It was a clear night over Siberia, and as the plane swung north toward its destination, Chapel got to see the sun set, then peek back over the horizon and set again. Yakutsk was close enough to the Arctic Circle that its nights were only six hours long this time of year. When they landed, the sun was rising again and the first pink tinge of dawn was still lining one side of all the airport buildings.
It was enough to give his jet lag jet lag. Chapel hobbled out of the plane, his legs cramped from the flight and still sore, bruised, and lacerated from the beating he’d taken at Aralsk-30. He stepped down a short flight of stairs to the tarmac and thought he could feel the world turning under his feet.
His guard detail emerged behind him, weapons in their hands. Kalin came down last, looking fresh and ready for whatever happened next. If Chapel hadn’t already hated the man with an undying passion, that would probably have been reason enough to start.
They were met by a Russian army officer in a long greatcoat with fur trim around the collar. He looked overdressed. Yakutsk was the coldest city of its size in the world, Chapel knew, but this was the height of summer and it couldn’t be less than fifty-five degrees out. Windbreaker weather, as far as Chapel was concerned.
The officer looked confused as to whom he should salute. He finally settled on Kalin, who returned the gesture with a perfunctory touch of his forehead. The two of them spoke in Russian. Chapel could follow most of what Kalin said, but the officer’s accent was so thick he might have been speaking ancient Etruscan.
They’d been expected, of course, and the officer had a car waiting to take them to an army base where they would be quartered. Kalin replied that wasn’t necessary, that they needed to get to work right away. He ordered that the local troops ready a long-range helicopter at once.
The officer seemed a little put out that his offer of hospitality was rejected. He relayed the order, though, then waved for his troops to come over. There were about fifty of them, and they looked tired. Chapel gathered that they had been part of the detail that was turning the city of Yakutsk upside down looking for Nadia — for the terrorist Asimova. They had searched about a third of the entire city, going door-to-door and checking every house and place of business. They’d gone into cellars and up into attics and found no trace of her, but they were sure that with a little more time—
“She’s not here,” Chapel said, in Russian.
The officer turned to look at him with genuine curiosity. Chapel wasn’t surprised. His presence here was a state secret, not the kind of thing Valits would have passed on to his low-ranking officers. Beyond that, a foreigner in civilian clothes with one arm was always going to stand out on an army base.
“She’s not stupid enough to come to Yakutsk,” Chapel went on, carefully sounding out the words in his head before he said them. “She knows you will look here first.”
The officer opened his mouth to ask a question, but Kalin cut him off. He spoke slowly, perhaps for Chapel’s benefit, but his words had the sound of true command. “This man is an American who specializes in advanced signal technology. His role is to help us find the terrorist Asimova. However, he does not possess a security clearance. Your men will not speak to him unless it is absolutely necessary, and under no circumstances are they to accept any order he tries to give.”
The officer nodded in understanding. He looked distinctly relieved. Chapel had been a soldier long enough to understand why. No matter what rank you held in the military, someone was always your boss, and someone else probably took orders from you. You had to answer to the former for the mistakes of the latter. You always needed to know where everyone around you fit in, what category they belonged to. Now that Chapel was squared away, the officer could just write him off.
The officer led them to a nearby building where there was coffee and a simple meal of coarse bread and pickled fish. For about fifteen minutes they waited there until the helicopter was ready to receive them. Nobody spoke a word to him the whole time.
The helicopter turned out to be an Mi-8, recognizable by the twin turboprop power plants mounted over its canopy. It was a beast of a machine, a huge fuselage with the tail assembly sticking out the back like the tail of a tadpole. Drop tanks full of fuel studded its sides. Kalin led his troops onboard — twenty men in full body armor, each of them carrying a carbine and enough grenades to make them jangle as they jumped on board. He waved Chapel in last, putting him close to the hatch where he would at least get a good view of the ground. It occurred to Chapel that placing him there would make it convenient for Kalin to throw him out of the helicopter at altitude, if the need arose.
Kalin bellowed some orders over the noise of the screaming engines, but Chapel didn’t bother translating in his head. He knew what his job was here.
From the air, from the crew compartment of the helicopter, Yakutsk was an island of concrete buildings huddling around the Lena River, surrounded on every side by close ranks of high pine trees that stretched away to the horizon. Here and there Chapel caught the reflection of moonlight on water glinting through the trees, but the pines were tall enough he couldn’t ever figure out where the ponds and rivers were. He put his hand over his left ear and spoke to Angel through the hands-free unit in his right.
“Did you find it?” he asked.
“Sweetie, I’m a miracle worker, but some miracles are harder than others,” she told him, sounding apologetic. His heart sank. If she hadn’t found the information he needed, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. “You asked me to find anything on Nadia’s grandfather, but you couldn’t even give me his name.”
“He was a shaman who rode around on a reindeer,” Chapel said. He forced himself to make a joke to cover how nervous he felt. “Did you try looking up Santa Claus?” He glanced north, over the endless landscape of trees. “I know he lives at the North Pole, and we’re close here.”
“Cute. But weirdly appropriate. Where you are now, they call Santa by the name Ded Moroz and he lives east of Finland. Believe it or not, his name basically means Grandfather Frost, and he’s always accompanied by his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden.”
“You’re kidding me. You don’t think she made the whole thing up—”
“I’d hardly put it past her,” Angel said. “But at least this time, no, I don’t think she was lying. I don’t think she gave you a children’s legend as her cover story. I looked back through her genealogical records. She had a grandfather on her father’s side who was an accountant in Novosibirsk — there’s lots of information on him; you have to love accountants for the way they keep such nice, tidy records. As far as her maternal grandfather goes, there’s basically nothing. No national identification in the databases, no tax records, no death certificate, even. Not surprising if he really was a tribal shaman. Communications and transportation in Siberia were very spotty up until recently, and there’s never been an accurate census for the more northern settlements. There are probably whole ethnic groups out there in the woods that don’t even know that they’re Russians yet, because nobody from Moscow has found them to tell them.”
Chapel closed his eyes. “So you couldn’t find what I need.”
“I didn’t say that. I did find something, but it’s thin. I started poking around Nadia’s parents’ records. There was a lot more there. Her mother was a metallurgist, but she didn’t start out that way. She was born in a village somewhere southwest of Yakutsk, an Evenk village where her stated occupation was ‘herder.’ She ran away from home when she was fourteen and ended up in Yakutsk — it’s the only decent-sized city in a thousand square miles. That’s where she got her training and where she met Nadia’s father. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, so I don’t even know what the name of her village was—”