The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  “How’s it work?” Angel asked.

  “Pretty good,” he told her. “Your voice is a little distorted, but I can understand you just fine.”

  “Do I still sound all breathless and sultry?” she asked.

  “That comes through, no problem,” he told her.

  There were benefits to working for the world’s most technologically advanced military.

  He tested the mask to make sure it wouldn’t fog up with his breath. Then he ducked his head under the water, bled some air from his buoyancy compensator, and dropped down into the dark ocean like a stone.

  OFF CAY SAL BANK: JUNE 10, 22:24

  For a second he flailed around in the dark, looking for the anchor cable. His good hand grasped it, and he pulled himself over to hug it. He waited a moment for his body to adjust to the weightlessness of the water. Then he started his descent.

  There wasn’t much swimming involved. He turned himself upside down and started climbing down the cable, hand over hand. A little moonlight streamed down around him, shafts of it spearing down into the dark and occasionally lighting up the flickering shape of a passing fish. The local wildlife kept its distance, scared of this big weird shape that had invaded their domain. Sharks would be less wary, but probably wouldn’t attack him on principle—or so he hoped.

  After a minute or two, the light went away, and he could see nothing through his mask but black water. There was no sound anywhere except for his own breathing and the rhythmic slap of his hands on the cable.

  Down. Put one hand forward, grab the cable. Release the other hand. Move that hand down, grab the cable. Down. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing to smell but the rubber mask. He could barely feel the cable through the thick gloves. Down.

  It was funny—well, not ha-ha funny—how fast the total lack of light affected him.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in darkness this profound. Where he lived now, in New York, it never really got dark. There were streetlights outside his apartment’s windows, and the city itself gave off so much light it painted the sky no matter how cloudy it got.

  This was like being at the bottom of a coal mine. This was like floating, weightless and lost, in the depths of space. This was like being blind.

  Down. One hand after another. Down. He kept repeating the word to himself in his head, reminding himself that he was moving in a particular direction. He had no referents other than the cable. His body didn’t feel like it was upside down. If he let go of the cable now, if he swam away, he wouldn’t even know which direction was up, or how to get back to the surface.

  Better not let go, then. Down. He checked the luminous readouts on his dive computer, made sure his oxygen mix was at the right partial pressure. If it was off, if the various safeguards and fail-safes built into the rebreather all went off-line at the same time, he could flood his lungs with oxygen and give himself oxygen toxicity. Supposedly that felt like being pleasantly drunk, but it was a great way to die underwater. Especially if you were diving alone. The first symptoms would be disorientation and giddiness.

  He definitely felt disoriented. He double-checked the readouts.

  His oxygen levels were fine.

  Down. Release with one hand, clutch with the other. Down.

  When Angel spoke in his ear, he was absurdly grateful. “You’re making good time,” she told him. “It’s going to feel longer than it actually is. Can you still hear me okay?”

  “Loud and clear. Everything okay topside?”

  “Yeah. So. Now that we can talk in private . . .”

  Chapel stopped climbing down the cable for a second. “Yes?” he asked. “Something on your mind?”

  “I just wondered—have you got the ring yet?”

  Chapel wanted to laugh. Never a great idea on a dive, of course. Laughing used up a lot of air. He forced himself to merely grin through the plastic mask. If any fish were watching with better eyes than he had, maybe they would see the scary monster from above the surface bare its teeth.

  “Yeah,” he told her. “It’s waiting for me back in New York. I just have to pick it up.” He pulled himself down another meter. Down.

  “Is it nice? Julia deserves something nice.”

  “I agree.” Down. One hand over the other. “It’s nice. A gold band with a single diamond. Nothing showy—you know that’s not her style. Not too big.”

  “I think if it were me you were proposing to,” Angel told him, with just a trace of jealousy in her voice, “I’d be perfectly happy with something showy. And big.”

  “Stop trying to make me laugh.” Down. Release with the left hand, clutch with the right. Release with the right hand, hold on with the left. Down.

  “You know I’m happy for you,” Angel said. “You know that.”

  “I do,” he told her. When he’d first told Angel that he was going to propose, it had felt distinctly weird. He was confiding in a woman he’d never met. He didn’t even know what Angel looked like. But it didn’t feel weird for long. She’d been whispering in his ear for so long he felt like they were old, close friends.

  “I mean, I’m happy for you now. I wasn’t . . . convinced. At first.”

  “I know,” Chapel said. Down. Angel had suggested he take his time and think about what he was doing. He and Julia had been fighting a lot, and they had both said things they couldn’t take back. Angel had suggested that maybe that wasn’t the best time to make things official. But Chapel was certain he was making the right decision.

  Down. One hand. The other hand. Down.

  He checked his depth gauge. Thirty meters. This was the farthest he’d ever dived before, and he was only a fifth of the way to the bottom. It had felt like no time at all. Or like he’d been doing this for hours.

  “How long until I can turn my lights on?” he asked.

  “A little ways, yet. I just wanted to tell you something. I know you can make her happy. You’ve never failed at a mission yet, Jim. I think if you put your mind to this, you’ll be a great husband.”

  Down. He wished he could kick his way down. It would be so much faster. But he had to stay with the cable. Down.

  He thought about what Angel had just said. “Is there a ‘but’ somewhere in that statement?”

  Angel was quiet for a while. He started to worry there was a problem with the transponder. But apparently she was just thinking about what to say next.

  “Not so much a ‘but,’” she said.

  Down. Hand over hand. Down.

  “More,” she said, “oh, I don’t know. A hope. I wanted to say that I hope she can make you just as happy. That you’re sure you’re making the right choice for yourself.”

  He stopped again. He told himself he was resting, conserving his energy. In truth, what she’d said had just distracted him so much he couldn’t concentrate on his descent. When he realized that, he forced himself to focus. He adjusted the pressurization of the drysuit and checked over his dive computer. Then he started down again.

  Angel couldn’t really be jealous, could she? Admittedly she was the woman he was closest to in the world other than Julia. And Angel flirted with him all the time—and he definitely reciprocated. But that was just the way they were, wasn’t it? It was just banter. Harmless.

  At least, he’d always thought it was.

  Down. Suddenly concentrating on climbing down the cable was a great distraction.

  “I am sure,” he told Angel. “I definitely am.”

  “Good. As long as you’re sure. Then I guess you have my blessing, though I notice you didn’t ask for it.”

  He smiled inside his mask. Down. One hand, then the other. Down. “Can I turn my lights on yet?”

  “Give it another ten meters.”

  Down. One hand, the other. Left hand, right hand. Down.

  Seventy-five meters down. Halfway to the bottom. He tapped a button on his dive computer screen. A halogen lamp the size of his pinkie finger mounted on either side of his mask flicked on, spearing light
out into the darkness.

  There was nothing to see, of course, not even any fish at this level. But he’d never been so glad to see anything as the cable he held in his hands. He looked down and then up along its length. It stood as straight as a pillar in the middle of the ocean.

  He looked at his gloves. Put a hand to the cable. Then the other.

  Down.

  OFF CAY SAL BANK: JUNE 10, 22:37

  Lying between the Florida Keys and Cuba, the Cay Sal Bank was one of the world’s largest coral atolls. From the surface it was almost invisible, merely a handful of tiny cays—rocks too small to be called islands. Just below the waves, however, more than three thousand square miles of ground rose up from the ocean floor, in most places coming within twenty feet of the surface. Unsurprisingly it was a graveyard for shipping—dozens of oceangoing vessels had run aground there, and most lay where they’d fallen, barely covered by the lapping blue water of the Caribbean.

  If you could remove all that water and look at the bank in open air, it would resemble an enormous and ludicrously high plateau, with a flat top and—almost—sheer sides. If you stepped off that hypothetical plateau, you could fall two thousand feet before hitting the ground.

  But that “almost” was important. Though from a distance the sides of the bank would look sheer, up close they were rough and slightly tapered, interrupted everywhere by promontories and narrow ledges that would stop your fall long before you hit the bottom. Donny’s yacht had dropped its anchor onto one of those ledges about eighty fathoms—a hundred and fifty meters, as Chapel’s dive computer reckoned—down.

  That was still very deep. It was far, far deeper than Chapel had ever dived before, even though he’d been SCUBA diving since he was old enough to get his certification. It was deeper than most professional divers went. A hundred meters down, still pulling himself along hand over hand, he could feel the water above him pressing down on him, squeezing him inside his drysuit like a tube of toothpaste. He was getting cold, too, which was always a bad thing on a dive when you couldn’t afford clumsy fingers. He’d passed through the thermocline where the water dropped fifteen degrees in the space of a couple of meters of depth. Up on the surface he’d sweated inside his suit, and now he felt like he was slicked down with a layer of clammy water.

  He concentrated on breathing normally, on regularly checking the gas levels on his dive computer. On sticking to a steady pace.

  At a hundred and twenty meters down he saw the rocky wall of the slope as a looming shadow, a patch of darkness that cut off his lights. A little farther he started to see towers of coral rise up around him like the fingers of some enormous beast reaching up to snatch at him. The wall of the slope kept getting closer, which perversely enough made him feel claustrophobic—he’d gotten used to the sense of floating in limitless space, so any indication that there was solid ground nearby made him worry about falling and smashing into the ground below.

  Of course that was an illusion. All he had to do was turn one knob on his belt and he would fall upward instead, dragged up by his own buoyancy. His body didn’t want to be down here, and only constant effort and high-tech engineering made it possible to fight his way down through the dense ocean at all.

  The water down there was murky and thick with marine snow—a constant cascade of organic debris, the bodies of dead plankton settling slowly to the seafloor. There were fish down there who lived on that snow, but he saw few of them. They had evolved to live in an environment of perfect darkness, and his lights probably confused the hell out of them.

  A hundred and forty meters down he saw what he’d come for, a long, tapered shadow at the very limit of his light.

  “I’ve got it,” he told Angel. They had agreed in advance not to talk about the mission during his descent, except in the vaguest of terms. The odds of anyone listening in to their frequency were remote, but you couldn’t be too careful when you were working an illegal operation. “Right where we expected.”

  The yacht’s anchor had fallen not half a dozen yards away from the wreck. The satellite data was spot-on. Now that his light touched the seafloor, it was safe for him to let go of the cable, but he found himself reluctant to do so. Once he let go, he would be out of communication with Angel, for one thing. But he knew his hesitation was more psychological than practical.

  He indulged himself for a few seconds, under the pretense that he was scoping out the wreck before proceeding.

  What lay before him was a wrecked submarine about two hundred and twenty feet long and thirty feet wide. It lay on its side, its long sail pointing away from him, its underslung tail fin sticking up in his general direction. A Kilo class sub, one of the old workhorses of the Russian navy.

  For twenty years it had rested down here undisturbed by the world above. Coral had begun to grow over its tail and up its sides, while countless barnacles broke up the curve of the hull. Mud and drifts of marine snow obscured much of its skin, but he could still see the rivets that held the hull plates together.

  He couldn’t see any names or designator numbers painted on its side, but he knew what he was looking at: the B-307 Kurchatov. Maybe the last submarine in history to fly the flag of the Soviet Union.

  OFF CAY SAL BANK: JUNE 10, 22:48

  The Kurchatov had been built in the early 1980s as an attack sub, designed to search out and destroy enemy shipping. As far as anyone knew, it had never fired one of its torpedoes, though, or seen any kind of real action. Like most of the world’s military submarines, it was more important as a deterrent than an actual weapon. It did possess one claim to fame, though—or rather, it would have if anyone had ever been allowed to know about its final mission.

  In August 1991, when it became clear the Soviet Union wasn’t going to last, a bunch of Kremlin hard-liners attempted a coup d’état against Gorbachev in a last-gasp effort to hold on to power. After months of planning, they flooded Moscow with tanks and paratroopers and the world held its breath, but after only two days the coup failed. All the plotters were either arrested or committed suicide, and it was clear that the old USSR was finished.

  The plotters must have known there was a chance they would fail, because they had given very special orders to the captain of the Kurchatov. He was to put in at the closest convenient port to Moscow and take on passengers, specifically the wives and children of some of the coup plotters, who might become victims of mob retribution during the coup. Originally the captain’s orders had simply been to take that human cargo out to sea and keep them safe until the coup succeeded and they could come home.

  Chapel had learned all this from his boss, Rupert Hollingshead, who had it from the CIA. The information the American government possessed did not indicate what the Kurchatov’s captain was supposed to do if the coup failed. It was known that the captain was fanatically loyal to his superiors in the Kremlin, a member of the Communist Party, and a personal believer in state socialism. Perhaps when he realized that his homeland failed to share his beliefs, he decided to go somewhere where people still did. So he’d set course for Cuba, a voyage that would have strained his overcrowded vessel to the very limits of its fuel and supplies.

  The captain signaled ahead of his intentions and had received an offer of asylum from the government of Fidel Castro. He’d been ordered to bring his vessel into the port of Havana where he would be welcomed as a hero of the socialist revolution. Why he failed to obey those instructions was unknown—maybe he didn’t trust Castro as much as he’d trusted his Soviet superiors, or maybe he was simply out of fuel. For one reason or another, just after Christmas in 1991, he had come to a dead stop in the water twenty miles from Cuba and ordered everyone to abandon ship.

  The sub’s crew had intentionally scuttled their boat, opening all its hatches and letting it sink gracefully while they fled in lifeboats. Most likely the captain had intended for the submarine to sink to the very bottom of the ocean, but instead it had come to ground on the sloped side of the Cay Sal Bank. The crew and passengers had a
ll disappeared into the Cuban population. And that was the last anyone had heard, or probably thought, about the Kurchatov until now.

  Until Jim Chapel was ordered to disturb its decades-long sleep.

  Through the murky water Chapel could only get a rough idea of how the submarine had fared after being scuttled, but it was obvious right away that it hadn’t come through unscathed. It must have struck the rocks several times as it sank, judging by the massive dents on the hull. Worse, it had been torn open toward its rear half where it had scraped up against a long spar of hard coral. A boat like the Kurchatov was built with two concentric hulls to withstand oceanic pressures. Both hulls were made of thick reinforced steel, but the coral had cut through them like a ceramic knife through a tin can, leaving the whole interior of the sub open to the seawater. That might actually be a good thing. Chapel hadn’t relished the prospect of trying to muscle open the heavy pressure hatches in the sail, normally the only way inside. The tear in the hulls might give him a better access point.

  “Angel,” he said, “I’m going off radio now. Everything good up top?”

  “There’s a little movement about twenty miles from you. Looks like a fishing boat. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Okay. Talk to you in a few.”

  “Be careful, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll be here, waiting.”

  Chapel let go of the anchor cable and kicked away from it, using just his flippers to propel him toward the sub. He swam down toward the crack in its side and reached out to touch the place where the hulls had been cut through. The tear was pretty rough, and when it first happened the edges of the opening might have been razor sharp, but time and salt water had smoothed them down until he was pretty sure he wouldn’t rip his drysuit crawling through. He peered in through the rent, letting his lights play over the big boxy shape of the engines, then pushed inside.