The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  THE WRECK OF THE KURCHATOV: JUNE 10, 22:53

  Tiny fish darted away from Chapel’s lights as he pushed his way through the cramped engine compartment, gingerly crawling along using his hands to keep from colliding with any sharp or rusted surface. It wasn’t easy. Submarines were cramped by design, cluttered by nature, and the crushing, tearing impact that tore the Kurchatov open had crumpled much of its hull, reducing further the room he had to maneuver. It felt more like he was spelunking than diving as he had to consider each move, work out in advance where his legs and arms would fit. Everything around him was pitch-black until he looked directly at it. But this wasn’t like the darkness outside, when he’d felt like he was drifting through outer space. Chapel was constantly aware that he was surrounded on every side by metal, by ton after ton of Soviet-era military equipment, and the thought of pushing himself deeper inside the crumpled tin can was daunting.

  It didn’t help that the only sound he could hear, the only noise in the world, it seemed, was a deep, rumbling groaning sound that never quite stopped. It was just the sound of the submarine settling around him, straining against its own weight as it must have been doing for twenty years. But it was distorted by the water around him and amplified by the otherwise ubiquitous silence until it sounded alien and wrong, a sustained symphony of grinding, roaring moans.

  At least he didn’t have to worry about radiation. The Kurchatov, like all Kilo class submarines, ran on diesel fuel, not a nuclear reactor, and there had never been any nuclear missiles on board. There were plenty of nasty chemicals around him—the lead-based batteries that filled the lower third of the sub had probably been leaking poison into the water for twenty years—but his drysuit would protect him from the worst of that.

  The biggest danger he faced was ripping his suit or hitting his head on the low ceiling. If he stunned himself down here or if he lost visibility, he could be in real trouble. But he doubted it would come to that. He’d done his homework. Chapel had trained for this mission for weeks before coming down to Miami. He’d studied every known schematic of a Kilo class sub, memorized where everything was inside, thought himself through each motion he needed to make, every inch of the submarine’s interior he would have to traverse.

  Of course, the interior of the sunken boat looked nothing like the photographs he’d studied. The interior would have been painted a drab, uniform tan when the sub was operational. It had gone through a real sea change since. Every surface inside was coated in organic muck, drifts of marine snow mixed with mud and the skeletons of coral and other invertebrates. A colony of tiny white-shelled clams had taken over one of the engine housings, looking like shelf fungus on a fallen tree. Brain coral had wrapped itself around one of the big fuel pumps. He thought he saw an octopus slither underneath an oil trap as he approached, though it was gone before he could be sure.

  At the fore of the engine compartment stood a massive pressure hatch with a wheel mounted on its front. It lay on its side now, and for the first time Chapel realized that the entire submarine was heeled over on its port side and that what he’d been thinking of up and down were actually port and starboard. Added to the virtual weightlessness he felt while diving he had to force himself to remember what direction was up—something he definitely needed to keep in mind if he wanted to get back out of the wreck.

  The door was closed, but he searched around its edges with his fingers until he found that it had either been left open by the crew—the better to scuttle the sub—or had been knocked out of its frame by the impact with the coral spar. It swung open with just a little elbow grease and let him into the engineering decks.

  The semiclosed hatch had kept most of the marine life out of the middle of the submarine, so it didn’t look quite as alien to his trained eyes. The engineering decks were just as he’d expected to find them, tight corridors where every wall was lined with electrical boxes and stowed equipment. All tilted ninety degrees from the schematics he’d pored over. Strange ropy growths hung from both walls—now the ceiling and the floor—and at first he tried to identify what animal had left them behind, but then he realized they weren’t growths at all. They were the remains of string hammocks. The VIP passengers on board must have found any space they could to bunk down in, even the hot, noisy engineering areas that would normally have been unlivable. Chapel imagined just how desperate they must have been to cram inside the submarine with the fifty men of the Kurchatov’s crew, living shoulder to shoulder for long weeks as the sub inched its way across the Atlantic. They must have been terrified, he thought—afraid to surface in case a vengeful Russian proletariat was looking for them, constantly worried about being detected by American antisubmarine patrols. And all for nothing. Though every one of the coup plotters had been arrested and sent to prison, from what Chapel had read there had been no serious retribution against the families that stayed behind. The people who made the desperate journey in the Kurchatov had suffered in the tin can in vain.

  Who knew, though? Maybe they were happier now in Cuba. Winter in Havana had to have Moscow beat.

  The boat was less damaged through the engineering decks, and Chapel made a little better time crawling along until he reached another pressure hatch, this one leading to the crew and command areas underneath the sail. The door opened as easily as the one in the engine room and Chapel slipped inside, letting his lights play over what had once been the Kurchatov’s bridge. There were more hammocks here, though most were stowed carefully out of the way of the sonar screens and computer stations. Chapel pulled himself over the long silver pipe of a periscope stalk and found the narrow stairway leading down to the bunkrooms and officers’ cabins below.

  He was getting close. Ahead of him, in the submarine’s bows, lay the enormous torpedo tubes, but those were of no interest to him. What he needed would be in the captain’s cabin if it was there at all.

  Chapel ignored the groaning roar of the submarine and pulled himself along the stair rail, resisting the urge to kick for speed. The crew deck was one of the tightest spots in the whole boat, with four tiny rooms crammed together in a space half the size of a school bus. He saw the wardroom first, little more than a closet where the crew could have taken their meals or what little leisure time they got. It comprised a single narrow table with a bench behind it and a twelve-inch television set mounted to what had been its ceiling. The crew’s bunks lay beyond, with room for maybe twenty men at a time if they were very friendly. The crew would have had to sleep in shifts, taking turns using the same bunks, catching what sleep they could under blankets that smelled like the men who’d had them before.

  The captain’s cabin had its own pressure hatch, which was closed. It lay on what had become the floor of the submarine, originally its port side, so it was beneath him. Chapel expected the hatch to open like the others, but his fingers couldn’t seem to get any purchase around its seals. He tried the wheel and found that it turned freely, but when he tried to pull it open it was like attempting to lift the entire submarine with his bare hands.

  Chapel tugged and pulled for a while but that made him breathe heavier, and he couldn’t afford that with the amount of breathing gas he was carrying. He forced himself to take shallower breaths and relax.

  He closed his eyes. Tried to block out for a moment the sustained painful groan of the dead submarine. Tried to think about why the door wouldn’t open.

  Was the damned thing jammed? Maybe the impact that tore open the engine compartment had warped the door in its seals. Chapel felt around the edges of the metal door, looking for any sign that it had crumpled or fused in place, but he found nothing. He tried the wheel again. Looked for any kind of mechanism that might have locked the door shut—nothing.

  In his frustration he smacked at the door with his hand, though that was worse than useless, since in the thick water he couldn’t get much leverage, and—

  “Huh,” he said to himself.

  He slapped the hatch again, and this time he listened to the sound it mad
e.

  Again. Yes, definitely. It didn’t make the clanging sound he would have expected. It sounded more like he was striking a drum.

  It seemed impossible, but it had to be right. The door wasn’t jammed or locked. It was being held shut by the pressure of the water on top of it, because the cabin beyond was still full of air. This one hatch must have remained sealed when the sub went down, unlike all the others. Even after twenty years it hadn’t 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 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 be the captain’s tomb.

  Out on th
e 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.