded in through the broken windscreen, a great wave of it smashing over Chapel, almost cold enough to stop his heart. It filled his mouth, crushed him back in his seat. Water filled the cabin almost instantly, and he clamped his mouth shut to hold on to a desperate breath. His hand was yanked free of hers by the wave. He wrestled with his straps, got loose somehow. He reached for her, found her face.
There was nothing left in her eyes.