As he got even closer he could make out a few details. The Cuban ship had tied up to the side of the yacht, which had to mean the Cubans had already boarded. Chapel was going to have to sneak back on board and hope he could mix in with the partygoers so no one noticed he hadn’t been there the whole time.
Angel could help him get a feel for how things were up there. As he neared the surface he reached for the anchor cable again. “Angel?” he asked. “What can you tell me? Am I too late?”
There was no answer except the steady hiss that meant his earphones were working. They just weren’t picking anything up.
Chapel poked his head above the water and studied the cable. The transponder unit he’d clipped to it was gone. Someone must have found it.
That could be very, very bad.
Once he’d broken the surface, though, his headset could patch into the cellular network and he could at least make contact. “Angel,” he whispered, “are you receiving me?”
“I sure am, honey,” she said back. “You’ve just got time, if you hurry.”
The mystery of the missing transponder would have to wait. Chapel climbed up onto the swimming balcony at the bow of the yacht and started tearing off his gear. The mask came first and suddenly he was breathing real, fresh air again, not his own recycled breath. It burned his lungs — there was a lot more oxygen up here than he’d been getting below — but it tasted so sweet he didn’t care. He wriggled out of the drysuit as fast as he could, careful not to get his artificial arm wet. He opened the pouch that held the little laminated book he’d salvaged from the Kurchatov, then bundled up all the rest of his gear, drysuit, rebreather, headset, all of it, and tossed it over the side. It floated for a second and then disappeared without so much as a gurgle. It was a real shame to just throw away all that expensive equipment, but Chapel knew if he was caught with technical diving gear, the Cubans would ask a lot of questions he was in no position to answer. Worst of all, it meant losing his connection to Angel as well — but that was another thing he would have a hard time explaining.
Wearing nothing but a thin pair of trunks, Chapel ran hands through his sweaty hair and stepped through the balcony’s door, into the lower deck of the yacht. He could hear someone shouting in Spanish over his head, but no one saw him as he moved quickly toward the stairs that led to the main deck.
Halfway up, a brick wall came out of nowhere and hit him full on.
At least, it felt that way. Every muscle in his body just shut down at once. A wave of fatigue and dizziness passed through him, and he felt a desperate, unbearable desire to sit down, to lean his head against the wall. To go to sleep right then and there and not even bother finding a comfortable place to lie down.
“Shit,” he breathed, because he knew where that came from. It could take hours for the first symptoms of decompression sickness to set in, he knew, or just minutes. The faster it came on, the worse it was going to get.
In all his time diving, Chapel had never gotten the bends before. He’d always been careful to decompress in stages, to read dive charts more carefully than some people read the Bible, to know his limits. He’d managed to stay clear of every diver’s worst nightmare — until now.
But he’d seen other divers go through it. It wasn’t pretty. He remembered one guy down in Mexico, off the Yucatán, curled up in the bottom of a rowboat, screaming and crying as his joints shook and spasmed. If that was what awaited him—
He couldn’t let it. He couldn’t give in to the nitrogen in his blood. Chapel forced himself to stand upright, to keep moving. He climbed the stairs one at a time, forcing himself to lift each foot, to keep himself steady.
Just a little farther. Just up a few more steps. Up ahead the main deck opened up around the pool. Chapel could just see what was going on out there. The partygoers were lined up around the edge, none of them talking. Most were looking at their feet or up at the sky, anywhere but at the soldiers who had boarded the yacht.
There were a dozen of them, all of them carrying carbines slung around their necks. They wore the green uniforms and flat-topped hats that Chapel always associated with Fidel Castro. That was strange. Those were Cuban army uniforms, not the white sailor suits that naval personnel wore.
Another mystery. Chapel had no time for mysteries. It was taking everything he had to keep climbing the stairs.
The soldiers were looking every partygoer up and down, checking names against a list. They didn’t leer at the young women in their bikinis, didn’t try to outmacho the muscle-bound guys in their Speedos. The soldiers had a job to do, and they were being consummate professionals. Not what Chapel had expected at all.
He came up to a broad archway that led to the main deck. He would walk out there, he thought, walk out calling his own name and apologizing profusely. He would claim that he’d been stuck in the head and couldn’t get up top until just now. Maybe, just maybe, the Cubans would buy it.
He took a step toward the deck, but his foot never came down.
Instead a bright blossom of pure red agony burst inside his knee, and his leg bent under him until he was standing like a flamingo. A flamingo that very much wanted to die.
“Christ,” Chapel said, biting off the word so he didn’t shout it. The pain was incredible. He’d been shot before, several times in fact, but even that didn’t hurt like this. Nothing ever had.
At least, not until his good shoulder started up, too. It felt like his arm was being cut off, like he was going to lose that one too. Like there was a knife inside his arm, ripping away at his muscles, grating against his bones. He reached over with the artificial arm to grab the flesh there, to squeeze it even though he knew that wouldn’t help at all.
Standing on one foot, suddenly off balance, he couldn’t stay upright anymore. He crashed to the floor, his head thudding on the polished wood of the deck. He could only hope the Cubans hadn’t heard him fall.
Out by the pool they were nearly done with their inspection. One of the Cubans, a young guy wearing round glasses, looked down at a piece of paper in his hand. He smacked it with the back of his fingers, and it made a noise like a snare drum.
Chapel brought his head up so he could watch. He didn’t need to — he knew what was going to happen next. The young guy was clearly the commanding officer of the Cuban patrol. He strode up to Donny and got way too close to his face.
“¿Dónde está Chapel, James?” the Cuban demanded.
Chapel curled up into a ball on the carpeted floor of the stairway landing. He couldn’t get up, could barely breathe. The pain had spread to every joint in his body, and it was only getting worse. He could hear people moving out on the deck, but his eyes were clamped tightly shut and he knew he wouldn’t be able to get away, wouldn’t be able to move from the spot where he lay. At any moment the Cubans would start searching the yacht and they would find him — there was no chance of his even rolling into the shadows, must less finding a place to hide.
Once they found him the questions would begin. They would want to know what was wrong with him. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out that he was suffering from decompression sickness, and then they would want to know why he was diving in Cuban waters. They would find the little black book and he would be arrested, dragged back to Cuba, and thrown into a bottomless pit of a jail and never heard from again.
And there was nothing he could do to stop them. He couldn’t fight like this, and he couldn’t run. He tried desperately to move, to use his artificial arm — which at least didn’t hurt — to drag himself farther down the corridor, back to the top of the stairs. If he could push himself down those steps, and if he didn’t break his neck, maybe, just maybe—