The Hydra Protocol Read Online Free PDF

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