by Jason Heaton
“Oh sure, you betcha,” Upali said in an exaggerated Midwestern American accent. Tusker punched him hard on the shoulder.
“Hey man, you spent enough time in Houghton to pick it up. Now you’ve got a weird mish-mash of Sri Lankan and Yooper,” Tusker joked, referring to the nickname given to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula natives.
After a short lunch of red rice and jackfruit curry eaten out of a banana leaf on the sweltering skiff, Tusker wriggled back into his damp wetsuit and spat in his mask. Raj would take Ian back to the dock while Upali and Tusker were underwater, returning with the skiff. They bade farewell to Ian, heaved their air cylinders onto their backs and backrolled off opposite gunwales. The commotion scattered a group of gulls floating nearby. As soon as they reached the bottom, Tusker heard the outboard motor start up and watched the silhouette of the boat swing around and disappear.
Upali and Tusker spread out, picking around the search area they’d marked with yellow flags, probing the deep silt with wire probes, stopping to mark promising spots with red flags.
Next week, best bring the metal detector and some hand tools to investigate all these. Tusker mentally prepped for next week to fill the monotony. Wouldn’t Upali be jealous if I find something while he’s over on the east coast. He smiled to himself.
At four o’clock, after two more tank swaps, they were ready to call it a day. The sun dropped like a stone in the tropics, meaning it would be dark in two hours. Underwater, it was already getting hard to see in the late afternoon light. Probing, flagging and digging was monotonous, exhausting work, especially while sucking dry, compressed air. Despite the bathtub warm water, Tusker was thoroughly chilled.
Raj, whose day sitting in the skiff under the hot sun had been no less arduous, helped them heave their gear into the boat. They motored across the crowded harbor to a dock. Tusker tugged on the faded red Mount Gay Rum baseball cap he’d gotten while crewing in the Chicago-Mackinac regatta years ago. Along with the old Aquastar diving watch, it was one of his few prized possessions, and he held on to the brim tightly as Raj gunned the little boat across the water.
“All in a day’s work, eh, machang?” Upali shouted over the motor, using the Sinhala term for “mate.”
“It never felt this hard when we were doing site surveys up in Lake Superior!” Tusker replied, pausing to smear a forearm across his damp brow.
“But at least there’s no risk of frostbite here!” Upali said. They both laughed.
“The legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee…” Upali broke into song, starting an off-key rendition of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Tusker joined in and they belted out the rest of Gordon Lightfoot’s famous song about the sinking of a ship in Lake Superior. Raj watched them with an amused grin.
At the dock, the three of them loaded a rickety cart and pushed it slowly up the dock, its rusty steel wheels protesting under the weight of the scuba tanks, weight belts, and the soaking-wet gear.
It hadn’t been an entirely bad day. After lunch, Upali had identified a promising patch of sea bed with his probing. Digging down a couple of feet had turned up some rusty objects of indeterminate age that they had hauled topside and placed in the bottom of a plastic bucket full of sea water. It might just be a jumble of decades-old fishing tackle, but to expose it directly to air would risk rapid oxidation and disintegration, and Upali wanted to get it back to the lab to examine more closely.
Raj had a shed across the busy road from the harbor. It was five o’clock now, and inside it was dark and smelled of rotten fish. Raj flicked on a naked fluorescent tube light that swayed from the tin ceiling and the sudden light scattered a few large insects. Tusker’s skin, despite being bathed in sweat, went instantly cold. He hated the cockroaches, centipedes, and large spiders that lived in the tropics, and even after five months of daily sightings, his phobia hadn’t diminished. So much for exposure therapy. Raj grinned, his teeth bright red from the betel nut he constantly chewed. He said something to Upali in Sinhala, who laughed loudly in response.
“Raj wonders how a big guy like you can be so afraid of small critters,” Upali said. Tusker gave an exaggerated shiver in Raj’s direction. Raj didn’t speak much English and Tusker’s Sinhala was limited to about ten words. They both laughed.
For the next half hour, the three of them worked to clean and stow gear. Wetsuits were hung to dry, though they never would in the humidity. Tusker turned his neoprene booties inside out and hung them on nails in the wall, away from the scorpions and centipedes that sought their damp crevices at night.
“Machang, you should come across to Batti and we’ll dive the Hermes,” Upali finally broke the silence of their chores. “You can’t leave Sri Lanka without diving its best wreck. Otherwise you’ll think all our diving is like the harbor here!”
“Yeah, I might just take you up on that,” Tusker replied. “I’ll have to see if my boss will give me a day or two off.” He winked.
“I’ll think about it,” Upali smiled back. “But only if you haul the tanks.”
Raj filled the air compressor with diesel and pulled the starter cord. It roared to life. Tusker fitted the manifold to two of the day’s empty air cylinders and made sure the intake hose was rigged up over the top of the shed’s swinging door. It had to be far enough away from the compressor’s exhaust to not push exhaust fumes and carbon monoxide into the tanks. Not that the air outside the shed was much better, with the passing Leyland buses belching black exhaust that settled in a haze over the road.
Tusker waved to Raj. “Go home! We can finish up here!” Upali nodded and repeated it in Sinhala. Raj looked at both of them, then pressed his palms together, gathered up his sarong, and headed off down the roadside into the gathering dusk. He had three bus connections to make before he’d be home to his wife and two sons, up in the hills behind Galle town, at least an hour’s commute.
Tusker switched the compressor manifold to two more tanks and settled onto a flimsy folding chair. He pulled two warm Lion lagers out of the cooler and passed one to Upali. They both sat, not talking over the din of the compressor, and watched the evening traffic pass by.
Tusker thought about the artifacts they’d pulled out of the sea bed and dragged the water-filled bucket close to him. He fumbled for the camping headlamp he kept in his backpack and switched it on. He pulled the largest object, a curved piece of dark wood that had a small rusted metal hasp on one end, carefully out of the saltwater bath. It looked to be a piece of a larger ring and was quite heavy.
“What do you reckon?” he said to Upali. “Sail hoop?”
The object reminded him of the hoops used to raise canvas sails on the masts of tall ships. Tusker had seen plenty of them, still intact, on the schooner wrecks of Lakes Huron and Michigan. He knew he shouldn’t fiddle too much before sending these to the lab for proper preservation and analysis, but he couldn’t resist a closer look.
“Don’t mess with it too much, machang,” Upali said, knowing that Tusker, while a skilled archaeologist, was also impatient. “We can get it cleaned up in the lab when I’m back in Colombo.”
“A little cleaning won’t hurt,” Tusker said, grinning. He examined the hoop more closely in the white light of his headlamp. He was convinced it was a piece of sail hoop now, but how old? It was hard to tell. The level of degradation on this one, even in the salty, polluted harbor, made it seem much older than that. On the reinforcement near the hasp he thought he could make out a pattern beneath the rust.
Tusker pulled a folding knife from his soggy cargo short pocket and flicked it open. He lightly scraped the rust away and re-aimed his headlamp’s white beam. Was that…?
“Yup, crow’s foot!” Tusker exclaimed. The marking on the metal hasp was a pheon, the so-called crow’s foot or king’s mark, indicating Crown property. The symbol had been engraved or painted on everything from fasteners and cannonballs to rifles and watch dials since the 1300s.
“This is British R
oyal Navy all right,” he said and handed it to Upali, who studied it.
“I think you’re right,” Upali said, gently setting it back into the bucket of saltwater. “That makes today’s efforts worth it for sure. And with any luck, what I find out east next week will be even more exciting.”
“Hey man, be careful over there,” Tusker’s tone turned serious. “Those wrecks are deep.”
“Don’t worry, machang. I’ll be back here cracking the whip on you jokers before you know it.”
They both laughed, their laughter quickly drowned out by the roar of a passing bus on the dark road outside.
Into the Vampire
Bay of Bengal, eight nautical miles east of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Two days later.
Three hundred and thirty-five feet beneath the Indian Ocean, the blinding arc of a Broco cutting torch lit up the black water like an exploding star in deep space. Rory Aitkens squinted behind the dark welding glass of his dive helmet, intent on his task. He’d been at it for over two hours, making slow progress. He and McElroy had spent the first hour of the dive making a survey of the wreck site, first with a measuring tape, then slowly swimming along the upturned hull with a Geiger counter. After they had marked the hull with phosphorescent chalk, Aitkens took over with the torch.
Aitkens had learned his very specialized skills in the North Sea. The son of a rig worker, he’d grown up seeing no other way of life than working the oil fields. By the age of 19, he was cleaning sewage outlet pipes and inspecting ships’ hulls in Aberdeen. Then, the next 15 years he spent welding pipes and replacing valves at 80 fathoms for £600 a day. When his father died in 2001 in the Norskoil Deepstar platform explosion, Aitkens got a sizable inheritance from his will. He quit his day job and spent the next years bleeding away his bank account on expensive wristwatches and Aberdeen’s numerous prostitutes, occasionally taking odd diving gigs that interested him and paid well.
The torch burned at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, cutting a white hot line into the three-inch thick steel plating, which glowed orange and then quickly dulled to a black bruise. Aitkens was making good progress, though a little slower than planned. Turns out, a ship’s hull designed to resist torpedoes also does a good job against a cutting torch. He’d have the twelve-by eight-foot rectangular hole opened up within the hour.
The torch sputtered and died suddenly, and the ocean went immediately black.
“Oh-two’s lost pressure!” Aitkens said in an annoyed Scottish brogue that was made even less comprehensible by the effects of the helium gas on his voice. At this depth, divers breathe a blend of 80 percent helium and 20 percent oxygen, known as “heliox.” The helium replaces all of the nitrogen in normal air to eliminate its narcotic effects. Heliox provides a clear mind but does have its drawbacks: Helium causes the vocal cords to vibrate faster, raising the voice’s pitch to a comical tone. It also carries warmth away from the body faster; hence the hot water that circulated through Aitkens’ suit.
“Sorry, pressure regulator glitch,” a tinny reply came back down through 100 meters of water. Dive Control onboard DSV Depth Charge was monitoring the entire dive via an audio feed of all divers and the cameras inside the bell and on the divers’ helmets.
McElroy, waiting on the sea bed nearby, heard the exchange, and chimed in through his own helmet’s radio, “Topside, you asleep at the wheel, or what?”
Aitkens chuckled, “We should’ve gotten paid by the hour!” No reply from above, so Aitkens thought better of continuing.
A few minutes later, the high-pressure oxygen feed from the surface resumed. “Should be good now, Rory,” Dive Control squawked. Aitkens squeezed the trigger and sparked the torch back to life.
After another 45 minutes of cutting, the plate, which now resembled a burned outline, hung by a mere few inches of uncut plate on each end. Aitkens had intentionally left these retaining tabs in place so the heavy section of hull wouldn’t fall inwards too quickly and crush what lay below it.
“I’m about done,” he announced. “Another couple of cuts and she’ll collapse in.”
“What are you waiting for?” came Rausing’s voice over the radio, sounding impatient. Rausing had lured the dive team to Sri Lanka with the promise of an easy job and good money: $25,000 each for this one night’s work, plus a bit of decompression time. And for their silence.
Aitkens was about to reply with something snarky but then thought better of it. No point in pissing off the boss. By next Monday he’d be in Bangkok’s red light district, where the girls were prettier and they washed your dick when they were done.
Aitkens lit the torch again and slowly sliced through the last small tabs of steel. The 75-year-old metal shrieked in one final protest, then hinged on itself and disappeared down into the black hold of the Vampire. A cloud of silt billowed up from inside.
“Still pretty silty,” McElroy said a minute later, shining his headlamp into the eerie cloud, “but I’m going in.” The view through his helmet faceplate reminded him of driving in a blizzard during a Scottish winter, with visibility barely the length of his outstretched arm.
McElroy tentatively climbed down into the maw. Dive Control could only hear his breathing become rapid as he struggled among the debris. Most of it was unrecognizable as anything from a warship from its seven decades decaying underwater. The bulkhead to his right had partially collapsed in and with it, what appeared to be a shelf unit or rack that had spilled its contents into a jumbled pile that McElroy slipped on as he made his way. Artillery shells? Pipework? Bottles? He tried to discern by the cylindrical shapes he felt with his booted feet. It occurred to him that it might be unexploded ordnance and tried to tread lightly on the debris.
After a half-minute of heavy breathing, McElroy finally spoke. “I don’t see the cargo,” his Scottish-accented, helium-distorted voice came through. “It’s a mess in here, shit everywhere.”
“Whatever it takes,” came the reply. It was Rausing’s voice. McElroy could picture him standing in Dive Control, arms folded. “Given its size, it’s most likely fallen to the very bottom of the room.”
Easy for you to say. McElroy picked his way down, further into the jagged, twisted obstacle course that conspired to entangle him. He knew what he was looking for. Rausing had prepared them for this, with archival photos, ship’s plans, and sketches.
Then he saw it, lying on top of what used to be a stack of wooden crates, now long since disintegrated into rubble that would crumble at the slightest touch. It looked like a cartoon drawing of a bomb, with a bulbous nose and tail fins. It was about the size of his prized 1972 Mini Cooper back home in Dundee, McElroy thought, momentarily amused. Probably weighs as much too.
He located two lifting rings on what would have been the top of the bomb, unfurled two large yellow JW Automarine lift bags, and clipped one to each ring. Then he held a pneumatic hose underneath the bags’ open ends. He carefully puffed gas into each one until they evenly inflated, lifting the heavy, bulbous cylinder from its resting place. As it rose from the bottom, it dislodged a cloud of silt that rendered McElroy blind. According to plan, Aitkens was waiting outside the wreck, ready to secure the lift cable that snaked down from a powerful hoist onboard the Depth Charge.
“Ach, I’m having trouble seeing in here,” came McElroy’s voice. He sounded rattled.
“Calm yourself, McElroy.” Rausing’s voice again, with no measure of reassurance, only a command. He abhorred incompetence and fear, especially if either got in the way of his goals. Then, to Aitkens: “Can you reach the cargo yet?”
“Negative,” Aitkens replied, “It’s still too deep inside.”
Before Rausing could reply, there was a muffled cry and McElroy’s panicked, helium-inflected voice cut in. “I’ve slipped down the hold and somehow wedged my foot in something.”
The bomb was now above him, slightly buoyant under its lift bags. McElroy looked around through the settling silt, trying to get his bearings. The funhouse effect of the tilted shipwreck played tricks
with his perception and he tried to slow his breathing to reorient himself.
He'd lost traction on the loose debris in the steeply pitched bilge and slid 15 feet to what had been the far bulkhead of the bomb room. How did I fall so far? He felt his heavily booted foot wedged between a row of pipes that somehow had remained mounted to the bulkhead. His umbilical was stretched taut, fouled on something, making his maneuvering more difficult. He gave his foot a twist, first one way, then the other. The boot didn’t budge an inch.
Aitkens peered through the gap in the ship’s hull. The interior of the wreck was now zero visibility, the silt McElroy had dislodged billowing out of the hole in the hull in a slow moving cloud.
“I need to go help McElroy,” Aitkens said, now also in a mild panic.
“Don’t concern yourself with McElroy!” Rausing’s voice was pitched now. “Your job is to secure the cargo!”
But by now there was no chance of finding either the bomb or McElroy in the whiteout. Aitkens perched, paralyzed by indecision and growing fear, listening to McElroy’s struggling through the radio in his helmet. It sounded as though he was hyperventilating, dangerous at this depth, breathing heliox.