The Hydra Protocol (6 page)

Chapel spun around and looked at the skeleton. At the uniform jacket it wore. He kicked over and looked down at the skull, saying a silent apology. Then he pulled at the jacket until its buttons came loose. The rib cage underneath collapsed under his hands as he rummaged in the captain’s pockets.

There! A little book with a black leatherette cover, just as it had been described to him. It looked like an address book, but when Chapel opened it to a random page, he saw columns of numbers and Cyrillic characters in a grid. The pages had all been laminated to protect them from the water. This was what he needed.

He stowed it in a pouch at his belt and took one last look at the captain’s skeleton. He wished he could take the medals, too, or some token of the man’s passing so he could send it to the captain’s family. So they would have something of the man. But no—no one could ever know that Chapel had been inside the submarine, that
anyone
had touched it since it sank.

He could only offer the respectful moment of silence that one military man owed another. The recognition, something like a prayer, of those who served in secret. He saluted the skeleton, then turned to leave the cabin that would forever be the captain’s tomb.

Out on the crew deck he stopped and checked his partial pressures, then took a second to get his bearings. His head felt a little light, but not enough so to make him giddy. The long dive and the scare he’d gotten when the captain’s skull came at him had left him exhausted and sore, as if he’d been working hard for hours.

It was time for Chapel to get out of there. To head back to the surface. He knew he wouldn’t feel right again until he could take off his mask and breathe the clean air above the waves. Time to start his ascent.

Moving carefully, Chapel retraced his path and emerged from the broken tail of the submarine, back out into open water.

It was going to take a lot longer to go up than it had to come down. Diving to these kinds of depths was always a risky proposition, and he’d gone down a lot farther than anyone ever should. His tissues were suffused with gaseous nitrogen from breathing the Trimix provided by his rebreather. He was going to need hours of decompression time before he was back in real air again, to prevent the bends. The rebreather would help shorten that time, especially with the helium he’d added to his mix, but it was dangerous to breathe too much helium during an ascent as well, so he was going to need to take his time.

So he took his time looking for the cable. He swam around in circles for a bit until he found the ledge, a darker patch of shadow to one side of him. He made his way slowly up that slope, pausing for a few minutes every ten feet, paying very close attention to his depth gauge because it was the only way to tell that he was, in fact, ascending and not diving deeper into the cold water.

When he reached the ledge, he stuck close to it, reinforcing in his mind the idea that it was down, a floor from which he could make his ascent. He stumbled on the anchor almost by mistake, banging his artificial hand on one of its flukes. He yanked the hand back in surprise, then cursed himself and patted around himself carefully to find it again in the murk. Then he did something he really, really didn’t want to do—he turned off his lights. That left him blind, but at least he didn’t have to stay deaf anymore.

Groping his way up he reached for the anchor cable. The conductive wires in his glove made contact with the metal cable and he heard a very welcome hiss in his earphones. He was back in communication with Angel.

“It’s done,” he told her. “I’m starting my ascent. Should take—about two hours, now.” Saying it made his heart sink. He was more than ready for this dive to be over.

His frustration didn’t last long.

“Chapel? I’ve got you—can you hear me all right?” she asked. She sounded nervous. That was never, ever a good sign.

“You’re coming through just fine. There were some hiccups, but I’ve managed to—”

“Chapel, you need to be up top
now,
” she said.

“What?” He didn’t understand. “No, Angel, I need to decompress—”

“There’s no time. I wish I could have kept you apprised, but you were out of communication for so long. Chapel, start your ascent now,
please
.”

Chapel reached for the cable with his free hand and started hauling himself slowly upward, hand over hand. “I can reduce the number of decompression stops,” he told her. “I’m supposed to stop every ten feet and pause, but I can make it twenty—”

“No, Chapel—you don’t have that kind of time. The Cubans found the boat.”

Oh no
, he thought. That was bad. That was very bad.

The
Kurchatov
had sunk in disputed waters, claimed by both the Bahamas and by Cuba, which made them off-limits to American vessels. When Chapel had spoken with the yacht’s captain and asked him to drop anchor here, he’d known there was a risk they would be spotted by the Cuban coast guard. The risk was low—Cuba wasn’t known to have a large number of vessels patrolling these waters—but they had tried to prepare for it anyway. Angel had been watching for any approaching vessels, and one must have appeared while he was down in the wreck.

“How much time do I have before they arrive?” Chapel asked. There was no question in his mind that the Cubans would approach and board Donny’s yacht as soon as they spotted it.

“None. They’ve already signaled the yacht that they’re coming aboard. In a few minutes they’ll be boarding and they’ll probably search the whole boat. You need to be topside right now.”

Chapel grunted in frustration. “What if I just stay down here until they’re gone?” he asked. “That’ll give me plenty of decompression time. If I come up now, I’m at real risk for decompression sickness.”

“You’re going to have to chance it. Chapel, your name is on the passenger list.”

Crap
, Chapel thought. He hadn’t thought of that. When he came aboard Donny’s yacht, Donny had insisted he sign in. He would have preferred to come aboard incognito, but it hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time.

“If you’re not present when they board the yacht, they’ll have way too many questions and they’ll be able to claim the yacht is evidence in an ongoing investigation,” Angel told him. “They’ll impound it and tow it back to Cuba to try to figure out what’s going on. You can stay down and wait for them to leave with the yacht, but then you’ll be surfacing in twenty miles of open water with no way home but to swim there.”

Worse than that, Donny and all his party guests would be arrested and thrown in a Cuban jail until they could explain what had happened to the missing man on the guest list. He couldn’t let that happen to his friends.

“All right, Angel. I’m going to have to go back into radio silence for a minute. I’ll contact you when I hit the surface.”

“Understood. The Cubans are coming in from behind and slightly to starboard of the yacht. If you’re going to make bubbles or a splash, try to use the bulk of the yacht to cover your ascent.”

“Got it.” Chapel let go of the cable and swam backward for a second.
This is going to hurt
, he thought. Coming up from this depth without decompression stops made it inevitable that he was going to get the bends, rebreather or no.

It couldn’t be helped. He unbuckled his weight belt and let it fall away into the murk. He shed as many of his pouches and pieces of equipment as he could, even the dive computer, then he started kicking toward the surface. His natural buoyancy started lifting him up immediately, straight toward the waves above, but even that wasn’t fast enough. He unclipped the helium tank from his abdomen and pointed its nozzle downward, then threw open its valve and used it like a miniature rocket booster.

Up. Straight up. A hell of a lot faster than he’d gone down.

As Chapel approached the surface his eyes started working again. A little moonlight was coming down to meet him, and it turned the surface of the waves into a vast rolling mirror, obscured by a large dark mass. As he got closer he saw that shadow split into two. One part was the yacht, big and square and right over his head. The other must be the Cuban coast guard ship. It was only about half the size of the yacht, but it had the sleek, streamlined curves of a warship and looked like a shark nuzzling up against a bloated sunfish.

As he got even closer he could make out a few details. The Cuban ship had tied up to the side of the yacht, which had to mean the Cubans had already boarded. Chapel was going to have to sneak back on board and hope he could mix in with the partygoers so no one noticed he hadn’t been there the whole time.

Angel could help him get a feel for how things were up there. As he neared the surface he reached for the anchor cable again. “Angel?” he asked. “What can you tell me? Am I too late?”

There was no answer except the steady hiss that meant his earphones were working. They just weren’t picking anything up.

Chapel poked his head above the water and studied the cable. The transponder unit he’d clipped to it was gone. Someone must have found it.

That could be very, very bad.

Once he’d broken the surface, though, his headset could patch into the cellular network and he could at least make contact. “Angel,” he whispered, “are you receiving me?”

“I sure am, honey,” she said back. “You’ve just got time, if you hurry.”

The mystery of the missing transponder would have to wait. Chapel climbed up onto the swimming balcony at the bow of the yacht and started tearing off his gear. The mask came first and suddenly he was breathing real, fresh air again, not his own recycled breath. It burned his lungs—there was a lot more oxygen up here than he’d been getting below—but it tasted so sweet he didn’t care. He wriggled out of the drysuit as fast as he could, careful not to get his artificial arm wet. He opened the pouch that held the little laminated book he’d salvaged from the
Kurchatov
, then bundled up all the rest of his gear, drysuit, rebreather, headset, all of it, and tossed it over the side. It floated for a second and then disappeared without so much as a gurgle. It was a real shame to just throw away all that expensive equipment, but Chapel knew if he was caught with technical diving gear, the Cubans would ask a lot of questions he was in no position to answer. Worst of all, it meant losing his connection to Angel as well—but that was another thing he would have a hard time explaining.

Wearing nothing but a thin pair of trunks, Chapel ran hands through his sweaty hair and stepped through the balcony’s door, into the lower deck of the yacht. He could hear someone shouting in Spanish over his head, but no one saw him as he moved quickly toward the stairs that led to the main deck.

Halfway up, a brick wall came out of nowhere and hit him full on.

At least, it felt that way. Every muscle in his body just shut down at once. A wave of fatigue and dizziness passed through him, and he felt a desperate, unbearable desire to sit down, to lean his head against the wall. To go to sleep right then and there and not even bother finding a comfortable place to lie down.

“Shit,” he breathed, because he knew where that came from. It could take hours for the first symptoms of decompression sickness to set in, he knew, or just minutes. The faster it came on, the worse it was going to get.

In all his time diving, Chapel had never gotten the bends before. He’d always been careful to decompress in stages, to read dive charts more carefully than some people read the Bible, to know his limits. He’d managed to stay clear of every diver’s worst nightmare—until now.

But he’d seen other divers go through it. It wasn’t pretty. He remembered one guy down in Mexico, off the Yucatán, curled up in the bottom of a rowboat, screaming and crying as his joints shook and spasmed. If that was what awaited him—

He couldn’t let it. He couldn’t give in to the nitrogen in his blood. Chapel forced himself to stand upright, to keep moving. He climbed the stairs one at a time, forcing himself to lift each foot, to keep himself steady.

Just a little farther. Just up a few more steps. Up ahead the main deck opened up around the pool. Chapel could just see what was going on out there. The partygoers were lined up around the edge, none of them talking. Most were looking at their feet or up at the sky, anywhere but at the soldiers who had boarded the yacht.

There were a dozen of them, all of them carrying carbines slung around their necks. They wore the green uniforms and flat-topped hats that Chapel always associated with Fidel Castro. That was strange. Those were Cuban army uniforms, not the white sailor suits that naval personnel wore.

Another mystery. Chapel had no time for mysteries. It was taking everything he had to keep climbing the stairs.

The soldiers were looking every partygoer up and down, checking names against a list. They didn’t leer at the young women in their bikinis, didn’t try to outmacho the muscle-bound guys in their Speedos. The soldiers had a job to do, and they were being consummate professionals. Not what Chapel had expected at all.

He came up to a broad archway that led to the main deck. He would walk out there, he thought, walk out calling his own name and apologizing profusely. He would claim that he’d been stuck in the head and couldn’t get up top until just now. Maybe, just maybe, the Cubans would buy it.

He took a step toward the deck, but his foot never came down.

Instead a bright blossom of pure red agony burst inside his knee, and his leg bent under him until he was standing like a flamingo. A flamingo that very much wanted to die.

“Christ,” Chapel said, biting off the word so he didn’t shout it. The pain was incredible. He’d been shot before, several times in fact, but even that didn’t hurt like this. Nothing ever had.

At least, not until his good shoulder started up, too. It felt like his arm was being cut off, like he was going to lose that one too. Like there was a knife inside his arm, ripping away at his muscles, grating against his bones. He reached over with the artificial arm to grab the flesh there, to squeeze it even though he knew that wouldn’t help at all.