Free The Hydra Protocol by David Wellington

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 happened—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