The Hydra Protocol by David Wellington Read Free Book Online

been breached.
    Chapel knew there was no way he would ever get the hatch open by main strength. He would have had to fight the entire ocean to do it. Luckily he’d come prepared. In a pouch at his belt he had a small lump of plastic explosive and an electronic detonator. He worked the plastique carefully, rolling it into a thick rope, then pressed it into place along the hatch seals. Then he swam away from the door, moving into the tiny wardroom. It had a folding door that he shut behind him. He put one arm over his mask and hit the detonator.
    The explosion made a lot of noise and a huge shock wave that buffeted Chapel even through the wardroom door. He hated to think what would happen to any nearby fish. When it had passed, he shoved open the wardroom door and swam back out.
    The crew deck was full of bubbles and disturbed sediment that made his lights nearly useless. A thick torrent of silver bubbles rushed up out of the place where the cabin hatch had been, the trapped air of twenty years screaming out and upward. Chapel fought through the curtain of roiling air and heard it hiss against his suit, felt it push back against him as it tried desperately to escape. He reached for the wheel to open the hatch—the pressures would equalize soon, and it would open easily once—
    Then a grinning skull came flying at him and smacked him right in his mask.
THE WRECK OF THE KURCHATOV : JUNE 10, 23:49
    Chapel sucked in a deep breath and shoved himself backward, out of the storm of bubbles, but the skull kept after him, bouncing against his face again and again. He collided painfully with something behind him and one of his flippers broke loose, and for a second he could only spin around, desperately grabbing for it as the disturbed muck of the submarine rose up around him, filling up the cone of his lights, making him half blind—and still the skull kept bobbing after him, bumping against the ceiling, its teeth lunging right for his mask.
    It took all his self-control to stop thrashing and try to calm down.
    It wasn’t some long dead sailor’s ghost that was after him. Just the remains of a man who had sealed himself in his cabin when the submarine went down. Chapel forced himself to reach out and take hold of it, one thumb in an eye socket. The skull wanted to float out of his hand—there must still be a bubble of air inside it, a bubble that had lifted it out of the ruptured hatch. When he had shot backward, away from the cabin hatch, he had created an eddy in the water that had sucked the skull after him. That was all.
    The skull looked a lot less imposing when it wasn’t attacking him. It was just a normal human skull, fleshless and yellow. It was missing its lower jaw. There was a big ragged hole in the back of it that looked like the exit wound of a gunshot.
    He got his flipper back on. The muck had started to settle again, and he could see a little better. The bubbles had all but stopped streaming from the breached door. Still holding the skull, he used the fingers of his free hand to lift the cabin door, releasing a last trapped pocket of air.
    Around him the hissing roar of the escaping air slowly subsided, and once again he could hear the long, drawn-out death knell of the submarine. He ignored the noise and slipped inside the captain’s cabin.
    This room hadn’t changed at all in twenty years. It had been sealed shut and full of air, not seawater, until Chapel came along. The tan paint on the walls was intact, and the captain’s meager furnishings were still in good shape—hardwood gleamed where it had been polished, brass shone in Chapel’s lights. It was a ridiculous mess now, though. Chapel had done far more to disturb the cabin than the ocean could. Letting in the seawater had sent papers floating like two-dimensional fish that swirled around him. The blankets on the single narrow bunk fluttered and frayed as he watched, stirred up by the water that had rushed inside.
    Curled up in one corner of the