The Hydra Protocol by David Wellington Read Free Book Online Page A

floor—what had been the portside wall of the cabin—was most of the captain’s body minus the skull. The body was still dressed in a Soviet naval uniform. Clutched in one skeletal hand was a pistol that must have fired the fatal shot, the one that left the exit wound Chapel had found in the skull.
    He could guess what had happened. His briefing hadn’t mentioned what became of the Kurchatov ’s captain. At the time Chapel assumed he had just gone ashore with the rest of his crew and his passengers. Apparently not. Instead the man had elected to go down with his ship.
    He must have sealed himself in his cabin and waited for the end as the submarine sank to the bottom. He must have listened to that horrible groaning, just as Chapel was now. How long had he waited until he took his own life? Had he used up all the oxygen in the room and chosen not to let himself asphyxiate? Or had it happened long before then, when he realized that his beloved nation was no more? Maybe—
    Maybe, Chapel thought, he should stop trying to imagine the captain’s last moments and focus on the mission at hand.
    He realized he was still holding the skull. He turned it upside down to let a last wavering silver bubble of air out of its cavity, then gently put it down with the rest of the skeleton. Then he turned and looked for the captain’s desk. It was a tiny ledge that folded up into the cabin’s wall. He pulled it down on its hinges and some of its contents drifted out—more papers, a pair of brass calipers that settled quickly to the floor. It had a compartment that could be locked but hadn’t been. He opened the compartment and found a couple of neatly folded charts inside and an envelope that probably held the captain’s orders for what to do when the coup failed.
    Not what he was looking for.
    Chapel turned around and found the captain’s personal locker under the bunk. He pulled open its door and reached inside to search the contents.
    He drew out the contents of the locker. A spare uniform. A wooden box containing a couple of Soviet medals. A box of ammunition for the captain’s pistol. Some old photographs.
    None of that was helpful to him. But he was out of places to look. The cabin was tiny, with very little in the way of storage space—the desk and the locker were pretty much it. He supposed that what he was looking for could be hidden somewhere, underneath the thin carpeting that lined the floor, maybe, or in a secret compartment built into the walls, but—
    Think, Chapel , he told himself. What he was looking for wouldn’t be hidden in a secret compartment that was difficult to access. The captain would have needed it every time he used the sub’s radio. It had to be close by, and easy to get to, but secure . . .
    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