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

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.
OFF CAY SAL BANK: JUNE 11, 00:43
    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