Depth Charge

by Jason Heaton

  “Friday’s findings,” he said in reply, “British Navy, I think.” Last week’s excitement faded, and Tusker had an urge to just dump out the bucket and toss the artifacts back in the harbor. They grabbed damp wetsuits, fins, and buoyancy wings and heaped them in the back of the van. “That’s gonna make for a smelly ride,” Ian tried to joke. Tusker didn’t react.

  Srivathnan smoked a cigarette in the shade, talking quietly to Raj. Tusker and Ian finished loading the van and slammed shut the heavy rear door. “Well, Raj, you’ve got a couple days off til we get back,” Tusker said. He could see that Srivathnan had told him the news. Raj’s eyes looked watery. He didn’t say anything, but touched Tusker’s arm and shook his head side to side. Tusker clasped his hand and quickly turned to go. “Come on, Nathan. Long drive ahead.”

  Deep Salvage

  Bay of Bengal, eight nautical miles east of Batticaloa. 15 April, 1942

  The Royal Navy dive tender HMS Drake arrived in Trincomalee a week after the Vampire sank to the bottom of the Bay of Bengal. She didn’t have far to come. The Easter raid on Colombo by the Japanese had left that city’s harbor littered with downed planes, sunken ships and unexploded ordnance. The difficult work of removing all this debris kept the Drake’s small team of clearance divers busy. The shallow water there meant little risk of the bends, so the divers rotated into the water in shifts around the clock, only pausing to eat and sleep. They would have remained there for another month if the urgent order to move around to the east coast for an undisclosed mission had not been received from London.

  Bodies were still washing up down the coast near the small fishing village of Pasikudah when the Drake steamed into position offshore. The southeast monsoon season hadn’t yet blown itself out and the surface was choppy, with uneven swells and whitecaps. The Drake idled over what was thought to be Vampire’s final resting place, extrapolated from survivors’ dead reckoning and the heaviest concentration of debris and leaking fuel oil.

  The Drake’s captain, a Welshman named Llewellyn, came out of the pilothouse and surveyed the frothy seas. Among the whitecaps was a calmer radius of water, flattened out by the leaking oil from the wreck below. He turned to the dark-haired man standing in the shade of the ship’s foc’sle.

  “This is your operation, Lieutenant,” he said, studying the impassive eyes. “But 60 fathoms is awfully deep.”

  The other man, dressed in a navy blue Mackintosh coat against the spray didn’t make eye contact with Llewellyn. “Yes it is, Captain. But needs must.” Then he turned and spoke directly. “Your crew has all signed the Official Secrets Act, I trust?”

  “Yes, they have, including the divers,” the captain replied. “I’ve put the signed copies in your stateroom.” The intelligence officer nodded, turned, and walked aft along the railing with the steadiness of a man who had been to sea many times.

  On the broad deck amidships, two men in red watch caps sat in heavy canvas suits while tenders fitted their heavy breastplates, cinched rope to their harnesses and fastened their lead boots. It could have been an ancient scene, squires readying armored knights for battle. Then the copper helmets were ceremonially fitted over their heads. It was difficult work in the uneven seas but the two divers joked with each other right up until their helmets were clicked into place. One tender checked the air hose connections while another confirmed that the wired telephone connection worked, with a tinny “Testing, 1,2,3…” echoing inside the helmets.

  The two divers chosen for the job were the most experienced in the Royal Navy, with hundreds of hours of diving between them. One was Lionel Stanwick, a good-humored shipbuilder’s son from Newcastle. Growing up around the Swan Hunter shipyard, “Wick” as everyone called him, was well suited for salvage work on sunken ships similar to many built just down the road from his childhood home.

  The second diver was a young, sandy-haired man named Angus Rausing. Rausing cut an imposing figure with his broad shoulders, piercing pale eyes, and serious demeanor. He’d learned his craft the hard way, in the cold, dark waters of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. The unpopular son of Swedish immigrant parents, Angus built his own diving helmet out of an old boiler tank and some garden hose and recruited a school mate to crank the pump while he explored the German wrecks that littered the waters around the islands. When the war started, he signed up to be a clearance diver at the age of 17.

  The divers and crew knew better than to ask why the Vampire took such priority over the larger British ship, Hermes. It was an unusual mission to begin with for divers used to clearing munitions and debris from shallow harbors. They were told only to try to gain entry into the bomb room near the stern of the ship and inventory its contents. Then, possibly, a retrieval.

  The two men awkwardly climbed down ladders on the side of the pitching Drake. Their lead boots made descending the wet rungs treacherous in the morning swell. A gas compressor on deck was already running, sending air through the hose to the gooseneck fittings at the back of the helmets. With two thumbs down reciprocated from the tenders on deck, the divers stepped backwards into the sea and sank like stones. The tenders watched them descend in a torrent of bubbles, and then returned their eyes to the horizon, scouting for Japanese planes or ships.

  The pneumofathometer on the compressor’s panel showing the divers’ depth went past 300 feet, the accepted limit of what could be safely dived while breathing air, and kept dropping. It stopped at 348 feet. The tenders held tight to the divers’ safety ropes and ensured that the air and communication lines didn’t get fouled on the Drake’s stanchions.

  “I’ve lost communications, sir!” shouted the young seaman manning the two-way telephone. “I’m only getting static. Should we bring them up?” It had been only six minutes since the divers went into the water.

  “Leave them another few minutes,” the Naval Intelligence officer replied calmly. “If they get into trouble, they know the rope signals.” The tenders manning the safety lines looked at each other but stayed quiet. Unbeknownst to them, 350 feet below, one of the divers was in trouble.

  Stanwick had landed directly on the upturned hull of the sunken Vampire. His lead boots were better suited for walking on the sea floor than on the rounded, smooth hull of a sunken ship and he scrabbled for footing. With a gloved hand, he gripped a railing on the edge of the hull and tugged on it to steady himself. This forced him off balance and he fell to his knees, straining to stay upright.

  It was vital when wearing these positive pressure helmets to remain vertical or else they would fill with water. Stanwick was panting with exertion and with each breath, he was pulling in lungfuls of toxic, compressed oxygen. Where was Rausing? Through the tiny porthole, his eyes searched the gloomy darkness for his partner. But he was nowhere in sight.

  Angus Rausing had landed forward of the ship’s superstructure, touching down almost directly on a searchlight near the starboard railing. The ship was in eerily good condition. The grey paint reflected back his torchlight and he could see that most of the windows on the pilothouse remained intact. Bubbles emanated from the wreck’s bowels, even one week after her sinking. But there was no time to take in the scenery. Rausing knew from the engineering sketches he’d been shown that their target was aft of his current position by at least 20 yards. He had to make his way back along the wreck, no easy feat in his lead boots and heavy suit. He took pains to control his pace and breathing so as not to become hypoxic. The cold of the deep ocean penetrated his suit and woolen undergarments and the sweat on his back from his time at the surface began to chill him.

  When Rausing got to Stanwick, the Newcastle man had already blacked out and was lying on his side, his helmet full of water. Rausing called into his helmet’s telephone transceiver, but got back only static. He then tried to right Stanwick and purge the helmet, but he was aware of his own exertion and knew there was little he could do to revive Stanwick. He thought about giving the “four tugs” signal on Wick’s rope so the tenders could start to pull him up, but then
decided not to. They might also pull him up, and he still had a chance to find his target and that was his strict instruction. Official secrets and all. No hope for Wick anyway, he coldly thought. Might as well get on with the job.

  In the dim yellow cone of his dive torch, he left Wick behind and made his way across the now vertical rear deck of the stricken destroyer to the bulkhead door leading into the bomb room. Everything not attached to the deck now lay below him on the sea floor. Rausing wondered if he would see any dead bodies. Probably not, he guessed. With only nine lost in the sinking, he doubted any would be this far back, in the bomb room, during an aerial attack.

  Visualizing the ship’s layout, he easily found the bomb room. Entering meant shimmying in sideways but once inside, he easily walked on what used to be the wall until it opened up into the large space. The sinking had sent the contents of the room down against the upturned inner wall at the far end of the room. In the dim light of his torch, he saw spilled racks of depth charges, crates of 105-millimeter shells and an arsenal of rifles scattered among other debris. He made mental notes of what he saw to report back to the Naval Intelligence man on the Drake. There must be something more important in here, he thought. Then he saw it. In the corner was the largest bomb he’d ever seen. It was at least ten feet long, with a bulbous nose and telltale fins at the back. This was no torpedo. This was meant to be dropped from a plane. This is what I’ve been sent for. No doubt there would be a second dive to retrieve the bomb, but without Wick and no other divers on board the Drake, could he do it alone?

  Just then, his torch flickered and died. Flooded, no doubt, he calmly thought. Rausing found himself in complete blackness. He slowly backpedaled, retracing his steps up the corridor to the outside hatch. The dimmest of ambient light guided him. He didn’t panic. He’d been here before, inside a wreck, in the dark. But unlike the old wrecks he dived in Scotland, this one was newly sunk and there was no silt to kick up and obscure his vision and by pulling on his own air hose he was able to climb back out on to the tilted deck of the Vampire.

  Somewhere in the dark in front of him was Wick’s body. Rausing paused for a moment and then tugged on his safety rope three times to be brought slowly back to the surface. No doubt they would wonder why Wick didn’t tug on his rope but by the time Rausing’s decompression was done, they’d have figured it out. Nothing to be done about it. Wick wasn’t that good a diver anyway.

  Rausing’s decompression stops would be controlled by the tenders, who watched the pneumofathometer for his depth. He’d be back on the surface in about two hours, which gave him plenty of time to think about what he’d seen inside the Vampire. Then, a second dive, possibly even today, to fetch the bomb. Maybe I’ll even be rewarded a medal for valor. He smiled inside his helmet at the thought as he was slowly reeled upwards.

  But there would be no second dive.

  Bastard Son

  Though he scarcely knew the man, Malcolm Rausing assumed he’d acquired both his affinity for the sea and his taste for violence from his father. Angus Rausing had been discharged from the Royal Navy in 1942 after a diving accident nearly paralyzed him. He was awarded a hardship pension and sent back to Scotland where, after lying low for a few years, he founded a salvage and diving operation, eventually acquiring a fleet of ships that he based in Aberdeen.

  Angus was an unforgiving, brutal man, who rewarded loyalty, but punished incompetence, often by medieval means. Once, a long-time employee of Rausing Oceanic, who was suspected of floating a paycheck to pay gambling debts, was found naked in Aberdeen harbor, hypothermic and missing his right hand. Nothing was ever proven about the circumstances of his situation, and the man never spoke of it. He even continued to work for Rausing, rising to the rank of financial controller. But everyone noticed he never looked Angus Rausing in the eye again.

  Malcolm was born to a Portuguese mother, Andréa, with whom Angus had spent a month while overseeing a dredging project in the harbor at Cascais. Andréa was an Iberian beauty, with parchment-colored skin and short black hair that framed high cheekbones and dark brown eyes. Malcolm remembered numerous men passing through the house with regularity, their hands probing and faces hungry, leaving a crumpled wad of cash on his mother’s nightstand. He assumed his father had been one of these men, but Andréa told him he was not. “Your father is a very important and powerful man,” she would say, which made Malcolm grow to hate him even more.

  Though he had no soft spot for children, Angus did possess a sense of responsibility and sent Malcolm’s mother a healthy stipend every month until Malcolm turned 18. About once a year he would return, ostensibly on business, and visit the tidy apartment he rented for mother and bastard son. To Malcolm, the man’s face was ugly and broad, his eyes piercing, his limp a gruesome remnant of a final dive years before.

  On one of these visits, when Malcolm was 12, Angus pulled him down onto a chair and told him he had a secret, one that had almost cost him his life but also could make him rich. His father’s breath was laced with whisky, his grip strong. When Malcolm asked him what it was, his father angrily pushed him away. “Why would I tell a bastard like you?” he said, and laughed.

  Angus insisted that his son be educated in England, and, when Malcolm turned 14, he was sent to boarding school at Ipswich. By this time, his inherited cruel streak had surfaced, and he was disciplined for fighting four times until the school threw him out after his second year for the particularly vicious beating of a younger boy who simply looked at Malcolm a bit too long.

  From there, Malcolm drifted around Europe, selling heroin in France, stealing cars in Belgium, and selling stolen watches in Holland for money. He would occasionally appear at his mother’s door, always leaving her a little bit of cash before he would disappear a week later. She never asked him what he did.

  On one of Malcolm’s visits to Cascais, he came home from a night of drinking to find a man shouting at his mother. He was an old john, a fat, rich Spaniard who’d occasionally employed Andréa’s services. His belt was undone, a bottle in his hand. Malcolm could see that his mother had been crying. He snatched the bottle from the man, smashed it across his head and used the jagged butt of it to castrate him. If his mother hadn’t intervened, Malcolm would have killed the man.

  Malcolm served four years in a Lisbon prison. His sentence would have been longer if the man he’d beaten had not been a Spanish diplomat who wanted to keep the whole episode quiet.

  Prison taught Malcolm about power dynamics, and how to clamp down his fighting fury into a more controlled seething. He emerged stoic and brooding. The violence was still there, but harnessed, exercised only when necessary and useful. The day he was discharged, he found out that his father had died, leaving Rausing Oceanic entirely to his bastard son.

  The company was nearly bankrupt when Malcolm arrived at its offices in Aberdeen, fresh out of prison. His father had over-leveraged on new ships in the expectation of an oil boom that never materialized. Bestowing the failing firm to Malcolm seemed like a cruel, final joke.

  The knowledge gained from a lifetime living by his wits, his ruthless efficiency, and an almost psychopathic absence of sentimentality made Malcolm an excellent CEO. Within five years, Rausing Oceanic grew successful under his watch. The company, which had previously specialized in undersea recovery and commercial diving support, expanded into custom shipbuilding, supplying littoral and amphibious watercraft for mercenary groups and small countries’ militaries.

  Malcolm became wealthier than even his father could have dreamed. He had no permanent address, but lived aboard his fleet of ships worldwide. The Aberdeen headquarters were merely symbolic and vestigial. Rausing’s was a nomadic existence that suited him, living on the outlaw sea, free to sate his own appetites with no one watching.

  In Sri Lanka, the Chinese were pumping money into infrastructure projects in exchange for long term leases on deepwater ports, city property, and airports. It was a part of their “Belt and Road” initiative that would give them a st
rategic foothold in developing countries throughout Asia and Africa.

  In Batticaloa, the small city on the east coast of Sri Lanka, a Chinese contractor had plans to develop a port for cargo vessels. It would require dredging a nearby lagoon, installing modern loading docks, and laying communications cables and pipework under the sea bed. Rausing Oceanic was hired for much of the underwater construction and commercial diving support. It would turn out to be the perfect cover for Malcolm Rausing’s larger and more ambitious project.

  The Deep Blue

  Four miles south of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Monday evening.

  Just prior to entering Batticaloa, on the west side of the A15 coast highway, sits a large lagoon that floods with the high ocean tide. Every day, as they have for centuries, enterprising local fishermen wait for the tide to ebb to scout the shallow lagoon for mud crabs. These large crustaceans are sold in the town markets up and down the east coast, most often cooked into a deliciously spicy curry. The dish was brought to Sri Lanka by Hindu Tamils from India, but is distinctly non-denominational, eaten by everyone but the most hardcore Buddhists, who eschew eating any sort of sentient being.