The Hydra Protocol

by David Wellington

  Then he heard the sound of wood splintering, and he knew they were breaking their way in.

  The Asian woman did something then he could not have expected. She reached up and undid the strap of her sundress, then let it fall away from her body until she wore nothing but a pair of black lace panties. She balled up the dress and threw it in the laundry hamper. Then she pushed her way into the shower, sliding in under Chapel’s body, her bare breasts pressing up against his sternum.

  “Put your arms around me,” she whispered.

  That was when the door flew open, knocked half off its hinges. Cuban soldiers came rushing in, their guns in their hands, ready for anything. They spread out around the cabin, covering every part of it, ready to shoot anyone who moved.

  Underneath Chapel, the Asian woman moaned as if she were in the throes of passion. Chapel stared at her face and saw her looking back, cool and dispassionate. She didn’t even close her eyes as she moaned again, nodding at him.

  Message received. Chapel forced his arms around her, fighting the pain in his elbow and his wrist. His artificial arm wrapped around her waist, and he pulled her close. Water streamed over his silicone skin, which was bad—he was supposed to keep the arm as dry as possible—but there was nothing for it. He tried to grunt out a cry of arousal but only managed a whimper.

  The door of the shower stall banged open, and a Cuban soldier stared in at them. A mischievous smile started to crack on his face, but he fought it down—the man was a professional, all right.

  Behind him the young soldier with the glasses, the one in charge, peered in at the two of them. He didn’t so much as blink when he saw them like that.

  For a second Chapel worried that the ruse would fail, that the man would realize the two of them were only acting as if they were aroused. But then the Asian woman turned her head to look at the Cubans and she let out a whooping screech of embarrassment that was enough to make the two soldiers step back. The Asian woman brought a hand up to her face, and her eyes went wide as saucers. And then she started giggling.

  It was not a sound Chapel ever expected this woman to make. It was the sort of giggle someone like Shelly might let out if she were caught in this situation.

  “Oh my God,” the Asian woman said, and her accent was gone. She sounded exactly like one of the coeds up on the deck. “Oh my God oh my God, Jimmy, there are . . . people here! Oh my God!”

  The Cuban soldier who had discovered them turned beet red and turned his face away. The commanding officer still stared at them, and Chapel could see he wasn’t quite convinced.

  “Did you two not hear us when we called everyone up to the main deck?” the officer asked, in perfect if accented English.

  “I thought I did,” the Asian woman said. “Jimmy, didn’t I say something, I was like, like—”

  “Hey, buddy,” Chapel said, forcing himself to sound normal despite the pain and weakness. “Can we at least finish before we get the third degree?”

  The officer frowned. Then he addressed his soldier. “No need to search these two, I think,” he said, in Spanish. “Get their names and check their papers, that’s all.” He glanced back at Chapel and shook his head. “Borracho pendejo,” he muttered, and then he walked away.

  The soldier, still blushing, gave them an embarrassed shrug. “May I see your passports, please?” he asked.

  SOUTH OF MIAMI, FLORIDA: JUNE 11, 02:32

  It was another hour at least before the Cubans finished their search of the yacht. Chapel would very much have liked to know what they were looking for, and why they had devoted so much manpower and time to investigating what was clearly just a party boat that strayed accidentally into disputed waters. He had no way of finding out, though.

  It was all he could do to curl up on a bunk and try to breathe through the pain.

  He only knew the Cubans had gone because Donny came into the cabin and told as much to the Asian woman. She had put her sundress back on but had sat with Chapel the whole time, stroking his back and telling him how strong he was. He appreciated the effort, but it didn’t help much. Donny came in with the news that they were headed back to Miami and that the Cubans had left them with just a stern warning. When he saw Chapel curled up on his bed, though, his eyes went wide and he grabbed the door frame as if he was having trouble balancing.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Donny asked. “He didn’t drink that much.”

  “He has the raptures of the deep,” the Asian woman said. “We need to get him treatment right away.”

  “The raptures . . . you mean the bends? He’s got the bends? Jimmy, what the hell have you been up to?”

  “Please,” the Asian woman said. “He’s in great pain. He may die!”

  “Shit,” Donny said, and he ran over to kneel next to the bed. “Jim. Jim, come on, man, look at me. Look at me—you’re a ranger, man. You can get through this.”

  “Oxygen,” Chapel managed to croak. The pain came in waves, and just then it was hitting a peak. He could barely move his lungs.

  “He needs a hyperbaric chamber,” the Asian woman said. “There’s one in Miami. Call ahead and have it made ready. But in the meantime—”

  “Oxygen,” Chapel said again.

  “He’s right,” the Asian woman said. “He needs to breathe pure oxygen, to flush the nitrogen from his system.”

  “We have some SCUBA tanks onboard,” Donny suggested. “I can get one up here right away.”

  “That won’t work,” the Asian woman told him. “Those tanks hold only normal air, and that’ll just put more nitrogen in his blood.”

  “There’s . . . there might be an oxygen tank in the medical kit—I think—”

  “Go now,” the woman told Donny. “Please.”

  Donny nodded and rubbed at his mouth with one hand. Then he ran off to get the tank.

  Chapel turned his head to the side, to look at her face. She looked scared. He wondered just how bad he looked to make everybody so scared. “Why are you helping me?” he asked. She didn’t answer, just rubbed at his arms. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Nadezhda,” she told him. “Nadia, to my family and friends.”

  A Russian name. Who was this woman? “After . . .” Chapel paused to let the pain in his joints reach a fiery crescendo. It got so bad he couldn’t see for a moment. “After that shower we took together—”

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled at him. “You can call me Nadia.”

  Chapel closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was gone. He must have blacked out for a while. Donny came running into the room and put a mask over Chapel’s face, and that was the last thing he remembered for a while. When he woke up again, he was on a stretcher being wheeled down the yacht’s gangplank. The sky was red with dawn. He heard seagulls and smelled diesel fuel and knew he must be in Miami. Donny was walking alongside the stretcher, holding Chapel’s hand.

  The pain was just a shadow of what it had been. The oxygen must have done its job. The relief of it, of not hurting so much he wanted to die, washed through Chapel and was better than any surge of endorphins.

  “You’re awake,” Donny said. “You had us pretty worried there, for a while.”

  “Sorry about that.” Chapel could move his head again without crippling pain. He turned as far as he could and looked back at the yacht. The deck was lined with blond girls in bikinis, and they were all watching him with concerned looks on their faces.

  “Listen, Jim, I have a feeling about . . . about what happened back there. I have a feeling my captain didn’t just accidentally wander too far south.”

  “Maybe not,” Chapel said.

  “I have a feeling you didn’t just come on my boat for a chance to relax and think things through.”

  “Maybe that was part of the reason,” Chapel said.

  “I’m starting to get another feeling. A feeling that maybe I’m not supposed to ask you too many questions.”

  Chapel sighed. He would love to explain to Donny everything that had happ
ened—why the yacht dropped anchor where it did, why he had gone diving in the middle of the night. It didn’t work that way, though. “I’d trust that feeling.”

  Donny just nodded. He’d been a good soldier. He knew that good soldiers didn’t get all the answers they might want; they just got orders and followed them whether or not they understood them. Donny had never worked for military intelligence, and he’d never had to deal with real secrets, but he knew the drill.

  “You saved my life,” Chapel told him. “I’m never going to forget that.”

  “It was Nadia who knew what to do,” Donny said.

  Nadia.

  The Asian woman had saved him from the Cubans, too.

  Chapel thought of something then. He got a feeling of his own—a bad one. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “She went ahead to the hospital, to get things ready. Practically jumped off the boat before we reached the dock. Why? You want to thank her in person?”

  “Something like that,” Chapel said. What he really wanted to know, what he was suddenly very afraid of, was whether when she left the yacht Nadia had been carrying a little black book. She hadn’t said anything about it, but she hadn’t looked surprised when she found it, either. And it was awfully convenient that when the Cubans boarded the yacht and made everybody line up on the deck, Nadia had stayed behind exactly where she needed to be to get Chapel into the shower.

  But Chapel couldn’t ask Donny about the little black book. Maybe he could learn a little something, though. “Who is she?” he asked.

  Donny shrugged. “Just some Miami party girl. I don’t think she’s American.”

  “I kind of guessed that myself—but what was she doing on the yacht?”

  Donny looked confused. “I met her in a club in Miami a couple of weeks ago. I was there with Sheila, and the two of them hit it off. I meet a lot of girls in clubs—they know about my boat, and they all want an invite on one of my cruises. Sheila said Nadia looked like fun, so we asked her to come along. I don’t think I said twenty words to her since I met her.”

  Chapel had more questions—a lot more—but he didn’t get to ask them. Paramedics took him away then and drove him straight to a hospital. Nobody wasted any time. Soon they had Chapel in the hyperbaric chamber, a steel tube little bigger than a coffin with one window over his face. Doctors came and tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t communicate very well—once the chamber was sealed, its compressors made such a racket he couldn’t hear anything.

  They left him alone while the chamber worked its magic, subjecting him to pressures that would scrub all the nitrogen bubbles out of his bloodstream. It took the pain away almost immediately, which was great, but the doctors managed to let him know he would have to stay in the chamber for at least twenty-four hours.

  He couldn’t move around in the chamber, couldn’t make any phone calls, couldn’t do anything but lie there and think.

  Think about a little black book. A little black book he’d been willing to dive to the bottom of the sea to retrieve. A little black book he’d been willing to die for.

  A little black book that was probably in Nadia’s hands now.

  He knew nothing about the Asian woman with the Russian name. Nobody else seemed able to help. The doctors told Chapel she had, indeed, come to them and told them what kind of treatment he needed—she’d even been able to tell them what depth he’d dived to, which was crucial information for his therapy. The doctors were quite clear that she had saved his life.

  But as soon as she’d told them what they needed to know, she had disappeared. No one had seen her since.

  Chapel knew when he’d been played.

  Who was she? A foreign agent? His mission had been secret, the details known only to three people—Chapel, Angel, and his boss in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rupert Hollingshead. A leak was next to impossible—but somehow Nadia must have discovered what he was up to. Had she been sent to make sure his mission failed?

  A dozen scenarios ran through his head as he tried to make sense of it. None of them came up the way he’d want them to. He was sure she had known what he was after, and she had used his decompression sickness to get the book away from him. Maybe she had called in the Cubans to destabilize the situation, or maybe she had just used them to further her cause.

  Even Chapel had no idea why the book was so important. Hollingshead had never told him, and he had known better than to ask. But he bet Nadia had that information. He was going to have to track her down. Find her and make her give him the book back. That, or explain to Hollingshead that he had failed.

  When they let him out of the hyperbaric chamber, the first thing he did was ask for his clothes and his cell phone. The doctors told him to take it easy, and that they wanted him to stay for another twenty-four hours for observation, but he knew he wouldn’t have time for that. He turned on the phone and called Angel as soon as he was alone.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he told her.

  “Sugar, it sounds like you’ve had nothing but,” she replied. “I’m just so glad you made it, that you’re feeling better—”

  “There’s no time, Angel,” he said, as apologetically as he could manage, given how keyed up he was. He tucked the phone into the crook of his shoulder and started pulling on his jacket. “I need you to find somebody for me, and she’s not going to make it easy. All I have is her first name, Nadezhda, but she was on Donny’s boat and she should be on the passenger list, the same one that got me in trouble. I can give you a physical description and—”

  He stopped because when he put his artificial arm through the sleeve of the jacket, something hard in the inside pocket tapped against his chest. He couldn’t think of what it was—he’d had nothing in there when he went aboard the yacht.

  “Chapel?” Angel asked. “Everything okay?”

  “Hold on,” he told her. He reached carefully inside the pocket. Felt leatherette and laminated pages.

  It was the little black book.

  Nadia must have put it there. She must have put it in his jacket before she left the hospital, knowing he would find it there.

  “Uh,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. “Huh. Angel—never mind. I made a mistake.”

  THE PENTAGON: JUNE 13, 09:13

  They wouldn’t let Chapel fly. There was still some nitrogen dissolved in his fatty tissues, the doctors told him. Spending any length of time in the pressurized cabin of an airplane would put him at risk of forming new bubbles and suffering a total relapse. He needed to stay at sea level for a month, just to be safe. But he had to get back to work, and back to Julia, so he took the train.

  The whole way up the East Coast he kept the little black book in his jacket pocket. He didn’t risk letting anybody see it, though he very much wanted to study it and try to make sense of what he’d risked so much to salvage.

  He arrived in Virginia first thing in the morning. He stopped off at Fort Belvoir, the headquarters of INSCOM and the Defense Contracts Audit Agency—two groups he’d worked for before starting his present life as a covert operative. To maintain some kind of cover identity, he still kept an office at the fort. He visited it every few months for appearances’ sake. He kept a change of clothes, there, too, and it gave him a chance to shower and clean up before meeting with his boss.

  From Fort Belvoir it was a short drive and a long stretch of traffic before he could reach the Pentagon. Once there he walked through security, which was actually a nice change of pace because it went so smoothly. Chapel always had a problem with metal detectors since his left arm set off alarms in every airport in the world, but the Pentagon was accustomed to being visited by amputees and they had an officer on duty trained in clearing prostheses. Chapel was inside the building in minutes. He headed back to an unexceptional office deep inside C Ring and then called for an elevator that shouldn’t be there. The armed guard whose job was to ride that elevator all day smiled when he saw Chapel and hit the button for H Ring without be
ing asked.

  The Pentagon wasn’t supposed to have an H Ring. Very few people knew that it did. The elevator dropped through two underground levels and opened on a long corridor of unmarked doors. People cleared for entrance to those doors would know which one they wanted—signs were unnecessary.

  Chapel opened the door to his boss’s office without being announced. Again, it was unnecessary—Rupert Hollingshead would have known Chapel was coming as soon as he walked in the Pentagon’s front door.

  As usual, the transition from the drably painted corridor to Hollingshead’s office was jarring. The door was just simple metal painted an institutional green. The office behind it, by way of contrast, was lined with immaculately polished hardwood and featured a full wet bar with brass accoutrements, overstuffed leather armchairs, and a working fountain that filled the air with a musical sound. The office looked like nothing so much as a gentlemen’s club straight out of nineteenth-century London.

  When it was constructed, the office had been a common room for a suite of fallout shelters meant to be used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a nuclear war. The intention had been to give the Chiefs some measure of comfort in a stressful time. Now it had been appropriated as office space for a man whose life was one constant bout of stress.

  Not that the man would ever let it show.

  “Bit, ah, early for a drink,” Rupert Hollingshead said, coming out from behind the bar. “But if you’d like some coffee, son, it can be arranged.”

  Chapel smiled. “Admiral,” he said. “It’s good to be back.”

  Hollingshead’s eyes twinkled merrily behind round spectacles. The man looked like he belonged in this room. He wore a tweed jacket and a bow tie—the sort almost no one wore anymore, the kind that actually had to be tied instead of clipped on. He looked like an absentminded Ivy League academic more than anything. He even had long sideburns that were far from regulation.

  The look—right down to the facial hair—was designed to put people at ease and make them think this man was a harmless old eccentric who wouldn’t hurt a fly. It completely belied the fact that Hollingshead had been a rear admiral in the navy during the first Gulf War, or that since then he had become one of the most powerful spymasters in the American intelligence apparatus. He was the director of a directorate that did not officially exist, a man who could whisper in the ear of a president in the morning and start a war by dinnertime.