The Hydra Protocol Read Online Free PDF Page B

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