The Hydra Protocol (2 page)

Donny had always been a big guy. He and Chapel had gone through Ranger school together and bonded over the fact they’d both grown up in Florida. Back then, Donny had constantly complained that the life of a soldier interfered with his ability to lift weights and that he was running to flab. That had regularly elicited nothing but groans from the other grunts, who wanted to bitch about how heavy their packs were—some of them suggested Donny could carry their packs for them. When Chapel went off to Afghanistan, Donny had gone to Iraq. Flabby or not, after one particularly nasty firefight in Fallujah, Donny had ended up carrying two wounded soldiers off the battlefield, one under each arm. He’d gotten a medal for that.

Since his discharge Donny had clearly returned to working out almost full-time. Nor was he particularly modest about his body. He wore nothing but a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses, some floral print board shorts, and a neon pink pair of flip-flops. One of his massive biceps had been tattooed with a banner reading
75 RANGER RGT
, while his other arm had been decorated with a multicolored banner showing he’d fought in the war on terror. Neither of those tattoos was regulation, though now that Donny was a civilian again, he was allowed to do with his skin as he pleased.

“How many times did I invite you down for a cruise, and you always said no? I don’t know how you did it, but you picked the perfect time to say yes. There is some serious action over there,” Donny told Chapel as he released him from the bear hug. “I’m talking
talent
, Jimmy. Normally, I call one of these boat rides, I’m looking at five or six girls I would do bad things for. Today there’s at least a dozen. At least come take a look, huh?”

“Maybe
just
for a look,” Chapel told Donny.

“I promise, your redhead girlfriend will not mind if you look,” Donny told him, smiling. “And anything else that happens, well, we
are
in international waters.”

“That doesn’t give me a get-out-of-monogamy-free card. And stop calling me Jimmy. Only my elementary school teachers and my mother ever called me that.”

“Sure thing, Jimbo,” Donny said, grabbing Chapel’s arm and pulling him back toward the deck.

Chapel couldn’t help but grin. Donny Melvin deserved a little fun after what he’d done in Iraq. If he was a little raucous about it, where was the harm?

Back on the deck a group of girls in bikinis shouted and squealed as Donny burst into their midst. One of them threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. She had a plastic cup of beer in one hand and she spilled half of it down Donny’s back by accident, but Donny just whooped at the icy touch and hugged the girl. “This is Sheila,” he shouted over the thumping music. “She’s a student at—what school was it?”

“Shelly!” she shouted back.

“What?” Donny asked her.

“My name is Shelly!” she shouted. “Shelly!”

“Seriously?” Donny spun her around and squatted to take a look at the tattoo that rode just above the top of her bikini bottom. “Oh, man! King James, meet Shelly,” he said. “You can recognize her by the butterfly back here.”

Shelly spun around with a mock scowl on her face, which prompted Donny to get a shoulder under her stomach and lift her up into the air. She screamed and giggled and spilled the rest of her beer as he carried her through the crowd toward the open air bar. Dancers and drinkers alike moved out of his way, some of them raising cups in salute as he barged through their midst. This was, after all, Donny’s party. And Donny’s boat.

Donny had not exactly signed up with the army for the GI bill. His father owned half the orange trees in Florida. One day Donny was going to have to learn how to take care of orange trees himself. But clearly that day was not today.

“Shots!” Donny shouted, and a hundred people all around him shouted it back. The two bartenders grabbed for bottles with both hands and started lining up waxed paper shot glasses on the marble top of the bar, which was already strewn with empty cups and discarded pieces of swimwear. Donny laid Shelly down on her back across the bar, and one of the bartenders poured a good measure of liquor right into her open mouth. Two other girls had already come rushing up to hang on Donny’s arms. It didn’t seem to be slowing him down any.

“Who’s your friend?” one of them asked, a blonde with elaborately plucked eyebrows. She gave Chapel a look that might have melted him on the spot if he was ten years younger. It threatened to melt him anyway, old as he was.

“A fellow soldier, I think,” another woman said, from Chapel’s right. She had a slight accent he couldn’t place, and when he turned to look at her, he saw she wasn’t like any of the bikini-clad coeds surrounding Donny. “He has the bearing. And the quiet that hides behind the eyes. Yes?”

The woman was significantly older than the coeds. Early thirties, Chapel thought. Short dark hair surrounded vaguely Asian features and instead of the orangish tan of the girls, her skin was a rich, warm shade that looked like it actually came from spending time in the sun. Shelly and the blonde and all the others were beautiful, in a sort of mass-produced girl-next-door kind of way, but this newcomer was striking, the kind of woman you would take a second look at wherever you saw her. She wasn’t wearing a bikini, either—instead she had on a short sundress that tied at the back of her neck. The dress gave just the subtlest sense of the athletic body underneath and somehow seemed more scandalous than a bikini would, since it left so much to the imagination.

“He’s got soldier hair,” the blonde said, reaching around Donny to run her fingers across the stubble on the back of Chapel’s neck. “I love that feeling! It tickles,” she said, laughing.

It did more for Chapel than just tickle. Still, he found himself turning to look at the older woman. He found he wanted to look at her very much. Nothing more, of course, not with Julia waiting back in New York. But like Donny had said, there was no harm in looking.

“Quite a lot hidden back there, I think,” she said, as if the blonde didn’t exist. “Jim here could tell us all a few things, if he let himself.”

Chapel’s mouth started to curve into a frown. How had she known his name? Nobody had introduced them. But it seemed the mystery would have to wait.

“In the pool, now,” Donny called out, lifting a pair of plastic cups over his head.

“You go ahead,” Chapel told him, smiling at his friend.

But Donny wasn’t having it. “My party, my rules. I’m getting hot and I want to cool down. With you,” he said to the blonde, “and you,” to a brunette who looked up with the wide eyes of someone who had just won the lottery, “and Sheila, of course.”

“Shelly!” the girl yelled from the bar, sitting up and knocking over the paper shot cups the bartender had been arranging on her stomach. Nobody seemed to mind. Shelly jumped off the bar onto Donny’s back and howled in laughter as he ran with her over to the pool, only a few feet away. He jumped in with Shelly still clinging to his neck, sending up a great wave of chlorinated water that splashed half a dozen dancers nearby. A general roar of excitement went up and the DJ switched to a new track, one with an even faster beat. One by one girls and men jumped in the pool after Donny, until the deck was awash with their splashing.

“Jim-meeee!” Donny shouted. “Where’s my Jim Dog? Jim-Jam, you get in here right now or I’ll have the captain throw you overboard!”

Raising his hands in protest, Chapel tried to laugh off the invitation.

Donny wouldn’t hear it. “In. The. Pool. Now!” He lunged out of the pool and grabbed Chapel’s leg. “Now!”

“Hold on,” Chapel said, suddenly alarmed. If Donny pulled him into the pool just then, it was going to be a problem. “Let me just—”

“Get that shirt off him,” Donny shouted, and a couple of coeds came giggling up to do just that. Despite his best efforts, they managed to pull Chapel’s polo shirt over his head.

Chapel knew exactly what would happen then.

The girls in the pool stopped laughing. One of them wiped hair from her eyes and stared at his left arm, and especially his left shoulder. It took a second for others to notice, but he could tell when they did because their eyes went wide too. Nobody said anything, of course. But it looked as if the water in the pool had suddenly turned twenty degrees cooler.

“Damn it, Donny,” Chapel said, under his breath.

Under the polo shirt, Chapel’s left arm looked just like his right one. It had the same skin tone and the same amount of hair. The illusion ended at the shoulder, though, where the arm flared out into a wide clamp that held it secured to his torso.

There was no point in trying to hide it anymore. Chapel reached up with his right hand and flipped back the catches to release the arm. It was a prosthesis, an exceptionally clever and well-designed replacement for the arm he’d lost in Afghanistan. When he took it off and laid it down carefully on a deck chair, it looked like something torn off a mannequin. He worried about just leaving it there, but he doubted anyone would get too close. None of these people would want to touch the thing.

The DJ didn’t scratch a record. Most of the partygoers saw nothing, and their roaring clamor of excitement didn’t drop by so much as a decibel. But around the pool the whole atmosphere of the party had changed, grown more subdued. The party was ruined.

Chapel stepped down into the pool and submerged himself until only his head was above the water. He looked over at Donny with half a grimace on his face. He wanted very much to duck his head under as well, and just disappear.

“Does it hurt?” Shelly asked.

“No,” he told her. “Not anymore.”

“How did . . . I mean, how—”

Donny swam over to stand next to Chapel. “Shelly,” he said, “do you remember 9/11?”

“Of course I do!” she squeaked. “I was in fifth grade when it happened. We got to go home from school for, like, three whole days.”

Donny’s face squirmed as he tried to contain a braying laugh, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Eventually he just gave in and let the laughter boom all around the pool, until somebody else picked up on it, and then everyone was laughing. Even Chapel. “This man here,” Donny said, “is an American hero!,” and he grabbed Chapel’s right hand under the water and dragged it up into the air, making Chapel stand up and show his ruined left shoulder again.

The pool erupted in one huge roaring cheer, as cups everywhere lifted in the air and pointed in Chapel’s direction. The dancers jumped up and down and the bartenders grabbed new bottles and the party lurched back into full-on mode, back to exactly where it had been before Chapel’s shirt came off.

Good old Donny
, he thought.

The party never really ended, but the level of alcohol consumed on board meant that by the time the sun set, a lot more people were sitting down than dancing. Dinner—catered by one of Miami’s best authentic Cuban restaurants—was served at eight o’clock and that helped alleviate the chaos a little, too.

Chapel found he had to be careful where he walked on the deck, which was strewn with abandoned cups and greasy paper plates. It would be very easy to slip and fall overboard, and he was a little surprised nobody had done so yet. He found Donny holding court in a lifeboat that hung off the starboard side. Nestled in there with him on a canvas tarp were Shelly and a couple of girls Chapel hadn’t been introduced to. A guy who looked like a surfer, maybe half Chapel’s age, was tuning an acoustic guitar while he puffed on a joint. As Chapel leaned over the side of the boat the surfer tried to hand it to him, but Chapel politely waved it away.

“Permission to come aboard?” Chapel asked.

Donny smiled. His eyes were a little hooded, and he looked like he was ready for a nap. Shelly was stroking his arms as if she couldn’t believe how muscular they were. “Granted,” he said. “Jim . . . Jim . . . I need another stupid name to call you.”

“Keep going, you’ll get there,” Chapel said, climbing into the lifeboat. It swayed a little and he mostly fell inside, right on top of a woman he hadn’t seen. Everyone seemed to think this was hysterically funny, including the woman he’d fallen on.

“Sailor Jim,” Donny said, finally. “Is that something? Is there a Sailor Jim? Lord Jim, maybe. Isn’t that a book?”

“There’s a Slim Jim,” Shelly pointed out.

“I was saving that one for later.” Donny reached over and steadied Chapel as he tried to find a seat in the crowded lifeboat.

Once Chapel was safely ensconced he turned to apologize to the woman he’d fallen on. It turned out to be the dark-haired Asian woman he’d met earlier at the bar, the one who’d pegged him as a soldier. She acknowledged his apology by closing her eyes for a second and giving him a vampish shrug.

“I’ve had worse things fall upon me,” she said. “So Donny has told us all about you.”

“He has?” Chapel asked, a little alarmed.

“Is it so strange? You are the honored guest of this voyage. And a very interesting man to hear him tell it. A man of many accomplishments. You fought in Afghanistan, he says?”

Chapel frowned. What had Donny been saying about him? Donny didn’t know anything too secret—most of Chapel’s military career was classified—but he valued his privacy. “I don’t much like to talk about the past.”

“Me either,” Donny announced. He struggled to sit up, pulling Shelly with him until she was sitting on his lap. “Especially when the present is so much more interesting. In all the years I’ve been sailing on this yacht, this is the very first time Jim Chapel has agreed to grace us with his presence. I want to know why now, after all this time.”

Chapel sighed. “I had some things I needed to think through. I thought I would get away for a few days, give myself some quiet time.”

“Exactly what you should expect from one of my world-famous party cruises. Peace and quiet!” The girls in the lifeboat all cheered and shouted at the idea. “C’mon, Jimster. Spill the beans. You said it was something to do with that girlfriend of yours. The sexy redhead.”

Chapel laughed. “You’ve never met Julia. How do you know she’s sexy?”

“Red hair. Likes soldiers. Sounds like a good start,” Donny pointed out.